Mind/Reader

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘It’s all there,’ began Claudine, as euphoric as Volker. ‘We’ve got everything we—’ She stopped as quickly as she’d begun. ‘No,’ she corrected. ‘We haven’t got everything we need. We know who and where to target, which is incredible. But we got it illegally, so none of it can be produced in any court: it has to be obtained legally. And even then it could be judged circumstantial. There’s no fucking proof!’

  She was conscious of Yvette staring in surprise at the outburst, from the other end of the room, and Rosetti, of whose arrival she’d only been vaguely aware, came to the door of his office and said: ‘What is it?’

  Claudine shook her head, not replying.

  Volker said: ‘But we do know where to look.’

  Quickly Claudine said: ‘I’m not dismissing what you’ve done. You’re a genius.’

  ‘I know,’ said the German.

  Claudine couldn’t decide whether he was accepting her apology or agreeing with her assessment.

  Claudine was unsure whether Volker should accompany her to the meeting with Sanglier, anxious for the computer expert to be given every credit for what he’d achieved but apprehensive of Sanglier’s reaction when he learned how the information had been obtained. In the end she offered Volker the choice. The German said he thought he should come to avoid her being criticized.

  She handwrote three drafts of her account, trying to gloss over how Volker had made the sensational breakthrough, before she finally dictated it to Yvette, Rosetti listening at her shoulder. She attached supporting, annotated print-outs of all Volker’s computer programs, but in Sanglier’s office she had Volker verbally explain it all, as he had to her, believing that it would be more quickly understandable than subjecting the French commissioner to initially incomprehensible charts.

  Sanglier listened throughout without expression or interruption. He was still expressionless when he said, at the end: ‘Absolutely and totally brilliant!’

  ‘It is,’ agreed Claudine hopefully.

  ‘But all obtained quite illegally?’ At last! There was no urgency - he could take all the time he wanted - but after all the false starts and wrong turns he finally had the lever to prise her out. And with the most satisfying irony of all by using the very material with which he could, eventually, bring the whole investigation to a conclusion to his maximum personal benefit!

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

  ‘Did you condone it?’

  ‘I encouraged it: the intrusion into the Customs records particularly.’ There was a bitter paradox that in trying to draw condemnation away from Volker she risked drawing credit away from the man as well.

  ‘So it’s completely unusable.’

  ‘Legally.’ Irritated, Claudine fought back. ‘But not practically. We know where to concentrate, absolutely: all of this becomes legal when it’s seized in a police investigation. The way we’ve got it need never become public.’

  ‘Any means justifying an end,’ sneered Sanglier.

  Claudine knew damned well there wasn’t a policeman from Outer Mongolia to Patagonia who hadn’t bent the law to solve a crime, and found Sanglier’s professional moral outrage preposterous. ‘If it stops kids being raped, mutilated and dismembered I can live with it.’

  The undisguised contempt, which an hour earlier would have concerned him by its implied confidence, brought Sanglier up short but didn’t worry him now: she was more his victim than he was hers. There was nothing to be gained by taking it any further at this point. Careless even of the contradiction he said: ‘From this moment it becomes entirely a police inquiry.’

  Momentarily Claudine could not comprehend the remark, and from his facial reaction beside her she knew Volker didn’t either. Then she thought she did, although it didn’t help her to understand the reason for it. ‘The inquiry is still far from complete.’

  ‘A profile is to tell us where to look. We know that now. And it didn’t directly come from a profile.’

  What the fuck was this man trying to prove? ‘Are you disbanding the task force?’

  Sanglier was brought up short again. ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Removing me from it?’

  ‘Not at this moment.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand what you’ve just said.’

  Sanglier realized the moment he briefed the Amsterdam police he would be condoning the very computer illegality he intended to condemn the woman for condoning in the first place. ‘I mean that for the moment how this information was obtained remains a separate, internal matter.’ Which, so total was his control within the Commission, he could manipulate in whichever direction he chose.

  Claudine didn’t think that was what he’d meant at all: it made no more sense than so much else of what Sanglier did or said. Could she have been wrong in believing there was latent ability beyond the advantage of a special name qualifying the man for the position he occupied? Or was he, like so many others within the organization, someone of limited capability his own country didn’t know what to do with and had shunted into an organization European law enforcement considered an elephants’ graveyard? ‘Is there anything else we can help you with?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Sanglier, in a tone of what Claudine thought to be self-satisfaction. ‘I will personally handle things from now on.’

  Claudine’s hesitation was not second thoughts about having accepted Rosetti’s invitation before leaving Europol, nor because of the answering machine’s ‘please call me’ message from Francoise Sanglier she’d expected to be waiting - and was - when she returned home. It held her, though, directly in front of the telephone for several moments while she reached the final decision before picking up the instrument. Her first call was much briefer than those that followed. The longest was with her mother, who insisted she couldn’t remember a time when she’d felt so well. She’d put on half a kilo and was being fitted the following day for the suit she was having made for the wedding. The appointment had been confirmed with the notaire but he’d been warned Claudine might have to rearrange or even cancel, at short notice. Claudine said she wouldn’t have to do either.

