Close Call

by Stella Rimington

  ‘Of course,’ said Liz, though there was resignation in her voice.

  Isabelle said hesitantly, ‘Is he still so … obsessed with Milraud?’

  Liz sighed, and Isabelle added gently, ‘It’s understand­able, Liz. The two of them worked closely together. That must make Milraud’s betrayal very painful.’

  ‘I know, but I had hoped he was getting over it. There’s been no real sign of Milraud for several years. Just rumours and false leads. Martin used to jump at each one, but the last time there’d been a possible sighting he didn’t seem to feel the need to go rushing off after it. I thought that was a good sign.’

  ‘This is different, alas.’ They looked through the sheaf of photographs. ‘I’m afraid there can be no doubt. It is Milraud. Which makes it especially galling that he got away.’

  Liz shrugged. ‘These things happen.’

  Isabelle admired her equanimity. Had their roles been reversed, she liked to think she would have stayed equally calm. But she wouldn’t have bet on it. ‘Anyway,’ she replied. ‘we will do our very best to find him. I’ll get these photographs out straightaway. We’ll check the airlines, the railway stations, the hotels. But I’m afraid he’ll be long gone by now.’

  Liz nodded. ‘Unless you think there’s anything I can do here, I need to be getting back to London. I want to send the pictures out to Bruno Mackay. He’s gone out to Sana’a to join the CIA man there whose source gave us this lead. I’ll send the pictures of Numéro Deux too. Maybe someone out there can identify him, though it’s pretty unlikely. He could be absolutely anybody.’ Then, seeming to sense Isabelle’s gloom, Liz added, ‘Cheer up, Isabelle. You may get a break. If Milraud was stupid enough to show up in the Luxembourg Gardens, he may have made some other mistakes as well.’

  Chapter 11

  Three hours later Isabelle was still in the office, Liz having long gone. Isabelle would have liked her to stay longer, though she knew that there was nothing she could do by sticking around. She liked her English colleague, not least because she was a woman who seemed comfortable with herself. She was intelligent and very focused but she was also attractive and easy to get on with. Too many of Isabelle’s female colleagues seemed so intent on proving to their male colleagues that they were their equals that they lost all femininity.

  It also pleased her to see Liz so happy in her relationship with Martin Seurat, even if inevitably it made her a little jealous. Isabelle was divorced. Her former husband was a diplomat; their two careers just hadn’t fitted together and Isabelle had not been prepared to give up hers for her marriage. And nowadays she worked such long and irregular hours that there didn’t seem much prospect that she’d find a successor to him.

  She was married to her work, she thought to herself, imagining her own obituary. How ghoulish – she decided to stop feeling sorry for herself and get on with finding Milraud.

  Ten minutes later, as she was wishing for the hundredth time she hadn’t given up her beloved Gitanes Blondes, there was a knock on her door.

  ‘Entrez,’ said Isabelle mildly, thinking it was time she went home. Her young son was at her mother’s apartment; he often spent the night there when Isabelle was working late. So often in fact that Isabelle sometimes wondered guiltily if he would grow up thinking he had two mothers. But it wasn’t too late to collect him now.

  Her assistant Madeline came in, looking unusually excited. ‘I think we’ve found something. They have been checking the hotels of the inner arrondissements and they’ve discovered where Milraud was staying.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘Yes. He checked out two hours ago. A place on the Rue Jacob. He must have gone back there when we lost him. He got the receptionist to call him a taxi.’

  ‘Where was he going?’

  ‘The taxi company can’t reach the driver.’ She saw the disappointment on Isabelle’s face. ‘There’s more. We know the alias he’s using. It’s Pigot.’

  ‘Pigot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’ It was almost the exact name of Milraud’s Irish Republican customer – who had been gunned down attempting to escape from their hideout off the south coast of France. Calling himself after his dead colleague seemed a bad joke, unless Milraud was thumbing his nose at his pursuers.

  Isabelle shook her head, trying to focus on what needed to be done. ‘I want the airlines contacted, and we need to check car rental agencies and the train stations.’

