‘How are you getting on?’ he asked Harold, still crouched over the encoder in the corridor, frowning.
‘At least another fifteen minutes,’ he said.
‘You?’
‘Same applies to me,’ Elsa replied. ‘Relax, Tom, please.’
Kell felt as though he was intruding on events over which he had no power or influence. He went downstairs, removed the shoes from the hall, and found Barbara dutifully dragging a Hoover up and down on the sitting-room carpet.
‘Any sign of CUCKOO’s phone?’ he asked.
‘None,’ she replied. ‘Must have taken it with him.’
59
Barbara was correct.
Pausing in front of the first stile in the meadow, about four hundred metres from the Shand house, CUCKOO reached into his trouser pocket and powered up his mobile phone.
‘I’m afraid you’re unlikely to get a signal,’ Amelia told him, asking for his hand so that he could steady her as she crossed over the stile. ‘I normally have to drive across to Fovant if I want to check my messages. Occasionally one can get a feeble signal on the hill.’
She pointed ahead of her, in the direction of Ebbesbourne St John.
‘Why don’t you have a booster fitted to your house?’ CUCKOO asked, an edge of surprise in his voice. ‘Don’t MI6 like to be in touch with you?’
‘That’s the whole point of this place.’ Amelia watched as CUCKOO swung a leg over the stile, following her. ‘Isolation. Retreat. I like to be somewhere that nobody can find me. My privacy is very important to me. You know what it’s like to be at the mercy of text messages, constant calls on one’s BlackBerry, endless emails from colleagues. My weekends are sacred. When I take over next month, they’ll be posting security guards in the lane, wiring the house for CCTV. These are the last moments of solitude you and I will know for years.’
It was a deft coda, planting CUCKOO with the idea that Amelia envisaged their relationship stretching far into the future. She found it curious to reflect on how much she was enjoying turning the tables; she had expected to feel physically ill in his presence, but after only a few minutes in the house, CUCKOO had become little more than a cipher to her. Those aspects of his character that she had once found endearing – his sensitivity, his shyness, his careful and enquiring intellect – she now viewed as faults, weaknesses. She considered most of his conversation to be repetitive and lacking in insight; anecdotes and jokes were already beginning to be repeated. His physical attractiveness, which she had once, embarrassingly, prided herself on, was now evidence only of an extreme vanity, bordering on narcissism. The process by which Amelia had come to loathe CUCKOO was not all that different, she reflected, to the process by which she came to resent her former lovers. Those things she had most adored about him were now those things that she abhorred. She felt only an unequivocal determination to destroy him, borne of shame and the desperate desire to find François.
‘Merde,’ said CUCKOO.
He was patting his trousers, front and back, searching the inside pockets of his Barbour.
‘What is it?’
‘I forgot my cigarettes.’
Amelia felt an itch of alarm.
‘Does it matter? I hate it when you smoke.’
He looked at her as though she had betrayed him, a sudden sullen expression of his contempt.
‘What? Even outside, in the open air?’ It was the first time that he had raised his voice against her. Why the shift in his mood? Did he suspect that something was going on at the house, the forgotten cigarettes a ruse to go back? But then CUCKOO seemed to remember the need for tact and good manners and his characteristic charm returned. ‘I just like to smoke as I walk. It helps me to think, to relax.’
‘Of course,’ Amelia said. ‘But we’ll be home fairly soon.’ She gestured ahead at a wooded glade about a quarter of a mile to the west. ‘We can turn around at the end.’
CUCKOO was shifting from foot to foot. ‘No, I’ll run back,’ he said, and before Amelia could stop him, he had vaulted over the stile and started jogging towards the house. At that speed he would be there in less than a minute. She looked back along the valley for a sign of Kevin Vigors. He was nowhere to be seen.
‘François!’
CUCKOO stopped and turned around, frowning.
‘What?’
Slowly, Amelia took herself back over the stile and walked towards him, buying time with every step. When she was a few metres away, she reached into her coat pocket and took out her keys.
