A Foreign Country (32 page)

Kell was in the kitchen. By now, Barbara had gone to Gatwick, en route home to Menton. Harold was upstairs in the Shand house watching
3:10 to Yuma
.

‘What is it?’

Kell came into the library carrying a mug of tea. Elsa pointed at the third laptop, on the right-hand side of the oak table. The pressure of her index finger blurred the screen.

‘This just came through?’

‘Less than a minute ago. How do they know about you?’

Kell put the tea down on the table.

‘They must have bugged Delestre’s apartment,’ he said. It was the only possible solution he could think of.

‘But you were there on Monday. How can it have taken them so long?’

‘Manpower,’ Kell replied, knowing that, when it came to following up every lead, listening to every conversation, the French were just as stretched as the Security Service or SIS. ‘They probably have microphones all over Paris, checking Malot’s friends and colleagues. Could have taken them several days to work out I was there.’

‘I’m finding the name Vincent Cévennes all over CUCKOO’s files,’ said Elsa, drinking from a bottle of Evian. ‘Also Valerie de Serres, probable girlfriend of Luc Javeau. You think that’s an alias for Madeleine Brive?’

‘Almost certainly.’ Kell scribbled down the names on a piece of paper. ‘Where’s CUCKOO now?’

They looked up at the bookshelves, nine screens in rows of three, like a game of noughts and crosses. It was just after eight o’clock on Saturday evening, Amelia preparing a fish stew in the kitchen, CUCKOO reading Michael Dibdin in the sitting room.

‘Can you hold the message on the server?’ Kell asked.

‘I don’t think so.’ Elsa typed something into the lines of code on the second laptop. ‘I could delete it. That way he won’t find out until he leaves tomorrow. I guess they’ll be trying to call him on the phone.’

‘Harold!’

Kell shouted upstairs. There was a grunting noise through the floor, then the sound of Harold scraping away from his western and thumping downstairs.

‘Yes, guv?’

‘Can you take another look at CUCKOO’s mobile phone activity? Chances are there’s a text message or voicemail waiting for him, instructing him to abort.’

‘To
what
?’

‘They know about us. They know their operation is blown. They’re trying to tell him to go back to Paris.’

Kell made the decision to buy time and to delete the email from the DGSE server. He then sent a message across to Amelia telling her that the operation was blown. At breakfast, she was to tell CUCKOO that there was an SIS emergency in London and that a car was coming to pick her up. For security reasons, she could not offer ‘François’ a lift to St Pancras, but a pre-paid taxi had been booked to take him back to London. Kell knew that as soon as CUCKOO was a mile outside Chalke Bissett, he would come within range of a mobile phone signal and hear any of three messages left for him by Valerie de Serres. The first was explicit enough:

François, it’s Madeleine. I don’t know why you haven’t responded to your email but you must abort, OK? Call me immediately please. We will crash meet Sunday midnight. We can explain everything. I need to know that you have received this message and that you will be there.

Harold had hacked into CUCKOO’s voicemail, allowing Kell to re-acquaint himself with the tense, petulant voice of his ferry seductress, Madeleine Brive. CUCKOO, having heard the message, would then make every effort to evaporate into the English countryside, shaking off SIS surveillance as he did so. The trail to Amelia’s son would be lost.

Vincent realized there was a problem when he heard Amelia knocking rapidly on the door of his bedroom shortly before eight o’clock on Sunday morning. He had been awake for almost an hour, finishing the Dibdin and listening to the bleating of the lambs on the steep hill behind the house.

‘Are you awake, darling?’

She came into his bedroom. She was already dressed, in the uniform she wore for Vauxhall Cross: a navy-blue skirt with matching jacket; a cream blouse; black shoes with kitten heels; the gold necklace given to her by her brother as a present on her thirtieth birthday.

‘You look like you’re going to church,’ he said.

He was shirtless in bed, propped up against the headboard, deliberately provoking her with his physique. He knew that Amelia felt an overpowering love for him, but also a physical desire that conflicted with her duties as a mother. He could sense it in her; he could always tell with women.

‘I’m afraid there’s an emergency in London. I have to leave. There’s a car coming for me at half-past nine.’

‘I see.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ She sat on the end of the bed, imploring forgiveness with her eyes. Vincent remembered his first sight of her pale skin beside the pool, the swell of her breasts. He had often thought about the taste of her, the transgression of a sexual relationship. ‘The worst of it is I can’t offer you a lift back to London. The Office doesn’t know about you and my driver would cotton on. But I’ve arranged for a taxi to pick you up at nine fifteen. Is that all right? Does that give you enough time to pack?’

