A Foreign Country

by Charles Cumming

  ‘How was your afternoon?’ she asked as they walked in the direction of a dazzling sun.

  ‘Great,’ Kell lied, because he was glad of her company after the long afternoon and did not want to appear negative by complaining. ‘I had some lunch, went to a gallery, read a book …’

  ‘I really do not like Nice at all,’ Elsa declared, her English precise and musical.

  ‘Me neither.’ She looked across at him and smiled at the sudden fracturing in Kell’s composure. ‘It’s inexplicable. I love everything about France. The great cities – Paris, Marseille – the food, the wine, the movies …’

  ‘Blah blah blah …’ said Elsa.

  ‘… but Nice is like a theme park.’

  ‘It has no soul,’ she offered quickly.

  Kell contemplated this and said: ‘Precisely, yes. No soul.’

  A long line of rush-hour traffic was held at a set of lights and they crossed the Promenade des Anglais, pushed together by two teenage boys running in the opposite direction. A hooker in stilettos and a black leather skirt was climbing out of a car on the nearside lane of the central reservation.

  ‘There is nothing unusual on the SIM card,’ Elsa said, picking her way through a flock of mopeds. ‘I double-checked with Cheltenham.’

  ‘And the BlackBerry?’

  ‘It has been used to Skype.’

  Of course. In the absence of a secure line, Skype was the spy’s first port of call: near-impossible to bug, tricky to trace. A BlackBerry in this context was no different to an ordinary computer: all Amelia would have needed was a cheap plastic headset. She had probably borrowed one from reception.

  ‘Do you know who she spoke to?’

  ‘Yes. Always to the same account, always the same number. Three different conversations. The Skype address is registered to a French email.’

  ‘Is there a name associated with it?’

  ‘It’s to the same person. The name is François Malot.’

  ‘Who is this guy?’ Kell asked aloud, coming to a halt. He had assumed that the question was rhetorical, but Elsa had other ideas.

  ‘I think I may have the answer,’ she said, looking like a student who has solved a particularly knotty problem. She reached into her bag, rummaging around for the prize. ‘You speak French, yes?’ she asked, passing Kell a printout of a newspaper report.

  ‘I speak French,’ he replied.

  They were leaning on a balustrade, looking out over the beach, rollerbladers grinding past in the heat. The story, from Le Monde, reproduced the grisly facts of an attack in Sharm-el-Sheikh. Middle-class couple. Dream holiday. Married for thirty-five years. Brutally assaulted with knives and metal bars on a beach in Sinai.

  ‘Not such a nice way to die,’ she said, with graphic understatement. She took out a cigarette and lit it with her back to the wind.

  ‘Can I have one?’ Kell asked. She touched his hand and caught his eye in the flame of the lighter. Theirs was the sudden intimacy of strangers who find themselves in the same city, on the same job, sharing the same secrets. Kell knew the signs. He had been there many times before.

  ‘François Malot was their son,’ she said. ‘He lives in Paris. He has no brothers or sisters, no wife or girlfriend.’

  ‘Cheltenham told you this?’

  Elsa reacted haughtily. ‘I do not need Cheltenham,’ she said, exhaling a blast of smoke. ‘I can do this kind of research on my own.’

  He was surprised by the sudden flash of petulance but understood that she was probably keen to impress him. A good report back to London was always useful to a stringer.

  ‘So where did you get the information? Facebook? Myspace?’

  Elsa turned and faced the beach. A man in a white shirt was making his way towards the sea, walking briskly in a straight line as though he intended to stop only when he reached Algeria. ‘From sources in France. Myspace is not so popular any more,’ she said, as if Kell was the last person in Europe not to know this. ‘In France they use the Facebook or the Twitter. As far as I can see, François does not have a social networking account of any kind. Either he is too private or he is too …’ She could not find the English word for ‘cool’ and used an Italian substitute: ‘Figo.’

  An ambulance approached from the east, yellow lights strobing soundlessly through the fronds of the palm trees. Kell, since childhood, had felt an almost superstitious despair at the passing of an ambulance, and watched it accelerate out of sight with a feeling of dread in his gut.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ he asked. ‘Anything unusual on the BlackBerry?’

