‘Every tower block in the world, every thirty-storey high-rise built to house the urban working class in the last sixty years, looks like it does because of the Cité Radieuse.’
‘It’s true?’ The driver was looking at Kell in his rear-view mirror, eyes narrowed against the sun. It was hard to tell if he was interested or just being polite.
‘It’s true. From Sheffield to Sao Paulo, if you grew up on the tenth floor of a concrete housing scheme, Le Corbusier put you there.’
‘I grew up outside Lyon,’ said the driver. ‘My father owns a shop,’ which was where the more enlightened section of their conversation ended. Thereafter he was intent only on talking about football, pointing out the Stade Velodrome on Boulevard Michelet, home to Olympique de Marseille, and complaining that Karim Benzema, once the darling of Lyon’s supporters, had ‘whored himself to Real Madrid’. Moments later the driver had dropped Kell at the entrance to the Cité Radieuse.
‘This is it?’ he said, peering up at the building with evident suspicion. ‘Looks like every other fucking tower in Marseille.’
‘Exactly,’ Kell replied. Two hundred metres back along the road, two men on mopeds had pulled over on Boulevard Michelet. Kell was certain that he had seen one of the drivers, wearing a blue crash helmet, tailing the cab on Place Castellane. The two mopeds disappeared out of sight down a side street and Kell paid the driver.
‘Good to talk to you,’ he said.
The Cité Radieuse was situated in a small, poorly maintained municipal garden, set back from Boulevard Michelet behind a screen of trees. Kell found the entrance and was soon in the third-floor restaurant eating a sandwich and drinking a cup of coffee. This section of the building operated both as an upmarket boutique hotel and as an area in which visitors to the complex could look at examples of Le Corbusier’s work. The rest of Cité Radieuse was still a fully functioning apartment building, complete with a rooftop kindergarten and a row of shops. Kell, breaking a minor law of trespass, took an interior staircase to one of the upper storeys so that he could snoop around without feeling like a tourist.
This was a mistake. Emerging into a long, black-red corridor, dark as a throat, he found himself entirely alone, with little sound except the occasional murmur of a television or radio in one of the apartments. Halfway down the corridor, which was blocked off at the far end, Kell heard a noise behind him and turned to see two young Arab men in tracksuits moving towards him. He thought immediately of the moped drivers. One of them, brandishing a metal pole said, in English: ‘Hello, mister, can we help you?’ but Kell was under no illusion that they were residents. La Cité Radieuse was too affluent for a couple of migrant kids in tracksuits to be renting an apartment.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said, replying in French but already setting his shoulder bag on the ground so that he could move and react more freely. ‘I’m just looking around. Big fan of Corbusier.’
‘What have you got with you?’ said the older of the two men, nodding at Kell’s bag. Kell saw the glint of a knife in his left hand, the blade briefly catching the dull yellow glow of a light in the doorway of an apartment.
‘Why?’ he replied. ‘What’s on your mind?’
Nothing more was said. They came for him. Kell picked up the bag and threw it very quickly across the floor, hard enough that the man with the knife was briefly knocked off balance. Rather than turn to retaliate, however, the man moved several paces back down the corridor and picked up the bag, leaving his friend to fight alone. The second Arab was older, but shorter and more agile than the first. Kell felt the numb slowness of his middle-aged bones as he wheeled to confront him. There was noise now, Kell shouting loudly in French to alert the residents, projecting strength, watching the metal bar and looking constantly for the flash of a second blade. He was effectively trapped at the end of the corridor, with nowhere to turn, no space in which to run. In front of him, about ten metres down the corridor, silhouetted by a distant whitewashed wall reflecting outdoor light, the younger man shouted out: ‘OK, I’ve got it,’ just as his accomplice moved in to strike. Rather than use it as a weapon, he hurled the bar, but Kell had time to duck as it whistled past him, clanging into a door at the back of the corridor. The Arab came at him now, throwing a punch that Kell took in the ribs. He was able to catch his attacker in his momentum, to grab at him. They were thrown to the ground and Kell, drawing on some vague and distant memory of a Fort Monckton fight class, pressed a finger into the man’s left eye and drove it deep into the socket.
