The Nameless Ones by John Connolly
Chapter XXXVII
A cell phone, unsolicited, was delivered to Louis at his hotel shortly after seven the following morning. It was fully powered, came with a Bluetooth earpiece, and rang five minutes after it arrived. Louis picked up, and Harris spoke.
‘Marković is on the move,’ he said. ‘We have eyes and ears in his room, but he’s using a clean burner phone. He received a text message about twenty minutes ago, armed himself, and left. We’re trying to get a trace on the sender and the message, but that will take time.’
‘Any idea where he’s going?’
‘We think it’s Gare de Lyon. Our information is that it’s the Vuksans’ preferred final destination for important deliveries.’
‘Okay. By the way, I thought you were retired.’
‘Semiretired,’ said Harris. ‘Plus, I’ve always liked France. We’re going to patch you into the coms group, so keep the earpiece in place and you’ll hear what we hear. The phone has a fifteen-hour battery life, so don’t worry about charging it.’
‘I’m on my way,’ said Louis. He inserted the earpiece and dropped the phone in his coat pocket, but not before muting the microphone on the device. It was one thing permitting himself to be tracked by Harris and his people, another to have them listening in on his conversations. He placed one of the Rohrbaugh pistols in a hip holster under his jacket. The other already had its Osprey suppressor in place because he didn’t want to waste time trying to fit it if he needed to use the Rohrbaugh in a hurry. That gun now hung vertically from a custom Velcro strap beneath his coat, and could be released with a single hard yank. The setup wasn’t ideal, but neither was the world. The remaining two pistols had gone to his guests.
When he was ready, he made a call on his own cell phone.
‘Game on,’ he said.
Aleksej Marković took a seat in the Costa Coffee at Gare de Lyon, which gave him a good view of the station concourse and the exit onto rue de Châlon. At no point would he make direct contact with the two men arriving from Port-Vendres. Their shadows, acolytes of the Vuksans, would stay with them until they left the station, at which point the Syrians’ own people would take over; and that would be the last Marković or anyone else at the Vuksans’ end would see of them, at least until their photographs appeared on BFM, the BBC, or Sky, alongside images of rising smoke and fleeing bystanders, of blood and broken glass.
He watched the Syrians, Saad and Mahdi, emerge separately. Both were in their forties, which made them old by jihadi standards, and dressed in business suits that looked more expensive than they were. Marković knew this because he had supervised their purchase himself, just as he had chosen the clear-lens glasses and overnight bags. The men had trimmed their beards and now resembled middle managers for some modestly successful business, or academics at one of the lower-ranked colleges.
A few meters behind them walked Baba and Fouad, the shadows. Both came from the northern suburbs of Paris, the banlieues where immigrant unemployment was high and opportunities for advancement were few. Fouad, the Algerian, was Muslim, although far from observant, while Baba, the Senegalese, was a Christian from that country’s Casamance region. The two men were not close, but managed to work well together. Marković preferred dealing with Fouad because he didn’t feel compelled to talk about God quite as much as Baba did. Every two years, Baba made a pilgrimage to Popenguine, on Senegal’s Atlantic coast, where he prayed before the Black Madonna and asked her to intercede on his behalf and that of his extended family. How Baba balanced his deep Christian beliefs with a capacity, even a propensity, for extreme violence was one of the mysteries of his particular brand of worship. But then Marković, a devout member of the Serbian Orthodox Church, was hardly in a position to criticize the contradictions of others, not with all the blood on his own hands.
Marković had not informed Baba and Fouad that he would be present for the handover, if only as an observer. His appearance had altered since last he’d met the two operatives. He was now bearded, and his hair was a few shades darker. Up close, they might have recognized him, but not from any kind of distance. He wasn’t sure what they knew of the Vuksans’ current situation, but he had seen no reason to enlighten them if they were ignorant of it. Both Baba and Fouad were shrewd, which was why they’d been entrusted with the care of the Syrians; but if they became aware of the Vuksans’ problems, the smart move would be to walk away, and Marković couldn’t afford to let that happen. Their eyes scanned the crowd, always returning to the Syrians. Fouad struck Marković as the more uneasy of the two, but he was by nature a nervous animal. Baba was always calmer. Even when he was hurting another human being, he remained implacable.
