Without Warning (74 page)

“This is the last of them,” said Caitlin. “If he’s not here, or hasn’t been here, I’m tapped out,
Capitaine.”

The French officer patted her gently on the shoulder.

“You have done well. Better than we could have asked. Perhaps you should let us handle this now?”

Caitlin peered through the window of the ruined apartment across the street from the tenement where Baumer had met with English members of Hizb ut-Tahrir on three occasions.

“No. I don’t think so. If that fucker turns up, there’ll be a reckoning between him and me.”

“You are still very weak, Miss Monroe. If we are to get him, it will mean a struggle.”

“I’m strong enough to pull a trigger.”

Rolland pulled her around to face him.

“We need him alive. Both him and Lacan. We need to know the extent of the School Masters’ influence.”

Caitlin folded her arms and leaned against the wet, peeling wallpaper. A bomb had damaged the upper floors of this building, letting in the elements. She was wrapped in a padded army jacket but still shivered at the unseasonable chill. Three French commandos kept watch on the street while staying well hidden from view. It had been a hellish business, just getting them into the neighborhood, let alone into this house across the street from the last of Baumer’s known addresses. Three days they had been on his trail, using her knowledge of al-Banna’s networks and contact nodes. Three days they had been scurrying like dump rats from one ruin to the next, avoiding all contact with the enemy, both uniformed and otherwise.

She felt much stronger in mind and body than she had for a long time, although her illness still weakened her, and she would be months fully recovering from Noisy-le-Sec. In truth, she should not have been out here, but there was no choice. She was the expert on al-Banna, and that meant being in on the hunt, no matter how damaged she might have been. A wet, dank-smelling armchair, covered in plaster and mouse droppings, sat in the nearest corner. After one more glance back out on the street she dropped into it. Outside she heard sporadic firing and the occasional shout, but the street was relatively quiet for now. A more distant thunder spoke of the pitched battle at
the edge of the park, as Sarkozy’s forces attempted to break into the heart of the old city.

“He may not come,” she said, forcing the weariness she felt out of her voice.

“No,” Rolland admitted. “Maybe not. He may have fled the city already. But we must do what we will. Would you like a coffee, Caitlin? I saw some in the kitchen before. I could have one of my men heat up some water. We may be waiting awhile.”

They were.

It was not until night had fallen completely that any significant activity returned to the street. There had been a small explosion, earlier in the day and a cloud of dirty black smoke rose over the roofline of the buildings opposite, but nothing came of it. Just another skirmish in a city of a thousand myriad clashes. She dozed through the afternoon, fitfully, for a few hours, waking in the early evening as Rolland’s men ate a cold meal of MREs. She’d been hoping the French might have better field rations than the U.S. version, but there was no discernible difference in quality.

It was all NATO standard slop, she supposed.

“Miss Monroe, come here, please.”

She came fully awake with a start, and slid from the chair like a cat. Rolland stood by the window, narrowing his eyes, peering through the lace curtain.

“Those men, do you recognize any of them?”

She peered out. At least four young men, all civilians, all Arabic or African in appearance, were gathered outside the target address across and down the street a little ways. It was dark outside, but some of them smoked, and as they passed around a lighter she was pretty sure she recognized a couple of faces.

One in particular stood out.

Short. Round-shouldered, with a potbelly. Gray stringy beard with no mustache. His skin was dark brown, as though stained by tobacco juice. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, and in her imagination she could smell the fragrant blend. Some acne pits blemished the left side of his face, and melted skin from a homemade bomb gone wrong marred his other profile. The permanent squint to his right eye was a result of the same disfiguration. She couldn’t see from here, but she knew he would have yellowed, crooked teeth, with two of the lower incisors missing, thanks to a beating from the Malaysian Special Branch five years ago. Powerful forearms and thighs from years of silat and karate training.

