The National Police and the gendarmerie saw to the roadblocks, the identity checks, the smashed windows of abandoned warehouses, and the severed padlocks of suspected hideouts. But inside a graceful old building located on the rue de Grenelle, eighty-four men and women were engaged in a search of a far different kind. Known only as the Alpha Group, they were members of a secret unit of the DGSI, France’s internal security service. The Group, as it was known informally, had been formed six years earlier, in the aftermath of a jihadist suicide bombing outside a landmark restaurant on the Avenue des Champs-élysées. It specialized in human penetration of France’s sprawling jihadist underground and had been granted the authority to take “active measures” to remove potential Islamic terrorists from circulation before the Islamic terrorists could take active measures against the Republic or its citizenry. It was said of Paul Rousseau, Alpha Group’s chief, that he had plotted more bombings than Osama bin Laden, a charge he did not dispute, though he was quick to point out that none of his bombs actually exploded. The officers of Alpha Group were skilled practitioners in the art of deception. And Paul Rousseau was their undisputed leader and lodestar.
With his tweed jackets, tousled gray hair, and ever-present pipe, Rousseau seemed more suited to the role of absentminded professor than ruthless secret policeman, and not without good reason. Academia was where he began his career and where, in darker moments, he sometimes longed to return. A respected scholar of nineteenth-century French literature, Rousseau had been serving on the faculty of Paris-Sorbonne University when a friend in French intelligence asked him to take a job with the DST, France’s internal security service. The year was 1983, and the country was beset by a wave of bombings and assassinations carried out by the left-wing terrorist group known as Direct Action. Rousseau joined a unit dedicated to Direct Action’s destruction and, with a series of brilliant operations, brought the group to its knees.
He remained with the DST, battling successive waves of leftist and Middle East–based terrorism, until 2004, when his beloved wife Collette died after a long struggle with leukemia. Inconsolable, he retired to his modest villa in the Luberon and commenced work on a planned multivolume biography of Proust. Then came the bombing on the Champs-élysées. Rousseau agreed to lay down his pen and return to the fight, but only on one condition. He had no interest in tailing suspected terrorists, listening to their telephone conversations, or reading their maniacal musings on the Internet. He wanted to go on offense. The chief agreed, as did the interior minister, and Alpha Group was born. In the six years of its existence, it had foiled more than a dozen major attacks on French soil. Rousseau viewed the bombing of the Weinberg Center not merely as a failure of intelligence but as a personal affront. Late that afternoon, with the French capital in turmoil, he rang the chief of the DGSI to offer his resignation. The chief, of course, refused it. “But for your penance,” he said, “you shall find the monster responsible for this outrage and bring me his head on a plate.”
Rousseau did not care for the allusion, for he had no intention of emulating the conduct of the very creatures he was fighting. Even so, he and his unit threw themselves into the task with a devotion that matched the religious zealotry of their adversaries. Alpha Group’s specialty was the human factor, and it was to humans they turned for information. In cafés, train stations, and back alleys across the country, Rousseau’s case officers met quietly with their agents of penetration—the preachers, the recruiters, the streetwise hustlers, the well-meaning moderates, the blank-eyed lost souls who had found a home in radical Islam’s global Ummah of death. Some spied out of conscience. Others spied for money. And there were some who spied because Rousseau and his operatives had given them no other choice. Not one claimed to know that an attack had been in the planning—not even the hustlers, who claimed to know everything, especially when money was involved. Nor could any of Alpha Group’s assets identify the two perpetrators. It was possible they were self-starters, lone wolves, followers of a leaderless jihad who had constructed a five-hundred-kilogram bomb under the noses of French intelligence and then delivered it expertly to their target. Possible, thought Rousseau, but highly unlikely. Somewhere, there was an operational mastermind, a man who had conceived the attack, recruited the operatives, and guided them skillfully to their target. And it was the head of this man that Paul Rousseau would deliver to his chief.
And so, as the whole of the French security establishment searched for the two perpetrators of the Weinberg Center attack, Rousseau’s gaze was already fixed resolutely upon a distant shore. Like all good captains in times of trouble, he remained on the bridge of his vessel, which in Rousseau’s case was his office on the fifth floor. An air of academic clutter hung over the room, along with the fruited scent of Rousseau’s pipe tobacco, a habit he indulged in violation of numerous official edicts regarding smoking in government offices. Beneath his bulletproof windows—they had been forced upon him by his chief—lay the intersection of the rue de Grenelle and the tranquil little rue Amélie. The building itself had no street entrance, only a black gate that gave onto a small courtyard and car park. A discreet brass plaque proclaimed that the building housed something called the International Society for French Literature, a particularly Rousseauian touch. For the sake of the unit’s cover, it published a thin quarterly, which Rousseau insisted on editing himself. At last count it had a readership of twelve. All had been thoroughly vetted.
Inside the building, however, all subterfuge ended. The technical support staff occupied the basement; the watchers, the ground floor. On the second floor was Alpha Group’s overflowing Registry—Rousseau preferred old-fashioned paper dossiers to digital files—and the third and fourth floors were the preserve of the agent runners. Most came and went through the gate on the rue de Grenelle, either on foot or by government car. Others entered through a secret passageway linking the building and the dowdy little antique shop next door, which was owned by an elderly Frenchman who had served in a secret capacity during the war in Algeria. Paul Rousseau was the only member of Alpha Group who had been allowed to read the shopkeeper’s appalling file.
A visitor to the fifth floor might have mistaken it for the office of a private Swiss bank. It was somber and shadowed and quiet, save for the Chopin that occasionally drifted through Paul Rousseau’s open door. His long-suffering secretary, the implacable Madame Treville, occupied an orderly desk in the anteroom, and at the opposite end of a narrow hall was the office of Rousseau’s deputy, Christian Bouchard. Bouchard was all things Rousseau was not—young, fit, sharply dressed, and far too good-looking. Most of all, Bouchard was ambitious. The chief of the DGSI had foisted him upon Rousseau, and it was widely assumed he would one day be Alpha Group’s chief. Rousseau resented him only a little, for Bouchard, despite his obvious shortcomings, was extremely good at his job. Ruthless, too. When there was bureaucratic dirty work to be done, invariably it was Bouchard who saw to it.