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“Great,” I said, watching the Dog leave the cluttered living area and orbit into a back hallway.
Shaking his head, Louis hurried from the kitchen, glanced at me in deep distress, and said, “The lawyers, Jack. They say to watch the news. Life is getting worse for us and for Farad.”
Before I could reply, he snatched the remote off a coffee table.
I told Justine I had to go, and hung up in time to see the flat-screen on the wall blink and then jump to a Parisian street scene I recognized immediately.
“That’s Barbès,” I said. “The mosque. FEZ Couriers.”
“And Al-Jumaa tailors,” Louis said as the camera angle shifted to show officers wearing bulletproof vests and carrying MAT-49s as they led the tailor out of his shop in handcuffs.
Other anti-terrorists stood guard at the doors of the mosque and the courier service. A perimeter had been formed, blocking off a growing crowd of onlookers that burst into angry shouts when the police brought out Firmus Massi in cuffs. The owner of FEZ Couriers looked shaken and bewildered.
“Killers!” some began to chant. “Assassins!”
I recognized one of the protesters as that kid who’d chased the robed woman down the sidewalk, trying to get her picture. He still had the camera hanging around his neck, and shook his fist at the camera, yelling, “These immigrant AB-16 bastards want to destroy France, but France will destroy them!”
The mob’s fury built when the feed cut to the mosque doors, where anti-terrorists were hauling out Imam Ibrahim Al-Moustapha, who held his head high despite the wrist restraints and the hysterical crying of his wife and three children behind him.
Immigrants in the crowd began to shout, protesting the arrest.
“They think Farad’s involved because that’s his mosque,” I said. “And he knows that guy Massi, right?”
Louis nodded, transfixed by the imam, who looked right into the camera as he went past it, saying forcefully, “We are innocent. We have nothing to do with AB-16 or these killings. France is our home. We would never—”
The anti-terrorists pushed the imam into the back of a black van along with the head of the courier service and the tailor. The doors slammed shut and the van drove off.
Several men wearing FEZ jackets appeared, shouting angrily in French.
“I’m not getting what they’re saying,” I said.
Louis replied, “They say that the imam is a man of peace, and that this is a travesty of justice and a mockery of France’s tolerance. They say Massi was targeted because he’s a Muslim immigrant who has built a big business during the economic crisis, and the old French hate him for it. They don’t agree with the AB-16 killings, but they understand the reasons.”
On-screen, a bottle sailed through the air. It struck one of the men on the side of the head, and he staggered, bleeding. A piece of brick followed. Within moments the street all around the reporter erupted into chaos and fighting before the feed cut and the screen went to black for several seconds. Then it jumped to a pair of rattled French news announcers apologizing for the break in coverage.
Louis looked over at me gravely.
“I fear we are entering a dark and dangerous time in Paris,” Louis said. “We may be seeing the end of Private in France, and perhaps Europe.”
My stomach plummeted. This sort of thing could easily snowball, destroy the reputation of an investigative firm I had nurtured over years.
“Unless Farad and the imam are telling the truth,” I said.
“But if they’re not?”
Before I could answer, the television feed cut to, of all people, Laurent Alexandre, who was on the sidewalk across from Millie Fleurs’s shop, fighting back tears as he publicly mourned her death and denounced AB-16.
“French culture is not going anywhere,” Alexandre vowed. “Paris is the number one tourist destination in the world because we are so fierce about our culture. Millie was fiercely passionate about Paris and France, and I know she would want us to fight for it, to show her killers that her spirit and our culture go on. I have spoken with several of Millie’s friends, and instead of a funeral or memorial, we are going to put on a celebration of her life, a runway show in her honor. We’re hoping it will be televised to the nation.”
Before I could begin to wrap my fatigued brain around that, the Dog orbited back into the room.
“Louis,” he said before someone knocked sharply at the apartment door.
The hacker moved straight down the short hallway and looked through the peephole. Still cradling the iPad and the memory stick, he started to unlock the dead bolts.
“Who is it?” Louis asked.
“Maria,” he said.
