A Foreign Country

by Charles Cumming

  ‘I’ll need money,’ he told Amelia. ‘A lot of it. These are good people and they’ll all need paying.’

  ‘It can be arranged.’ He wondered if she would lean on Giles for the cash. ‘I’ll see what I can dig up on Luc Javeau, but I can’t be away from the Office this week. You’ll be on your own until I get down to Wiltshire on Friday. The next few days are wall-to-wall with meetings, then the PM on Wednesday. Is that all right?’

  Kell nodded. ‘It’s fine.’ It was better that she should remain out of the picture once CUCKOO had returned to Paris. If anything went wrong, Amelia needed to be deniable. ‘What about our military options?’ he asked.

  ‘What about them?’

  He tried to plant the idea as delicately as he could. ‘If we find François, it may be necessary to go in with force. If it goes to ransom, they will almost certainly attempt to kill him, whether or not you pay.’

  ‘I understand that.’ By now, they were halfway through their meal. Amelia pushed what remained of her food to the side of her plate. Kell mistook the silence as she wiped her mouth for disquiet.

  ‘All I’m saying is, we need to get to them before it gets to that stage. We will need to enjoy an element of surprise …’

  ‘I know what you meant, Tom.’ She looked across the room, a clatter of plates and glasses being cleared from a nearby table. ‘We have people in France, in northern Spain, who could do a job like that. But I don’t know how to get it past Simon. To use SAS would require … finesse.’

  ‘Forget SAS. We’d have to go private sector.’

  Amelia touched the simple gold chain around her neck, tugging at it for ideas. ‘As long as they’re not gung-ho. Those guys sit around for weeks on end, cleaning their bloody rifles, dreaming of the good old days at Hereford. I don’t want them going in all guns blazing. I want people with experience, people who know their way around France.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’d want you to go in with them, Tom. Can you promise me that? Keep an eye on them?’

  It was an astonishing request, not least because, throughout his long career, Kell had never so much as fired a shot in anger. Nevertheless, he was in no mood to deny Amelia what she wanted.

  ‘I promise,’ he said. ‘Of course, if it comes to that, I’ll go with them.’ He found a half-smile that seemed to reassure her. ‘We will get to François,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens, we will bring him home.’

  50

  Vincent Cévennes arrived at St Pancras station at 19.28 on Friday evening, his appearance noted by an ex-Special Branch associate of Kevin Vigors named Daniel Aldrich, who sent an email via BlackBerry to Kell with photo confirmation of the target passing the statue of Sir John Betjeman on the station concourse. Amelia, reluctant to spend any more time in CUCKOO’s company than was absolutely necessary, had arranged for a taxi to collect him from St Pancras and to drive him south-west to Wiltshire. Standing in a crowd of pedestrians at the edge of Euston Road, Aldrich watched as the driver held out a sheet of A4 card on which he had written ‘Mr Francis Mallot’ in black marker pen. CUCKOO, spotting the message, handed him his bags, which were placed in the boot of the car.

  The taxi was soon pulling out into the pell-mell of Friday evening traffic. Aldrich did not attempt to follow the vehicle from London, nor had Kell’s team wired it for sound; it was extremely unlikely that Vincent would risk making a telephone call to his controllers in the presence of a driver whom he would surely assume was employed by Amelia. Instead, Aldrich sent a second email to Kell.

  Confirm CUCKOO has two bags. Black leather computer shoulder holdall + black moulded plastic suitcase, wheeled. Carrying m/phone, also Hermes gift bag. Vehicle leaving StP now, 19.46, navy blue Renault Espace n/plate X164 AEO. Driver heading west along Euston Road.

  Kell received the email on a laptop in the kitchen of Amelia’s house and announced to the assembled team that CUCKOO would likely arrive in Chalke Bissett at around nine-thirty. Harold Mowbray, with Kell’s assistance, had spent the previous twenty-four hours equipping the house, top to bottom, with surveillance cameras and voice-activated microphones. Amelia had come direct from Vauxhall Cross at lunchtime and suggested that Vincent should sleep in the larger of two spare bedrooms. On the assumption that he might ask to move to a different room, the bedroom to the left of the landing had also been fitted with cameras and microphones, the first in a gilt mirror fixed to the north wall, the second in the frame of an oil painting hanging to the left of the bed.