“The chunky-looking groover in the nasty gray acid-wash jeans and cheap vinyl jacket, his name’s Noordim ul Haq. He’s an Indonesian. Javanese. We
call him Dr. Noo. He’s a Jemaah Islamiyah commander. A bomb maker, too, but not a great one, as you can see from his pretty face.”

“He is part of Baumer’s network? I have not heard of him.”

Caitlin frowned.

“Nope. But they have met, twice that we knew of. Once in Singapore, August 1998, and later that year in Surabaya. We’re not sure to what ends or if they ever met again under the radar. But the Doc there is a heavy hitter in Mantiki 3, the Jemaah Islamiyah franchise with responsibility for the Philippines and Central Indonesia.”

Rolland looked lost.

“Sorry,” said Caitlin. “I can be a bit of a fucking trainspotter, can’t I? His CV doesn’t matter. The fact that he’s here does. He should be about ten thousand miles away, blowing up noodle shops in Jakarta for the glory of God.”

“Well, we don’t have many noodle shops in Paris anymore.”

“You never did, Marcel. Not worth a pinch of shit anyway.”

“So, this Noordim,” said Rolland softly, peeking out into the dark again. “If he is here, there must be something important going on.”

“Dude, if he’s here, it’s the end of the fucking world … Oh, wait. Sorry, we already did that, didn’t we? Okay, look, it’s not just delicious noodles and opportunities for mass murder that kept him in Mantiki 3. This guy, he doesn’t like whitey. His father was a midlevel official in Golkar, the guys who put the party into Indonesia’s one-party state under Suharto. His mother was a singer, but more important a second cousin to Tuk Tuk Suharto, the big guy’s daughter. The family controlled the distribution of kretek cigarettes in East Timor and lost it all in the Australian takeover of ‘99. Dr. Noo was already into the whole jihad thing by then. His family may well have been funding him. But Timor pushed him right over. Ruined the family and put the zap on his head. So he really hates whitey.”

She paused and Rolland took the hint.

“But?” he said.

“But,” she continued. “He
really
fucking hates Arabs and resents their control of international jihad. To his way of thinking the Arabs never recovered from the crusader attacks after 9/11. All the best jihadi since then have since been Asian or African, but in the mythology of the jihad, it is the Arabs who matter. And they make sure their little rice-eating cousins know about it, too. Our understanding was Noordim got assfucked three ways from Sunday while he was in the Northwest Territories and Afghanistan. The camel humpers really broke his balls. His raison d’être ever after was to be acknowledged as a player of equal importance to the likes of bin Laden and Zawahiri.”

“So he blew up noodle shops?”

“Yeah. Lots and lots of noodle shops. Apparently Allah really fuckin’ hates noodles.”

Rolland smiled, an exhausted, washed-out smile. Caitlin watched the men in the street as they moved into the building.

“Tell your guys they need to be on the stick now,” said Caitlin. “They need to …”

She trailed off as a car appeared.

Gasoline was so scarce that any moving vehicle was invested with significance. This one, a blue Passat with a cracked windshield, appeared to be full of passengers. She motioned Rolland over to the gap in the curtains.

As they watched, saying nothing, the car came to a halt and all four doors opened like insect wings. Heavily armed, unshaven young men stepped out and scanned the street. Neither Caitlin nor Rolland moved. Nobody pointed them out or paid anything but scant attention to the ruined building in which they stood. As a jet screamed overhead somewhere nearby the last of the passengers exited the rear of the Passat.

Baumer and Lacan.

Melton was lying in a child’s bed, his head pillowed by a mildewed stuffed elephant. The room was dark and the multileveled house empty. Abandoned.

Or at least it had been.

As he came awake he heard voices on the lower floors. Men talking in a ghetto mixture of Arabic and French. He was jolted awake as all of his body’s remaining adrenaline reserves sluiced into his nervous system. A cool ball of ice seemed to form in his stomach, making his balls contract and loosening his bowels.

He wondered if friends of the man he’d killed earlier had come looking for him, but the few snatches of conversation he heard clearly seemed to be about the civil war.

