The soup was a simple broth, a thin brown liquid in which floated a few chunks of carrot, some onion and a little shredded meat, possibly beef, but to Caitlin it was heaven in a bowl. She sipped at the rim. Her hands shook too much to use the spoon they had given her, and she had already finished the small piece of bread that came with the meal.
‘Thank you,’ she said again. ‘I’m afraid this place doesn’t really deserve its Michelin star.’
Captain Rolland smiled kindly and effected a very Gallic lift of the shoulders. ‘Standards are slipping everywhere, mademoiselle.’
Caitlin returned the smile. ‘I dunno. My last stay here wasn’t much better.’
She finished the bowl and placed it on the table in front of the old leather couch on which she sat, wrapped in a clean blanket and dressed for the first time in weeks. Rolland snapped his fingers and a young soldier appeared from outside the office to clear away the dish and plate. They did not speak while he was in the room.
Caitlin stood up and peered out of the window, over a rain-slicked parking lot below. A bus burned in one corner, and a couple of bodies lay nearby in pools of blood, which became lighter and pinker as the rain diluted them. She appeared to be about three storeys up, high enough to see over the red tiled roofs of the surrounding buildings to the eastern suburbs of Paris. A few fires burned in a desultory fashion here and there, dwarfed by a huge tower of smoke about five miles away. She couldn’t see any movement in the streets, but she could hear gunfire. A lot of it.
‘Sounds like Beirut. Or maybe the Mog,’ she said.
Rolland, a handsome thirty-something man with a full head of black hair that was swept back and oiled in a very old-fashioned style, lit a cigarette and then stopped himself. ‘Excuse me, do you mind?’
The pain in her head was wretched, but it was no worse than any of her other manifold agonies. ‘Knock yourself out, mon Capitaine,’ Caitlin replied as she returned to the couch, ‘I doubt those things will kill me. They’re at the back of a very long line.’
The Frenchman sat down across the coffee table from her and drew deeply on the unfiltered cigarette with evident pleasure. His army uniform was filthy and his boots caked with mud. He hadn’t shaven in a few days.
‘This is my first one all week,’ he said, waving the cigarette around. ‘And I had to take it from one of the jihadi pigs. It’s Turkish. Not my blend. But what can one do?’
‘Yeah, those jihadi pigs – you want to tell me what my target was doing in your dungeons? You know, besides raping me.’
Rolland shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘It was a disgraceful thing. But, I am afraid, all too common these days. Monsieur Baumer, your target – and mine, as it transpires – he unfortunately escaped our net. We were hoping you might be able to help us find him. After all, you are the expert on “al Banna”?’
She laughed, a short, joyless sound. ‘I’m the world expert on getting my ass kicked by him,’ she replied. ‘And I have to tell you, Rolland, the shape I’m in, I’d get it kicked all over again if we met. But you’re not answering my question – what was he doing here? What were any of them doing here? And what the hell’s been going on out there? Reynard told me you guys had things under control.’ She nodded towards the city centre. ‘But that’s not under control. This place is dying.’
Momentary confusion passed over the soldier’s face as he shook his head. ‘Reynard?… Oh, you mean Lacan. No, it is not under control, mademoiselle. It has not been for weeks. Half of the city’s population have fled into the countryside, but things are worse out there. All the cities have emptied out. You can imagine what that means. Some of them took tents and provisions for a few days’ camping. Most just fled when the intifada and the Resistance began in earnest. Farms and villages have barricaded themselves off from the world, fought off everyone who seeks shelter or aid. It is a Dark Age again. There are bodies piling up in fields – possibly a million of them by now. With thousands more dying every day. Many, many are dead.’
Caitlin was already dizzy with exhaustion and moral collapse, but Rolland was making her head spin. She imagined a host of totally unprepared urbanites swarming over the French countryside expecting to live off stolen eggs and wild berries. They’d have stripped the fields bare in days. She began shaking again, the same deep body tremors that had seized her after being raped by al Banna. ‘S-sorry,’ she stuttered.
Rolland reached into his blood-smeared tunic and removed a silver flask. ‘Here, drink some,’ he said. ‘It is brandy. Good brandy, not like the hospital disinfectant you are familiar with. And my battalion surgeon, he said these may help too.’
A small blister pack of tablets dropped onto the tabletop. Half of them had already been popped.
‘They will calm your nerves,’ he explained. ‘But should not dull your senses.’
Caitlin briefly wondered whether she might react to them, given her medical condition. Then she thought, What the hell, and downed two with a swig from Rolland’s flask. The liquor burned softly and warmed her upper body. As she handed back the brandy, a jet suddenly screamed through the air nearby, the noise arcing up from a distant whine to a deafening shriek in mere seconds. A very short time later she heard the unmistakable crump of air-dropped munitions detonating within a few miles.
‘So, things haven’t gone as well as I was led to believe?’
