Soldier of God (33 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Soldier of God
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“There’s a Swiss Federal cop and a killer on the second floor.”
McGarvey said, loudly, in French, so that there would be absolutely no misunderstanding.
At that moment everyone heard two gunshots from somewhere upstairs.
Khalil slumped in a kneeling position beside the chair he had pushed aside, his head lolling on the chair seat, his eyes open and fixed on the corridor door, as if he were dead.
The situation was rapidly becoming critical for him, and he seethed with a barely controlled rage. He’d heard the police sirens outside, and if they had heard the two unsilenced shots they would be on their way
now. It’s why he had momentarily stepped into view to draw fire and then had pretended to be wounded. He wanted to lure the shooter in the corridor to show herself.
The woman whom McGarvey had come up with was in the corridor. She had to figure that her two shots had hit their mark. From her position she would be able to see him, unmoving.
She was hiding behind the door frame, taking only brief glimpses at him and then ducking back. She was obviously a cop or an intelligence officer, and not a prostitute as Khalil had first thought.
It was a stupid mistake on his part, just as shooting the idiot cameraman on the balcony had been a less than ideal move because of the attention it had apparently attracted. But having one of his critical avenues of escape denied him was totally unacceptable.
Khalil was almost sure that McGarvey had spotted the photographer in the windows, mistook him for an assassin, and had gone down to the street to catch him from behind.
Now he was in a bad situation. Unless the woman made her move before the police came up to investigate the shots or surrounded the hotel, he would not be able to make his escape.
His pistol was in his right hand, on the floor between his torso and the side of the chair. He had to raise it only a centimeter or two to have a clear shot at anyone coming through the doorway. Or if she came close enough, he could reach for his belt-buckle knife.
It would give him a great deal of pleasure to watch life leave her eyes as her blood pumped out of her body with each diminishing beat of her fading heart.
Khalil fluttered his eyes and took a big, blubbering breath as if he were gasping for air, fighting for his life. He had seen his victims do the same thing countless times. He was an excellent mimic.
The woman stepped into clear view, her pistol extended in both hands in front of her, her elbows slightly bent.
Khalil could not see her face clearly because she was backlit from the lights in the corridor, but he got the impression that she was probably pretty, and young. She held herself like a cop, though her mistake was exposing herself and not simply waiting for the police to show up. And he thought with amusement, she didn’t know the proper narrow-profile sideways stance for approaching a downed, but possibly dangerous, assailant.
If there was more time, there were so many things that he could teach her. Women needed to be guided with a firm hand. Especially Western women who did not know their place in the historical sense.
She stood in the doorway, hesitating with indecision.
He could see that from the way she held herself. She was waiting for McGarvey to return. But she had enough respect for the man she thought she had shot and wounded to keep her distance.
Khalil raised his pistol very slowly, ready to take a snap shot if she spotted his movement.
But she remained in place, her gun pointed into the room.
Khalil’s finger began to squeeze on the Sig’s trigger.
The stairwell door at the end of the corridor opened with a tremendous bang. Liese turned her head toward the noise as uniformed cops, their guns drawn, burst through the door and immediately began to spread out.
“Mademoiselle, put your weapon down now, and step back!”
one of them shouted, in French.
Liese hesitated. She glanced at the figure crumpled against the chair inside the suite. His movements had stopped. In all likelihood he was dead. Kirk was not going to be happy, because he had counted on capturing Khalil. He’d wanted to force the man into telling him about bin Laden’s threat. The Americans were in desperate need of immediate information.
“There will be no further warning!”
the cop shouted.
Liese had to wonder how Gertner was going to take the news that she’d been arrested in Monaco for shooting to death a Saudi prince she was supposed to be investigating.
Moving very slowly, she bent down, placed her pistol on the floor, then straightened up. Raising her hands above her head, she stepped away from the doorway.
“Un terroriste du al-Quaida
est ici,” she said. She nodded toward the suite. “Là,” she said.
“Il est mort.”
He’s dead.
More cops emerged from the stairwell as two rushed down the corridor to Liese. One of them kicked her weapon away, his pistol never leaving her, while the other turned her around, brought her hands behind her back, and cuffed her.
She didn’t resist. She knew better than to give them any provocation, even though the one handcuffing her ran a hand over her ass. Anyway, it was finished. Khalil was dead. He wouldn’t provide them any information, but there was one less very bad man on the streets. He would not kill again.
Even more cops had arrived on the scene, and suddenly Kirk came through the door, his hands cuffed behind him.
“He’s dead,” Liese called to him in English. “I shot him.”
The cop, who had handcuffed her, moved her down the corridor, as two other cops, wearing vests, their weapons at the ready, flanked the door to the suite.
On signal, one of them rolled inside the room, sweeping his pistol left to right. A moment later the second cop entered the suite, while two others took up positions on either side of the door.
Someone took the chair away from the elevator, and the car started down. Other cops came from the opposite end of the corridor, guns drawn, but none of the hotel’s guests had dared to open their doors to see what all the commotion was about. The two unsilenced shots had been enough to keep them inside. It was just as well, Liese thought. Khalil had shot the photographer on the balcony, and he would not have hesitated to kill anyone else who got in his way.
