Children of War (5 page)

Bruno knew that Bagram was the big airbase outside Kabul, run by the U.S. military. But the French had their own transport link and airfield facilities at Dushanbe, in Tajikistan, the country immediately north of Afghanistan. Bruno remembered that if the French military could possibly find a way to be independent of their American allies, they would. He was glad of it, imagining the kind of bureaucratic hurdles required to get a mysterious French civilian through American security checks.

He was just sending a quick reply when the Mayor came into his office and closed the door behind him. ‘What’s this I
hear about your being attacked at the
collège
? Philippe Delaron called to ask me about it.’

Bruno groaned inwardly. At least Philippe had not got a photo of him writhing on the floor, throwing up and worse.

‘I’m just heading to the Gendarmerie for a meeting about it with the Brigadier and J-J.’ Bruno described the events of the morning. ‘The only reason to target Momu would be something to do with Sami, and it looks as though he’s on his way back here.’

‘You mean Sami is the real target, and Momu is the just the way these men think they can get to him?’

‘That’s right. Sami disappears from a mosque in Toulouse four years ago and turns up in Afghanistan, after doing heaven knows what. Then he arrives at the French military base, which means somebody in Afghanistan will be wondering what happened to him. His story suggests that people at a mosque in France are funnelling French Muslims to the Taliban. Presumably those people would want to stop him from talking, which could mean killing him. But first they have to find him, and Sami’s last known contact is Momu here in St Denis. I assume they planned to question Momu, probably brutally.’

‘So Sami coming home could put the whole of St Denis in danger?’ the Mayor asked.

Bruno shrugged. ‘The two tough guys they sent barely got away. I’ll be making photofit sketches of them this afternoon and I believe the Brigadier has been keeping that mosque under surveillance anyway. I don’t think they’d take the risk of coming back here.’

Bruno tried to sound more convinced than he felt. The Mayor did not look reassured. He shrugged and sighed in a way that
seemed to express all the anger and frustration that Bruno himself felt at the invasion of their placid town by murderous forces from the incomprehensible world outside. This was a time of year when St Denis should be thinking of little but the wine harvest and the coming of the new rugby season.

*

The Brigadier had taken over the commandant’s office in the Gendarmerie, and he and J-J were each talking on separate mobile phones when Bruno was shown in by Yveline Gerlache. Her supposedly temporary appointment as commandant of the small squad of Gendarmes in St Denis had been extended so often it looked like becoming permanent. After a rather nervous start earlier in the year, which Bruno put down to its being her first time in command, Yveline had settled in well, and she gave him a warm smile and a firm handshake when she came out to greet him.

Yveline had been a star athlete at the officer training school in Melun and almost made the French Olympic team for field hockey. She’d already won the women’s final in the annual tournament of the town tennis club. Once she had learned that Bruno was training a girls’ team to play rugby as well as the usual boys, she’d volunteered to help. The regular coach trips to away matches had given them time to talk and get to know one another a little better. Fabiola had arranged a dinner for Yveline to meet some of the other women in town and had asked Bruno to help her cook. He’d been delighted to do so and had made a joke of it, dressing as a waiter and serving the food and wine before leaving them to their desserts and coffees. They had gone on long after midnight, Fabiola later told him.

‘Glad to see you looking alright,’ said the Brigadier, closing his phone. As always, he looked as if his hair had just been cut. Like many soldiers he seemed to transfer the neatness of parade uniforms to his civilian clothes. He wore a starched white shirt with tightly knotted silk tie and an anonymous but well-cut suit of navy blue. Despite his trip by helicopter the trousers looked newly pressed. His shoes were black lace-ups and his sole idiosyncrasy was to keep a white silk handkerchief in his sleeve.

‘The doc said to warn you I might pass out and I’m to go straight to bed once this meeting’s over,’ Bruno said.

‘In that case you’d better take my chair,’ said Yveline, rising to perch on the window ledge.

The Brigadier waited until they were settled and said, ‘I’ve just been talking to Paris. They’ve accepted my recommendation that we keep watching the Toulouse mosque but take no further action at this time. It’s more important to know what’s going on than to go in bull-headed and provoke all sorts of Muslim complaints about police discrimination. I know you won’t like it but that’s policy. It’s what we’ve been doing for twenty years, infiltrating the bastards and turning them rather than just arresting them. It’s my belief that’s why Paris hasn’t been through the kind of hell they’ve seen in New York, London, Madrid.’

