by Jon King
“But I have a meeting in Paris at four o’clock,” Andanson protested.
“Cancel it. This is extremely urgent, James, we have a job for you. I’ll see you at four o’clock.”
Andanson discarded his mobile on the passenger seat of his black BMW 320d Compact and turned right on the A71, south. He’d thought about ignoring the caller, of course, had thought about defying his instruction and heading on up to Paris anyway. But he knew better than to cross Richard Mason. At the first opportunity he pulled over and called Christophe Lafaille to cancel his appointment – tried to contact Sophie as well but couldn’t get through – then continued his journey south towards Millau and the Hotel Campanile.
At around 3.30 pm that afternoon Andanson arrived in the panoramic town of Millau. Six minutes later he pulled into a petrol station situated opposite the town’s Hotel Campanile and filled his tank. He also refilled the spare petrol container he carried in the boot of his car, having emptied its contents a few days previously when he’d run low on fuel en route to an unexpected photographic assignment. The years of constant travelling had taught him to be prepared. Having paid for the fuel and returned the refilled container to its place in the boot he climbed back in his car and drove across the road to the Hotel Campanile car park where, he’d been led to believe, Mason would be waiting for him.
But waiting for him instead was an unwelcome surprise.
“Mr Mason couldn’t make it,” the man said. He’d watched as Andanson had pulled into the car park and, Glock 17 unholstered, had made his way over to the paparazzo’s BMW and climbed in beside him. “He asked me to meet you instead.”
Andanson didn’t bother to ask the man’s name. The semiautomatic pistol levelled at him now told him everything he needed to know. He’d been set up. This man had been sent to kill him.
“Drive,” the man said. “I’ll direct you.”
Andanson fired the engine.
Sometime later Andanson found himself driving along an isolated dirt track, across farmland towards a fenced-off, wooded area up ahead. It was early evening, around 8 pm and it was beginning to get dark. His headlights were on full beam.
“Turn off your lights,” the man beside him instructed, and indicated left with the pistol he still brandished. “Take this track here.”
Andanson doused his lights and turned off left along an even more primitive dirt track. He knew this area pretty well, but daylight was disappearing fast and it was becoming more and more difficult for him to see ahead. To some large extent he was trusting to luck, but luck was something that was about to desert him.
“In there.” The man with the gun pointed to a clearing in the woods just ahead of them. “Drive into that clearing, turn off the engine and give me the keys.”
Andanson followed instruction. “So what now?” the paparazzo said. “You are going to kill me?”
“No,” the man said. “You are going to kill yourself.”
Back in the courtroom Judge Stephan started gathering up the papers on the bench in front of him. “Conspiracy to murder is a very serious allegation, Monsieur Tomlinson,” he said. “It must be supported by hard evidence. I have heard nothing to persuade me your claims are anything but wild speculation.”
“But you will order the release of the files?” Tomlinson wanted to know.
“What files?”
“The files I’ve told you about. They will identify the embassy staff, as well as the Ritz informant and the paparazzi agent.”
“The court will examine everything it deems pertinent to the inquiry. Now, if that is everything.” He tapped the edge of his papers on the bench top and turned to confer with his assistant magistrate, Marie-Christine Devidal.
Tomlinson could scarcely believe what was happening. “But you must at least order the release of the files,” he said, his voice raised, more in desperation than annoyance.
But: “That will be all,” Judge Stephan said and the two magistrates stood up to leave. “You will be contacted in due course.”
For what seemed like several minutes after Stephan and Devidal had departed the courtroom Richard Tomlinson simply stood there, aghast, motionless, the questions in his eyes almost audible.
At length he turned and headed for the door. He’d been gagged.
CHAPTER 32
While Richard Tomlinson was being discounted by the French Inquiry, JB and I had decided to visit one or two key locations, if for no other reason than to familiarize ourselves with what until now had been little more than points on a map. From the downtown café where we’d had our morning coffee – the café where I was sure I’d seen Richard Tomlinson, or his double, drive past me in a cab; and where I’d spoken to Jackie on the phone – we’d made our way back to the more affluent 1st arrondissement of Paris and Place Vendome, where among other palatial constructions the Ritz Hotel was situated. Place Vendome was the most uptown and fashionable square in Paris, the centre of chic, the place to hang your hat, for those who could afford to. It was also where Diana and Dodi had taken their last supper and from where they’d begun their last journey amidst the melee of turmoil and confusion that had marked that fateful day. Indeed, as we made our way, on foot, across the square, past the imposing Vendome Column towards the entrance to the Ritz Hotel, I found myself picturing the commotion that must have ensued here, almost a year earlier—the day the princess was killed.
Diana arriving here with Dodi in the late afternoon sunshine, alighting from the limousine and having to fight her way through the scrum of paparazzi already gathered here, outside the hotel’s front entrance―largely the same scrum that had pounced on her at Le Bourget Airport some two hours earlier, when she’d arrived in Paris from Sardinia.
Then being whisked away to Dodi’s apartment on Rue Arsène Houssaye, just off the Champs-Élysées, some two-and-a-half hours later, only to find the same salivating media scrum already there and waiting, like hyenas stalking a kill.
