The Witness (2 page)

Marwan watched police cars and other emergency vehicles converge on the area from every direction and knew the media wouldn’t be far behind. That was the last thing he needed—his face plastered all over newspapers throughout Europe and the Middle East. It was not exactly the kind of publicity the CEO of a thriving executive security company craved.

He checked his watch and scanned the crowd outside. He finally spotted his driver crossing the street, getting into the gleaming new Range Rover, and starting the engine.

Marwan moved for the front door. He wanted to get out of there as quickly as he possibly could. But just as he exited the building and began making his way across the plaza, the SUV suddenly erupted in a tremendous explosion, the force of which sent Marwan crashing to the ground. Flames and smoke shot into the air. Glass and pieces of burning metal rained down from the sky. And in that horrifying moment, Marwan suddenly realized that he, too, was being hunted.

3

Bodies littered the street and grounds. The wounded screamed for help. Others stumbled around in silence and in shock, looking for friends and loved ones or wondering what had just happened and why.

Marwan got up and wiped the blood from his face, wincing as the handkerchief passed across the tiny gashes spotting his cheeks and forehead. He removed the ammo clip from one of the guard’s pistols he had taken, emptied the chamber, wiped his prints off the gun, and threw it in a nearby trash can. Then he stuffed the other in his belt, covered it with his jacket, and began running north for the main business district, just a few blocks away.

He needed to get back to his hotel, gather his things, and get out of town. No one stopped him. Everyone seemed frantic or too shell-shocked to care who he was or why he was in such a hurry.

He flagged down a passing cab.

“Le Méridien,” Marwan told the driver.

“Yes, sir,” the man replied in a heavy accent. A moment later the two sped off.

The sun was slowly approaching the mountains. The lights of the city were coming on. The casinos and cafés were open for business. Monte Carlo, the playground of the rich and famous, was coming alive, though news of the attacks would be spreading soon.

Marwan watched the yachts in the harbor blur by as he made a mental checklist. He needed to call his brother. He needed more cash. He needed a flight—reservations, tickets. But to where? from where? Was he headed to Italy or France?

Running would make him look guilty, he knew. But given all that had just happened, he wasn’t sure he had a choice. Staying could be a death sentence. He would be questioned at length by the police, of course.
Who had first introduced him to Rafeeq Ramsey? Why had Marwan come to Monte Carlo when he knew full well that Ramsey already had a French security firm working for him? How could he explain that his second meeting with Ramsey had ended in the man’s death? Why had he taken the security guards’ weapons? Why had he not claimed his own pistol from the front desk?
On and on it would go, and those were the easy questions. What really concerned him was something Ramsey had said the first time they had met.

The taxi pulled up to the hotel. Marwan paid the driver and asked him to wait. He wouldn’t be long. Then he raced inside and took an elevator to the fifth floor.

An attractive young woman in her early twenties rode up with him. She reminded him vaguely of a woman he used to date. Long dark hair. Soulful brown eyes. White silk blouse, black skirt, black stockings, pearl necklace. Red painted nails and red lipstick, with a bit too much eye shadow.
That was a long time ago,
he thought. She smiled shyly. Normally Marwan would have smiled back, struck up a conversation. But not tonight.

He looked down at his feet and forced himself to refocus. He tried to reconstruct his first conversation with Ramsey, a week and a half earlier. The broad strokes were easy. Ramsey had recounted the events leading up to the simultaneous abduction of his wife and daughter, one from the beauty salon, the other on her way home from school; one leading to blackmail, the other to murder.

But it was the names of suspects that Marwan kept running through in his mind. Ramsey had suggested no less than a dozen ex-employees and business rivals who he believed might have the motive, the means, and the opportunity to attack his family. But there was one scenario that concerned him above all others.

The elevator bell rang. The door opened on the third floor. The woman beside him pulled out a cell phone and began dialing as she stepped off. He took one last look at her.
Missed opportunities,
he mused as she strutted away.

The door closed again.

