A Foreign Country

by Charles Cumming

  They had been. Their top-floor flat four blocks away in Montmartre had gone up in smoke at two o’clock in the morning. An electrical fault, according to the landlord. They had been lucky to escape alive. If the fire brigade had not come as quickly as they did, Maria explained, Kitty would almost certainly have suffocated.

  ‘And you don’t know anybody else who might have a photograph of François? An uncle? An aunt? An ex-girlfriend?’

  Christophe shook his head. ‘François is a loner,’ he said.

  ‘He does not have any friends,’ Maria added, as though she had long been suspicious of this. ‘No girls, either. Why do you keep asking about photographs? What’s going on?’

  By now, she had sat on the arm of her husband’s chair, her hand in his. Kell opened the window and sat in the chair that Maria had earlier occupied. The light outside had faded and there were children playing in the street.

  ‘When did you last hear from him? You said that you’d received a number of emails.’

  ‘It sounds as though you’ve already read them.’ Christophe’s quick response lacked malice. It was as if the fresh air blowing in from the street had cleared the last of the ill-feeling between them.

  Kell nodded. ‘MI6 intercepted an email that François sent to your ‘dugarrylemec’ address three days ago. His situation is a concern to us. The email was sent from Tunis. That’s how I know about Kitty, about Uncle Frankie, about the books. What else has he told you?’

  The question appeared to unlock something within Christophe, who frowned as though poring over a puzzle.

  ‘He has told me a lot of things,’ he said, his soft eyes almost sorrowful in their confusion. ‘I have to be honest with you. Some of it worries me. Some of what he has written does not make very much sense.’

  45

  It all poured out, and was later produced as a transcript thanks to a DGSE analyst who, five days later, conducted his weekly check on the microphones at the Delestres’ apartment and came across evidence of the conversation with Thomas Kell.

  The take quality was considered extremely high.

  CHRISTOPHE DELESTRE (CD): He has told me a lot of things. I have to be honest with you. Some of it worries me. Some of what he has written does not make very much sense.

  THOMAS KELL (TK): Tell me more.

  CD: I know Frankie very well, OK? It isn’t like him just to disappear and make a new life, even with everything that’s happened to him.

  TK: How do you mean, ‘make a new life’?

  MARIA DELESTRE (MD): In the other emails he’s talked about leaving Paris for good, how upset he is about what happened in Egypt, saying that he doesn’t know when he’ll be coming home …

  CD: The thing is, Frankie was never that close to his mother and father. He was adopted, did you know that?

  TK: I knew that.

  CD: But now it’s like he can’t get out of bed in the morning. He won’t talk to me, he won’t go to work …

  TK: What do you mean he won’t talk to you?

  CD: I can’t get him on the phone …

  MD: [Unclear]

  TK: He doesn’t answer the phone?

  CD: No. He won’t respond to my messages. We used to talk all the time, I’m like his brother. Now everything is SMS …

  TK: Text messages.

  CD: Exactly, which was never his style. He [expletive] hates SMS. But now I get maybe three or four every day.

  TK: May I see them?

  Pause. Sound of movement.

  MD: [Unclear]

  CD: Here. You can just click through them.

  MD: It’s difficult for you to know, but they aren’t like him at all. What do they say? ‘Starting new life’? ‘Sick of France’? ‘Too many memories in Paris’? All [expletive]. Frankie is not sentimental like this. It’s as if he’s joined a cult or something, some kind of therapy that’s telling him to say these things, breaking him away from his old friends.

  TK: Grief can do strange things to people.

  CD: But [Traffic noise. Unclear.]

  TK: [Traffic noise continuing. Unclear.] How did he behave at the funeral?

  MD: It was like you would expect. Just awful. He was very brave but very upset, you know? We all were. It was Père-Lachaise, very formal, only close friends and family invited.

  TK: Père-Lachaise?

  CD: Yes. It’s a cemetery about half an hour—

  TK: I know what it is.

  CD: [Unclear]

  TK: Which arrondissement is that?

  MD: What?

  CD: Père-Lachaise? The twentieth, I think.

