Still The Enemy

By Jeff Schajer

Forgotten in America’s War on Terror is that there are other enemies who wish to destroy our way of life. Islamic terrorists remain the number one priority, but they are not the only ones who are intent on bringing death and chaos to our streets. Past adversaries are ... Still The Enemy.

Still The Enemy races from Moscow and Egypt, Geneva and Paris, on to New York City and the suburbs of Washington, DC. Not everything is what it seems in this global thriller.

This is a complex tale of terrorism, espionage, and assassination. The perpetrators have committed horrible acts and there are determined professionals who seek to find and eliminate them. French counter-terror operative Francois Levy is one man who will do anything to save Western Civilization and you definitely want him on your side.

Fans of Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, Daniel Silva, and Barry Eisler will enjoy the work of Jeff Schajer.

This book is the debut novel of Jeff Schajer and marks the return of Francois Levy, introduced in the short work “Terror Hunter’s Holiday.”

This eBook runs about 200 pages in print.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Schajer
• Release date: Apr 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452466521

Jeff Schajer

Jeff Schajer has worked as a bond trader, a venture capitalist, and in high-end fine art sales. He is a graduate of New York University and lives about fifty miles outside of New York City with his wife and daughter where he is currently at work on a novel and several short stories. Still The Enemy is his debut novel. Terror Hunter’s Holiday was his first published work.

Book preview

Dedication

To Elyse: you are truly beautiful inside and out. Your strength and wisdom inspires me each and every day. Alexandra and I are so very lucky to have you.

Prologue

Moscow, Russia

10 May 2010

Ilya Kovalev was not happy to be in Russia. It was the Motherland and the home of his people, yes, still he would rather be elsewhere defending her interests from abroad. He had been summoned to Moscow by his superior for a meeting. An old crow of a secretary waved him in. Checking his watch, he saw that he had only been kept waiting outside the General’s office for twenty minutes. Must be moving up in the world, he thought.

He had been thinking of London, the city he woke in just yesterday. How he wished he was walking that rainy city instead of being driven around this one. Now that was a city for a Russian with money or power. Cursing himself for his momentary lapse in concentration, in what was a very dangerous place to do so, he knocked on the heavy birch door.

Ilya was ushered inside with a gruff, Enter. Help yourself, as the General glanced at a rickety side table, decades old, where a cold vodka bottle and several glasses were set out on a silver tea tray. Pouring as small a glass as he could reasonably expect to get away with, Ilya greeted the General by rank and thanked him for the vodka. He waited for the General to tell him why he was there.

Lieutenant General Mikhail Furisov was the head of the SVR and also its secretive Directorate S. The SVR, whose initials came from the Russian words Sluzhba Vneshney Rasvedki, evolved out of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate and was now Russia’s primary foreign intelligence service. General Furisov reported directly to the Prime Minister. Mikhail Furisov was a large, rumpled man who always looked as if he had just rolled out of bed. Even his crisp, immaculate uniform did very little to dispel that impression.

General Furisov did not care for the man standing in front of him. Yet, Ilya enjoyed the confidence and protection of the Prime Minister and so was a special case.

Close the door, Kovalev. Wasting no time on pleasantries, the General gave him his orders.

You are to plan and implement a terrorist attack in New York, using Arabs, and set up your billionaire to take the blame. The death toll should be in the hundreds. The details for now are up to you.

Never knowing the General to joke, Ilya almost choked on his drink. He was dismissed and left. Whether it was presence of mind or the shock of what he had heard that caused him to leave without speaking, he didn’t know. Nor did he care.

~ * * * ~

Moscow, Russia

6 May 2010

Lieutenant General Furisov was summoned for a private meeting with his superior, Prime Minister Yuri Zubov, a few days earlier. The two men went back decades and Furisov had been one of Zubov’s trusted few for a long time. He owed his position, his wealth, everything he had to that man. The General’s loyalty to Prime Minister Zubov was absolute.

Zubov was trim and rugged, particularly so for a man of his age, which was a little north of sixty. His icy, clear eyes radiated intelligence and intensity. Zubov very well may have been the world’s most powerful man. In theory the American president should be, but Yuri Zubov hadn’t spent much time being encumbered by anything as quaint as checks and balances. Zubov’s prior stint as president of the Russian Federation had put him in position to acquire many billions of the Russian people’s money and he was also able to choose his successor without any resistance to speak of.

