Ice Cold Kill (31 page)

“Hmm. Less than you’d imagine, really. My cover was a twenty-something political science student, Western-oriented but curious about the Islamist movement. I was supposed to like clubbing and MTV. It made me a good target for the extremists.”

The PC’s hourglass continued to rotate. Belhadj kept his eyes on the screen.

Daria said, “Are you a believer?”

“It’s complicated.”

“We appear to have some time.”

Belhadj turned directly toward her, sitting sideways in his chair, left arm thrown over the back, locking eyes with her. “I believe. I do. But … a very long time ago, I made a vow to be a killer. To do things that the Holy Quran expressly forbids. I believe in Allah and in Heaven but I also recognize that men like me have no place there.”

Daria studied his slate-gray eyes.

“And what of you? Are you a good Jew?”

“No. I lost my faith early. In my childhood. By the time I was working in Lebanon, I realized I could have served the other side easily. I enjoyed being undercover, and the danger. But I didn’t do it because of faith.”

He snorted another huff of a laugh. “So. Whoever is in charge of Heaven has chosen me to defend Islam, and you to defend Judaism. I’m starting to think the pagans got it right.”

The Internet screen flared to life. Belhadj turned frontward in his chair. He typed a few keys, waited for the screen to catch up.

“I hunted you.”

Daria said, “Sorry?”

He didn’t look in her direction. “I hunted you. After you shot me. I had a dossier created for you. I retasked overseas teams who were supposed to be doing other things to shadow your operations for the Shin Bet. No matter how pedestrian or business-as-usual they may be. We bugged you, but only in places Shin Bet would expect to find Syrian bugs. When they got swept up, they would be associated with specific operations, not with you. You were watched, nonstop, for the better part of a year. I … I hunted you.”

Belhadj typed orders on the keyboard with his two forefingers, hunched forward, squinting. His hooded eyes glanced at the keyboard every time he typed. He made many type-overs.

Daria watched him. He took pains not to look in her direction. She waited.

“I wanted to kill you. I asked permission for a kill order.”

She sipped her coffee.

“Eventually, anger and hatred gave way to respect. That night, on the bridge near Al-A’ref School, you made a shot from a kilometer away. Dead of night, no moon, and precious few stars.”

He typed, peering at the screen. Daria stood, ankles crossed, damp hair falling forward toward her charcoal eyes.

“When the kill order came?” Belhadj clucked his teeth. “Damnedest thing. I threw it away.”

He typed some more.

Daria waited almost a minute. “I’m not sorry I shot you that night in Damascus.”

“Nor should you be.”

“But I’m glad I didn’t kill you.”

The Internet screen flared to life. Belhadj turned in his chair. “Ah, good. For a moment there—”

Daria crossed the wooden floor in bare feet and straddled his lap. She held his head tight and kissed him ferociously. Belhadj kissed her back, his hands along her flank, raising the shirt.

She used her leg muscles to rise long enough to reach down and unzip him.

The dial-up Internet screen waited patiently.

*   *   *

Later, Daria found clothes; a sleeveless white undershirt, the boy’s chambray shirt, a girl’s matchstick jeans, a jean jacket, and boots with Spanish heels. She stole a small backpack with a Hello Kitty decal.

They pushed the DCRI command vehicle into a dry ditch and set the interior ablaze. They doused the interior with petrol, turning the truck into a furnace. No reason to leave the pathologist’s bloody body around for the farm family to find.

Belhadj changed, too. They left the pathologist’s eight hundred euros behind as payment, then stole a sixteen-year-old compact car and drove back roads to Lyon.

Twenty-five

Lyon, France

Raslan Nadr grumbled the entire way across the de Tattre Bridge toward Lyon’s Second arrondissement. The handle of the plastic Monoprix grocery bag dug into his palms. That prick Abdul insisted on adding Coca-Cola and tins of tomato sauce to the shopping list. Of course. When it was Abdul’s turn to shop, he never returned with anything heavier than a baguette.

Nadr wore jeans, aging Doc Martens, and his Lyon Villeurbanne rugby jersey with matching scarf. He looked like a couple thousand other shoppers. With white buds in his ears and a Nano stuffed into his hip pocket, he drew no stares, no attention.