  TK: Not the fourteenth?

  CD: What?

  TK: You’re certain that the funeral was in the twentieth arrondissement? Not in Montparnasse?

  CD [and MD partial]: Yes.

  TK: Can you tell me the date?

  CD: For sure. It was a Friday. The twenty-first or twenty-second, I think.

  46

  That two funerals had been arranged for Philippe and Jeannine Malot confirmed to Kell that Amelia had been the victim of an elaborate DGSE sting. The emails Christophe had received from François (‘Frankie is not sentimental like this. It’s as if he’s joined a cult or something’) had almost certainly been written by an impostor. Kell checked out of his hotel and prepared to return to London, where he would confront Amelia with the wretched truth of what had been done to her.

  In the early years of his career, coming home had always given Kell a buzz. He might have been returning from a meeting in Vienna or Bonn, or from a longer operation overseas, but always there was the same slightly elevated sense of his own importance as he touched down on British soil. Passing through Heathrow or Gatwick, he would feel like a superior being among a rabble of lesser mortals, gliding invisibly through passport control on Her Majesty’s secret service. Such arrogance, such hubris, had long since ceased to form a part of Kell’s make-up. He no longer felt anointed or conferred with particular status; he was conscious only of being different to all the rest. Towards the end of his time with SIS, he had envied the uncomplicated lives of the men and women of his own generation with whom he came into contact. What would it be like, he wondered, a life without lies, an existence free of the double-think and second-guess that was a permanent feature of his clandestine trade? Kell had been recruited for his charm and cunning; he knew that. He had risen to the heights as a direct consequence of his imagination and flair for deceit. But the ceaseless demands of the work – the need to stay one step ahead of the competition – not to mention the increasingly burdensome bureaucratic dimension of spying in the post-9/11 environment, were exhausting. Sometimes Kell wondered if what had happened to him in Kabul had been a blessing. The scandal had forced him out just at the point at which he was getting ready to jump. In this sense, a forty-two-year-old spy was no different to a forty-two-year-old chef or accountant. Men reached a certain point in their lives and felt the need for change, to make their mark on the landscape, to bank some serious money before it was all too late. So the chef bought himself a restaurant; the banker started his own hedge fund. And the spy? The drop-out rate from SIS after forty-five was as alarming as it was unstoppable. The cream of the crop, like Amelia, stayed on, in the hope of making ‘C’; the rest grew observably tired of the game and diverted their energies to the private sector, finding lucrative jobs in finance and oil, or opening up their contacts books to the grateful directors of boutique corporate espion-age outfits which attended, at colossal expense, to the whims and schemes of oligarchs and plutocrats the world over.

  Yet, while queuing for the Paddington Express at Heathrow, Kell was visited by a thought that had been troubling him throughout his journey across Tunisia and France: I was wasting my time before this. Thoughts of writing a book, thoughts of starting his own business. Why had he tried to deceive himself? He could no more function in the world beyond SIS than he could imagine becoming a father. He was like one of the grey, institutionalized men who had taught French or mathematics at hi
s school, teachers who were still plying their trade in exactly the same fashion at exactly the same place more than twenty-five years later. There was no escape.

  He had spoken to Amelia from a France Telecom booth in the Gare du Nord, using the télécarte purchased in Marseille.

  ‘Tom! How lovely to hear from you.’

  She had been in her office at Vauxhall Cross. He tried to keep the conversation brief, because you never knew who was listening in.

  ‘I need to see you,’ he told her. ‘Are you free tonight?’

  ‘Tonight? It’s a bit late notice.’ It felt like making a date with a girl who had six better offers. ‘Giles has tickets for the National.’

  ‘Can he go alone?’

  Amelia had detected Kell’s anxiety, something more than a bullish desire to get his own way.

  ‘Why, what’s happened? Is it Claire? Is everything all right?’

  Kell had looked out at the bustle and thrust of the Gare du Nord and allowed himself a momentary pause for reflection. No, nothing was all right with Claire. She’s putting me through the ringer. She’s drinking Pinot Noir with Dick the Wonder Schlong in Napa. He would gladly have talked to Amelia about his marriage for hours on end.