Then being forced to return here for dinner later that evening, to the Ritz, it being simply too dangerous for them to dine at their favoured restaurant, Chez Benoit, scarcely a diamond’s glint from Dodi’s luxury apartment. On this occasion, too, the couple would have to fight their way through the ever-madding media scrum, past the avalanche of cameras and flash bulbs and into the relative calm of the Ritz Hotel’s exclusive Imperial Suite.
But there was yet one more journey to be made: the getaway.
As I stood there now, lost in this bizarrely evocative moment, strangely mesmerised by the hotel’s lavishly baroque façade, I pictured Diana at twenty past midnight having to sneak out via the hotel’s rear entrance in order to evade the pack of wolves still baying for her blood, here, at the front. She must have been terrified. Indeed, as the images of her ill-fated escape played hauntingly on my mental screen I seemed in some small, insignificant measure to relive that terror―as though the ghost of that terrible night had momentarily resurrected itself and shared its forbidding secrets for all to see. Inwardly, I shivered.
“You look like you’ve seen that ghost again, Jon,” I heard JB say.
“Just thinking,” I said, and folded my arms around myself as though to ward off the chill I was feeling, even though it was twenty-plus degrees in the shade. “I was wondering what it must have been like, you know, having all that attention constantly heaped on you. She couldn’t even leave the hotel without the security guards having to deploy decoy cars.”
“Why do you think they did that?” JB said, unexpectedly, taking me by surprise.
I shrugged. “To try and fool the paparazzi into chasing the wrong vehicle, I guess.”
“Yeah, that would be my guess, too.”
“So…?”
“Well, it’s just … I can’t help wondering…”
“What…?”
“Well if that’s really what they were trying to do, why didn’t they just keep driving? I mean, they could’ve kept going in that direction…” he said, indicating north along Rue de la Pa
ix. He then spun round and indicated south across the square in the direction of Rue de Castiglione. “…Or in that direction. Why didn’t they just keep driving away from the square, at least for a mile or so, before coming back here? If they really wanted to lure the paparazzi off the scent why didn’t they take them on a wild goose chase across town? It doesn’t make sense.”
“What are you getting at, JB?”
“Well, think about it. All they actually did was drive the so-called decoy cars once around the square and straight back here. They didn’t fool anybody. In fact all they succeeded in doing was create even more hysteria, to the point that the paparazzi became even crazier than they already were. It just seems odd.”
This was the most fired up I’d seen JB since we’d started investigating the case. JB the doubter, the sceptic. “Do you think they might have done it deliberately, then?”
He made a face. “I dunno about that. It’s just … well it’s not what I would’ve done, that’s all.”
“No, me neither,” I agreed. “Not unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless I was deliberately trying to whip up emotions so they got out of hand.”
“And why would you want to do that?”
Again I pictured the out-of-control media scrum that was gathered here, outside the hotel’s front entrance, Diana having to sneak out the back in an attempt to get away unseen. Again the image was terrifying. “Because when things get out of hand,” I heard myself say, “that’s when accidents happen.”
JB offered no further response, but I could see he’d taken on board what I’d just said. I wondered if maybe, just maybe, the doubter in him was starting to ask new questions.
A few moments later: “Come on, let’s check out the embassy. It’s about half a mile up the road, this way,” I said as we turned and strolled off in the direction of l’Ambassade de Grande Bretagne, the British Embassy. Ten minutes later we were standing on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, opposite the embassy—a commanding bourgeoisie town house renovated and modernized for twentieth-century use. Evidently the British government had purchased it in 1947.
“Well, here it is,” I said, eyeing the building opposite with both eyes—one on its impressive architecture, the other on the secrets it housed. If the operation that led to Diana’s death had been run out of this place, I thought, it would likely remain secret forever. Or at least for a very long time. “Base of operations.”
“What, the embassy?” JB said.
“Where else? Where better to locate your operational control room than right here in the heart of things?”
“I s’pose, but…”
“The Ritz is only half a mile back that way, remember, the Alma Tunnel a mile away in that direction, the headquarters of French Intelligence a mile beyond that. All comfortably within touching distance. MI6 would have had a team based here anyway, under diplomatic cover. It was the perfect location.”
“Except for one thing,” JB said, considering my hypothesis with some cynicism. “It was bank holiday. The embassy was closed that day.”
“Exactly,” I came back.
“Eh…?”
“Think about it. If you were running an operation as clandestine as this one, you’d hardly want the place to be crawling with extraneous staff, would you, much less open to the public.” I caught his eye, purposely. “Like I said, it was the perfect location.”
“You know, you could have a point there,” JB agreed after a moment’s thought. “You actually could have a point.”