Marwan’s thoughts returned to his conversation with Ramsey. The old man had told him that several years earlier, two French intelligence operatives had tried to blackmail him, claiming that if he did not pay them two hundred and fifty thousand euros, they would get their friends in the tax bureau to launch an investigation into Blue Nile Holdings for tax evasion and accounting irregularities. They said they would leak stories to the newspapers designed to embarrass him and his company.

At the time, Ramsey had been trying to sell his company to a Paris-based multinational. He didn’t want the deal scuttled by some long and public government investigation, even if the allegations were false. He told Marwan that he had paid the men, writing it off as “consulting fees.” But when they had demanded more—this time, one million euros—Ramsey had contacted Interpol, which had set up a sting operation. The agents were soon caught and faced twenty-five years to life in prison. But when they cut a deal with prosecutors and promised to name several coconspirators, they were found dead in their jail cells. The murders were never solved, and the case went cold.

The French government officially apologized to Ramsey, and—though he never blamed them—they seemed to go out of their way to assure him and his wife that those responsible were rogue agents who had been acting on their own and that they in no way represented the intelligence services or the administration in Paris.

Still, Ramsey had confided in Marwan that he also believed there was at least one more rogue agent deep inside French intelligence who had planned the blackmail operation from the beginning. Furthermore, he believed this rogue agent had had his coconspirators killed in prison to keep them from talking and was once again trying to shake him down.

That, Ramsey had said, was why he had contacted Marwan—because he wasn’t sure whom else he could trust. If some higher-up in French intelligence, acting on his own, was coming after him, how could he trust some low-level homicide detective in the Parisian police force to solve the case and bring the guilty party or parties to justice?

The elevator bell rang again.

The door opened on the fifth floor. But Marwan, lost in thought, barely noticed. Could Ramsey have been right? What’s more, could Ramsey’s wife have been working with this unnamed, unknown French operative from the beginning? Why? What would have been her motive? From all appearances, Rafeeq and Claudette Ramsey seemed a happy couple—rich, amorous, and about to enjoy his long-overdue retirement. What had gone wrong?

The elevator door began to close.

Marwan suddenly snapped back to the reality of the moment. There would be time to figure this all out later. Right now, he needed to get his things and get out of there. If the police wanted an interview, he would let them know where to find him. But he wouldn’t hang around to get picked off by a sniper or another car bomb.

He reached out his hand and triggered the doors back open. Then, stepping off the elevator, he turned right and headed down the hallway. Something seemed odd, different in some way, and it wasn’t until he was five steps out of the elevator that he realized how dim the light was, as if some of the lights had blown out or the bulbs had been removed.

At the end of the hallway, a figure moved in the shadows. Marwan heard the distinctive sound of a hammer being pulled back. And he knew instantly that he’d been found.

4

Marwan broke left as the gun fired, and the blast echoed through the hallway. The shot ripped a hole in the wall beside him, sending chunks of Sheetrock into the air.

He quickly drew the gun from his belt and returned fire. As he did, the exit door at the other end of the hall flew open. Marwan turned in time to see another figure emerge from the shadows—the woman from the elevator.

Marwan dropped to the floor just as another round exploded in the wall over his head. He aimed for the woman’s head and squeezed off two shots, then pivoted back and fired two more rounds at the man in the shadows ahead of him. None of the shots hit their intended targets, but they bought him a few precious seconds.

Just ahead several meters was a tiny side hallway on the right—a vestibule, almost—leading to a large suite. It didn’t offer much protection, but it was all he was going to get for now. He fired again—twice in both directions—then dashed to the side hallway, turning the corner just as the return fire began. For the moment, neither hunter had a clear shot at him. But that wouldn’t last for long.

Again the hallway filled with the sounds of gunfire.

They were already closing in. Meter by meter. Door by door.

He had only a few seconds to make his move.