It seemed as though he had no choice. Vincent pulled back the duvet, climbed out of bed and put on his dressing-gown.

‘It’s a real pity.’ Was Amelia being honest or had she somehow discovered the truth about him? ‘I was looking forward to spending the rest of the day together. I wanted to talk about the move to London.’

‘Me too.’ She stood up and put her arms around him, and it was all that Vincent could do not to press his body against hers and to kiss her. He was convinced that he could possess her, that she would offer no resistance. ‘I can’t even let you stay, I’m afraid. Too many people would start asking awkward questions if …’

‘Don’t worry.’ He broke free. ‘I understand.’ He began pulling out clothes from the chest of drawers and placing them in his suitcase. ‘Just give me five minutes to take a shower and pack. I’ll come downstairs. We can have breakfast. Then I can go back to Paris.’

As Kell had predicted, Vincent Cévennes was exactly one mile east of Chalke Bissett when his mobile phone began to come alive with a symphony of beeps and tones that lasted the better part of a minute.

‘Blimey, you’re popular,’ said Harold Mowbray, sporting the casual weekend attire of a Wiltshire taxi driver as he accelerated towards Salisbury.

Vincent, sitting in the back seat of the taxi, did not respond. He saw that there were messages on his voicemail and clicked ‘Listen’ on the read-out.

François, it’s Madeleine. I don’t know why you haven’t responded to your email but you must abort, OK? Call me immediately please. We will crash meet Sunday midnight. We can explain everything. I need to know that you have received this message and that you will be there.

At first, he did not understand what Valerie was telling him. Abort? Why was it necessary to hold a crash meeting in Paris within twelve hours? Vincent took out his BlackBerry and checked the inbox. There were no messages, just as there had been no emails on his laptop the night before. Perhaps, in the confusion of the weekend, unable to reach him as easily as they would have liked, Luc and Valerie had simply panicked.

He dialled the number in Paris, heard it reconnect to Luc’s cell phone.

‘Luc?’

‘Vincent, Jesus. At long fucking last. Where the hell have you been?’

Back at the Shand house, Elsa was able to feed the conversation into Amelia’s Audi as she and Kell tailed the taxi on the Salisbury road. Within seconds, Vincent had realized that he was completely compromised. Luc told him everything: that ‘the guy on the ferry was an MI6 officer’; that ‘Uniacke was an alias for Thomas Kell’; that ‘Kell talked to Delestre in Paris and put two and two together about the funerals’. Luc and Valerie were certain that Amelia had known about Vincent’s deception ‘for at least five days’. That was why she had invited him to her house in the country; not to get to know him better, but to find out who was behind the Malot conspiracy. Vincent asked if MI6 knew that François was being held in captivity.

‘Assume that they know everything,’ Luc replied.

Sitting alongside Kell in the passenger seat, Amelia shook her head and said: ‘We’ll never get to François. They’ll kill him or move him in the next forty-eight hours.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Kell replied, but it was baseless optimism. Unless Elsa could trace the origin of Luc and Valerie’s communi- cations more precisely, their hopes of success were slim. He suspected that François was being held within a five-mile radius of Salles-sur-l’Hers, the village in Languedoc-Roussillon where Arnaud had dropped Vincent in the cab, but without accurate coordinates it would be like droning caves in Tora-Bora. Vincent was their only hope, but with only two specialist surveillance officers at his disposal, Kell’s chances of following him to the crash meeting were near non-existent. How could he expect Harold and Elsa, two tech-ops specialists given only a basic grounding in surveillance techniques, to tail CUCKOO without being spotted?

Up ahead, Vincent had hung up on Luc and was already making plans to disappear.

‘Listen,’ he said to Harold. ‘That was my boss. I need to get to a train station as quickly as possible. There’s been a change of plan.’

‘I thought I was dropping you in London, sir?’ Harold replied, enjoying the role. ‘Cleared my whole day.’

‘Just do as I say,’ Vincent told him, his faultless English now punctuated with rage. ‘You’ll get paid just the same.’

Amelia, listening alongside Kell in the pursuing vehicle, turned up the volume as Harold responded: ‘All right, all right. No need to lose your rag. You’re the one changing his mind, mate, not me.’ His voice was muffled by road noise and static, but the words were clear enough. ‘Salisbury OK for monsieur? Trains run from Tisbury as well if you prefer.’