The captain took a long draw on the harsh-smelling cigarette. ‘I am afraid not,’ he admitted. ‘The situation remains… confused.’
‘Not as confused as me. Why don’t you try explaining – you could start with Baumer. He was one of yours, right, so is that why I was targeted?’
‘A double agent? No, I am afraid not.’
Caitlin’s head felt as though it had been wrapped in old towels soaked in chloroform. She had trouble concentrating and holding her thoughts. ‘But, what was he doing here at the fort?’ she asked, trying again. ‘Are you saying that Reynard… sorry, what did you call him?’
‘Lacan. Bernard Lacan, second-in-charge of the Action Division.’
‘Okay. Lacan then-you’re saying he’d sold out to the intifada?’
Rolland waved his hands in a frustrated manner, as if trying to shoo a fly. ‘It is not so simple, no,’ he replied. ‘You have been out of contact for a long time, Caitlin. Do you mind if I call you Caitlin?’
‘It’s not the worst liberty that’s been taken with me recently. Go on.’
‘Lacan was working with Baumer’s network, yes. But not just Lacan. And not just with one jihadi cell. It is difficult, Caitlin, this situation I must explain. Please bear with me. You will be aware of some of the history of the DGSE, your rival service, non?’
She leaned back against the arm of the leather sofa and pulled the blanket around to a more comfortable position. Outside, the rain began to pick up, strongly enough to wash much of the blood from the courtyard, she imagined. The pills hadn’t kicked in yet, but the brandy was having a soothing effect. Rolland used the opportunity to light up another cigarette as he continued.
‘Unlike your CIA, and despite its name, the Action Division does not maintain a standing section of paramilitary covert operatives. When such skills are required, it draws on what we call a “tank” of operators from the army, mostly the special forces and commandos.’
She nodded. The information wasn’t new to her.
‘Do you know the original battalion on which the Action Division relied, Caitlin?’
She searched her battered memory and came up with some fragment. ‘Some paratroop regiment?’
‘Very good,’ said Rolland, with a nod of his own. ‘Almost right. Le 11-iиme Bataillon Parachutiste de Choc- “the Shock Parachutist Battalion”, as you would say. It was first raised in 1946, then disbanded in 1963 because its officers were collaborators, supporters of French Algeria.’
‘Okay. That means they backed whitey, right? The pieds-noirs. Ancient history, but go on.’
‘Ancient for you, young lady, not for France. The Algerian war nearly destroyed us. It collapsed the Fourth Republic, brought back the Gaullists, and forever changed our view of France as une puissance musulmane. Do you know the phrase?’
‘A Muslim power,’ she replied. ‘Again, so what? A hundred years ago you wanted to lord it over the Arabs, because the Brits scarfed up all the good colonies for themselves.’
He favoured her with a lopsided smile. ‘I had been told you are a difficult woman.’
‘I prefer to think of myself as challenging,’ she quipped back.
‘Your American psychology betrays you, Caitlin. Une puissance musulmane does not just mean to wield power over the House of Peace. It means to hold that power in… how would you phrase it?… In agreement, in accordance – a sort of entente cordiale with the Islamic world itself. You and the British often described your filial bond as a special relationship. Indeed, that relationship extended across all of the English-speaking world. Your employer, Echelon, it was a perfect expression of that dysfunctional anglophone family, non? An alliance, a secret one, between the English-speaking powers, directed against everyone else. That is quite special, when you think about it. Well, our special relationship, our particular delusion, if you wish, was with the dar-al-Islam. Or so some thought.’
‘Captain,’ she said, as toxic rain began to patter against the windowpanes and the room became even gloomier, ‘you’re going to have to help me out here. I have a brain tumour and I’m having trouble putting two and two together.’
Rolland stood up and flicked on a light. He called out to one of his men stationed in the corridor and they spoke in murmurs for a moment before he returned.
‘Excuse me, Caitlin. I am expecting someone… Yes, I am sorry – it is the continental way of narrative. Much more elliptical than your own. Let me “bottom-line” it for you, to borrow from your own vernacular. Since the accommodation in Algeria, there has been a school of thought, a quiet but powerful clique within the state, which has believed that accommodation with Islam is the only way forward. At first this group was centred on the Quai d’Orsay, here in Paris, and they applied their doctrine within their own sphere, often in conflict with other actors in the state realm.’
‘Okay, so your Foreign Ministry was rub-fucking the Arabs. I have to say, this isn’t breaking news.’
Rolland uncapped the brandy flask and took a swig for himself before offering it to Caitlin again. She joined him. The pills, whatever they were, had begun to smooth her rough edges and another drink seemed like a good idea. Sitting on this magnificent old sofa, drinking fine spirits and chatting with the handsome French officer, she finally began to get some distance on the horror of the previous weeks.
