“I understand,” Rodet said politely. Indeed he did; if there were a terrorist incident in Paris while the summit was occurring, he would be the scapegoat. The politicians would publicly blame him and, of course, sack him. That outcome was inevitable, perhaps, but the minister wanted to be able to say that he told Rodet he was responsible and accountable. Actually the minister had said it four or five times — Rodet had lost count.
The two men agreed to talk again later that afternoon and terminated their conversation.
Alone at last, Rodet stood at the window looking at his view of Paris. Beyond the double-pane, electronically protected windows the autumn wind swirled fallen leaves in clouds through the streets, but he was thinking about the desert.
He had been young then, only twenty-four.
The heat and cold, the wind, the hard-packed, scoured dirt that stretched away to the horizon in all directions, and the occasional small stone outcrops… that was the desert. There wasn’t a grain of sand for a hundred miles, just endless vistas of naked dirt under a cloudless sky — and the oil pipeline, which ran from horizon to horizon. The company that built it hadn’t bothered to bury it, of course. They had laid the pipe on top of the dirt and rock, here and there putting it up on posts to keep it level where it crossed a wash or low place, and burying it only when necessary to provide a crossing place for vehicles — or the occasional Bedouin. The pipeline ran from the wells in the south across the desert, across the mountains, to the sea.
Algeria! Not the Algeria of the coastal plain, but the Algeria of the desert, the Sahara.
In the summer there was the pitiless dry heat that sucked the moisture from living bodies, literally beginning the mummification process while one was alive. In winter, the desiccating wind was bone-chilling cold. Was hell hot or cold? Summer and winter there was the wind-borne dirt, getting into everything, clothes, food, water, every nook and cranny, accumulating in ears, eyes, hair, every fold of skin, sandblasting metal, windshields, exposed skin, ruining engines, contaminating oil, turning grease into an abrasive…
He had hated the desert. Hated the circumstances that brought him to it. Hated the people who lived in it, the dirty, smelly Arabs in their filthy robes, with their dogs and goats and camels. Most Westerners, Rodet included, discovered that the Arabs did not understand the concept of truth, used an incomprehensible logic, and were reliably unreliable. The world’s worst thieves, they would steal anything they could carry, actually anything they could disassemble to pieces small enough to carry, even if the object was useless, even if they didn’t know what it was. They were illiterate and ignorant, knowing nothing of the outside world, nothing of germs or bacteria or sanitation, nothing about anything except the desert and the animals— and, of course, the Koran, which they committed to memory in the ancient tradition of oral literature. They were religious in the way that illiterate nomads have always been religious, in tune with nature, convinced that the eternal, immortal spirit surrounded them in this grand desolation in which they lived.
Rodet’s job, back when he was young, had been to prevent theft and keep the pipeline intact and operating. So he drove the road beside the pipe and checked on the toolsheds and supply depots located at convenient intervals. The job was mind-numbing.
Standing in Paris all these years later, he could still remember that hot summer day, the brassy sky, the choking dirt raised by the truck that blew in through the windows, coating the dashboard and windshield and seat and every square inch of every single thing, clogging his nostrils, burning his eyes. Oh, yes, he could still see it in his mind’s eye: see the figure in the great distance running from the toolshed, leaping up on a camel, and trotting directly away from the pipeline.
He gave chase, of course. Caught up with the trotting camel and the barefoot man aboard it. Motioned for the rider to stop his mount.
He didn’t. Kept whacking at the camel with his bare heels.
Rodet waved the revolver. The rider urged the animal to greater speed.
Rodet lost it then — shot the camel from a distance of a dozen feet and watched the thing trot on for a few more strides, then slow, stumble, and go down. The rider went flying and landed all in a heap.
Rodet boiled out of the truck with the pistol in his hand.
The rider was a boy with only scraggly facial hair. He was dressed in rags.
They were a hundred miles south of the nearest collection of mud huts, in the midst of a great plain of mud and rock, broken only by an occasional thorn bush. To the east lay the low hills that the boy had been running toward. Once in the hills, he could have found a place to get out of sight until the infidel in the truck tired of waiting and drove on. Now, of course, Rodet had him.
As he stood with the pistol covering the boy, who was sitting, not trying to stand, he looked back at the pipeline and the tool depot. The door of the storage shed was standing open; no doubt the boy had broken the lock and entered to see what he could steal.
The camel flopped around a few times, groaning, then lay still.
Staring at the young man, Rodet realized that he could kill him and no one would know. Or care. For the first time in his life he felt the power of life and death, felt the power of the blued steel he held m his right hand.
The Arab stared at him, watching every move, expressionless. He made no attempt to stand, or even move. Not that anything he could nave done would have done him any good. Only fifteen feet separated them, and Rodet held the revolver, which still had five cartridges in it. Five was probably four more than enough.
Damned dirty Arab thief!
He stood there, tempted, acutely conscious of the heft of the revolver.
Not a trace of emotion crossed the brown face before him. It was only when Rodet glanced away from the dark eyes that he realized the young man was holding one arm with the other. The arm being cradled had a sliver of white bone protruding through it.
The kid was extraordinarily tough. Rodet had never seen anyone with this kind of physical courage.
He stuck the pistol in his hip pocket and went back to the truck for the first aid kit. When he returned the youth hadn’t moved. As he inspected the broken arm, he realized that if he didn’t set it, it would never be set. This boy was from one of these ubiquitous collections of mud huts that surrounded the “towns”; the arm would either heal or fester, and if the latter, be taken off by some self-taught surgeon to prevent the infection from killing the patient. People with missing limbs were a common sight in the third world.
He touched the limb, explained in French what had to be done. The boy’s expression never wavered. “Do you understand?” Rodet asked.
“Oui.”
So he seized the arm and braced his foot against the elbow and pulled until the bone came back inside the skin. The boy groaned once, a moan that escaped from deep inside. Rodet felt the arm to make sure the bone was where it should be, more or less, and then splinted the limb. He left an opening in the splint for the wound, which he sprinkled with a disinfectant powder and dressed.
When he was finished, he half-carried the boy to the truck.
His name was Abu Qasim. His arm healed, and as it did, he taught Henri Rodet to speak Arabic. Not shooting Abu Qasim was the turning point in Rodet’s life, the most important thing that ever happened to him.
Abu Qasim …
Henri Rodet turned away from his palatial window and tackled the paperwork piled in his in basket.
I spent the evening riding the subways and walking into and out of department stores. Those exercises, I have learned through the years, give me an excellent opportunity to see if I am under surveillance. I was well aware of the fact that if the DGSE wished, they could devote so many agents, cars, and helicopters to the task that the subject would be under continual surveillance and, unless he was very astute, be unaware of it. During the cold war the Soviets took this kind of roving surveillance to a whole new level in Moscow. Fortunately this was France. A government bureaucracy, the DGSE had no more extra people than any other agency of a democratic government; God willing, they had no reason yet to pull out all the stops to learn what that American wart Terry G. Shannon was up to. All I was doing was checking to see if, for any reason, I had aroused enough suspicion somewhere to warrant a little checking up on by one or two officers. I didn’t see anyone paying any attention to me, and after two hours of strolling, I was certain I was clean.
I needed to be, because I was going to a meet with two agency types. This meet was set up by the call Grafton told me to expect. These men had diplomatic cover, which was a mixed blessing; as personnel assigned to the embassy, the counterintelligence section of the DGSE would automatically be interested in them and would routinely, from time to time, devote people and assets to checking on their movements and activities. They had to be loose when they met me or I would come under suspicion and my future activities would ecome more difficult. I