  There were a lot of photographs throughout Hugo Rosetti’s immaculate bachelor apartment, which was very close to the Kloosterkerk church, but in no way did Claudine think of it as a shrine as she had the Sanglier house. Her immediate reflection was Rosetti’s remark about their not laughing: in virtually every photograph of Hugo and Flavia they were, several times where they hadn’t been aware a picture was being taken. In a great many they were holding each other: he lifting her, hair flying, or grasping her hand or touching her face. In one taken from behind they were walking into the light, each with an arm tightly around the other, so that it was impossible to see any separation between them. There were also two studio portraits, the poses different but from the same dress obviously taken during one sitting. Flavia was very beautiful. The hair - tightly coiled in a chignon in one shot, long enough to reach her shoulders in the other - was deeply black, like the eyes that gazed directly at the lens. She was wearing a high-necked dark dress, a sweater maybe, so the slight but full-busted figure was more obvious in the unposed shots, which showed her just a little taller than Rosetti. Sophia was in three. In one she was being swung between the two of them, in another laughingly astride Rosetti’s shoulders with her hands covering his eyes, he play-acting with his arms outstretched to grope forward. She was crying in the third, with Flavia and Hugo kneeling either side to comfort her. The child had been with Flavia at the studio session, best-dressed in frills and bows and trying hard to be grown up, serious-faced and doe-eyed - black-haired and dark-eyed like her mother - only betraying a smile that never developed in one shot.

  ‘I almost put some of them away.’

  ‘Why?’ She didn’t have any photographs of herself and Warwick showing the joy that was evident in the pictures all around her.

  He shrugged. ‘That’s what I thought. So I didn’t.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ She held back from the aren�
�t-they-beautiful cliché. He didn’t need to be told that.

  ‘It’s spaghetti,’ Rosetti announced enthusiastically, hurrying the conversation on. ‘The trick is in the Bolognese sauce: minced pork as well as beef and left to marinate overnight. You’re going to miss the final piquancy without the Argiano Brunello di Montalcino: I prefer it to Chianti.’

  ‘Maybe a glass.’

  He stopped with the bottle briefly suspended over his own goblet, which he then filled and handed to her across the table without comment.

  ‘Surprised?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The reason for not doing so was pretentious.’

  ‘I know. As it would have been if I’d put the photographs away.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  There was a slight shoulder movement. ‘It was your pretension. Your business.’

  ‘Non-interference?’

  ‘I’d probably try to stop you jumping off a cliff’

  ‘But not try to stop me drinking wine?’

  ‘No one should be stopped drinking wine.’

  The spaghetti was sensational, the sauce unlike anything she’d ever tasted. She told him so without making too much of it, not wanting to remind him he’d cared for himself for so long.

  After that day’s encounter with Sanglier their major conversation was more predictable than ever. Rosetti initiated it. ‘What I can’t believe is how quickly - and easily - it’s all been solved. From virtually nowhere to a conclusion, in one mighty leap.’

  ‘It hasn’t been solved, not yet,’ Claudine pointed out. ‘And Volker just made it seem easy. Which is a bloody sight more than Sanglier is doing.’

  ‘He’s certainly odd.’

  ‘Odd? The bastard just doesn’t make sense. He hasn’t done from the very beginning.’ She was enjoying the wine and decided to accept more.

  ‘You’re the mind-reader,’ Rosetti reminded her lightly.

  ‘I can’t read his. I don’t think he knows it himself. It was an open threat, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Officially he had to say what he did,’ insisted Rosetti. ‘He won’t actually do anything. That would be ridiculous.’

  ‘He is ridiculous. Nothing should happen to Kurt.’

  ‘What did Kurt say afterwards?’

  ‘That a lot of people did what he does before Europol became operational, because it was the only way. And everyone knows it. So he couldn’t understand the fuss Sanglier was making.’

  ‘Sanglier is right though, in a way,’ Rosetti pointed out. ‘It becomes a straight police investigation now. Your job’s over.’

  ‘It’s too soon to say that, too,’ she warned. ‘Volker’s use certainly isn’t over.’ She didn’t want it to end: to go back into meaningless limbo, attending meaningless seminars and having meaningless arguments about theory with Scott Burrows for no other reason than to fill the time.

  ‘I hope you’re wrong: that nothing stops it being wrapped up.’ He gestured with the wine bottle and she nodded.

  ‘At the moment there’s absolutely no provable evidence,’ Claudine reminded him unnecessarily. Was she being totally objective or was she being influenced by her reluctance to see the task force, with Rosetti a part of it, disbanded.

  ‘But without any bodies it’s a respite for both of us.’

  Claudine looked towards the biggest photograph of Flavia, immediately hoping he hadn’t seen her switch of attention. ‘You going to use it to go to Rome?’

  He nodded but said nothing.

  ‘I’m going to Lyon, for my mother’s wedding.’ She paused.