“Are you sure he’s down—” McGarvey said, but a slightly built Frenchman in crumpled civilian clothes came through the door at that moment. His long narrow face and dark eyes were a blank slate, as if he were in the middle of a poker game and was hiding his emotions. He took a quick look at the scene in the corridor, then held his ID wallet in front of McGarvey’s face.
“I am Lieutenant of Police Maurice Capretz. Why have you come to Monaco, Monsieur McGarvey? Why aren’t you at home attending to your duties? Basking in the adulation of your countrymen who believe you are a hero?”
“I came to find the man who was responsible for the deaths in Alaska.”
Capretz nodded, as if it was what he knew McGarvey was going to say. “Oui, Prince Salman is your prime suspect.” He glanced at Liese. “And you are Sergeant Fuelm. We were warned about you as well. And here you are in the flesh, apparently having just done mischief.”
One of the uniformed cops appeared at the suite’s doorway. He had
holstered his weapon. He shook his head. “Lieutenant, there is no body.”
“But I shot him!” Liese shouted. This was all wrong. She’d seen him react to her two shots. He’d gone down. He was dead.
“No body, no blood,” the cop said. “No one was there, though there are bullet holes in the windows.”
“Perhaps you shot a
fantôme
, Mademoiselle,” Capretz said. He seemed relieved. “But it is perhaps for the best. Had you actually shot and killed someone, you would not be returning to Switzerland quite as
rapidement
as you would like.”
McGarvey had a resigned look on his face. Liese shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. She had let him down when he’d counted on her.
“But there is a body,” McGarvey said. “Just below on the street. I think that you’ll discover he was shot with a silenced pistol. Probably a large caliber from the effect of the impact.”
Capretz nodded to one of his men to check it out, but his eyes never left McGarvey’s. “No doubt you are telling the truth. France has always had a great respect for you, though you will never be welcomed back. Would you care to explain to me what you are talking about, because I certainly hope that someone hasn’t shot the prince. There would be no end to the political repercussions.”
“He was a photographer trying to get a picture of Sergeant Fuelm and me, together. He tried to take our photo down on the street when we came back to the hotel earlier, but I sent him away. Apparently he found out what room I was in, and climbed up to my balcony. It cost him his life.”
“The phantom in your suite shot him?”
“Someone did,” McGarvey said. “I think your ballistics people will confirm that the bullet didn’t come from either of our weapons. Which will leave you with something of a problem, compounded by the fact you’re allowing an al-Quaida killer, who probably climbed down the tree outside my room, to walk away.”
Capretz wasn’t impressed. “Are you aware that the prince’s yacht suddenly left La Condamine one hour ago?”
“Was Salman aboard?”
“I don’t know,” Capretz admitted.
“Then I think I would like to contact my government.”
The police lieutenant’s cell phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and answered the call. “Oui,” he said. He glanced at Liese and then back at McGarvey, and nodded. “Bon. Merci.”
Liese stared at McGarvey, trying to gauge his mood. Unless the French meant to put him in jail, he wasn’t finished. He would continue going after the prince until one or the other of them was dead.
Bin Laden’s threat was real. No one believed any differently. And the attack would happen very soon. No one had any doubt of that either. Nor was there any question that the strike would be every bit as big as
9/ 11.
Liese knew her career was almost certainly on the edge of disaster.
Capretz broke the connection and put the phone in his pocket. He turned to the cop who’d brought McGarvey up. “Did you examine his gun to see if it has been fired recently?”
“It did not appear to have been fired, sir. The magazine is full, and there is a round still in the chamber.”
Capretz turned his attention back to Liese. “But you fired two shots—at your phantom. Can you explain why there is no body and no blood? Are you that terrible a marksman, Mademoiselle?”
Liese felt lightheaded. “I must have missed,” she replied, evenly.
Capretz shrugged. “We’ll see,” he said. Once again he looked at McGarvey. “A representative from your Federal Bureau of Investigation is waiting downstairs.You will be turned over to him. There is a warrant for your arrest.” He grunted. “Unless, of course, you wish to fight extradition.”
McGarvey shook his head. “That was fast work,” he said. “What about Sergeant Fuelm?”
Capretz shrugged. “A representative from her service is here as well. As soon as we finish our ballistics test to ensure that her weapon was not used in a crime of bodily injury, she will be returned to Switzerland.”
“I suppose it would be useless to ask for help from Action?” McGarvey said.
Capretz shrugged again.
“Totalement.”
Liese felt miserable. It was obvious that she would have to do whatever she could to help Kirk, even if it meant first returning to Switzerland without creating a fuss to somehow make amends.
Looking at him, her resolve hardened.
Whatever it took, even if it meant sleeping with Gertner.
Muhamed Abdallah sat on a plastic chair in the screened patio behind the trailer, letting his nerves wind down in the cool evening mountain air. Working with explosives was a tricky business. The Polish-made Semtex was in itself not unstable. In fact, the dead gray, puttylike substance could be thrown against a wall, struck with a hammer, or even put into a fire, and yet it would not explode.
