A Foreign Country (8 page)

Kell wanted to have both the BlackBerry and the SIM analysed by someone who could break their SIS encryptions. Marquand, despite the early hour, had already been in touch with a source in Genoa and explained that she would reach Nice at around midday.

‘Elsa Cassani. Used to work for us in Rome. Freelance now. Worked out she can make a lot more money that way. Can do tech-ops, background checks, more contacts in more agencies than I care to think about. Feisty, smart, hyper-efficient. You’ll like her. Comes highly recommended.’

‘Tell her to call me when she gets into town.’ Kell reckoned he could grab a few hours’ sleep if Elsa left him undisturbed until twelve. ‘What else have you got?’

‘Cheltenham has been in touch. They’ve analysed the numbers you sent through. One of them was Amelia’s house in Wiltshire. She rang it three times over the course of two days. Must have spoken to Giles on each occasion because he’s been down there for the last week. As far as we know, he hadn’t heard from her since she vanished. Each conversation lasted less than five minutes.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘Giles probably bored her into a persistent vegetative coma.’ Kell was looping a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the handle of his room and was too strung out to acknowledge the joke. ‘The French mobile isn’t known to us. It’s a new number, purchased in Paris four months ago. Registered to a François Malot. Amelia may have only left a message because the call lasted less than thirty seconds.’

Kell made the connection. ‘Malot was one of the funerals in the Fourteenth.’ He put the security chain on the door and remembered how Marquand had always been a beat behind the rest.

‘Right, yes. Very good, Tom. I knew we’d hired the right man. I’ll take a closer look. Watch this space.’

Elsa Cassani had the washed-out complexion of a young woman who had spent the bulk of her twenty-seven years sitting behind computer monitors in darkened rooms. A full-figured, lively Italian with stud ear-rings and a steady smile, she had called Kell’s mobile shortly after twelve o’clock and arranged to pick up the SIM and BlackBerry from a café on the Rue de l’Hôtel des Postes.

The handover was straightforward. As instructed, Elsa had put on a hat, found herself a table and ordered a Campari and soda. (‘Ah,’ she had said, enjoying the trick. ‘Because it’s
red
.’) Within a few minutes, Kell had strolled in, spotted the hat and the drink, handed over the hardware and told her that he needed the results ‘by sunset’. He had then walked off in the general direction of the Mediterranean leaving Elsa alone at the table. Nobody had batted an eyelid. No need for the discipline of a formal brush contact. No need for Moscow Rules.

Kell had forgotten how much he disliked Nice. The city had none of the character that he associated with France: it felt like a place with no history, a city that had never suffered. The too-clean streets, the incongruous palm trees, the poseurs on the boardwalks and the girls who weren’t quite pretty: Nice was an antiseptic playground for rich foreigners who didn’t have the imagination to spend their money properly. ‘The place,’ he muttered to himself, remembering the old joke, ‘where suntans go to die.’ Kell recalled his last visit to the city, an overnight stay in 1997, tracking a Real IRA commander who had struck up a friendship with an unsavoury Chechen money launderer with a villa in Villefranche. Kell had flown down on a soggy May morning to find a ghostly and sterile city, the cloistered cafés surrounding the old port deserted, the Café de Turin serving half a dozen oysters to half a dozen customers. It was different now, a tornado of summer tourists in the city, taking up every inch of sand on the beach, every changing room in the smart boutiques on Rues Paradis and Alphonse Karr. Kell began to wish that he had simply stayed in his hotel, lived off room service and watched pay-per-view movies and BBC World. Instead, he found a brasserie two blocks back from the Med, ordered inedible
steak frites
from a pretty Parisian waitress who smouldered for tips, and began to work his way through the copy of Seamus Heaney’s
The Spirit Level
that he had packed at the last minute in London. Behind the bar, a fifty-something proprietor who appeared to have modelled his appearance on Johnny Hallyday was killing time on an iPhone, trying to catch his reflection in a nearby mirror. Kell had long ago concluded that all restaurants in the south of France were run by the same middle-aged proprietor on his thirty-fourth wife with the same paunch, the same tan and the same bombshell waitress whom he was inevitably trying to fuck. This one kept scratching an itch in the crack of his bum, like Rafael Nadal preparing to serve. When it was time to settle the bill, Kell decided to have some fun with him.

