A Foreign Country

by Charles Cumming

  Suddenly, from the opposite end of the office, came the ping of a lift and the distant sound of doors sliding open. Kell looked up as a middle-aged South American man emerged on to the landing, trailing a vacuum cleaner. Walking towards him across the open-plan office, Kell saw that the man had a set of keys in his hand and was preparing to unlock the door.

  ‘What do you want?’ he shouted.

  ‘It’s just the cleaner,’ Amelia muttered.

  Through the glass, the man lazily waved a hand and indicated that he would return when the office was empty. Kell walked back to the sofa.

  ‘Held captive?’ Amelia asked. Kell could see how hard she was working to mask her despair.

  ‘It makes the most sense,’ he replied, but found that he could not elaborate. His mind was momentarily blank. He had no clue as to François’ whereabouts, save for the fact that the man impersonating him had been dropped off by a Marseille cab driver near a village south of Castelnaudary. Amelia pulled on her shoes, covering her painted toes.

  ‘It’s certainly an interesting theory,’ she said. Kell still did not know what to say or do. Bending forward, Amelia flicked a speck of dust from her tights. ‘But it rather begs a question, don’t you think?’

  ‘Several,’ Kell replied, and wondered if she was preparing to leave.

  ‘Such as why?’

  ‘Why you?’ he said. ‘Or why kidnap François?’

  Amelia produced a look of quick contempt. ‘No, not that.’ Kell felt momentarily insulted. ‘I mean, why stage such an operation? Why murder two innocent civilians? God knows the Service Action has carried out quiet assassinations on foreign soil, but what did Philippe and Jeannine ever do to anyone? Why would the DGSE take another risk on the scale of Rainbow Warrior? To humiliate me?’

  ‘You ever hear of a DGSE officer using the legend Benedict Voltaire?’ Kell asked.

  Amelia shook her head.

  ‘Tall, mid-fifties, smokes filterless cigarettes. A lot of them. Sarcastic, a bit macho.’

  ‘You could be describing every middle-aged Frenchman I’ve ever met.’

  Kell was too tense to laugh. ‘Dyed black hair,’ he said. ‘His real name may be Luc.’

  Amelia flinched. ‘Luc?’

  Kell moved a step towards her. ‘You think you might know him?’

  But Amelia seemed to back away from the coincidence, suspicious of any probable link. ‘Must be a hundred Lucs in the Service. In the run-up to Iraq, I became entangled with a man who roughly fits that description, but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.’

  ‘Entangled how?’ Kell couldn’t tell whether she was implying a romantic or professional relationship. Amelia quickly provided an answer.

  ‘You remember in ’02 and ’03, the Office ran a fairly aggressive attack on the French team at the UN after Chirac turned his back on Blair and Bush.’ Kell had suspected that such an operation had been put in place, but its secrecy had prevented it from ever being confirmed in his hearing. ‘At the same time, I recruited a source at the Élysée Palace.’

  ‘You personally?’

  ‘Me personally. Known to us as DENEUVE.’

  Kell was impressed, but not surprised. It was the sort of coup with which Amelia Levene had made her name.

  ‘And Luc found out about it? That’s the nature of the entanglement?’

  Amelia stood up and began to walk towards the southern wall of the office, like a customer in a shop testing a new pair of shoes. Several seconds passed before she answered Kell’s question.

  ‘There was always a suspicion that DENEUVE was unreliable, but we were up against it in terms of time and needed whatever information we could get from Chirac’s people. When the invasion began, the relationship with DENEUVE quickly came to an end. We noticed that, within a few weeks, she had lost her job. If Luc is Luc Javeau, he was the DGSE officer in Paris tasked with covering up the DENEUVE leak. We think she named me as her SIS case officer in order to save her skin. Javeau actually called me up in person and warned me off any further French targets.’

  ‘That must have been an interesting conversation.’

  ‘Let’s just say that it didn’t end well. I denied all knowledge, of course, but as far as Javeau was concerned, it was now “open season” on London.’