It was the triggering mechanisms that were extremely delicate and dangerous.
A wrong move at this stage—when he was wiring the twenty kilos of bricks to a single trigger so that at the proper time the entire mass would explode at the same instant—would be disastrous.
He extended his right arm and raised his hand in front of his face so that it blocked a section of the not-so-distant mountains. When he spread his fingers, he could see strips of the highest, snowcapped peaks.
Mountains were power. Dear Osama had a perfect understanding of this when he first went to Afghanistan to drive the infidel Russians from the righteous land.
The jihad had taken ten long years. But what was that compared to the eternity of Paradise?
When the word came, the attack would take place in seventy-two hours. It would be a second blow against the Satan America. More important even than 9/11, as it was explained to Muhamed. This time they would strike at the heart of the people.
“It will be much the same as the Israeli attacks on our refugee camps in which our children are targeted,” the man from Pakistan told them at the Nablus meeting.
He said his name was Ghulam, after the secretary to the former defense minister Aftab Mirani. No one believed it, of course, but it didn’t matter. He had come to offer them certain salvation as soldiers of God.
“Take me,” Muhamed had cried, his enthusiasm bubbling over. “I must go for my mother,” he added, shyly.
No one in the small courtyard apartment in one of the few buildings
that hadn’t been damaged or destroyed by rocket attacks laughed. And Ghulam was patient with him.
“But you don’t know what the mission is,” the Pakistani mujahideen said, not unkindly. “It may be too difficult. Too terrible for you to contemplate, let alone carry out.”
His eyes were kind and understanding. Much the same as Muhamed imagined Osama’s eyes were. They had seen unimaginably horrible things, and yet al-Quaida’s resolve was strong because the
jihad
was just and the men at the core were strong.
“What can be more terrible than what the Israelis are doing to us?” Muhamed said to the other young men gathered in the apartment. “They kill our soliders and old men, and now they even kill our children.” Muhamed looked back to Ghulam. “What can be worse than that to contemplate?”
“Killing the infidel’s children,” the al-Quaida recruiter answered, quietly.
Muhamed was shaken. But just for a moment. He shook his head. “There can be no innocents in the battle for the will of Allah.” He looked at the others now, none of their enthusiasm damped. “
Insha’allah
.” He looked Ghulam directly in the eye, his own gaze steady. “Tell me what I can do for the
jihad
. My life for the cause.”
They had driven north that night out of the West Bank and all the way across the border into Lebanon, passing through the Israeli checkpoints on the strength of Ghulam’s credentials almost as if they were ghosts. During the two hundred-kilometer drive to Beirut, Muhamed learned that in return for his giving his life to Allah’s cause, his parents would receive fifty thousand American dollars when the mission was completed. He was also told that his sacrifice would not take place in Israel or Palestine. In fact, he would never see those places again, nor would he see his family until they joined him in Paradise. But that would be as if only an eyeblink in time.
In Beirut, Muhamed was placed aboard a Liberian-registered freighter, where he was confined to his tiny cabin in the bowels of the ship for five days and nights until he was finally taken ashore in a small boat in the middle of the night.
“Welcome to Algeria, my brother,” his guide welcomed him. “It is here that you will begin your journey.”
His journey to Paradise.
Gazing up now at the Front Range above the college town of Fort Collins, Muhamed could feel his anxiety subsiding. His hands no longer shook. Nor did he suffer from the despair that had gripped him for many weeks after he had learned the true nature of his mission here in the U.S. He knew that he was not alone, that there were others who would be carrying out similar attacks at exactly the same moment.
But that knowledge had never given him any comfort.
Even now they would be doing the same things he was doing. They had seen their targets. They were preparing their explosives, which they would strap to their bodies. And they were preparing their minds for their deaths.
Muhamed had made lists in his mind of the things he would miss. His mother. His father and his brothers. A future in which he would be married and have beautiful sons of his own. Especially a future in which he and his family would live in a free Palestine.
He even allowed certain silly things to occupy his list. But only for a short time. Drinking
cha
and listening to the men talk while they played dominoes in the sidewalk cafés. Playing soccer with his friends. Someday seeing movies. Tasting ice cream. New clothes, especially white shirts.
Seyoum Noufal came out to the patio, a strange pinched expression on his long sad face. “Muhamed,” he whispered, as if he were afraid that their nearest neighbor several hundred meters away might overhear him.
Muhamed looked up at him, and he knew what he had come out to say. “The message has come?”
“Yes.”
Muhamed turned his gaze back to the vista of the mountains, the details washing out with the gathering dusk.
The Qur’an says that for every people there is a messenger; when their messenger comes, the issue between them is justly determined and they are not wronged.
His messenger had come, and he would not be wronged, for he had a passage to Paradise.
In three days, freshly shaved, the Semtex strapped to his body beneath his schoolboy clothes, he would enter Rocky Mountain High School as a student. At the very same moment others across the country were doing the same thing in similar small-town high schools, he would place himself in the middle of the school and activate the detonator.
It would be a blow against the infidel, worse in horror than 9/11.
Infinitely worse.
Insha’allah.

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