He switched the two heavy plastic bags to his right hand and stared glumly at the ligature marks the plastic had left on his left-hand fingers.

Abdul … that prick.

Nadr turned right after he cleared the banks of the Saône River. Twenty minutes later, he was at the safe house. He could barely feel the fingers of either hand. He thought it would serve Abdul right if he drank two of the six Coca-Colas before that prick got home from his shift at the garage. Maybe three.

Let him complain.

Raslan Nadr let himself into the safe house and hefted both bags up onto the peeled linoleum counter between the two-burner stove and the shallow aluminum sink.

The sink was filled with dirty dishes from last night’s tin of potato soup and pita with hummus. Nadr yanked the earbuds free, the music fading.

Prick.

He unwound the scarf, threw it over the twelve-inch TV in the living room and froze, his right arm still extended from tossing the aqua-and-black scarf.

Abdul, the prick, was facedown on the aged, orange shag carpet, his arms at his sides. The carpet was only a little bit stained with his blood. Being orange shag, Raslan Nadr doubted it would affect the cleaning deposit.

Major Khalid Belhadj sat on the room’s radiator, hugging a sapper jacket around his frame, a mug of coffee balanced precariously atop the curved, white-painted radiator.

A bird sat on the raspberry-colored couch. Raslan had picked up the term
bird
from expatriate English rugby fans at the Villeurbanne home matches. She was nicely rounded with good muscle tone, shoulder-length black hair, very straight, and midnight-black eyes. Wearing tight jeans and boots, she sat with legs crossed. She was reading a magazine as if she were the only one in the room, and as if her left boot wasn’t resting on the upturned ass of that prick, Abdul.

Nadr had always thought of Belhadj as the ultimate soldier. He never imagined the man with a woman. He never even imagined the man having friends.

The curvy bird ignoring them suggested something different.

Raslan Nadr said, “Is Abdul all right?”

Belhadj plucked the mug off the radiator and sipped. The bird turned a page in her magazine.

“Was he ever?” Belhadj seemed to ask the mug.

Nadr shrugged. “No. He’s a prick.”

“Well, the prick lives.”

With no hint of emotion, Nadr said, “Praise God.”

“I know. His uncle is a such-and-such in the party. A big whistle. At least, he is this month.”

Raslan Nadr studied the plastic-handle creases in his palms, as blood returned to them. His eyes turned to the upturned soles of Abdul’s virgin-white Nikes and realized they were pristine, unscuffed, and American.

“When I was a boy, I had a hermit crab in a little balsa wood cage. The thing hardly ever moved. It would have made a better partner than Abdul.”

The dark-haired bird laughed. So she spoke Arabic. Nadr filed that away.

“Of course. It’s been like that since…” Belhadj didn’t finish the sentence, just shrugged. Both men knew he was talking about the civil war in Syria. There were far too many cooks in the kitchen of Syrian intelligence these days. No way of telling whose broth one was tasting.

Belhadj said, “So. What is the official story?”

“You went insane. You attacked our own people. Killed your own crew in America. You’re attacking Western forces. You’re so enraged by the betrayal of Islam in Libya, in Egypt, in Tunisia, and especially at home, that you snapped.”

Belhadj sipped his coffee, nodded. The bird ripped a preperfumed page out of the magazine, sniffed it, set it aside. Nadr had no idea how to describe her eyes. They were—simply—black.

“The story is, your loyalty to the Assad family is such that you are on Jihad. And while that is admirable and speaks well of your family, you are to be stopped.”

Belhadj did something very uncharacteristic. He smiled. Then he puffed out his cheeks in a semi-laugh. He made eye contact with Nadr. “And…?”

Raslan Nadr smiled back. “Good to see you, Major. What do you need?”

*   *   *

Nadr drove them to a seedy bar that gave seedy bars a bad name. He peered out through the grimy windows of his Toyota. “Are you sure, Major? Perhaps the young lady would be better off waiting in the car.”

In the backseat, Daria said, “Afraid of criminals, Mr. Nadr?”

“Tetanus,” he said, studying the tavern. “Mostly just the tetanus.”

Daria opened her door and said to Belhadj, “I like this one.”

