by Chris Ryan
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money that's where we want to drop our friend U the only way -- short of stealing a boat with an and waking everyone up within miles - of him out to deep water. I'd suggest swimming ;g him out, but I know that area and it's one er of a river up there. It's deep, it's dirty and ent is very strong.'
t about weights and so on?' asked Andreas. got all the kit we'll need in the car.' by item, he went through this with them until ilwere all certain that nothing had been iked. 'I've also bought four pairs of night-vision . The moon's on the wane, but there should be ient light. The routine is going to have to be us on the dump-and-splash detail, two on stag, going to need the comms kits, warm clothing, footwear, rations and a cover-story in case iped by the local police. There's no reason to that's going to happen, but just in case it does icone saw us, for example, and thought we ars -1 think we should leave all the weapons laming away a midnight walk by the river is explaining away the fact that we're armed th is quite another.' looked around questioningly. The others
lly we get to the place about three this Son, park up, and have a recce. Then we finalise and wait till dark. I've included a couple of bags and biwies in the kit so that if we're
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challenged we can say that we're looking for somewhere to camp. The first thing we've got to do though - and do fast -- is buy ourselves some sensible outdoor clothing. It's Sunday, so it's going to have to be supermarket stuff. There's a place on the Peripherique about fifteen minutes away.'
On the journey, Slater made a point of sharing the lead car with Leon. Not to avoid Eve, but to try and get to know a fellow team-member with whom, indirectly, he felt he had much in common. Leon drove, having devised the route to the disposal location. He ran the Mercedes fast but with care, ensuring that the Peugeot was no more than a car or two behind them at any time. ~ .
At the same time both he and Slater scanned the traffic at intervals for signs that they were being followed. Their fear -- expressed by neither of them but felt by both - was that the French DGSE might be on to them. Had the DGSE been watching FanonKhayat too? Was there an anti-Serbian element in the French secret services - there was certainly an anti British element.
At this moment, carrying the body with them as they were, the team were acutely vulnerable, and they knew it. One nosy traffic-cop asking them to unlock the trunk and they were finished. To Slater even the flat suburban countryside was spooked territory. The sooner Fanon-Khayat's body was deep beneath the mud-brown surface of the Seine, the better.
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To distract himself, and to pass the time, Slater asked about his life.
an's story was an unusual one. After leaving school ic Indian Ocean island of Mauritius he had found elfin some sort of'trouble' -- upon which he chose i elaborate - and had worked his passage to Europe kitchens of a cruise liner. Poorly paid domestic 'protection' work had followed in France, and the Marseilles pimp who had hired him was :d and imprisoned on charges of corrupting minors had hitchhiked to Castelnaudary and offered his ces to the Foreign Legion. After a short, sharp ini period at Aubagne which he described as sting', Leon had been dispatched to Canjuers and to undergo basic training and selection. Six and several violent beatings later he had passed up of his cadre, and had chosen to join the Legion's fchute regiment at Calvi in Corsica, lere, in counterpoint to the chronic drunkenness twhoring enjoyed by his fellow Legionaries, Leon contemporary European history by jondence course. To make his studies more ig, and to improve his English, he signed up i the Open University.
ic Deuxieme Regiment Etranger de Parachutistes lot discourage Leon in these academic activities. Sin two years he had been promoted, and as a NCO accompanied the 2nd REP to Rwanda they were involved in the covert training of forces.
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Repelled by the future implications of this policy Leon transferred to the Legion's 3rd Infantry Regiment in French Guyana, whose nominal task was to guard the Ariane Rocket launch site at Kourou. There, having qualified as a jungle warfare instructor, he earned French citizenship by serving out his five year contract with the Legion. At about the same time he was awarded a BA by the Open University. His plan on leaving the Legion was to train as a schoolteacher, but things did not quite work out that way.
'I went back to France . . .' he began, but Slater silenced him with a gesture.
'I may just be paranoid,' he said, 'but I think we might have picked up a tail. There's a large grey or blue car I've'just seen which I'm pretty sure was there about fifteen minutes back.'
'Well, this is a motorway,' said Leon. 'What kind of car?'
'Looks like some big German thing. An Opel or something - it was too far away to get a make on.'
'And it was . . .'
'It was just at the extreme of visibility. I might be imagining things, but it just seemed to me that it was tucked in perfectly for a long-range tail.' He shrugged.
'Let's pull off at the next exit,' said Leon. 'See if we can get a fix on it. Why don't you ring the others, warn them that's what we're going to do?'
Slater did so, and five minutes later they left the motorway by a slip-road. As they waited at traffic lights on the exit roundabout. Slater watched the
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sing motorway traffic. There was no sign of the car 1 thought he had seen. The lights turned green and ' progressed a kilometre up a country road to a lay where they drew to a halt. Behind them the j)geot did the same.
