Primary duty, p.4
Primary Duty, page 4
But right now, marathons were clearly not on Karl’s mind. Vilar met him at the white iron railing at the edge of the deck.
Karl leapt right in without preamble. “Your honor, we’ve got to make some decisions about tomorrow. The Barcelona police are wondering if we’re going to request an escort into the mountains, and I have to say…”
“I’ve decided,” Vilar said.
Karl nodded. “Okay. You have? What’s the verdict, in that case?”
Supreme Court justices were in charge of how much security traveled with them. They could choose to have none. Vilar had not chosen that. But he was tired of being flanked by operatives everywhere he went. From here, he could see four armed men, just on the deck alone. There were more downstairs, outside the door to his suite, protecting his wife and daughter as they got ready for dinner.
“It’s a tiny village,” Vilar said. “I don’t want to go up there like an invading army. That’s not how I want to return to the place of my forebears. If you and your two men want to accompany us, that’s fine. But let’s leave the military and police escort here in the city.”
“That’s your decision?” Karl said.
Vilar nodded. “Yes, it is.”
“Judge, I don’t want to impose anything on you, least of all something that makes you uncomfortable. But I would like to remind you that security environments are always in flux. There is no reliable way to predict…”
Vilar raised a hand and smiled. He didn’t like to pull rank and, as a general rule, refrained from doing so. But he was a Supreme Court justice, after all, and this man worked for the Supreme Court.
“Karl,” he said. “Save it, okay? If anything goes wrong, you can tell everyone you begged me to go up there with tanks and fighter planes, and I said no.”
“Judge…”
“But I promise you, nothing will go wrong.”
CHAPTER SIX
7:15 pm British Summer Time (2:15 pm Eastern Daylight Time)
St. Pancras Railway Station
London, England
The man finally made it through the security checkpoint.
It was a busy night, the lines a slow-moving crush of humanity. It seemed these evening trains to France were always crowded. The inspection itself was cursory at best. He put his rolling overnight bag on the conveyor belt and watched as it disappeared into the tunnel to be X-ray scanned. Then he stepped through the human scanner.
The guards he faced barely seemed to look at him. His skin was a deep, rich brown, which at times meant extra scrutiny. But he was dressed impeccably, in a well-tailored suit and topcoat. His hands were neatly manicured. His face was clean-shaven, his short dark hair slicked back and showing a touch of gray along each side. He wore a gold wedding band on the ring finger of his left hand.
If he were stopped by security personnel, and taken in for questioning, the name on his passport and driver’s license was Yosef Ensour. He was a 45-year-old Jordanian-born barrister, living in London. He rode the Eurostar train to France twice a month because he was a wealthy do-gooder.
The refugee camp at Calais was large and growing all the time. People, the vast majority of them men, displaced by wars and political upheavals in the Middle East, in Egypt and in Libya, and by drought in North Africa and the Sahel, were accumulating in that squalid camp.
They arrived at Calais hoping to sneak into the Channel Tunnel, the very tunnel Ensour was about to ride through aboard the fancy new Eurostar train, the fastest high speed in the world. If these men could enter the tunnel on foot, the theory went, they could simply walk into England and begin new lives.
Someone must have successfully done it, at some point. Otherwise, why would thousands of people pin their hopes on such an outlandish idea? To be sure, no one was getting through these days. The French had encircled the refugees with high fences, razor wire, guard towers and electronic monitoring equipment. The French police and immigration authorities routinely went through the camp, looking for men with criminal records to deport back to their home countries.
Yosef Ensour, bleeding heart that he was, fluent in Arabic and English, with the ability to speak and understand some French, and armed with his legal background, waded into the camp for a couple of days every two weeks, and gave free immigration law counseling to the people he encountered there.
Of course, none of this was true. The Calais Jungle refugee camp was all too real, but the man’s name was not Yosef Ensour. He was not a lawyer, and he wasn’t from Jordan. He was a decade younger than 45 and colored his hair with a commercial cream that gave him that touch of gray, for men who wanted the distinguished, sophisticated look that came with age and experience. The wedding band on his ring finger was certainly gold, but he was not married. And he had never spent any time in the camp - indeed, if he entered it, he had no idea if he would make it back out again.
Better to steer clear of such entanglements.
Now, he passed into the wide-open atrium of the gleaming train terminal, rolling his overnight suitcase along behind him. He was on the ground floor, and the glass and steel ceiling was three stories above his head. All along the concourse, evening crowds sat in restaurants or in bars, eating, drinking, and chatting, creating a background hum. There was a pleasant air of… if not excitement, then certainly energy. These people were headed to the Continent tonight - Paris, perhaps, or Brussels, or Amsterdam.
His train was above him, on the second level, preparing for departure. He could see it from here. They hadn’t called it yet. There was plenty of time.
He stopped into the men’s room. The light in here was bright and white, nearly glaring. He moved along the row of stalls to the last one. It was empty. He went inside, closed and locked the door behind him, removed his topcoat and hung it on the hook, then sat on top of the toilet seat, still fully dressed.