The four men entered the concourse. Fouad glanced to his right, and his gaze froze before moving on. It was only the minutest of pauses, but Marković caught it, and it seemed to him that Fouad slowed down, falling farther behind Baba and the Syrians. Marković saw a couple, a man and a woman, cease their examination of a ticket machine and begin closing fast on Baba and the Syrians. Meanwhile, by the exit, a young black man in a clean tracksuit and an older male in a dark suit, a misbaha wrapped around his fingers, brightened as they took in the Syrians’ approach.
Suddenly there was shouting, and the couple from the ticket machine reached for guns, the butts visible to Marković beneath their jackets. At the same moment, heavily armed officers from RAID, the National Police’s tactical unit, emerged from a pair of unmarked doorways and moved in on the Syrians. Marković instinctively looked around, expecting to see more armed personnel closing on him. He was carrying a pistol but wasn’t so foolish as to believe he would stand a chance against a cadre of antiterrorist operatives. The best he could hope for was to be taken alive. So far, though, it seemed that he remained unnoticed, and so he began planning his escape.
Curiously, at that point the couple quickly separated, vanishing into the crowd, and Marković thought he saw at least three other men, all in civilian clothing, head for the exits. They didn’t run, unlike some of the passengers at the station who had immediately panicked at the sight of assault weapons, nor did they remain frozen in place like so many others. In common with Marković, who was already on his feet, their instinct was to remove themselves from the scene before they were spotted.
Marković immediately identified it for what it was: a fuckup, two operations being conducted independently of each other on the same target. One unit was clearly French, given the presence of RAID, but the likelihood of two French teams working in ignorance of each other was slim. The French had learned a lot of hard lessons from the terrorist attacks of 2015, one of which was the importance of integration and coordination. UCLAT, the Unité de coordination de la lutte antiterroriste, representing all branches of the National Police, was responsible for the centralization of operational information and decisions. It existed to ensure that, theoretically at least, the main gauche always knew what the main droite was doing. Regardless of divisional rivalries, no French agency would risk a takedown at a site such as the Gare de Lyon without first clearing the operation at the highest levels. That left a foreign power or independent operators as the second team, and Marković was leaning toward the former.
Fouad, he noticed, was nowhere to be seen. Baba, on the other hand, had peeled away as soon as the police appeared, but only managed to walk a few feet before he was surrounded. He was now lying on the floor with three assault weapons pointing at his head. The Syrians were still standing, their hands raised, although the two men who had been waiting for them were gone. The Syrians had their backs to Marković, but one of them – Marković thought it might be Saad – was shouting at the police in Arabic. Around them, passengers huddled low or lay flat on the ground, giving the officers clear fields of fire if required. Saad’s right hand dropped, and he reached inside his jacket. At least three RAID officers opened fire simultaneously, two with pistols and one with a Heckler & Koch G36. They drew no distinction between Saad and Mahdi. Within seconds, both men were dead.
Louis was at the main station entrance when he heard swearing in his Bluetooth earpiece, before Harris’s voice gave the order to abort the operation. Louis listened for a while longer, until a woman’s voice announced that they’d lost Marković. Almost immediately, his own cell phone buzzed, and he answered.
‘We have him,’ said the voice on the other end. ‘He’s on Place Henri-Frenay, heading north.’
Louis took out the Bluetooth earpiece and replaced it with a wired earpiece and microphone connected to his own phone. He removed the SIM card and battery from the Android device that had been delivered earlier that morning, and debated breaking the SIM card in two. Instead he put it in his pocket, but dumped the phone and battery in a trash can. He wouldn’t have put it past Harris to embed a tracker in the phone, one that operated independently of the battery.
Louis walked away as more police vehicles pulled up outside the station, along with a pair of ambulances. His taxi was waiting on the street; the driver had come highly recommended, as selectively blind and deaf as the evolution of his breed would allow. As Louis got in, the voice in his ear told him that Marković had been making for the Reuilly-Diderot Métro station, but now looked as though he might be reconsidering. Moments later, Marković had hailed a cab, and his trackers were now following, all the time keeping up a constant flow of information from their cell phones to Louis’s earpiece.
‘North at present,’ Louis heard. ‘Do you think he’s going back to his hotel?’
‘Only if he’s dumb,’ said Louis, ‘and Marković doesn’t strike me as that.’
Louis was frustrated. Harris’s operation had gone south fast, but at least Marković wasn’t in the wind, not yet.