Zubov could have held on to the presidency but had promised to step aside after serving two terms, back when the West was in a stronger position and held some sway over Russia. Now that Russia was the world’s leading exporter of gas and number two in oil, the equation had changed. Still, Zubov kept his promise to relinquish the presidency and just elevated the authority of the Prime Minister’s Office, which he claimed for himself. The president was also a longtime member of Zubov’s inner circle. They disagreed in press releases just often enough on unimportant matters to keep the West off balance about who was really in charge. In reality the two men were on the same page. Not because the president was his puppet. He wasn’t. They just saw the world pretty much the same way.

Good Evening, General.

Mr. Prime Minister. How may I be of service?

You can take a drink and stop looking so nervous.

General Furisov poured himself two small splashes of vodka, a much smaller drink than he would normally take, and waited for Zubov to tell him why he had been summoned.

Later at home, a Dunhill cigarette between his lips, General Furisov muttered, What a shit storm this will be.

Part One

Chapter One

Alexandria, Egypt

2 June 2010

Ilya spent three weeks thinking. Not all of it on planning the attack. He wondered if he was being set up, if the Prime Minister had lost his mind, he even considered the remote possibility that General Furisov could be plotting against the Prime Minister. Ilya dismissed all of these thoughts and realized that Zubov, as always, knew exactly what he was doing and he would follow his orders and do it with style. When the time was right, he might be told something. The truth was that even though this operation was highly irregular, this sort of espionage technically was under the purview of Directorate S, to which Ilya was officially assigned.

Ilya Kovalev was thirty-eight years old with blond hair turning to gray. He had grown up in St. Petersburg back when it was still called Leningrad. Ilya stood a little less than 6’0" tall and weighed about 185 pounds. He wasn’t particularly large or muscular but there was something about him that scared others. Soldiers, intelligence officers, even gangsters. Most people didn’t remember Ilya’s physical characteristics, but they did remember the look in his eyes.

Ilya was in an old Greek part of Alexandria, an Austrian 9mm handgun tucked into the small of his back, doing Surveillance Detection Routes to make sure he was not followed to his meeting. Not an easy task in this part of the world. The Egyptian Mukhabarat, as their secret police was known, would not choose to screw with a Russian agent, but all the same he would rather not be seen at all.

The success of the terrorist attack in New York would depend on many variables, none more important than Ilya choosing the cell leader wisely. So here he was in a filthy, ancient port, breathing in fumes, making sure that he arrived clean to his meet. Some of the opposition here could be the Egyptian Mukhabarat, the CIA, MI-6, French DGSE, Israeli Mossad, Saudis, Jordanians, Palestinians, Iranians, recently Chinese, and even the odd Scandinavian, plus his own service.

Ilya walked into a tea shop two blocks in from the quay. He ordered, quietly in Arabic, three teas. The counter man nodded and went outside to sweep the ground in front of the shop. From doors behind the counter stepped Mohammed Salim.

Salim was twenty-eight and was raised in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He stood 6’0" tall and weighed over two hundred pounds. Salim appeared pudgy and soft, a mistaken assumption that very few made twice.

As Salaam Alaikum.

Wa Alaikum Salaam. With that out of the way they sat down to tea.

Why was I told to order three teas?

Always best to keep it simple. I told my friend out there that if a lone man, not Arab, ordered three teas that was his cue to step outside. Now what’s so important that I had to leave the desert to come meet you in Alexandria?

Ilya filled Salim in on the basics of what he had in mind. With Salim, who looked to his fellow Muslims to be a man who was in it for religion and faith, it was really about money. They bargained for a time over cost, but reaching agreement was not difficult. They had worked together successfully in the past and had expectations of doing so again. The two agreed to locate the training camp in the Maghreb, familiar ground to both men.

The only surprise came when Ilya said that he needed a cell member to have some sort of a gay past and that he needed to be intelligent. Salim feigned outrage saying, None of our brothers partake in that infidel behavior.

Stop, I don’t want to hear it. Save it for mosque. I don’t care.

It truly was an open secret that jihadists behind closed doors regularly had sex with each other, and they both knew it. Salim sighed and asked, Why?

Ilya said that a honey trap was in the works and that it was a necessary part of the operation.

