Children of War (33 page)

‘We’ve heard from Sami’s adoptive father about his dreadful experience in the Algerian civil war when his family was slaughtered. He knew pain and terror then, but you say his later childhood showed no sign of that,’ Deutz suggested.

‘I don’t know whether his childhood in Algeria before the massacre was normal, whether he spoke and interacted like other children. Momu or Dillah might know. At the time, not having learned from Momu about the massacre, I assumed
Sami had been born that way. Now I suspect his autism, or whatever name we use to describe his problem, came as a result of his ordeal, but I’m not a doctor and not qualified to judge.’

That was all the tribunal wanted from him. As he left the balcony Nancy was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Nice job, particularly on the Mozart. It really helps to humanize Sami,’ she said. ‘I was worried about the wind messing up the audio when they hold these sessions outdoors, but the video feed was fine. Now they have the feed direct in Washington, they hardly need me.’

Bruno’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘You mean that what I just said has already been heard in Washington? Including that part when I said I liked him?’

‘And Harvard, and New York, Raleigh, Houston and Minneapolis. We’ve lined up some of the best psychologists in the States to monitor these hearings and give us their own reports. I don’t think the West Coast is awake yet but I know there’s someone from Seattle on the monitoring team. And others in the Justice Department, who’ll make their own report on Sami’s likely legal status.’

‘I had no idea … all this set in train for little Sami.’

‘He’s going to be the most famous case of autism on the planet, and probably the most studied. The newspapers back home are suddenly full of medical experts and psychologists explaining what it is and how little we understand it. The TV footage has really helped changed the mood. He’s Sami now, not the Engineer.’

‘Probably because it’s shorter for the newspaper headlines,’ Bruno said.

‘Wait till the next little drama hits: a tribunal member being
arrested for rape,’ she went on, a triumphant glint in her eye. ‘I had a call from Annette. She’s spoken to one of the other medical students who got the Deutz treatment. That’s two cases as well as Fabiola. The guy is toast.’

She used the French term
pain grillé
, and Bruno shook his head, not understanding the expression.

‘It means he’s done, he’s finished, his goose is cooked.’

Bruno grinned. He loved to hear these English idioms translated directly into French, reminding him how wonderfully inventive and quirky languages could be. And ‘his goose is cooked’ was one any good Périgourdin would relish.

‘Then the essential question is likely to be about the timing,’ Bruno suggested. ‘The
Procureur
has to sign off on it first, and I imagine he’ll need to talk to Paris. They won’t want an arrest to overshadow the tribunal process, so they’ll probably wait until the tribunal report is complete.’

‘They’re supposed to end the hearings today and produce their report tomorrow. The Brigadier expects it will be unanimous, but who knows. One thing worries me: who’d respect a tribunal verdict once Deutz has been disgraced?’

Bruno nodded; he hadn’t thought of that. Either way would be a mess. He was glad it wasn’t his decision.

‘I just hope the trial isn’t too much of an ordeal for Fabiola,’ he said.

‘A lot less of an ordeal than she’d face in the States, with a clever defence lawyer asking her about her every sexual experience. That’s our adversarial system. The defence usually tries to turn the woman into a slut in front of the jury by alleging the wicked woman led the poor helpless guy along. There are times I prefer justice your French way.’

Bruno remembered something he’d read, he thought in one of Montaigne’s essays, that one of the most convincing reasons to believe in a supreme being was that it held out the prospect that a perfect justice could exist, however impossible it might be for flawed humans to achieve it. He was just trying to recall the exact quote when he heard footsteps on the stairs and the Brigadier arrived, leading the two Imams and smiling broadly, a triumphant gleam in his eye.

‘They have agreed to tell the tribunal what they know of Sami’s time at the mosque,’ the Brigadier explained, and led them up the last set of stairs to the balcony, the older Imam on Ghlamallah’s arm.

‘That’s good,’ Nancy said when they were out of earshot. ‘It means we’ll get Ghlamallah’s voice on tape. We’ve got some special equipment that washes out all the voice-modifiers you can buy. There’s a lot of queries about some of the voices on the phone taps and it would be useful to have something on him.’