‘Let’s go!’ his accomplice shouted. Kell saw the younger man at the edge of his vision, as he drove his hand up into his attacker’s throat, pushing his neck backwards. At the same time, a knee thumped into his groin, slowly and almost without force, but pain was soon shunting into Kell’s gut and spine so that he groaned and swore, again trying to gain a hold on the Arab’s neck. His assailant somehow freed himself, days-old sweat like a taste in Kell’s mouth, and launched a kick directly into his face. Kell brought his arms up around his head, trying to get to his feet, but the younger man had joined them and was standing above him, swearing triumphantly in high-pitched Marseille Arabic and landing heavy kicks repeatedly into Kell’s arms and legs. He was terrified that he would now use the knife.
Just then, a commotion behind them, a door opening in the black-red corridor. There was a voice in the dark.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ a woman shouted in French and the two assailants ran, scooping up the shoulder bag and taking it with them, trainers squeaking on the linoleum. Kell swore after them, defeated and lying on the ground. They had the laptop, the camera, the Marquand mobile, the Uniacke passport. They had everything.
The woman came towards him.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
39
There were police, there were paramedics, there were a great many concerned neighbours from all corners of La Cité Radieuse. There was also, of course, the shame of being mugged, that particular sense of humiliation which comes in the aftermath of a thorough defeat. But mostly Kell felt the dread of bureaucracy, of form-filling, of enforced visits to local hospitals, of the pity and fuss of strangers. He was obliged to see a doctor, who issued a Certificat Medicale which confirmed that Kell had suffered no serious physical damage save for a severe bruise on his left bicep and another on his left thigh, both already the colour of aubergines. His right kneecap had swollen slightly and he had a cut above the eye that did not require stitching. Both Claude, the French paramedic who examined him at the scene, and Laurent, the lugubrious police officer who had only that morning arrested ‘trois putains de beurs’, recommended that Kell stay overnight and submit to a full medical examination in hospital. You could be in shock, said Claude. You ought to have a blood test, said Laurent. There was no way of knowing if Monsieur Uniacke had sustained internal injuries.
Kell, who had spent exactly one day in bed with illness since the age of fifteen, had always been a firm believer in listening to his own body, rather than to the risk-averse counselling of jaded public servants. On this occasion, his body told him what he wanted to hear: that he would be a little stiff in the morning, a little older, and that the injury to his knee would cause him to limp for several days. Otherwise the fight had damaged no more than his pride. It had also placed Thomas Kell in the awkward position of having to give a sworn Procés-Verbal to the Marseille police in the name of Stephen Uniacke. This was contrary to the spy’s DNA, to every impulse he possessed to keep a low profile when conducting an operation overseas. Yet if the DGSE was going to send two Arab thugs to beat him up, Kell figured he didn’t have much of a choice.
It took less than five minutes in Laurent’s spruce Citroën Xsara to reach police headquarters half a mile away, thanks to the traffic-parting wail of a siren. The building was a sandstone, three-storey Hausmann throwback in an otherwise hyper-modern Marseille suburb with a predictable mix of late-afternoon clientele idling in the lobby: jumpy pickpockets; protest
ing drug dealers; breathalysed post-lunch businessmen; pensioners with a grudge. Kell was fast-tracked into an office on the second floor and interviewed formally by Laurent and his partner, Alain, a thirty-something hard man with salt-and-pepper stubble and a gleaming firearm, which he touched from time to time, like someone stroking a cat. Kell was asked for a full inventory of his shoulder bag and listed the contents as best he could, well aware that Jimmy Marquand and the beancounters at SIS would require a copy of the official police statement in order to reclaim the laptop and camera on insurance; such was the box-ticking small-mindedness that had overtaken the Service in recent years. After thirty minutes he was taken into a second room and shown a series of mug shots of local North African hoodlums, none of whom matched the descriptions of the two men who had assaulted him. It was already seven o’clock by the time Laurent was satisfied that he had covered every detail of the attack, asking Kell to sign the official ‘Plainte Contre X’ and apologizing, much to Alain’s evident distaste, that ‘as a British tourist’ he had fallen prey to ‘an immigrant crime’. Kell, who was in no doubt that his two assailants had stolen his laptop and phones to order, thanked both policemen for their ‘patience and professionalism’, and asked to be driven back to his hotel as soon as possible so that he could rest before travelling to Paris in the morning.