  Madeline said mildly, ‘It’s all under way.’

  ‘Good,’ said Isabelle. ‘Could you ring my mother please? Ask her if she’ll keep Jean-Claude tonight. I’ll be here a while yet.’

  Five minutes later Madeline came in again. ‘A Monsieur Pigot made a reservation on an Air France flight to Berlin. Business Class.’

  ‘That’s him all right,’ said Isabelle. Milraud had always liked the best; Seurat had once told her that his expenses had been legendary in the DGSE. ‘I want him arrested at the gate, and held at the airport until I get out there.’

  ‘Too late. The flight took off from Charles De Gaulle twenty minutes ago.’

  Damn. Another tantalisingly close miss. But this time she knew exactly where Milraud was. ‘Get me the BfV on the phone – I want the Germans to be waiting for the plane when Milraud lands.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes. Book me on the first flight to Berlin in the morning.’ She paused for a moment, thinking of something. ‘Book two seats while you’re at it.’

  She examined her options. What should she ask the Germans to do? Arrest Milraud? Martin Seurat would be delighted to lay hands on him but Liz would be worried that the trail to her case would go cold as a result. Milraud would be sure to have some plausible story about his meeting in the Luxembourg Gardens. So put him under surveillance instead? But did she dare risk losing him again?

  Minutes later she was on the phone to her opposite number in the BfV, Germany’s security service, asking him to set up surveillance on an international arms dealer travelling under the name Pigot, who would land at Tegel in one hour. Photographs of the man were on their way. He was a former intelligence officer and highly surveillance-conscious.

  Then she rang Martin Seurat.

  Chapter 12

  Hans Anspach of the BfV stifled a yawn as the flight information line on the board at Tegel airport flipped over. Air France 1134 from Paris had landed. Anspach signalled to his colleague, Pieter Dimitz, who was coming back from the terminal’s Starbucks with two cardboard cups of coffee in his hands. ‘You’d better dump those,’ he said.

  The junior officer groaned. ‘Don’t tell me the flight’s on time.’

  ‘Yes. It’s just landed. And I bet our man will be one of the first through. Control has just told me that the French say he has no checked baggage on board.’

  Anspach had been halfway home when the call had come, telling him to go to Tegel airport where a French arms dealer called Pigot would land at ten minutes past nine. Anspach and his hastily put together team were to follow Pigot wherever he went and stay with him till they were told to stand down. No reason was given at this stage, though according to the French he was likely to be alert for surveillance.

  That probably means they screwed up and he saw them, thought Anspach grumpily. He was missing seeing his son’s school play and he was going to get hell from his wife when he eventually got home.

  Sitting inconspicuously in a small interview room just behind the passport control desks, Gunter Beckerman was waiting for a buzzer to alert him that Pigot was at the passport desk. He would send a warning to Anspach’s phone, before following Pigot through Customs and into the Arrivals Hall.

  There Anspach and Dimitz were taking up their positions. Dimitz wore a dark blue suit and had now put on a peaked cap. Holding a sign reading Herr Rossbach, he went to stand alongside the waiting chauffeurs next to the exit point from Customs.

  Anspach stood further back at a newsstand, idly examining a copy of Der Spiegel. As he tu
rned the pages he kept a deceptively casual eye on everyone emerging into the Hall. He wasn’t relying on Beckerman’s call to tell him the suspect was coming through, for it was perfectly possible that Monsieur Pigot might now have a different name, and a different passport, from those he had used to board in Paris.

  His phone vibrated and he glanced down at its screen. Coming now. Brown leather coat, read the message attached to a photograph of a man in a leather coat and roll-neck sweater, carrying a laptop bag on one shoulder.

  And then, not thirty seconds later, he spotted him.

  Pigot was medium height, broad-shouldered, dressed in the smart casual clothes of a businessman. But, unlike a visiting businessman, he wasn’t carrying a suit bag, only the laptop case hanging from a shoulder strap. He was walking quickly – though not so quickly as to call attention to himself – and heading towards the far exit, under the sign for taxis. Anspach followed, knowing both Dimitz and Beckerman were behind him.