Marković’s cab held the straightest route north, only veering east as it approached Gare de l’Est. For a moment it seemed possible that Marković might just be foolish enough to return to his Stalingrad base, but the cab passed Stalingrad and continued over the Bassin de la Villette and on to Pantin, where it stopped outside a budget hotel near the quai de l’Aisne that was only marginally more appealing than Marković’s original lodgings. There was no other hotel in the vicinity. Marković did not enter immediately but instead took a seat in a nearby coffee shop, from which he could watch the hotel while making a series of calls.
He was still there when Louis’s taxi arrived. By then one of the men tracking Marković had already paid cash for a room at the hotel, and he slipped the card keys to Louis as they passed each other on the street: one for the door that separated the lobby from the interior of the hotel, including the elevator, and another for the room itself. If, as seemed likely, Marković was keeping a second base at the hotel, Louis now had the means to follow him inside. Louis bought a newspaper, found a bakery, and took a space by the window that gave him a clear view of Marković.
Marković was patient, but only up to a point. He waited forty-five minutes before leaving the coffee shop and walking toward, then entering, the hotel. Louis was behind him, tapping the copy of Le Monde against his right leg as he went, although he hoped that no one tried to test him on his knowledge of its contents, his command of the French language not extending to the intricacies of the newspaper’s political commentary. From his pocket he removed a baseball cap and placed it on his head. Louis hated baseball caps, but sometimes indignity was the better part of valor.
Marković glanced back as he reached the security door in the lobby, aware of the presence at his back, but relaxed a little when he saw Louis flipping a card key between his fingers. They waited for the elevator together, each man giving the impression of studiously ignoring the other. When the elevator arrived, Marković went in first and took up a position in the corner farthest from the panel of buttons. Louis noted the camera above Marković’s head, protected from vandalism by a wire cage.
‘Votre étage, monsieur?’ said Louis.
‘Trois,’ said Marković, then he added, ‘S’il vous plaît.’
Louis pressed the buttons for the third and fifth floors. No one else entered and the doors slid closed. The elevator rattled upward and did not stop until it reached the third floor. The doors opened again, and Marković exited. Louis nodded at him as he passed, but Marković did not respond. Just as the doors were about to close for the second time, Louis halted their progress with a foot, stepped out, and called to Marković.
‘Monsieur, vous avez oublié quelque chose!’
Louis was holding up a key card. Marković turned back, saw the key card, and displayed his own, which was when Louis shot him twice with the Rohrbaugh concealed in the folded newspaper. The first bullet took Marković in the belly, the second in the chest. Marković stumbled backward, landing hard against the wall, and slid to the floor, leaving a smear of blood on the paintwork. Louis advanced and fired one more time as Marković raised his right hand as though to shield himself. The third bullet passed through the palm of Marković’s hand and entered his brain through his right eye. The hand dropped, and Marković was still.
The shots had sounded loud in the low hallway, even with the suppressor, but no one emerged from a doorway to investigate the source of the disturbance. Maybe, Louis reflected, the hotel was under-occupied; that, or its residents were endowed with enough sense not to display obvious interest in what might have been gunfire. Either way, Louis wasn’t going to wait around long enough to find out. He took the stairs to the lobby and left through the front entrance. There was no point trying to hide his face as his presence had already been recorded by the cameras in the lobby and the elevator, but the baseball cap would help, along with the inability of ignorant men to distinguish one Black face from another. What mattered now was getting out of Paris. Harris and his people could sort out the mess, which would be easier for them if the police hadn’t yet laid hands on a suspect.
Louis turned right at the corner and climbed in the back of the rental Peugeot idling by the curb. It pulled away quickly but not recklessly, and attracted no attention. The two Japanese men in the front did not look back at him, although the driver raised an inquisitive eyebrow in the rearview mirror.
‘One down,’ said Louis. ‘Four to go. You have my stuff?’
‘It’s in the trunk,’ said the driver.
‘Then take me to the airport.’
The two Japanese did not return immediately to New York after dropping Louis at Charles de Gaulle. They took a room at Le Bristol, and dined that evening at Dersou on rue Saint-Nicolas, because Paris was always pleasant for a few days. Admittedly, they had not been required to dispose of anyone in a new and interesting way, but into every life a little rain must fall, and they remained hopeful that Louis might need them again before his work was done.
They were, in their way, optimists.