A Foreign Country (34 page)

‘Didn’t buy a ticket? Didn’t go to the BA desk?’

‘No. Hasn’t bought a coffee, either. Just sitting there.’

Kell explained the situation to Amelia, who hazarded what turned out to be an accurate guess.

‘He’s either meeting somebody or picking up a package. They may have cached a passport for him. Tell Danny to sit tight.’

Needing the jolt of a cup of coffee, Vincent stood up, queued at the counter and bought a double espresso. His table was still free by the time he returned to his seat. For hours he had felt an almost fatalistic sense of imminent capture; everything he’d done in Salisbury, every move he’d made on the trains, wouldn’t have been enough to throw off a decent British team. There were cameras at the airport, police in plain clothes, customs officials, security personnel. What if his photograph had been circulated among them? How was he going to get on to a plane? If he could just get through passport control, he might throw off MI6 on the Paris Metro. They wouldn’t be able to operate as effectively on French soil. But even that loophole seemed to close in front of Vincent’s eyes; there was an MI6 station in Paris and Amelia had had more than enough time to arrange blanket surveillance across the capital.

Think
.

Try to see it from her perspective. She doesn’t want her secret to get out. If it does, her career is over. Only a handful of her most trusted colleagues will know about François Malot. Maybe she’s just as confused, just as rattled, as I am. Bouyed by this thought, Vincent sank his double espresso and did what he had come to do.

The Multi-Faith Prayer Room was a few paces away. He walked through the door from the main terminal and came into a short narrow corridor with prayer rooms on either side. To his left, a bearded Muslim was kneeling on a mat, in the act of praying. To the right, three veiled African women were seated on plastic chairs. They watched Vincent as he passed. The bathroom door was open. He went inside and locked it.

The bathroom stank of urine and patchouli oil. Vincent waved his hand under the automatic drier to create a covering noise and stood on the toilet, pushing one of the ceiling tiles above his head. It came free and jammed at an angle as small particles of dried paint and dust fell into his hair. Vincent looked down to protect his eyes while feeling blindly with his right hand, pushing through what felt like tiny nests or cobwebs, little piles of dust. His arm began to ache and he switched hands, turning around on the toilet seat so that he could search in the opposite direction. The handdrier cut out and he flushed the toilet with his foot, hearing voices outside in the corridor. Was it the police? Had they followed him into the prayer rooms so that they could make a discreet arrest?

Then, something. The crisp edge of a large envelope. Vincent went up on tiptoes and pushed the loose ceiling tile further back, stretching to reach what he had come for. It felt like his first piece of luck in hours. It was the cached package, covered in a scattering of dust. He flushed the toilet with his foot a second time, replaced the tile, sat down and opened the seal. Five hundred euros in cash, a French driving licence, a clean phone, a passport, Visa and American Express cards. Everything in the name ‘Gerard Taine’. Vincent flicked the dust from his hair and clothes, left the bathroom and carried the package out into the terminal.

Time to go home. Time to get a plane to France.

‘So that was interesting.’

Danny Aldrich had watched the scene unfold from a queue at one of the automated check-in machines.

‘What happened?’ Kell asked.

‘CUCKOO went into the multi-faith rooms, came out five minutes later carrying something. Now he’s fifth in the queue at the BA ticket desk.’

Kell looked at Amelia. They were both thinking the same thing.

‘He must have had a passport cached in there,’ she said. ‘We need to know where he’s flying to. Can you get into the queue behind him?’

‘No chance,’ Aldrich replied. ‘Not a good idea to get that close after Reading. He’ll make me.’

‘You carrying any ID?’ Kell asked.

‘Sure.’

‘Then find a member of airport staff on the security side, preferably somebody high up the food chain. Tell them that they need to talk to whoever serves Vincent at the BA counter. Be discreet about it. Make sure he doesn’t see what’s going on. Get the flight number, get the name on the passport, credit-card details if he doesn’t pay cash. Can you manage that?’

‘No problem.’

