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“Interesting.”
“That’s your response?” Cooke asked, making no attempt to hide his frustration. “That is a very serious accusation. You’re not going to deny it?”
Stansfield studied Cooke for a long moment. He sensed something that he didn’t like. Cooke was fishing, and he got the specific feeling that Wilson had put him up to it. With the director’s office open down the hall, who knew what delusions of grandeur were floating through people’s heads these days. Cooke did not have the analytical abilities to run Langley, but he could certainly see Wilson waving the job in front of his face to get him to do his bidding. “Paul, you should remind the secretary that we’re all on the same team, and he should probably think twice before he starts throwing around wild accusations that could seriously harm this country and our foreign policy.”
“So you had nothing to do with what happened the other night?”
Cooke might not have known it at the time, but Stansfield could see that a line had been drawn. Any Langley man who was dumb enough to be a messenger for the State Department was dangerous. Stansfield looked Cooke straight in the eyes and said, “I had nothing to do with it. Are you satisfied?”
Cooke accepted the answer even though he knew it was a lie. “Well.” He slapped his knees and stood. “I’m heading over to Paris in the morning. See if I can help smooth things over.”
“What exactly do you have to smooth over?”
“That might be the wrong choice of words. I want to reassure our allies that we had nothing to do with this.” Cooke started for the door and when he reached it, he looked back to Stansfield and said, “You’re more than welcome to join me if you’d like.”
Stansfield took the invitation with a reasonable nod. “I’ll think about it. I’d have to move a few things around, but it might be worth the trip. It’s been a while since I paid a visit to our friends at the DGSE.”
“Good.” Cooke left the office, closing the door behind him, a satisfied grin on his face.
Stansfield sat motionless for a minute or so, running the various possibilities through his head. Any way he looked at it, he didn’t like what he sensed. The old spy’s strength was his ability to take facts, plug in a person’s motivation, and predict what he was after. Cooke was up to something. Stansfield considered the possibility that he had underestimated the man. He very quickly concluded that there was a good possibility that he had. Frowning, he decided that he would have to move quickly to deal with the situation. He ran down a list of trusted operatives he could call on. There were no files for these men; all of them were retired yet still very useful. Stansfield decided on an asset and then asked himself if he should have a talk with Marvin Land. Stansfield and Land had a great deal of professional respect for each other, as they had fought side by side against the Soviets. He wondered if Cooke had already tried to play Land. That would be an interesting yet very stupid move.
CHAPTER 22
PARIS, FRANCE
IT was midafternoon on Sunday and the restaurant at the Hotel Balzac was crowded. The place was always swarming, as it was ideally located for tourists, diplomats, and high-society shoppers. There were a handful of hotels in Paris that catered to the ultra-rich, and this was one of them. The head maître d’was on Fournier’s payroll, as were a few of the top waiters. For special occasions, Fournier was not opposed to putting his own people in the uniforms of restaurant employees so they could eavesdrop on certain influential diners. Not today, however. The head of the DGSE’s Action Division had ordered his men to make sure the corner table and the surrounding area were swept for listening devices. One of his men was standing five feet from them, blocking them from the rest of the restaurant. He was trained to look for directional listening devices, and he would subtly shift his position by an inch or two every half minute to block any would-be listener from having a direct line of sight to his boss.
Fournier had a hefty expense account for this exact reason. He needed to rub shoulders with the right people, and with rare exceptions, those people had expensive tastes. Switzerland was known for banking, but Paris was where international businessmen came to get deals done. Fournier had no problem meeting Max Vega in public. In fact, it was good for him to legitimize their dealings. Industrial espionage was a big part of Fournier’s job, and any intel he could get on foreign companies that were conducting business in France or competing against French companies abroad was a top priority.
Vega sat on the board of one of Spain’s top telecommunications companies. He was considered a rising star in the burgeoning market of mobile phones. Vega was a bit of a contradiction. His mother was Spanish and his father a wealthy Saudi prince. His Spanish mother didn’t take too kindly to her royal husband taking a second wife. She hung around for nearly a year, and then when he married wife number three, a seventeen-year-old Yemeni, her Spanish pride could take no more. She left him and returned to Madrid. She took her son Omar with her, and legally changed his name to Max Vega after her father, who had been against her marriage to the Saudi in the first place. Two years later, at the age of ten, Max was shipped off to a boarding school in Switzerland and then at eighteen to the London School of Economics. After that he blazed a trail through three investment houses and a mergers and acquisitions firm, and all the while he performed brilliantly and accrued a nice tidy sum for his talents.