  Kell moved closer towards her, shutting down the space. ‘So you think there may be a possibility of payback in all this?’

  Amelia was too smart, and too experienced, to pin the Malot operation on mere vengeance, without a greater burden of proof.

  ‘What else have you got?’ she asked.

  ‘Africa,’ Kell suggested.

  ‘Africa?’

  It was a thesis that Kell had been turning over in his mind since Paris. ‘Arab Spring. The French know that Amelia Levene has prioritized greater British involvement in the region. They know that you have the ear of the PM. Either they were seeking to blackmail you, to get you to ease off Libya and Egypt, or they were simply going to expose you when François was subjected to vetting. Paris sees the Maghreb as their patch. They’ve already lost significant control of Francophone West Africa to the Chinese. The last thing they want is a new Chief of the SIS trying to roll back that influence still further.’

  Amelia looked across the office at a shuttered window on the Queensway side. ‘So they get rid of me, George Truscott takes over, and the Moscow Men go back to a pre-9/11 mindset?’

  ‘Precisely.’ Kell was warming to his theme. ‘No movement on Libya, Egypt, Algeria when it falls. No meaningful strategy for China or India. Two officers and a dog in Brazil. Just keep kissing Washington’s arse and preserve the Cold War status quo. It’s no coincidence that the operation began as soon as you were appointed Chief. The DGSE may have known about François for years but only chose to act now. That tells us something. It tells us that they knew François’ existence, if taken advantage of effectively, had the potential to compromise you. Expose him and it could end your career.’

  ‘My career is already over, Tom.’

  It was an uncharacteristically defeatist line.

  ‘Not necessarily.’ One of the strip-lights above Kell’s head began to flicker. He reached up and twisted the tube until it cut out. ‘Nobody knows about this. Nobody but me.’

  Amelia looked at him sharply. ‘You haven’t told Marquand?’

  ‘He thinks you were in Tunis on a dirty weekend. He thinks you and François are fucking. They all do. Just another one of Amelia’s extra-marital affairs.’

  Amelia winced and Kell saw that he had gone too far. Male hypocrisy writ large. Amelia took a sip of water, forgiving him with a glance, and Kell moved the subject on.

  ‘We have options,’ he said, because it had occurred to him, not for the first time, that he was saving her career as well as salvaging his own.

  Amelia met his gaze. ‘Enlighten me.’

  Kell arranged his pieces on the board. ‘We go after the DGSE,’ he said. ‘We go after the man who is masquerading as Malot. Let’s call him what he is: CUCKOO. A cuckoo in the nest.’ Kell drained his cup of water and set it on the table. ‘You invite him to stay with you in Chalke Bissett this weekend, a little mother-and-son bonding time. We get a team together, we soak his phones, his laptop, we find out who’s behind the operation. He eventually leads us to where they’re holding your son.’

  ‘You truly believe that François is still alive?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course. Think about it. They’ve known all along that they have an insurance plan. Even in the worst-case scenario, even if the operation gets blown, they still have François in captivity. Why would they kill someone who is so valuable to them?’

  48

  He was not afraid of dying, but he was afraid of Slimane Nassah.

  He could stand the waiting, he could stand the loss of his privacy, but François feared Slimane because he was the only one among them who was completely unpredictable.

  The tone had been set almost immediately, as soon as they had driven him down from Par
is. Luc and Valerie keeping their distance, never looking him in the eye; Akim playing good cop with his soft, innocent eyes – and Slimane taking every opportunity that came his way to crawl under François’ skin, to probe for weaknesses, to taunt him with threats and insults. It was worst when the house was deserted. On only the third day, Akim had gone for provisions, Luc and Valerie for a walk in the garden. Slimane had come into the cell, closed the door, indicated to François not to make a sound – then grabbed at his nose, blocking the air so that he was forced to open his mouth to breathe. Next thing François knew there was some kind of cloth or handkerchief stuffed into his mouth, a taste of petrol on his tongue; he thought that Slimane was going to light it and burn his face away. Then he had bound his hands and feet and François had started to struggle. He’d stood up off the bed and shuffled around the cell, falling over on the cold ground. Slimane had opened the door of the cell, walked outside and come back with a knife, the blade heated on the gas stove in the kitchen. He was smiling as he picked François up and sat him upright on the bed. Then he had drawn circles around his eyes with the black steel, the heat on the tip of the blade opening up a cut above François’ left eye so that tears slipped down past his cheek and Slimane began to laugh, taunting him for crying ‘like a woman’. A few moments later, the gag had been removed from his mouth, his hands and legs untied, and Slimane had gone next door, securing the bolt and putting some Arabic rap on the iPod in the sitting room, a smell of marijuana drifting into the cell.

