Private Paris Read online

  TEARING THE RED hoodie off so that I was again down to that white dress shirt, I ran down the lane into the churchyard, where several other cars were parked as well. The Suzuki was next to a closed green gate that blocked access to a larger parking lot and a brick building immediately north of the Saint Martin Church.

  Two police cars were parked in that lot, along with two small white sedans. I could see a well-traveled route beyond them. A bus sighed, caught gear, and then roared past the mouth of the bigger parking lot.

  Figuring the women had gone to the main route, I jumped the gate and ran through the lot to a large traffic rotary with a park at the center.

  The bus stop was to my left, along with an Asian grocery store and a clothing shop, both closed, and a pharmacy, still open. When I looked right, I was surprised to see another police car, and more surprised to realize that I was right in front of the Sevran police station.

  Had they gone in there? Did I have this all wrong?

  I hurried inside to check. The officer behind a pane of bulletproof glass was on the phone but lowered it when I adopted a prayer pose. When I asked in halting French if two Muslim women had come inside, she looked down her nose, shook her head, and immediately lifted the phone to her ear again.

  I tried to talk again, but she held up her finger and turned away from me.

  Frustrated, I went out onto the sidewalk. Where the hell had they gone?

  There were three people at the bus stop now: an elderly man wearing a turban, a young Vietnamese girl, and a woman with long, braided reddish hair. She wore a laborer’s clothes, leather boots, tan canvas pants, and a denim shirt. She had her back to me and was smoking.

  A heavyset blond woman wearing heavy makeup, a white pantsuit, and carrying a large black purse was coming down the sidewalk toward me. A mother and child exited the pharmacy, and I headed their way. As I walked by the bus stop, the woman with the reddish braids flicked her cigarette into the gutter, and squatted to rummage in a stonemason’s bag at her feet.

  I kept going. The blonde in the pantsuit passed, giving me a quick, bright smile. Sweet perfume lingered in her wake. The lights in the pharmacy went dark. A bus approached. I wanted to punch something.

  Had they circled me? Gone back to the car? I could go there and sit on it, or just go back to the police station and make the officer understand the situation.

  Changing direction, I followed the bus to the stop, seeing the four people board and wondering if the Muslim women had gotten on the first bus I’d seen leaving the area.

  I thought about the pale blue gravel that had fallen off the Suzuki’s bumper. It was definitely ammonium nitrate fertilizer. I’d tasted and smelled remnants of the stuff in the air after IED explosions back in Kandahar.

  But if they’d left the area with the bags…

  Oh, Jesus. I had it wrong.

  I took off toward the police station. The bus doors closed. As I came abreast of the bus, it began to pull away. I happened to glance at the windows.

  The woman in the work clothes, the one with the reddish braids, was sitting in the third row from the front, looking out the window at me. She was exotically beautiful, with haunting nickel-gray eyes and high cheekbones across which stretched burnished, dusky skin.

  As the bus drove off, I was puzzled by the sense that I had seen her somewhere before…

  I began to sprint after the bus, trying to get a better look at her. But crossing the mouth of the narrow parking lot next to the Sevran police station, I understood that I was too late. I’d never catch up.

  I staggered to a stop just beyond the entrance to the parking lot, right in front of the station, and was sucking wind, cursing, and watching the bus disappear into the dusk when the car bomb erupted.

  Chapter 86

  THE BLAST THREW me off my feet and to the pavement. Shock waves pounded through my back, deafened me, and rattled my brain for several minutes. And I took some body shots from falling debris.

  But thanks to the northwest corner of the Sevran police station, which stood between me and the parking lot and the Catholic churchyard where the robed women had left the Suzuki, I was otherwise uninjured.

  There was dust and debris everywhere, and that acidic fertilizer smell permeated the air like humidity on a stiflingly hot day.