Perhaps a bit carelessly, he allowed his rolling suitcase to fall over sideways onto the floor. He stared at it as it lay there. It was almost new, dark gray in color, non-descript in every way. It could easily be mistaken for the hundreds of other nearly identical suitcases rolling along the corridors out there.
As he watched, two hands appeared from under the barrier between his stall and the one next to him. The hands seized his suitcase and pulled it under the barrier. In an instant, Ensour’s suitcase was simply gone.
He carefully controlled his breathing. It was always like this. Even though he knew it was coming, he was never quite ready.
An instant later, the hands reappeared, pushing another suitcase under the barrier and into Ensour’s stall. It would be easy to believe that the new suitcase was the same as the one that just disappeared seconds ago. In fact, they were the same color, and the same model, churned out in their millions by the same manufacturer. The two suitcases were even approximately the same age, with the same amount of wear and tear.
Then the hands were gone. The suitcase was lying there, fallen over sideways. Outside, in the public men’s room, the door to the stall next to his opened, and someone walked away, trailing a suitcase behind him. Ensour could hear the wheels rolling on the cement floor. He knew what items could be found in the suitcase that had just left - he was intimately familiar with them because he had packed them himself. Clothes for a couple of days away. Pajamas. Toiletry items. Very mundane things.
Ensour, which was not the man’s name, pulled the new suitcase closer to him. Immediately, he noticed it was quite a bit heavier than the earlier suitcase. Curious, he zipped it open, just a bit, and pulled back the flap.
There were blocks of C4 plastic explosive in this case, more than enough to blow out the side of a train while it was in motion. Perhaps enough to blow out the tunnel itself. There were blasting caps and long, looped fuses in here. There were two semiautomatic pistols with pre-loaded magazines lying alongside them.
Ensour did not know if these things were real or not. Maybe they were just very convincing replicas. He wasn’t going to inspect them any further in the hope of finding out. All that mattered was he had done it again. He had carried out his task exactly as assigned. Whoever the man in the other stall had been, he had done the same.
Ensour had successfully passed though security, a professional man, a long-time Londoner, above reproach or suspicion. And then these weapons, which had no doubt taken a different route into the station, had joined him here. Assuming the explosives were real, in 20 minutes he would get on the train equipped to cause a disaster that could kill everyone, or nearly everyone on board.
It was the third time he had done this in the past month. Whoever had devised this method, had come up with a way to defeat the security at St. Pancras train station, thus making the train itself, as well as the tunnel, vulnerable to attack. Indeed, the train was slowly becoming a high-speed rolling bomb.
“Praise Allah,” Ensour murmured, very quietly, under his breath.
He zipped up the suitcase and got ready to leave the stall.
CHAPTER SEVEN
September 22
2:05 am Central European Summer Time (8:05 pm Eastern Daylight Time, September 21)
Vielha Tunnel
Beneath the Pyrenees Mountains
“In the name of the Prophet!”
The man’s name was Hamzah. In Arabic, the name meant strong and steadfast, and he lived by these ideals. When he spoke, it was to himself, and under his breath. The sound was just barely audible in the cab of the large tractor-trailer, where he was alone anyway.
He was driving the truck under the mountains from Alta Ribagorca comarca to the town of Vielha, on the other side. He had left a warehouse on the outskirts of Barcelona earlier this evening, with a precious cargo.
Just up ahead, another truck driver was unaccustomed to the poor lighting and visibility in this tunnel, and the head-on traffic coming from the other direction in what was a very narrow space. The man kept riding his brakes and slowing his truck from a reasonable speed, down to a crawl. Then, as his courage returned, he would speed up again, only to hit his brakes again a moment later.
Hamzah had nearly rear-ended him three times now. He resolved to simply slow down and let the other truck get far ahead of him.
At one time, this was the longest road tunnel in the world. Completed in 1948, it was old, outdated, and had recently been announced as the most dangerous tunnel in Europe. More people died in here than inside any other tunnel on the continent. It was also notorious for its lack of security - there were no checkpoints on either side. You simply drove a curving road set up as a wind break, came upon its dark, gaping maw, and entered the death trap at your own discretion.
Ahead, the red brakes lights of the other truck came on again. An instant later, another tractor-trailer, invisible until the last second, whooshed by going in the other direction. That one didn’t slow down at all, and Hamzah’s truck lurched from the wind blast of its passing.
It was really quite dangerous under here.
They were building a new tunnel, parallel to this one, in the hopes of replacing it, but the project had been hampered by delays, cost overruns, and accusations of corruption.
In Spain? You don’t say.
Hamzah smiled to himself. He had left Morocco more than a decade ago. He had lived in Spain nearly all of that time, and he knew nothing got done in the entire country unless the right beaks were allowed to dip into the right fountains first. It was just the way the place worked.
The truck ahead was traveling 30 kilometers per hour now. Hamzah was right on his tailgate again. The red brake lights never wavered. The man should find a new line of work - driving trucks through the mountains was clearly not for him. Hamzah sighed and pressed his horn.
“Come on! Come on then!”