  ‘Nothing to do with Claire,’ he said. ‘Everything is as it was on that front. This is work stuff. Professional.’

  Amelia misunderstood. ‘Tom, I can’t talk about Yassin until I take over next month. Then we can sit down and we work out how to clear your—’

  ‘This is not about Yassin. I’m not worried about Kabul.’ He realized that he had not formally congratulated her on becoming Chief. He would do it later, if and when the opportunity arose. ‘It’s about you. We need to meet and we need to do it tonight.’

  ‘Fine.’ Her voice was suddenly slightly hostile. Amelia Levene, in common with most driven and successful people of Kell’s acquaintance, didn’t like being pushed around. ‘Where do you suggest?’

  Kell would have liked to meet outdoors, but it had begun to rain. He needed a place where they could talk at length without risk of being overheard. Amelia’s house and his own bachelor bedsit were out of the question, because any number of interested parties could have wired them for sight and sound. They might have gone to one of the private members clubs in Pall Mall to which he had access, if such places opened their doors to women. They could even have taken a room at a London hotel, if Kell had not been worried that Amelia would misread his intentions. In the end, she suggested an office in Bayswater to which SIS kept a set of keys.

  ‘It’s just behind the Whiteleys shopping centre,’ she said. ‘We use it from time to time. Nobody in the building after six o’clock except the odd cleaner. Will that do?’

  ‘That will do.’

  She arrived on foot and on time, wearing her habitual Office uniform: a skirt with matching jacket, a cream blouse, black shoes and a simple gold necklace. Kell had come straight from Paddington and was standing outside the building on Redan Place, his suitcase and shoulder bag set down on the steps behind him.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ Amelia asked, kissing him on both cheeks.

  ‘Just got back,’ he said.

  47

  The office was on the fourth floor. An alarm triggered as Amelia stepped inside; she knew the passcode and tapped it in. Kell followed her as she flicked a bank of lights, strobing rows of computers on desks in an open-plan office that stretched back to what looked like a kitchen. There were magazines and brochures on the desks, headsets and mugs of half-finished tea and coffee. Along the right-hand wall, rows of dresses wrapped in plastic were jammed on hangers like outfits in the backstage chaos of a fashion show.

  ‘What is this place?’ Kell asked.

  ‘Mail-order catalogue.’ Amelia walked to the far end of the room and immediately settled into a low red sofa near the kitchen. Kell closed the door behind him, put his bags on the ground and followed her.

  ‘So,’ she said, as he peered into the kitchen. ‘What happened to your face?’

  ‘Got into a fight. Mugged.’

  ‘Christ. Where?’

  ‘Marseille.’

  Amelia tripped on the coincidence, a split-second reaction fleeting across her face like scudding clouds. She disguised her concern by saying simply: ‘Poor you’ and then waited for Kell to elaborate. There was nowhere for him to sit, nowhere to make himself comfortable. He paced back and forth, wondering how to begin. Amelia always had this effect on him; he felt jumpy and somehow incomplete in her presence, a generation younger.

  ‘There isn’t anything straightforward about what I’m going to tell you,’ he said.

  ‘There never is.’

  ‘Please.’ Kell found that he was anxious enough to ask Amelia not to interrupt. ‘I’m just going to tell you what I know. The facts.’

  ‘About the mugging?’

  He shook his head. She had kicked off her shoes and was stretching the fabric of her tights with painted toes. He found himself staring at them.

  ‘When you have had time to absorb everything, I hope you’ll come to understand that I am on your side, that I am doing this to protect you.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Tom, spit it out.’

  He looked at her and remembered how happy she had seemed at the pool, so attentive towards François, so relaxed and unguarded. He wished he wasn’t about to take it all away.

  ‘Your trip to France raised some alarm bells.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Please.’ Kell lifted a hand to indicate that he would explain everything, but in his own time. ‘Simon and George got nervous. They couldn’t work out why you had taken off at such short notice. So they had you watched in Nice.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  He marvelled at the nonchalance of the question, as though Amelia was merely enquiring after a point of detail. In all probability she was already several stages ahead of him, seeing the problem in seven dimensions, anticipating everything that Kell was about to say and calculating its implications.

