Enemy of My Enemy (20 page)

"What do you think?" Avi asked. "You'll be the one at risk. Do you want to take the chance?"

Jack began thinking aloud. "The boys from the SDECE play rough, but they're also loners. They rarely coordinate with the local gendarmes or with the authorities in other E.U. countries." He paused. "On the other hand, we have to assume that they'll have my name and a picture at passport control at airports. Maybe even posted at train stations."

"You might be able to get one more use out of the Angelli tire ED if you needed it."

"That's too risky. The picture on the Italian passport is still mine, and the Syrians may have forwarded our Italian names to the French. A better bet might be to fly to Brussels and drive down to Paris. The European border checkpoints are a thing of the past."

Avi evaluated what Jack had said. "You'd better avoid your office and apartment in Paris."

"That's what I was thinking. In Paris my official residence is behind my wine business in a building on Avenue de Messine. But I also have another place off Avenue Victor Hugo in the name of a dummy company in case I ever had to go underground."

Jack sounded sheepish. He felt defensive about owning a second costly apartment in Paris. He had bought it years ago with his share of the life-insurance money from his parents that he and Sam split before prices went out of sight.

"Would your secretary give you away?"

"I sent Monique off to Australia for a month's vacation when I heard about Moreau's visit. You can stay with me at the Victor Hugo pad."

Avi shook his head. "I don't want to impose. Besides, Koach, the arms manufacturer I work for, keeps a suite at the Hotel Pyrenees on the left bank. I can toss the wet towels on the bathroom floor. We'll use your place for our working headquarters."

"I'll make sure I've got lots of cold beer for you."

Avi laughed. "Sorry to disappoint you, but in France I drink Armagnac and smoke cigars."

"Lucky for you, I have plenty of both."

* * *

They took a cab to Queen Alia Airport in Amman. As they sat in a coffee shop waiting to board a plane to Athens, where they would connect to Brussels, Jack said to Avi, "How much do you know about Major General Nadim?"

"I never met the man, but I feel as if I know him well, he's been a nemesis of ours for so long. A couple years ago I asked our researchers and psychologists to do an in-depth profile from all the information we've been able to gather."

"How can I get a copy?"

Avi leaned over the table, close to Jack. "Wait until we hit Paris. I have friends at our embassy there. One of them will pull it off the computer for me without getting any approvals."

"We have to act fast," Jack said. "Nadim has to be worried that Washington could begin a massive bombing, or take some other action in Turkey or Syria if they know he's moved the pilot. So we have to assume that he'll probably make his move in a matter of days."

 

 

 

Chapter 14

 

"Where is Jack Cole?" Daniel Moreau demanded of George, the building manger, who lived on the ground floor of the Avenue de Messine building that housed the office for Jack's wine business as well as his official residence. They were standing in the entrance to the building.

George stared hard at Moreau, his face registering defiance. "How the hell should I know? He doesn't report to me."

"Is he in Israel with all the other
Jews?"
He pronounced the word with contempt.

"I'm not his travel agent," George fired back.

Moreau, who had arrived with two agents of SDECE and flashed his ID, had expected that George wouldn't be intimidated. Before coming he had run a background check on the man. George would be eighty-five next month. Active in the resistance and captured by the Gestapo, he never cracked under torture, even after losing an arm. After the war he had worked as a real estate agent until the company had retired him, and then as a building manager. Since the Germans hadn't broken him as a young man, Moreau didn't expect to coerce him into talking now. But Moreau couldn't resist making one more try. "Jack Cole's a spy for the Israelis," he said sharply. "If I think you're concealing information, I can lock you up until you talk. You won't have the right to a lawyer or anything else."

George looked indignant. "Listen, Inspector, or whatever the hell you are. As far as I know, Jack Cole's an American in the wine business. I don't know anything about spying."

"I have proof that you're lying."

George held out his hand and locked eyes with Moreau. "Then arrest me."

Moreau knew there was no point in doing that. "What about his secretary, Monique? I met her the last time I was here. Is she upstairs?"

"I haven't seen her in days."

"How convenient," Moreau said sarcastically. He reached into his pocket and removed a small notebook and pen from his pocket.

"What about other employees of Cole? Where are they?"

George shrugged. "You'll have to ask Jack Cole."

Moreau knew he was banging his head against a wall. "Give me the key to his apartment," he said angrily.

"I don't remember seeing a search warrant. Show me one."

Moreau pointed to one of his men, who was eagerly brandishing a crowbar. "You're looking at it."

George had no doubt that this bastard was going into Jack Cole's office and apartment whether George gave him a key or not. There was no point letting him break down the door. George went inside to his desk and returned with a key. "I'll walk up and let you in."

"Wrong. You give me the key. You'll stay down here with him." Moreau nodded to the other man.

Reluctantly George handed over the key. "He has the fourth floor." George mumbled under his breath while Moreau and the man with the crowbar went into the lift.

From his prior visit, Moreau knew that the front of the apartment was Jack's office, where Monique and Jack had separate rooms. Slowly and systematically Moreau looked through every drawer and file cabinet in those two rooms, searching for anything related to Jack's activities for the Mossad. To his dismay all he found were papers related to the wine business. As he looked through each drawer and came up empty, he cursed and dumped the contents on the floor.

Moreau took the computer hard drive and all the disks from both computers, Jack's and his secretary's. He shoved them into his briefcase. Then he turned to his assistant with the crowbar. "Do your work."

