He went into the tiny bathroom, ducking his head through the door. He brushed his teeth, he took off his shirt. He then retrieved the camera from his suitcase, took out the memory card from his pocket and replaced it in its slot. He picked up the bottle of Macallan and poured himself a tooth mug of whisky to ease him into sleep.
The Spirit Level was still open on the bed, face down, stretching the spine. Kell picked it up, planning to read ‘Postscript’ again in order to erase his questions, to change his mood and to shut out the operation for a few well-earned hours.
The earthed lightning of a flock of swans.
The book was on the wrong page. ‘Postscript’ was the final poem in the collection, but he was looking at ‘At the Wellhead’, four pages earlier. Somebody had picked up the book and put it back without due care. Somebody had been through the contents of his room.
34
If Kell was in any doubt that Madeleine Brive had been intent only on distracting Stephen Uniacke while a third party searched his room, it was dispelled by what happened next. As soon as he lifted the lid on the Marquand laptop, he saw that the encryption page installed by SIS had booted up: the small blue box in the centre of the screen was awaiting his sequence of passwords. A chambermaid, a cleaner, would not have done such a thing. Whoever had been into his room had attempted to boot the computer, only to encounter the password protection. Unable to shut it down, they had closed the lid and put the laptop back on the floor.
Kell lay on the narrow bed and considered his options. Was Uniacke blown? Not necessarily. If a DGSE team had control of the ship, they would know the names and cabin numbers of every passenger on board, including ‘Stephen Uniacke’. Madeleine would have been instructed to distract him with her little dance of the honeytrap so that one of her colleagues – Luc, perhaps – could go through his belongings. Accessing Kell’s cabin would have been as easy as breaking a pane of glass: a quick bribe of the concierge; a computer attack on the SNCM reservations system – either would have yielded the pin. And what would Luc have discovered? At worst, a camera with no memory card and a laptop with password protection. Hardly the stuff of conspiracy theories. The rest of his belongings were as mundane as they were blameless: clothes; toiletries; books.
Kell was suddenly aware – too late, perhaps – of a threat from visual surveillance. A basic, low-light camera might have been fitted in his cabin. He was still lying on the narrow bed, arms propped behind his head, and tried quickly to recall how he had behaved since entering the room. He had been into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. He had poured himself a whisky, opened and then closed the laptop. He had looked – too long and too hard, perhaps – at the book of poems. How would his behaviour have seemed to Luc, watching on a blurred surveillance screen in Cabin 4571? Suspicious? Kell doubted it. Any agitation he might have shown could more plausibly have been interpreted as regret for not following Madeleine to her cabin. Nevertheless, he set about going to bed, knowing, of course, that if there was a camera concealed in a light fitting, or hidden behind the mirror, that he could not go looking for it. Instead, he must behave naturally. Rising from the bed, as though he had been briefly distracted by an unsettling thought, Kell keyed the ten-digit password into the laptop and typed a random sequence of letters into the computer for several minutes, to give the appearance of writing up a report or filling in the pages of a journal. Next, he turned to The Spirit Level, studying a couple of poems intently, as though his earlier behaviour had been some indication of scholarly angst. He then stripped to his underpants, took a T-shirt from his suitcase, and climbed into bed.
It was a relief to turn out the light and to lie in the darkness unseen, a taste of whisky and toothpaste in his mouth. Kell’s beating heart kept time to the thrumming of the engine and he felt enclosed by the womb of the ship. As soon as the ferry came within signal range of the European coast, Kell knew that he would be obliged to call London with an update. He had three options. He could tell Jimmy Marquand that Amelia Levene, the Chief-designate of the Secret Intelligence Service, had an illegitimate son. This was the truth of the situation and would fulfil Kell’s formal obligation to SIS. He could also reveal his suspicion that French Intelligence had discovered Malot’s identity, followed him to Tunisia and perhaps even attempted to recruit him en route to Marseille. Of course, these revelations would be catastrophic for Amelia and lead to her immediate dismissal from the Service. As a consequence, the revival of his own career would be stillborn; with Truscott in charge, Kell would remain persona non grata.
There was a second option. Kell could tell Marquand that François Malot was a fraud, that he was masquerading as Amelia’s son and had returned to France by ship in the company of at least two French Intelligence officers. But was there any evidence for this? Kell had spent an hour talking to Malot in the bar and at no point felt that he was speaking to an impostor. Amelia’s son bore a striking physical resemblance to his mother and his legend was watertight: a thorough search of his hotel room in Gammarth had failed to turn up anything suspicious. The purpose of the DGSE mounting such an operation – so fraught with risk, so difficult to carry off – was also not clear, but neither was it beyond the realms of possibility. Furthermore, the implications it entailed – that Malot’s adoptive parents had been murdered and their funeral faked – were too wretched to consider. For this reason, Kell set them to the back of his mind and concluded that he had no proof of such a conspiracy.