  ‘Of course.’ Elsa’s reply hinted at a bottomless reservoir of secret activity. ‘The user accessed the websites of two airlines. Air France and Tunisair.’

  Kell remembered Amelia’s file, but could make no meaningful connection between her year as an au pair in Tunis and her sudden disappearance more than thirty years later. Was SIS secretly working on a leverage operation, possibly in conjunction with the Americans? Post-Ben Ali, Tunisia was ripe for picking. ‘Did she buy a flight?’

  ‘This is hard to say.’ Elsa frowned and ground out the cigarette, as if Marlboro was to blame. ‘It’s not precise, but there was a credit-card transaction of some kind with Tunisair.’

  ‘What was the name on the credit card?’

  ‘I do not know. No amount in the transaction, either. When there is encryption by a bank, everything is much more difficult. But I have passed all of the details that I have found to my contacts and I am sure that they will be able to track the identity.’

  Kell tried to fit together the remaining pieces of the puzzle. The fact that Amelia had left her hire car in Nice indicated that she had almost certainly flown overseas. It seemed logical, given the footprints on her BlackBerry, that she had gone to Tunisia. But why? And where to? Long ago, SIS had kept a small station in Monastir. Or was she in Tunis itself? Elsa provided him with the answer.

  ‘There is one other thing that is vital,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The mobile telephone of François Malot. My contacts have tracked it. It would seem that he is no longer in Paris. It would seem that he is taking a holiday in Tunisia. The signal has been triangulated to Carthage.’

  15

  Kell took Amelia’s BlackBerry and SIM back to the underground car park, replaced them in the boot of her hire car and returned to the Hotel Gillespie. He put the car keys back in the safe, ensured that the rest of the room remained as he had first found it, then booked a flight to Tunis on the Marquand laptop. By seven o’clock the following morning he was en route to Nice airport, dumping the Citroën at Hertz.

  A French baggage handlers’ strike was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., but Kell’s flight took off shortly after ten o’clock and he had landed in the white heat of Tunis-Carthage less than an hour later. GCHQ were certain that François Malot was staying in Gammarth, an upmarket seaside suburb popular with package tourists, financiers and diplomats looking to escape the bustle of downtown Tunis. The signal from Malot’s mobile had been fixed to a short stretch of the Mediterranean coast in which two five-star hotels wrestled for space in an area adjacent to a nine-hole golf course. Malot could have been staying in either hotel. The first of them – the Valencia Carthage – had no record of a guest of that name in the register, but the second, the Ramada Plaza, which Kell called from a phone booth at Nice airport, was only too happy to connect him to Mr Malot’s room. Kell got the number of the room – 1214 – but hung up before the call was put through. He then rang back three minutes later, spoke to a different receptionist, and attempted to book a room of his own.

  There was just one problem. It was high summer and the Ramada was full. At Tunis airport, Kell tried again, calling from the tourism desk in Arrivals in the hope that there had been a cancellation while he was in the air. The receptionist was adamant; no rooms would be free for at least four days. Might she suggest trying the Valencia Carthage hotel, just along the beach? Kell thanked her for the tip-off, c
alled the Valencia a second time, and booked six nights full board on a Uniacke credit card.

  The Valencia should have been half an hour by car from the airport but Kell’s taxi became congealed in thick traffic heading north-east towards the coast. Vehicles on the two-lane highway spilled out on to the hard shoulder, mounted the central reservation and even faced down oncoming traffic in an effort to escape the jams. Africa, Kell thought, and sat back to enjoy the show. His driver, an old man with a split windscreen and a taste for mid-period George Michael, weaved and shunted as best he could, views on either side of the cab of tilled fields bordered by the breeze-block shells of half-forgotten construction projects. Men, young and old, wandered at the sides of the road to no discernible purpose, the din of over-revved engines and horns, predictable and ceaseless.

