Chapter 27
The important meeting would prove to be another useless exercise in faux diplomacy.
But both presidents wanted it, primarily because it might make the old allies feel better and closer.
Heavyweights on both sides were instructed to attend and contribute something to the general notion of solidarity.
It took place in Paris at the offices of the foreign minister, in the National Assembly Building on Quai d’Orsay.
The U.S. secretary of state would not attend; therefore his equal, the French foreign minister, would not be there either.
Both sent their top deputies. The U.S. ambassador to France arrived early with the deputy director of the CIA and the associate deputy director of the FBI.
Special Agent Pascal Goff was present. Huff Norton wanted a top FBI man in the room, just to listen, observe, and record.
The French sent its director of national security, the rough equivalent to the CIA director, and Jean-Pierre Chalamet to represent the DGSI, its FBI.
Since the meeting was on his turf, the deputy foreign minister, Tomas Grenelle, presided and called things to order.
With the diplomacy that was expected, he cautioned the group about confidentiality.
Since they all had the highest security clearances, it was an unnecessary opening.
And it wasn’t as if their adversary was a foreign power with plenty of spies itself, though they were still uncertain who, exactly, the enemy was.
Everyone wore headphones for the translations, though the French didn’t need them. They were all fluent in English. The U.S. ambassador knew a smattering of French. His fellow countrymen knew far less.
Grenelle went on and on in French, occasionally lapsing into English, to show off perhaps.
The first informal presentation was by Monsieur Chalamet, who described the street-level investigation in great detail.
The bottom line, which the Americans preferred to hurry up and get to, was that the investigation had yielded virtually nothing.
The phone and email tracking, the surveillance cameras, the eyewitnesses, the efforts to identify the man known as Laurent, the movements of the stolen Peugeot, and so on.
Jean-Pierre did not offer a single new piece of evidence, but took his time anyway.
Next he went over the basics of the Jason Snyder kidnapping a year before, then the Alan Stockman abduction three years ago near Bordeaux.
Silently, the Americans thought: Zero for three. We already know this.
They asked a few questions to prove they were awake, and they tried their best to seem engaged.
The director of national security went next and continued the theme of being totally perplexed.
Their intelligence professionals, their spies, their informants, none of them had managed to uncover anything useful.
There had been a bit of excitement when an informant whispered something about an American being shipped out of Marseille in a crate on board a smuggler’s boat.
The smuggler was known to deal in women and narcotics, most of which were going into various ports along the North African coast. Tunisia may have been the destination.
French agents flooded the docks of Marseille, Nice, and Toulon.
And they leaned hard on the police and their contacts from Tunis to Marrakech, but the hot tip could not be verified and the chase it created soon fizzled.
The deputy director of the CIA went next and proved equally adept at revealing almost nothing.
In reality, he had nothing. He described the aerial and satellite surveillance for the Mediterranean and North African region.
Every square inch had been watched and analyzed.
Including Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, the CIA had hundreds of agents in the region.
The deputy director was convinced they would pick up the trail, eventually.
An important woman from Interpol then took the floor and added nothing but her organization’s initial efforts to cooperate with the two countries. The international police force stood ready to assist in any way.
After all the presentations and discussions, the unofficial meeting adjourned with a rarity—they were all in agreement.
They were certain the three kidnappings were the work of the same organization, a small unknown gang of criminals with a growing war chest, which meant it would, more than likely, strike again.
They agreed that issuing travel warnings would not help. In the first place, such warnings would not be heeded by a bunch of Americans accustomed to traveling anywhere regardless of the danger. And, warnings would possibly stain the image of Paris as the most visited city in the world.
With congratulations and pats on the backs, they said their farewells. The meeting ended after two fruitless hours, but by the end of the day both presidents would be briefed and assured that France and America were firmly on the same page and confident the boys would be found and rescued.