  François had always thought of himself as a brave person, difficult to unsettle, self-sufficient. At fourteen, his parents had told him that he had been adopted, that he was the son of an English mother who had not been able to care for him. So François had grown up with the idea that he was somehow uncherished and temporary; no matter how much Philippe and Jeannine adored him – and they had been wonderful parents – they could never have loved him in the same way as his natural mother. This had bred in François a certain stubbornness allied to a profound distrust of people. Terrified of being hurt and abandoned, he had always kept his friends and colleagues – with only one or two exceptions – emotionally at arm’s length. He was an honest man, and liked for this by those who knew him, and, for the most part, his choice of a solitary life had suited him well. François had made sure to move around, from job to job and from place to place, so that he was not obliged to put roots down, nor to forge links with people for any length of time. What he hated most in his captivity was that Slimane understood a lot of this almost instinctively. François came to dread not the loneliness or the fear of his imprisonment, but the knowledge that Slimane could, at any moment, humiliate him for the accident of his birth.

  ‘Think about it,’ he had whispered to him one night through the door of the cell. ‘Your own mother hated you so much that she was prepared to give you up, to abandon you. You ever think about that, about how ugly you must have been? A real cunt to do that to her son, too, don’t you reckon?’ It was perhaps three or four o’clock in the morning, the house asleep, not even the click of the cicadas outside to break the silence. François, lying on the bed, had wrapped the pillow around his ears but could still hear every word of what Slimane was saying. ‘I’ve seen a picture of your mother,’ he whispered. ‘Good-looking woman. I’d like to fuck her. Akim wants to fuck her too. Maybe we’ll both do it after we kill you. What do you think? You like that idea? We’ll both fuck her in the ass for what she did to you when you were just a little kid.’

  That was perhaps the worst night, the one that François always remembered. But Slimane’s constant taunts were debilitating to his spirit. Whenever he brought food, for example, whenever he emptied the bucket, whenever he thought Akim was getting too close or too friendly to ‘the little boy’, Slimane would make a remark, put the gun in François’ groin, come up behind him and rip at the hairs on the nape of his neck or slap him hard around the head. François wondered if a braver man would have fought back or tried harder to escape. It made sense to try to run. If they had killed Philippe and Jeannine, they were surely going to kill him.

  Often, at night, when he was on shift, Slimane would wake François as a kind of sleep deprivation for kicks, a way of passing the time through the boredom of a nightwatch. So François would sleep during the days, resting on his bed listening to the frogs and birds in the garden, dreaming of Paris, of his parents brought back to life and protecting him from what had happened. Then, in time, he began to dream of his real mother, of Amelia Levene, but had no picture of her in his mind’s eye, nor of the man who was his father. Did he look like either of them? Perhaps François was now too old for any family resemblance to have lasted. He had never wanted to find them, not since Philippe and Jeannine had given him the news of his adoption, but towards the third week of his captivity François began to pray that he would be rescued by them, that his real parents would somehow pay the ransom and return him to his life in Paris. At times, François would sob like a child for the mother he had never seen, for the father he had never known, but not so that his captors would hear him or see his face, never so that Slimane could enjoy the pleasure of his distress. François at least kept that dignity. But everything was complicated by Vincent. Everything was made worse by the knowledge that another man had replaced him, stolen his life, and was already making a relationship with Amelia.