He settled, with no great fanfare or embattled conscience, on a third course of action. Let London continue to think that Amelia Levene is having an affair. Let Truscott and Haynes assume that she merely slipped her moorings for a few days in order to enjoy a dirty weekend with a French lothario in Gammarth. It was what they wanted to believe, after all; it was what they deserved to believe. To lie to Marquand in this way was not something Kell would have considered twelve months earlier, but his loyalty to the newly minted high priests of SIS was close to non-existent. ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,’ he thought, remembering the words of E.M. Forster, ‘I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’
For the first time in his life, that notion made sense to him.
35
The safe house was located on the summit of a hill overlooking the southern expanse of the Ariège, about three kilometres east of the village of Salles-sur-l’Hers in Languedoc-Roussillon. It was approached from the south by a single-track road leading off the D625. The track passed the house in a tight loop and turned sharply downhill past a ruined windmill before rejoining the main road to Castelnaudary about two kilometres to the south-east.
There were usually only two guards at the house: Akim and Slimane. That was more than enough to keep an eye on HOLST. Each man had his own bedroom on the first floor with a shelf of pirated DVDs and a laptop computer. In the downstairs living room there was a large television equipped with a Nintendo Wii, and the two men spent as many as four or five hours every day playing rounds of golf in St Andrews, games of tennis at Roland Garros or fighting al-Qaeda insurgents in the backstreets and caves of a cartoon Afghanistan. They were forbidden to bring women to the house and lived off a steady diet of roast chicken, couscous and frozen pizzas.
HOLST himself was locked in a small room between the entrance hall and a large ground-floor bedroom at the southern end of the house. There were two doors leading into his makeshift cell. The main door, linked to the entrance hall, was secured by a padlock. The second, which connected the cell to the bedroom at the back, was held in place by two metal bars mounted on hooks. The boss had built a sight-glass into both doors to monitor HOLST’s movements and behaviour day and night. HOLST received three meals per day and was allowed to exercise for twenty minutes every afternoon on a small patch of grass behind the house. The exercise area was bordered on three sides by a twelve-foot hedge so that HOLST could not be seen by passers-by. He had never refused food and made no complaint about the conditions in which h
e was kept. If he needed to go to the bathroom, there was a bucket in his cell which Akim and Slimane emptied at meal times. From time to time, Slimane would grow bored and agitated and do things that Akim didn’t think he should do. On one occasion, for example, Slimane took his knife and put a gag in HOLST’s mouth, then heated the blade on the gas stove and got a kick out of watching HOLST wince and moan as he drew circles round his eyes. They never hurt him, though. They never touched a hair on his head. The worst thing, maybe, was when Slimane got drunk and told HOLST about a girl he had raped. That was a really bad story and Akim had gone in and got him to cool down. But generally Akim believed that the prisoner was being treated with dignity and respect.
After a week, on the instructions of the boss, HOLST had been allowed a television and some DVDs in his room, which he watched for up to sixteen hours every day. As a further gesture of goodwill, and against all protocol, Akim had let HOLST sit with him in the living room one evening – albeit while handcuffed to a chair – to watch a football match between Marseille and a team from England. He had given him a beer and explained that it would not be long before he was allowed to go back to Paris.
Akim’s only moment of real concern arose in the middle of the second week when a neighbour happened to pass by the house and enquire if the owners would be returning in the autumn. The sight of a shaven-headed Arabe in the rural Languedoc had evidently surprised the man, who had quite literally taken a step backwards when Akim had opened the door. Only a few metres away, Slimane had stuffed a dishcloth into HOLST’s mouth and was leaning a gun into his groin to prevent him from shouting for help. Akim had said that the owner was a friend from Paris who would be arriving within the next few days. Thankfully, the boss himself did indeed turn up the following afternoon and any concerned neighbours with binoculars trained on the house would have been gladdened by the sight of a bearded white man mowing the grass in his shorts and later diving into the outdoor pool.
On a clear day, it was possible to see the distant foothills of the Pyrenees across the flat expanse of the Ariège, but on the morning of Akim’s weekly trip to Castelnaudary, a storm had blown in from the Basque country and drenched the property in an inch of warm summer rain. Akim went first to the hypermarket at Villefranche-de-Lauragais to buy basic provisions, as well as Bandol rosé for Valerie and a bottle of Ricard for the boss. In a pharmacy in Castelnaudary, he fetched the asthma medication for HOLST and bought himself some deodorant and aspirin, both of which were running low in the house. Slimane had put in a request for several pornographic magazines, which Akim purchased in a tabac from an elderly woman who did nothing to disguise the fact that she considered the presence of an Arabe in her shop an affront to the dignity of the Republic.
‘Scum,’ she muttered under her breath as Akim left the shop and it was all that he could do to control his rage and to keep on walking. The last thing the boss wanted was any trouble.
He returned to the house to find HOLST watching Diva on DVD. Slimane was sitting in the kitchen smoking a cigarette in the company of two men whom Akim had never seen before.
‘Boss wants us for a job,’ he said. ‘These guys are going to watch our friend.’
The two men, both white and in their early twenties, introduced themselves as ‘Jacques’ and ‘Patric’, names that Akim took for pseudonyms. Slimane had his laptop open on the kitchen table and swivelled it round so that Akim could see what he was looking at. There was a blurred surveillance photograph on the screen, taken in what looked like a disco or late-night bar.
