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“Good,” Noa says. “And be thorough. Really thorough.”
One last look at the body.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Noa says. “And I need to have it make sense. Sooner rather than later.”
CHAPTER 35
PARIS, FRANCE
LIAM GREY IS flat on his belly at about three a.m. in a hot and filthy attic of a tenement building in the Seine-Saint-Denis neighborhood of Paris, also known as “the 93” for it being the93rd Départementin the country. This cramped district is home to shuttered factories, crumbling tall concrete public housing buildings, and one of the most infamousbanlieuesin France, where certain blocks are “no go” zones for the police. The unemployment rate for the mostly Muslim youth in this area runs at about 21 percent, and, lacking jobs and opportunities, they go out in the streets at night, burning cars and breaking shop windows, and get involved in running battles with the Paris police.
This mission has been planned for months. It’s taken just over a week for Liam and his crew to infiltrate this tightly knit neighborhood, where imams and fathers and jihadists fresh home from the various battlefields of the Middle East and Southeast Asia gather on dirty street corners to see who belongs and who doesn’t.
Through quick nighttime walks, riding the Metro, melting into the crowds, and hiding in dirty white delivery vans, he and his crew are now in position.
Save for one, Benjamin Lucas, who unexpectedly left Franceyesterday, saying, “Sorry, Liam, off to Africa for an emerging operation. Can’t be avoided.”
Which sucks, meaning his team is down one key member, even though it should be a straight in-and-out mission.
He focuses the binoculars, peering through a set of ventilation slats. Across the narrow alleyway is another two-story tenement building, and the windows there are darkened, hiding whatever might be in that small apartment.
But Liam is fairly sure who’s in there: three ISIS members who have fled Syria and have found shelter here, near the middle of Paris, and have placed their particular bloody talents up for sale to the highest bidder. It should have been an easy pickup for the Paris Police Prefecture or even France’s own intelligence agency, the General Directorate for Internal Security(Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure),but as often happens in France, it’s become a sticky situation. A niece of the French president abandoned family and friends to travel to Syria, and she has fallen in love with one of the ISIS terrorist leaders inside that apartment.
Negotiations for him and his two friends to surrender to the French under the protection of the president’s niece—always delicate, always lengthy, Liam thinks grumpily—have been going on for months, and now President Barrett’s patience has run out.
Those three have raped countless women, have beheaded aid workers, and have burned American pilots alive in metal cages. Their tickets get punched, as soon as you can make it happen.
In other words, this is not a raid to capture these three.
It’s a straight kill mission.
In his earpiece, an encrypted message comes in. “Liam, you clear?”
“Yeah,” he says. “What’s our drone status, Boyd?”
“Our bird is flying free and clear, getting a nice view of the streets and alleys,” Boyd Morris says. “No apparent overwatch going on from the target building. What’s going on inside?”
“About to find out,” Liam says. “Hold on.”
He puts the binoculars down, picks up a boxy viewing device that is quietly humming along. Highly classified, the system is called CLARK/K—SUPERMAN being too obvious for what it can do. He brings up the box to his eyes, blinks to get adjusted as to what he’s seeing.
CLARK/K has a variety of imaging and viewing capabilities, including thermal imaging that can go through concrete and brick walls, as well as a form of penetrating radar that can bring living shapes into view.
Liam takes a breath.
There are three men moving around in the second-floor apartment, and two sit down on a couch. Through the imaging and data processing, CLARK/K tells Liam that the shapes have a 95 percent probability of being Haji Omar al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr, and Abd Samir Muhammad al-Khlifawi, due to height, weight, body temperature, and presence of shrapnel in two of the figures.
“Liam, all stations, targets in place.”
Mission parameters say the go order can be issued if the probability rate is above 90 percent, so Liam is feeling pretty good, considering he’s resting among rat shit and pigeon droppings, and he and his four team members are here illegally in the eyes of two countries.
Country one, of course, is France. Various political and military pressures on the government and its agencies and the Élysée Palace have proven fruitless, and now, the French being the French, Liam thinks, they’re being stubborn just for the hell of it, to show they won’t be bossed around by the arrogant Americans.
Country two is the land of the free and home of the brave. Station chiefs of the CIA jealously guard their turf, and the one here in Paris is smart, tough, and has a take-no-prisoners attitude. If she were to find out that Liam and his crew were here without her authorization, they’d be Gitmo’ed so hard and fast she’d make it a point to ship them past the International Date Line so they’d spend an extra day in custody.
Liam says, “Ferris, you have anything?”
“We’ve got angry yutes in the street, but that’s about it,” says Ferris Walton, stationed on the top of an adjacent concrete housing building. “Nothing of concern around the target building. Quiet.”