32
Paris is a good town to spot a tail. Capitalize on the plethora of channels — the quiet one-way streets, the narrow bridges, the maze of Métro corridors — and your surveillant has little choice but to fall in step behind you. So Canning told himself as he slid on eyeglasses designed specifically for the occasion. His light disguise also included an absurdly expensive charcoal virgin-wool business suit just like those worn by the bankers comprising much of the male population in Paris’s affluent and old-line sixteenth arrondissement. He smiled at the notion that, if this morning’s meeting went as he expected, he would never again need to give consideration to the price of a suit — or the price of anything.
Heaving open a wrought-iron door, he stepped out of the century-old apartment building whose fourth floor served as a safe house. A buttery dawn made the rue de Passy evoke an Impressionist painting, although the rumbling of early traffic could be heard. The street itself was quiet and still; a fluttering moth would have stood out against the contiguous limestone façades. Canning didn’t put it past surveillants to deploy drones smaller than a gnat, for which reason he’d placed sensors among the lilies in the fourth-floor window box. Should the devices pick up transmissions in the 900 MHz to 2.52 GHz range, his cell phone would vibrate three times.
The phone remained still. Effectively a green light.
To be on the safe side, he planned to duck into several buildings and underground passages en route to the meeting. Also he would change clothes, twice. Turning onto rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, he sensed nothing amiss. No one else was out. As he rounded the corner onto boulevard Raspail, the delicious aroma of pains aux raisins surrounded him. Within the little boulangerie, preparations were under way as usual.
He hurried down a stairwell, then toward the Métro station via a humid ceramic tunnel that amplified his footfalls. With a pair of midpoint exits and a three-pronged fork at the far end, the tunnel was a textbook surveillance detection route. It, too, was deserted. Until two men followed Canning down the stairs, one about five seconds before the other, both in charcoal suits just like his. Probably both early-bird bankers. At least one could be a spook, though. It was difficult to tell, but not impossible; even the best surveillants could be manipulated into revealing their cards.
At the end of the tunnel, Canning turned onto a sparsely populated platform just as a Porte de Clignancourt — bound 4 train hissed to a stop. No one disembarked. As both banker types followed him aboard the third of five cars, the doors snapped shut and the metro launched into a dark tunnel. There were three other passengers: another suit, a nurse, and a party girl for whom it was still last night. Canning took mental pictures of each; he would recognize them if they reappeared along his route this morning. The Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur — France’s FBI — would put multiple tails on him, as many as fifty, if they had any idea what he was up to. And CIA surveillance would have no “reruns.” Langley would think nothing of dispatching a team of 100.
A few minutes later, the metro rolled into the Saint-Germain-des-Prés station. Canning rose slowly, giving a surveillant ample time to get up too. Stepping out of the car and onto the platform, he regarded the mirrored film glued inside his tortoiseshell frames, providing a rear view. He searched for as little as a passenger muttering to himself — i.e., into a hidden microphone. No lips moved. No fingers tapped at keys or dug in their pockets for phones. No one, for all intents and purposes, did anything.
He transferred to the line terminating at Gare d’Austerlitz, one of the city’s six major railroad stations. There he climbed up to the street, walking against traffic on the pedestrian lane of the pont d’Austerlitz, a bridge over the Seine supported by a series of five stone arches. Halfway across, he halted abruptly, as if taken with the view, the river transformed to a mosaic by the early morning sun. This was a timing stop, to see if anyone’s pace altered along with his. Again, he saw nothing — or, as he thought of nothing in this case: an idyllic view.
It was a five-minute walk to the meeting place, the Gare de Lyon, northern terminus of the Marseille railway. Canning spent an hour, taking turns at random, observing who reacted and who didn’t, finding nothing out of the ordinary. Finally a one-way street brought the Gare de Lyon’s celebrated clock tower into view. Canning chose not to enter the train station through the front doors where the crush of early commuters might obscure a dozen tails. Instead he clambered down the stairs to the adjoining Métro stop before riding an escalator up and into the station’s palatial beaux arts lobby. Any remotely competent team would post someone at a secondary entrance like this. Canning’s countersurveillance was impeded for a moment by shafts of sunlight from the latticed ceiling. He was forced to squint. Bad luck.
But he’d taken bad luck into his planning. He climbed aboard a TGV. The high-speed train thrummed its readiness to cover the 250 miles to Lyon in less than two hours. Canning strolled down the narrow aisle, passing thirty-three seated teenage girls, all in kelly green tracksuits. Nine heads turned. Another time he’d be glad he still had it. Now he was just glad no one was in the aisle behind him.
At the other end of the car, he took the stairs back down to the platform and made his way to a brasserie at the back of the lobby. His eye went past the crowd to a high-backed booth in the far corner that offered the advantage of a view of the entire place. A heavyset middle-aged man in a three-piece camel hair suit sat there, dissecting a big breakfast. His chin was a small island in a sea of tan flesh, but he had kind blue eyes and a pleasant smile. In the latest French fashion, his dark hair, short on the sides, rose on top — with the help of a lot of mousse — into a peak. La Gazzetta dello Sport, the popular daily printed on distinctive pink paper, was spread across the table, signifying that his own countersurveillance jibed with Canning’s.
Canning proceeded to the counter, ordering a café au lait and a croissant from one of the four workers, all of whom had appeared in recent recon photos. With his petit déjeuner in hand, he passed two occupied tables, stopping at one of several that were empty. He and the man in the booth struck up a pre-scripted conversation, in French, about last night’s rugby match.
Cheerfully introducing himself as Laurent, the man said, “Why don’t you join me?”
Canning took inventory of the crowd. The nearest patron, a businessman three tables away, was out of earshot given the general clamor of the station.
Soon after Canning lowered himself onto the bench opposite Laurent, their conversation shifted from sports to current events. Then Laurent said, “So what’s too good to be true?”
Like his hair and blue irises, the name Laurent was fake. Canning knew his tablemate was in fact Izzat Ibrahim al-Hawrani, once a high-ranking officer in Iraq’s Republican Guard. By way of response, Canning asked, “What if someone offered to sell you an E-bomb capable of frying Washington and the vicinity?”
“I suppose I would be curious if he really had such a device.” Al-Hawrani nibbled at a brioche. Canning had anticipated an expression of elation from the man who now led the National Council of Resistance of Iraq, an assembly of deposed Ba’athist Party members exiled to France in 2003. With the billions of dollars smuggled out of Baghdad, the council underwrote al-Qaeda spin-off Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn — the Organization of the Jihadi Base in Mesopotamia — which waged an Iraqi insurgent brand of jihad. The organization’s relentless attacks on security forces in Iraq attracted a steady flow of volunteers, yet in Sisyphean fashion, failed to advance the cause.