  Struggling to my feet, I saw that all traffic on the roundabout had come to a halt. People were outside their cars, covering their mouths, or stretching them wide to scream. But I could barely hear them. Their voices were drowned out by a high-pitched ringing in my ears.

  Still in a daze, I stumbled a few steps and looked into the parking lot. Through the thick cloud of dust, I could see that the entire front of the church had been blown inward, collapsing the roof. A large jagged hole had been opened in the rear sidewall of the police station.

  A policeman staggered from it, covered head to boots in dust and plaster. His face showed blood from a nasty scalp gash.

  I went to him, tried to talk to him. But he looked at me as if I were a creature in a nightmare, and walked dumbly past me. I looked into the hole, into the dark hull of the police station, seeing human silhouettes amid the wreckage.

  I threw my sleeve across my chest and fought my way in across the debris, finding an officer dead at his desk and the pieces of a dead man in a holding cell. Then I spotted the desk officer who’d ignored me minutes before.

  She was trying feebly to get up from the floor. I went to her, got her in a fireman’s sling, and got her outside. Her face was a mess. Blood soaked her right leg and I could see the bulge of bone sticking from her thigh.

  I ripped off my belt and cinched it tight around her upper thigh. If I was right, the blast had broken her femur and probably nicked her femoral artery. Had the bone fully cut the blood vessel, she would have been dead where I had found her.

  I was acting on autopilot at that point, focused on saving the officer and nothing else. Surging with adrenaline, I scooped her up again and moved back toward the roundabout, where red and blue lights were flashing.

  Reaching the sidewalk, I saw cops, firemen, and paramedics racing to the scene. I set her down amid the rubble in front of the station.

  A team was working on her in seconds. I stood there and watched numbly. One of the new officers on the scene began talking to me, but I still couldn’t hear for the ringing.

  I said, “J’ai vu les saboteurs.”

  I saw the bombers.

  Chapter 87

  THAT STATEMENT GOT me a lot of attention in the next couple of hours. The cop went and returned with a captain. The ringing in my ears began to fade and I repeated what I’d said, showed them my Private identification, and told him to contact Louis Langlois at Private Paris, or Investigateur Sharen Hoskins from La Crim, or even Juge Fromme. They would all vouch for me.

  Klieg lights shone from the park across the street, where a gathering horde of media was encamping. The police captain was caught in the glare of indecision, looking at my identification card and then at me. Finally he dug in his pocket for his phone, and hurried off.

  He returned about an hour later, but not with Hoskins or Fromme or Louis. A French Army officer in full battle gear and helmet trailed him, his eyes going everywhere until they settled on me.

  “I am Major Émile Sauvage,” he said in flawless English. “French Army. I am in charge of this area under martial law.”

  “Lucky you,” I said.

  “What can you tell us?” he asked, studying me from under his helmet brim.

  Sauvage listened attentively and wordlessly during my summary of events. I gave it to him, all of it, from following Epée to a condemned linen factory in Pantin to the moment when I lost sight of the two robed women after they’d parked the Suzuki in front of the church.

  “I think they changed out of the robes,” I said. “And left on a bus that pulled away shortly before the bomb went off.”

  “What bus?” he demanded tersely. “What route?”

  “I don’t k
now.”

  “What makes you think they were aboard?”

  “Because I think I recognized one of them.”

  That seemed to dumbfound the major. “You knew one of the women?”

  “No, not like that,” I said. “It was just a feeling. The redhead. Her face. Like I’d seen it before somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  Shaking my head slowly, I said, “I don’t know. As I said, it was a feeling. The shape of her face. Her eyes. The way it all came together.”

  “But nothing more specific, sir?” Major Sauvage asked.

  “No,” I said. “At least right now. My bell got rung in the explosion.”

  “Take care of that,” the major advised. “I speak from experience. Concussions can make you feel stupid or nuts.”

  Another French Army officer, a big dark-skinned captain, hurried up and signaled the major for his attention.

  “You are not to leave France without notifying me, Monsieur Morgan,” the major said. “I’m sure there will be others who make the same demands on you.”