  ‘But there’s something else I have to do first.’

  He frowned at her across the table. ‘What?’

  ‘I called Paul Bickerstone before coming here tonight.’

  ‘You bloody idiot!’ said Rosetti.

  Three and a half thousand miles away, on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland, two specially trained, body-armoured FBI assault teams surrounded an isolated farmhouse as the third, wearing breathing apparatus, coordinated the jackhammering of the door with firing tear-gas grenades into the ground-floor windows.

  The owner, his wife and two daughters were all in the basement. The autopsy estimated they had been dead for more than three weeks and that it would have taken them several days before that finally to die from the torture that had been inflicted.

  From the evidence upstairs they guessed they’d only missed the killer by hours. He’d quit leaving behind a lot of what he would have regarded as his personal belongings.

  The full details of the failed raid were immediately cabled to the Bureau station at the US embassy in Holland.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Henri Sanglier decided he had every reason to feel as he did, all-powerful, all-important, in total command of everything. Every law enforcement officer in Holland was on standby to be at his instant disposal. The only unit uninvolved was that investigating the separate killing of Anna Zockowski.

  He held back from taking over the Amsterdam office of the Dutch police chief, Willi van der Kolk, satisfied that the man automatically accepted the secondary role in whatever was to happen. Poulard and Siemen just as automatically became his personal assistants, liaising with his personal secretariat which he had brought with him from The Hague. Convinced it was now the moment to put himself into the forefront and anxious to be associated with every success, he insisted that Poulard and Siemen also keep in daily contact with the Zockowski inquiry as well as that of the other Polish girl in Brussels to take instant advantage of a development in either.

  Sanglier would naturally have delegated to ensure his self protection against personal error. But it was essential anyway, because no briefing could be given outside the security of a police building and there wasn’t a room large enough at any in the city to accommodate at one time the sheer size of the combined forces. And because of the problem of gossiping leaks from such numbers there was additional security in dividing into tightly controlled and supervised units an investigation that Sanglier was determined, at its successful conclusion, would be recognized throughout Europe - and beyond if possible - as a copy-book formula for anything like it ever again.

  He allocated the largest concentration of manpower to twenty-four-hour surveillance upon 32-40, Van Diemen Straat. Sanglier decreed it should go beyond identifying every employee and user of the premises to creating dossiers on their wives, partners and friends. Each one had to be photographed and those photographs compared with criminal records first in the city itself, then in Holland as a whole and finally in Europol. The ownership of every private vehicle driven by any employee or user had to be established through licensing records and each car assigned a permanent, round-the-clock watch squad to follow it when it was driven not just by the owner, but by his wife, partner or acquaintance.

  A second unit had to discover through Dutch company records the named directors and managers resident in Holland and through liaison with the first group identify them photographically. Once that had been done those photographs had to be compared against whatever international records Interpol held of known Asian criminals, and if that check drew a blank Interpol was to be asked to extend the check to every one of its Asian member countries.

  Sanglier devoted an entirely separate division to maintaining a minute-by-minute vigil on every truck, lorry or commercial vehicle - refrigerated or otherwise - owned by Wo Lim Ltd. A fleet of unmarked cars was allocated so that each could be followed wherever it went throughout the European Union. This division was composed entirely of officers from Europol, whose establishing Convention permitted cross-border pursuit among every one of the fifteen EU countries. Every stopping place, business, restaurant and outlet had to be logged and every contact photographed if possible. Only if the following detectives became convinced the lorry they were following contained something suspicious were the local police to become involved. All local force liaison was to be through Sanglier, who had decided to be personally present a
t any body part seizure. To make that possible he had Europol’s plane on permanent standby at Amsterdam airport.

  There was an obvious flaw in that part of his planning but Sanglier was prepared when the challenge came from van der Kolk. The Dutchman pointed out that with the major highway checks throughout the Celeste killing countries already in place they could coordinate a concerted, Europe-wide interception of every Wo Lim lorry.

  ‘And throw away whatever chance we might have?’ Sanglier snapped back aggressively. ‘How long do you think it would take them to realize their vehicles were being specifically targeted? Minutes. The random road checks, which might find something in a Wo Lim lorry, can be nothing more than back-up at this stage, concealed as a drugs search.’

  ‘There could be more dismemberment killings,’ protested van der Kolk, an avuncularly broad-bellied, white-haired Santa Claus of a man.

  ‘In a war platoons are sacrificed to save brigades,’ said Sanglier, enjoying the analogy and unembarrassed by its doubtful hyperbole. He actually reflected, as he spoke, that it was not something he would have said in front of Claudine Carter. But then she was no longer a problem, if indeed she’d ever been one. That had never been the consideration. She’d been an uncertainty that had to be removed. And was now going to be.

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re saying,’ complained the Dutchman, who thought the remark had been absurd.

  ‘I want to get a lot of other things in place - take the investigation a long way beyond where it is at the moment - before we make a positive move against their vehicle fleet. We can only do that once. If we found nothing incriminating we would have lost everything.’