Tom Clancy Duty and Honor (28 page)

Jack and Effrem had discussed this. They’d decided to lay everything out for René and hope they were bringing something valuable to the table.

Jack said, “Effrem tells you his story, then I tell you mine.”

“And if I do not want to share my own?”

Jack answered with a little steel in his voice: “Then that’s on you. Get in your van and leave, but stay out of our way. Effrem, tell him.”

Effrem took Allemand through his story, starting with Fabrice the café owner in Abidjan, then his tailing Eric Schrader after Allemand’s meeting with Madeline in the Parc de la Feyssine, then finally his encounter with Jack and Stephan Möller at the nature preserve.

“That was you in the Parc de la Feyssine?” asked Allemand. “I thought I might have picked up a tail, but after I left it was gone. Madeline brought you to our meeting? Truly?”

“She’s worried about you. She’s trying to help.”

Allemand frowned; it was almost a snarl. “I shouldn’t have called her. Sentimentality is weakness. So. You followed Schrader to Virginia, then found this Möller person . . .”

Jack asked, “You’ve never heard the name?” When Allemand shook his head, Jack showed him a screen capture
from the West Haven gas station’s surveillance camera. “He’s since lost his beard.”

“Doesn’t look familiar. You think he’s with Rostock?”

“We have no evidence of a connection—to Möller or Schrader. Do you?”

“Nothing that would suffice in court.”

This statement surprised Jack. Was Allemand merely using a colloquialism, or did he really believe this situation could be resolved on the white side of the law?

“Please go on,” Allemand said. “After the nature preserve . . .”

Jack continued the story, but first backtracked to the attack at the Supermercado before recounting their hunt for Möller, his escape at the Vermont airstrip, their foray into Munich, then their meeting at the villa.

Effrem asked Allemand, “You were tailing us this morning. How did you know we’d be here tonight?”

“Like you, I had to leave Munich in a hurry. The only other trail I could follow was the same one that brought you here: Alexander Bossard and Schrader. I’ve been here for a week. I set up real-time game cameras in the trees across from the villa, hoping either Bossard or someone else would show up. He’s impossible to get to at his office or his apartment in the city. I saw you pass by the villa a few times, got curious, and drove down here. I picked you up on your way back to Zurich. Jack, why would Jürgen Rostock want you dead?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“Effrem has a theory about you,” Jack said. “He thinks you were false-flagged. That’s when a—”

“I know what it is. What makes you think that, Effrem?”

“It’s what you said to Madeline—‘He isn’t who he claims to be.’”

Allemand shook his head, scratched furiously at his arm, then replied, “I don’t recall saying that.”

“Not good enough,” Jack replied. He shoved the newspaper toward Allemand. “Time for you to go.”

“Pardon me?”

“We’ve been straight with you. If you’re not going to reciprocate, we’ve got no use for you. In fact, from what I can tell, you’re more of a liability than an asset.” Jack intended this last comment to sting, and the change in Allemand’s eyes told him it’d worked. “We’ll be better off without you.”

Allemand said nothing for several seconds. “It’s difficult, you must realize. I don’t have a home, Madeline is the only person from my former life that knows I’m alive, and a good portion of my fellow Frenchmen think I died either a deserter or a traitor and therefore got what I deserved. Jürgen Rostock is a powerful man. I’ve been walking on a razor’s edge since Abidjan. I feel like I’m sometimes in a dream, other times not. And now, to find out my Madeline confided in a . . . reporter. Is it hard to see why trust is hard for me?”

“I get it, I do,” Jack replied. “But here’s what I know, René: Whatever your connection is to Rostock, it’s a miracle you’re still alive. I don’t think you’ll last out here on your own much longer. You’ve got to trust somebody sometime. Whether that’s us, only you can decide.”

Allemand, who’d been staring at his hands, clasping and unclasping them while Jack was talking, now looked up. He held Jack’s gaze for a long five seconds; Allemand’s eyes were twitching slightly. He said, “What do you want to
know?”