  “I’ll help any way I can, Major,” I said.

  With a stiff nod and a limp handshake, he pivoted and went to the captain. They spoke and moved off.

  Louis hobbled up with Sharen Hoskins and Juge Fromme, and I had to repeat my story all over again.

  “You don’t know where you saw that woman before?” Fromme asked.

  “Only that she reminded me of someone.”

  “Could she be the same redhead the opera director was seen with the night he was murdered?” Louis asked.

  “Again,” I said, “I’m clueless. Maybe it will come to me.”

  Hoskins said, “We can’t do a thing here. Military intelligence and anti-terror will be all over it. Think you can find that linen factory again?”

  Knitting my eyebrows, I thought back, still fuzzy, but said, “I think so.”

  Chapter 88

  10:20 p.m.

  HOSKINS DROVE. SHE and Fromme got us past the blockades near the blast site. Louis and I sat in the back and studied Google Maps on an iPad that the magistrate had produced from his briefcase.

  Gesturing at the screen and the roof of a building close to a narrow bridge over a canal, I said, “That’s it, I think.”

  “You have an address?” Hoskins asked.

  Louis tapped on the satellite image and an address popped up. He gave it to her and she called it in while driving toward Pantin.

  I said, “You’ll want to take a look from the other side of the canal before you go kicking down the door.”

  Hoskins looked ready to argue, but the magistrate said, “He’s right. We must consider them heavily armed.”

  The investigateur sighed, nodded, and altered her route. Someone called Hoskins a few minutes later to inform her that the address she’d called in was a condemned property that had been seized for taxes and was due to be razed to make way for a vacant lot sale in the coming weeks.

  “Perfect safe house,” Louis said.

  “Again I agree with you,” Hoskins said. “These are miraculous days.”

  She pulled over fifteen minutes later on a deserted industrial street and said, “We’re two blocks off the canal here, close to the north side of that bridge.”

  We set off in that direction slowly, having to wait for the magistrate and Louis to limp along behind us. A block closer to the canal, headlights appeared. A news van shot by and skidded to a halt by a construction site beside two other news vans.

  “What the hell is going on?” Hoskins cried, and ran toward the canal.

  I did my best to stay with her, but she reached a small crowd gathered just east of the pedestrian bridge before I did. The reporters had their backs to the canal and the condemned factory, and were barking at the cameras.

  When I caught up, Hoskins looked at her watch and said, “AB-16 sent out a message calling the media to be here at ten thirty p.m. In less than a minute they’re supposedly going to deliver a message to France.”

  Juge Fromme and Louis hobbled up to us, gasping.

  A series of thumping booms like mortar fire echoed across the canal. Fire fountained high inside the condemned factory. Plumes of it billowed out the broken windows and set the whole structure ablaze.

  In minutes it was a runaway, throwing shimmering heat and fire that blew through the roof and licked at the Paris skyline like so many snake tongues. Hoskins was calling for fire and police backup, but the rest of us were transfixed by the growing inferno.

  Was this the message AB-16 wanted to send in the wake of the bombing? That Paris was burning?

  I got my answer a second later, when many of the reporters gasped.

  Deep inside the factory something else had ignited, blue and then white and silver hot, almost blinding in its intensity. That brilliant new fire within a fire expanded and took shape at a blistering pace, two bent columns rising from the floor of the factory to a massive curve that soon became the powerful haunches of a giant prehistoric-looking horse reared up on its back legs, pawing at the flames and the sky.

  As the roof fell in, there was a third ignition. The horse had wings that burned so hot it was as if the creature actually had molten silver feathers that fluttered in the greater inferno, as if the beast was poised to take flight.

  “It’s Al-Buraq,” Louis said.

  I nodded in grim awe. “The Prophet’s warhorse.”

  Part Five

  Warhorse

  Chapter 89

  8th Arrondissement

  April 12, 7:20 a.m.