As Moreau moved into Jack's living quarters, the young man used the crowbar to decimate the green leather top on Jack's Louis XIV desk. Then he smashed one end through the screens of the two computers. He turned over file cabinets.

Meantime, Moreau searched Jack's living quarters in the back. When he failed to find a single inflammatory piece of paper, he called for his associate. This time the young man cut Jack's suits and scattered them across the floor of the apartment. A glass lamp was smashed. Tables were turned over. The mattress was slit open.

"Fucking Jews," Moreau cursed in frustration as his assistant finished the job.

* * *

An hour later Moreau entered the office of the director of the SDECE to report what had happened in Montreal. He decided to omit his pointless search of Jack's office and apartment.

As Moreau spoke, he watched the director's expression turn from curiosity to disbelief and finally disdain.

"You idiot," the director railed with scorn. "How could you have let Francoise jump off that balcony?"

Moreau was livid. His chest muscles tightened. He didn't like being chewed out as if he were a schoolboy by anyone, particularly by the director. "It was a mistake. I told you that. Obviously I shouldn't have let her out of my sight."

"It wasn't a mistake," the director screamed. "It was a total fuckup. Your brain froze on you. Now we've lost our only witness."

Moreau sat in front of the director's desk, trying to keep his anger in check. He was the one who had decided to reopen the Osirak investigation after the recent death of Khalifa persuaded him that the Mossad was operating again on French soil. He was the one who had painstakingly read and reread every transcript from Jean Pierre's interrogation and then combed Paris directories from 1981 for actresses, which was all that Jean Pierre said about the woman he slept with, until he found Francoise Colbert.

Now Moreau began silently to count. If the director's tirade didn't stop by the time he reached twenty, he would turn in his badge and gun and seek a job in industry as a private security chief in some big company, where he'd make a lot more money.

Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen...

The director stopped. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's more than losing our only witness. I hate the idea of the Israelis operating freely on French soil. The Jews should stay in their own country, where they belong. All of them. Let them fight their battles with the Arabs somewhere else."

"I couldn't agree more," Moreau said.

"All right. Let's get down to business."

"How certain are you that this Jack Cole, with an American passport, is operating as a Mossad agent?"

Moreau had explained this to the director before he had gone to Montreal. Wasn't the asshole paying attention? He hated wasting time repeating it again. "In Jean Pierre's interrogation, all he said about the man who recruited him was that he was in the wine business. Someone who spoke French with what he thought was an American accent. Before I went to Montreal I searched every trade list of people in the wine business at the time. Jack Cole is not only the best candidate; he's the only one. Is that clear enough?"

"But now you're back to square one."

"Not quite. I've been busy since I got back."

The director leaned forward in his chair and put his elbows on the desk with anticipation. "Really, what do you have now?"

"Remember the explosion of Khalifa's car in Marseilles?"

The director's face lit up. "Yeah."

"I checked flight manifests in and out of Marseilles around the time. Jack Cole flew down from Paris a week before the incident. He returned home hours after it happened."

"That's pretty good work," the director said grudgingly. "Where do you go from here?"

"Back to Marseilles to try to find a witness who can testify against Jack Cole."

 

 

 

Chapter 15

 

Michael Hanley and Vladimir Perikov flew from Moscow to Volgograd on Volga Airlines in a plane scheduled to leave at 6:15 a.m., that took off four and a half hours late with no explanation. It was an old Russian plane, a discard from Aeroflot, that was filled to capacity. They separated to avoid having someone who recognized the famous physicist report that he was traveling with an American.

Perikov was in the second row during the choppy flight, while Michael was in the rear of the plane, sandwiched in a narrow seat between a wizened old Russian man with garlicky breath who kept taking slugs from a bottle of vodka, and a woman with two small, red-faced, runny-nosed children. They cried the whole way, while she alternated between slapping them and feeding them bread smeared with a greasy coating that looked to Michael as if it were a combination of butter and lard.

Midway through the flight the plane, buffeted by strong winds, lurched and dropped without any warning through several thousand feet before the pilot regained control. Everyone in the plane was terrified. Some gasped. Others cried out in panic. Was this it? The end?

The pilot managed to get the tired old plane under control.

At the airport they rented separate cars. Anyone watching them would have no idea they were together. Driving through Volgograd, Michael looked up at the sword-wielding statue of Mother Russia, seventy-two meters tall, that dominated the landscape, a memorial to those who died in the battle of Stalingrad, one of the most decisive of the Great Patriotic War, where the Germans lost 350,000 soldiers. But Stalin fell out of favor, and, like many other places in Russia, the city had been renamed.

For nearly an hour Michael followed Perikov along a winding road that skirted the Volga River. Dodging the huge potholes was a challenge. It was late afternoon, though still daylight, when they reached the remains of what had been a plant to manufacture farm machinery, operated by the government during the Communist regime, on the edge of a small factory town. The company had been privatized with the advent of capitalism. It operated three years in that mode until corruption and theft forced it into bankruptcy, to the chagrin of the American investment bank that had put up millions to back the purchasers in the expectation of reaping a huge windfall from the new Russia. The last tractor had been made four years ago. Since then the plant sat rotting and decaying at one end of the town, whose inhabitants suddenly found themselves without their main source of employment. Not surprisingly, the sale of vodka became the town's leading business, while the more ambitious young people drifted away to larger cities in the north.