Hunt the Wolf (10 page)

C
rocker arrived
in Marseille early the next morning feeling as though a load of bricks had landed on him. The tight airplane seat combined with the residual effects of the climb had caused lactic acid to build up in his muscles. He knew he needed to move, rehydrate, and rest.

The last one would have to wait.

Crocker deplaned from the Air France Airbus surrounded by businesspeople and tourists. He wanted to go for a run or speak to his wife, but knew he couldn’t do either because he was on a short-fused mission and had to move quickly.

Beyond the baggage turnstile he found Akil at a news kiosk leafing through a magazine. He looked fit and rested.

“What took you so long?” he said when he saw Crocker.

“They sat me in the last row. Don’t tell me you slept.”

“Like a baby.”

“Who the fuck is he?” the team leader asked, pointing to the bare-chested man on the cover.

“Samir Nasri.”

“Who?”

“One of the top young footballers in the world. Born here in a poor suburb of the city. His parents were Algerian immigrants. Plays with a fast, attacking style. Great footwork. Considered the next Zidane. Currently with the British club Arsenal.”

“Never heard of him.”

“You need to broaden yourself, boss.”

“You need to stop looking at pictures of half-naked men. Let’s go.”

Crocker was glad to see that Akil had recovered so quickly. It made him even happier to watch him flirting with the lashy-eyed girl at the desk who checked them into the three-star hotel they were staying in near the old port, Hotel Port Select.

The room was clean and tight. Two double beds with patterned white coverlets, a mirror over a set of drawers, a little desk, and a small TV.

It seemed like it was built to accommodate people smaller than the two large SEALs.

Ten minutes after they arrived, as Crocker was studying a street map, the phone rang.

The girl at the front desk said, “Your car has arrived.”

“Thanks.”

Crocker left Akil in the bathroom and returned to the lobby. A tall, attractive young North African woman stood waiting. Jet black eyes, hair, and eyebrows. High cheekbones. She looked like she was ready to break in half anyone who bothered her.

“Are you the one who brought the car?” Crocker asked.

“Yes, I am,” she answered with a British accent. “Follow me.”

He trailed her out onto the narrow cobblestone street. Parked along the curb was a little green Renault that looked about the size of a bathtub.

“You couldn’t find anything bigger?” Crocker asked.

She handed him a set of keys. “My number is in the glove compartment, if you need me.”

His eyes followed the back of her tight black pants until they disappeared around a corner, then he crossed the street and entered an Internet café. Ads in the windows advertised cheap long-distance rates to Algeria, Morocco, and the Comoro Islands.

With the smells of the port wafting in the front door, Crocker logged into his e-mail server. As he waited for his password to clear, he noticed that the patron before him had visited www.aljazeera.com. Other destinations included a variety of porno sites.

His e-mails appeared. Mancini, Ritchie, and Davis were already growing antsy in Islamabad, wondering if they could return home since Crocker didn’t seem to need them.

“Wait another couple of days. I might require your services,” the team leader wrote back.

Entering the address “Club Rosa–Marseille” and pressing Search, Crocker entered an amateurish website that featured videos of local bands like Carpe Diem, 13 Departement, PSYA4 De La Rime, IAM, Bouga, Fonky Family, and the Mystik Motorcycles, news about upcoming motocross racing events and meetings, and ads from people selling motorcycles.

Crocker and Akil ate lunch—fresh seafood couscous—at a restaurant across from the docks. Then, with Akil consulting the map and giving directions, Crocker drove the tiny Renault through the cramped Noailles quarter lined with Arabic and Indo-Chinese shops, then north into a spiral of low-income French HLM housing. Sandstone-colored high-rises with Spanish tile roofs swallowed them up. All seemed to have laundry flapping from clotheslines on their balconies.

The monochromatic building scheme was interrupted by colorful signs in Arabic. They passed a number of stores selling fake Nikes and Diesel jeans, and makeshift cafés filled with dark-skinned men with faces lined from the sun. They wore button-down shirts with short sleeves and pressed dress slacks.

