Meaning I'm not sending you a message.
Though, of course, Jana knew that he came from a country where the most beautiful women often wear concealing saris, even to the beach, and that Balan had to be aware of her body. So maybe there was a message.
But the killer had resisted even glancing at her figure. He was a professional and had learned to stifle his lust. Sikari always came first.
Jana now said through her untraceable cell phone, "I have the hypodermic ready for him."
The plan was that Balan would stun the American with a Taser and kill the others. Then Jana would race up in the van. They'd throw the man inside and inject him with a tranquilizer. She'd drive him to an abandoned warehouse outside of Nice for the interrogation. Balan would meet her there soon after.
"You'll kill the family," she said, as if this were something they'd argued about, which they had not.
"Yes."
"All of them."
"Of course." He resolved to keep to his decision not to harm the child. But he couldn't help but wonder about her: How could a woman be so casual about killing an infant?
"Get to work," Jana said abruptly.
Because she was beautiful he didn't give her a snide response, which was his first reaction. Instead he simply disconnected.
Balan looked around for traffic. Nobody was on the wind-swept beach road. He climbed out of the car with a canvas bag over his shoulder. Inside was an automatic weapon with a sound suppressor. It could fire 600 rounds a minute, but he had it set to fire in three-shot bursts every time the trigger was pulled. This was far more efficient than fully automatic, and more deadly than single-shot.
The bullets weren't big--.22 caliber--but they didn't need to be. Sikari instructed his people to look at guns as an extension of more primitive weapons, like spears or knives. "Your goal," Sikari said, "is to open the flesh and let the life flow out. Let the body destroy itself."
How brilliant he is, Balan thought, his heart tapping hard with love and awe as he rubbed the copper bracelet and walked closer to the people whose lives were about to change so dramatically.
He crossed the sandy road and slipped behind a faded sign advertising Gitane cigarettes. He peeked out. The family was pouring wine and beer and setting out food.
Their last meal.
Balan looked over the older husband, who was fairly fit for someone in middle age. From here--50 yards away--he was handsome in a nondescript American way; all of them looked alike to him. And his wife was even more striking up close. The younger man, Balan now decided, wasn't their son. He wasn't young enough. Besides he didn't resemble either of the older couple. Perhaps he was a co-worker or neighbor or the American's younger brother. His wife, the mother of the baby, was blond and athletic. Recalling his thoughts about sports, he decided she looked like a cheerleader.
Balan reached into the bag and extracted the gun, checked again to make sure it was ready to fire. He then put on a powder blue jacket that said Inspecteur des Plages and a fake badge, slipped the gun's strap over his shoulder and hung the gun on his back so it wouldn't be seen from the front.
He thought of Sikari.
He thought of Jana, the cold, beautiful woman now waiting in the van.
Would she await him later that night? In her bed? Perhaps this was only a fantasy. But, as Sikari taught his followers, fantasies exist so that we might strive to make them reality.
Then standing tall, he walked toward the family with casual purpose.
One hundred yards.
Then 75.
Making slow progress over the fine white sand.
The American, smiling from something his wife had said, glanced his way, but paid Balan little attention. He'd be thinking, a beach inspector? Those crazy French. At worst I'll have to pay five euros for permission to lunch here.
Fifty yards.
Forty.
He would shoot when he was 15 yards away. Balan was a good shot. He'd learned his skill killing Pakistanis and Muslims and other intruders in his home in Kashmir. He was accurate even standing in the open with the enemy shooting back.
The younger woman, the mother beside the baby's bassinette, glanced his way without interest and then turned back to her music streaming into her ears through the iPod. She leaned forward on her beach chair, looked inside the carriage, smiled and whispered to the baby.
That will be her last image as she died: her child's face.
Thirty yards.
Twenty-five.
Balan kept a restrained smile on his face. Still, none of them was suspicious. Perhaps they were thinking that with his brown skin he was from Algeria or Morocco. There were many Frenchmen around here who had roots in North Africa.