‘I believe similar tensions existed between your own State Department and the military,’ Rolland countered. ‘It is the usual way between peacemakers and war fighters. But here in France, there was a complicating factor, which grew more complicated with every year.’
Caitlin nodded slowly. ‘Your own Muslim population.’
‘Quite so. Just as your country found that certain questionable policies and state activities initially carried out beyond your borders, say, in South-East Asia, tended to return home in one form or another…’
‘We called it “blow-back”.’
‘How brutally elegant. Well, we too have discovered that a contagion, acquired in Algiers, transmitted itself to the body politic right here.’
‘Rolland, this would be a fascinating discussion if we were Jean-Paul and Simone sucking down Gitanes and black coffee in a Montmartre cafe. But how about you ditch all the context and sell me your pitch.’
The captain leaned back and blew twin streams of blue smoke out through his nostrils. ‘Betrayal, Caitlin,’ he replied. ‘I am talking about betrayal. The man who held you here, Lacan, did not do so on his own recognisance. Nor did he operate as part of a small, traitorous cell. I am afraid that Monsieur Lacan was part of a much larger, and very well organised network of state officials, the Algerian School, as we know them, who had determined that the only possible, rational option for dealing in the long term with the rise of Muslim power in the Middle East, and within France herself, was accommodation.’
‘Appeasement, you mean.’
‘Non, “appeasement” is not a strong enough word, Caitlin. To appease is simply to make morally compromised concessions in order to maintain one’s own tenuous status. That is not what the School’s philosophy now entertains. “Adaptation” is more apt. Although in your language it sounds rather bloodless, it is not. As practised by the Algerian School, it means to slowly adapt the French secular state to the brute realities of its future as an annexe to the dar-al-Islam, as a true Muslim power.’
‘To convert.’
‘Yes. To convert. And to that end they have allied themselves with the intifada, in which your target is a leading player.’
‘Holy shit,’ she said, impressed at last. ‘And the Action Division, how many of them were…?’
Rolland shook his head. ‘Enough. Perhaps one-third. The others were quickly dealt with in the first days of fighting.’
‘But you’ve got a civil war out there. Surely you can’t have whole army divisions who’ve gone over…’
Another headshake from the Frenchman. ‘No. There is fighting between many arms of the military and other organs of the state. But most of those involved see nothing beyond their gun-sights. An army regiment is ordered to put down a mutiny by the Foreign Legion, for example, and the individual soldiers do not understand they are fighting an engagement to suit the ends of the conspiracy. To them, it is just a civil war, and now it is so far advanced that chaos reigns. Accusations, counter-claims, propaganda – all is confusion.’
He leaned forward and stubbed the butt of his cigarette.
‘But this I do know, Caitlin. You can help stop it. Your target, Baumer, he is not the key, but he leads to the key – to the masters of the Algerian School. Take them down, and the intifada is leaderless, nothing more than a rabble. A huge rabble, yes – but not one that can match an army that is not divided against itself.’
‘You want me to kill your own people?’ she asked, still having some difficulty taking it all in.
A new voice spoke up from the doorway behind Rolland, startling her. An American voice. ‘That was always going to be your next mission. That’s why you were targeted.’
‘Wales? Goddamn, Wales!’
As sick in body and soul as she was, Caitlin pushed herself up off the couch and ran over to hug Wales Larrison, almost knocking him off his feet as she threw her arms around his neck.
‘Goddamn, Wales, it’s been… it’s just…’ A small burning lump in her throat grew and grew, until it merged with the ache in her chest and for the first time since she had been captured, Caitlin Monroe let herself go and poured out a torrent of tears.
The rangy, silver-haired Nebraskan enfolded her within a generous bear hug and made no attempt to calm her down, as wretched, pitiful sobs and shudders racked her body.
‘I’m s-s-sorry, Wales. I failed… and…’
He shushed her and stroked her head, patting down masses of thick dark hair still wet from the shower and smelling of cheap shampoo. ‘It’s all right, Cait, it’s all right,’ he said softly. ‘You’ve been sick. I know. They told me. You shouldn’t have been out in the field, let alone trussed up in this shithole… if you’ll excuse my, er, French, Captain Rolland.’
‘But of course, it is a shithole,’ the Frenchman agreed.
Caitlin could feel Larrison’s strong heartbeat through his suit jacket, and that strength flowed through his arms and into her. She slowly regained her composure and pushed herself away.
‘How did you get here?’ she asked shakily, wiping her nose on a shirt cuff. T thought they’d grabbed you, Wales. I thought they’d rolled up the whole network.’
Larrison put one finger on her lip and bade her to be quiet. He then led her back to the couch and eased her down, before sitting himself at the other end.
