‘Fucking MI6,’ he said. ‘Fucking Amelia Levene. I was right. She worked it out. She knows about the second funeral.’
There’d been an argument between the two of them, then Luc had dressed and driven north to Castelnaudary, where he’d bought himself half an hour at the Internet café and sent an email to Vincent’s dedicated server.
They know about the second funeral. Stephen Uniacke is an MI6 officer named Thomas Kell. He found Delestre in Paris. Levene must know and is playing you. Abort immediately. Crash meeting, Sunday midnight.
When he got back, at around nine, it had looked as though they were going to abort and go home. Then Valerie had done what she always did. She had talked Luc round.
‘Look, nothing has changed,’ she said, smiling the whole time like she knew everybody was going to agree with her in the end. ‘This operation was always top secret. Only six or seven of your colleagues in Paris knew the full extent of what you were trying to do. Even the Elysée was in the dark. Am I right?’
‘You’re right,’ Luc had said quietly.
‘Good. So you just close it down. You tell them François will be taken care of. Paris will be disappointed that they didn’t get their leverage against Levene and they’ll want to question you when you go back. But you don’t go back. Fuck Paris. We keep François alive for a few more days and send a ransom to Levene. He’s priceless to her.’
‘MI6 doesn’t pay kidnappers,’ Luc had replied, which was when Valerie had snapped.
‘Don’t give me that shit.’ Akim had looked across the room at Slimane who was grinning like it was all just a game. His face was still marked from the fight in Marseille, a blue-black stain under his injured eye. ‘Her husband is a millionaire. She has access to tens of millions of dollars in offshore MI6 accounts. She’ll pay up. She’ll pay because we make her pay. She knows that if she doesn’t, the boys will kill her son. That’s a motivation, wouldn’t you say?’ There had been all that sarcasm in the room, like a test of their courage, Luc looking defeated and uncomfortable and Slimane almost laughing in his face. ‘And when she finally pays’ – Valerie was lighting up a cigarette – ‘we give the guys their share, we take the money, we kill this prick’ – a flick of her blonde hair in the direction of HOLST’s cell – ‘and then you finally get to quit the job I’ve been trying to get you to quit for the last three years. Or are you scared about that? Are you worried your bosses will catch you out?’ It was a deliberate provocation in front of the team. Even Slimane looked at the ground.
‘I’m not scared, Valerie,’ Luc had replied, like he wanted to take the conversation next door. ‘I just want to be sure we know what we’re getting into.’
Akim could still picture what she did next. She stood up, walked across the room, and buried her tongue in Luc’s mouth, at the same time grinding her hand into his cock so that Akim felt himself grow hard.
‘I’ve always known what I’m doing,’ she had said. ‘All you guys have to do is follow me.’
Soon after that, Luc agreed to everything: the timing of the ransom; the date when they would kill HOLST; the sweetness of his revenge against Levene. Like Slimane always said, Luc was weak around Valerie, prepared to do whatever she wanted. There was a kind of flaw in his character that kept him permanently under her spell. Unlike with everybody else, he never argued back, never stood up for himself, never questioned her decisions. This tough guy of the DGSE seemed to be under a kind of hypnosis. It was embarrassing to watch a man behave like that. Slimane called him ‘the carpet’.
The toilet flushed next door and Akim heard Valerie padding back to the bedroom. He wanted to fuck her – he’d felt that way since they’d met – and lit a cigarette, pulling on his tracksuit and shoes. Then he opened the curtains. That amazing view down to the Pyrenees. Akim always liked looking at it first thing in the morning. Like a new country, a heaven. Then he went to work.
Slimane was asleep in the armchair at the bottom of the stairs, his hand down the front of his trousers, spittle coming out of one side of his mouth. Akim looked through the spyglass and saw that HOLST was lying on his bunk, eyes fixed on the ceiling. He woke Slimane, was sworn at for his efforts, then went into the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee. Moments later, Luc appeared, naked except for a pair of white cotton boxer shorts. There were tattoos on his biceps, flakes of sunburn on his shoulder blades. Akim caught the funk of their sex, like Luc wanted him to know that he’d just nailed Valerie. He opened the door out on to the back porch.
