“All right,” Nikitin said then. “I can do that. I’ll make all of you believers.”
Chapter 86
AS SOON AS I arrived back at the Préfecture, Martin Lodge caught up with me. “Let’s go!” He started to pull me along.
“What? Go where?” I looked at my watch—something I seemed to be doing every couple of minutes now. It was 10:25.
“A raid is going down in a few minutes. The hideout that the Russian gave you—it’s real.”
Martin and I hurried upstairs to the crisis room at police headquarters. My old pal Etienne Marteau met us and guided us to a row of monitors set up to view the raid. Everything was happening incredibly fast for a change. Too fast maybe, but what choice did we have?
Marteau said, “They’re confident, Alex. They coordinated with the power authority, EDF-GDF. The power grid in the area goes down and then they go in.”
I nodded at what he was saying and watched the screens in front of us. It was strange to be once removed from the action. Then it was happening! French soldiers appeared out of nowhere, dozens of them. They wore RAID jackets: Recherche, assistance, intervention et dissuasion. They carried assault rifles.
The soldiers rushed toward a small town house that looked harmless enough. They broke down the front door. It happened in seconds.
A UBL, a French version of the Hummer, appeared and crashed through a wooden gate in the rear. Soldiers jumped from the UBL.
“We’ll see soon enough,” I said to Martin. “RAID is good at what they do?”
“Yes, they are skillful at destruction and death.”
A couple of the French police were miked and carried cameras, so we got to see and hear much of the raid as it happened. A door was thrown open, a gun fired from inside, then a blaze of return fire.
Someone’s shrill scream, the sound of a body thumping against the floorboards.
Two gunmen ran out into a narrow hallway. Both in their underwear. Shot down before they knew what hit them.
A half-naked female with a handgun—shot in the throat.
“Don’t kill
them all,” I muttered at the monitor.
A Cougar helicopter swooped down and more commandos appeared. Inside the house, soldiers swarmed into a bedroom, then fell on a man lying on a cot. They took him alive, thank God.
Other terrorists were surrendering, their hands held high.
Then more rapid gunshots, off camera this time.
A suspect was marched down the hall with a gun held to his head. An older man. The Wolf? Was it possible they had captured him? The policeman with the gun was smiling as if he had scored something big. The raid was certainly fast and efficient. At least four of the terrorists had been captured alive.
Then we waited impatiently for news. The cameras at the raid site were shut down. We waited some more.
Finally, about three in the afternoon, an army colonel stood at the front of the room in the crisis center. Every seat was taken; there was no more standing room; the tension was almost unbearable.
The colonel began, “We have identified the prisoners, those who are alive. One from Iran, a Saudi, a Moroccan, two Egyptians. A cell. Al Qaeda. We know who they are. It is doubtful that we caught the Wolf. It is also doubtful that these terrorists were involved in the threat to Paris. I am sorry to give you bad news at this late hour. We did our best. But he remains a step ahead of us. I’m sorry.”
Chapter 87
THE TERRIBLE, “FINAL” deadline was so close now, and no one had any more information on what would happen next. We seemed to have run out of options to stop the Wolf.
At 5:45, I was one of several nervous men and women climbing out of dark Renaults and then hurrying toward the tall ironwork gates of the Ministère de l’Intérieur building for a meeting with the DGSE, which is the French equivalent of our CIA. The front gates were immense. Like supplicants entering a cathedral, we seemed small and insignificant as we passed through them. I felt small and insignificant, as well as at the mercy of higher powers, and not just God.
The gates opened onto a grand courtyard, a vast expanse of cobblestones, and I was reminded of the horse-drawn carriages that had once rolled through these very gates. Had there been progress in the world since then? It didn’t seem like it on that particular day.
I walked with other police officers, government ministers, and directors into a magnificent entry hall with a marbled pink and white tile floor. Armed guards lined the staircase. Hardly anyone spoke on the way up. There was only the dull sound of our plodding footsteps, the occasional nervous cough. It was possible that within the hour, Paris, London, Washington, and Tel Aviv would be bombed and thousands would die. There could be a much higher number of casualties. A hundred thousand or more was a possibility.