“For you, maybe,” said Rosenfeld. “You would be just as happy to blow all of us up. My master and I prefer to return home in one piece. We will have a country to govern, after all.”
“My poor brother,” said Tariq. “Jabr thinks you’re his friend.”
“Never,” said Rosenfeld. “At least you’re smart enough to know that.”
Chapter 26
Passy, sixteenth arrondissement
Paris
“Hello, Harry.”
“You’re dead,” said Harry Crooks.
“Nine years now,” said Mac.
“Took you out in Beirut. Car bomb.”
“A taxi bomb,” said Mac. “But who’s checking.”
“Shake my hand,” said Crooks. “I have to know this is for real.”
“Hell, I’ll give you a kiss if you want.”
Crooks reached out and took Mac’s hand. “You bloody bugger. It is you.”
His friend had aged considerably. His hair was gone, his pate shaved as smooth as a billiard ball. He’d grown a beard, far more white than black. He had the same sparkly, inquisitive eyes; eyes that speared you, made you pay attention. But now they lurked behind a pair of owlish, horn-rimmed glasses.
Still, he looked as fit as ever. The same old Harry. Broad, powerful shoulders tapered to an athlete’s waist. Biceps as big as softballs pressed through his tight black sweater. What was he? Sixty-five? Seventy? Not too far, Mac realized, in front of him.
They’d met at the tail end of the Iraq War. Crooks was a big shot at GCHQ—Government Communications Headquarters—the UnitedKingdom’s signals intelligence–gathering organization, the rough equivalent of America’s NSA. He’d come to Baghdad to help set up a cutting-edge IED detection system that relied on intercepting phone signals. Mac had come to kill the people making the IEDs. The team’s motto was “You track ’em, we whack ’em.”
It wasn’t untilSkylark, however, that they’d really gotten to know each other.
“Nice to see you, too, by the way,” said Mac. “Ummm ... you mind if I come in?”
Crooks angled his wheelchair to block his entrance. “This isn’t a social visit, is it? Hate small talk.”
“No, Harry, it isn’t.”
“By all means, then,” he said, rolling back and away, a smile brightening his features. “Come in. Mac Dekker. As I live and breathe.”
Mac shut the door and followed Crooks down the hall and into a spacious living area. There was a leather couch and a recliner, bookshelves filled to overflowing. A Ghanaian flag hung in one corner, next to the Union Jack. Mac remembered something about Crooks’s family immigrating to England when he was a teenager. In all these years, he’d never lost the accent.
The room’s center of activity was a large L-shaped desk, filling up the far corner. Several laptops sat open alongside other electronic gadgetry, lots of loose papers, books.
“Still at it?” asked Mac, gesturing to the electronics scattered across the desk.
“You know me.”
“The original gearhead.”
A grenade had put Harry Crooks into a chair forty-odd years ago. Crooks was SAS, a sergeant, part of a team charged with taking an airfield during the Falklands War. He never talked about it, and Mac remembered whispers of his receiving the Victoria Cross, Britain’s equivalent of the Medal of Honor.
“It’s addictive, isn’t it?” said Crooks. “Listening in. Snooping.”
“Eavesdropping?” said Mac.