‘I thought we were looking for two murder suspects,’ Bruno objected. ‘We also have to stop a second killing. I don’t think they were carrying that sniper’s rifle for fun.’

‘That’s not the priority,’ the Brigadier replied, his voice as crisp and official as his appearance. ‘The priority is to establish just how far this mosque is tied up with Afghans
and jihadis and to find out who is behind it. The chief Imam is on the government’s advisory board on Islamic assimilation, so if he’s involved it would be very embarrassing. You probably know that glib deputy of his from the TV talk shows, Ghlamallah, the one who speaks oh-so-reasonably about a new Islam that’s being reformed to integrate with European democracy. You may have seen an op-ed piece he wrote about it for
Le Monde
.’

The Brigadier made no effort to keep the sneer out of his voice, and J-J snorted from his perch on the corner of the desk. Bruno noted with interest that Yveline kept her face impassive. He suspected that like him, she didn’t agree with the Brigadier’s mockery. Bruno had heard Tayeb Ghlamallah speak on the radio and thought he’d made a lot of sense. There were six million Muslims in France, nearly a tenth of the population, and an even greater proportion among those under the age of twenty. Without assimilation and a more tolerant, less defensive Islam, France faced a difficult future.

Bruno, aware that he was feeling light-headed, made an effort of will to keep his voice reasonable. ‘If they mean what they say, then the Imams should be eager to help us track down a couple of murderers, all the more so since Rafiq was one of their own. I presume he was a Muslim.’

‘Rafiq may have been born into a Muslim family but he never went to mosque until we asked him to start doing so,’ the Brigadier said. ‘We inserted him into that new prison at Seysses and he managed to get himself recruited. He’s been in that mosque for three months; a nice little operation until he got himself killed. But we don’t know how much these thugs got out of him first.’

‘Preliminary autopsy says he was still alive when they set his feet on fire,’ said J-J. ‘But they’d tortured him first, that cattle prod up his backside.’

‘I had a taste of that cattle prod and I’d have told them anything they wanted to know,’ said Bruno. ‘But there’s another part of this which may be connected. A young Muslim guy from St Denis has just turned up at our army base in Afghanistan, wanting to come home. He was supposed to be at the special school they have attached to that mosque in Toulouse. His name is Sami.’

‘Special school? You mean he’s retarded?’ J-J asked.

‘No, he’s smarter than you or me at maths puzzles. He’s just different, autistic. He hardly ever speaks.’

‘What was he doing over there?’ the Brigadier asked.

‘I don’t know, but he’s coming back here as a distressed citizen in a danger zone. The Mayor looked up the regulation. Here’s a copy of his file.’

‘Sami Belloumi, born in Algeria, arrived in France as a child fifteen years ago and adopted by his aunt and uncle, Momu al-Bakr of St Denis. Naturalized as a French citizen the following year,’ the Brigadier read aloud. He looked up and asked Yveline, ‘Have you got a scanner here? Then when we’ve finished perhaps you could scan this thumbprint on his ID card and email a copy to my office. Let’s see if that tells us any more about him.’

The Brigadier put the file on the desk before him and looked thoughtful. ‘This could be just what we want to smoke out the jihadis. They think he’s here, or on his way, and presumably they’ll want to stop him talking. That means they’ll be coming here again, and this time we’ll be waiting for them.’

‘But they’ll know he’s autistic and doesn’t speak much, and anything he says isn’t the kind of evidence that is likely to convince a court,’ said Bruno. He hated the idea of Sami being used as live bait, let alone turning his town into a killing ground. ‘Why would they take that risk?’

‘Thanks to Rafiq, we know quite a lot about that mosque already,’ said the Brigadier. ‘We’ve been monitoring their phones and computers for months.’

‘Did Rafiq explain what he was doing before he got killed?’ asked J-J.

‘Just that two men he called the action team were up to something and he’d follow, observe and report. We know their names and we can pick them up whenever we want, but right now I’d rather just watch them. It’s not the toughs we want, it’s the guys who are pulling the strings.’

‘Did Rafiq have a family?’ asked Bruno.