‘You’ll need these.’
‘Barbara can let me in,’ he replied, turning and starting to jog. He called back: ‘I’ll only be five minutes.’
And all Amelia could do was watch and wait.
60
Less than two hundred metres away, secluded behind a screen of chestnut trees, Kevin Vigors saw CUCKOO running towards the house and immediately radioed through to Kell.
‘Serious problem,’ he said. ‘CUCKOO is coming back.’
‘What? Why?’
‘No idea. But get out of there. You’ve probably got less than a minute before he reaches the house.’
‘Can you stall him?’
‘He’ll smell a rat. Just get out of the bedroom.’
Kell was standing in the sitting room. He went into the kitchen, opened the bin, pulled out the contents and handed them to Barbara.
‘Get outside,’ he said, grabbing a pile of papers from the kitchen table, as well as Elsa and Harold’s shoes and a recipe book from the shelf above the Aga. He stuffed them into the bin liner until it was full. ‘Walk down the lane towards the Shand house. There are black dustbins between the two houses. CUCKOO is coming back. You’ll have to stall him or we won’t have time to clear out. Get him to help you with the bin.’
Barbara nodded but said nothing. She went to the door, walked up the stone steps towards the lane and headed slowly downhill in the direction of the Shand house. At the same time, Kell grabbed the vacuum cleaner from the sitting room and ran upstairs, holding it in his arms like an outsized child.
‘Get the fuck out of there right now,’ he called to Elsa and Harold, plugging the Hoover into a socket in the corridor. ‘Grab everything. We are going into Amelia’s room.’ He was scooping up one of the kitbags in the corridor. He heard Harold say: ‘Jesus fucking Christ’ and watched as he picked up the encoder and took it past him, down the passage. Harold then came back into CUCKOO’s bedroom and threw the rest of his hardware into a second bag that he slung over his shoulder and removed to the master bedroom.
Kell heard three clicks on the radio. CUCKOO was at the gate. In twenty seconds he would be opposite the Shand front door, in forty, at the back door of Amelia’s house.
Elsa, repeatedly whispering ‘Shit, shit’ in Italian, had shut down the DGSE laptop and was putting it back in the leather carrying case.
‘Hurry,’ Kell hissed at her, coiling loose cables into the third bag. He unplugged her computer from the mains and ushered her out of the room, bundling the bag into her arms. He left the Hoover in the corridor to make it look as though Barbara had been cleaning upstairs. ‘Go, go,’ he said.
CUCKOO’s bedroom was now empty. Kell checked the carpet. There was a small piece of yellow plastic beside the chest of drawers that he picked up and put in his pocket. There seemed to be a strong odour of work and sweat, but he could not decide whether the smell of Elsa’s perfume was in the room or in his memory. He opened the window, on the basis that Barbara could have done so, and ensured that the team had left no trace of themselves in the bathroom.
Two clicks on the radio. CUCKOO was passing the Shand house.
Kell looked out of the bathroom window and saw him coming. He turned, walked into the corridor, reached the landing, went into Amelia’s bedroom and closed the door.
It was only then that he realized they had not replaced the SIM in CUCKOO’s jeans.
61
Barbara saw CUCKOO as she reached the dustbins. He had stopped jo
gging and was walking towards her, passing the Shand house and frowning in surprise at the sight of Amelia’s cleaning lady struggling down the lane under the weight of a bin bag.
‘You are OK?’ he called out.
Barbara, tilting to one side for maximum visual impact, nodded her head in a demonstration of unbuckled stoicism and moved forward towards the dustbins.
‘What are you doing back here, love?’ she asked, resting the sack in the centre of the road so that CUCKOO’s path was partially blocked.
‘Smoke,’ he said, miming a cigarette going in and out of his mouth. ‘I help you?’
At least he’s got some manners, Barbara thought, breaking into an effusive speech of gratitude as CUCKOO lifted the bag from the lane and carried it the short distance to the large black dustbins at the edge of the road.