‘The steak was tough,’ he said in English.

‘
Comment
?’

The proprietor was looking past his shoulder, as though it was beneath his dignity to make eye contact with a Brit. ‘I said the steak was tough.’ Kell gestured towards the kitchen. ‘The food in this place is only marginally better than the stuff they served up in
Papillon
.’

‘
Quoi
?’

‘You think it’s OK to charge tourists eighteen euros for medium-rare chewing gum?’

‘
Il y a un problème, monsieur
?’

Kell turned around. ‘Never mind,’ he said. It had been enough to see Hallyday stirred from his complacency. The waitress appeared to have overheard their conversation and honoured Kell with a flirtatious smile. He left fifty euros of Truscott’s money for her on the table and walked out into the afternoon sunshine.

A wise man once said that spying is waiting. Waiting for a joe. Waiting for a break. Kell killed time by wandering the streets of Vieux Nice and the Yves Klein galleries at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. On a steel bench in the mezzanine he checked the messages on his London phone. Claire had left a series of increasingly irate texts from the waiting room of their marriage guidance counsellor. He had completely forgotten the appointment.

Thanks a lot. Total fucking waste of my fucking time.

He did not want to explain himself, to confess that Marquand had brought him in from the cold. Instead, texting quickly, he wrote:

Sorry. Totally forgot. Crazy 24 hrs. I am Nice.

It was only when she responded with a string of three bewildered question marks that he checked the outgoing message and saw his mistake. He called Claire to explain, but the line went direct to voicemail.

Sorry. I realize that I am not particularly nice. I meant to say that I am
in
Nice. As in France. Had to come here on business at the last minute. I completely forgot about the appointment. Will you apologize to …

But Kell could not remember the name of the marriage guidance counsellor; he could only picture her hair, a bob, her biscuits, the clock that ticked on the mantelpiece. He fudged it:

… the good doctor. Just say that I’m too busy. Call me back if you get the chance. I’m hanging around waiting for a meeting.

He knew that Claire would join the dots. She was too well versed in the euphemisms of the secret world not to read between the lines: ‘last-minute business’; ‘waiting for a meeting’; ‘had to go to France’. Thomas Kell was a disgraced spook; he no longer had any business; he didn’t
need
to go to any meetings. What possible reason would he have for flying to Nice at the last minute if not to run some errand for SIS? One of the features of his long career had been the necessity to lie to Claire about the nature of his work. Kell had enjoyed the brief respite from such fabrications, but was now back in the same cycle of concealment that he had spun for twenty years; back in the habit, so natural to him and so easily acquired, of keeping anybody who came close to him at arm’s length. In this context, he wondered why Claire was keen on seeing a shrink. There was no ‘structural flaw’ in their marriage – a phrase the counsellor had used, time and again, with apparent relish. Neither was there any ‘hard-wired animosity’ between them. On the rare occasions that they met to discuss their future, Mr and Mrs Thomas Kell inevitably ended up in bed together, waking in the morning to wonder why on earth they were living apart. But the reason for that was clear. The reason for that was unequivocal. Without children, they were finished.

Elsa eventually rang at five and they arranged to meet outside the Negresco Hotel.

It was like meeting a different person. In the five hours that she had been analysing the hardware, Elsa appeared to have undergone a complete transformation. Her pale skin was suddenly ruddy with health, as though she had returned from a long walk along the beach, and her eyes, so lifeless in the café, sparkled in the dazzling summer light. Earlier, she had seemed nervous and closed-off; now she was animated and full of warmth. So easy was the rapport between them that Kell toyed with the idea that she had been ordered by Marquand to win his trust.

‘How was your afternoon?’ she asked as they walked in the direction of a dazzling sun.

‘Great,’ Kell lied, because he was glad of her company after the long afternoon and did not want to appear negative by complaining. ‘I had some lunch, went to a gallery, read a book …’

‘I really do not like Nice at all,’ Elsa declared, her English precise and musical.

‘Me neither.’ She looked across at him and smiled at the sudden fracturing in Kell’s composure. ‘It’s inexplicable. I love everything about France. The great cities – Paris, Marseille – the food, the wine, the movies …’

‘Blah blah blah …’ said Elsa.