Laurent was on the point of agreeing when the telephone rang. He picked it up and said: ‘Yes?’ then embarked on what Kell assumed was an internal call. ‘Oui, oui,’ the policeman muttered slowly, before a half-smile broke out on his face. Laurent nodded his head and made happy eye contact with Kell. Something had happened.
‘It appears that your bag has been found, Monsieur Uniacke,’ he said, hanging up the phone. ‘It was dropped outside La Cité Radieuse and picked up by a member of the public. One of my fellow officers is bringing it to you now.’
Three minutes later there was a knock at the door and a third police officer walked into the room. He was wearing regulation black boots and a crisp, navy-blue uniform. Like Alain, he carried a firearm on his belt, but looked in every way a more imposing figure, thickset and pitiless. The beard had gone, taking as much as ten years off his face, but Kell recognized the man instantly.
It was Luc.
40
That Luc had bothered to shave off his beard told Kell everything he needed to know. Malot’s companion from the boat intended to interview him while impersonating a police officer and did not want to run the small risk that Kell would recognize him. He said: ‘Bonjour’ in an upbeat fashion, passed the shoulder bag to Laurent, and introduced himself as ‘Benedict Voltaire’, a pseudonym as preposterous as any Kell had ever encountered.
‘So what happened here please?’ he asked in English, settling into a chair that Alain had vacated, as though making way for a visiting dignitary. Kell noted the extra stripe on Luc’s shoulder, outranking his two putative colleagues. He was either a senior police official or, more likely, a French Intelligence officer who had persuaded Laurent and Alain to let him masquerade as a cop.
‘Monsieur Uniacke is a British national. He was visiting La Cité Radieuse when he was attacked by two Arab youths. They took his bag, but it looks like he got lucky.’
‘It does look like that, yes,’ Luc replied, this time in French. He had the cracked, gravelly voice of a heavy smoker and was studying Kell’s face intently, as though delaying the inevitable moment when he would expose him as a liar. Laurent had unzipped the bag.
‘Would you like to check that nothing is missing?’
He passed the bag across the desk and Kell quickly began to remove the contents and to place them, one by one, amid the paperwork and mugs in front of him. The laptop was the first item to emerge, not damaged in any way. Next came the camera, then the Marquand mobile, which was still switched on. He placed it beside his London phone on the table. The Scramble for Africa was at the bottom of the bag, wedged in next to a tourist map of Marseille. Finally, from a zip-up interior pocket, he retrieved the Uniacke wallet.
‘Two cell phones?’ said Luc, a rising note of suspicion in his voice. Kell knew that he was in a scrap potentially far more dangerous than his earlier fight in the corridor. The SIM would have been checked and traced and he prayed that Marquand had erased Uniacke’s trail through Nice. It was only by sheer luck that Kell’s London phone had not been stolen; had Luc been given access to that, it would have been game over.
‘That’s right,’ he said, picking up the Marquand phone and inspecting it. ‘I have one for work, one for personal stuff.’
There was an unread text message on the screen and he opened it. It was from Marquand himself:
You were right. Everyone safely back in town. See you next week.
‘Personal stuff,’ Luc repeated, in English, as though Kell had employed a euphemism. The smell of a recently extinguished cigarette was on his breath.
‘This is fantastic,’ Kell said, trying to ignore Luc’s cynicism by channelling the innocent relief and enthusiasm of Stephen Uniacke. ‘Everything seems to be here. My laptop, my camera …’ He checked the wallet next, flicking through the books of stamps, the membership of Kew, the various Uniacke credit and debit cards. Inevitably, more than four hundred euros had been removed. ‘Fuck, they took all my fucking money,’ he said. ‘Excuse my language.’