‘Big day.’ The boss went to the fridge. He took a long swig of orange juice direct from the carton. When he had finished, he put the carton on the kitchen table and fixed Akim with one of his lazy stares.
‘Vincent still isn’t responding,’ he said. ‘We’ve only had two emails from him since he got to St Pancras, one on Friday night, one yesterday morning when the housekeeper arrived. The message we sent to abort has gone from the server, so he must have seen it. Valerie has left a voicemail telling him to go to Paris, but there’s no reception for mobiles at the house.’
Slimane strolled into the kitchen, spotted the carton of orange juice and went to pick it up. Luc grabbed his forearm, holding it above the table like there was a flame underneath.
‘You two not listening to me?’ he said. He was stronger than Slimane, who had a look on his face like spilled acid. ‘We have a problem. Vincent was lured into a trap and we don’t know if he’s been arrested, if he’s still at the house or if he got the message to abort.’
‘Fine,’ said Slimane. ‘So you can tell him when he gets back to Paris.’
‘No.’ It was Valerie, coming in behind him in jeans and a T-shirt. ‘I want you to tell him, Akim.’
‘Me?’
Luc released Slimane. Valerie spread her arms to embrace the two Arabs, holding them around the neck. ‘We want you to talk to him.’ Akim enjoyed the feeling of her skin against his neck. ‘Find Vincent when he gets back to Paris. He’ll be holed up at the Lutetia. Find him and then do what you do best. Smartest thing we can do now is clear the trail.’
64
Luc’s email to Vincent had been seen almost instantaneously by Elsa Cassani in the Shand library, where she had saturation coverage of CUCKOO’s lines of communication. The message appeared on the dedicated DGSE server, where it would be encrypted the moment CUCKOO logged on.
They know about the second funeral. Stephen Uniacke is an MI6 officer named Thomas Kell. He found Delestre in Paris. Levene must know and is playing you. Abort immediately. Crash meeting, Sunday midnight.
‘Tom,’ she said. ‘Christ. You need to see this.’
Kell was in the kitchen. By now, Barbara had gone to Gatwick, en route home to Menton. Harold was upstairs in the Shand house watching 3:10 to Yuma.
‘What is it?’
Kell came into the library carrying a mug of tea. Elsa pointed at the third laptop, on the right-hand side of the oak table. The pressure of her index finger blurred the screen.
‘This just came through?’
‘Less than a minute ago. How do they know about you?’
Kell put the tea down on the table.
‘They must have bugged Delestre’s apartment,’ he said. It was the only possible solution he could think of.
‘But you were there on Monday. How can it have taken them so long?’
‘Manpower,’ Kell replied, knowing that, when it came to following up every lead, listening to every conversation, the French were just as stretched as the Security Service or SIS. ‘They probably have microphones all over Paris, checking Malot’s friends and colleagues. Could have taken them several days to work out I was there.’
‘I’m finding the name Vincent Cévennes all over CUCKOO’s files,’ said Elsa, drinking from a bottle of Evian. ‘Also Valerie de Serres, probable girlfriend of Luc Javeau. You think that’s an alias for Madeleine Brive?’
‘Almost certainly.’ Kell scribbled down the names on a piece of paper. ‘Where’s CUCKOO now?’
They looked up at the bookshelves, nine screens in rows of three, like a game of noughts and crosses. It was just after eight o’clock on Saturday evening, Amelia preparing a fish stew in the kitchen, CUCKOO reading Michael Dibdin in the sitting room.
‘Can you hold the message on the server?’ Kell asked.
‘I don’t think so.’ Elsa typed something into the lines of code on the second laptop. ‘I could delete it. That way he won’t find out until he leaves tomorrow. I guess they’ll be trying to call him on the phone.’
‘Harold!’
Kell shouted upstairs. There was a grunting noise through the floor, then the sound of Harold scraping away from his western and thumping downstairs.
‘Yes, guv?’