  There were two bathrooms on the first floor of the house. The first was en suite in Amelia’s bedroom, the second located between CUCKOO’s room and a short, wallpapered corridor that connected it to the landing. This was the bathroom Vincent would use and it had also been rigged by Mowbray.

  ‘My experience, people do all sorts of strange things in toilets,’ he muttered, installing a miniature camera in the socket of a towel rail about six inches above the floor. ‘CUCKOO comes in here, thinking he’s got some privacy, he might drop his guard as well as his trousers. If he makes a call, we can catch it on the microphone. If he’s got stuff in his bags, we might see him go through it. Unless your frog goes looking for this shit, he’s not going to have a clue we’re watching him.’

  There was a risk of French surveillance on the house, so Kell remained in the property as much as possible, to avoid being recognized as Stephen Uniacke. Susie Shand, Amelia’s literary-agent neighbour, had given permission for her house to be used as a base by Kell’s team. Shand herself was on holiday in Croatia, a signed copy of The Official Secrets Act tucked into her suitcase. The owners of the third house in this isolated corner of Chalke Bissett, Paul and Susan Hamilton, were used to strangers from London staying at Shand’s home and did not approach any member of Kell’s team to enquire what they were doing in the village. In the event of a conversation in the neighbourhood, the team had been briefed to pretend that they were members of the family visiting for the long weekend.

  Shand’s house was a run-down cottage with low, worm-eaten beams about a minute’s walk from Amelia’s front door. Both houses looked out over a lush valley on the northern side and a steep hill to the south. Shand’s garden backed on to the western perimeter of Amelia’s property. The rooms in which the team had installed themselves were damp but comfortable and Kell found that he enjoyed the relative peace and tranquillity of the countryside after days of travel and cities. Their main operational centre was a large library lined with books given to Shand by the cream of London literary society. Barbara Knight, a lifelong bibliophile, found first editions of works by William Golding, Iris Murdoch and Julian Barnes, as well as a signed copy of The Satanic Verses.

  It was in this room that Elsa Cassani set up shop, placing three laptop computers on a large oak dining table and nine separate surveillance screens on bookshelves that she dusted and cleared of books. The screens showed live feeds from each of the rooms in Amelia’s house; during a brief rain shower on Friday morning, the images blurred and flickered, but Kell was satisfied that they would have complete coverage of CUCKOO at all times. The only ‘black hole’ was a utility room in the northern corner of the house that he was unlikely to use.

  Underneath the main window in the Shand library, Elsa had placed a mattress on which she slept at intermittent hours of the day beneath a duvet without a cover. She kept a bottle of Volvic beside this makeshift bed, some night creams and perfume, and an iPod that screamed and grunted whenever she plugged it into her ears. Harold was billeted upstairs in the smaller of two spare rooms. Kell was across the hall on a mattress that sagged like a hammock. Barbara, on account of her advanced years, was given the master bedroom.

  ‘The Gillespie’s not a patch on this,’ she joked. She spent the majority of her time alone, sitting in the room, reading a new biography of Virginia Woolf and working through the plan for Saturday morning.

  ‘It’ll be Miss Marple all over again,’ he had told her. ‘Put on a show like the one in Nice and we’ll put you
up for a BAFTA.’

  Spying is waiting.

  On the Thursday evening, with Amelia still in London and Vincent still in Paris, Harold and Barbara had driven into Salisbury to watch a film, leaving Kell and Elsa alone in the house with nothing to do but reminisce about Nice and to work through the final details of the operation.

  ‘Amelia is going to try to persuade Vincent to go for a walk with her on Saturday morning. If the weather’s bad, she’ll suggest visiting a pub near Tisbury for lunch. Either way, we should have enough time to get into his room and soak his gear. There’s no mobile reception in the valley, so if we’re lucky, he might have switched off his phone and left it behind as well.’