‘C’est lourd,’ he said. It’s heavy. As if to confirm this, the Frenchman held his bicep as though he had suffered a sprain. For a split second, Barbara was about to reply in fluent French, the language of her life in Menton, but she checked herself and instead continued in her role.
‘That’s so kind of you, François,’ she said, slowing her words down, as though talking to a child. ‘Thank goodness I ran into you.’ She was aware that, no more than ten metres away, behind the windows on the first floor of the house, Kell, Elsa and Harold were most probably in a perfect storm of panic, clearing out of the bedroom as fast as possible. She drew CUCKOO’s eyes down towards the ground with a stern warning: ‘Now, I don’t want you going into the house with those muddy boots on.’
It was to the Service’s advantage that CUCKOO was obliged to pretend that he did not understand what she had said.
‘What, please?’ he said. ‘I not follow.’
Barbara repeated the warning, buying yet more precious time as she slowly explained, in nursery-level English, that she would not allow dirty footwear in Mrs Levene’s home.
‘Come with me,’ she said eventually, channelling all of the charm and the mischief of her brief encounter with the receptionist at the Hotel Gillespie. She took CUCKOO’s arm and walked him slowly up the lane towards the front of the house. When they had reached the kitchen door, which was still ajar, she again gestured to his feet.
‘Your cigarettes are on the table, aren’t they, love?’
CUCKOO pointed at the packet of Lucky Strike, which were indeed on the kitchen table, partially concealed from view by a peppermill and a bowl of sugar.
‘I’ll get them for you,’ she said, squeezing through the door. ‘That way you won’t have to come in.’
‘And the lighter,’ he said. ‘I must have my lighter.’
She passed the cigarettes through the door and asked for its whereabouts.
‘In my room,’ CUCKOO replied. ‘But I can get this.’
‘No, no, you stay there, love,’ and Barbara climbed the stairs to the first floor, which was now a ghost town of inactivity. She walked into CUCKOO’s bedroom, spotted the gold cigarette lighter on top of the chest of drawers, slipped it into the front pocket of her smock and returned to the kitchen.
‘Voila!’ she said with an air of triumph, handing the lighter across the threshold. It sounded as though it was the only word of French that she knew. ‘Now you get back to Mrs Levene. She’ll be wondering what’s become of you. And if I don’t see you again, it’s been lovely meeting you. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Safe trip back to Paris.’
62
Lying flat on the floor of Amelia’s en-suite bathroom, so that their silhouettes would not show in the windows, Kell, Elsa and Harold could pick out only the mumble of Barbara and CUCKOO’s conversation. Taking slow, near-silent breaths, side by side like campers sleeping in a three-man tent, they listened as Barbara closed the kitchen door, then heard what sounded like the footsteps of CUCKOO returning to the lane and walking back past the house, heading in the direction of the meadow. About a minute later, Kell received two low-volume clicks on his radio, then a pause before Vigors confirmed, with three further clicks, that CUCKOO was passing through the gate on his way back towards Amelia.
It was another minute before Kell dared to break the spell of their silence. Standing up, he swore quietly and looked down at Elsa and Harold. Slowly, like survivors from an earthquake, they clambered to their feet.
‘Cazzo,’ she whispered.
‘Squeaky bum time,’ said Harold and Elsa said: ‘Shhhhh!’ as though CUCKOO was still in the next room.
‘It’s all right,’ Kell replied, opening the bathroom door. ‘He’s in the meadow. Gone.’
Barbara appeared at the top of the stairs.
‘Do mind my language,’ she said, ‘but bloody hell, how did that happen?’
‘What did he want?’ Elsa asked.
‘Cigarettes,’ she replied. ‘He wanted bloody cigarettes. Imagine if he’d come upstairs.’
‘I’d have smoked one with him,’ Harold muttered, and everybody went back to work.