  Outside, the sky was pitch-black, but the pavement was eerily illuminated by the series of sodium lights lining the front of the terminal’s façade. Anspach saw his quarry standing in the taxi queue, which was short this late at night. He waited until Dimitz passed him, no longer wearing his peaked chauffeur’s hat. Then both men got into the back of a Mercedes saloon parked by the kerb in which the final member of the team had been sitting in the driver’s seat. He’d prevented vigilant security and parking staff from having it towed away by waving his security pass at them.

  From the car they watched Pigot enter a taxi. When it drove off they followed. Beckerman, having joined the taxi queue two behind Pigot, was in another taxi, not far behind. The convoy headed off on Route 11 for the centre of Berlin.

  Ten minutes later a message flashed up on Anspach’s phone. ‘Booking in name of Pigot made two days ago at Westin Grand Hotel, Unter den Linden. 3 nights, arriving yesterday. Await further inquiries.’

  ‘What do they mean, “Await further inquiries”?’ muttered Anspach. ‘How can we await anything? We’re right behind the guy,’ and he tapped furiously on his phone.

  Twenty minutes later as they drove, still in convoy, into the centre of Berlin, Anspach’s phone vibrated again. ‘A Madame Pigot checked out of Westin Grand this pm. No forwarding address. No trace so far of any other booking in central hotels in name of Pigot.’

  ‘Don’t lose that cab,’ said Anspach to the driver. ‘We don’t know where the hell we’re going now.’

  ‘Well, we’ll be on Unter den Linden in a minute,’ he replied. ‘So perhaps he’s rebooked.’

  The lights were bright along the pavements of Unter den Linden, traditionally Berlin’s most glamorous avenue, but the atmosphere was marred by a darkened construction site running all the way down the street’s centre, where work was going on to connect the subway between the former west and east sectors of the city. The beautiful trees were virtually invisible behind the boards and railings; what could be seen of them was covered in white dust that each day’s excavations threw up.

  ‘If he gets out here and crosses the road we’ll lose him behind the hoardings,’ said Dimitz.

  ‘It depends if he’s spotted us,’ grunted Anspach.

  But the taxi containing Pigot didn’t stop. It drove on at a stately pace down Unter den Linden until it turned off into a small quiet square and drew up in front of the Hotel Schmitzkopf, an ornate six-storey building with little balconies and flower boxes, an oasis of nineteenth-century solidity amid the city’s East German decrepitude and its obsession with new build. This was a hotel designed for comfort rather than style. We have seen it all before, the hotel’s stone façade seemed to say. Fads come and go, but the Hotel Schmitzkopf remains the same.

  Warned by a text from Beckerman in his taxi, Anspach and Dimitz had stopped their Mercedes further up Unter den Linden, behind a skip that was half full of broken asphalt. They waited fifteen minutes, then Anspach got out. He turned into the square, climbed the steps to the glass and oak door of the hotel and went into the ground-floor lobby, where at this late hour the soft sofas and chintz-covered armchairs were unoccupied.

  At the reception desk a young blonde woman in a smart black suit gave a welcoming smile from behind a large bowl of wrapped sweets. Her face fell slightly when Anspach produced a card identifying him as a government official and asked for the manager.

  ‘He’s on his break,’ the girl said hesitantly. ‘Do you want me to fetch him for you, sir?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary. Tell me – a man came in a few minutes ago and checked in. A Herr Pigot, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said the girl. ‘That was Herr Pliska. He’s a Polish gentleman. He and his wife are in Room 403. She arrived this afternoon. We have no guest called Pigot and no booking in that name.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Anspach. Then, after a pause while he absorbed the new information he said, ‘I must have made a mistake. Got the wrong hotel. Please don’t mention to anyone that I was inquiring for Herr Pigot. It’s a matter of national security,’ he added solemnly.

  ‘Certainly not, sir,’ the girl replied, wide-eyed. ‘Shall I let you know if Herr Pigot turns up?’

