office have been encrypted and the only nonencrypted call was too vague for us to draw any conclusions from.”
Wallace paused, realizing that things were moving too fast and as part of a game that seemed to be without rules. He knew that he needed to slow down. He took a step back.
“Will the PLA really let these people get away? They must know it’s going to happen.”
“We assume they do, but we don’t know whether they’ll allow it. If they charge into the Meinhard facility within the next twenty-four hours and execute everyone, then we’ll have our answer.”
“And what do we want them to do? “
Casher pointed over his shoulder toward the door. “That’s up to the man in the Oval Office, not me.”
CHAPTER 43
Batkoun Benaroun filled two shot glasses with bourbon. They were sitting in the back room of a North African bar owned by a childhood friend of Benaroun’s fifteen minutes after they’d broken free from the Mercedes. It was a space of chipped paint and ground-in dirt, of a floor that was swept, but seldom washed, and of hand-smudged entrance and exit doors with deadbolts, but no doorknobs.
“Great driving,” Gage said, reaching for a glass and raising it toward Benaroun, who raised his in turn. “I owe you.” Gage took a sip.
Benaroun tossed his drink into his mouth, and then swallowed with a grimace.
“It’s kind of hard to calculate the balance of debt,” Benaroun said. “If you hadn’t said let’s get out of here, we never would’ve made it.” Benaroun poured himself another shot and then took a sip. “But if you hadn’t made me go there, we wouldn’t have had to escape.”
Gage smiled. “So you’re saying we’re even?”
Benaroun smiled back. “Not exactly. Any new thoughts about who they were? “
Gage shook his head, then pointed at Hennessy’s cell phone and his small water-soaked notebook lying on the table.
“The answer is probably in there,” Gage said, “but it’ll be a while before we find out.”
“You want me to see if someone at the Police Scientific Laboratory can help us?”
“Can’t take the risk. It might put Tabari in a compromising position.”
Gage picked up the cell phone, opened the back, and removed the battery and the SIM and memory cards and set them on a napkin. All three sheened with water that soaked into the paper. He moved them to another. He laid out more napkins, then spread the leather covers of the notebook as supports and stood it on end.
Benaroun rose. “I’ll see if Mashaal has a space heater. Maybe that will speed things up.”
After he left, Gage brushed the corners of the pages with his thumb, trying to get a sense whether they were soaked through to the middle. None of them separated. They were a mass of pulp. It would take hours of slow heat to find out whether they were pulped all the way through.
Gage closed his eyes, trying to re-create in his mind the moment when the Mercedes had made the corner and had faced them head on. He had only a cloudy image of the faces of the two men inside. Mid-thirties. Dark- skinned. Sunglasses. Suit or sports jackets, but no ties.
No question but that like Gilbert and Strubb, they were hired help. But by whom and for what reason?
Benaroun returned with a small radiant heater. He set it on the table and plugged it in. Gage positioned it so that just a breath of heat touched Hennessy’s notebook; he didn’t want to warm it too fast and cook the pulp into a hard mass.
“I once had a stack of bank records we recovered from a money launderer found floating in the sea,” Benaroun said. “He’d only been out there for a short time, but the plastic bag they were in had leaked a little. I used a razor to cut off the edges and was able to spread the pages.”
Gage thought back to when he had skimmed through Hennessy’s books in his office and had noticed the highlightings and handwritten notes.
“Can’t take a chance,” Gage said. “Bank records have margins, notepaper doesn’t. And Hennessy was a scribbler who wouldn’t have respected them anyway.”
Benaroun smiled. “So we just sit here and watch the water evaporate.”
“And think.” Gage leaned back in his chair and folded his arm across his chest. “Who sent those guys and what were they up to? People hunting for Ibrahim?”
“Or maybe people protecting him.”
“I suspect that it was someone trying to find out what Hennessy had learned.”
A knock on the door drew their eyes away from the drying notebook.
Mashaal walked in carrying beers they hadn’t ordered and set them down.
Gage watched Benaroun’s face harden and his jaw clench as Mashaal spoke to him in Arabic. Benaroun nodded and Mashaal walked back out to the bar.
“He says that the people who chased us now know who I am,” Benaroun said. “And they’re looking for me.”
Gage sat forward. “How did they figure it out?”
Benaroun shrugged. “Maybe they recognized me. Maybe they got my license plate number. Their story is that I fled from the scene of an accident.”
Gage thought of Benaroun’s Citroen parked in the alley two blocks away. “But your car isn’t damaged.”
Benaroun sighed. “It is now.”
Gage tilted his head in the direction of the car. “How’d they find it?”
“I don’t know. I used to use this room to meet with witnesses who were afraid to come to the Hotel de Police. Mashaal and I grew up together in Algiers. They must’ve gotten someone in the department to-“
Benaroun’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen and said, “It’s Tabari.” He answered, listened for thirty seconds, and then nodded.
“Where were you when they called?” Benaroun asked. He listened again for a few seconds and shook his head at Tabari’s response.
“And your partner doesn’t know who they were?” Benaroun asked.
Gage held his palm up toward Benaroun, who told Tabari to stand by.
“We may need some help getting out of here,” Gage said, then pointed back and forth between the bar and alley. “I’m sure they’ve got the place covered.”
Benaroun passed on the information to Tabari, listened again, then disconnected and said to Gage, “He’s on his way from the strike with a couple of cars of uniformed police. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”
As Benaroun reached down and withdrew a small Beretta from an ankle holster, Gage pointed at a spot to the left of the door from the bar. Benaroun walked over and braced himself against the wall with the gun aimed waist-high so anyone in the frame would get hit in the gut.
Gage unplugged the heater and surveyed the room looking for a place to hide Hennessy’s phone and notebook. He dragged a chair over to the opposite wall, climbed up, and pulled off the cover of an air duct and placed the items inside. He then positioned himself next to the back exit. As he listened for sound from the alley, he caught a whiff of garbage seeping between the door and the loose frame and saw that the concrete abutting the metal threshold was slick with grease and blackened with mildew.
“Mashaal pretended that he hadn’t seen us,” Benaroun said.
“Let’s not put him in a bad spot. Call Tabari. Have them first scare away whoever is in the alley and we’ll go out that way.”
Benaroun made the call, then disconnected and said, “They’ll be here in-“
The back door exploded inward, the lock shattering the frame and shooting wood fragments into the room as it slammed against Gage’s shoulder. He pushed it away, then kicked it, swinging it back. A gun discharged. A man grunted. The door swung back at Gage again. He stepped around and reached for the leather jacket of the gunman crouched in the doorway and pulled him facedown to the floor. The gun bounced out of the shooter’s hand when it hit and slid across the linoleum toward Benaroun. Gage dived, sliding along behind it. As he grabbed for it, he heard pounding at the door from the bar, then the thud of a shoulder or a boot smashing against it. He looked up.