63
Akim was woken the next morning by the sound of Luc and Valerie fucking in the next room. Always the same routine: Luc increasingly struggling for breath as he chugged against the headboard; Valerie smothering her moans with what was probably a sheet or the edge of one of the pillows. She was like a teenager or newlywed bride: wanting it every morning, wanting it every night. A cast-off from Internal Security, Valerie was the one random element in the operation, brought in by the boss because he could not function without her, but kept secret – as far as Akim knew – from Luc’s masters in the DGSE. Even Vincent himself had only met her for the first time a few days’ earlier. Luc had sworn him to secrecy, knowing that Paris would pull the plug if they so much as suspected that Valerie was so intimately involved in the HOLST operation.
Akim looked at the clock beside his bed. It was just after six on a Sunday morning; he could have done with the extra hour’s sleep. Now he was just thinking about pussy, about how much longer it was going to be before he could go back to Marseille.
‘Arseholes,’ he muttered and hoped that his voice would carry into the next room and stop the scrape of the bed against the floorboards, the soft muffled squeak of the springs. Eventually there was a groan from Luc, louder than most mornings, and the bed stopped moving, like a car coming to a halt in a lay-by. Moments later Valerie was padding barefoot next door and running the tap on the bidet. Akim heard Luc cough a couple of times, then the radio, the volume turned down low. Always the same routine.
Akim was due on duty at seven fifteen, relieving Slimane from the night shift. Three days earlier, he had gone down to find Slimane and the prisoner talking, HOLST’s door wide open, his eyes filled with rage and tears. Later on, walking in the countryside near the house, Akim had asked for an explanation and Slimane had told him – laughing about it, like it was the funniest thing in the world – that he’d been taunting François about Egypt, about what they’d done to his ‘fake mum and dad’. Akim, who had grown to like François, to respect him for the way he’d handled himself since the grab in Paris, had launched at his friend, a lot of the stress and the tension of their long confinement suddenly coming out in a frenzy of rage. The two men had fallen to the ground and scrapped like kids in the street, only to stop after a minute or two and look at one another, laughing at the dust on their clothes and trainers, flicking away the flies that buzzed around their heads.
‘Who gives a fuck about him anyway?’ Slimane had said, and then they’d ducked behind a tree and lain close to the ground because somebody had come past on a tractor.
Who gives a fuck about him anyway? Akim had given a lot of thought to that question. Do I give a fuck about François? Should I give a fuck about François? He’d hurt his dad, sure. He knew that. But it was Slimane who’d had the blade in Egypt, just like it was Slimane who’d wanted to finish off the spy at Cité Radieuse. Akim didn’t want anyone, especially François, thinking he and Slimane were similar. Akim was a soldier, he did what he was told to do; he stayed true to whoever was payi
ng him. With Slimane, you never knew where his loyalties lay, what he was thinking, what wildness was going to spring from him next.
Who gives a fuck about him anyway? Akim had gone to bed the previous night knowing that he might have to kill HOLST. Maybe that was what was bothering him. He didn’t want to have to do it but he knew that Luc or Valerie were crazy enough to give him the order, just to test his loyalty. At about seven o’clock, after he had finished his nightly swim, Luc had received a document from Paris that effectively ended the first phase of the operation. It was a transcript of a conversation at Christophe Delestre’s apartment in Montmartre, recorded by DGSE microphones five days earlier but only now, thanks to a typical Paris fuck-up, making its way to Luc. The conversation was between Delestre, his wife, and an MI6 officer calling himself ‘Thomas Kell’. Kell, Luc had realized instantly, was Stephen Uniacke, the same man who had talked to Vincent on the ferry, the same man Akim and Slimane had been instructed to rough up at Cité Radieuse. Kell had run Delestre to ground, shown him a photograph of Vincent and worked out that HOLST had been switched. Luc, running downstairs, a dressing-gown tied slackly around his belly, wet legs still dripping water on the floor, had shouted for Valerie.
A Foreign Country Page 24