Twenty yards.
He wiped his palms on his blue jacket.
Fifteen.
All right . . . Now!
But Balan froze as he gazed at the family. Wait . . . what was this?
The two men and the older woman were diving to the sand.
The woman with the iPod ear buds leapt from her chair and reached into the bassinette. She pulled from it a black machine gun, a Heckler & Koch MP-5, which she trained on Balan's chest.
Astonished, the Indian looked right and left, as two men in NATO olive-drab uniforms and two French soldiers, in dark blue, sprinted from what seemed like empty cabanas. They must have been hiding there all morning; he'd checked the beach carefully after the Americans arrived.
A trap! He'd been set up!
One of the NATO officers, a boy-faced blond--his name badge read "Wetherby"--growled, "Atakana!" in a perfect Hindi accent. This was followed by "Arretez maintenant!" Then "Freeze!" As if Balan needed an interpreter to explain that he was about five seconds away from dying if he didn't do exactly as instructed.
Brandishing a large pistol, Wetherby stepped closer and repeated the warnings.
Balan remained where he stood, his head swiveling from the officers on his left, to the Americans, then to the other soldiers on his right.
His eyes fell on the older husband who was climbing to his feet, studying Balan--with interest, but without surprise. So he was the one responsible for the trap.
And in this instant he understood too that a man so clever was indeed a serious threat to Devras Sikari.
He told himself: You've disappointed him. You've failed. Your life is pointless. Use your death to good purpose. Kill the American. At least any risk to Sikari and his plans will die with him.
Balan crouched fast and reached for the gun.
Which is when his world went mad. Yellow lights danced in his eyes. His muscles spasmed and pain exploded from teeth to groin.
He dropped to his knees, his limbs unresponsive. He glanced down and saw the Taser barbs in his side. It was the same brand of weapon that he'd brought with him to use on the American.
Balan's eyes teared from the pain.
And from his failure to "go and do well" for his beloved mentor.
He fell forward on the sand and saw nothing more.
"His name's Kavi Balan, sir," said Petey Wetherby, the younger of the two NATO soldiers assisting on the operation here. He spoke with a North Boston accent. The eager, crew-cut man, an interpreter by specialty, nodded at the prisoner, who sat with his hands and feet cuffed, slowly coming to, beside one of the concession stands closed for the season. He was beneath a large sign that said "Creme glacee! Pommes Frites! Hot Dawgs!"
"Balan. Never heard of him," nodded Harold Middleton, the man who'd been masquerading as the older husband in the sting operation.
Wetherby continued, "We found his car. Rented under a fake name and address, prepaid credit card. But we've got his real passport and we recovered a computer."
"Computer? Excellent." Middleton looked around the deserted beach, then turned to one of the French soldiers. In French, he asked, "Any sign of Sikari?"
"No, Colonel Middleton. But the perimeter . . . " The slim Frenchman gave a Gallic shrug and twist of his lip.
Mean
ing, Middleton understood, they didn't have the manpower to search very far. The French had been cooperative to a point but weren't all-hands-on-board for an operation that was primarily American and NATO, and would deliver the suspect not to the Palais de Justice in Paris but to International Criminal Court in the Hague--the tribunal with jurisdiction to try war criminals and other human-rights violators.
Middleton had doubted Devras Sikari himself would be here. While intelligence sources had reported that someone from Kashmir had traveled to the South of France to kill or abduct the "American geologist," it would be unlikely that Sikari would risk coming out of hiding for such a mundane crime.
The best he'd hoped for was to capture someone who could lead them to Sikari.
Which, it seemed, they had.
Middleton continued to the Frenchman, "He'll have an accomplice, though. You find any other cars nearby? Monitor any radio transmissions?"
"No," the Frenchman said.
"You?" Middleton asked Wetherby. The NATO officers had their own monitoring system.
