Jake Grafton looked amused as he listened to me tell of my success in getting bugs into Rodet’s Paris flat. When I ran out of air he sat in silence looking around with unfocused eyes, lost in thought. There in the SCIF the only sounds were the hum of the air-conditioning and faintly, almost too faint to discern, the sound of background music. The speakers for the Musak were inside the walls, floors and ceilings, to foil listening devices.
Finally he looked at me and blinked, almost as if seeing me for the first time. “That was a bold stroke,” he said, “and regardless of what she does or whom she tells — in the French government — I can’t see how we’re compromised.”
“In the French government?”
“She could be MI-6, BND, Russian, Polish, Italian, Israeli — even an agent of a terrorist cell.”
“Okay, okay. Maybe I should have talked it over with you first.”
Grafton sighed. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. You used your best judgment and acted on the information you had, which is the only way we’re going to get through this.” He smiled at me. “I spent my adult life in an outfit that operates that way and it’s probably too late for me to change now. However it works out is how it works out.”
“How do we know that she’s anyone’s agent? I thought that her father was the spy who—“
Grafton made a face. “Really, Tommy!”
I tried to explain. “Rodet thinks she’s just a hot French tootsie. Maybe he’s right.”
Grafton rolled his eyes. “She’s a beautiful, young, wealthy daughter of the establishment who is driven wild by the prospect of jumping in bed with a rich, powerful man old enough to be her father? Do you believe that?”
“No, but I know a few men who—“
“I doubt if Rodet believes it either,” Grafton said. He picked up the photos we had taken of Rodet’s apartment and began looking at them, one by one.
After a bit he put his feet up on the desk, leaned back and looked at each photo again. He must have looked at each of them three times when he handed the stack to me. “What kind of television does Rodet have?” he asked. He picked up the cell phone lying on the desk and fingered it.
“You mean what brand?”
“Brand, size?”
“I don’t remember the brand. The one I saw at the apartment wasn’t large. It was just a normal television. Floor thing, in a cabinet, kind of old-fashioned. Why?”
Grafton passed me a photo. “He has a satellite dish on the roof of the house. I would have thought he’d have a big Japanese flat screen, maybe a home movie studio, something like that.”
I looked at the photo. Sure enough, there was the dish, sitting like a plate next to a chimney. “If he has a setup like that, I didn’t see it,” I said. “All I saw was an older television.”
Grafton opened his phone and fingered it. Of course, it didn’t work here in the SCIF, and he knew that. “Okay,” he said, rising from the chair. “Now if you will excuse me, I’ve got to go upstairs to make a call.”
I picked up the aerial photos and studied the dish antenna. They were sprouting all over Paris, it was true, yet Marisa hadn’t struck me as a big fan of television, and I doubted that Rodet had the time.
Jake and Callie Grafton ate dinner at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant three blocks from their apartment. Night had fallen in Paris and the cool wind had picked up.
“The police accepted my explanation, had me go through it twice, and let me go. They said they would call me if they had more questions.”
A few minutes later she said, “Poor Professor Heger. To die like that…”
“But he tried to answer your question?”
“He made a noise, Jake. I couldn’t understand it.”
“Could he have been trying to tell you the name of his killer?”
“I don’t know. He was semiconscious, at best. I don’t know how much he heard or understood of what I said. At the time I thought he was trying to answer my question. I asked about Abu Qasim. He made a noise. But do you think … Abu Qasim, here, in Paris?”
Jake Grafton shrugged and toyed with his wine glass. “It’s a possibility to keep in mind.”
“It’s more than that. I ask him about Abu Qasim, and the next day he’s murdered. It may be a coincidence, but—“
“Yesterday fifty people spoke to Professor Heger, about fifty different things. They couldn’t all be cause and effect.”
Callie wasn’t going to take a brush-off that easily. “If Qasim is a killer, why would Rodet protect him?”
When her husband didn’t reply, Callie said, “That was a stupid question. Twenty-five years is a long time.”
“He’d have to be somewhere between forty-five and fifty,” Jake said, musing aloud. “Maybe a year or two older.” Their food came and they ate in silence. When they finished and were sipping on tiny glasses of apple brandy, Callie murmured, “Professor Heger was a nice man.”
“So it’s possible that Heger recognized him,” Jake mused. “Rodet might recognize him, too, if he saw him.”
“Now you are assuming that Rodet’s Al Qaeda spy is a killer. If he is, why did he tell Rodet about the Veghel conspiracy?”
Jake threw up his hands. “I wish I knew,” he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
They were an unlikely pair, Henri Rodet and Abu Qasim. The Frenchman was eight years older than the Bedouin lad, they were from vastly different cultures and walks of life, and yet each found something in the other that made the friendship worthwhile.
Qasim was waiting one morning when Rodet drove by on a pipeline patrol. Rodet stopped, the boy climbed in the truck, and away they went. Qasim had nothing better to do, so they rode the pipeline twice a week. Rodet taught the boy French and Qasim taught him Arabic. They argued in both languages about God, religion, history, the world and man’s place in it. Rodet enjoyed puns, and Qasim had a wicked sense of humor. They became like brothers who enjoyed each other’s company.
The crisis came when the pipeline company laid off Rodet and hired a local man at half his salary. Two weeks after he went back to France, Rodet sent for Qasim. The boy didn’t bother his father with the news — he merely walked away from home. A week later he showed up on Rodet’s doorstep. Rodet’s parents, both teachers, welcomed him.
Rodet went into the French intelligence service and Qasim went to school. After two years, he won a scholarship to the Sorbonne. He was just finishing his education when Anwar Sadat was murdered.
That was the day the earth moved, Rodet thought as he stood looking out his window at Paris. That October day in 1981 was the dawn of the age of terror.
Islamic fundamentalists murdered Sadat, the president of Egypt, as he reviewed the army. The assassins were cut down by his security forces, but after all, they expected to die and were prepared for it. They were members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, fighting to overthrow the old order and convert Egypt to an Islamic republic, a nation ruled by God. Why the God who created the universe and everything in it needed their help was never explained by the bearded holy men, but the warriors knew in their hearts that it was so. They wanted it to be so. And so they committed murder, paid immediately with their lives and were ushered into paradise.
Sadat’s murder didn’t just happen, of course. It was the culmination of months of civil strife between Muslims and Coptic Christians, which had resulted in bloody riots in some of Cairo’s worst slums. With a stagnant economy, isolated from the Arab world for making peace with Israel, Egypt under Sadat was a powder keg. Sadat jailed the fundamentalists and Copts without trial, laying an iron hand upon them. They struck back and he died.
His successors crushed the Islamic movement in Egypt. They jailed its adherents, tortured prisoners for information and confessions, and executed without trial those they thought the most dangerous. The survivors of the purge fled Egypt and declared war on civilization.
Rodet had been working out of the French embassy in Cairo the year that Sadat died. He had witnessed the riots firsthand. Heat, dirt, squalor, blood, body parts… and the stench — he had only to close his eyes and he could
