“Good-bye.”
Rodet said to Arnaud, “Goldberg wants to bring a colleague to meet me. Wednesday at three. Grafton, do you think?”
“It’s very possible.”
“Could you be here for that?”
“Of course.”
They went back to their discussion of the situation in the Middle East and moved on to security preparations for the G-8 conference at Versailles.
That morning Jake and Callie Grafton were playing tourist. They were near the head of the queue when the Louvre opened and marched through the endless galleries with a purpose. Callie had the map, which she consulted regularly. Her husband kept his eyes peeled for signs. He pointed them out.
“That way.”
They went up a wide flight of stairs and along a series of galleries, passing a seemingly infinite collection of old paintings that had little to commend them, Jake thought. Many were portraits commissioned centuries ago by the rich. Callie looked at yesteryear’s aristocracy while Jake scanned the rooms of the old palace, trying to imagine the gentlemen in wigs and silk hose who had once walked these rooms on their way to see the king, and their ladies, with hair piled high, rouged cheeks, and wide skirts. The crowd today was more casual, in jeans and slacks, tennis shoes and cameras. It seemed as if everyone had a camera dangling from his neck.
They finally arrived at Callie’s destination: the Mona Lisa. “It wasn’t on display when I came with Amy,” she whispered.
He left her to stare while he wandered on. He found dirty windows that looked out into courtyards that were either under renovation or abandoned, awaiting someone’s attention, someday. The day was gloomy, with clouds rushing by overhead. Pigeons perched on every ledge and left their deposits to eat at the stone. No one paid any attention to the American standing with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking out.
He was still there when Callie found him a half hour later. She wrapped her hands around one of his arms. “You’re wishing you were back in the States, aren’t you?”
“I shouldn’t have taken this job.”
“Oh, Jake.”
“I’m in over my head on this one, Callie. I have never in my life felt so damn overwhelmed.”
“You’ve been in tough situations before,” she pointed out. “I seem to remember you were up to your eyes when I met you, all those years ago. You’ve always found your way through the forest.”
“Everyone strikes out, sooner or later.”
She stood with him watching two workmen in the plaza below cleaning up construction debris.
“The world was simpler then,” he said.
She squeezed his arm. “Let’s go get some lunch.”
“Okay.”
Holding hands, they wandered along looking at tourists while the long-gone Europeans watched from the walls.
As they were eating lunch in the museum cafe, Jake said, “I have a little job for you, if you would like to help?”
Jake glanced around to ensure they couldn’t be overheard, then told her about Henri Rodet’s spy. He gave her the name he was given in Washington, Abu Qasim. “As it happens, Qasim is one of the names that a top Al Qaeda lieutenant, Abdullah al-Falih, uses occasionally. We know a little about him. He was originally from Algeria and spent time at the university here in Paris as a philosophy student. Al-Falih was one of the men the Egyptians swept up after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. They didn’t think he was anything but a religious fanatic, or they couldn’t find any evidence against him at all, whatever, so they didn’t execute him. They kept him locked up for two years and then released him. Of course, he met many of the major figures in Al Qaeda while he was in prison.”
“What is the source for the Qasim name?”
Jake smiled. His wife always asked the right questions. “Interrogation.”
“Torture, you mean?”
“I don’t know. But the name came up in an interesting way. The source claimed that Abu Qasim had a source inside French intelligence who passed him information.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No, but it would be the perfect cover to pass information the other way. And we do know, or think we know, that the head of the DGSE got some critical intel from someone in Al Qaeda.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Go over to the university this afternoon and ask questions. I would like to find at least one person who remembers Abu Qasim or al-Falih. I want a description, some fact or facts that will put flesh on this legend.”
“Okay.”
“If the DGSE has an agent, it’s someone that Rodet recruited or someone he once knew well,” Jake mused. He commented on how difficult it was to recruit agents, who were by definition traitors to the society in which they lived. The possibility of talking a religious fanatic on the inside into becoming a traitor struck Grafton as very remote, and to do it without endangering one’s self or the prospective recruit, probably impossible. On the other hand, a man who had never believed and infiltrated … he might have a chance. A slim one, true, but a plausible chance. If he could live in the belly of the beast and keep his nerve.
“What if there is no record of him?” Callie asked.
“That would be a factor in the equation.”
“You mean someone could have removed his name from the records?”
“Or he never existed. What we have is a tidbit spit out by the computer, a factoid someone once passed to an interrogator. It may be dross, pure fiction.”
“Or a story woven around a germ of truth,” Callie said thoughtfully.
Henri Rodet sat staring at a painting on the wall, an Algerian desert scene by a well-known young artist. “The old gang from Algeria…” He had used that phrase with Arnaud. The men he had known in Algeria all those years ago were either elderly or dead.
Except for Abu Qasim.
After he met Qasim, he checked on him the following week. Yes, he lived in a mud hut on the ragged edge of nowhere. There was the old man, Qasim’s mother, two younger brothers, and a sister or two. The family had owned just one camel, and Rodet had killed it. The dressing on the wound in Qasim’s arm had not been changed, and the wound was infected. If the boy didn’t get medical treatment soon, he would lose the arm. Or die.
So there he sat, the Frenchman who caused it all.
“Inshallah,” the old man muttered. As God wills it.
Using French and a smattering of Arabic, Rodet explained about the infection, how the wound must be cleaned and disinfected. He explained about germs. The old man was having none of it. No one was touching his son. It would be as Allah willed it. Finally it dawned on Rodet that the old man didn’t know what germs were.
Why didn’t he let the boy ride away on that mangy, half-starved camel? Why on earth had he shot the beast?
He went to see the company doctor, a fat man who had lived most of his adult life in Algeria, and explained the problem.
“Why did you return?” the doctor asked.
“Because I shot the camel and the boy broke his arm.”
“You cannot save these people from themselves. They live in squalor and filth, ignorant, illiterate, besotted with God, and there is nothing you can do to save them. You understand, Rodet? Nothing!”
He had had it up to here with Algeria. He knew it was true. And yet… “I want bandages and disinfectant, sulfa powder, something to clean the wound.”
The doctor threw up his hands. “They will not let you touch the boy. They will not thank you. They would rather watch him die. Whatever happens will be God’s will, and man must submit. Don’t you see, nothing can be done. It’s useless to fight against your fate. The boy was doomed when he was conceived.”
“We all were. Give me those things.”
On the way back to the hut he bought a goat, paying twice as much as it was worth, and put it in the bed of
