Private Paris (Private 10)

My chief concern, however, was Michele Herbert, who was still in surgery. I had put her there, gut shot, and it was killing me. The fact that I was walking up to prison doors instead of in vigil outside the operating room was killing me too. To my way of thinking, you owe a person who takes a bullet for you, and then saves your life by putting a bullet through someone else.

Two high-level French intelligence officers met us on the other side of security. The shorter, balder one introduced himself as La Roche. The taller, paler one told us his name was Rousseau. Both were probably operational handles.

“You are here as a courtesy, Morgan,” La Roche said in perfect English.

Rousseau said, “Despite the fact that you broke enough laws to get you thrown in jail for thirty years, you risked your life multiple times to catch Hamid, and France owes you that much.”

“The handcuffs necessary?” I asked.

Juge Fromme cut the intelligence officers off before they could reply, saying, “The minister of justice himself says those cuffs are staying right where they are until Mr. Morgan is placed on a jet leaving France.”

La Roche shrugged.

Admitting defeat, I asked, “Has she said anything?”

“Hasn’t had the chance,” La Roche replied. “You busted her up pretty good, but the doctor says she’s coming around. They’re moving her to an interrogation room as we speak. Investigateur Hoskins? We’d like you to conduct the initial interrogation, along with Juge Fromme. All on tape, of course.”

Hoskins said, “Why me? Why not some big counter-terror expert?”

“Because this began as a murder case,” Rousseau said. “You know the details better than we do, so I want you to question her about the killings at the same time you ask about her accomplices, and their future plans.”

“Back and forth,” said La Roche. “Keep her off-balance. If we have questions, we’ll text you to come out of the room to hear them. Can you do that?”

“I’ll try,” Hoskins said, and the magistrate nodded.

Soon after we started walking, Rousseau moved beside me and said, “There are a few things I don’t understand.”

“Only a few?” I said, wincing at my sutured and bandaged cheeks.

“Two, then. How did Professor Herbert know Haja Hamid? And how did you track her down so fast?”

As we made our way through the ruined halls of the old prison, I explained that Haja had attended the academy of fine arts on a scholarship for one year. Michele Herbert, an upper classman at the time, had been Haja’s student adviser. She described Haja as an angry woman right from the start, someone who made life difficult for just about everyone she met. At the same time, she was passionate about her art, and had gravitated to metal sculpture and welding almost immediately.

Haja, Michele said, liked to play with fire and hammer heated metal, as if she were burning and beating her inner demons when she was working. After the first year, she left to go to a welding school.

“Haja told Professor Herbert that she’d learn all she needed to know there,” I told Rousseau as we reached the ultra-max security wing, where Ali Farad, the imam, and the others caught up in the AB-16 conspiracy were being held.

“Haja dropped off Michele’s radar when she left,” I went on. “The last the professor heard, she’d gone off to work somewhere in the south of France. When Michele saw the picture of the woman outside the mosque and recognized her, she called up the alumni office at the academy of fine arts, and asked if it had a forwarding address for Haja on record. There was one, and I blundered us into the hornet’s nest that got Michele shot.”

“I know her surgeon,” Rousseau said. “She’s in good hands.”

The other intelligence officer asked, “Did the professor know what Hamid was angry about back in school?”

“Michele didn’t know,” I said. “Haja wasn’t the kind who opened up.”

“Did Herbert ever hear her speak of hating France, or supporting radical Islam?”

“She remembered Haja as happy to be in France, glad to have left Africa, so Michele figured her anger was personal. And Islam? Michele said Haja was adamantly nonreligious, and apolitical. Do we know exactly where she’s from, by the way? The professor couldn’t remember.”

“Niger, in sub-Saharan West Africa,” La Roche said. “By birth she’s Tuareg, a desert nomad. On her citizenship application she listed no religion, and her occupation as ‘welder and artist.’”

We stopped near two doors guarded by counter-terrorists.

“People do change,” said Rousseau. “Investigateur Hoskins, Juge Fromme: your job is to show us how much. Give us five minutes to get in position, and then go in.”

Chapter 98

THE FRENCH INTELLIGENCE officers led us into a soundproof booth that faced a two-way mirror into an interrogation space turned ICU.