“At which point the police will start looking for you. You’ll be able to prove these two cops were working for Syrian interests, that this was an assassination attempt, and then you will be in the clear. But for now, you’ll have to run.”
The couple stood and put on their overcoats as they headed for the front door. “Thank you,” Rima muttered, but in her hurry and shock she did not even look Court’s way.
“Wait,” Court said. “You have to do one thing for me now.”
Tarek turned back to him. “What is that?”
Court told him what he needed, Tarek Halaby complied, and then the Halabys left their apartment, heading for the elevator and the side exit. The sounds of sirens echoed off every building in the Left Bank now; the police were already covering the front and back streets, but Court just closed and locked the apartment door, then headed back to the smashed window, leaving all the bodies as they were. Climbing through the window, he looked down towards the Passage Dauphine and saw a pair of cops standing at the side door, almost directly under Court’s position. They weren’t looking up, so Court swung out silently and moved along from window ledge to window ledge. Once he was out of view of their position he descended via a drainpipe and ran off to the east, ducking into a travel agency for a brochure as a cavalcade of police cars rolled by.
CHAPTER 18
Sebastian Drexler sat in his office, thinking over his conversation with the Halabys and this mysterious American working for them. He’d told the man he expected they would have more dealings with one another, and he fully anticipated this to be the case. He hoped he’d see him at the end of a gun barrel, and on the streets of Paris, for two reasons.
One, Drexler saw himself as more than capable in a fight, and taking down this American who was making so much trouble for his operation would be supremely satisfying. And two . . . More than anything on this Earth, Sebastian Drexler wanted to go home to Europe.
Here in Damascus he had money, power, women, and respect, but he dreamed of seeing his home continent again, of being around Westerners and Western food, customs, and ideals.
But he knew he had to be careful in Europe, because if the police in any nation on the continent picked him up, he’d never set foot outside a prison as long as he lived.
Drexler was born in the picturesque Swiss mountain village of Lauterbrunnen to parents who owned a climbing-expedition tour company, and he became a top-ranked youth alpinist before leaving the nation of his birth for university. Educated in international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, he then spent a few years in his nation’s foreign intelligence service. But the slow pace of Switzerland bored him, so he left his home country and took a job for a private risk management firm specializing in helping large corporations navigate their business interests in dangerous African conflict zones.
Drexler was bright, cunning, ruthless when he needed to be, and ambitious. After a couple years working for multinationals, he went out on his own, peddling his expertise as a veteran intelligence operative with third-world experience to well-heeled African warlords. He spent two years working under Gaddafi but got out before the fall of Libya. Then he spent two more years in Europe doing the remote bidding of Nigeria’s corrupt leader Julius Abubaker, and then he did stints supporting the aims of the leadership in Egypt under Mubarak, in Zimbabwe under Mugabe, and in Sudan under Bakri Ali Abboud.
He was a field man who could think, not a mindless gunman but a well-versed and broadly trained operative. He could protect, he could investigate, he could surveil his clients’ opposition and assess his clients’ threats. And yes . . . he could assassinate.
Hell, Sebastian Drexler could raise armies and sack nations.
But he grew tired of the Third World and sought employment back on his home continent. It took Sebastian Drexler years to make his way back to Europe, but finally he left Africa and was discreetly hired by one of the oldest family-owned banks on Earth, Meier Privatbank of Gstaad. The institution employed him as a “consultant” for ultra-affluent private clients, assigning him to those who needed Drexler’s discreet physical and mental abilities to help keep their funds right where they belonged: at Meier Privatbank.
He broke up family squabbles that threatened accounts with all manner of subterfuge and silenced his clients’ legal problems with intrigue and violence. In rural Denmark, a wealthy family patriarch with cancer decided he wanted to remove all his holdings at Meier, some thirty million euros, and donate them to medical research. The younger members of the family were livid, but legally, there was nothing they could do.
The children consulted the bank; Sebastian Drexler arrived at the family estate outside Silkeborg and poisoned the patriarch to death with tainted meds before he could complete the transaction.
The patriarch’s kids were pleased, as were Drexler’s employers at Meier.
Drexler did not have a conscience; he had a code. He served the wishes of his employer without question or hesitation. He would cheat, intimidate, maim, kill; he would fund an insurgent attack on a factory in Morocco, contract and sanction a street criminal to stab a lawyer over his wallet in Athens to get him off a case—do anything that would further the wishes of his bank’s clients to keep his bank’s balance sheet large and risks to his clients’ assets small.
Life was going well for Drexler, but eventually his crimes caught up with him. Interpol identified him as a criminal and a killer for his actions in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, and they began investigating his rumored ties to the Swiss banking industry.
His employers could have washed their hands of him, but instead they made him an offer. He was told there was work for him, lucrative work, in a place Interpol would never persuade the local police to arrest and extradite him.
One of his bank’s largest clients had a need for a personal agent, someone to help her navigate a tricky political and criminal climate both at home and abroad, and a well-rounded, well-connected operative like Herr Drexler might be able to succeed in this mission quite handily.
He was offered the job as the personal action arm of Shakira al-Azzam. He would not be stationed in Europe—which was good news, because Drexler was now persona non grata in Europe—but in Syria itself. If he moved to Damascus to work for the beautiful and powerful first lady, she would win, the bank would win, and Drexler would win.
Well . . . that was how it was all sold to him, and he leapt at the chance to get out of his dangerous predicament in Switzerland. But he had no idea of the dangers in which he’d find himself in Damascus. Even as a personal agent of a member of the first family, it was a perilous environment.
Syrian president Ahmed al-Azzam himself had to sign off on the plan, and he was agreeable to the idea, for the very simple reason that the hundred million euros in Switzerland at Meier Privatbank was essentially the last of the money he and his wife had socked away abroad as a hedge against being overthrown at home. If the Swiss bankers who’d managed to hide his loot this long wanted to send a European spy to work full-time keeping their financial interests protected, then Ahmed knew this would work better than his own intelligence service trying to do the same.