“Well, that’s the thing. Something’s come up.” Decker exhaled and focused on the road.
“I’m not going to like it, am I?” Mark was dead tired. He hadn’t slept at all on the red-eye from Dubai to Paris.
“No, you won’t. It’s a freakin’ complete clusterfuck.”
“What happened?” asked Daria.
“So like I said, first day I was here I found the compound and started up surveillance from a barn loft a couple lots down. I didn’t see a lot of activity, just a few guys who looked like guards patrolling the perimeter. Five guys total on the inside. None of them was your uncle. On the outside it’s just a bunch of old French geezers riding by once in a while on bikes.
“Then just six hours ago, around an hour before midnight it was, I’m watching from the barn and a laundry-service van pulls up to the front gate. A few guys wheel out a couple canvas sacks and dump them in the truck. I’m talking big sacks, these guys can barely lift them. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that whatever’s inside them, it sure as hell ain’t somebody’s dirty underpants. So I follow them.
“They drive to a field, ten clicks or so to the northwest, in farm country. I watch the two guys who’d been driving the van meet a couple more guys who are waiting for them there in the field. When they’re all together, damn if they don’t pull out two bodies from those laundry sacks and then set about burying them in the field.
“They dig one grave and put both bodies in it. There’s a lot of other areas that had been dug up recently too. And I mean a lot — whole field’s scattered with them. More graves probably, though I didn’t try to dig them up because after these bodies get buried, I follow the two men that hadn’t come from the main compound. They drive straight to this farmhouse a couple clicks away from the field and disappear inside. So I set up a surveillance post in an abandoned church not far away but didn’t see shit and then I had to blow to pick you two up. How many people used to live inside the main MEK compound?”
“Probably a hundred or so, maybe more, maybe less,” said Daria. Her voice was hard, but trembled.
“Fucking hell,” said Decker. “I hate to say it, but I think they’re toast. That compound is practically empty.”
“Then ditch the compound. Take us to this farmhouse,” said Mark coldly. If Minabi was dead, he’d learn what he could from her killers.
“Going there now, boss.”
63
Decker pulled to a stop in front of a big stone church encircled by a six-foot-high chain-link fence on which notices had been posted, warning people away and proclaiming that the church had been slated for destruction. Down the street, a few old stone houses abutted the road.
“If you hop the fence, you can get inside through a door in the back that I popped open,” said Decker. “Behind the altar to your left are steps to a lookout. The first twenty feet or so have been ripped down, but I pimped a ladder from a house down the street. Once you get to the top, look due south. You’ll see the farmhouse in the middle of a field.”
Decker got out and opened the trunk of the Hyundai, revealing two sets of high-powered binoculars, food supplies, a large brown canvas tarp, and a digital camera with a telephoto lens.
“Won’t need the camera,” said Mark brusquely. “Bought one in Dubai.”
He eyed the church. It was made of stone similar in color to the surrounding houses, but unlike the old houses, the church walls had more of a smooth, polished look. Built just a hundred or so years ago, he guessed. Which meant no tourists would bother to visit it — not when there were gorgeous medieval cathedrals to look at all over France — and since hardly anyone in the country under the age of eighty bothered to go to church for religious reasons anymore, tearing it down had likely been deemed a more practical option than renovating it.
Evidence of neglect abounded. The roof had a few big holes in it where patches of slate tiles had fallen off, exposing the wood timbers beneath; the pavement surrounding the building was half-covered with weeds; and most of the varnish on the massive front entrance door had peeled off. Anything of value appeared to have been removed — a gaping circular hole hovered behind the altar where a rosary window had once stood, and what Decker had called a lookout Mark pegged as a former bell tower whose bell and roof had been salvaged, leaving just an open platform on top.
“Are workers going to be showing up this morning to take the rest of this thing down?” asked Mark.
“Maybe, but I’ll be watching from the ground so I can call you if we get any surprises.”
In the east the sky looked as though the sun would crack the horizon at any moment. Except for the sound of a distant owl, it was absolutely quiet. Mark concentrated on the silence, listening for a break in it, maybe the sound of an approaching car.
He heard nothing. “All right, let’s do this.”
64
Colonel Henry Amato fumbled in the dark for his cell phone, finally locating it on the end table next to his bed. After pushing a few wrong buttons, he found the one that allowed him to answer.
“Amato, here,” he half shouted, still disoriented from the several glasses of grappa he’d downed just a few hours ago. He was bare-chested, wearing only boxer shorts.
An antique brass lamp embossed with a Persian design stood on the end table. He turned it on as he sat up in bed.
“This is Martinez, sir.”
Amato asked for a verification code. Upon receiving it, he said, “Confirmed.”
“There’s been activity in France. Two individuals are monitoring Minabi.”
“Have they been identified?”
“No, sir.”
“What’s their present status?”
“Well, they’re watching the house from a church tower.”
Amato ran a hand through his disheveled hair. “A church tower?” he said skeptically.
“Yes, sir, it’s about a half kilometer away from the compound where Minabi’s being held. One of our NightEagle drones picked up a suspicious thermal image on top of it five hours ago.”
“Human?”
“We thought. But the image was taken from a few miles up, so it wasn’t conclusive. We continued to monitor the site from a better angle but didn’t see anything else — until dawn that is, when we picked up two bodies. That’d be zero one thirty your time, just a half hour ago.”
“You have the images?”
“I sent them to your account.”
Amato slipped out of bed, being careful not to stand up too quickly because of his bad back, and made his way out to the spare bedroom where he kept his laptop computer.
He logged on to an anonymous, nongovernment e-mail account and typed in an additional security code to view the files. The first was a five-second infrared video clip shot five hours ago. The central image was a grainy blur of green, red, and yellow — indicating heat — against a background of deep indigo blue. The video had been shot from directly above the church, and the size approximation was in meters, so it was impossible to know whether he was looking at a large bird or a human being.
He played the second video clip, which had been recorded just a half hour ago. Here there were two blotches, each a mix of red, green, and yellow. This time the video had been taken at a forty-five-degree angle to the church, allowing for a size approximation down to the nearest centimeter.
In this clip each figure looked like a ghostly human being.