Laurent smiled. ‘No problem.’ He looked quickly at Luc, as though tacitly asking permission to speak. ‘You have insurance, yes?’
‘Of course.’
‘How much is missing?’ Luc asked. ‘How much did they take?’
‘I think about four hundred euros. I took five hundred out of an ATM this morning but spent some …’
‘Put a thousand on the form,’ Luc said grandly, nodding towards Laurent. It was a smart, if obvious psychological move.
‘I’m not sure I approve of that,’ Kell replied, but the smile on his face belied any ethical reservations he might have possessed. He turned the smile into a grateful nod of the head, saying: ‘Thank you’ to Luc with as much sincerity as he could muster. To bolster his image as a family man, he then laid out the frayed photographs of ‘Bella’ and ‘Dan’, his phantom son and phantom daughter, and said: ‘These are the most valuable things in my wallet. I’m just glad I didn’t lose those.’
‘Of course,’ Laurent replied quickly, with what sounded like genuine sincerity, and even Luc seemed moved by Kell’s devotion to his family.
‘What about the computer?’ he asked. ‘Is it damaged in any way?’
This was the most vulnerable moment in the interview, the point at which the DGSE could easily catch him out. They had stolen Kell’s bag in order to examine the laptop. He was convinced of that. He was also convinced that they would not have returned the computer to him unless they had failed to crack the encryption. Even had they done so, it was unlikely that French tech-ops would have found anything incriminating. In the hotel, Kell had run an SIS-installed software programme that erased the user’s digital footprints, replacing them with a series of benign cookies and URLs; the DGSE would have found only the emails and search engine history of Stephen Uniacke, marketing consultant and family man, reader of the Daily Mail and occasional gambler with Paddy Power. The Uniacke legend was so watertight it even had an account with Amazon.
‘Is it working?’ Luc asked, rising to his feet after Kell had flipped the lid and powered it up. It was obvious that he was coming round the desk in order to watch Kell typing in the password. Kell had no choice but to do so without complaint, tapping in the ten-digit code right under Luc’s direct and unembarrassed gaze.
‘Why do you have a password, if I may ask?’
‘I work as a consultant,’ Kell replied, again channelling his alter-ego’s guileless integrity. ‘We have a lot of high-net-worth clients who wouldn’t want information about their businesses falling into the wrong hands.’ He remembered the moments he had spent staring at the laptop screen in his cabin, under the possible surveillance of a DGSE camera, and found
a way of explaining it: ‘Trouble is, I always forget the code because it’s so bloody long.’
‘Of course,’ said Luc, who hadn’t moved an inch.
‘Is there something you wanted to see?’ Kell asked, looking back over his shoulder with what he hoped was the mild suggestion that Benedict Voltaire of the Marseille constabulary was beginning to encroach on his privacy. ‘Everything seems to be working fine.’
This was enough to deter him. Reaching up to stroke the beard that was no longer there, Luc walked towards a double-glazed window at the southern end of the room and looked out over the back of the building. He tapped a couple of fingers on the glass and Kell wondered how he would make his next move. Surely the DGSE was now convinced of his innocence? Surely he had nothing to link him to Amelia or Malot?
‘What were you doing in Marseille, Mr Uniacke?’
Kell’s instinct was to insist that he had already answered such questions many times since the attack, but it was vital not to rise to Luc’s provocations.
‘I was in Tunisia on holiday. I came over on the ferry last night.’
Luc turned to face him. ‘And was there anybody on the ferry who may have antagonized you? Who may have had a reason to follow you in Marseille and to attack you?’
It was not the line of enquiry that Kell had expected. Where was Luc going with this?
‘I don’t think so. I talked to a couple of people in the bar, to some others in the queue while we were waiting to disembark. Otherwise, nobody. I was mainly reading in my cabin.’
‘No arguments? No problems on the boat?’
Kell shook his head. ‘None.’ It was almost too easy. ‘No arguments,’ he said, a sudden wince of pain in his knee.
In a room nearby, a man suddenly raised his voice in violent anger, as though enraged by a wild injustice. The building then became quiet again.
‘You said to my colleague that you are on your way to Paris?’
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