‘I was in London when everything happened,’ he said. ‘I had to sit on my ass and watch it from there. I’m sorry, Caitlin. I tried to get an overwatch team to you, twice, but the DGSE had a legitimate counter-intel responsibility for shadowing us. We did spy on them, after all. They never penetrated a cell, but their Intelligence Division was aware of us. That’s how they grabbed you the first time you were here. And they blocked both teams I sent in – wiped out the first, grabbed up the other one.’
Caitlin pulled the blanket closer around her shoulders. ‘What’s left of us, Wales? Of Echelon, I mean.’
He puffed out his cheeks. ‘Every op we had running in France was taken down. Every one. With extreme prejudice. The Brits lost their people too. Would have caused a quiet, dirty little war if we hadn’t known about the Algerian School. So now, in France, I’m afraid you’re it. You’re Echelon. Our last designated hitter.’
He indicated the fort around them with a wave of his hand. Somewhere many miles away, more bombs exploded.
‘Lacan had people here, all over,’ Wales went on. ‘This Algerian School, it’s like Captain Rolland told you, they were everywhere. When we sent you after Baumer, they stepped in. He was protected as part of the… accommodation. They were always going to try to keep you off him.’
Rolland put one muddy boot on the coffee table, leaned forward and retrieved his packet of pills. ‘Normally you would have been detained, interrogated, the usual inconveniences,’ he explained. ‘But, the Disappearance, it changed everything. A massive, world-changing shock.’
‘They had contingencies,’ added Larrison. ‘In the event of some foreseeable catastrophe that would cripple the US, or financial collapse, or a nuclear strike – whatever. The Disappearance wasn’t foreseeable, but it was also a hell of a lot more than a simple catastrophe. It wiped us out.’
‘And the contingency?’ said Caitlin.
‘To finish the work of Allah,’ answered Rolland. ‘As soon as it was confirmed what had happened in America, Lacan purged the Action Division and sent his trusted people out to roll up your network. It was not just you, of course. The British also maintained Echelon cadre in France, as Monsieur Larrison explained. They too were targeted. Even your junior partners, the Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, all of them were smothered.’
‘So, all the street fighting, the ethnic clashes – they were engineered by the School? That seems a bit far-fetched.’
Larrison, who looked so much older than the last time they had spoken, just two months ago, shook his head sadly. ‘Not all of them, Cait. A lot of violence arose naturally. Once the capstone was off, the geyser blew. But yes, some incidents were engineered to bring on a wider confrontation. An uprising. Even then it may not have worked. Conspiracies often don’t, as you would know. But Israel nuking half of the Arab world – that was a deal breaker. Race war, holy war, civil war, whatever you want to call it. It was inevitable after that. And people have been killing each other ever since.’
She moved her head carefully to look out of the windows again. The rain had turned the suburbs outside into a bleary, grey netherworld, but some elements did resolve themselves. There was no traffic, vehicular or pedestrian. The only aircraft aloft were military, and of course she had already noted that they were attacking targets within the city. There seemed to be fewer fires burning than she remembered, but the rain was heavy, and on looking more closely she could see that whole districts had already been burnt out.
Caitlin snuggled deeper into the sofa. It was strangely comforting. ‘You said something about my next mission?’
Wales clicked his tongue. ‘Yup. I did. We didn’t tell you, because you didn’t need to know, not at that point. But the file on Baumer was a joint operation with the DST, the intelligence arm of Sarkozy’s Ministry of the Interior. Sarkozy had decided to move against the Algerian School and asked us to help. It was unprecedented. Echelon does not play outside of the family. But in this case, we did, because the strategic consequences could affect the family, generations down the line. The Brits were particularly gung-ho. Your mission was designed to shake out Baumer’s contacts. To expose Bernard Lacan and his people. They were being monitored by the DST without their knowledge.’
‘Or so we thought,’ added Rolland.
‘Or so we thought.’
‘There was a leak?’ asked Caitlin.
Larrison grunted. ‘There was. We still don’t know where from. But Lacan found out, and that’s why he bet so much on grabbing you up. He needed you to start unravelling the op against him and the other School masters.’
‘Son of a bitch,’ muttered Caitlin.
‘I’m sorry, Cait, but you know the rules.’
She waved away his apology. ‘I’m not pissed at you, Wales. I know my job, and I know it’s not always what it seems. I’m a pawn. I can be sacrificed. It’s just… I dunno. I’m sick, Wales, really sick. And it’s messing with my head, the way I think and see things.’ A weak breath escaped from her lips, and she deflated. ‘I made a friend. An asset. I shouldn’t have, but I did. I’m not well… And I got her killed because I wasn’t good enough to save her.’
The room broke up into a jewelled kaleidoscope as more tears came. Larrison leaned over and patted her on the knee. Her dad had done the same thing a thousand times, and it only served to deepen her sadness. Wales’s voice was soft, like her father’s had once been, but still hard with it.
‘You’re not a pawn, Caitlin,’ he said. ‘You’re a knight. And you’re still in play.’