>t's give it five minutes,' said Leon. 'After that I'm to get nervous. The last thing we need is for bored cop to dnve past and start asking long .'
ae two cars sat motionless in the afternoon heat, i drove past at intervals, but none resembled a grey iue Opel, and Slater began to wonder if his senses been overtuned to danger. When on enemy tory, as they undoubtedly were now, the mind t habit of conjuring up enemies. At the same time isregarded your instincts at your peril. The line , fine one. 7e should move,' said Leon eventually. 'We're
ig to push our luck.'
ter agreed. They returned to the motorway and . for five minutes in silence, you decided to train as a teacher,' he began jally, still watching the wing-mirror. ; the wheel Leon nodded. 'Yeah,' he said. 'That plan . . .'
ling to France and hooking up with a former | colleague in a bar in the Rue St Denis in Paris, f allowed himself to be talked into driving the ay car for an armed robbery. The attempt to a wages delivery-van went badly wrong, with a
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security guard and a gang-member both fatally wounded in the firefight which ensued. As the unarmed driver, Leon got off comparatively lightly and ended up serving less than three years.
It seemed long enough at the time, however. The twenty-three-year-old ex-Legionary served his sentence at Clairvaux prison, some 250 kilometres east of Paris. The former monastery, a notorious dumping ground for hard cases, is often described as the French Alcatraz, and the regime was brutal. To make matters worse Leon realised that with better planning planning he himself would have been happy to undertake - the robbery attempt would have worked perfectly and no one would have got hurt.
In between reading books of political theory in his cell, Leon passed the time by planning -- and mentally executing -- increasingly complex and ingenious crimes. Or, as he himself prefered it, 'events'. Packed into the jail were experts in fraud, larceny, embezzlement, kidnapping, drug-smuggling and every other field of illegal activity. Leon consulted them all. He would submit imaginary scenarios to these criminal tutors - scenarios detailing companies to be defrauded, banks to be robbed, officials to be kidnapped, and rivals-j to be executed - and invite them to pick holes in his plans.
For the first six months the experts were able to suggest better solutions than Leon, but not thereafter. When interviewed by the prison rehabilitation board at the end of his second year, he informed his
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Miers that he intended to retrain as a risk assessor private security sector. One of the board must ad connections in the field, for a month later he guested by the prison governor to undertake a 'exercise'. On the basis of given data, he was assess the vulnerability to armed assault of a processor fabrication plant in Bordeaux. He was cils, paper and the use of an office, forty-eight hours he had produced a fully ted plan which, if put into execution, would the company in question relieved of 30 francs' worth of stock for an outlay of less than ?,000. Although he had not been asked to do so, fcalso produced a detailed proposal for the sellings'the stolen microprocessors, was thanked for his efforts, and heard no more. : later, however, he found himself on one of the 's coveted computer-training courses, and on Jetion of his sentence was passed the name of a icl officer employed by the Paris branch of a ational security group named Nordstrom. A training in their offices at La Defense was red by a two-year posting to London, where he gad-hunted.
by the standards of the Cadre it was a curious lent. Leon was walking home from the jm office in Sloane Street to his flat in i. It was a five-minute journey by bus, but he I) to clear his head after the overheated fug of the L It had been a long and dizzyingly dull day -- he
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had been compiling a report on the security needs of a! private hospital in Marylebone blessed with ^ 'upscale, high-profile clientele'.
A woman fell into step beside him - a dark-haired woman in a leather jacket, jeans and Doc Marten boots i
- and invited him to join her for a drink in the Grosvenor Hotel at Victoria Station. At first he assumed she was a prostitute, but when she asked after i a couple of Nordstrom employees - former MI5 officers whose names were very far from being in the i public domain - he started to pay attention.
'Ellis?' asked Slater.
'Ellas,' Leon confirmed. 'You've heard the stories,* then?' v
'I've heard how she died.'
Leon nodded, and was silent for a moment.
Ellis had led him to the hotel's Travellers Bar.j ordered them a gin and tonic each without botherir to ask what he wanted, and set out her stall. She] represented a co-ordinating wing of the Foreignj Office, she told him in rapid and fluent French, andl she had been empowered to offer him a job. Her! department needed someone with specialist military! skills, the ability to plan and execute covert operations! overseas, and an intimate knowledge of the French! underworld. The last was perhaps the most importantl
-- the service had assets on French soil, of course, butf they were not. . .
Not bien cabUs? Leon had suggested. Not connected?
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, she had admitted. They weren't. The complex linked the French military, mercenary and underworlds was not one that the service she ited had been able to negotiate with ease. They jdy found themselves beholden to the DGSE -- ich secret service -- for entrees to that world, fte way things were, frankly, they were
;ly reluctant to do so. | Slater said. Right.
sturn for joining her department, Ellis had sd - peremptorily draining her gin and tonic -- 3wn was offering him British citizenship, a jltial drop in salary, and the guarantee of acute id physical danger. And that was about it. had agreed almost immediately. At twenty was not ready to grow stale in an office - ?r the material benefits of his position. He to deploy his old skills. He wanted the excitements and terrors of operational life. : that he had not been born French and was free pentional French loyalties and prejudices, he had probably encouraged them to approach
|$o, for the second time in his life, he told Slater, assumed new citizenship. He had joined the
Ijseven years ago, become a British national, and egretted his decision. He even liked British j - it was next to impossible, he claimed, to find : kebab or vindaloo in France, st the deciding factor, however, had been the
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charismatic personality of his recruiter. Something about the lean, leather-jacketed figure, some wild and fundamental nonconformity, had told him that this was the organisation he had been looking for all his life.
