A Foreign Country (35 page)

My solitude is my talent, he thought. My self-sufficiency is my strength.

There was a knock at the door.

By midnight, Kevin Vigors had arrived in Paris, picked up a Peugeot hire car at Gare du Nord and driven south to Boulevard Saint-Germain where he found Kell, Elsa and Aldrich at a table in Brasserie Lipp, nursing their sorrows with four plates of choucroute and a couple of bottles of Chinon.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Elsa whispered as Vigors slipped on to the banquette beside her. ‘I did not have the experience that Danny has, that you have. I am so sorry that …’

Kell interrupted her. ‘Elsa, if you apologize one more time, I’ll get you a job fixing computers in Albania for the rest of your life. There was nothing you could have done. One of us should have got on the train with you. It’s impossible to follow a trained target without back-up.’ He looked up at the three faces gathered around him and raised his glass of wine. ‘All of you were fantastic today in extremely difficult circumstances. It was a miracle we got as far as we did. There’s still every chance that we can find François once Luc and Valerie make contact with Amelia tomorrow night.’

He had already given the bad news to Amelia, who had been obliged to stay in the UK so that she could put in an honest day’s work on Monday for the benefit of Truscott, Marquand and Haynes. To avoid spending the night with Giles in Chelsea, she had taken a room at the Holiday Inn, where she was gradually making her way through the various items that CUCKOO had left on the back seat of Aldrich’s cab. She kept the gold lighter, engraved with the initials P.M., but put everything else back into Vincent’s suitcase and the black leather holdall, wondering what she would do with them. Sitting alone on the sixth floor of the hotel, looking out over a gridlocked M4, her sense of frustration was akin to the powerlessness she had felt in the face of her late brother’s cancer. Despite all the resources at her disposal, all of her experience and expertise, she could do nothing to influence the events unfolding in France. Her trust in Thomas Kell was absolute, but she could hardly believe that she had left François’ safety in the hands of only three men and an Italian computer specialist with non-existent experience in the field. Amelia had managed to organize a three-man team of ‘security experts’ – an Office euphemism for ex-SAS soldiers moonlighting in the private sector – who would leave for Carcassone in the morning. But she could only afford to have them on stand-by for forty-eight hours, not least because she had drained one of her bank accounts to pay for them. Unless Kell discovered François’ whereabouts in that time, there would be no military option for seizing her son. And how were they going to find François without CUCKOO? The trail had gone cold.

Amelia was checking her emails at regular intervals, staying in touch with Kell and confirming arrangements with Anthony White, the commander of the security team. At twenty past eleven, she heard the ping of a message coming through on her laptop.

It was from GCHQ, with the subject heading ‘Amex’.

You requested live trace on American Express card 3759 876543 21001 / 06/14 / GERARD TAINE

Card use (abbreviated):

British Airways (Sales) / LHR T5 / 16.23 GMT £584.00

World Duty Free / LHR T5 / 17.04 GMT £43.79

Hotel Lutetia / Paris / 00.05 GMT+1 €267.00

She picked up the phone and dialled Kell.

The Hotel Lutetia was a five-star Parisian landmark known to Kell from his brief tenure in the city a decade earlier; he had held meetings with SIS and DGSE colleagues in the lobby and knew something of the hotel’s history as a base for the occupying German army during World War II. It was less than a mile from Brasserie Lipp and would logically make a safe, discreet location for CUCKOO’s crash meeting with Luc and Valerie.

Within four minutes of receiving the call from Amelia, Kell had paid the bill at Lipp, walked south-west with Elsa down Rue de Sèvres and told Danny Aldrich and Kevin Vigors to park as close to the hotel as possible.

Aldrich found a space for the Peugeot on the eastern side of Boulevard Raspail and kept an eye on the entrance. Vigors went straight to the reception desk and booked a double room in his own name before settling into an armchair with clear sight of the main bank of lifts. Kell and Elsa walked into the hotel arm in arm, like lovers returning from a midnight stroll.

‘We’re staying here,’ he told her as they ambled past reception. ‘Dirty weekend. We’re going to have a drink in the bar before we go up to bed.’

‘Promises, promises,’ she replied, and squeezed his arm tight against her chest.