"No, Colonel." He referred to Middleton's rank when he'd retired from the Army years ago.
Middleton preferred "Harry," but some monikers just stick and "Colonel" was better than some others he could think of.
It was then that Middleton's "wife" joined them. She was in reality Leonora Tesla, a colleague. The intense woman, with a mane of dark Mediterranean hair, held up a Nokia. "Prepaid cell phone. Some local calls within the past half hour but they're all caller-ID blocked."
A flash of white in the distance caught Middleton's eye. It was just a van accelerating slowly away into the hills.
Tesla added, "JM's going through the computer now. He said it's password-protected but he's trying to bypass that."
Middleton glanced at where she was nodding. In the back of the unmarked NATO van, Jean-Marc Lespasse, the "husband" of the younger couple, was pounding away at the keys on the laptop. Athletic with spiky black hair, JM had been playing his role in the sting to the hilt, referring to his boss, who was only 15 years older, as "Dad" for the past two days and asking if he should cut up Middleton's food for him.
"What do we know about him?" Middleton nodded toward their prisoner, slumped on the ground, and only semi-conscious.
"I just emailed Interpol," Tesla told him. "They'll let us know soon."
The fourth member of the faux family approached: twenty-nine-year-old Constance "Connie" Carson, who like Middleton and Lespasse, was former military. She'd returned the "baby," the MP-5 machine gun, to the NATO van. Though they couldn't legally carry weapons without permission--which the French had not given them--Connie, with her muscular cow-girl's body and piercing blue eyes, wasn't the sort to say no to. She'd walked up to the NATO officers, pulled the machine pistol off the gun rack, chambered a round and tossed the gun into the bassinette. Ignoring their protests, she'd said, "Just gonna take her for a little stroll," in an accent that pinpointed her roots in West Texas.
She unplugged the walkie-talkie ear buds, disguised to look like they belonged to an iPod, and examined the roads. "Betcha he's not alone."
"That's what I think," Middleton said. "We can't find anybody, though."
Connie continued to scan for possible offensive threats. This was her nature, Middleton had learned.
"He's coming to, Colonel," the other NATO officer called, standing near Balan, sitting under the sign. It looked like a cartoon, with the words "Pommes Frites!" in a dialog balloon over his head.
"How long?" Middleton asked.
"Five minutes."
"What do you want me to do, Colonel?" Wetherby asked.
"Hang tight. I might need you to interpret."
"Yes sir."
Harold Middleton stretched and gazed out to sea, reflecting that he was a long, long way from his home in Fairfax County, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., where he'd been only last week.
He was a bit trimmer than he had been a few years ago, when he was living comfortably--"fat and sassy," he'd tell his daughter Charley--with two great jobs: authenticating music manuscripts and teaching music history. He'd taken them up after retiring from one that was considerably more demanding. As a military intelligence officer, Middleton had witnessed the results of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and other atrocities in many parts of the world. Determined to help bring the perpetrators of those offenses to justice, he'd left the service and started a nonprofit group called War Criminal Watch, devoted to tracking down human rights violators wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague and by other tribunals around the world.
Since they were not affiliated with any law enforcement agency or non-governmental organization and made virtually no money for their work, they were known as the Volunteers. They gained a reputation throughout the free world for their brilliant detective work in tracking down elusive criminals.
For various reasons, the group had disbanded some years ago, and Middleton went on to his beloved music, Leonora Tesla to do relief work in Africa and the other Volunteers to their own lives.
But recently a vicious, wanted war criminal who'd eluded them for years surfaced with plans for terrible carnage. The Volunteers were forced out of retirement. They managed to apprehend the killer--though only after Middleton's ex-wife was murdered and his daughter was nearly killed by her own husband, who turned out to be connected with the criminal.