The young people, in comparison, were dressed like urban American teenagers. Muscle shirts, baggy tees, baseball caps. Some of the young women were veiled; others wore skimpy tank tops and low-rise jeans.

Crocker remembered hearing that Marseille was the most ethnically diverse city in France. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Phoenicians had taken refuge in the city (then known as Massilia) when the Persians destroyed Phocaea in the sixth century BC. Then as now the city was a haven for immigrants—back then Greeks, Romans, Genoans, Spaniards, and Venetians, in more recent times German and Polish Jews, then Vietnamese and Cambodians, followed by a huge influx of North Africans, predominantly Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians.

He’d also heard that 20 percent of the population lived below the poverty line and something like 40 percent of young people between eighteen and twenty-five were unemployed. Different cultures grew up with different values. But all values frayed in the absence of hope.

Akil asked Crocker to stop near a group of Arabic-looking boys stripped to their waists who were working on an old Fiat sedan.

“How come? You lost?”

“We’re looking for the Club Rosa,” Akil said to the boys in French. “Can you tell us where it is?”

A skinny kid wearing a Yankees cap pointed them down a narrow alley. “Down there. Turn right.”

The Club Rosa was housed in the garage of one of the sandstone-colored high-rises. Posters of Tupac Shakur, Al Pacino in
Scarface
, and motocross world champion Yves Demaria hung in the window.

Crocker knocked and entered. Two young surly-looking guys smoking cigarettes sat at a table working on a hard drive of an old Dell computer as a replay of a Marseille-Lyon football match played on the TV in the corner. A foosball table stood on the other side of the small, linoleum-floored room. Behind it hummed an old refrigerator. Posters of motorcycles and models in bikinis decorated the stained beige walls.

Crocker intuited the rest. Young men gathered here to blow off steam and discuss their common interests in girls, football, motorcycles. They drank beer and Red Bull, bragged about their exploits, joked around with each other, tested their ambitions.

The younger of the two kids, maybe seventeen, was black, with a shaved head and thick black eyebrows. The older one looked Arabic and wore a goatee.

The darker-skinned kid looked up and said, “If you’re with the police and you’re asking about the cars that were broken into last night, we don’t know anything. We left the club right after dark.”

“We’re not with the police,” Akil replied in Arabic. “My friend here used to be a professional motocross rider.”

“What’s his name?”

“Crocker.”

The boys looked at each other and shook their heads. “Never heard of him.”

In his youth Crocker had spent endless hours on the motocross track, broken many bones, and won a decent number of pro-am races. He’d also developed the reputation of a daredevil who never backed down.

“He’s retired now but is looking to buy a bike and heard that someone here was selling a used Triumph Legend,” Akil said.

“A Triumph Legend?”

“My brother used to ride one,” Crocker said, in his badly accented French. “I’d like to check it out, take it for a ride. I’ll pay cash.”

“How much?”

Akil stepped closer to them. “He’s got to see the bike first.”

The black boy shrugged at the goateed kid, who shrugged back. Neither of them seemed to know what the big Egyptian American was talking about.

“Who told you about the bike?”

“Rafiq. He said it’s a great ride. Three-cylinder 885cc twelve-valve engine. Around 30,000 miles on it. Needs some work.”

“Rafiq?”

“Yeah, Rifa’a Suyuti. We call him Rafiq.”

“You mean the guy who lives out on the road to Toulon?” the goateed kid asked.

“Yeah. Tall. Wavy hair. Big smile.”

“Leave me a number. We’ll call you back.”

“When?”

“That depends.”

Akil scribbled down his cell-phone number and told the boys that his Canadian friend had cash and wanted the bike soon for a trip into Spain.

“We’ll call you,” the black kid said to their backs.

Outside, Crocker decided to visit the local prefecture of police, where the two men were shuttled from one official to the next, only to learn after an hour that the Marseille office had no record of a Rifa’a Suyuti living in their jurisdiction.

The two Americans were near the port, eating dinner and watching the sky turn shades of mustard and red, when Akil got a call from a man named Yasir Simon, who said he was the owner of the Triumph Legend. He offered to meet them at the club at nine.

That gave them a little more than an hour and a half.