Amelia nodded in mute agreement. ‘Nice idea,’ she said as Kell hung up. The Audi was parked on the second floor of a multi-storey short-term car park, less than a minute’s walk from where Aldrich was standing. Against the grinding roar of an aeroplane passing low overhead, Amelia adjusted her position in the passenger seat so that she was facing Kell at an angle. ‘Something has occurred to me,’ she said. Kell was reminded of a gesture Amelia had made at the office in Redan Place, a quiet resignation in her features. It was uncharacteristic of her to be so shaken. ‘I should go to Number 10. We should try to set up a line to the French, cut some sort of deal. Falling on my sword may be the only way to save François.’

Falling on my sword.
Kell disliked the phrase for its pointless grandeur. Amelia was better than that.

‘That won’t save him,’ he said. ‘Whoever these people are, Paris will tip them off. Even if it’s a rogue operation, which I suspect it now is, there will be factions within the DGSE loyal to the perpetrators. There’ll be an internal leak, François will be killed, Luc and Valerie will catch the next boat to Guyana.’ When he saw that he was making no progress with his argument, Kell took a risk. ‘Besides, if you go, my career is finished. The minute Truscott gets his hands on the tiller, he’ll throw me to the wolves over Yassin Gharani. If you don’t survive, I’m looking at growing tomatoes for the next thirty years.’

To his surprise, Amelia smiled.

‘Then we’d better make sure nobody finds out what we’re up to,’ she said, reaching for his hand. It was as though she had been testing him and was now assured of his loyalty. ‘I’ll talk to some military friends, put a unit together in France. And get Kevin on the phone. We ought to send him up to St Pancras.’

It took Vincent Cévennes seven minutes to reach the front of the queue at the British Airways ticket desk, where he was observed looking at a flight schedule on the teller’s computer screen before handing over a French passport and a credit card, in return for a ticket. With CUCKOO’s attention fully occupied, Aldrich had taken the opportunity to flag down two patrolling police officers and to inform them that he was a surveillance officer with the Secret Intelligence Service. One of the officers agreed to approach the BA desk and to interview the female member of staff who had just sold CUCKOO a ticket. Aldrich made it clear that any conversation must take place out of sight of other passengers in the terminal.

They waited until CUCKOO had taken a lift upstairs to the duty-free shopping level. The more senior of the two policemen then approached the BA desk, indicated to the teller that he would like a discreet word, and managed to hold a brief conversation with her in a small staffroom secluded behind the ticket desks. The entire exchange took less than five minutes.

Aldrich called Kell with the news.

‘Right. Got a pen? CUCKOO is travelling under the name Gerard Taine. Just paid five hundred and eighty-four pounds on an American Express card for a business-class seat on the BA flight to Charles de Gaulle, leaving Terminal Five at eighteen fifteen.’

Kell, who was still in the car park, looked at his watch.

‘That’s in less than two hours. Get two tickets on the same plane. One for you, one for Elsa. Travel separately. When CUCKOO comes out the other side, I’ll try to be there.’

‘How are you going to manage that?’

Kell had looked at the list of flights leaving Heathrow for Paris before six.

‘There’s an Air France to Charles de Gaulle leaving Terminal Four fifteen minutes before you take off. We’re going there now, I’ll try to get on board.’ Kell had already started the engine and was pulling out of the parking bay. ‘Kevin is en route to St Pancras. Amelia will stay here and organize hire cars at Gare du Nord and Charles de Gaulle. If we’re delayed or you don’t hear from me, try to stay on CUCKOO’s tail as long as you can. He’ll probably take the Metro, try to shake you off in Paris. If we get lucky, he’ll hail a cab.’

Fifteen minutes later, Kell was barging the queue at the Air France desk in Terminal Four and hustling himself on to a packed Sunday-night flight to Paris, shelling out more than seven hundred euros for the last seat on the plane. By eight fifteen local time he had touched down at Charles de Gaulle, only to be told that CUCKOO’s BA flight was delayed by half an hour. That gave him time to pick up the hire car and to drive it in loops around the airport, waiting for a call from Aldrich with the number plate of whatever taxi CUCKOO hailed outside the terminal. In the end, CUCKOO caught an RER train to the city, standing for the duration of the journey just three rows from Elsa Cassani, looking, for all the world, like any other washed-out twenty-something Italian returning from a hedonistic weekend in London. Danny Aldrich boarded an Air France bus to Etoile. Kell took the A3 autoroute south-west into Paris, but his Renault became snarled in peripherique traffic and he lost contact with the RER. By the time Elsa had pulled into Chatelet ten minutes later, she was the only member of the team within two miles of the target.