  Brothers and Sisters,

  We the warriors of AB-16 fight in the name of Al-Buraq, warhorse of the Prophet Mohammed, blessings be upon his name. Flying into battle on the back of the winged Lightning, AB-16 calls to all immigrants and immigrant youth:

  Look at the way France has treated you.

  No job. No future. No hope.

  And brutal oppression when you protest.

  This will be your useless life unless you join our fight now. Take up the sword of divine justice. Wage holy war for your children’s lives.

  Help us drive out the decadent French culture now, and replace it with one that will make the Prophet proud.

  Lightning has taken flight over Paris. The warhorse soars over all of France in 2016.

  Hear his battle cry. Spread the message. Join our ranks.

  Al-Buraq in 2016!

  AB-16!

  Sitting in the living area in the suite, with the television on and my breakfast eaten, I set the letter aside. It was the fifth time I’d read it since Ali Farad first received a copy three days before, but it was the first since I’d watched the sculpture of the Prophet’s warhorse ignite and burn so furiously hours before.

  The two together—image and call to jihad—felt greater than the sum of their parts. The letter alone was incendiary, a call to treason and revolution. But footage of the factory fire and the statue was dominating the news in ways the letter could not.

  Every station I turned to, even the ones out of Japan and China, was showing images of the Prophet’s warhorse engulfed in flames. CNN kept broadcasting a clip with firemen arriving on the scene. When they had turned the hoses on the still-glowing sculpture, it had hissed and thrown steam, which made it seem otherworldly and threatening all over again.

  The BBC was reporting that in response to the bombing in Sevran and the factory fire in Pantin, the riots had spread. The feed cut to a knot of youths, their faces wrapped in head scarves, defying the curfew and chanting, “AB-16! AB-16!”

  In voice-over, the British reporter said that police and army officers, firemen and ambulance workers, had been shot at repeatedly during the night, and dozens of vehicles had been set ablaze and used to block streets.

  I changed to a French station and was reaching for the pot to pour myself more coffee when the screen jumped to someone I recognized.

  It was Major Sauvage, the French Army officer from the night before. He was giving the press a briefing. H
e looked hard and focused, not tired at all.

  “It has been a violent night,” Major Sauvage began. “While trying to stop a van of immigrant men from breaking curfew and attempting to leave Les Bosquets at around three a.m., my men came under intense fire. Three men in the van were killed. The other two are in custody.

  “All five men were carrying AK-47 assault rifles and a considerable amount of ammunition,” he went on. “As of now, we consider all members and supporters of AB-16 to be armed and dangerous.

  “Despite this brazen show of force, my soldiers remain committed to preventing outside forces from destroying France and its culture. That, I can tell you, will not happen on our watch.”

  The screen jumped to Barbès, where the imam’s mosque had been firebombed, and several white French teenagers had been beaten by immigrant gangs.

  A picture appeared, showing one of the boys and identifying him as Alain Du Champs, an aspiring photojournalist who had been hospitalized in serious condition. To my surprise, I recognized him. He was the same kid who’d sung that funny version of the Billy Joel song to the Muslim—

  The room phone rang. It was Louis.

  “Hoskins wants you to work with a sketch artist on that redhead you saw on the bus,” Louis said.

  I thought of her, saw her clearly in my mind, and somehow it all clicked.

  “I know where I saw her before,” I said with growing conviction. “You’ve seen her too, Louis. Remember the day we went to Al-Jumaa tailors and there was a white kid with a camera singing to a beautiful Muslim woman?”

  “I remember. It’s her?”

  “Her eyes were a different color, but I think so,” I said.

  Louis said in a leaden voice, “She was coming from that mosque then, Jack, so the imam has to be involved with AB-16. And by extension Ali Farad.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, and then I did.

  “We’ll deal with whoever is involved later,” I said. “Right now we need to find out what hospital the rioters in Barbès were taken to last night.”