Committed by Chris Merritt

Author:Chris Merritt [Merritt, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

Paris, five years earlier

Ellen is in her apartment, studying the intel that Reyes found online. He managed to hack a local extremist forum that Nadia told them Jalil was using. Although Reyes doesn’t know what the participants are talking about, because he can’t speak French, what he has found are a bunch of connections. He has the logs of which users have messaged which other users. Most of them use aliases, but their underlying email and IP addresses let Reyes cross-check with their surface web use to identify them. And what he’s discovered scares Ellen.

Nadia’s husband, Jalil, has exchanged a handful of private messages with a guy whom they believe to be Moustapha El-Amin. He’s an arms trafficker who specializes in bringing old Soviet weapons – mostly AK-47s – into France from Eastern Europe, typically selling them to big-city gangs who run the drug trade. What the hell is Jalil doing talking to him, Ellen thinks, if he’s not trying to get hold of guns? Not just any guns, either. Fully automatic rifles. The kind terrorists use for mass casualty attacks against civilian targets.

Reyes has sent Ellen the transcripts and, although it’s Arabic-infused Parisian argot , she can just about understand it. The messages are about a delivery of halal meat. Jalil says he’s hosting a party. Moustapha says he knows a good butcher. Ellen is sure it’s code.

“You okay, honey?”

She looks up to see Harry standing in a doorway, holding two beers.

“Uh, yeah,” she replies. “Actually, no.”

“You look as though you could use one of these,” he says, handing her one of the bottles.

“Thanks.” Ellen takes a long swig, then presses the cold glass to her forehead and sighs.

“What’s up?”

She shuts the laptop. Even though she totally trusts Harry, and he knows some of what she does and who she works with, she’s not allowed to let him read her messages.

“Have you ever been certain that something bad was going to happen,” she asks, “only no one else believed you?”

“I don’t know, maybe.” Harry frowns, sips his beer. “I mean, when the French government was staying out of those migrant camps on the coast and pretending they didn’t exist, my aid agency told them things would get worse. And we were right. Poor sanitation, disease, crime. They didn’t listen to us. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t believe us. You can know something but choose to ignore it.”

“Right.”

“What do you think’s going to happen?” he says, laying a hand on her shoulder.

“I don’t know,” she replies. “Just something bad. Something really bad.”

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