Crocker said, “Tell him we might be a few minutes late.” His mind was already pushing ahead, anticipating contingencies and what they might need in terms of protection.

Akil said, “My instincts tell me we should expect trouble.”

“I think they’re right.”

Crocker used Akil’s cell phone to call the number that had been left in the glove compartment. “I’m going to need a bike rack for the car,” he said in English.

“Where are you located?” the female voice with a British accent asked on the other end.

“I’m in town near the old harbor.”

“How many bicycles are you planning to carry?”

“Two.”

“We’ll have someone meet you on the corner of Rue Lafayette and Rue Marcel Sembat, near the Gare St. Charles, in half an hour.”

“Thank you.”

Right on time, a dark blue Acura SUV pulled up to the curb.

Crocker walked up to the driver’s-side window, where the attractive North African woman sat behind the wheel.

“We meet again,” he said.

Her black eyes reflected the yellow light from the streetlamp. “Yes. The equipment you requested is in the boot.”

All business.

He transferred two black gym bags to the back of the Renault, which was parked half a block away. Then zipped them open to find two M11 pistols and two MP5 submachine guns with magazines and extra ammo. Also tear-gas canisters, flash bangs, concussion and smoke grenades.

“Nice rack,” Akil said from the passenger seat.

“We’re good to go.”

Crocker navigated the Renault through the loops of narrow hilly streets and arrived at Club Rosa ten minutes past the hour.

Yasir Simon hadn’t arrived yet, but a half-dozen other young men were gathered in the club drinking beer and discussing something they’d just heard on Al-Manar TV, the Hezbollah propaganda station. Crocker recognized the Arabic words for “Jews” and “Zionists.” Sparks of danger electrified the air.

“Where’s the bike?” Crocker asked.

“They said he’s coming,” Akil whispered back.

Crocker bought two Red Bulls from the kid behind the counter, then heard a terrific roar approaching in the alley. He and Akil went out to look. Three guys on bikes. One a Triumph Legend. Green with some chrome, nice-sounding pipes. Decent leather.

Back in Crocker’s youth, a green bike was considered bad luck, especially among Harley riders.

The guy selling it—Yasir Simon—had a silver ring through his nostril and a tattoo of a cobra on his forearm.

As Crocker drank the Red Bull, he went over the bike carefully, checking for oil leaks around the engine gaskets, transmission leaks, tires, paint, chrome. Then he said, “I’d like to take it for a ride.”

“How much?” Akil asked.

“Two thousand euros.”

Crocker shook his head. “I’ll give you thirteen hundred. Cash.”

“You’re American?”

“Canadian. But I want to ride it first.”

“Why not? Follow me.”

Crocker sensed something was up when all three of them came along, Yasir behind a tall, sinewy guy on a Kawasaki Ninja and the third hard-looking dude alone on an older BMW. All three looked like they’d been spending a lot of time in the gym.

They led him through dark narrow streets to a two-lane highway that dipped and curled along the coast.

That’s when Crocker pulled back the throttle that opened up the big engine. He tore into the mottled light, leaving the other bikes behind him, surprised that the guy on the Ninja didn’t try to keep up.

The raw wind from the Mediterranean slapped his face. Scents of lavender and rosemary mixed with diesel fumes and the smell of the sea. He took the turns hard and wove around trucks and cars east toward Toulon, watching the landscape zip past, feeling like he owned the road.

Reaching the turnoff to Cassis, Crocker pulled over and stopped. The other two bikes caught up, and he could tell from the expressions of the three men that they were pissed off.

“Great bike!” he exclaimed in French, feeling like a teenager again.

Yasir, the silver ring glinting in his nostril, looked surprised. “You’re a crazy driver. You really serious to buy it?”

“Fuck yeah. Tonight. You sign over the registration, I’ll give you the cash.”

“Très bien.”

As the seller translated the news into Arabic for his two companions, Crocker sized them up further. They were rough—all in their late teens, early twenties. Deeply suspicious of him and Akil. They’d come expecting trouble.

He figured he could take all three of them if he had to, as long as they weren’t armed.

Crocker said, “I want to show the bike to Rafiq first. You guys lead the way.”