‘… but Nice is like a theme park.’

‘It has no soul,’ she offered quickly.

Kell contemplated this and said: ‘Precisely, yes. No soul.’

A long line of rush-hour traffic was held at a set of lights and they crossed the Promenade des Anglais, pushed together by two teenage boys running in the opposite direction. A hooker in stilettos and a black leather skirt was climbing out of a car on the nearside lane of the central reservation.

‘There is nothing unusual on the SIM card,’ Elsa said, picking her way through a flock of mopeds. ‘I double-checked with Cheltenham.’

‘And the BlackBerry?’

‘It has been used to Skype.’

Of course. In the absence of a secure line, Skype was the spy’s first port of call: near-impossible to bug, tricky to trace. A BlackBerry in this context was no different to an ordinary computer: all Amelia would have needed was a cheap plastic headset. She had probably borrowed one from reception.

‘Do you know who she spoke to?’

‘Yes. Always to the same account, always the same number. Three different conversations. The Skype address is registered to a French email.’

‘Is there a name associated with it?’

‘It’s to the same person. The name is François Malot.’

‘Who
is
this guy?’ Kell asked aloud, coming to a halt. He had assumed that the question was rhetorical, but Elsa had other ideas.

‘I think I may have the answer,’ she said, looking like a student who has solved a particularly knotty problem. She reached into her bag, rummaging around for the prize. ‘You speak French, yes?’ she asked, passing Kell a printout of a newspaper report.

‘I speak French,’ he replied.

They were leaning on a balustrade, looking out over the beach, rollerbladers grinding past in the heat. The story, from
Le Monde
, reproduced the grisly facts of an attack in Sharm-el-Sheikh. Middle-class couple. Dream holiday. Married for thirty-five years. Brutally assaulted with knives and metal bars on a beach in Sinai.

‘Not such a nice way to die,’ she said, with graphic understatement. She took out a cigarette and lit it with her back to the wind.

‘Can I have one?’ Kell asked. She touched his hand and caught his eye in the flame of the lighter. Theirs was the sudden intimacy of strangers who find themselves in the same city, on the same job, sharing the same secrets. Kell knew the signs. He had been there many times before.

‘François Malot was their son,’ she said. ‘He lives in Paris. He has no brothers or sisters, no wife or girlfriend.’

‘Cheltenham told you this?’

Elsa reacted haughtily. ‘I do not need Cheltenham,’ she said, exhaling a blast of smoke. ‘I can do this kind of research on my own.’

He was surprised by the sudden flash of petulance but understood that she was probably keen to impress him. A good report back to London was always useful to a stringer.

‘So where did you get the information? Facebook? Myspace?’

Elsa turned and faced the beach. A man in a white shirt was making his way towards the sea, walking briskly in a straight line as though he intended to stop only when he reached Algeria. ‘From sources in France. Myspace is not so popular any more,’ she said, as if Kell was the last person in Europe not to know this. ‘In France they use the Facebook or the Twitter. As far as I can see, François does not have a social networking account of any kind. Either he is too private or he is too …’ She could not find the English word for ‘cool’ and used an Italian substitute: ‘
Figo
.’

An ambulance approached from the east, yellow lights strobing soundlessly through the fronds of the palm trees. Kell, since childhood, had felt an almost superstitious despair at the passing of an ambulance, and watched it accelerate out of sight with a feeling of dread in his gut.

‘Is there anything else?’ he asked. ‘Anything unusual on the BlackBerry?’

‘Of course.’ Elsa’s reply hinted at a bottomless reservoir of secret activity. ‘The user accessed the websites of two airlines. Air France and Tunisair.’

Kell remembered Amelia’s file, but could make no meaningful connection between her year as an au pair in Tunis and her sudden disappearance more than thirty years later. Was SIS secretly working on a leverage operation, possibly in conjunction with the Americans? Post-Ben Ali, Tunisia was ripe for picking. ‘Did she buy a flight?’

‘This is hard to say.’ Elsa frowned and ground out the cigarette, as if Marlboro was to blame. ‘It’s not precise, but there was a credit-card transaction of some kind with Tunisair.’