This tunnel was the only thing connecting the small enclaves of Spain on the north slopes of the mountains with the rest of the country to the south. Many people thought of these mountains as the border between Spain and France, but it wasn’t entirely true. Places like the Valley of Aran were Spanish, just on the wrong side of this geological barrier.
Things like that interested Hamzah. He liked to study maps. It interested him in this case especially because the border here was wide open. A man could easily walk from Spain into France, and no one would challenge him. Recreational hikers who traversed these mountains crossed the border regularly along their path, lodging in a French village one night, and a Spanish village the next.
These facts were important. The precious cargo Hamzah was carrying were men. The men were bringing weapons, and they were prepared to go to war. They were well-provided for, with food, water, and bedding. The truck had enough gaps in its structure to provide them with ample, free-flowing air from the outside. The mountain evening was cool, even cold
When he arrived in Vielha, 15 minutes from now, Hamzah would park the truck at a rest area outside the town where many truck drivers parked overnight. Then he would sleep. Tomorrow, in the late afternoon, he would drive the truck up to the village of Bossost. The village was very close to the border, and closer still to the old siege tunnel complex left from the second world war.
If Allah willed it, tomorrow evening, the men inside this truck would acquire their own precious cargo, move it into France, and then along towards its final destination.
CHAPTER EIGHT
6:05 pm Central European Summer Time (12:05 pm Eastern Daylight Time)
Bossost Village
Valley of Aran, Pyrenees Mountains
Spain
It was a shock when the shooting began.
“What do you think, honey?” Richard Sebastian-Vilar said, just moments before.
He was walking the steep, winding cobblestone streets of the village with his wife and daughter, and the mayor of the town, a man named Paulo Robles.
Karl Adams and the other two agents in Vilar’s three-man security team flanked the group at a polite distance. All three wore dark suits and sunglasses, despite the fact that the sun was already fading to the west.
Mayor Robles was the same age as Vilar, just in a different way. Besides being mayor, he also owned the town bakery, and he looked like a baker - short, portly, bald at the top of his head with dark hair growing along his ears, and a thick salt and pepper mustache. But Robles navigated the high-altitude hills with no apparent effort, while slim, fit Vilar was breathless. The man was acclimated to his surroundings.
And Robles was an eccentric. He was dressed in a white suit, with a white vest, white shoes, and a walking stick painted white.
“It’s beautiful,” Sydney Vilar said. “Completely beautiful.”
Vilar glanced at his wife. She was as beautiful as the surroundings, long blonde hair, much younger than he was. Her face in the near distance, with the whitewashed houses in the village, and the mountains looming behind her created a stunning image, one that should be in a travel magazine.
Between them, holding each of their hands was Grace, their eight-year-old daughter. Sometimes, back home, they would run with Grace in the park, holding hands with her in just this way, and when they got enough momentum, they would pull her high into the air as they ran. Grace loved that game. But it wasn’t possible here, not in these hills.
It had been a great day. They’d arrived in the afternoon and eaten a late lunch in a tiny café with Mayor Robles, who spoke basic English, was charming and gracious, and knew absolutely every person in the town by their first name, knew that person’s family, and knew the family history as it interlocked with the history of the town and the region, and all the other families who lived here, or once had. The man was a compendium of lore concerning the village of Bossost and the surrounding countryside.
Many people visited with them at their table, eager to say hello to the long-lost village son returned from America. And a Supreme Court judge? It just went to show you how people from the village were. They chose to remain here, because it was the best, but in the wider world, they could become anything.
Tomorrow, in the morning, there would be a formal breakfast at the community center. Mayor Robles would be there, of course, as the master of ceremonies. But many people from this town, and from others nearby in the mountains, were also coming. There were second cousins of Vilar’s still here, and they would be there as well.
It was a wonderful homecoming, not what Vilar might have imagined (he had somehow pictured himself walking these cobbled streets alone and unidentified), but wonderful, nonetheless.
Vilar was here, in part, because he had sent himself on a fact-finding mission. And what facts was he finding? Had he discovered anything useful? Perhaps what he was learning was something he had already known.
Most people were inherently good, friendly, and welcoming. People were people, everywhere you went. The United States was a melting pot of peoples and cultures, a nation of nations, and the people…
He smiled and shook his head. He was getting ahead of himself. He was doing research, and that was fine. But his job was to hear the facts of the case brought before him. He would wait until then to decide anything.
Now, Robles was taking his leave from them. They were at the top of a long narrow alleyway of a street, between two rows of tidy homes with flowerpots under the windows. There were no cars - this alley was built for donkey carts from centuries ago. A modern car probably wouldn’t fit between the sidewalks. The small guest house where Vilar, his family, and Karl Adams were staying was here. The other pension, the one where the other two members of the security team were staying, was diagonally across the street.
The mayor’s home, so he said, was further up the hill, a little bit outside the town. As they shook hands, Robles glanced up the hill. The sun had set, and night was coming in. About 50 meters away, a large tractor-trailer truck had pulled up at the top of the alleyway, blocking it. It seemed prepared to park there.