Fournier only half listened to Vega talking on his mobile phone. His office had tried to ascertain the thirty-eight-year-old’s net worth, but it had proven difficult. He was easily worth twenty million on his own, but Fournier’s top financial analyst thought that he was receiving funds from his father, who had well-known radical leanings. Twenty million was a nice number
, but Vega lived way beyond that. The theory was that while Vega was talented and relatively well off, it was his father who had bought his seat on Telefonica’s board.
Fournier could only guess at what had driven Vega to reconnect with his Saudi father. Curiosity was undoubtedly a part of it, and he was sure the psychiatrists at DGSE, one a devotee of Carl Jung and the other of Sigmund Freud, could go on for hours telling him how it had something to do with his collective unconscious or his unfulfilled ego and his insecure id and some oral fixation he’d had as a child. All of it bored Fournier. He was less concerned with how people became who they were than simply who they were. He wasn’t in the business of changing people. He was in the business of getting valuable information from them, and bending them to the use of the Republic.
These radical Islamists were all mentally unstable as far as Fournier was concerned. What he was still trying to figure out was where Vega came down on the religion side of this mess, and in general what he was after. He appeared to be the classic smooth European businessman, but Fournier had real fears that underneath his five-thousand-dollar Savile Row suit lurked a fundamentalist who might bite him in the ass. Fournier didn’t like not knowing. He was the one who deceived, stacked the deck, and got things to work out in his favor. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Vega was manipulating him. This deal that Vega had offered him was going to blow up in his face if he didn’t get it under control quickly, and he didn’t like that feeling one bit.
These were the thoughts that were circulating through Fournier’s brain as he took a sip from his second glass of Syrah and looked into Vega’s oily black eyes. It was easy to like Vega when you compared him to the two imbeciles, Rafique and Samir. It still irritated Fournier that Samir had fucked things up so badly. He had given the fools everything they asked for, and Tarek, that greedy idiot, had been the perfect bait. As far as the Directorate was concerned, Fournier would be killing two birds with one stone. He would get rid of Tarek, and he would also receive assurances from these radicals that they would keep their suicide bombers out of France. His superiors would understand his motives and appreciate his initiative. As for the cash on the side, Fournier had already moved it from one bank in Switzerland to another. It would be untraceable, and unlike other intelligence agencies the DGSE wasn’t too hung up about its people padding their retirement accounts. It was considered the wise thing to do. As long as the Republic’s best interests were kept at the forefront, it was a beneficial situation for all.
As far as this assassin was concerned, Fournier was fairly ambivalent. He’d seen the list of men that he’d killed, and not a one of them would be missed by those who were allied against terrorism. But while Fournier had no love for Islamists, his number-one job was to keep France secure from the reprisals of the zealots. That meant protecting France both at home and abroad. If Vega and his people wanted this killer dead, it was of no concern to France. But he wasn’t dead. It had all failed, and in a spectacular fashion. Fournier had worked his contacts, found out that the Libyan oil minister was on the list, and helped them set the trap. At first Fournier had been hit with a wave of panic over the news that this assassin had killed not only Tarek but four of Samir’s men as well. He immediately assumed the assassin was that good, but with another day came more perspective. Samir was an idiot. That much was undeniable, which meant that maybe this assassin wasn’t quite so talented.
Fournier took a sip of wine and wondered for a moment where the assassin might be. The man had almost certainly fled France. Fournier was confident that his role in the hotel massacre would never see the light of day, but there were a few loose ends to tie up, and as soon as Vega got off his phone Fournier would jam his terms down the younger man’s throat. And then he would restructure their deal.
Vega finally snapped his phone shut and laid it on the table. “I am sorry, but that was a very important call.”
Fournier swirled the red wine around in his glass and then said, “Max, I have enjoyed working with you.”
“And I with you as well.” Vega smiled and held up his glass of Perrier.
The congenial expression melted from Fournier’s face. “I have, however, not enjoyed working with your two associates.”
Vega smiled as if that was a minor thing. “They are a little rough around the edges.”
“That is an understatement.” Fournier set his glass down and asked, “Are they up in your suite right now?”
Vega got the feeling that the Frenchman already knew the answer to his question, but Vega was not so ready to concede the point. “I’m not at liberty to say.”
