‘That’s ideal,’ Kell told him. ‘Anybody else with them?’
‘No, sir.’
‘And are you OK? Have you had something to eat?’
‘I am well, thank you.’ Sami sounded guarded and tense, as though he was experiencing a sudden crisis of conscience. ‘We had a long conversation while they were in the back of the car.’
‘I’d like to hear about it.’ Kell peered over the balcony and saw that the reception desk was clear. ‘We can have a meeting in my room when you get back.’ A teenage girl emerged from one of the lifts and looked at the ground as she passed him. ‘Try to remember every detail of what they talk about on the way home. It could be important.’
‘Of course, sir.’
Time to go. Kell took the lift to the ground floor, timed his approach to the receptionist, and produced a weary but apologetic smile.
‘I have a problem,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘I can’t find my room key. I rented a donkey on the beach this afternoon. I think it may have fallen out on to the sand. Would it be possible to have a replacement?’
‘Of course, sir. What was the room, please?’
‘Twelve fourteen.’
The receptionist keyed the number into the computer.
‘And the name, sir?’
‘Malot. François Malot.’
23
He was conceived as an act of love; to destroy him would be an act of hate.
Amelia remembered almost every word of the long-ago conversations with Joan, the to-and-fro of their arguments, her own steady conviction that she had no right to abort Jean-Marc’s child without his knowledge. Joan had at first advised her to terminate the pregnancy, to fly back to London and to chalk up the experience to the cruelties of youth. Once Amelia had convinced her of her determination to give birth to the child, however, the American had proved a priceless ally and unshakeable friend. It was Joan who had installed Amelia in a one-bedroomed apartment just two blocks from the Guttmann residence, an arrangement so secret that only David, Joan’s husband, had known anything about it. It was Joan who had put Amelia to work on American consular business so that she would have something with which to occupy herself in the seven months of the pregnancy. A few weeks after moving her into the apartment, the Guttmanns had taken Amelia to Spain for a fortnight, treating her as the daughter they had never had, showing her the treasures of the Prado, the splendours of Cordoba, even a bullfight at Las Ventas, during which David had rested his hand gently on Amelia’s stomach and said: ‘You sure a lady in your condition ought to be watching this stuff?’ And it had been Joan, once they were back in Tunis, who had first floated the notion of adoption through Père Blancs, an idea that Amelia had grasped at perhaps too readily, because she was so ambitious for herself at that age, so hungry for life, and terrified that a baby would rob her of all of the experiences and possibilities in her future.
Paris seemed to have been waiting for her. The humid summer streets were crowded with tourists, the pavement cafés alive with bustle and conversation. Sometimes, arriving in a new city, Amelia would feel an immediate and underlying sense of threat, as though she had been displaced into an alien environment, a home to bad luck. She was well aware that this was not much more than a hunch, a superstition, the sort of thing that her colleagues would laugh at if she had ever shared it with them. Yet a sixth sense – call it intuition – had been with her throughout her career, serving her, for the most part, very well. As an SIS officer working under diplomatic cover in Cairo, for example, or during her years in Baghdad, Amelia had reckoned that she needed fifty per cent more cunning and persistence than her male equivalents, simply to survive in such hostile environments. But France had always embraced her. In Paris she was always something close to her old self, the self before Tunis, the twenty-year-old Amelia Weldon with the world at her feet. As soon as they had taken François from her – it had been an immediate thing, she had never held or even seen her own child – the process of constructing a new and invulnerable personality had begun. Lovers were betrayed, colleagues discarded, friends forgotten or ignored. The double life of SIS had presented Amelia with what she looked back on as ideal laboratory conditions in which to re-make herself in the image of a woman who would never fail again.
Yet she was failing now. Failing to keep calm, failing to maintain whatever decorum she had brought with her across the Channel. She longed for the slow hours to quicken and to be in a room with her boy, just the two of them, and yet she dreaded what she might discover: a person unknown to her, a young man with whom she had nothing in common but their shared contempt for a mother who had abandoned him at birth.
There was a message waiting at her hotel, sent by the adoption agency and addressed to ‘Madame Weldon’. The concierge had been reluctant to hand it over, because Amelia had booked her room under the name ‘Levene’, but when she explained that ‘Weldon’ was her maiden name, he relented. François had contacted the agency and requested that Amelia go to his apartment at four o’clock on Monday afternoon. He did not wish to speak to her by telephone beforehand, nor to communicate with her in any way prior to their first meeting. Without hesitation, Amelia rang the agency to confirm, because she was predisposed to cooperate with all of their instructions, yet she worried that the arrangement was a sign of François’ anger. What if he told her, face-to-face, that she could never replace the mother who had been killed? What if he had lured her to Paris merely to wound her? All her life, Amelia had been blessed with an ability to assess people and to develop a quick and intuitive understanding of their circumstances. She could sense when she was being lied to; she knew when she was being manipulated. Some of this gift had been taught, as a necessary skill for a career in which human relationships were at the core of the work, but mostly it was a talent as innate as the ability to kick a ball or to capture the play of light on a canvas. Yet now, faced with what might become the most important relationship of her life, Amelia was almost helpless.