Place de l’Alma was busier than I’d imagined. More tourists. More traffic. But only one camera to capture all the action—one traffic-monitoring camera looking back along Cours Albert 1er and Cours la Reine towards Place de la Concorde, Place Vendome and the Ritz Hotel. Cours Albert 1er was the riverside highway along which Diana’s Mercedes had been chased by at least three still-unidentified vehicles on the night of the crash. If any camera should have captured the chase – in particular the moment the Fiat Uno dipped out in front of her Mercedes and forced Henri Paul into a violent and, as is turned out, deadly correction manoeuvre – it was this one towering above us now, mounted near the top of the lamppost overlooking the entrance to the Alma Tunnel. The official word, of course, was that no cameras had captured the event—not any part of the journey from the Ritz Hotel had been captured by CCTV or traffic camera: not the departure, not the chase, not the crash. Standing here now with JB, on the Place de l’Alma overpass, having just walked from the embassy, past Place de la Concorde and along Cours la Reine, following the same route Diana had taken on the night she died, it seemed all the more evident why no images or footage of the journey existed. There were, quite simply, no cameras. Or at least very few.
“Notice anything, JB?” I said. We were standing by the lamppost, beneath Place de l’Alma’s solitary traffic-monitoring camera, gazing back along the route we’d just walked. The camera was filming every vehicle that entered the tunnel. “Anything different?”
“Everyone’s driving on the wrong side of the road, for a start.”
“What else?”
JB shrugged. He didn’t know.
“Cameras,” I said. “Traffic cameras. This is the only one. There are ten or so private security cameras I counted back along the route, two attached to a couple of the embassies and the Chamber of Commerce over there and several others on some of the buildings on Cours la Reine. But this is the only traffic camera.”
Suddenly latching on to where I was going JB scanned the horizon and his eyes locked onto the solitary security camera attached to the front of the Chamber of Commerce on Cours Albert 1er. It seemed to be working fine.
“They say all the security cameras were facing the wrong way on the night of the crash.”
“All of them?”
“That’s the official word.”
“Well what about this one?” JB wanted to know, craning his neck and gazing up at the traffic-monitoring camera whirring above our heads.
“According to French Traffic Control it wasn’t working at the time of the crash.”
“Convenient.”
“Evidently everyone at Traffic Control goes home to bed at eleven o’clock, and when they do they turn the cameras off. It was gone midnight when the crash happened.”
“So all the cameras, what few there are in Paris, were either facing the wrong way or they were out of action when the crash happened?”
“Correct.”
“There’s scarcely any cameras, anyway.”
“Correct.”
JB let this information sink in. At length he said: “I guess that makes Paris the ideal place to assassinate a princess, then—without being seen.”
“Or filmed.”
“Or filmed, indeed. All part of the plan from the outset.”
“The plan?” Was I still talking to JB, the doubter? The hardened sceptic? “You’re beginning to sound like a conspiracy theorist, JB.”
“Well if I am,” he said, “it’s because I’m beginning to sense a conspiracy. Come on, or we’ll miss our flight home.”
CHAPTER 33
“I’m there now,” Mason said into his mobile phone, as the cab he was travelling in drew up in the SIPA press agency car park. It was around 3.30 am, and dark. “We’ll have the remainder of the archive soon enough.”
As the cab driver killed engine and lights Mason ended the call he’d just made and immediately dialled a different number. At the opposite end of the car park the headlights of a Renault Master van flashed on and off, once. Mason cut the call and climbed out.
“Wait here,” he said to the driver. It was no ordinary driver, of course. It was no ordinary cab. “If anything goes wrong, kill them.”
Unbuttoning his jacket Mason’s ‘driver’ unholstered his Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol and cocked it, click-click.
Closing the door noiselessly behind him Mason felt for his own semiautomatic as he stepped cautiously into the shadows, all six senses aliv
e and alert. Though mounted security lights illuminated the SIPA building’s main entrance, he saw, the car park remained largely in shadow, and for a beat Mason had to allow even his sharply trained eyes to grow accustomed to the dim light. He scanned the scene. There, perhaps twenty yards ahead of him, he could just make out the form of a tall, rangy man dressed all in black and wearing a black ski mask rolled up so that his face was partially visible. He was standing by the Renault Master van, and even at this distance Mason could now see it was the man he’d come here to meet. He let his grip on the semiautomatic relax, just a little, but left the safety lock off as he softpadded his way around the perimeter of the car park to where the man stood.
Then: “I trust there were no problems?” Mason said.
“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” the man replied, but in a way that told Mason things perhaps hadn’t gone as smoothly as they might have.
“What do you mean?”
The man shrugged his shoulders. “One of the security guards tried to play the hero. He tried to take the gun off me. There was a struggle and it went off.”
“And…?”
“He’s okay. He took the bullet in the leg, or the foot, I’m not sure. He’s still alive anyway, tied up with the others in the lobby.”
“Great.”
The news that a firearm had been used in the raid momentarily angered Mason, but only momentarily. The armed gang he’d hired to break into the SIPA offices – and more precisely, into James Andanson’s office – were of course professional criminals. But they were far from professional agents. The shooting of the security guard would make it look all the more authentic, he quickly realized: make it look like the break-in had been carried out by a gang of amateur thieves and, if anything, negate any suggestion that the intelligence services might have been involved. The gang’s incompetence would work in his favour, then.
“Let’s get our business done,” he said. “I take it you managed to find what we were looking for?”