A Foreign Country (31 page)

‘Come with me,’ she said eventually, channelling all of the charm and the mischief of her brief encounter with the receptionist at the Hotel Gillespie. She took CUCKOO’s arm and walked him slowly up the lane towards the front of the house. When they had reached the kitchen door, which was still ajar, she again gestured to his feet.

‘Your cigarettes are on the table, aren’t they, love?’

CUCKOO pointed at the packet of Lucky Strike, which were indeed on the kitchen table, partially concealed from view by a peppermill and a bowl of sugar.

‘I’ll get them for you,’ she said, squeezing through the door. ‘That way you won’t have to come in.’

‘And the lighter,’ he said. ‘I must have my lighter.’

She passed the cigarettes through the door and asked for its whereabouts.

‘In my room,’ CUCKOO replied. ‘But I can get this.’

‘No, no, you stay there, love,’ and Barbara climbed the stairs to the first floor, which was now a ghost town of inactivity. She walked into CUCKOO’s bedroom, spotted the gold cigarette lighter on top of the chest of drawers, slipped it into the front pocket of her smock and returned to the kitchen.

‘
Voila!
’ she said with an air of triumph, handing the lighter across the threshold. It sounded as though it was the only word of French that she knew. ‘Now you get back to Mrs Levene. She’ll be wondering what’s become of you. And if I don’t see you again, it’s been lovely meeting you. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Safe trip back to Paris.’

Lying flat on the floor of Amelia’s en-suite bathroom, so that their silhouettes would not show in the windows, Kell, Elsa and Harold could pick out only the mumble of Barbara and CUCKOO’s conversation. Taking slow, near-silent breaths, side by side like campers sleeping in a three-man tent, they listened as Barbara closed the kitchen door, then heard what sounded like the footsteps of CUCKOO returning to the lane and walking back past the house, heading in the direction of the meadow. About a minute later, Kell received two low-volume clicks on his radio, then a pause before Vigors confirmed, with three further clicks, that CUCKOO was passing through the gate on his way back towards Amelia.

It was another minute before Kell dared to break the spell of their silence. Standing up, he swore quietly and looked down at Elsa and Harold. Slowly, like survivors from an earthquake, they clambered to their feet.

‘
Cazzo
,’ she whispered.

‘Squeaky bum time,’ said Harold and Elsa said: ‘Shhhhh!’ as though CUCKOO was still in the next room.

‘It’s all right,’ Kell replied, opening the bathroom door. ‘He’s in the meadow. Gone.’

Barbara appeared at the top of the stairs.

‘Do mind my language,’ she said, ‘but bloody hell, how did that happen?’

‘What did he want?’ Elsa asked.

‘Cigarettes,’ she replied. ‘He wanted bloody
cigarettes
. Imagine if he’d come upstairs.’

‘I’d have smoked one with him,’ Harold muttered, and everybody went back to work.

Akim was woken the next morning by the sound of Luc and Valerie fucking in the next room. Always the same routine: Luc increasingly struggling for breath as he chugged against the headboard; Valerie smothering her moans with what was probably a sheet or the edge of one of the pillows. She was like a teenager or newlywed bride: wanting it every morning, wanting it every night. A cast-off from Internal Security, Valerie was the one random element in the operation, brought in by the boss because he could not function without her, but kept secret – as far as Akim knew – from Luc’s masters in the DGSE. Even Vincent himself had only met her for the first time a few days’ earlier. Luc had sworn him to secrecy, knowing that Paris would pull the plug if they so much as suspected that Valerie was so intimately involved in the HOLST operation.

Akim looked at the clock beside his bed. It was just after six on a Sunday morning; he could have done with the extra hour’s sleep. Now he was just thinking about pussy, about how much longer it was going to be before he could go back to Marseille.

‘Arseholes,’ he muttered and hoped that his voice would carry into the next room and stop the scrape of the bed against the floorboards, the soft muffled squeak of the springs. Eventually there was a groan from Luc, louder than most mornings, and the bed stopped moving, like a car coming to a halt in a lay-by. Moments later Valerie was padding barefoot next door and running the tap on the bidet. Akim heard Luc cough a couple of times, then the radio, the volume turned down low. Always the same routine.