  ‘Because when you disappeared, Jimmy Marquand hired me to come and look for you.’

  Kell watched Amelia’s face. ‘I see.’

  ‘Look.’ He had sat at the edge of a large table, but stood again now and paced towards the sofa. ‘Long story short, I got the keys to your hire car from the safe in your room at the Gillespie …’

  ‘Jesus.’ That caught her out. Amelia stared at the floor. Kell found himself saying: ‘I’m sorry’ and felt a fool for doing so.

  ‘I got hold of your BlackBerry, traced some calls …’

  ‘… and followed me to Tunis. Yes, I understand.’ There was now a degree of hostility in her voice.

  ‘The man you were with in Tunis,’ he said, no longer wishing to prolong Amelia’s suffering, ‘he is not who you think he is.’

  She looked up. It was as though he had stepped on her soul. ‘And who do I think he is, Tom?’

  ‘He is not your son.’

  Four years earlier, Kell had sat with Amelia Levene in a control room in Helmand province when news came in that two SIS officers and five of their American colleagues had been killed by a suicide bomber in Najaf. One man in the room, still a senior figure in SIS, had broken down in tears. Kell himself had accompanied his opposite number in the CIA outside and comforted her for fifteen minutes in a passageway that buzzed with oblivious Marines. Only Amelia had remained unaffected. This was the price of war, she would later explain. Almost alone among her colleagues, she had been full-square behind the invasion of Iraq and incensed by the bien-pensant Left, on both sides of the Atlantic, who had seemed happy to leave Iraq in the hands of a genocidal maniac. Amelia was a realist. She didn’t live in a black-and-white world of simple rights and obvious wrongs. She knew that bad things happened to good people and that all you could do was stick to your principles.

  So it did not surprise Kell when she looked at him with an almost stubborn indifference and said: ‘Is that so?’

  He knew how she work
ed. She would do anything to maintain her dignity in front of him.

  ‘I tracked down his closest friend in Paris,’ Kell said. ‘A man named Christophe Delestre. There were two funerals. Philippe and Jeannine Malot were cremated on July twenty-second at Père Lachaise. That service has now been wiped from the public record, almost certainly by elements in the DGSE. You attended a similarly intimate funeral on July twenty-sixth at a crematorium in the Fourteenth. Is that correct?’

  Amelia nodded.

  ‘Did this man make the eulogy?’

  He passed a photograph of Delestre to Amelia, taken on his mobile phone in Montmartre. She looked at the screen.

  ‘This is Delestre?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve never seen him before. There was no eulogy. Just a Bible reading, some …’ Her voice trailed off as she realized what had happened. ‘The funeral was a set-up.’

  Kell nodded. He did not like to see Amelia suffering, but had no choice but to press on. ‘At the end of my meeting with Delestre and his wife, I showed them a photograph of François lying beside the pool at the Valencia Carthage. They didn’t recognize him. He said the two men were similar in build, in colouring, but that was all. He had never seen this man before in his life.’

  Amelia stood up from the sofa, like a physical rejection of what Kell was telling her. She went into the kitchen and poured herself some water. She came back holding two plastic cups, one of which she handed to Kell. It did not seem as though she was ready to speak, so Kell assembled the final points of his theory and put them as delicately as he could.

  ‘It seems likely that Paris found out about your son at some point in the last few years, arranged for Philippe and Jeannine to be murdered, then put you alongside an agent whom you assumed, because you had no reason to doubt him, was François.’

  Amelia took a sip of the water. There was an obvious question and it was as though she could not bear to ask it.

  ‘What about François?’ she said. ‘What about my son?’

  Kell wanted to come forward and to hold her. All through their long association he had been careful never to allow his affection for Amelia to cloud their professional relationship. He needed all of that discipline now. ‘Nobody knows what’s happened to him. Delestre has received emails and text messages which indicate that François may still be alive. There’s a strong chance that he’s being held captive by the DGSE, possibly at a safe house in the Languedoc …’