‘Can you take another look at CUCKOO’s mobile phone activity? Chances are there’s a text message or voicemail waiting for him, instructing him to abort.’
‘To what?’
‘They know about us. They know their operation is blown. They’re trying to tell him to go back to Paris.’
Kell made the decision to buy time and to delete the email from the DGSE server. He then sent a message across to Amelia telling her that the operation was blown. At breakfast, she was to tell CUCKOO that there was an SIS emergency in London and that a car was coming to pick her up. For security reasons, she could not offer ‘François’ a lift to St Pancras, but a pre-paid taxi had been booked to take him back to London. Kell knew that as soon as CUCKOO was a mile outside Chalke Bissett, he would come within range of a mobile phone signal and hear any of three messages left for him by Valerie de Serres. The first was explicit enough:
François, it’s Madeleine. I don’t know why you haven’t responded to your email but you must abort, OK? Call me immediately please. We will crash meet Sunday midnight. We can explain everything. I need to know that you have received this message and that you will be there.
Harold had hacked into CUCKOO’s voicemail, allowing Kell to re-acquaint himself with the tense, petulant voice of his ferry seductress, Madeleine Brive. CUCKOO, having heard the message, would then make every effort to evaporate into the English countryside, shaking off SIS surveillance as he did so. The trail to Amelia’s son would be lost.
65
Vincent realized there was a problem when he heard Amelia knocking rapidly on the door of his bedroom shortly before eight o’clock on Sunday morning. He had been awake for almost an hour, finishing the Dibdin and listening to the bleating of the lambs on the steep hill behind the house.
‘Are you awake, darling?’
She came into his bedroom. She was already dressed, in the uniform she wore for Vauxhall Cross: a navy-blue skirt with matching jacket; a cream blouse; black shoes with kitten heels; the gold necklace given to her by her brother as a present on her thirtieth birthday.
‘You look like you’re going to church,’ he said.
He was shirtless in bed, propped up against the headboard, deliberately provoking her with his physique. He knew that Amelia felt an overpowering love for him, but also a physical desire that conflicted with her duties as a mother. He could sense it in her; he could always tell with women.
‘I’m afraid there’s an emergency in London. I have to leave. There’s a car coming for me at half-past nine.’
‘I see.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ She sat on the end of the bed, imploring forgiveness with her eyes. Vincent remembered his first sight of her pale skin beside the pool, the swell of her breasts. He had often thought about the taste of her, the transgression of a sexual relationship. ‘The worst of it is I can’t offer you a lift back to London. The Office doesn’t know about you and my driver would cotton on. But I’ve arranged for a taxi to pick you up at nine fifteen. Is that all right? Does that give you enough time to pack?’
It seemed as though he had no choice. Vincent pulled back the duvet, climbed out of bed and put on his dressing-gown.
‘It’s a real pity.’ Was Amelia being honest or had she somehow discovered the truth about him? ‘I was looking forward to spending the rest of the day together. I wanted to talk about the move to London.’
‘Me too.’ She stood up and put her arms around him, and it was all that Vincent could do not to press his body against hers and to kiss her. He was convinced that he could possess her, that she would offer no resistance. ‘I can’t even let you stay, I’m afraid. Too many people would start asking awkward questions if …’
‘Don’t worry.’ He broke free. ‘I understand.’ He began pulling out clothes from the chest of drawers and placing them in his suitcase. ‘Just give me five minutes to take a shower and pack. I’ll come downstairs. We can have breakfast. Then I can go back to Paris.’
66
As Kell had predicted, Vincent Cévennes was exactly one mile east of Chalke Bissett when his mobile phone began to come alive with a symphony of beeps and tones that lasted the better part of a minute.
‘Blimey, you’re popular,’ said Harold Mowbray, sporting the casual weekend attire of a Wiltshire taxi driver as he accelerated towards Salisbury.
Vincent, sitting in the back seat of the taxi, did not respond. He saw that there were messages on his voicemail and clicked ‘Listen’ on the read-out.