When she had stepped out, Nadr handed the major a cheap drawstring bag, the kind you get when you buy sunglasses. “Contacts for the biochemist in Milan. A mobile. Also some euros and a couple of credit cards that are clean. I can get guns but it would take a day.”

Belhadj took the bag. “We have guns.” He nodded out the window at Daria. “My friend is fast and quiet. Abdul never saw who hit him.”

“Then praise God, the filthy thieves who stole his phone, euros, and credit cards didn’t kill him.” Nadr shrugged. “Also, they took his new Nikes, I noticed.”

Belhadj poked through the bag, nodded his approval.

Nadr said, “I posted a query through Russian intelligence channels. I said one of my sources spotted you in London. A lot of eyes will turn that direction, I think. It might buy you some time.”

Belhadj hefted the drawstring bag. “You’re a good man.”

“Our country—” Raslan Nadr broke off. He peered out the window again and shook his head forlornly.

“I know.”

“Go with God, Major.”

*   *   *

Daria entered the bar first. Belhadj waited ninety seconds, then walked in. It was dark and dank, ripe with the funk of sweat and old beer. Belhadj ordered a coffee and found a corner table, where he could use the light of a neon Pilsner sign to read his new cell phone.

He kept his head down so as not to be obvious about watching Daria. She was by the pool tables, getting reacquainted with Lyon’s smuggling elite. She had told him that she had worked with them often when she’d been stationed in Paris. They seemed to remember her well—a little intimately, Belhadj thought but kept to himself.

Twenty minutes later, Daria slid in beside him, rather than opposite, to keep her eye on the room. She had secured the only glass of good cold champagne the bar likely had ever served. Belhadj had seen the bartender send a boy out to retrieve it shortly after Daria entered.

“I have a pilot with a Skyhawk,” she said. “He can get us over the border to an airfield outside Stressa. The price was reasonably unreasonable, given the time constraints.”

“Raslan gave me some money. It’s not much but—”

Daria said, “It’s paid.”

He angled the phone her way. He’d found a story on al-Jazeera about the battle at the factory in Paris. “The site’s been quarantined. The World Health Organization said they are investigating a pandemic they are calling Pegasus-B.”

“Pegasus.” The file name for the CIA operation in Manhattan.

“Yes. Come on,” he said, pushing the table away so they could both stand.

*   *   *

Daria led him out of the bar and around to a snow-covered pétanque pitch. It gave them privacy. Raslan Nadr had secured both the phone number and the name “Bianchi,” under which the biologist had been living.

Daria made the call. The voice that answered was elderly and male. He spoke in Italian but was no native.

“Dottore Bianchi? I am sorry to bother you, but my friend and I wondered if we could talk to you about one of your creations.”

She waited through the long-distance hiss, hugging the phone against her shoulder and zipping up the denim jacket.

“Who is this, please?”

“My friend does business with Damascus. You once contacted his organization regarding a product you had created. We wish to drop by and see you, later today if we may.”

The elderly voice hacked a dry cough. “I don’t know you. I don’t know that to which you refer, signora.”

“No, but perhaps we could share a cup of tea and discuss it. Hot tea would help for a winter conversation that is influenced by the cold.”

She used the Italian idiom:
influenza del freddo
. She thought the word
flu
might be too common to trigger computerized antiterrorism monitors, but she didn’t want to chance it.

“You wish to speak to me about this?”

“We do, sir.”

The old man sighed. It was difficult to separate the sigh from the static. “I can see you around four? But not in my home. Do you know the Café della Amalfi?”

“No, sir, but I know Milan. I can find it.”

“Across from the cathedral.”

Daria said, “Then of course I can find it.”

“I’ll be seated outside, drinking tea. Four o’clock?”

“Four o’clock, Dr. Bianchi.”

She hung up and winked at Belhadj. “We’re all set.”

Milan, Italy

Dr. János Tuychiev’s childhood accent from Tajikistan had completely evaporated but he still held a trace of the Moscow accent from his twenties, thirties, and forties. “It was a woman,” he said. “Not Italian. I cannot place the accent, but—”

Asher Sahar sat opposite the old man in the cluttered Milanese apartment, in a forest green armchair with an old-fashioned antimacassar thrown over the humped back. He smiled and cleaned his lenses on the tail of his cardigan.

“Your phone line is quite good, Doctor. I could hear her.”