Tom Clancy Duty and Honor (29 page)

The question was, a lever to accomplish what?

Effrem’s eyes had glazed over. “Kidnapping,” he murmured.

“What?”

Effrem held up his finger for Jack to wait. He got out his cell phone, browsed for a minute, then said, “Son of a bitch! I knew I’d read something about this. René wasn’t Rostock’s first victim. Five years ago Alexander Bossard’s daughter, Suzette, was kidnapped in Brazil. RSG rescued her.”

“Save a man’s child and you could own him for life.”

“It’s a hell of a debt to repay,” Effrem said. “So what do we do with René?”

“In the long term, that’s a question for a psychologist. In the short term, René’s going to keep going until he assembles the puzzle in his head or Rostock kills him. If we keep him close we can at least steer him a bit.”

Allemand returned to the booth and sat down. He drummed his fingers on the table and looked at each of them in turn. “You have more questions, yes?”

“You said you and Rostock talked,” Jack replied. “About what?”

“What else? Islamic terrorism. It has to be stopped.”

Jack didn’t disagree, but René’s tone had been condescending, as though Jack had asked what should be done with a lawn that needed to be mowed.
You mow it, idiot.

“How?”

“Not the way we’ve been doing it here, or in the United States, for that matter. It’s time to remove the gloves, as you might say. We root them out, wherever they are, and kill them all. If you help a terrorist, you are yourself a terrorist. If you sympathize with a terrorist, you are yourself a terrorist. We’ve been treating this like a conventional war. That’s ludicrous. We need to go nuclear.” As he’d been speaking, René’s tone had become increasingly strident, and now he punctuated this last statement by jabbing the table with his index finger.

“You mean literally or figuratively?” asked Effrem.

“Whatever it takes. Nation-state armies are worthless in this kind of fight. Too many laws, regulations, rules of engagement. Governments come and go, as does political will. Terrorists don’t bother with those things; we can’t afford to,
either. It has to stop, don’t you see that? We have to stop them before it’s too late. Rostock’s approach is the only one that can work.”

Jack thought: The looming threat, the ticking clock, and the savior. Three more operant-conditioning techniques.

“What approach?” asked Effrem.

Allemand was gazing out the window. After a couple seconds he snapped his head toward Effrem. “What?”

“I said—”

Jack broke in: “Maybe you can help me understand something. If you believe in Rostock’s message, why are you running from him?”

“Schrader,” Allemand replied simply. “I didn’t trust him. He was my contact, my training officer, but there was something about him. I started following him.”

“And?” asked Effrem.

“Did you follow the Lyon attacks?”

Both Jack and Effrem nodded.

“Do you remember the bomb maker’s apartment they found a week later, near that pharmacy, and the makeshift shooting range outside Montanay? A few days before the attacks, Schrader visited both places.”

Jack was stunned. Provided this wasn’t a delusion of René’s, Eric Schrader, one of Jürgen Rostock’s operatives, had been involved in the Lyon attacks.

“But Schrader was working for Rostock,” Effrem said.

“No, I think he turned. I was trying to get proof to take to Jürgen. I didn’t know who else at RSG might be allied with Schrader, so I decided to handle it myself. And it’s a good thing I did. Schrader and Alexander Bossard met a number of times with Rostock present.”

Once again Allemand’s reasoning was muddled. Schrader was a rogue agent and Rostock a terrorist-fighting savior who couldn’t see what was happening under his own nose. Jack suspected part of René’s mind was pushing him toward the truth about both Rostock and what had happened to him in Abidjan, but he couldn’t yet make the leap. What would happen when the man had no choice but to face that
chasm?

WÄDENSWIL, SWITZERLAND

H
alfway through Allemand’s revelation Jack had decided it was time to get Belinda Hahn out of harm’s way. He’d been leaning in that direction already, but René’s instability forced the issue. Plus, Allemand’s trust of Jack and Effrem was tenuous. Belinda’s presence might be too much for the soldier.

As it turned out, Allemand van had been serving as his command post and mobile living quarters. Jack convinced him to follow them back to the motel, then sent Effrem up to the room while he and Allemand sat in the van. During the drive Effrem had called his mother in Brussels to arrange for Belinda’s safekeeping.

Effrem called a few minutes later. “She’s ready to go.
There’s a red-eye leaving in a few hours. I’ll drive her, then come back. We’re coming down now.”

“Good. Drive safe.”

Jack waited a few minutes to ensure Effrem and Belinda were gone, then led René up to the room. Jack ordered pizza, and then while René took a shower he plugged the flash drive into his laptop and uploaded the data to Mitch’s private server. Mitch called a few minutes later as René emerged from the bathroom.

Mitch said, “Jack, there were no documents of interest on that computer, but I did find something interesting in the browser history—looks like a business portal. Is this guy an attorney? In Zurich?”

“Yes.”

“Then, yeah, it fits. I don’t know what kind of encryption and firewalls I’ll find on the portal’s server side, but I’ll get started and keep you posted. Anything specific I should be keying on?”

“For starters, any mention of Jürgen Rostock or Rostock Security Group, or similar combinations. Throw my name in the mix, too.” Jack lowered his voice, then added, “And any mention of a Janine Périer. She may have worked for the Red Cross.”

“Got it.”

Jack disconnected.

Allemand asked, “Who was that?”

“We’ve got a guy working on the data from the villa,” Jack replied.