François, it’s Madeleine. I don’t know why you haven’t responded to your email but you must abort, OK? Call me immediately please. We will crash meet Sunday midnight. We can explain everything. I need to know that you have received this message and that you will be there.
At first, he did not understand what Valerie was telling him. Abort? Why was it necessary to hold a crash meeting in Paris within twelve hours? Vincent took out his BlackBerry and checked the inbox. There were no messages, just as there had been no emails on his laptop the night before. Perhaps, in the confusion of the weekend, unable to reach him as easily as they would have liked, Luc and Valerie had simply panicked.
He dialled the number in Paris, heard it reconnect to Luc’s cell phone.
‘Luc?’
‘Vincent, Jesus. At long fucking last. Where the hell have you been?’
Back at the Shand house, Elsa was able to feed the conversation into Amelia’s Audi as she and Kell tailed the taxi on the Salisbury road. Within seconds, Vincent had realized that he was completely compromised. Luc told him everything: that ‘the guy on the ferry was an MI6 officer’; that ‘Uniacke was an alias for Thomas Kell’; that ‘Kell talked to Delestre in Paris and put two and two together about the funerals’. Luc and Valerie were certain that Amelia had known about Vincent’s deception ‘for at least five days’. That was why she had invited him to her house in the country; not to get to know him better, but to find out who was behind the Malot conspiracy. Vincent asked if MI6 knew that François was being held in captivity.
‘Assume that they know everything,’ Luc replied.
Sitting alongside Kell in the passenger seat, Amelia shook her head and said: ‘We’ll never get to François. They’ll kill him or move him in the next forty-eight hours.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Kell replied, but it was baseless optimism. Unless Elsa could trace the origin of Luc and Valerie’s communi- cations more precisely, their hopes of success were slim. He suspected that François was being held within a five-mile radius of Salles-sur-l’Hers, the village in Languedoc-Roussillon where Arnaud had dropped Vincent in the cab, but without accurate coordinates it would be like droning caves in Tora-Bora. Vincent was their only hope, but with only two specialist surveillance officers at his disposal, Kell’s chances of following him to the crash meeting were near non-existent. How could he expect Harold and Elsa, two tech-ops specialists given only a basic grounding in surveillance techniques, to tail CUCKOO without being spotted?
Up ahead, Vincent had hung up on Luc and was already making plans to disappear.
‘Listen,’ he said to Harold. ‘That was my boss. I need to get to a train station as quickly as possible. There’s been a change of plan.’
‘I thought I was dropping you in London, sir?
’ Harold replied, enjoying the role. ‘Cleared my whole day.’
‘Just do as I say,’ Vincent told him, his faultless English now punctuated with rage. ‘You’ll get paid just the same.’
Amelia, listening alongside Kell in the pursuing vehicle, turned up the volume as Harold responded: ‘All right, all right. No need to lose your rag. You’re the one changing his mind, mate, not me.’ His voice was muffled by road noise and static, but the words were clear enough. ‘Salisbury OK for monsieur? Trains run from Tisbury as well if you prefer.’
‘Just take me to the closest train station.’
About a quarter of a mile further along the road, Kevin Vigors was travelling in advance of the cab with Danny Aldrich. They were coming into Wilton when Kell contacted them on the radiolink.
‘You hear that?’
‘We heard it,’ Vigors replied.
‘Harold’s taking CUCKOO to Salisbury. If he tries to get clear of us, that’s where he’ll do it.’
‘Sure.’
All night, Kell had tried to anticipate how CUCKOO would behave in the aftermath of his exposure. His instinct would be to return to French soil as soon as possible. But how? In addition to the major London airports, there were airlines running flights to France from Southampton, Bournemouth, Exeter and Bristol. It was unlikely that Vincent would go direct to St Pancras without first trying to shake his tail, but he might pick up a Eurostar to Paris at either of the two stations in Kent, Ashford or Ebbsfleet. There was an option to hire a car and to drive it on to the Eurotunnel service at Folkestone, but Vincent would assume that SIS had access to number-plate recognition technology and would quickly be able to identify his position. A train south from Salisbury would take him to the cross-Channel ports.
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