  ‘This would be very lucky, I think,’ Elsa replied. She had three separate gold studs in her left ear and Kell kept staring at them, thinking of her other lives. ‘All I need is fifteen minutes with the laptop. I can copy over everything from his hard drive, then bring it back here for analysis. If he’s getting emails from his people, we can start to read them. If they are being careless, we might be able to trace where the messages are coming from.’

  ‘What do you mean “if they’re being careless”?’

  ‘Anybody serious wouldn’t email from the location where they are holding Amelia’s son. They would drive a few kilometres away, do it from there. People often keep a device for that purpose away from the base. But it can be a pain working like this and sometimes people get lazy.’

  Kell thought of Marseille, of his own computer stripped down by Luc and handed back, complete with key-logger software and the tracking device. He had told Elsa about the attack in Cité Radieuse and she had touched the scar on his face, a tenderness which had surprised him. In Nice, he had been concerned that Elsa was playing him, most likely at Marquand’s request, but there was surely now no reason to doubt her.

  ‘You were a little dismissive with me the first time we met,’ she said.

  ‘I was working,’ he replied.

  ‘This is fine. I expected it. Jimmy told me that you could be … what is the word?’

  ‘Wonderful?’

  A swipe of laughter. ‘No. Impatient. A little arrogant …’

  ‘Brusque.’

  Elsa had never heard the word before. She tried it out, rolling it around, and decided that it was adequate enough as a description of Thomas Kell. ‘Brusque, yes. Then later on, much kinder to me. I liked our conversations.’

  He was surprised by her flirting, but enjoyed it. She had a way of dismantling his professional veneer, of strolling into the more private rooms of his personality with what felt like the fearlessness of youth.

  ‘You did a fantastic job,’ he said, and meant it. The research Elsa had done into Malot’s background had unlocked the DGSE operation and led him to Christophe Delestre.

  ‘Let’s eat,’ she replied.

  The day before, Harold had stocked up on ready-meals for the team at a supermarket in Salisbury. Opening the fridge at lunchtime, looking for something to eat, Elsa had dismissed the food as ‘disgraceful’ and duly set about making a batch of fresh pasta in the kitchen. Within half an hour, she had transformed the room into a bombsite of bowls and dough, flour hanging in the air like the dawn mists over the Chalke Valley. Now she cooked the pasta for Kell, who opened a bottle of wine from Shand’s cellar and sat at the kitchen table, watching as she chopped courgettes, frying them in garlic and olive oil.

  ‘You look like you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘I am Italian,’ she replied, happy to bask in the stereotype. ‘But in return for your supper, I want to hear all of Thomas Kell’s secrets.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘That may take a long time.’

  He did not want to talk about his marriage; that was his only boundary. Not out of loyalty to Claire, but because the story of their relationship was a story of failure.

  ‘Start with why you left the Service.’

  He had been drinking wine and stopped the glass against his lips, surprised that Elsa had broached the subject of his disgrace.

  ‘How did you know about that?’

  He was not angry; indeed, he felt an odd sense of relief, finding that he wanted to speak candidly of what had happened.

  ‘People talk,’ she replied.

  ‘It’s a complicated situation. I’m not supposed to discuss it.’

  Elsa had put a pan on to boil. She looked at him with a quick, mock contempt and threw salt into the water.

  ‘Nobody is going to hear us, Tom. We are alone in the house. Tell me.’

  And so he told her. He told her about Kabul and he told her about Yassin.

  ‘After 9/11, I did a lot of work alongside the Americans. They were angry about what had been done to them. Understandably so. They were ashamed and they wanted revenge. I think that’s a fair assessment of their state of mind.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Late 2001, I went into Afghanistan with a team from the Office. Joint operation with Langley. All of us had been caught off guard by what had happened in Washington and New York. We were playing catch-up, making things up as we went along.’

  ‘Sure.’ Elsa was watching the pan, her back to him, waiting for him to find his rhythm. She was wearing blue denim jeans and a white T-shirt. Kell stole a married man’s glance at her body, all the time falling into the trap of trusting her.