  ‘Please do,’ replied Anspach. ‘Here is a card with a number to ring,’ and he handed her an official-looking card with no name on it and a telephone number that didn’t exist.

  Chapter 13

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Annette Milraud got up from the chair where she had been watching TV as soon as Milraud walked into the hotel room. ‘Why did you tell me to change hotels and names? Did something happen in Paris?’

  She paused as Milraud dropped his bag onto the floor and sat down on the bed. He was tired. Tired of life on the run. He’d always known that things would be difficult when he cheated his old employer, the DGSE, and went underground. But he’d thought that eventually some sort of steady state would emerge, allowing him to live without constantly looking over his shoulder.

  He’d been wrong. His old employer had not forgotten him. And everywhere he went he’d been conscious that somewhere in the shadows they were there, waiting to pounce if he gave them the smallest chance. There had been financial rewards greater than anything he had ever enjoyed before, but with them went a total lack of peace of mind.

  Annette was always angry these days, always nagging. He was taking too many risks, she said, but he had tried to explain that it was only because he took risks that he could make the kind of money he did and she could live in the style she demanded. Risk and money were linked like uneasy soulmates, bonded as unhappily as … Milraud and Annette.

  They had been together seventeen years, married for fifteen of them. At first, they had been very happy. He enjoyed his work at the DGSE and she was content with their life in the prosperous Parisian suburbs, such a far cry from her humble origins in Toulon in the south of France. He realised later that her single goal then had been to have children, and that compared with this nothing else mattered.

  It was when, after every kind of test, the doctors had finally told them that having a family simply wasn’t going to happen, that Annette’s dissatisfaction had begun. It was as if money had replaced children as her objective, and making the kind of money she had in mind was no more likely for Milraud as an officer in the DGSE than having children with his wife.

  Then an operation to bust an arms deal had gone wrong, through an untimely intervention by the Swiss authorities. For a few hours the money at the heart of the deal had floated in a kind of no man’s land between the dealer and the buyer. It was there for the asking, and before anyone had thought to reclaim it, Milraud had seen his chance – and taken it.

  And since then money had led to the pursuit of more money – and more trouble. He had left the Service under a cloud that soon turned into a criminal investigation and a warrant for his arrest. He had fled France, escaping by the skin of his teeth, with Interpol fast on his heels. In the years that followed, his new business dealing in arms had become global. He h
ad set up shop in Venezuela, where he had made certain arrangements that he felt confident would keep him safely out of the reach of Interpol and the European and American intelligence services. From there he ventured forth carefully, using a multitude of different passports, and usually to countries where there was no danger of extradition – certain Central European countries, the Middle East, parts of Asia, other South American countries. This trip to Western Europe was an exception and, as he was now realising, a mistake.

  Now Annette was looking at him with irritation. ‘Go and get a shower and change. I’ve hung your clothes up in the wardrobe. Let’s get out of this stuffy old hotel and get some dinner. I’ve booked a table at a restaurant round the corner. You can tell me what happened while we eat.’

  When he came out of the bathroom, Annette was getting dressed. She had put on a chic, tight-fitting black dress, and was trying on necklaces. He recognised one of them, a heavy silver chain he had bought for her in Geneva. The others she had bought for herself, with his money.

  ‘Which one?’ she asked as he came out of the bathroom.

  ‘Which one what?’

  ‘Necklace, you idiot,’ she said, half crossly, half affectionately. He noticed the small chicken wing flaps of skin under her arms. Annette was growing older and he couldn’t offer her the certainty of a secure retirement.

  She settled on a simple affair of thin gold strings braided together and turned for his approval. He nodded without looking at the necklace. ‘I’m a bit tired,’ he said.

  ‘Of course you are, chéri.’ She looked as if she would give him a hug for a moment, but the damp towel he’d wrapped around his middle put her off. ‘I think some supper would be just the thing. I’ve been cooped up all day waiting for you and worrying. Go on, darling, put some clothes on.’

  He shook his head and she stared at him. He said, ‘I don’t think we should go out tonight. In fact, I know we shouldn’t go out tonight.’