WÄDENSWIL, SWITZERLAND

L
et’s go back to the start,” Jack replied. “What happened in Abidjan?”

“The night they took me I was going to meet a girl, a Red Cross worker from Strasbourg. We met when her orientation group came to get some basic first-aid training before going into the field.”

“What’s her name?” Effrem asked.

“Uh . . .” Allemand thought for moment. “Janine Pelletier. No, Périer, that’s it.

“Do you have a picture of her?” Jack asked.

“Perhaps in my OneDrive account . . .” René got out his phone, tapped a few keys, then handed it to Jack.

He studied the photo and returned the phone to René. “Go on,” he said.

“Not long after I got there, a van pulled up. Five men in balaclavas poured out, swarmed me, put a hood over my head, and shoved me into the van. It happened so fast . . .” Allemand shook his head. “I barely put up a struggle, I was so shocked. After that, it was all something of a blur. We drove for hours, I don’t know in which direction, but it was almost dawn when the van stopped. I was put in a basement, I think, in a small brick room with no windows.”

Effrem asked, “Did anyone speak to you, ask you anything?”

“No, and that made it all the worse. No one said a word, not from the time I was taken to the day I got free. Once a day, every day, someone would come into the room wearing the same balaclava, give me food and water and change my waste bucket, then leave. A couple times a day two or three of them would come in, beat me and kick me until I passed out. Every few days another one would come in, put a gun to my head and pull the trigger, but the gun was always empty. Several times they had me stand on a chair with my head in a noose, and they would simply watch me. For hours. There were other . . . things, too, but I can’t . . .” Allemand’s words trailed off.

“How did you get free?”

“I was rescued. One night, very late, I heard two explosions. I recognized them as flash-bangs—you know, stun grenades—and then there was a lot of automatic weapons
fire. About ten minutes after it started, the door to my cell opened and a pair of men in camouflage came in. They told me they’d come to rescue me. They took me somewhere by vehicle, maybe Abidjan, but I can’t be sure. It was a private home, some kind of compound. Waiting for me were a doctor and a nurse. I had broken bones, torn ligaments and muscles, contusions on my liver and spleen. Even with the medication, the pain was indescribable. A few days later Jürgen Rostock showed up. It was his men who rescued me, he told me.

“From there we moved around a lot. Rostock told me my life was in danger, that people were hunting for me, that it had something to do with my father and the Army Defense Staff. I never quite understood it. I was fuzzy, you know, from the drugs, but eventually, after about six weeks, Rostock said they’d eliminated the threat.”

“Which was what?” asked Effrem.

Allemand shook his head. “I’m not sure. I’m sorry, it’s, uh . . .”

“That’s okay,” Jack said.

Was René a junkie? he wondered, René’s demeanor suggested a narcotic addiction, perhaps to oxycodone. His injuries certainly warranted such a prescription.

Pieces began falling into place for Jack: What kind of group, terrorist or otherwise, kidnaps a soldier—a soldier from a famous family, no less—but claims no credit for it and asks for no ransom? His captors had tortured him, but
had neither asked him questions nor tried to coerce him into some trumped-up, inflammatory confession.

And what about after his rescue? Rostock had made no effort to return René to his loved ones. And then there was the constant moving about, the vague, looming threats to René’s life, the insinuations about his father. And through all of this, Jürgen Rostock and his men were the only ones looking out for him, the only ones who could keep the boogeymen at bay.

Seeing it now with fresh eyes, Jack recognized René Allemand’s odyssey for what it was: an elaborately choreographed brainwashing program. But to what end? To answer that question, Jack had to first determine whether René understood the true nature of what’d happened to him. There was a larger worry as well: How reliable was he at all? He’d been kidnapped, that much was fact, but they had only his account of what happened after he was thrown into that van in Abidjan.

“What happened next?” asked Jack.

René replied with a proud grin, “Rostock offered me a job.”