  ‘I made seven separate visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan over the next three years. In ’04, the CIA arrested a man who you may have heard of. Yassin Gharani. He’d been in Pakistan where he’d attended an al-Qaeda training camp in the north-west. He told the Yanks he was a British citizen, had the passport to prove it. He’d subsequently been moved to their operations centre in Kabul, which is where they started to interrogate him.’

  ‘Interrogate.’

  ‘Interview. Question. Cross-examine.’ Kell wasn’t sure whether he was giving Elsa an English lesson or whether she was one step ahead of him on the semantics. ‘He had not been mistreated, if that’s what you’re driving at. Langley was informed by MI5 that they had a file on Yassin. He’d been on a watch-list of terrorist suspects in the north-east of England. Not a flagged threat, not a target, no surveillance. But they knew about him, had been worried about him, they’d wondered where he’d gone.’

  ‘So it makes sense to everybody that a young man like this goes to Pakistan and trains to fight?’

  ‘It makes sense.’ Kell poured himself more wine and stood to refill Elsa’s glass. She had fried the courgettes and set them to one side in the pan and now slowly lowered the pasta into the water.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, nodding at the glass. ‘The tagliatelle, it takes only a couple of minutes.’

  Kell took two bowls from a dresser beside the kitchen door, retrieved spoons and forks from a drawer. He put the cutlery on the table in front of him, the bowls next to the stove so that Elsa could reach them. Then he picked up the story.

  ‘Now here’s Gharani, a twenty-one-year-old student from Leeds, pretending to be visiting friends in Lahore, but the Americans have photographic evidence that Yassin is a jihad tourist who just got taught how to fire a rocket-propelled grenade in Malakand. I told him he had to be careful. I told him that his best prospect lay in talking to his own government. If he was honest about what he had done, about the people he knew back home, then I could help him. If he wasn’t, if he decided to keep quiet and keep playing the innocent, then I couldn’t be responsible for what the Americans would do with him.’

  ‘I know this story,’ Elsa said. She tested the pasta, pulling a single strand from the water and pressing it between her fingers. She wrapped a tea towel around the handle of the pan, took it to the sink and poured the contents into a metal colander, steam fogging into her face. She reared back and said: ‘The CIA tortured him, yes?’

  Kell felt a quick burst of irritation at her easy assumption of American guilt. He wondered if Elsa had worked on the case in some capacity or ha
d merely read about it in the European press.

  ‘Let’s just say that the Yanks were tough on him,’ he said. ‘We all were.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Kell shifted in his seat, choosing his words carefully.

  ‘It means that we were a long way from home. It means that we were trying to break up terrorist cells in the UK and US. We felt that Yassin knew things that would be useful to us and we ran out of patience with him when he wouldn’t talk.’ Kell found himself coughing. ‘Eventually certain individuals became aggressive.’ He composed himself, still protecting the identities of American colleagues who had stepped over the line. ‘Did I physically touch him? No. Did I push him around? No, absolutely not. Did I threaten to get to his family in Leeds? At no point.’

  Elsa did not visibly react. Her face was still as she said:

  ‘So the interview was as they described it?’ It was as though she had stopped herself using the word ‘torture’, like somebody stepping around a puddle. ‘What happened, Tom?’

  Kell looked up. She was no longer serving the food, as if the meal was being held in quarantine. She was not judging him. Not yet. But she wanted to hear his answer.

  ‘You’re asking a man you’re about to sit down and eat supper with if he water-boarded a suspect? If I pulled out a man’s fingernails?’

  ‘Did you?’

  Kell felt all of the despair of his final weeks at Vauxhall Cross rushing up to confront him.

  ‘Do you think I would be capable of that?’

  ‘I think we are all of us capable of doing anything.’

  Yet the tone of Elsa’s reply implied that she trusted Kell to have behaved within the law and within the boundaries of his own decency. He felt a great affection for her at this moment, because such an accommodation was more than Claire had ever been able to provide for him. At times in the preceding months, turned out of SIS in quiet disgrace, he had felt like a criminal; at others, like the only man in England capable of understanding the true nature of the threat from men like Yassin Gharani.