Twenty yards.
He wiped his palms on his blue jacket.
Fifteen.
All right… Now!
But Balan froze as he gazed at the family. Wait… what was this?
The two men and the older woman were diving to the sand.
The woman with the iPod ear buds leapt from her chair and reached into the bassinette. She pulled from it a black machine gun, a Heckler & Koch MP-5, which she trained on Balan’s chest.
Astonished, the Indian looked right and left, as two men in NATO olive-drab uniforms and two French soldiers, in dark blue, sprinted from what seemed like empty cabanas. They must have been hiding there all morning; he’d checked the beach carefully after the Americans arrived.
A trap! He’d been set up!
One of the NATO officers, a boy-faced blond-his name badge read “Wetherby”-growled, “
Brandishing a large pistol, Wetherby stepped closer and repeated the warnings.
Balan remained where he stood, his head swiveling from the officers on his left, to the Americans, then to the other soldiers on his right.
His eyes fell on the older husband who was climbing to his feet, studying Balan-with interest, but without surprise. So he was the one responsible for the trap.
And in this instant he understood too that a man so clever was indeed a serious threat to Devras Sikari.
He told himself: You’ve disappointed him. You’ve failed. Your life is pointless. Use your death to good purpose. Kill the American. At least any risk to Sikari and his plans will die with him.
Balan crouched fast and reached for the gun.
Which is when his world went mad. Yellow lights danced in his eyes. His muscles spasmed and pain exploded from teeth to groin.
He dropped to his knees, his limbs unresponsive. He glanced down and saw the Taser barbs in his side. It was the same brand of weapon that he’d brought with him to use on the American.
Balan’s eyes teared from the pain.
And from his failure to “go and do well” for his beloved mentor.
He fell forward on the sand and saw nothing more.
“His name’s Kavi Balan, sir,” said Petey Wetherby, the younger of the two NATO soldiers assisting on the operation here. He spoke with a North Boston accent. The eager, crew-cut man, an interpreter by specialty, nodded at the prisoner, who sat with his hands and feet cuffed, slowly coming to, beside one of the concession stands closed for the season. He was beneath a large sign that said “Creme glacee! Pommes Frites! Hot Dawgs!”
“Balan. Never heard of him,” nodded Harold Middleton, the man who’d been masquerading as the older husband in the sting operation.
Wetherby continued, “We found his car. Rented under a fake name and address, prepaid credit card. But we’ve got his real passport and we recovered a computer.”
“Computer? Excellent.” Middleton looked around the deserted beach, then turned to one of the French soldiers. In French, he asked, “Any sign of Sikari?”
“No, Colonel Middleton. But the perimeter… ” The slim Frenchman gave a Gallic shrug and twist of his lip.
Meaning, Middleton understood, they didn’t have the manpower to search very far. The French had been cooperative to a point but weren’t all-hands-on-board for an operation that was primarily American and NATO, and would deliver the suspect not to the Palais de Justice in Paris but to International Criminal Court in the Hague-the tribunal with jurisdiction to try war criminals and other human-rights violators.
Middleton had doubted Devras Sikari himself would be here. While intelligence sources had reported that someone from Kashmir had traveled to the South of France to kill or abduct the “American geologist,” it would be unlikely that Sikari would risk coming out of hiding for such a mundane crime.
The best he’d hoped for was to capture someone who could lead them to Sikari.
Which, it seemed, they had.
Middleton continued to the Frenchman, “He’ll have an accomplice, though. You find any other cars nearby? Monitor any radio transmissions?”
“No,” the Frenchman said.
“You?” Middleton asked Wetherby. The NATO officers had their own monitoring system.
“No, Colonel.” He referred to Middleton’s rank when he’d retired from the Army years ago.
Middleton preferred “Harry,” but some monikers just stick and “Colonel” was better than some others he could think of.
It was then that Middleton’s “wife” joined them. She was in reality Leonora Tesla, a colleague. The intense woman, with a mane of dark Mediterranean hair, held up a Nokia. “Prepaid cell phone. Some local calls within the past half hour but they’re all caller-ID blocked.”
A flash of white in the distance caught Middleton’s eye. It was just a van accelerating slowly away into the hills.
Tesla added, “JM’s going through the computer now. He said it’s password-protected but he’s trying to bypass that.”
Middleton glanced at where she was nodding. In the back of the unmarked NATO van, Jean-Marc Lespasse, the “husband” of the younger couple, was pounding away at the keys on the laptop. Athletic with spiky black hair, JM had been playing his role in the sting to the hilt, referring to his boss, who was only 15 years older, as “Dad” for the past two days and asking if he should cut up Middleton’s food for him.
“What do we know about him?” Middleton nodded toward their prisoner, slumped on the ground, and only semi-conscious.
“I just emailed Interpol,” Tesla told him. “They’ll let us know soon.”
The fourth member of the faux family approached: twenty-nine-year-old Constance “Connie” Carson, who like Middleton and Lespasse, was former military. She’d returned the “baby,” the MP-5 machine gun, to the NATO van. Though they couldn’t legally carry weapons without permission-which the French had not given them-Connie, with her muscular cow-girl’s body and piercing blue eyes, wasn’t the sort to say no to. She’d walked up to the NATO officers, pulled the machine pistol off the gun rack, chambered a round and tossed the gun into the bassinette. Ignoring their protests, she’d said, “Just gonna take her for a little stroll,” in an accent that pinpointed her roots in West Texas.
She unplugged the walkie-talkie ear buds, disguised to look like they belonged to an iPod, and examined the roads. “Betcha he’s not alone.”
“That’s what I think,” Middleton said. “We can’t find anybody, though.”
Connie continued to scan for possible offensive threats. This was her nature, Middleton had learned.
“He’s coming to, Colonel,” the other NATO officer called, standing near Balan, sitting under the sign. It looked like a cartoon, with the words “Pommes Frites!” in a dialog balloon over his head.
“How long?” Middleton asked.
“Five minutes.”
“What do you want me to do, Colonel?” Wetherby asked.
“Hang tight. I might need you to interpret.”
“Yes sir.”
Harold Middleton stretched and gazed out to sea, reflecting that he was a long, long way from his home in Fairfax County, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., where he’d been only last week.
He was a bit trimmer than he had been a few years ago, when he was living comfortably-“fat and sassy,” he’d tell his daughter Charley-with two great jobs: authenticating music manuscripts and teaching music history. He’d taken them up after retiring from one that was considerably more demanding. As a military intelligence officer, Middleton had witnessed the results of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and other atrocities in many parts of the