A quick scan of the room where he’d hidden out, far above the street, told him there were no obvious hiding places. He slowly, carefully eased himself up, fearful of a creaking bedspring that might give his presence away. For the same reason he dare not put his feet on the floor, as the boards would surely creak. Instead, he lay in darkness, straining to hear whatever he could pick up. He stroked his pistol for reassurance and checked that he still had the spare mags in his vest pocket. Not that a dinky little handgun would be much
help if he’d woken up in a house full of jihadi street fighters. And really, who the hell else was left in this part of Paris?

As the minutes ticked by with infuriating slowness his heart rate began to slow down a little and he even managed to relax. Nobody had come up to check on his room. He hadn’t been discovered. Indeed, there didn’t appear to be anybody in this attic level of the house. But he found that hard to accept. It commanded a good view of the street below and some of the approaching roads. He would have put a lookout up here, even if he was just running a small gang of looters. Then again, his instructors at ranger school had probably drilled the basics into him with more alacrity than the towel-headed loser who’d trained these guys downstairs. If trained they had ever been. Judo rolls and paintball in the forest didn’t really count.

Slowly, and as quietly as he possibly could, Melton eased himself off the bed and slid across to the door. He placed his ear against the cool wood for two minutes, straining to hear anything that might indicate he wasn’t alone up here. After that, he gripped the old-fashioned brass knob and turned it gently but firmly until the door clunked open. It sounded as loud as a grenade to him, but there was no discernible change in the flow of conversation from downstairs. He was able to make out a lot more of what was being said, however, not that it did him much good. The men’s French was heavily accented and their Arabic so guttural and fast-spoken that his very basic understanding of the language was all but useless.

Then someone spoke whom he could understand. A Frenchman, with a polished, well-educated voice. Again, Melton’s French wasn’t great, but he was certain this guy was giving them a pep talk. Something about how well the fight had gone in the suburbs and how they had to delay the fascist Sarkozy forces long enough to get their leaders out of this area. Or at least, that was what Melton
thought
he said. He simply couldn’t be sure, and it made no sense. He had no context in which to frame the conversation.

It was infuriating, but there was nothing he could do about it.

“They will be here in fifteen minutes,” said Rolland. “They are coming through the storm water drains. There is a … what do you call it… a man’s hole in the rear courtyard of the tenement two down.”

Caitlin snickered despite the seriousness of the situation.

“Okay. You got any floor plans?”

Rolland removed a set of drawings from a plastic tube.

“There has been some remodeling of the property in the last five years,” he
said. “These were lodged with the city archives. I had a devil’s job getting them.”

“Yeah, but God bless continental bureaucracy,” said Caitlin. “Now, what’ve we got here?”

They scoped out the plans of the house across the street on a fold-up card table in a windowless room on the second floor of their own building. It looked like it might have been a storeroom until recently. A few cardboard packing boxes, folded flat, remained.

The target property was not so different from the one in which they stood. Same number of floors, similar layout of rooms, save for the ground floor, which had been opened up into one vast living space. It was not bomb-damaged either, as far as they could tell.

“This will be very hard,” said Rolland. “Getting them alive.”

Caitlin nodded. “Like a hostage situation, where the hostage doesn’t want to come with. And he’s armed.”

“We would normally train in a mock-up facility first. But there is no time.”

“You could let me go in on my own,” she offered. “I am renowned as a sneaky bitch, you know.”

“You are renowned as an assassin, Miss Monroe. I have no doubt you could make it inside. But perhaps only you would come out,
non?”

“Perhaps,” she conceded. “But I could make it easier for you.”

“How so?”

She explained what she would need, and although the plan was crazy, to his credit, Rolland heard her out.

When she was finished she folded her arms and shrugged.

“It is the only way I can think of to kick down the doors, kill everyone who needs killing, and maybe,
just
maybe keep Baumer and Lacan in one piece.”

Rolland pinched his lip between thumb and forefinger, a gesture she recognized.

He was thinking of betting the pot.