Without warning

‘Dude, if he’s here, it’s the end of the fucking world,’ Caitlin replied before realising what she’d just said. ‘Oh, wait… We already did that, didn’t we? Okay, look, it’s not just delicious noodles and opportunities for mass murder that kept Noordim in Mantiki 3. This guy, he doesn’t like whitey. His father was a mid-level official in Golkar, the guys who put the “party” into Indonesia’s one-party state under Suharto. His mother was a singer, but more importantly a second cousin to Tuk Tuk Suharto, the big guy’s daughter. The family controlled the distribution of kretek cigarettes in East Timor and lost it all in the Australian takeover of ‘99. Doctor Noo was already into the whole jihad thing by then and his family may well have been funding him, but Timor pushed him right over. Ruined the family and put the zap on his head. So he really hates whitey’

She paused and Rolland took the hint. ‘But?’ he said.

‘But,’ she continued, ‘he really fucking hates Arabs and resents their control of international jihad. To his way of thinking, the Arabs never recovered from the crusader attacks after 9/11. All of the best jihadis since then have been Asian or African, but in the mythology of the jihad, it is the Arabs who matter. And they make sure their little rice-eating cousins know about it, too. Our understanding was that Noordim got ass-fucked three ways from Sunday while he was in Afghanistan. The camel humpers really broke his balls. His raison d’кtre ever after has been to see himself acknowledged as a player of equal importance to the likes of bin Laden and Zawahiri.’

‘So he blew up noodle shops?’

‘Yeah. Lots and lots of noodle shops. Apparently Allah really fuckin’ hates noodles.’

Captain Rolland smiled, an exhausted, washed-out smile.

Caitlin watched the men in the street as they moved into the building. ‘Tell your guys they need to be on the stick now,’ she said. ‘They need to…’ She trailed off as a car appeared.

Gasoline was so scarce that any moving vehicle was invested with significance. This one, a blue Volkswagen Passat with a cracked windscreen, appeared to be full of passengers. She motioned Rolland over to the gap in the curtains.

As they watched, saying nothing, the car came to a halt and all four doors opened like insect wings. Heavily armed, unshaven young men stepped out and scanned the street. Neither Caitlin nor Rolland moved. Nobody pointed them out or paid anything but scant attention to the ruined building in which they stood. As a jet screamed overhead somewhere nearby, the last of the passengers exited the rear of the Passat. Baumer and Lacan.

* * * *

Melton was lying in a child’s bed, his head pillowed by a mildew-riddled stuffed elephant. The room was dark and the multi-level house empty, abandoned. Or at least it had been.

As he came awake, he heard voices on the lower floors. Men talking in a ghetto mixture of Arabic and French. He was jolted awake as all of his body’s remaining adrenalin reserves sluiced into his nervous system. A cool ball of ice seemed to form in his stomach, making his balls contract and loosening his bowels.

He wondered if some friends of the man he’d killed earlier had come looking for him, but the few snatches of conversation he heard clearly seemed to be all about the civil war.

A quick scan of the room where he’d hidden out, far above the street, told him there were no obvious hiding places. He slowly, carefully, eased himself up, fearful of a creaking bed spring that might give his presence away. For the same reason, he dared not put his feet on the floor as the boards would surely creak. Instead, he lay in darkness, straining to hear whatever he could pick up. He stroked his pistol for reassurance and checked that he still had the spare mags in his vest pocket. Not that a dinky little handgun would be much help if he’d woken up in a houseful of jihadi street fighters. And really, who the hell else was left in this part of Paris?

As the minutes ticked by with infuriating slowness, his heart rate began to calm a little and he even managed to relax. Nobody had come up to check on this room. He hadn’t been discovered. Indeed, there didn’t appear to be anybody on this attic level of the house. But he found that hard to accept. It commanded a good view of the street below and some of the approaching roads. If this were his show, he would have put a lookout up here, even if he was just running a small gang of looters. Then again, his instructors at Ranger school had probably drilled the basics into him with more alacrity than the towel-headed loser who’d trained these guys downstairs. If trained they had ever been. Judo rolls and paintball in the forest didn’t really count.