‘They’re worried about some guy on the ferry,’ he said. ‘Luc’s girl wants us to follow him. Get your stuff. We’re going to Marseille.’
36
Kell was woken at seven o’clock by the sound of children running in the corridor outside his cabin. He had a shower in the tiny bathroom, packed his suitcase and took the camera up on deck. It was a grey morning, the French coast not yet visible through banks of cloud, but when he switched on the London mobile he discovered that he could get a signal. Kell immediately rang Marquand at home and found him awake and good-humoured, eating a bowl of cereal in the kitchen.
‘Bran Flakes, Tom. Fibre,’ he said. ‘Have to look after myself. I’m not getting any younger.’
‘No, you’re not,’ Kell replied, and told him what needed to be done.
‘There might be some calls to Uniacke’s office in Reading. The consultancy firm. Possible that his finances might be checked as well. Can you make sure everything is kosher, bank balances, tax returns, that there’s somebody who knows the drill? Uniacke stayed in a hotel in Hammamet, so that will need to flash up, also ATM withdrawals and restaurant receipts. Can you fix it?’
Marquand was putting the details into a computer. Kell could hear the soft taps as his fingers hit the keyboard.
‘Who the hell’s doing the checking? Amelia?’
Kell was ready with the lie. ‘Nothing to do with her. Different situation altogether. I spotted an old contact in Tunis. Decided to follow him to Marseille. I’m on the overnight ferry.’
‘You’re what? What does this have to do with our agreement?’
‘Everything and nothing.’ A sleepy-eyed African emerged from the interior of the ship, clearing her head in the brisk wind. ‘It’s a long story. Came at me out of thin air. I’ll brief you when I get back. Just make sure the Uniacke backstops are in place. If somebody rings the Reading office and asks to speak to Stephen, I’m on holiday until Friday.’
Marquand repeated the word ‘Friday’ and then withdrew any suggestion of financial or technical support. ‘Look, if you’ve abandoned Amelia to her fate, Tom, the Office isn’t going to pay you by the hour to pursue an entirely new operation. They pushed you out, remember? To all intents and purposes, you were fired, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Who said anything about abandoning Amelia?’ Kell was looking out at the eternal greys of the sliding sea, water fizzing against the sides of the ship. How typical of Marquand to think only of the money, to cover his back. A bureaucrat through and through. ‘She kissed François goodbye at the airport yesterday morning. Squeezed his bum and bought a bottle of Hermès Calèche to cheer herself up. Should be back in Nice by now. Have the Knights do a drive-by of the Gillespie.’ There was a grumble on the line, which Kell took as a sign that Marquand was backing down. ‘I don’t need paying,’ he added. ‘My work is done. If something comes of this, maybe you can throw me a bone later on.’
‘Who are you following, Tom?’
‘Not until I get home,’ Kell replied. ‘Like I said. Just an old contact.’ And he hung up.
Four hours later, no sign of Madeleine at breakfast, no glimpse of Luc or Malot, Kell was standing with his camera on the sun deck beneath the unceasing roar of the ship’s funnel, the ferry pulling towards Marseille. The southern coast of France was now lit by crisp midday sunlight, boats easing east and west below the squat cream cliffs of the Calanques. Kell had deleted the pictures of Malot’s room at the Ramada as well as the surveillance photographs of Amelia lying beside the pool. He now replaced them with a sequence of shots appropriate to the interests and sensibility of a lone, middle-aged marketing consultant on a roll-on, roll-off ferry: pictures of orange lifeboats; studies of laundry bags piled high behind paint-chipped portholes; weathered coils of rope.
Once the ship had docked in Marseille he queued with the other foot passengers, perhaps forty of them crowded into a narrow, increasingly stuffy stairwell leading down to the car decks. There was a long delay as the ship was cleared; only when every vehicle had funnelled out on to the mainland were the foot passengers permitted to leave. Kell fell in behind an Irish couple arguing vociferously about being late for a flight to Dublin. They shuffled en masse down a carpeted corridor towards a prefabricated building at the southern edge of the dock, where customs officials were inspecting random bags on formica tables. If the DGSE remained suspicious of him, Kell knew that he would now most probably be stopped and his luggage searched.
That was page one of the operational handbook. He was confident that they would find nothing to link him to Malot. The photos were gone and he had destroyed the Uniacke receipts from the Valencia Carthage. As long as Marquand had generated a paper trail for Uniacke in Hammamet, he would be fine.
In the event, Kell was allowed to pass through the customs area without incident and found himself in a slow-moving queue for Immigration. There were no split channels for EU citizens and several of the foot passengers ahead of him were carrying Tunisian and Algerian passports. Kell, aware that Luc or Madeleine could be watching from behind a screen of one-way glass at the side of the Immigration area, was surprised by the extent of his own anxiety. To occupy himself, and to convey an impression of calm, he read a couple of pages of The Scramble for Africa, then checked the messages on his London phone.
Claire had called. A voicemail had been left in the early hours of the English morning. Kell could hear, by the rushed and surly tone of her voice, that she had been drinking. Her anger at his failure to appear in Finchley had now crystallized into a typical rant.
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