Marwan fired two more shots around the corner to the left and two more to the right; then he wheeled around and fired into the Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the door handle. Smashing the door with both feet halfway down from the plaque declaring this the honeymoon suite, he knocked it off its hinges. Marwan dove forward as more gunfire erupted behind him.

Inside the room, a young couple huddled in the corner behind their room service trays, shivering with fear.

“Get down,” Marwan ordered in a voice not much louder than a whisper. “Under the bed—quick!”

He had no time to explain he wasn’t the villain in this nightmare. All he wanted to do was try to keep them as safe as possible for as long as possible. The two lovers scrambled to the floor and crawled under the large canopy bed, staring back at him as he ejected the spent magazine from his pistol and reloaded. Then Marwan moved to the sliding glass door and stepped onto the balcony.

He felt the bullet slice into his right shoulder before he heard the gun go off.

The impact sent him reeling. He crashed into a small glass table on the balcony, which collapsed beneath him. Still, he had the presence of mind to roll over, firing back into the room with one hand while shielding his face with the other.

One round went wild, and the partly open sliding door exploded into a thousand shards of glass, but the other rounds hit their mark. The woman with the pearls took two bullets in the chest. She screamed in agony and collapsed to the floor.

One down, but there was still one to go.

Marwan moved with as much speed as he could muster, fighting his pain. He shook off the glass, scrambled to his feet, and staggered back inside the hotel room, his gun still aimed at the door to the hallway, waiting for the partner to show his face. To his right, the young bride was hyperventilating. Her husband of probably only a few hours tried in vain to comfort her.

Marwan bristled with a murderous rage. He reached down and felt the pulse of the woman with the pearls. She was dying but was not yet dead. Her pulse was slow and erratic. He kicked her pistol out of her reach and turned her over, only to find her blouse turning crimson.

He fired a shot through the hallway door, buying himself a few more seconds. Then he thrust his pistol in the woman’s throat.

“Who sent you?” Marwan said through gritted teeth.

The woman, nearly unconscious, smiled weakly but said nothing.

Marwan repeated himself in French, but still the woman kept silent.

“Claudette Ramsey? Did she send you from São Paulo?” he demanded.

The woman’s face suddenly registered real fear—and surprise. It was clear she knew that name. She knew that city. He pressed the gun deeper into her neck, but she still refused to talk, and then suddenly her eyes rolled back in her head and her faint breathing stopped altogether.

Marwan’s heart was still racing. A nearly toxic combination of adrenaline and revenge coursed through his veins. He grabbed the woman’s pistol, checked the magazine, and stormed into the hallway, both guns blazing. The man in the shadows never had a chance. Marwan tossed his guns onto the man’s crumpled body, then pried the pistol from the man’s left hand and the spare magazine from his suit pocket.

The man had no identification on him whatsoever—no wallet, no passport, nothing. Marwan doubled back to the honeymoon suite. The woman with the pearls had no ID either. These were professionals—trained to be invisible, anonymous; trained to stalk their prey in the shadows and then strike without warning. What if Ramsey had been right? What if they were French intelligence?

For now, one thing was certain: they had picked the wrong fight.

As his heart rate finally slowed, the burning in his right shoulder intensified. He felt blood streaking down his cheeks from the multiple glass cuts on his head.

And then he heard the sirens.

5

Should he stay or run?

He had only seconds to decide. The police would be there any moment. The thought should have made him feel safer, but it only increased his anxiety.

Yes, he had an airtight case of self-defense. But would it matter? He was being hunted. And whoever was after him apparently knew his every move. They had known he was in Monaco. They had known he was staying at the Méridien, despite the fact that he had registered under an assumed name. They had known he would meet with Ramsey. They had known when. They had known where. They had known what car he’d be in, what elevator he’d be in. How was that possible? How could they have known?

He supposed it was possible that his pursuers had no connection to a European or Middle Eastern police force or intelligence service. But the odds were dropping quickly. Who else could be tracking him so closely? Only the tiniest handful of people had even known about this trip, and it had been arranged less than forty-eight hours earlier.