“I didn’t start it, and I sure as hell can’t end it.” He looked back and forth between the two of them. “Look . . . like you said, I’m just the hired gun here, but I can see the problem with your entire op. Your reach exceeded your grasp. If you flipped Bianca, you might have been able to get Azzam in hot water with the Russians. But this plan of yours wasn’t ever going to lead to his ouster. This was a harassing action. Nothing more.” He shrugged. “You tried, and you failed.”
He opened the door now, looked out into the hall, but turned back before departing. “What will you do with Bianca?”
Rima said, “That is no concern of yours, clearly. You are leaving her, and us, behind.”
The man said nothing, but neither did he make any move to walk through the door.
Tarek heaved his chest. “She will be taken care of here. She will not be harmed. But we can’t let her return to Syria. She knows too much about us and our organization now.”
The asset looked at the floor now. “The kid? What will happen to the baby when his mom doesn’t come back?”
To this Tarek said, “Ahmed has never acknowledged the son’s existence, so anything could happen. But if he has any decency, then I suppose—”
The American looked up. “Jesus Christ, do you realize what you just said?”
Tarek stared blankly at the man at the door. “The baby will not survive long. If Azzam thinks Bianca is dead, he won’t bring the child into the palace. Shakira would not stand for it. Azzam will be looking for Bianca now, but when he does not find her, he will have to remove the compromise.” Tarek frowned. “Kill the child, most likely. But you can’t expect us to just send Bianca home to Azzam after what she knows. We must keep her here, and try to persuade her to help us.”
The American did nothing to hide the disdain from his face. He just turned into the hall. Mustafa pushed off from where he was leaning against the wall and looked at the Western stranger.
Rima called out from behind. “We know we aren’t in control of all this. We aren’t trained as revolutionaries.”
“No shit,” snapped the American.
“We are doctors,” she continued. “And we are desperate for our people back in Syria, for the future of our nation. We thought this was a perfect opportunity to find important information about Azzam that could be used against him to end the war. It was.” Rima’s eyes teared. “We just didn’t know about the baby.”
The American said, “You are playing a dangerous game you don’t understand. Please, take my advice. Free the girl. And then go back to aid and comfort . . . something you’re good at.”
And with that he left the couple alone in their second-floor apartment, pushing past Mustafa in the narrow hallway.
CHAPTER 15
Court walked down the long hallway towards the stairwell. He descended one flight, moved through a narrow and dark passageway to the door to the street, then stepped out onto the Rue Mazarine.
A pair of motorcycle cops wearing the uniform of Public Order and Traffic Control rolled in his direction from the north, slowing to a stop not far from the Halabys’ large apartment building. They showed no interest in him, and there were two dozen other pedestrians around, so Court simply turned to the south, then made a quick right on a small winding avenue with outdoor cafés on both sides of the street.
The two helmeted cops never saw him.
Court’s personal security was at the forefront of his thinking now. All the pedestrians around him, the people he could see through the shop windows, in the vehicles passing by: they all had to be assessed as a potential threat. His eyes scanned and his brain spun as he evaluated individuals, looking for pre-assault indicators, the flash of a camera lens striking sunlight, any odd mannerisms that could indicate someone taking interest in his presence.
And cops. Court always had an eye open for cops, but especially in Paris, because he had something of a history here.
He’d been to Paris more than two dozen times in his life, which meant he knew these streets, and that helped him both assimilate and keep a keen eye for anyone acting out of phase. He spoke the language and he had the feel and rhythm of the city down cold. Not all of his experiences had been good; he’d nearly been stabbed to death just a few blocks south of here a couple of years earlier in an alleyway that ran off the Rue de l’Ancienne Comedie, and then he nearly bled out along the Left Bank of the Seine just a few blocks to the north.
But despite his close calls, he was comfortable here in the French capital; his tradecraft normally kept him safe, and he had every confidence it would do so today, at least long enough for him to get out of town.
And getting out of town was on his mind now. He told himself he had to go someplace far away from the neophytes who had hired him into this sloppy train wreck of an operation. But as he walked, he couldn’t help but feel something tugging at him, something telling him he shouldn’t leave the Halabys to swing in the wind alone.
He had no doubt they’d be killed before this was all over. There was danger in Paris, even from threats borne out of Syria. The Halabys were running the group holding the Syrian president’s mistress, and that would send a lot more bad actors into the area, sooner and not later. Azzam would either want her back or he’d want to silence her. Either way, people would die. Court knew he had no business in the middle of that madness, but he still felt like shit about leaving a lot of nearly defenseless people to deal with the fallout.
The na?ve and foolish young mother. The middle-aged couple working for the peace and health of their people, only to find themselves at the heart of a high-stakes, life-and-death operation.
And a four-month-old child. Son to the devil incarnate, true, but a baby whose only crime was having a shitty dad.
It was a cruel, sick, heartless world; this Court told himself not for the first time, and as he turned onto the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, his eyes still wary for threats, his mind began wondering just why he gave a damn about some random baby in some faraway land. Twenty-four hours ago he was trying to keep his head in the game because of his feelings for a woman on the other side of the world he might never see again, and now he found himself on the verge of getting caught up in a multifaction civil war in the Middle East, a quagmire that looked more and more like a never-ending meat grinder.
Why the hell did he even care?
It didn’t take him long to come up with the answer. Even though nothing that had gone wrong for the Halabys in the past twenty-four hours was, in any way, his fault, Court knew that his own actions now would determine if these people lived or died.
And it wasn’t impossible to imagine that getting that child in Damascus to safety could also play a small but important part in bringing one of the most brutal dictatorships on Earth to a close.
Court sure as hell didn’t want to go to Syria, but he weighed it against the alternative: sitting around in some European café, sipping coffee with the knowledge that right then a baby was being hunted, a mother was helpless twenty-five hundred miles away from her son, a well-meaning husband and wife were in imminent peril of assassination, and a savage dictator was winning his war.
Court’s moral compass was trying to steer his body to get involved, but his brain was fighting back, because Court’s brain had long ago concluded that this moral compass of his was an unrelenting pain in the ass.
“No . . .” he said aloud. “No fucking way.”
Just then, Court’s attention cycled back to the present. His PERSEC radar pinged when he saw another pair of motorcycle cops pull to a stop on the Rue André-Mazet, blocking the narrow road. But just as quickly as he alerted to them, the two young officers pushed their bikes up on the pavement and took their time removing their helmets. They showed no interest in Court as he approached their position across the little street, and as he passed them he saw no hint of trouble.