CUCKOO lost her in less than fifteen minutes. Emerging from Chatelet, he crossed the Seine and boarded a metro at St Michel, heading south towards Porte d’Orleans. At Denfert-Rochereau station, having spotted Elsa three times since Charles de Gaulle – once on the RER, once while crossing the Pont Notre Dame and once in his carriage between Saint-Sulpice and St-Placide – CUCKOO forced open the doors as they were closing and jumped out on to the platform, watching Elsa glide past him in a state of mute obliviousness.

Five minutes later she had surfaced at Mouton Duvernet and called Kell with the news.

‘Tom, I am so, so sorry,’ she said. ‘I lost him. I lost CUCKOO.’

My name is Gerard Taine. I am no longer François Malot. I work for the Ministry of Defence. I live in a small village outside Nantes. My wife is a schoolteacher. We have three children, twin girls of two and a son who is five years old. I am no longer François Malot.

Vincent remembered the mantra of his emergency cover but did not know Taine in the way that he had known François. He knew nothing of his interests, nothing of his proclivities; he could not imagine the grammar, the
architecture
of his soul. He had given no thought to him in the way that he had thought about François, day and night, for months. Taine was just a fallback; Malot had been his life.

Vincent sat on the bed in the Hotel Lutetia, unsure if the British had followed him, unsure if Luc or Valerie would ever come. He felt as though he would never leave this place. He felt as though he was a shell, a failure, a man who was being made to pay the heaviest price for a sin he had never committed. It was like that time at high school when he was fourteen and his whole class, every friend he had ever made, every girl he had ever liked, turned on him because he had reported a case of bullying to a teacher. Vincent had been trying to do the right thing. He had been trying to save his closest friend from the turmoil of the older children’s attacks, but was betrayed by the very teacher in whom he had confided. As a result, they had all rounded on him – even the friend whose neck Vincent had tried to save – and for many months afterwards had humiliated him in the classroom, caking his clothes in food and shit as he walked home, screaming ‘Bitch!’ and ‘Rat!’ whenever he passed. Vincent’s whole sense of justice, of right and wrong, had been inverted by that experience. He had learned that there was no truth, there was no kindness. Even his own father had disowned him.
You never betray your comrades,
he had said.
You never betray your friends,
as though Vincent was one of the soldiers he had fought alongside in Algeria. But he was just a fourteen-year-old schoolboy with no mother, no sister, no brother to love or understand him.
They were hurting my friend, Papa,
he said, but the old man hadn’t listened and now he was long dead and Vincent wished that he was in the hotel room so that he could tell him what had happened in England, what had happened to François, and maybe try to explain all over again that all he had ever wanted to do was protect his friend and to make his father proud.

He stood up and went to the window, looking down on to Boulevard Raspail. The curtains were open, the window ajar. He poured himself a whisky from the mini-bar, opened the carton of cigarettes he had purchased at Heathrow and raised a silent toast to François Malot, blowing smoke out into the damp Paris night. It was the wrong thing to think – he knew that – but he missed Amelia, he missed their talks and the meals they had enjoyed together, the time they had spent at the pool and the beach. He no longer wanted her; she had betrayed him and had ceased to exist as a woman. But he missed her as François might have missed her, because she was his mother, because she had cared for him and would have gone to the ends of the earth to protect her son. A woman that powerful, a woman that strong. Imagine possessing a mother like that. François was so lucky to have her.

Vincent drained the whisky, poured another from the mini-bar, even though Luc and Valerie might arrive at any moment and smell the alcohol on his breath. He began to dread what they were going to do. It was the sense of isolation he couldn’t stand; everything he had known about himself, everything he had trusted and believed, had been stripped away from him in just a few hours. Like the bullying at school: one minute he had been one person, the next he was somebody else. A rat. A traitor. Their bitch. He had been right never to trust anybody after that. It was what he had thought going into the first interviews with the Directorate, what they must have seen in him, what they must have liked.