Effrem leaned forward. “What? What do you mean?”

“A job in his company. He offered me a position as a field officer. I’d heard of RSG and knew of its reputation, but I’d always assumed my career would be in the French Army.
What happened in Abidjan and then what Jürgen and I talked about made me reconsider. I took the job.”

“And you never thought to contact your father or the Army to let them know you were alive? Why, for God’s sake?”

“At first, it was at Rostock’s suggestion. I was going to be doing undercover work, he said, and the training and transition were going to be intense. Once I was past that, Rostock was going to help me get my old life back. Later, well, I’m not sure why.”

Effrem’s mouth was hanging open. He said, “Are you suggesting you participated in faking your own death to join RSG? That you were going to be part of some secret . . . what, exactly? What was Rostock asking you to do?”

Allemand stared vacantly at Effrem, his face a mask of frustration and confusion. Clearly he wanted to, and should have been able to, answer Effrem’s question, but there was a disconnect somewhere in Allemand’s brain, related either to his addiction or to his treatment at the hands of Rostock, or a combination of the two.

Effrem said to Jack, “Christ Almighty, this guy is out there—”

Jack cut him off. “We’re just having trouble following this, René.”

“Yes. Of course. These are not simple issues we’re
dealing with. The world, I mean. We’re on the brink of a precipice.” Again Allemand’s words trailed off, as though he’d lost his place in a script.

Jack felt a wave of sympathy for René, but it was tainted by a gut punch of fear. He’d already felt he and Effrem had dropped into the rabbit hole. Sitting across from René, Jack now felt like he’d met the Mad Hatter. Or the White Rabbit. None of this was René’s fault, of course, but Jack now realized they’d joined forces with a highly trained soldier who not only had lost touch with reality, but was probably suffering from a narcotics addiction and PTSD as well.

Abruptly, René stood up. “I need the restroom.”

“Down that hall and left,” Jack replied.

Allemand walked away.

Effrem leaned across the table at Jack and rasped, “The man is insane, Jack.”

“Hold on—”

“No! I’ve spent a long time on this story, maxed out my credit cards, and almost gotten myself killed chasing a lunatic. We’ve got to get out of here. I’m done, Jack. Let’s go.” Effrem moved to stand up.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Jack snapped. “Sit down. You’re not seeing it, are you?”

“What?”

“René was kidnapped and he was held and he was
rescued, but it’s all Rostock.” Jack spent the next two minutes explaining his theory until slowly Effrem’s expression softened.

“Jack, brainwashing? That’s
Manchurian Candidate
stuff. Science fiction.”

“You’d be surprised. I think what happened to René is an extreme form of operant conditioning combined with drug therapy. Negative reinforcement, isolation, threat of extinction, desocialization, a skewed version of Stockholm syndrome—it’s all there. It’s what he went through, from the time he was kidnapped until Rostock offered him a job.”

“If that’s the case, why is he on the run from Rostock?”

“I think he knows something’s not right about all this, but he can’t pin it down. It’s like trying to grab a fistful of water. One minute he’s suspicious of Rostock, the next praising him. Allemand either saw or heard something that spooked him—something that contradicted his conditioning—so he bolted.”

“Let’s just assume you’re right. Why him? Aside from his famous name, right now he’s just another soldier. Why would Rostock go to all this trouble?”

“I don’t think it’s got anything to do with René. This is about his father, Marshal Allemand.”

“In what way?”

“I don’t know yet. But as a coercion technique, what
Rostock’s done is brilliant. If you kidnap a child your leverage lasts only as long as you have control of that child. Same with threatening the child’s life. But what happens when you take the child’s mind and turn it against the parent?”

“A puppet,” Effrem replied.

“A puppet whose narrative and fate you control,” Jack added. “René is either a heroic French soldier who survived a horrendous experience, or he’s a traitor to his country. To someone like Marshal Allemand, that’s a powerful lever.”