‘Whatever happened to those pixels in the photos on his smartphone?’ Bruno asked, remembering Nancy had said the NSA had software that could scan them for hidden messages.

‘They were clean,’ she said, shrugging. ‘But I’m not surprised. The jihadis have known we had that capacity for some time. But they don’t know we’re now reading their Mozart playlists.’ She checked her watch. ‘This is an unscheduled hearing. All the others are done. I was hoping it would be all wrapped up tonight and we’d have the final report tomorrow. The Brigadier said he’ll stay up all night writing it.’

‘And then you go back to Paris?’ Bruno asked, trying to keep his voice level. He knew he’d remember her and those sudden
moments when he had felt the jolt of attraction pass between them. Suddenly his mouth was dry again.

‘Probably straight to Washington, a lot of meetings as we draft the three options.’ She was looking into his eyes as if searching for something.

‘Three options? You know already?’ They were at least a metre apart but he felt she was much closer than that. There was a strange disconnect between the words they were exchanging and another quite different and deeper communication that seemed to be taking place.

‘It’s the way things are done in Washington.’ Nancy’s voice sounded faint. She closed her eyes, half-turned and took a deep breath. Whatever sudden charge had begun to flow again between them seemed to fade. Bruno supposed he ought to be grateful. She was leaving within a day or so and he’d never see her again.

‘Some president, I think it was Nixon, wanted every decision that came up to him to be on one sheet of paper with no more than three options.’ Now her voice was normal again, crisp and efficient, with a slight tone of mockery, as if she knew there was more to life than the politics of Sami.

‘So for Sami the options have been pretty clear from the start,’ she said, still looking away from him up the staircase. ‘One, we demand extradition and trial in the United States. Two, we demand a trial and punishment but leave the jurisdiction to France. Three, we accept a tribunal verdict that he’s not fit to stand trial and treat him as a cooperative witness who stays in protective and medical custody. The Brigadier and I have talked about it, we agree, and we’re going to do all we can to get the most sensible decision, option three.’

‘It sounds as though whoever drafted those options knew that one and two were hardly possible, politically. They wanted option three all along.’

‘Exactly.’ She turned back to face him, but without that intensity that had so stirred him a moment earlier. ‘That’s how bureaucracies work, how our political masters want us to work, reshaping the complexities of the world into three clear choices.’

She laughed, a warm sound, almost a chuckle that seemed to embrace him in a complicity of two professionals trying to make sense of a crazed world. ‘So here we are, two servants of our separate states, conspiring to bring about the only rational outcome while standing on the landing of a stone staircase in a medieval castle and wondering about a bunch of jihadi nuts on the loose and trying to kill us and everyone in here.’

Bruno said nothing, wanting to extend this moment, to remember her as she looked now. The time stretched and she looked away again.

‘We can’t stay here. What are you planning on doing now?’ she asked.

He closed his eyes and took a breath. It was over. He straightened his back and brought himself back to his duty. ‘I’m off to track down a little old Jewish lady, Kaufman’s grandma. The Brigadier is worried that she might be at risk, now the news of her bequest has gone public.’

‘Oh, Arab terrorism, Jewish money, I think I get it,’ she said. ‘And that car certainly stands out a mile. Have you seen the
Sud Ouest
website?’

She whipped out her smartphone and called up Delaron’s news story with the image of Maya waving cheerfully as she
stepped into her Rolls. A second photo below showed Bruno, the Mayor and Maya coming out from the
collège
.

Bruno hadn’t seen it and he was startled. The job of protecting Maya had suddenly grown urgent. And personal too: if the men who’d attacked him saw his photo, he reflected, they might think they were getting two targets rather than one.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked, but he was already calling Kaufman. Nancy turned away with a natural courtesy, pretending to be checking emails, giving him space. Bruno explained briefly, listened, agreed to meet and rang off.

‘They’re in Bergerac, sightseeing with the Rolls-Royce. I’ll drive there now to meet them and let them use my Land Rover. I’ll bring the Rolls back and put it in a friend’s barn.’

‘I should come, too. There has to be a woman in the back to replace Maya. Besides, I’ve always wanted to be driven in a Roller.’

Bruno shook his head. ‘We’re not playing bait. We just have to get that damn magnet of a car off the street.’