There was so much time to kill. The waiting was slower, the anticipation more sickening, than any intelligence operation she could recall. So many times in her career she had sat in hotel rooms, in safe houses, in offices that ticked like clocks, waiting for word from a joe. But this was quite different. There was no team, no chain of command, no tradecraft. She was just a private citizen, a tourist in Paris, one of ten thousand women with a secret. She had unpacked her suitcase and overnight bag within minutes of arriving, hanging the black suit from Peter Jones in a cupboard and putting the dress that she had picked out for the reunion on a chair in the corner of the room, so that she could look at it and try to decide if it was the correct choice for such an occasion. As if François would be concerned about her clothes! It was her face that he would want to see, her eyes into which he would pour his questions. For an hour Amelia tried to read one of the novels she had brought, to watch the news on CNN, but it was impossible to concentrate for more than a few minutes. Like a memory of her former self, she longed to speak to Joan again, to tell her what was about to happen, but could not trust the security of the line from the hotel. She thought of Thomas Kell, of all people, her confidant in matters of marriage and children, the one colleague in whom she might have confided. But Kell was long gone, forced into disgrace and a stubborn retirement by the same men whom she had leapfrogged to ‘C’. Would Tom even know about her triumph? She doubted it.
And then, finally, the meeting was upon her, the last hour before arriving at the flat passing as fleetingly as a face in the street. A vandal had scoured a deep scratch in the street door; a Chinese couple walking hand in hand smiled at Amelia as she walked into the lobby. Once inside, she felt as though she was going to be sick. It was as if the hole that had gaped inside her for three long decades was suddenly opening up. She had to steady herself against the door.
‘Would a man behave like this?’ she asked herself, a reliable maxim of her entire working career. But of course a man could nev
er have known what it felt like to be in such a situation.
François lived on the third floor. Amelia ignored the lift and walked there, feeling as though she had never met any person in the course of her long life, had never climbed a flight of stairs, had never learned how to breathe. Reaching the landing, she felt that she was about to make a terrible mistake and would have turned and walked away if there had been any other choice.
She knocked on the door.
24
Kell knocked quietly on the door of 1214, heard nothing back, slipped the card key into the slot and stepped into François Malot’s room.
A smell of shower gel and scorching sea air; a door had been left open on to a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. Kell moved quickly in the heat, noting the open safe, the 35mm camera on a side table, a carton of Silver Lucky Strike, a gold cigarette lighter engraved with the initials ‘P.M.’, presumably for ‘Philippe Malot’. Propped up on a table on the right-hand side of the double bed was a framed photograph of Malot’s parents, smiling for the camera, not a care in the world.
A passport was lying on the bedspread. French, well worn, biometric. Kell opened it up. A nine-digit code was perforated into the bottom of each page; he scribbled the number down on a piece of paper and stuffed it into his back pocket. Kell then turned to the identity page which listed Malot’s second name – Michel – his date of birth, the date of issue of the passport, his height, his eye colour and an address in Paris. On subsequent pages there were stamps for entry at JFK, Cape Town and Sharm-el-Sheikh, the last dated three weeks earlier. Kell photographed everything twice, checking that the flash had not reflected on the plastic seal. He then closed the passport and put it back on the bedspread.
Beside the framed photograph was a roman policier – a French translation of Ratking – as well as a wristwatch and a Moleskine diary. Kell photographed each page from January to the end of September, again checking the screen to ensure that the entries were legible. Though he knew that Malot was still miles away in La Goulette, this took time and his pulse was up. He wanted to move as quickly as possible. There was always the danger of a chambermaid stopping by to turn down the bed, even of a third-party guest with access to Malot’s room.
Next he went to the bathroom. Shaving products, dental floss, toothpaste. Inside a washbag Kell found several loose strips of pills: aspirin; chlorpheniramine, which he knew to be an antihistamine often used as a sleeping aid; St John’s Wort; a small bottle of Valium; insect repellent; a comb. No condoms.
Next he went through the pockets of Malot’s jeans, careful not to disturb the layout of the room. In a black leather jacket he found loose change, a Paris metro carnet and a soft packet of Lucky Strike. It was an identical process to that which he had undertaken in Amelia’s room, only now Kell felt a greater sense of the unknown, because he had no notion of Malot’s character beyond his recent bereavement and the obvious vanity he had displayed beside the pool. Under the bed he discovered a Gideon Bible, open at a page in Deuteronomy, and a small box of matches. Underneath the copy of Ratking was an envelope in which Kell found a letter, dated 4 February 1999, written by Malot’s father. Philippe’s handwriting was an illegible scrawl, but Kell photographed both sides of it and replaced the letter carefully in the envelope.
When he was satisfied that he had thoroughly checked the contents of the room, Kell went outside into the corridor, discovered a side staircase leading to an exit adjacent to the swimming pool, and walked back to the Valencia Carthage via the beach. He found the number for Elsa Cassani and called her direct on the Marquand mobile.