  Eventually they escaped the worst of the tailbacks and arrived on the outskirts of La Marsa, Kell’s taxi gliding along a coastal road dotted with diplomatic residences. Access to both the Ramada Plaza and Valencia Carthage was controlled by a roadblock at a roundabout on the highway. Three soldiers wearing khaki uniforms, each carrying an automatic weapon, had been ordered to check any vehicle approaching the complex of hotels and nightclubs that lined the beach; the last thing Tunisia needed in the wake of the Arab Spring was an Islamist fanatic setting off a suicide bomb in the car park of a seaside hotel. The youngest of the soldiers peered into the back seat and made studious eye contact with Kell. Kell nodded back, managed half a smile, and was duly waved on his way.

  The Valencia was located on a forty-acre lot directly adjacent to the Ramada. Marquand had arranged for a Renault Megane to be left in the car park. Kell knew the colour and number plate and found it quickly, the keys nestled, as agreed with London, inside the exhaust pipe. A porter with closely cropped black hair, wearing dark trousers and a burgundy waistcoat, saw Kell coming towards the hotel and greeted him like a long-lost brother. Despite Kell’s objections, his bag was placed on a trolley for the short journey up a ramp to the entrance of the hotel. Once inside, in the blessed relief of air conditioning, he tipped the porter, left the bag on the trolley and took a stroll around before checking in.

  The lobby was vast: three storeys high and finished in custard yellow. To Kell’s eyes it resembled a Mexican restaurant in a suburban shopping mall blown up to the size of an aircraft hangar. There were two dining areas on the ground floor, as well as a jazz-themed piano bar and a small, mocked-up Moorish café. Kell peered inside. A couple of baseball-capped tourists were drinking glasses of mint tea and smoking fruit tobacco from a shisha pipe, apparently under the illusion that they were experiencing the authentic Tunisian souk. Next door, Kell found a gift shop selling camels on key rings and overpriced bottles of suntan lotion. He bought a copy of the Herald Tribune then joined the queue checking in and out of the hotel. To the left of the reception desk, accessed through a second internal lobby, was a vast spa complex offering hammams, massage rooms and a saltwater plunge pool. More guests, most in white hotel dressing-gowns, were funnelling past. One of them had a bandage applied across her nose, as did a middle-aged Italian woman waiting in the check-in queue ahead of Kell. The bags beneath her eyes were black and bruised, as though she had been punched in a jealous rage. At the front desk, Kell asked what was going on.

  ‘Why is everybody walking around with facial injuries?’

  ‘Excuse me, sir?’

  ‘The bandages,’ he said, indicating his face. ‘The guests with broken noses. It’s like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. What’s the story?’

  The receptionist, a young Tunisian woman wearing a blue headscarf, spoke good English and smiled as she replied:

  ‘The hotel has a relationship with a plastic surgery clinic in Italy, Mr Uniacke. Their clients often come here in order to recuperate after an operation.’

  Kell nodded, trying to remember the architecture of the Amelia Levene nose and concluding that it was beyond all possibility that the Chief-designate of the Secret Intelligence Service was hiding out in North Africa in the wake of a nose job.

  His room was located towards the end of a three-hundred-metre-long corridor on the western flank of the hotel overlooking an outdoor swimming pool that boasted its own bar and restaurant and at least seventy sun loungers. Kell ordered a room service club sandwich and called Jimmy Marquand, updating him on the progress of the search. A database trawl at SIS had turned up just one photograph of François Malot, which Marquand sent as a JPEG to Kell’s laptop and mobile.

  ‘Good-looking bastard,’ he said as he clicked on the attachment. The photograph showed Malot in a group of four other men, all wearing business suits; they were captioned as IT consultants. Malot was in his early thirties, with a full head of dark hair, parted to one side, five o’clock shadow on a strong jaw and the ghost of a self-satisfied smile playing at the edge of his mouth. Just Amelia’s type, Kell thought and Marquand seemed to read his mind.

  ‘You suspect an affair?’

  ‘I don’t know what I suspect.’ Kell picked at a loose strand of fabric on the chair beside his desk. ‘She may not even be here. Malot could be a wild-goose chase.’

  ‘You don’t think there’s anything sinister in the murder of his parents, a connection of some kind?’

  ‘Isn’t that what I’m here to find out?’

