Daria needed, in the following order, a change of clothes, transportation, a decent meal, and a weapon. The young pickpocket would get her started. She bided her time, checking her sight lines for Belhadj.
The youth edged near a cluster of Dutch tourists in their mid-twenties, wearing the
Clockwork Orange
scarves and caps of the Netherlands Football Club. They were poring over maps of France, the girls giggling, the guys ribbing one another. Daria waited until her pickpocket was sliding past the Dutch, his hand drawing forth a wallet.
“Thief!” Daria shouted in French and shoved the pickpocket from behind.
The boy stumbled and fell, the wallet bouncing off the filthy tile floor. The kid made eye contact with the wallet, as did one of the Dutch, and a melee broke out. One of the Dutchmen let loose with a volley of kicks. The kid scrambled for safety. People shrieked and backed away. Others surged in to watch.
A gendarme heard the commotion and headed into the fray. He bumped into Daria, who dragged one of the wheeled suitcases she’d just stolen from one of the Dutch women.
“The train stations aren’t safe!” Daria wailed in French, free hand flailing. “It’s these immigrants!”
“Yes, madam,” the officer agreed, dodging around her and wading into the fray.
Moments later, Daria rolled her new bag out into the dusk. It took her two blocks to find a cab driver leaning against a dilapidated Toyota Auris, holding up the sports section of a newspaper but watching Daria’s legs beneath the brief skirt. He looked to be from Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union, she guessed.
She rolled the luggage to a stop, standing a little too close to the driver, looking up into his eyes. Daria took a gamble on English heavily tainted with a German accent. “I need a lift but I don’t have any money.”
Badly accented English means you’re a tourist, an outsider. It makes you vulnerable.
The driver grinned, revealing gray teeth. His English was carried aloft with a Ukrainian accent. “You want a ride, I want a blow job. Deal?”
She let her lips tremble. “All right. Find us a quiet spot.”
She tossed the bag in the backseat and sat up front with the driver. He wedged his belly beneath the steering wheel and drove. He’d done this before obviously. He quickly found a secluded space in an alley behind a bank. He leered at her and pushed back his seat just as Daria’s elbow connected with his temple. The driver was unconscious before his forehead hit the steering wheel.
She dug through his pockets and found a mobile phone; she set it on the dashboard.
She climbed over the seat back of the hatchback and used the driver’s keys to pry open the stolen luggage. It was freezing in the alley. Kneeling on the ripped vinyl seat, she quickly stripped. The first thing she found were panties. She checked the label. Extraordinarily cheap.
God
, she thought.
The things a girl does for world peace.
She found a sleeveless T-shirt known to Americans as a wifebeater. Daria had trouble dealing with American colloquialisms.
Wifebeater?
Is there a part of that term that is funny? She tugged on the T-shirt and freed her hair. Once, in Jerusalem, she had had a master sergeant who was, in fact, a wife beater. Daria had taken his wife to a public hospital and sat up with her through the night, listening to her excuses, why it had been
her
fault, why she had failed as a good spouse. In the morning, Daria walked into the motor pool, picked up a crescent wrench, and told the master sergeant, “I have a message from your wife.” She then proceeded to break every bone in both of his wrists.
He never pressed charges.
In the alleyway, she dug through the luggage, found a short denim skirt that would fit. Also black tights. She found a white, ribbed, long-sleeved undershirt. The Dutch woman’s feet were enormous, so Daria stuck with her chain-laden punk boots from New York.
She climbed out, opened the driver’s side door, and rolled the unconscious man out onto the grimy pavement. She took his wallet and climbed into the car, slid the seat forward, and cranked the key.
As the hatchback’s engine turned over and heater began pumping air through the vents, Daria snagged the driver’s mobile off the dashboard. She dialed the international code for the United States, then the number for Ray Calabrese’s mobile.
* * *
In the subbasement Shark Tank at Langley, one tech analyst had been assigned to monitor Ray Calabrese’s home, work, and cell phones, as well as his work and personal e-mail accounts. Ray was not on Facebook or any other social media site, making the tech’s job a little easier. The tech glanced up at his monitors as Ray’s cell phone line went hot.
