Hendricksen had not expected to return to the Balkans; the region held only bad memories for him. Perhaps the outcome of the Frend pursuit would alter that situation, but he doubted it. The best he could hope for would be to make up for past deficiencies – his own, and those of others.

Chapter XL

Spiridon and Radovan Vuksan watched the ongoing coverage of the Paris shootings on the television in the living room while Zivco Ilić worked the phone and monitored online chatter.

Two things were clear. The first was that the Vuksans would not be receiving the final portion of their fee for the safe delivery of the Syrian cargo, which was unfortunate. The second was that those who had entrusted the Syrians to their safekeeping would want to know why two of their most senior people had been martyred at a Paris railway station. They would already be trying to establish if they had an informant in their ranks, but only as a formality.

If the traitor were at their end, he would have passed on details of the operation long before Saad and Mahdi ever boarded the boat to France, a drone strike in the North African desert being easier and less dangerous than a confrontation at a crowded Parisian transportation hub. Similarly, the two men could have been intercepted shortly after they landed at Port-Vendres, or while they were in the safe house outside the town. Instead, the French had waited until they arrived at Gare de Lyon before moving on them, with the associated risk of civilian casualties should the men have been in possession of explosive devices, or had they elected to fight it out.

To Radovan, this suggested necessity rather than choice on the part of the French. While they might have had some foreknowledge that valuable ISIS operatives were headed for their territory, they didn’t know how, or when, until the Syrians were actually on the train to Paris. Radovan knew that Marković would have stuck to established procedure and isolated all stages of the operation, meaning that only he and the Vuksans were aware of all the arrangements, including false trails involving misinformation, unused cars and apartments, and associates placed on alert who would never be called upon to act. Marković had also decided to split the long journey to Paris between road and rail in order to minimize the risk of interception, so that even Baba and Fouad were not aware of the final destination until they boarded the TGV to Gare de Lyon at Perpignan. No, the leak had occurred only once the final phase of the trip was confirmed, which meant that either Fouad or Baba had betrayed them.