  The sandwich arrived and Kell rang off. Why was London so convinced that Amelia’s disappearance had a sexual element? As far as Kell was aware, in her long career Amelia had been involved in serious relationships with only two men other than her husband: an American businessman, recently settled in Oregon, and a close friend of Kell’s at SIS, Paul Wallinger, now Head of Station in Ankara. Yet that had been enough to earn her a reputation among the all-male inmates of the SIS asylum as a brazen seductress. Besides, how had she found time, on her schedule, to begin an affair with a Frenchman at least twenty years her junior?

  There were other possibilities, of course: that Malot was a colleague in French Intelligence – either DGSE or DCRI – with whom she was running an operation. That would explain why there was so little information about Malot on the SIS database. But why comfort him in the aftermath of his parents’ murder? There had to be some kind of emotional connection between them, something more than mere business.

  His bags unpacked, his sandwich eaten, Kell decided to spend the late afternoon walking around the hotel, to familiarize himself with the layout, and to look for Malot at the Ramada Plaza. Wearing a sunhat bought from the gift shop, he took a path from the swimming pool down to the beach, where hotel staff were serving drinks to guests assembled on deckchairs and loungers set out in rows on the sand. Donkeys and emaciated camels were available for hire. A bikini-clad model with long black hair and bright red lipstick was having her photograph taken in the shallows; kite surfers were ripping past on broken waves in vain attempts to impress her. Kell took off his shoes and walked along the hot sand, a warm westerly wind against his back. Within two hundred metres he came across a similar scene, this time at the entrance to the Ramada: more guests sunbathing in dazed rows, staff preparing drinks and snacks in a wooden cabin erected on stilts, more donkeys, more camels, all of them touting for business. He thought of Philippe and Jeannine Malot, attacked on a stretch of beach similar to this one, murdered within a stone’s throw of the sanctuary of a five-star hotel, beaten and robbed for a few pieces of silver.

  The Ramada was visible from the beach as a white outcrop above a line of palm trees. Kell found himself on a narrow path bordered by dune grasses and clumps of bamboo. An elderly lady wearing a white headscarf, walking in the opposite direction, greeted him with a cheery ‘Hello there’ as if they were on Camber Sands. To his left, Kell could hear the slow, regularly interrupted thock of tennis being played badly, almost certainly by overheated geriatrics. Eventually the path opened up at the edge of a crowded figure-of-eight swimming pool considerably larger than the one visible from his room at the Valencia. There were more plastic loungers and tables arranged a
round the perimeter, the great mass of the hotel surrounding it on three sides. As a man walking alone, neither dressed for the beach nor the pool, Kell was aware that he was conspicuous, particularly in such an open environment. He stopped at a small hut at the side of the swimming area and took a seat at the counter. It was fiercely hot. An Italian-made coffee machine and some soft drink bottles were visible on a shelf at the back, ceramic ashtrays piled up beside a small sink. He scanned as many of the loungers as he could see, looking for Amelia, looking for a man resembling Malot. But it was almost impossible to pick out faces. At least half of the guests were tanning their backs or asleep on their sides; of the rest, many had heads obscured by novels or newspapers. Kell stood up and decided to keep moving, taking a side door into the main body of the hotel.

  The lobby was an altogether more sober affair than the Valencia, akin to a business hotel in the centre of a large city. A couple in the reception area were arguing in Russian. The woman, bottle blonde and upholstered in white leather, was far younger than her partner and wore the spoiled-milk look of a mistress growing tired of her role. The other clientele appeared to be mostly retired couples from the United Kingdom; five of them were perched on an L-shaped sofa in the centre of the lobby, surrounded by wheeled suitcases and plastic bags stuffed with booze and Tunisian bric-a-brac. Kell walked past them towards the automatic doors at the entrance of the hotel and found himself in a car park overlooking the southern façade of the Valencia Carthage. He walked towards the road dividing the two hotels, past a lone official in a whitewashed security booth operating a traffic barrier. Then he saw what he was looking for. Seven yellow taxis lined up in the street beyond him, waiting for guests to emerge from either hotel. Kell fell among the drivers, talking in French to the nearest of them about nothing more pressing than the length of time it would take to reach central Tunis by car.