“Hi, it’s Ray. I’m on another line. Please leave me a message.” Beep.
“It’s Daria. I’m in trouble. And I’m in Paris…”
The surveillance tech jumped out of his seat, snapping his fingers at a fellow analyst. “Are you getting this?”
“Don’t use my phone, it’s in enemy hands. I cannot hold on to this one either, because the CIA is monitoring your phone. Sorry. I’m in trouble with them. I’m in trouble with the Syrians. It’s possible I’m in trouble with the Israelis. It’s been one of those weeks. Look up this name: Asher Sahar. I will contact you again soon. Ciao, love.”
The other tech leaned forward, blowing kinky hair away from her eyebrows, fingers moving so fast over her keyboard they were a blur. One of the eight flat-screen monitors switched to a map of the world. Then a map of Europe. Then France. Then the Tenth arrondissement. Then the Gare de l’Est train station.
“Got her! Near the train station, northeast Paris!”
* * *
The cheese and apple Daria had eaten at the Algerian’s electronics shop had been sufficient to hold her temporarily. Now she was famished. She spent some of the taxi driver’s money on a cheese-and-butter baguette sandwich and a large coffee from a street kiosk, a block from where she’d given the taxi driver his “blow” job.
Perhaps you should make your request more specific next time
, she thought, smiling to herself. She reached under the kiosk counter and wedged the stolen mobile into a hollow triangle made by the counter and its wooden brace.
* * *
Khalid Belhadj parked the stolen car away from onlookers, only two blocks from the electronics shop. He cursed himself. He checked for observation points, then stripped to the waist and studied the two nasty red welts on the concave spot between his shoulder and his chest, courtesy of Daria Gibron.
The madwoman must have palmed the damned Taser when she attacked the Algerian, but Belhadj hadn’t seen a thing. He was impressed despite himself.
Belhadj didn’t underestimate people very often. In some perverse way, he always admired enemies who proved better than anticipated. Being better than one’s reputation was one of the things that had kept Belhadj alive all these years.
He allowed himself a shallow smile. She was not the easiest of assets. But his decision to bring her along still had merit. Belhadj was a soldier, not a general. Against Asher Sahar? He needed more than brute strength.
He sat in the car and flexed his right arm. The muscles twitched, his hand shaking. He could go after Gibron, but to what end? He had hoped her hatred of Sahar would be enough to encourage her assistance. He had misjudged her hatred. Pity.
He would have to deal with Sahar himself, until such time as his superiors in Damascus could be … reasoned with.
* * *
In the Shark Tank, a communication techie doffed her headset and stood. “Nanette?”
The lanky show runner—a term Nanette Sylvestri’s most admiring staffers had borrowed from Hollywood to describe her—had been hovering over another monitor. She turned.
“DCRI, ma’am.”
Nanette nodded and stepped to the middle of the room, where the tech experts had told her to stand when using the room’s teleconference system. Someone had even put an adhesive tape X on the carpet. One of the flat screens popped to life. She recognized the man on the screen as Henri-Luc Deschamps, a high-ranking official of the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur, or Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence.
The French equivalent of the FBI.
“Nanette,” he said, nodding slightly. The man was in his late sixties and wore a bristle-cut flattop and a coarse mustache.
“Henri-Luc. Thank you for that cell phone trace. We appreciate your quick response.”
“Not quick enough, apparently.” He spoke English for the sake of Sylvestri’s crew. “Two of my people found the phone. It was at a baguette kiosk. No sign of your Jewish gunrunner. However, the mobile and your fugitive were only a few blocks from a surveillance operation of our own. An operation that, as you say, heated up today.”
Sylvestri mistrusted coincidence. He had her attention.
“We have been monitoring an Algerian cyberterrorist for some weeks. A Rene LeClerc,” Deschamps said. “This evening, we intercepted three mobile calls, to and from this man’s base of operations. One of my people is a linguist and identified at least one of the callers as a Syrian.”