To his surprise, Elsa was still in Nice, ‘getting drunk and spending the money you gave me’ at a bar in the old town. Kell could hear rock music thumping in the background and experienced an odd beat of jealousy for the men who were enjoying her company. He assumed that she was talking to him from one of the quiet cobbled streets south of Boulevard Jean Jaurès.
‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to stop getting drunk,’ he told her. ‘More work to do.’
‘OK,’ she replied. If she was disappointed by this, she did not betray it. ‘What do you need me to do?’
‘Got something to write with?’
He listened as she scrabbled around in her bag, found a pen and a piece of paper and announced that she had discovered ‘a nice step to sit on and to take your dictation, Tom’. Kell began to flick through the images on his camera.
‘I need enhanced traces on François Malot. Has to be off the books, through your famous contacts, not via Cheltenham.’ It was an unusual request, but Kell wanted to avoid raising alarm bells with Marquand. ‘You have ways of checking people in France, right?’
A knowing pause. ‘Of course.’
‘Good. I’m going to need full-spectrum background. Bank accounts, telephone records, tax payments, schooling and diplomas, medical history, whatever you can find.’
‘Is that all?’
Kell wasn’t sure if Elsa’s question was evidence of sarcasm or over-confidence. He found one of the photographs of the passport and read out Malot’s full name, his date of birth, his address in Paris. He took the piece of paper on which he had scrawled the passport number and checked that Elsa had taken it down correctly. ‘He was in New York in January last year, Cape Town six months later, Sharm-el-Sheikh in July. I’m going to email you a series of photographs from his diary. I’ll look at them, too, but you may find something useful there. Telephone numbers, email addresses, appointments …’
‘Of course.’
‘One other thing. It looks as though he’s an IT consultant. Try to find out where he works. London had a JPEG of what looked like the Christmas party. I’ll send that too.’
‘When do you need all this by?’ Elsa asked. It sounded as though she was making a concerted effort not to sound overwhelmed.
‘As soon as possible,’ Kell replied. ‘You think you can pull it off?’
‘This is why people hire me.’
25
The first thing that François reacted to was Amelia’s beauty. He had not expected to find her so striking. Her remarkable appearance surprised him, because he had deliberately decided never to look at her photograph. Extraordinary dignity and strength of character in her face. She was elegantly dressed. The cut of her jacket brought out the fullness of her breasts and made her waist look slim and flat, as though she had never borne a child. He saw that she was wearing only basic make-up: a pale pink lipstick, light foundation, some definition around the eyes.
At first, because it was what he had decided on as the best course of action, he closed the door behind her and then reached out to shake her hand. Very quickly, however, he was drawing Amelia towards him into an embrace. She resisted this at first, and looked at him as though concerned that he might run off, like a frightened animal. He was touched by this. Her embrace, when it eventually came, was soft and hesitant, but as she reacted to the strength in his arms she squeezed much harder. She was not shaking, but he could sense that she was overwhelmed to be with him and he allowed her to rest her head briefly against his shoulder. François found that his own breathing was quick and lacked control, an irregularity that he put down to nerves.
‘Do you mind if we talk in French?’ he said, the line that he had practised and rehearsed many times.
‘Of course not!’ Amelia replied, and he heard the accuracy of her French, the flawless accent.
‘It’s just that I have never learned to speak English. I heard from the agency that you were fluent.’
‘Well, that was flattering of them. I’m a little rusty.’
He had rehearsed the next part, too. My mother is British, and the British like to drink tea. Offer to make her a cup. It will break the ice and it will give me something to do in the first awkward minutes. To François’ relief, Amelia accepted, and he led her through the small apartment to a kitchen that faced on to the street. He had already set out two cups and saucers and a bowl of brown sugar and could sense her
watching him with forensic attention as he poured water into the kettle and retrieved a carton of milk from the fridge.
‘Would you like a biscuit?’
‘Thank you, no,’ she replied, a lovely open smile. She was so impressive to look at; what his grandfather would have called ‘sophistiquée’. He could see the euphoria in her eyes; she was trying hard to disguise it. He knew that she wanted to hold him again and to apologize for everything that she had done. Behind a British screen of nods and acknowledging smiles was a woman overwhelmed by the privilege of meeting him.
They spent the next four hours deep in conversation. To his surprise, Amelia told him almost immediately that she worked for SIS.
‘I can’t bear the idea of any lies coming between us,’ she explained. ‘Obviously it’s not something that I speak about very much.’
‘Of course.’ He was so surprised by her candour that he made a joke about it. ‘I guess it’s kind of cool to have a mother who’s like Jason Bourne.’
She had laughed at this, but he realized that he had acknowledged her biological role as his mother before he had meant to. It was not a mistake, but it was not how he had wanted the afternoon to proceed. He suspected that the secret Amelia had shared with him had been intended, from her point of view, as a bond between them, something that even François’ adopted parents had not known about her. And so it proved. Thereafter, he was surprised by how easy it was to talk to her. There were no awkward silences, no moments when he wished that she would leave so that he could be alone again in the apartment. They spoke about his career in I.T., they discussed the horror of the attacks in Egypt. Amelia appeared to be deeply sensitive to his loss, but she was not sentimental about it. He liked that. It showed that she had character.
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