Realizing that he could no longer remain in academia while such evil continued to thrive, Middleton decided to start up the Volunteers once again. The group included three of the original members: himself, Leonora Tesla and Jean-Marc Lespasse. New to the group were Connie Carson and Jimmy Chang, who now was back at headquarters outside of Washington, D.C. The slightly built Taiwanese-American had a miraculous grasp of languages, advanced degrees in computers and science and a love of research--Lespasse called him "Wiki" Chang after the on-line encyclopedia. Middleton's daughter also helped them out.
Glancing now at Balan, who struggled to sit up straight after the Taser jolt, Middleton sure hoped the interrogation was successful. They desperately wanted to capture the man's boss. Devras Sikari was a curious character. Born into a poor family in Kashmir, the disputed territory in the north of India, Sikari had somehow managed the impossible: He'd attended an elite school in England. A brilliant student, his mind sharper than many of his professors, he'd studied engineering and computer science.
There were rumors that he was being bankrolled for his entire education and living expenses, but no one knew who it might be; the source of his underwriting was anonymous. As soon as he left university, he'd shunned dozens of offers from large British firms and returned home to India, where somehow--no one quite knew how--he amassed some significant start-up capital. He began setting up engineering and computer companies and making millions in India's burgeoning high-tech world.
Then, having made his fortune, he disappeared from Mumbai and New Delhi, where his companies were based. "Not long after that he surfaced in Kashmir," Jimmy Chang had explained, "and became a combination warlord, insurgent and cult figure."
Chang had briefed Middleton and the other Volunteers about the Kashmir conflict. Formerly known as a "princely state," Kashmir has been the object of a deadly game of tug-of-war for more than half a century. India and Pakistan each control separate portions of the region, while China exercises authority over a smaller section of the northeast. But the partition is merely tolerated; both India and Pakistan claim that the entire state is theirs and have fought frequently to assert ownership. The massive, fertile area has been the basis for perhaps the closest nuclear confrontation between nations since the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s.
Devras Sikari settled in Jammu, in the Indian-controlled and largely Hindu portion of Kashmir, and now lived largely underground, surrounded by hundreds of followers, though he was known to travel outside of the country frequently using false documents, diplomatic papers and disguises.
He'd spent the past several years orch
estrating the slaughter, kidnapping and torture of Muslims, Pakistanis, Buddhists and Christians in Kashmir--anyone who wasn't Indian or Hindu and anyone he felt had no right to be in the region of his birth or a threat to Kashmir independence. He was suspected of massacres of entire refugee camps and villages, and he even made incursions into the Pakistani-controlled portion of Kashmir.
Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court had wanted to bring him to justice for some time but were stymied because India isn't a member of the Court, so Sikari's crimes, though horrific, couldn't be prosecuted at the ICC. But Middleton managed to find a loophole: The Volunteers discovered that Sikari had been responsible for committing murders in nations that were signatories, which made him subject to ICC jurisdiction.
The only problem was finding the elusive man. But finally they turned up a lead: a source at Interpol reported that Sikari was spotted in Paris making inquiries about buying sophisticated hardware and software used to find sources for underground water. This was odd, though. Kashmir was one of the few places in the world where water was plentiful. The name of the state, in fact, comes from the words ka shimir, meaning the act of "drying up water," referring to the draining of a primordial lake that covered much of the land. Many major rivers in India and Pakistan originated in Kashmir and other parts of the region--like perpetually drought-plagued China--and nursed whatever water they could from tributaries that sprung from there.
Middleton seized this chance--as he joked to the other Volunteers--"to flush" Sikari. He'd flown to Paris posing as an American geologist and tried to arrange a meeting with Sikari or his representatives.
But no one took the bait. So Middleton left a clear trail to the south of France, pretending to be vacationing with his wife and friends, in hopes that Sikari or an associate would try to find them. They'd been here only one day when NATO and French army surveillance units reported that they were being followed--by a dark-complexioned man who might be Indian.
Perfect, Middleton had thought. And he and Leonora Tesla set up the sting.