“Why are there three toothbrushes in the bathroom?”

“What?”

“There are two of you, but three toothbrushes,” said René. “Is there someone else staying with you?”

“No,” said Jack. “I must have packed two by mistake.”

René considered this, then nodded. “Mind if I use one? I have no running water in the van. My teeth feel like they’re wearing socks.”

—

E
ffrem returned three hours later. René had fallen asleep in the armchair an hour earlier, which Jack took as a good sign. You don’t sleep around people you can’t trust, especially someone in Allemand’s condition.

Jack was sitting at the table, willing his phone to ring. “There’s a few pieces of pizza left,” he whispered, nodding at the box. Effrem sat down, fished out a piece, and took a bite.

Jack asked, “What do you think about Lyon?”

“You mean about Schrader being involved in the attacks? If it’s true, there’s no way a guy like Schrader could orchestrate something like that. Rostock could, though.”

“I agree.” Rostock’s kidnapping and rescue of Allemand was a type of false-flag operation. Staging a terrorist attack and then pinning it on another group, though more complex in scope, wasn’t dissimilar in principle. “The group that claimed credit, the Sahrawi Islamic Liberation Army, dropped off the radar, didn’t it?”

Effrem nodded. “Officials I talked to in both Lyon and Paris claimed to know nothing about SILA. Then again, it’s not uncommon for smaller factions to dissolve, then reconstitute under a different name.”

“True, but after the second-deadliest attack on French soil? I don’t buy it.”

“Me neither, come to think of it.”

Jack wondered if there was a part of René’s mind that had already come to a similar conclusion: SILA was a construct of Jürgen Rostock’s, both fuel and another target for antiterrorist rage in Europe. There was, Jack thought, already plenty of that to go around—and rightly so. No Western nation would deny that the threat of Islamic terrorism was dire. Hell, the majority of the Muslim world felt the same way, so said all the intelligence he had analyzed.

If Lyon had been a Rostock operation, there had to be more to it than simple pot-stirring. What, though? And again, the as yet unanswered question that had been nagging Jack from the beginning: Why did Rostock want him dead?

—

M
itch called an hour later. The ringing of Jack’s phone woke Effrem and René. Jack put Mitch on speaker.

“I’m not calling about Bossard. But I can tell you where to find Gerhard Klugmann.”

Allemand asked, “Who the hell is Gerhard Klugmann?”

“A hacker we think works for Rostock,” Jack replied. “Where can we find him, Mitch?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

Effrem replied, “I haven’t liked much of anything in the past few weeks, so what’s the harm? Where is he?”

“In Windhoek, Namibia.”

“Namibia,” Effrem repeated. “What the hell’s in
Namibia?”

PARIS, FRANCE

A
s for the deeper answer to Effrem’s question, Jack had no idea, but a few minutes on Google offered a possible superficial answer: Namibia was home to almost thirty thousand German speakers, a holdover from Germany’s almost two-hundred-year history with the country, which had even been called German South-West Africa from 1884 until the middle of World War I.

Rostock’s possible presence in Namibia was no coincidence, Jack felt. Rostock had shown a preference for German employees. If Klugmann was there as part of RSG’s operation, Namibia’s German population would offer a deep pool of resources.

However, before he picked up his group and left Europe, Jack needed to satisfy his curiosity about the true reason for
René’s kidnapping. To do this, Jack left Zurich a few hours after Mitch’s call and landed in Paris shortly after noon. In his absence, Effrem would do his best to keep René occupied and even-keeled.

Marshal Hugo Allemand, though many years into retirement, was a fixture on Paris’s social and political scene. As had Jürgen Rostock, Marshal Allemand had parlayed a celebrated military career into a civilian life of luxury and influence. Subsequently Jack had little trouble finding the Allemand estate, a working horse farm an hour north of the city near Montmorency Forest.

Jack pulled his rental car up to an iron gate festooned with stylized fleurs-de-lis and pushed the intercom.
“Oui?”
a male voice replied.

“Parlez-vous anglais?”
Jack asked. His grasp of basic French was serviceable, but he’d found that outside the country’s tourist hubs the locals preferred visitors either speak proper French or not try at all.

“Yes, I speak English,” came the reply.

“I’m here to see Marshal Allemand.”

“The marshal has no appointments scheduled for today. Please contact his secretary and she will—”

“I’m here about the marshal’s son, René.”

“The marshal has said all he cares to about his son’s disappearance. All press inquiries should be directed to—”

“His secretary, I know.” Jack placed his cell phone up to the intercom box and tapped the play button. After ten seconds Jack hit stop and said, “I made that recording less than eight hours ago. I’ll wait.”

The intercom was silent for a bit, then: “One moment, please.”

It took five minutes. When the voice returned, Jack was directed to follow the driveway to the main house, where he would be met. Once through the gate, Jack did as instructed until he pulled to a stop before a ten-thousand-square-foot French-Georgian-style mansion. The colonnaded front steps were bracketed by a pair of bronze stallions rearing back on their hind legs.

A fit-looking man in a black suit was waiting on the walkway. By the time Jack climbed out of the driver’s seat, the man was standing at his door. “I am Claude. Please raise your arms to shoulder level.”

Jack did so. Claude ran a magnetic wand up and down Jack’s body, then expertly frisked him before asking, “What is your name, please?”

“Jack.”

“Your surname?”

“Smith.”

Claude frowned at him. “Follow me, Monsieur Smith.”