‘We’ll be bait whether we like it or not. We’re armed and we know what we’re doing. We’ll tell the Brigadier and he’ll arrange back-up. We have a chopper and squad of troops on call. How long is the drive?’

‘From Bergerac back here, thirty, forty minutes, maybe less.’

‘I’ll go see the Brigadier. You organize the weapons and flak vests. I’ve got my Glock but I want an M-16 or something like it. If we’re ambushed, some grenades would be useful, maybe some smoke.’

Bruno stared at her in disbelief but she was already heading up the stairs. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Look, this is Périgord, civilian country. We don’t go round gunned up like that.’

‘Bruno, you’re not a fool. You know how these jihadists will be armed. And how else are we sure to bring them out? They aren’t going to try hitting this place, it’s a fortress. We’ve got the sniper zones covered. They’ll be desperate to hit something, anything, and they won’t be able to resist an Israeli million-airess in an utterly recognizable car.’

Bruno could think of nothing he could say that wouldn’t sound ridiculous, but had to say something.

‘You’re a diplomat,’ he ventured.

‘I’m a law enforcement officer and these people are terrorist criminals and enemies of my country,’ she snapped. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Lead on,’ he conceded, ‘but we’ll both go to see the Brigadier. We can’t do this without authorization and only he can fix the support.’

The more he thought of it, the more inevitable the idea seemed. Maya would be at risk. Her car would be unmistakable. He had to get to Bergerac and arrange an alternative car for her. It was reasonable to take precautions, which should include helicopter reinforcements on stand-by. He found himself rehearsing the arguments he’d present to the Brigadier.

But there was no need. The Brigadier seized on the plan even before Nancy had finished explaining. ‘A damn sight better idea than twiddling our thumbs here and waiting for them to come to us,’ he said, and began organizing the troops for the helicopter, the communications and an ambulance.

The map was spread open on the hood of Bruno’s Land Rover. Nancy and the Brigadier stood to his left and the young para-troop lieutenant and his three-man team to his right. Bruno said, ‘We have to think like them, to know only what they know.’

Bruno explained that the jihadists knew from the media that Sami was in the château and probably out of their reach so long as he remained there. Short of artillery, the château should be deemed safe. They also knew that Bruno was based in St Denis and that Maya Halévy with her very identifiable car had been with him there that morning. They knew she was extremely rich, so they would assume she would be staying at the most luxurious hotel in the region. Without question, that meant the Vieux Logis in Trémolat. They would be wrong, she was staying at Pamela’s but the jihadis weren’t to know that. They would focus on the Rolls-Royce and Trémolat.

The lieutenant cleared his throat. ‘My men have been listening to the local radio. They’ve got a reporter following this woman and her car around like she’s a film star and sending in regular bulletins. She was in Mouleydier early this afternoon, apparently she was there in the war when it was destroyed. Now she’s in Bergerac. She went to the Protestant temple, another place she remembered.’

‘Should we call the radio station and tell them to stop?’ the lieutenant went on. ‘They don’t know it but they’re putting her life in danger.’

He took out his phone and called Philippe Delaron.

‘Philippe, it’s Bruno. You owe me a lot of favours already, but here’s a big one. You’re in Bergerac with Maya now. You know where she’s heading? No? She’s having dinner at the Vieux Logis. Yes, I’m told she’s staying there, hardly a surprise. It’s the best place around. Anyway, if you want an interview, Trémolat is the place to be. You should be able to get a word with her on the doorstep.’

He closed his phone. ‘Let’s work on the assumption that they’re listening to the radio. They’ll have at least one car, maybe two or even three. They have one good sniper rifle and I don’t know what else. Do we have any intel on their available weapons?’ he asked the Brigadier.

‘According to Rafiq, in the mosque they had small arms, grenades, explosives, a couple of Minimi machine guns with 200-round belts and some RPGs. That was all. We have no idea what they took with them when they left the mosque, but we’d better assume they brought all the weapons they could.’

Bruno pursed his lips. Rocket-propelled grenades were as good as light artillery at close quarters. And a Minimi could spew out a full belt in just over ten seconds, laying down a terrifying amount of fire.