'Supposing you'd been approached by Eve?' Slater asked him. 'Or by Andreas or someone else? Would you still have joined?'
'It's academic, man. I did join -- that's all that matters. As you'll have realised there are some very good sides to this job and some very weird and freaky ones. But I am what I am, just as you are what you are. If you're good enough to be offered the job and mad enough to accept it, then by definition, brother, you, are rightifor it.'
Slater laughed. 'I guess so.'
A few minutes before two o'clock they swungj northwards off the motorway towards Bonnieres-sur-1 Seine, and Slater saw the river to their left - deep, grey ] and forbidding. At that point the Seine looked about a I hundred metres across, and Slater understood instantly 1 what Leon had meant when he said that swimming thai corpse out was very much a last resort.
Pulling off the N13, the two cars followed the sig for Freneuse and Joigny. The minor road led them pa a paper-mill and cement-works, both of them wit gates padlocked for the weekend. Soon they wer driving between stands of pine-forest, with the su splashing the road only sporadically. Outside the ca after the background roar of the motorway, all oppressively silent.
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ae temperature's dropped,' said Leon. 'I'm glad jught all that outdoor clothing. It could be a cold
the next fifteen minutes they barely saw car. From time to time, parallel to the road, aught sight of the steely, baleful glint of the f, as Leon had suspected, proved to be sre than a collection of farm buildings. There church and a small village shop, but both ed untenanted. The only sign of life was a new Renault Espace parked outside one of the ises.
i plates,' said Leon. 'Well-off Parisians like their watch TV and play computer games in the side at weekends. They'll assume we're ; around for property too -- that or we're a pair ic dealers looking for agricultural scrap to flog -theme restaurants.'
sed-race gay couple, perhaps,' suggested ^Intent on perverting their children?'
laughed. 'They'd probably rather the truth ptt. Did you catch the National Front posters on (motorway bridge?'
map had indicated, the track petered out a or so beyond the village. Leon and Andreas he cars, and the four of them climbed out and 1 They were all wearing jeans, gumboots and |. jackets. Leon was carrying a knapsack (ing biscuits, a flask of coffee and other bits and ^Andreas was smoking. In a group, as Leon had
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intended, they looked like a bunch of* Parisians intent on local exploration.
A damp path between saw-edged ahead of them. Locking the cars, Andreas and his cigarette. The path ktjjj weeded towpath and the broad sweep oft
'We'll need a bit of weight,' observed j the remorseless flow of the water and the/i
'We've got a bit of weight,' said going to discover tonight when we try up here from the car.'
Six or seven minutes later the path led*! from the river, between two dark stands j back to the bank. Here the river wuj bend to almost twice its normal breadth,^ a locked boat-house, with a peeling door, and beyond it, as the map had jetty extended a clear fifty metres into | the distance, a couple of kilomet steeple of the church at Thieux was visit the trees.
'It looks good,' breathed Eve. 'It looks"
Several wooden and fibreglass boats alongside the jetty, and deep grey water s its heavy supporting piles.
'It looks deep,' said Andreas. 'That's the I
They spent an hour there, working details. With a ball of fishing line and a Leon took a series of depth soundings alol of the jetty. The deepest point, which he)
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f before the end. The river was
* -~ they all agreed - to fall more f jibe near future. And that would
4 f s
&nbs
p; g* murmured Leon, and took a s from the knapsack. ^Anrfreas.
sfcnd learn,' said Leon quietly, steak from the plastic bag. cube of meat and tied it to the {then lowered it into the water, took it straight to the bottom. f slowly drew it back through i?v&nd the others were amazed to er crayfish clinging by one
: on our man being pretty un i,' said Leon. 'There's nothing ( more than a side of meat.' 6d Eve.
llessly removed a pair of blunt |f$�0cket.
wanted to come,' Leon said remains of the steak into the ead fingers, anyone?'
ti
they had thoroughly rehearsed ?the night ahead, they discussed id attract more attention by
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remaining in the vicinity or by pulling back into a local town and returning after dark.
The final decision was to pull back. Cars obviously came and went along the Joigny road, Leon argued but few remained until dark. They would disappear until llpm.
Returning to the cars, they made their way to Vernon, twenty-five kilometres away. According to Leon's research the town was always full of tourists at weekends due to the presence, at nearby Giverny, of the house and gardens of the impressionist artist Monet.
His research was accurate. The place was very busy, with American, British and Japanese accents much in evidence. 'At Eve's suggestion the four of them behaved like conventional tourists, booking themselves dinner at a small restaurant in town and attending a guided tour of the artist's house and gardens.
They stayed there until the house closed at 5.30. At the museum shop Eve bought two tea-towels showing details of Monet's famous Waterlily paintings, which Andreas described as 'a nice role-playing touch'.
'We need them for the office,' Eve said severely. 'That area round the kettle gets really disgusting at times.'
Returning to Vernon they walked idly through the town and alongside the river for a couple of kilometres. Returning as the light began to fade, they installed themselves in a cafe. The minutes crawled
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