Against 6 was written: A truly brave man makes a secret of his bravery, which is the greatest bravery of all
The note for 43 was: How easy it is, once the lie has begun, to believe rather than remember, because every man is a hero in his own heart.
The third entry, against 106, was more intriguing than philosophical. Why Sanglier? Too much, too much.
Claudine reached into the drawer for the next book and in doing so jogged the pile, exposing the papers beneath. She didn’t bother with the books any further.
The document was a German original, a transcript of the Ruhr spy trial like the ones she’d seen in Paris. It was the prosecution’s opening of the case, she identified, recognizing the page number, 106. She’d read it, she thought. But she hadn’t. The version in Paris was the accusation against Sanglier, the positive link between the Ruhr group and the Pimpernel spy. But nowhere in the version before her was the name Sanglier. Careless of how her clothes would be soiled, Claudine lowered herself, gently to lessen the dust cloud, into the chair in which her father would have sat.
It was her job, her vocation, to solve puzzles. So what was the solution to this one? Her father hadn’t mislaid any documents. He’d stolen them: removed them from an official record. But they couldn’t be official. The official ones, retrieved from Germany long after the end of the war, were in Paris. She’d seen and read them. She remembered the inconsistencies. Dates that were missing. Carefully, methodically, she set out all the wartime originals on the table before her, in date sequence, looking for the pattern that was always so necessary. It was in the inconsistency. There were gaps she hadn’t been able to understand in Paris and what was set out before her was disjointed and meaningless by itself. But together they wouldn’t have been. If these German originals were put in date order with those she’d looked at in the French archive the picture would have been complete. But a picture of what?
Claudine read everything through again, with a path to follow now, signposted by dates and events, and then she read the statement that her father had signed but which wasn’t inexplicable any more.
No one should have known. No one would have done, if the decision had not been made to honour Marcel Temoine as Sanglier in the national archive. Before then - before her father had been entrusted with assembling all the uncollated material - the facts had been those Temoine had himself provided, on the understanding that the omissions came from the chaos of the war’s end and the confusion of the false material the Nazis had created.
But the dates didn’t correspond, she saw abruptly. Particularly with the trial that established the legend of the hero whom the Gestapo could not catch. A brave man who wanted to be braver. Marcel Temoine had been brave, in diverting transportation trains in those final, chaotic months. That he had done so was unarguably supported by the genuine German files. But it hadn’t been enough. Why Sanglier? Too much, too much. Marcel Temoine had invented himself, given himself a code-name - a French code-name, not a German one such as the Gestapo would have accorded - and changed the trial documents to intrude an uncaught spy who had never been part of the Ruhr operation. When the questions were asked he explained it away as wartime confusion, never imagining that the true records would survive to prove him a liar. No one should have known. They still didn’t. Her father had isolated the discrepancies going through the German material and had filleted out what would have incriminated the man, leaving gaps that couldn’t be explained but saved him from exposure. It was not my duty, as a soldier, when medals came for the valour of others … A test for myself. What medals had William Carter been awarded he felt he hadn’t deserved? So he decided to let a deserved legend survive. A silly game, a pointless gesture.
Claudine cried again. Sitting in the chair in which her father sat, at the desk at which he’d worked, probably while she and her mother ignored him far below, she confronted her final ignorance. It was not just herself she hadn’t known. She hadn’t known her parents either. She didn’t know that her father had been a soldier or why the love had turned to contempt or why her mother had so carefully preserved all his clothes or why he hadn’t told them.
A truly brave man makes a secret of his bravery, which is the greatest bravery of all.
She hadn’t had a weak man for a father, Claudine realized. She’d had a hero.
The full reflection came on the homeward flight, after the farewells to Gerard and the promises to come often, which she would because she’d left the loft intact, which he’d assured her she could: after, finally, the renewed self-consciousness at producing her Europol accreditation to satisfy the startled security official at Lyon airport that she could carry the Beretta aboard an aircraft.
Homeward, she thought. To a fortress apartment and a man she loved to whom she couldn’t physically prove it and another man with one of the most famous names in France and a lesbian wife. Did Henri Sanglier know the truth about his father? Guess, at least? It would account for so much that remained a mystery: the strange approaches, the fluctuating friendliness and the hostilities. Something else she’d never know. To know she’d have to ask him and she couldn’t risk that. She’d keep her father’s secret because it wasn’t his alone. Unwittingly he’d shared it with her.
Back in her apartment Claudine experimented with the security system, as self-conscious with it as she was with the weapon, before picking up the telephone. She stood with it ringing emptily in her ear for several moments until she remembered what day it was.
Hugo would still be in Rome, beside the bed of a wife who never knew he was there.
She jumped, startled, when it rang fifteen minutes later. Sanglier said: ‘I wanted to know if you’re fully recovered. Fit enough to come back?’
‘Completely, thank you.’
‘You’re quite happy about your safety?’
‘It’s very good,’ said Claudine.
It wouldn’t be, if the answer to his unasked question wasn’t what he wanted it to be. And Scott Burrows’ killing and the attack upon the woman herself had shown him how easily it could be manipulated. She was the proven choice for subsequent investigations. All he had to do was ensure she was assigned to the right one, where the danger of another personal attack was the greatest: after letting a little time elapse, for her to become complacent and grow careless about carrying the gun.
It would, he supposed, be the perfect murder. That’s how he wanted things. Perfect.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Europol exists.
The idea - and the name - of an FBI for the European Union came from John Alderton, a former Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall. It was eagerly taken over by Germany which saw itself the motivating and controlling nation of a police organization empowered, like the American Federal Bureau of Investigation upon which it is modelled, to operate across state lines as a supranational force.
The concept of a German-dominated law enforcement agency immediately encountered political resistance from European countries with memories of two world wars. Although Europol was assigned permanent headquarters in The Hague, in Holland - in a building used by the Gestapo during World War II - and staffed by detectives and police personnel from national forces, it was initially confined to being a computerized centre collating drug-trafficking information. The Convention which established Europol’s existence extended the remit to include nuclear and conventional arms and explosives trafficking, extortion, blackmail, protection racketeering, investment fraud, aggravated burglary, money laundering and illegal immigration.
The next step must be to expand Europol beyond an information-collecting-and-disseminating agency into a necessary and fully operational investigatory force throughout the European Union.
Mind/Reader anticipates that inevitable development.
ALSO BY BRIAN FREEMANTLE
Fiction
The November Man
Charlie Muffin
Goodbye To An Old Friend
Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie
The Man
Who Wanted Tomorrow
The Inscrutable Charlie Muffin
Deaken’s War
Face Me When You Walk Away
Charlie Muffin’s Uncle Sam
Madrigal For Charlie Muffin
Charlie Muffin San
Kremlin Kiss
Rules Of Engagement
Charlie Muffin and Russian Rose
The Runaround
Comrade Charlie
Charlie’s Apprentice
The Factory
The Bear Pit
Little Grey Mice
The Button Man
No Time For Heroes
Bomb Grade
Nonfiction
KGB
The Steal
The Fix
CIA
MIND/READER. Copyright © 1997 by Brian Freemantle. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
First published in Great Britain by Vista, an imprint of the Cassell Group, under the pseudonym Harry Asher under the title The Profiler
eISBN 9781466803619
First eBook Edition : October 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data
Freemantle, Brian.
[Profiler]
Mind/reader / Brian Freemantle. p. cm.
“A Thomas Dunne book.”
I. Title.
PR6056.R43P76 1998
98-4484
823’.914—dc21
CIP
First Edition: August 1998
Mind/Reader Page 47