Akim was due on duty at seven fifteen, relieving Slimane from the night shift. Three days earlier, he had gone down to find Slimane and the prisoner talking, HOLST’s door wide open, his eyes filled with rage and tears. Later on, walking in the countryside near the house, Akim had asked for an explanation and Slimane had told him – laughing about it, like it was the funniest thing in the world – that he’d been taunting François about Egypt, about what they’d done to his ‘fake mum and dad’. Akim, who had grown to like François, to respect him for the way he’d handled himself since the grab in Paris, had launched at his friend, a lot of the stress and the tension of their long confinement suddenly coming out in a frenzy of rage. The two men had fallen to the ground and scrapped like kids in the street, only to stop after a minute or two and look at one another, laughing at the dust on their clothes and trainers, flicking away the flies that buzzed around their heads.

‘Who gives a fuck about him anyway?’ Slimane had said, and then they’d ducked behind a tree and lain close to the ground because somebody had come past on a tractor.

Who gives a fuck about him anyway?
Akim had given a lot of thought to that question. Do I give a fuck about François?
Should
I give a fuck about François? He’d hurt his dad, sure. He knew that. But it was Slimane who’d had the blade in Egypt, just like it was Slimane who’d wanted to finish off the spy at Cité Radieuse. Akim didn’t want anyone, especially François, thinking he and Slimane were similar. Akim was a soldier, he did what he was told to do; he stayed true to whoever was paying him. With Slimane, you never knew where his loyalties lay, what he was thinking, what wildness was going to spring from him next.

Who gives a fuck about him anyway?
Akim had gone to bed the previous night knowing that he might have to kill HOLST. Maybe that was what was bothering him. He didn’t want to have to do it but he knew that Luc or Valerie were crazy enough to give him the order, just to test his loyalty. At about seven o’clock, after he had finished his nightly swim, Luc had received a document from Paris that effectively ended the first phase of the operation. It was a transcript of a conversation at Christophe Delestre’s apartment in Montmartre, recorded by DGSE microphones five days earlier but only now, thanks to a typical Paris fuck-up, making its way to Luc. The conversation was between Delestre, his wife, and an MI6 officer calling himself ‘Thomas Kell’. Kell, Luc had realized instantly, was Stephen Uniacke, the same man who had talked to Vincent on the ferry, the same man Akim and Slimane had been instructed to rough up at Cité Radieuse. Kell had run Delestre to ground, shown him a photograph of Vincent and worked out that HOLST had been switched. Luc, running downstairs, a dressing-gown tied slackly around his belly, wet legs still dripping water on the floor, had shouted for Valerie.

‘Fucking MI6,’ he said. ‘Fucking Amelia Levene. I was right. She worked it out. She knows about the second funeral.’

There’d been an argument between the two of them, then Luc had dressed and driven north to Castelnaudary, where he’d bought himself half an hour at the Internet café and sent an email to Vincent’s dedicated server.

They know about the second funeral. Stephen Uniacke is an MI6 officer named Thomas Kell. He found Delestre in Paris. Levene must know and is playing you. Abort immediately. Crash meeting, Sunday midnight.

When he got back, at around nine, it had looked as though they were going to abort and go home. Then Valerie had done what she always did. She had talked Luc round.

‘Look, nothing has changed,’ she said, smiling the whole time like she knew everybody was going to agree with her in the end. ‘This operation was always top secret. Only six or seven of your colleagues in Paris knew the full extent of what you were trying to do. Even the Elysée was in the dark. Am I right?’

‘You’re right,’ Luc had said quietly.

‘Good. So you just close it down. You tell them François will be taken care of. Paris will be disappointed that they didn’t get their leverage against Levene and they’ll want to question you when you go back. But you don’t go back.
Fuck
Paris. We keep François alive for a few more days and send a ransom to Levene. He’s
priceless
to her.’

‘MI6 doesn’t pay kidnappers,’ Luc had replied, which was when Valerie had snapped.

‘Don’t give me that shit.’ Akim had looked across the room at Slimane who was grinning like it was all just a game. His face was still marked from the fight in Marseille, a blue-black stain under his injured eye. ‘Her husband is a
millionaire
. She has access to tens of millions of dollars in offshore MI6 accounts. She’ll pay up. She’ll pay because we
make
her pay. She knows that if she doesn’t, the boys will kill her son. That’s a motivation, wouldn’t you say?’ There had been all that sarcasm in the room, like a test of their courage, Luc looking defeated and uncomfortable and Slimane almost laughing in his face. ‘And when she finally pays’ – Valerie was lighting up a cigarette – ‘we give the guys their share, we take the money, we kill this prick’ – a flick of her blonde hair in the direction of HOLST’s cell – ‘and then you finally get to quit the job I’ve been trying to get you to quit for the last three years. Or are you scared about that? Are you worried your bosses will catch you out?’ It was a deliberate provocation in front of the team. Even Slimane looked at the ground.