Sylvestri shushed a few talkative people in the Shark Tank. “Sorry, Henri-Luc. Go ahead.”
“Based on your circular regarding
la bête Syrienne
, we sent an assault team to the site about four minutes ago. We found the cyberterrorist.”
“Is he speaking?”
“No, and not for a while. He has suffered a trauma to the brain. He might be unconscious for days.”
“The cell calls…?” Sylvestri allowed herself to wish, and she was rewarded by a brief smile from the gaunt Frenchman.
“We recorded them, of course. And translated them. In short: I believe we know where
la Syrienne
and your
trafiquant d’armes
are headed. Tonight.”
* * *
Daria reviewed her needs: money, a cell phone, transportation, and food—the taxi driver had kindly provided those things. A change of clothes—the Danish tourist helped with that. Next on her list: a weapon.
It didn’t take long for Daria to find drug runners in an inner, northeast suburb of Paris. She cruised through an economically downtrodden neighborhood in the stolen taxi for about fifteen minutes before spotting two teenage boys, dashing out of an alley that faced a street in which eight of ten shops were abandoned. One boy would step up to an idling car, lean in the window, and take a handful of something—euros, of course—then would head back down the alley. A second boy then strolled out of the alley, leaned into the same car window, and handed something over.
They were very efficient. Daria cruised the block twice and watched four transactions take place.
She rounded the block and parallel parked the taxi in the first slot. She walked around the corner, halfway down the block, and into the alley. She shivered in the white undershirt.
“Hallo, boys.”
The boys appeared to be twelve or thirteen years old and Asian. Vietnamese, she thought. They looked at each other, then back at her.
“No walk,” one of them said in halting French. “Car only.”
Daria stood close and smiled. “It’s okay. I’m not here to buy drugs.”
The two boys frowned, trying to make out her game. One of the boys glanced nervously over Daria’s shoulder. The other studied her breasts under the clingy T-shirt. She thought his was the psychologically healthier reaction of the two. “I just want to stand here and talk a bit. See, I recently did some freelance work for a group called the DEA. Do you know them?”
The boy ogling her breasts shook his head. The other said, “No school today. Is day off.”
“Yes, I had several of those while in school. I was assured by the DEA that young, street-level runners, such as yourselves, would never face prison time due to your age.”
“You go now,” the older boy said.
“But you also wouldn’t carry firearms, because to do so would increase your chances of being treated as an adult in court. Was my associate correct in this?”
Daria felt the presence of a fourth person in the alley before she heard him. She saw it in the eyes of the boy not eyeing her breasts. “Which means you would need an enforcer. Correct?”
A hand grabbed the thin cotton strap over Daria’s left shoulder, pulling upward, hard. The newcomer began to turn her.
Daria turned with his motion, going in the direction she was being pulled, her elbow slashing diagonally. The newcomer fell to the filthy asphalt of the alleyway, both hands rising to cover a split lip. Daria knelt and drove her left elbow into the enforcer’s temple.
She heard the two teens sprinting past her and out of the alley.
The now-unconscious enforcer wore a sleeveless, black hoodie over a woolen plaid shirt. As the hood fell back, she realized it was a girl, also Asian, all of sixteen, if that.
Daria patted her down and found a Glock G17, the fourth-generation model. She smiled. It was among the most dutiful automatics in the world. She had fired literally thousands of target practice rounds with such a handgun and had never seen one jam.
She took the enforcer girl’s wallet, fat with folded euros.
With a little difficulty, she lifted the girl’s torso to free the hooded sweatshirt. It was sleeveless and midnight-black. It went with Daria’s dark denim miniskirt and black tights. Daria shrugged into the hoodie.
The enforcer also wore black lambskin gloves, which covered the first two joints of each finger but not her finger pads or nails. The gloves were very short with tiny gold zippers that ran half the length of each palm. Daria removed them and slipped her hands in. They fit, truncated just short of her wrist bones. She flexed her fingers, picked up the Glock. Daria was impressed. The gloves were warm but thin enough not to hamper her draw. She tucked the Glock into the waistband of the miniskirt and slid the sweatshirt over it.