  ‘Vincent’s living in your house,’ Slimane told him, day after day, night after night. ‘He’s wearing your clothes, he’s fucking your girls. He even went on holiday with your mother. Did you know that? Luc says she loves him, they can’t get enough of each other. He’s going to go and live with her in England. How do you feel about that, François? Amelia’s got the son she always wanted. So why would she ever think about cashing him in for a dumb prick like you?’

  49

  Amelia rang the man who was no longer her son, the man who had so humiliated her, less than an hour after meeting Kell in Queensway. She had made the call from the kitchen of the open-plan office using her private mobile. Kell, standing a few feet away, watched her intently, amazed by Amelia’s ability to continue with the masquerade of maternal affection.

  ‘François? It’s Amelia. I’ve missed you, darling. How are you? How are things in Paris?’

  They had talked for almost ten minutes, ‘François’ relating the story of his journey home via Marseille, the narrative of his lies still watertight, his facility for deceit as accomplished as any Amelia could recall. She wondered if the man Kell had identified as ‘Luc’ was seated alongside CUCKOO in Paris, listening to his conversation, just as Kell was listening to hers: two sets of spies, in London and Paris, both working under the assumption that they held the upper hand.

  ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ CUCKOO replied. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s just that I wondered if you would be free to come and stay at my house in Wiltshire?’

  ‘Oh …’

  ‘Perhaps it’s too soon?’

  ‘No, no.’ CUCKOO sounded enthused, as well he might; the invitation would be welcomed by his masters in Paris. ‘Will Giles be there?’

  ‘No.’ She glanced at Kell, who frowned, as though confused by CUCKOO’s interest in Amelia’s husband. ‘I think he’s away this weekend. Why, do you want to meet him?’

  ‘At this moment I prefer if it’s just the two of us, you know?’ CUCKOO replied. ‘Is that OK?’

  ‘Of course, darling.’ She generated a perfectly timed pause. ‘Does that mean you’ll come?’

  ‘I would love to.’

  ‘That’s wonderful news. I can’t wait.’ Amelia recalled CUCKOO’s insistence on taking the ferry to Marseille, rather than a flight direct to Paris and decided on a quick test of his cover. ‘Can I send you a ticket for the plane?’

  ‘I prefer not to fly, remember?’ he replied instantly, and she could only marvel at the speed of his lies. What a fool she had been, what a dupe. And now she would have to live a lie
of her own, to ensure that there was no difference between her behaviour in Tunis and her behaviour in Wiltshire. She would have to play the part of a caring mother, embracing him, smiling at his conversation, taking an interest in his affairs. Amelia dreaded that and yet she longed for the moment when she would have her revenge. From the great joy of the reunion in Tunis she had been cruelly returned to the tunnel of her working life, a place of ambition, of dedication to a cause, but a place without personal fulfilment. Perhaps it was where she belonged.

  ‘I’m starving,’ she told Kell after she had hung up. She saw her hand lingering on the sleeve of his coat, one of her habitual ways of controlling men. ‘Take me somewhere to eat?’

  ‘Of course.’

  They had walked a few hundred metres to a Lebanese restaurant on Westbourne Grove and set about formulating the plan to find François. Sitting over open menus, waiting for a bottle of wine in the bustle of the dining room, it was decided that, in order to keep the operation secret from Truscott, Haynes and Marquand, Kell would assemble a small team of trusted contacts off the books at Vauxhall Cross. He suggested bringing Barbara Knight over from Nice and told Amelia that he would call her in the morning to arrange the trip. Having ordered their food, he sent a text to Elsa Cassani, asking if it would be possible for her to take the next available flight to London. Elsa responded within fifteen minutes (‘For you, Tom, anything!’) and Kell smiled. He knew a former MI5 Tech-Ops officer named Harold Mowbray, now private sector, who would be able to work in tandem with Elsa on CUCKOO’s email servers and mobile phone networks. They would also need a surveillance man to tail CUCKOO once he had left Amelia’s house in the country. Kell had an old contact from his days working a desk in London, a former Royal Marine named Kevin Vigors, who would work in return for cash-in-hand.