Chapter Two

Paris, France

6 June 2010

Francois Levy walked the streets of Paris with a lot of things on his mind. Francois was restless lately and the many stresses of his job were the primary reason. He worked in the Action Division at the DGSE for the French Republic as a counter-terror operative. The acronym DGSE came from the initials of its name in French, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. The DGSE was France’s Foreign Intelligence Service. Francois hunted terrorists and did whatever he could to hinder their attacks.

Thirty-five years old, slim, and on the low end of average height, Francois was dark enough to pass for an Arab, but was actually Jewish. He stood 5’9", weighed 160 pounds and had dark hair and eyes. It was a beautiful day, with clear skies and a slight breeze to the air. Paris was an amazing city and Francois let himself enjoy the moment while it lasted.

Francois took his time strolling through the city and browsed a green market where he looked at vegetables and cheeses that he had no intention of buying. He was early for his lunch meeting and waited for Sophie to sit down at the café before he was satisfied that she hadn’t been followed.

Sophie Lerant had recruited Francois to join her team at the DGSE after learning of him through a contact in the military. At the time, Francois was an officer in the French Army’s Special Forces and had been passed over for promotion more than once for reasons that didn’t appear to be performance related. She looked deeper into his file and watched him for months before making her approach. Francois seemed a good fit for what she was looking for. He was attractive and looked suitably ethnic. Francois spoke Arabic like an Algerian and had the skills of a snake-eating commando combined with an innate ability to blend into urban terrorist environments as if he belonged.

Francois waited for Sophie to light one of her always present Gauloises and then sat down across from her. She regarded him with the sharp look that a loving older sister has for a wayward younger brother.

You look like shit, Francois.

Not you, Sophie. You are looking beautiful, as always. It was true, she was. Sophie was forty-six years old, tall with long shiny brown hair, and in spite of her constant cigarette smoking looked to be in excellent shape. She was divorced but currently married to her job.

It was an important job. She was now Operations Chief of the Action Division for North Africa. She was in charge of France’s efforts to stamp out terrorism in North Africa. Since the colonial history on the south side of the Mediterranean was overwhelmingly a French one, this region was of much more importance to the French than it was to the US or the British. The North Africa desks were back-water assignments at the CIA and MI-6, but to the French it was a plum assignment. The overt wars against the French were long over there, but a covert one continued to simmer.

Francois had proven himself to be one of her better operatives over the years but he was difficult to handle and so she kept that task for herself. This worked best for both of them. Francois was at his best when he didn’t have to deal with bureaucracy and didn’t have to answer to idiots. He was very loyal to friends, as Sophie had become, but couldn’t care less what his other superiors might say or think. This arrangement worked for Sophie because she was able to keep a top operative out of the usual chain of command, one who handled her sensitive assignments with discretion, an operative that nobody else wanted to run or even have to deal with. It wasn’t always this way but she had been running interference for Francois for a long time now. Francois was able to come and go as he pleased and didn’t have to answer to anyone but Sophie. True, she was often hard on him but it was out of genuine concern for his safety, not out of exercising her considerable power as one of the top intelligence officials in the West.

As much as I enjoy your company, Sophie, I am not feeling up to socializing. Please get to the point.

Francois. Is this how you behave with elders in the Sahara?

No, as you damn well know. I smile and drink their rancid tea. Only now I don’t have to be on.

That is my point. You are surly to the point of being rude. To me. What the hell, Francois? You know what? I don’t care. This ends. Would you do me a favor?

Francois rolled his eyes and said, For you? I would do anything.

Leave Paris for a little while and stop your brooding. Go to one of the islands in the Med. Maybe there you’ll even smile. Get laid; you need it.

He wanted to complain or to defend himself but knew she was right. The time was not right to have it out with Sophie. He would go to an island, get some sun, and hopefully have a little fun.

Chapter Three

Geneva, Switzerland

8 June 2010

Ilya drove the rented Renault sedan through the gate ignoring the sarcastic smile of the cretin in the cement box. He was probably a dumb Viking, Ilya thought. Kleiza’s security chief was Danish so it stood to reason that the hired muscle was also Scandinavian.

Ilya was no stranger to ostentatious wealth, as the oligarchs that he regularly kept tabs on in London had more money than class, but

Reviews for Still The Enemy

[ELS · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very entertaining fast-paced read...thoroughly enjoyed it. Definitely recommend if you like this genre and not a huge time commitment.