“What your minister doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
The Frenchman gave a mischievous smile. “And the ground rules?”
“The same as last time. An equal partnership. I have autonomy abroad, you have veto power over anything that happens on French soil.”
“What about the British?”
“I’ll require the services of the one who speaks French like a Corsican.”
“How much do I know about what really happened with Nouredine Zakaria and those guns?”
“About fifty percent.”
“Do I want to know the rest?”
“Not a chance.”
“In that case,” said Rousseau, “I believe we have a deal.”
Rousseau rang the Interior Ministry and ordered copies of two files, one bearing the name Nouredine Zakaria, the other the name of the man he worked for. The chief of the Registry, a fonctionnaire in the finest French tradition, immediately took issue with the request. Why was Rousseau, whose brief was restricted to jihadist terrorism, suddenly interested in a low-level Moroccan criminal and one of France’s most celebrated businessmen? It was, the registrar pointed out, a rather odd pairing, like red wine and oysters. To his credit, Rousseau did not tell his nemesis that he found the analogy infantile at best. Instead, he pointed out that, as chief of a DGSI division, even a division that did not officially exist, he was entitled to see virtually every file in the French system. The registrar quickly capitulated, though he hinted at a delay of several hours, as the files were quite voluminous. Wasting the valuable time of others, thought Rousseau, was a bureaucrat’s ultimate revenge.
As it turned out, it took slightly less than an hour to locate and copy the files in question. An Alpha Group motorcycle courier collected the documents at 4:52 and by a small miracle delivered them to the rue de Grenelle at eleven minutes past five. There was no disputing the time; the security guard, a recent addition, made a note of it in his logbook, as mandated by the Alpha Group’s new protocols. The guard gave the documents a quick inspection—five hundred pages bound by a pair of metallic clips—before waving the courier into the building. For the sake of his fitness he took the stairs instead of the fickle lift, and at thirteen minutes past he placed the documents on the desk of Madame Treville. Here again, there was absolute certainty regarding the time. Madame Treville made a note of it in her desk diary, which was later recovered.
It was at this point that Christian Bouchard, ever alert to danger or opportunity, poked his well-groomed head from the door of his lair and, seeing the stack of recently delivered files on Madame Treville’s desk, wandered over to have a look.
“JLM? Who ordered these?”
“Monsieur Rousseau.”
“Why?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Where is he?”
“The secure conference room.” She lowered her voice and added, “With the Israeli.”
“Allon?”
Madame Treville nodded gravely.
“Why wasn’t I included?”
“You were at lunch when he arrived.” She made this sound like an accusation. “Monsieur Rousseau asked me to deliver the files the moment they arrived. Perhaps you would like to do it for me.”
Bouchard seized the stack of paper and carried it along the corridor to the secure conference room, where he found Gabriel and Rousseau behind a wall of soundproof glass, deep in conversation. He punched the code into the cipher lock, entered, and dropped the heavy files onto the table as though they were proof of a conspiracy.
It was then, the instant the five hundred pages landed with a leaden thud, that the bomb detonated. In fact, the timing was such that Gabriel initially thought the documents themselves had somehow exploded. Mercifully, he would have only a vague memory of what came next. He was aware that he was falling through a blizzard of glass and masonry and human blood, and that Paul Rousseau and Christian Bouchard were falling with him. When finally he came to rest, he felt as though he were in the confines of his own coffin. His last conscious thoughts were of his funeral, a knot of mourners surrounding an open grave on the Mount of Olives, two young children, a daughter who was called Irene after her grandmother, a boy who bore the name of a great painter. They would have no memory of him, his children. To them he was a man who had come and gone in darkness. And it was to the darkness he returned.
Part Two
A Girl Like That
18
Paris—Jerusalem
It was the paper—the dossiers, the watch reports, the intercepted text messages and e-mails, the case histories—that would expose the true nature of the secretive enterprise housed inside the graceful old building on the rue de Grenelle. For several hours after the attack it swirled through the streets of the seventh arrondissement, from the Eiffel Tower to Les Invalides to the gardens of the Musée Rodin, adrift on an uncertain wind. There were numerous reports of uniformed police officers and agents in plain clothes frantically collecting the documents, even as rescue workers and paramedics were pulling stunned survivors from the rubble. By early evening, however, photographs of recovered documents, each bearing the logo of the DGSI, began appearing on Twitter and other social media. Le Monde broke the story first, followed soon after by the rest of the mainstream French media. Finally, having no other recourse but the truth, the interior minister confirmed the obvious. The target of the second major bombing in Paris in less than a year was not an obscure society dedicated to the promotion of French literature; it was an elite unit of the DGSI whose very existence the minister had recently denied. He then asked the citizens of the Republic to surrender all recovered documents to the authorities and to cease posting images of them on the Internet. Compliance with the request was despairingly low.