As far as Sauvage was concerned, Eric, the shadowy voice on the phone who’d hired him to find and stalk men and women on behalf of Syrian interests here in Paris, could go to hell.
Sauvage’s division of the Police Judiciaire was the Criminal Brigade, known around Paris as La Crim, and they did have a counterespionage group, but Sauvage wasn’t on it. He worked instead in the homicide division. But even though he wasn’t a spy or a spy hunter, he understood the concept of MICE. MICE was the acronym for the four principal forms of compromise used by intelligence officers—money, ideology, compromise, and ego. And even though Sauvage wasn’t trained professionally on the techniques, he recognized that the man he only knew as Eric had roped him into this mess by using three of the four on him to great effect.
Henri Sauvage had no ideology whatsoever—he was in it for the dough—but the other three motivations had brought him to where he found himself today. Money was easy to see; this was why he had agreed to work for Eric in the first place. But looking back on it now, he realized the man had played on his ego, as well, by making him feel important enough to recruit three other men in the force to help him. After this was done, Sauvage, Clement, Allard, and Foss continued taking payoffs to provide information to help the Syrians in Paris, first providing information out of Criminal Brigade databases. Eventually Eric upped the ante with footwork, having Henri and his boys tail men and women, Syrian expatriates, rebels, and reporters speaking out against the Azzam regime.
It was not long before the stakes were raised for the cell of police officers, when one of the Syrian immigrants they had been tailing simply disappeared.
Sauvage and his group knew good and well the man they’d surveilled had likely been assassinated, and by this time they had worked out that they were proxy operatives of the Syrian regime. But the four kept at it. Their standards of living had risen, and with this rise came the need for more and more money to fuel their lifestyles. Plus, the missing man had not been a French citizen or well connected, so no real attention was paid to the event, and Sauvage and his team got away with it scot-free.
Over the next year they were involved in two other operations that appeared to have led to assassinations, but Sauvage’s cell was still only involved in hands-off work on the fringes of the operations, so the four men remained compartmentalized from any real danger to themselves, their liberty, or even their careers.
But then the ante was upped again when the mysterious Eric ordered them to follow a Spanish model named Bianca Medina while she visited the city to work at Fashion Week and to report on the security around her.
This, Sauvage had known instantly, was a very different animal from all their other work for the Syrians.
Every fiber of the captain’s being had been against this, and his three partners in crime pushed back, as well, but by then the compromise was in play. Eric had enough dirt on the French cops to put them all in prison, so there was no way they would not comply. Plus Eric insisted that, as always, their input in the operation would be relatively minor.
So they did as ordered, followed the Spanish model, surveilled the location where she was staying, and passed on the information to Eric.
And in the process they became fully involved in the high-profile terrorist massacre that took place in central Paris three nights earlier.
Now the four police officers were in it up to their necks, and when Foss and Allard had been gunned down two days earlier in the apartment of Syrian expatriates, who themselves were now missing, the tension on the two remaining members of the cell of dirty cops was ratcheted up to ten.
And that tension had become unbearable for Henri Sauvage.
He’d decided to take his family and run, at least for a while. He knew that when he did leave town, Eric would probably go through with his threat to reveal his involvement in the ISIS attack, but Sauvage told himself Eric had no direct proof, and Sauvage could explain the accusation away by constructing an elaborate explanation that Eric was a confidential informant he’d been running off book, who had now turned against him because of an unrelated disagreement.
It was a gamble, but less so, Sauvage determined, than continuing the hunt for Bianca Medina and standing by while more people were slaughtered across the city.
So Sauvage decided to hit the bricks, but he could not just leave his partner behind to deal with this alone. To make his escape from his problem, he needed to sell Andre Clement on the idea of running out on Eric, as well. To this end he’d asked Clement to meet him at a location where they often met confidential informants for clandestine meetings: the Car Park Stalingrad garage next to the Gare du Nord train station.
* * *
? ? ?
Five minutes before one a.m., an exhausted and on-edge Henri Sauvage drove down the ramp and into the underground garage, parked his little but speedy Renault 308 with the front grille facing the exit ramp, and sat there in the nearly full but perfectly quiet garage while he texted Clement.
Ou est vous? Where are you?
Sauvage had smoked half a cigarette before the reply came.
Deux minutes. Two minutes.
Soon Clement’s four-door Citro?n rolled down the ramp, and Sauvage flashed his lights. The Citro?n turned his way and began rolling forward. Behind it, a pair of sedans also rolled down the ramp. One turned to the left and one to the right, and they disappeared in the massive garage.
The Citro?n parked in the closest space, just a few spots from Sauvage, so the captain and cell leader got out of his car, left the door open, and strolled over with his walkie-talkie in his hand. He tossed his cigarette, stepped to the driver’s-side window of the vehicle as it slid down, and leaned down to talk to his old friend.
And that was when he realized something was very wrong.
Thirty-three-year-old Andre Clement faced forward, his hands gripping the wheel so tightly his fingers were white . . . and only then did Sauvage see the man in the backseat with a pistol pressed against the back of Clement’s head.
Andre Clement looked up at his partner with eyes filled with dread now. “I am sorry, Henri. I couldn’t take it, so I tried to run out on this shit. I was going to leave it behind, pack up the kids and just—”
Without warning, an earsplitting crack battered Sauvage’s senses; Clement’s head snapped forward inside an arc of flame. Blood splattered the inside of the windshield and the steering wheel, but Sauvage did not wait to check on his partner’s condition. Instead he spun away, ducked down as low as he could, and sprinted back around to his Renault.
He dove through the open door and fired up his engine, not quite sure what the hell was going on but damn sure he needed to get the hell out of there. But just as he shifted gears to race from his space, a Ford van that had been parked in the garage shot in front of him on his left to cut him off. The van had no lights on, but Sauvage could see a man in the front passenger seat spin towards him with a short-barreled submachine gun.
The two sedans that had entered the garage a minute earlier appeared with squealing tires, shooting forward towards Sauvage.
The captain only now went for the weapon he kept in a shoulder holster, palmed the grip of the HK pistol, and started to yank it free. But looking around he could see a half dozen guns either pointing at him already or moving into position to do so.
Henri Sauvage released his grip on the weapon and raised his hands. His car door flew open and he was yanked out by a man with olive skin wearing a gray denim jacket and jeans, and the man pushed Sauvage forward and through the sliding door of the van, onto a floor covered in plastic tarp.
Other men jumped into the van with him; he could hear and feel them more than see them while facing down on the plastic.