The Brigadier shook his head. ‘Divorced, no kids. We don’t use family men for undercover work.’

‘There’ll be friends from his regiment who’d want to know,’ said Bruno.

The Brigadier shook his head. ‘We’ll keep this quiet. An unidentified man has been found dead by a burned-out car. Police are trying to identify him. That’s all we say to the media.’

‘The guys who did it left him handcuffed to a tree,’ said Bruno. ‘It seems to me they knew he was undercover and they’re sending you a message.’

‘Of course they are,’ the Brigadier replied. ‘But that’s no reason for us to respond. If pressed, J-J can leak to a friendly journalist that it looks like a gangland killing. Not a word about mosques or anything else. I’ll bring down a team to
babysit Momu and his wife, and Sami when he gets here. Any idea when that will be, Bruno?’

‘He should be on the next military flight from Dushanbe, but you’ll probably know before I do. I assume the flights come into the Creil airbase.’ It was the main airfield for France’s military transports, a big base outside Paris that Bruno had used several times in his army days.

‘That’s right, but there might be media there. We’ll arrange for this one to land at Évreux instead,’ the Brigadier said. Not for the first time, Bruno was struck by the wide authority the Brigadier seemed to have in the French military as well as its police and intelligence services.

‘I’ll make sure it all goes smoothly at that end and I’ll get them to fly him on to the Mérignac airbase outside Bordeaux so you can pick him up there. In the meantime,’ the Brigadier went on, ‘there’s a shrink we use, deputy head of the prison psychiatric service, name of Deutz, a very smart guy with lots of diplomas.’ Deutz, he explained, had noticed and then studied the way jihadis were recruiting in prisons. He had drafted profiles of the kinds of prisoner they recruited and proposed strategies to counter them.

‘He probably knows more about French jihadis than anyone else, but he’s also a top-notch psychologist. Or is it psychiatrist? I never know the difference. Anyway, he’s got all the necessary security clearances and I’d like him to look at Sami and see how much we can learn. He could be an intelligence gold mine and this fellow Deutz is just the man to get it out of him. Here, take a look at this analysis he wrote.’ The Brigadier pulled a slim, photocopied report from his briefcase and pushed it across to Bruno.

‘We might have trouble persuading Momu to cooperate,’ Bruno said, glancing at the report. It came with a Ministry of Justice heading above the title,
Challenges and Opportunities of Jihadists in the Penal System
.

‘That’s your problem, Bruno. Just tell Momu that this is the price he has to pay to get Sami back into France without trouble. If he doesn’t like it we can whip Sami straight into jail as a terrorist suspect. There’s a facility for psycho prisoners at Fleury-Mérogis just outside Paris, and it would be easier for Deutz to see him there. But I want Sami down here where the Toulouse jihadis know where to find him.’

‘So Deutz would stay here in St Denis?’

‘We’ll probably put him up at the
Ecouteurs
school up the valley; cheaper that way.’

Bruno knew the place, an old château converted into a training academy for the translators who worked with French intelligence, monitoring phone and Internet traffic.

‘Be nice to Deutz, Bruno, he’s very well thought of. The Brits and the Americans both invited him over to talk about jihadi recruitment in prisons. He’s an athletic type, alpinist, a bit of a ladies’ man, I hear. You and he should get along well,’ the Brigadier said with the suspicion of a wink.

‘Sir,’ said Bruno crisply. He had learned in the army that this monosyllabic answer sufficed for most occasions, particularly when he had no idea what to say. Once again, Yveline’s face was impassive. New as she was to the Gendarmes, she must have become accustomed to the macho banter that had characterized police and military establishments throughout Bruno’s career and doubtless long before. Some policewomen tried to join in, which never worked. Some made waspish comments,
which made matters worse. Most ignored it and developed the kind of blank, distant stare that Yveline had mastered.

‘Just to clarify, sir,’ said Yveline, addressing the Brigadier. ‘We have the murder of an employee of the French state on our patch. We know of two suspects, armed with a sniper’s rifle and a cattle prod, who also stole a car and got away from a pursuit by my Gendarmes. We have witnesses who can identify these two suspects, who also committed an assault on the chief of police here. We know they are based at this mosque in Toulouse but we do not seek to find or arrest them. Is that right?’