‘I’m not scared, Valerie,’ Luc had replied, like he wanted to take the conversation next door. ‘I just want to be sure we know what we’re getting into.’

Akim could still picture what she did next. She stood up, walked across the room, and buried her tongue in Luc’s mouth, at the same time grinding her hand into his cock so that Akim felt himself grow hard.

‘I’ve always known what I’m doing,’ she had said. ‘All you guys have to do is follow me.’

Soon after that, Luc agreed to everything: the timing of the ransom; the date when they would kill HOLST; the sweetness of his revenge against Levene. Like Slimane always said, Luc was weak around Valerie, prepared to do whatever she wanted. There was a kind of flaw in his character that kept him permanently under her spell. Unlike with everybody else, he never argued back, never stood up for himself, never questioned her decisions. This tough guy of the DGSE seemed to be under a kind of hypnosis. It was embarrassing to watch a man behave like that. Slimane called him ‘the carpet’.

The toilet flushed next door and Akim heard Valerie padding back to the bedroom. He wanted to fuck her – he’d felt that way since they’d met – and lit a cigarette, pulling on his tracksuit and shoes. Then he opened the curtains. That amazing view down to the Pyrenees. Akim always liked looking at it first thing in the morning. Like a new country, a heaven. Then he went to work.

Slimane was asleep in the armchair at the bottom of the stairs, his hand down the front of his trousers, spittle coming out of one side of his mouth. Akim looked through the spyglass and saw that HOLST was lying on his bunk, eyes fixed on the ceiling. He woke Slimane, was sworn at for his efforts, then went into the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee. Moments later, Luc appeared, naked except for a pair of white cotton boxer shorts. There were tattoos on his biceps, flakes of sunburn on his shoulder blades. Akim caught the funk of their sex, like Luc wanted him to know that he’d just nailed Valerie. He opened the door out on to the back porch.

‘Big day.’ The boss went to the fridge. He took a long swig of orange juice direct from the carton. When he had finished, he put the carton on the kitchen table and fixed Akim with one of his lazy stares.

‘Vincent still isn’t responding,’ he said. ‘We’ve only had two emails from him since he got to St Pancras, one on Friday night, one yesterday morning when the housekeeper arrived. The message we sent to abort has gone from the server, so he must have seen it. Valerie has left a voicemail telling him to go to Paris, but there’s no reception for mobiles at the house.’

Slimane strolled into the kitchen, spotted the carton of orange juice and went to pick it up. Luc grabbed his forearm, holding it above the table like there was a flame underneath.

‘You two not listening to me?’ he said. He was stronger than Slimane, who had a look on his face like spilled acid. ‘We have a problem. Vincent was lured into a trap and we don’t know if he’s been arrested, if he’s still at the house or if he got the message to abort.’

‘Fine,’ said Slimane. ‘So you can tell him when he gets back to Paris.’

‘No.’ It was Valerie, coming in behind him in jeans and a T-shirt. ‘I want
you
to tell him, Akim.’

‘Me?’

Luc released Slimane. Valerie spread her arms to embrace the two Arabs, holding them around the neck. ‘We want
you
to talk to him.’ Akim enjoyed the feeling of her skin against his neck. ‘Find Vincent when he gets back to Paris. He’ll be holed up at the Lutetia. Find him and then do what you do best. Smartest thing we can do now is clear the trail.’

Luc’s email to Vincent had been seen almost instantaneously by Elsa Cassani in the Shand library, where she had saturation coverage of CUCKOO’s lines of communication. The message appeared on the dedicated DGSE server, where it would be encrypted the moment CUCKOO logged on.

They know about the second funeral. Stephen Uniacke is an MI6 officer named Thomas Kell. He found Delestre in Paris. Levene must know and is playing you. Abort immediately. Crash meeting, Sunday midnight.

‘Tom,’ she said. ‘Christ. You need to see this.’