He put portable headphones over his ears, tuned in to a streaming music service as he waited for his coffee. A mad song came on that only a French teenager could appreciate, but now he wrapped himself in the jagged dissonance of the notes as the two male vocalists wailed and screeched unintelligible words in his ears. The vicious sounds made him think of his upcoming meeting that afternoon with Antoine Bardon at Marcel’s office in Bercy. It would be their final meeting, and he was quite looking forward to it. He would ever-so-pleasantly tell Bardon about his new budget, about to be approved by the president. Marcel had cut off all the farm-equipment subsidies Antoine Bardon had received yearly and promptly stuffed much of the money into his own fat pockets, millions of euros he used to facilitate foreign bribes through his bankers and trucking businesses. Marcel had tracked down the paper trail of the stolen federal money, laundered through a small bank in Marseilles, and now he had the power to bring him down. At last. Marcel couldn’t wait to see the look on Bardon’s face when he showed him the proof. For all practical purposes, Antoine Bardon would be gone, perhaps to prison, certainly dead to the French government. So what if Bardon let it out that he’d been one of Marcel’s ex-wife’s lovers? Everyone knowing that would only make it sweeter. Maybe he could call his ex-wife, tell her what he’d done to her ex-lover, offer to tell her which prison he’d be spending his retirement years.
Marcel found himself tapping his fingers to the music and smiled. He held all the cards now.
It was all over but for the shouting, and he planned to shout really loud after the meeting with Bardon. He’d walk out of his new, beautifully paneled conference room in Bercy and into the glorious Parisian sun. And call the media.
He’d won.
FOUR KILOMETERS
An attendant recognized who he was, was properly deferential, bowing so low he could have fallen on his face, but the TGV ran too smoothly for that. Marcel nodded his approval and the attendant disappeared. He sipped the bitter, hot espresso. It was delicious. He bit into his warm croissant, frowned a bit. It wasn’t quite as moist and fresh as the others he’d enjoyed on the TGV. No matter, he was too pleased with himself. Perhaps he would tease his friend, the Ministre de Transportation, Jean LeMarc, about it when next they met.
ZERO KILOMETERS
Marcel Dubroc had no warning he was about to die. His world disintegrated.
THE LIBERTY HOTEL
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Saturday morning
Samir Basara enjoyed the silk slide of Golden Slope chardonnay down his throat. He’d been surprised and pleased to find it in the small refrigerator in his suite, but he’d stayed at the hotel before and they knew it was one of his favorites. It was from a small boutique winery in Napa Valley, and very different from the heavy, overripe fruit taste of the Algerian wine he’d been raised with. He remembered his father striding through the family vineyard in Coteaux du Zaccar, fondling his Carignan and Clairette blanche grapes, whistling, giving orders, drinking a good amount of his profits. His preference had always been what they called their burgundy, but it wasn’t burgundy at all, rather a heavy mongrel blend. No one ever pointed that out to him, they were too scared of the old man, as Samir had once been, a very long time ago.
He remembered his mother carping and whining after his father had struck her, Samir so used to it he paid it little mind. He couldn’t wait for the day he left his family and Algeria, bound for Paris and the Sorbonne. He’d been unhappy in Paris as well, because his Algerian French accent was mimicked with a contemptuous twang, and he was looked down on, despite his family’s money, his academic success, and his good looks. He practiced his English, anxious to leave the French bigots behind him, and went on to take his doctorate in economics at Berkeley, California. He’d found his home at this fascinating place where he could say anything he wanted—the more outrageous, it seemed, the more he was considered to be an intellectual and accepted, the women always eager to sleep with him. And the wine was good. At Berkeley, he hadn’t been an outsider. He’d been embraced. He might have stayed on if he hadn’t known he was destined for greater things.
His three sisters, the worthless cows, had reveled in the rich lifestyle their father’s lands provided and had all married moneyed Frenchmen and enjoyed the fruits of Paris. But not Samir. He had chosen a different path. It had all come to him so gradually, it seemed, spawned in America, in the belly of the enemy, and there surely was irony in that.
Every year he traveled to Algeria to visit his father and mother, always during Ramadan. Last year Ramadan had fallen in July and a surprise awaited him. His father was lying in bed, his left side paralyzed from a stroke, and his mother now ruled the household. He was no longer a happy alcoholic who struck out when it pleased him, he was now a supplicant.
His mother glowed. Another irony. She’d talked mostly of wanting him to marry, about wanting grandchildren from her only son. All his father wanted was a drink.
Samir took another sip of his chardonnay, let it settle first on his tongue, then slide smoothly down his throat, and he smiled. Perhaps he would marry someday, perhaps Lady Elizabeth Palmer. He saw his dark hands on her smooth white flesh, heard her screaming his name when she came. What would their children look like?
His parents believed he was a big-shot intellectual, and he was, actually, a noted speaker and a professor at the London School of Economics. But he was much more than that. Neither of them had a clue that the man they called Hercule, the nickname his grandfather had bestowed on him, was also known as the Strategist, a shadowy figure, feared and spoken of in whispers, a man whose reputation continued to grow throughout Europe and the Middle East for the simple reason that he could always be trusted to fulfill a contract for any job desired, from an assassination to an exploded building. Jihadists believed him to be one of them, and Hercule knew his plan, his Bella, was a terrorist’s wet dream and would make them admire him even more. What they didn’t know was that the destruction of the West’s sacred cathedrals, for him, the Strategist, was something else entirely. In the future, after three or four of the world’s famous cathedrals had fallen into ruin from his hired bombers, all it would take was the threat of a specific target cathedral, and the payoffs would become a source of huge revenue to him.
He remembered Imam Al-H?di ibn Mirza had christened him the Strategist after a particularly intricate plan he’d devised to kill a Shiite banker in Syria who was helping to fund Hezbollah. Hercule had profited handsomely from that plan, seizing a shipment of large bills before the man died in a hail of bullets. The imam never learned that detail. The imam thought of Hercule as a committed genius who would help him bring the world to Islam, a true believer to whom money meant little. So did dozens of hardened fighters who had worked for him and who feared his name. He’d heard one of his most trusted, skilled men, Bahar, call him the iron fist inside the imam’s velvet glove. Until he decided otherwise, for the moment, he would continue to be tied to the imam.