‘Just take me to the closest train station.’

About a quarter of a mile further along the road, Kevin Vigors was travelling in advance of the cab with Danny Aldrich. They were coming into Wilton when Kell contacted them on the radiolink.

‘You hear that?’

‘We heard it,’ Vigors replied.

‘Harold’s taking CUCKOO to Salisbury. If he tries to get clear of us, that’s where he’ll do it.’

‘Sure.’

All night, Kell had tried to anticipate how CUCKOO would behave in the aftermath of his exposure. His instinct would be to return to French soil as soon as possible. But how? In addition to the major London airports, there were airlines running flights to France from Southampton, Bournemouth, Exeter and Bristol. It was unlikely that Vincent would go direct to St Pancras without first trying to shake his tail, but he might pick up a Eurostar to Paris at either of the two stations in Kent, Ashford or Ebbsfleet. There was an option to hire a car and to drive it on to the Eurotunnel service at Folkestone, but Vincent would assume that SIS had access to number-plate recognition technology and would quickly be able to identify his position. A train south from Salisbury would take him to the cross-Channel ports.

‘You think he’ll take the train?’ Amelia asked.

‘Let’s wait and see.’

On the outskirts of Salisbury, the cathedral spire drifting right-to-left across the windscreen as Harold negotiated a roundabout, Vincent announced that he needed to find an ATM. Three minutes later, Harold had pulled into a lay-by opposite a branch of Santander in the centre of town.

‘Can you wait here, please?’ Vincent asked him, leaving his suitcase and laptop on the back seat as he opened the door.

‘It’s a double yellow line, mate,’ Harold replied. ‘How long are you gonna be?’

There was no answer. Harold could only watch as the Frenchman crossed the road, stepped around an elderly couple, and joined a short queue at the ATM.

‘I’m parked outside a cinema,’ he announced. ‘Mock Tudor, branch of Black’s beside it.’ Harold was talking into the void of an empty car, and hoped that the commlink was working. He put in an earpiece and twisted in his seat, trying to get his bearings. ‘I’m in a parking bay at the side of the one-way system, looks like the street is called New Canal. Got a branch of Fat Face behind me, Whittard’s coffee next door.’

Amelia’s voice came through with a burst of static. ‘We have you, Harold. Tom’s coming around the corner. I know exactly where you are. Confirm CUCKOO’s position?’

‘Across the road, taking some cash out at Santander. He’s left everything on the back seat. Suitcase, laptop. Only thing he took was his wallet.’

‘What about a passport?’ Kell asked.

‘I’ll have to look.’

‘Is he wearing the leather jacket?’

This from Aldrich, who was parked with Vigors in the market square only three hundred metres away.

‘Affirmative,’ Harold replied. The leather jacket contained a tracking device that he had sewn into the lining the previous morning.

‘He’ll take it off,’ Amelia muttered.

And so it proved.

Think
, Vincent told himself.
Think
.

He put three successive cards into the ATM, taking out four hundred pounds on each. His heart had pounded him into a sweat of fear. He felt the distilled anger of a shamed man and wanted to find Amelia, to destroy her as she had destroyed him. How long had she known? How long had they all been playing him?

Think
.

Stuffing the last of the money into the hip pocket of his jeans, he looked to the right. Past the local cinema, just a few doors down, was a branch of Marks & Spencer. It would be open on a Sunday and he could perhaps find an exit through the back. The cab was behind him and he turned towards the driver, who wound down his window and peered out.

‘What’s that mate?’

Was he one of them? One of a team of ten or twelve surveillance officers now scattered around central Salisbury? Vincent had to assume that everybody was a threat.

‘I want to buy a sandwich in Marks & Spencer,’ he shouted across the road, gesturing towards the store. ‘Can you wait two more minutes please?’

He heard the driver’s response: ‘Mate, I told you. I’m not allowed to stop here,’ and, for a moment, Vincent wondered if Amelia was the only one in town, the only one following him. There were so many questions in his mind, so many variables to contend with. He recalled what Luc had told him on the phone.
‘Assume that they know everything.’
It was all so degrading, so hopeless and sudden. Vincent tried to remember what he had been taught at the Academy, but that was long ago and he found it difficult to think clearly. They did not prepare me for this, he told himself and began to blame Luc, to blame Valerie, because the whole operation had been crazy right from the start. How did they ever think they were going to get away with it? Was he going to be the fall guy? Would they wash their hands of him now?