The bar was in a large rectangular lobby the size of a real tennis court. About ten guests were seated in scattered groups on armchairs upholstered in scarlet and black,
digestifs
and cups of coffee on low wooden tables between them. A lone waiter moved briskly among the art deco sculptures, the tinkle and cough of polite conversation accompanied by a bald pianist covering show tunes at a grand piano in the corner. Kell sat in an armchair facing out towards the main entrance; Elsa was opposite him, watching the bar. For half an hour they conversed in English about Elsa’s childhood in Italy, while Kell sent and received occasional text messages to Amelia, Vigors and Aldrich.

‘If you were my lover and you spent this much time on your phone, I would leave you,’ she said.

Kell looked up and smiled. ‘Sounds like I’ve been warned.’

Seconds later, pushing through the revolving doors of the hotel, a young Arab man came in from the street wearing denim jeans and a leather motorcycling jacket emblazoned with the Marlboro logo. Kell could not at first make out his face, but as he passed the reception desk, he saw to his astonishment that it was one of the two men who had attacked him in Marseille.

‘Jesus Christ.’

Elsa, reclining sleepily in her chair, leaned forward. ‘What?’

‘It’s the guy from the …’ He had to think quickly. There was no time to alert Vigors. ‘Go to the lifts. Don’t hesitate.’ Elsa was out of her seat, her consternation plain for anyone to see. Kell lowered his voice. ‘There’s a young French Arab heading there now. He’s part of their team. Follow him. Try to find out which floor he’s going to.’

The waiter paused beside Kell’s table as Elsa walked away.

‘Is everything all right, monsieur?’ he asked.

‘Just my girlfriend,’ he replied. ‘She thinks she saw her cousin going past.’

‘I see.’ The waiter glanced after Elsa, noticing that a guest in the corner of the lobby was trying to seek his attention. ‘Would you like anything else before I close the bar?’

Kell saw Elsa arriving at the lifts.

‘No, no thanks,’ he said, turning back to the waiter. ‘Could I please just have our bill?’

As Akim stepped into the lift, sweating beneath the heat and weight of the leather jacket, he heard a woman’s voice behind him and turned to find a dark-haired girl, speaking in Italian, running towards the lifts. If she had not been young he would have allowed the doors to close, but he pressed the button at the base of the panel and they parted just in time to allow her to squeeze into the cabin.

‘
Grazie
,’ she said, breathless and gratefully catching his eye, then corrected herself, remembering that she was in Paris: ‘
Merci
.’

He liked the naturalness of her, a raw girl from nothing who had made it to a place of money. She wasn’t a whore; maybe somebody’s mistress or a guest at a family reunion. Looked like she knew how to be around a man; looked like a woman of experience. He breathed in the smell of her, the way he sometimes walked into a woman’s perfume a second after she had passed him in the street.

‘
Prego
,’ he said, a little late, but he wanted to make a connection with her. Akim switched to French and said: ‘My pleasure.’

She was not exactly beautiful, but pretty enough and with that glint in her eye that made everything come together. He wished he could have more time to be with her. He had pressed the button for the fifth storey and she now pushed six.

‘We are almost going to the same floor,’ he said.

The lift climbed through the building. The Italian girl did not respond. Maybe the adrenalin of the job was making him seem pushy. As the doors opened on the fifth floor, Akim muttered ‘
Bonsoir
’ and this time she did respond, saying ‘
Oui
’ as he walked outside. He waited until the lift had closed, then turned left towards 508.

The corridor was deserted. He came to Vincent’s door and knocked quietly. He heard the soft padding of approaching footsteps, then the slight contact of Vincent’s head as it touched the door, staring through the fish-eye lens. The latch came off and he was invited inside.

‘Where’s Luc?’

Not:
How are you, Akim?
Not:
What a nice surprise
. Just:
Where’s Luc?
Like Akim was a third-class citizen. Vincent had always made him feel like that.

‘They’re coming later,’ he said.

The room was large and smelled of cigarettes with a breeze blowing through it. There was a window open, a plastic pole on the curtain tapping against the glass. Vincent was wearing a white Lutetia dressing-gown over blue denim jeans with bare feet and looked, for the first time in Akim’s memory, like he had lost control of himself.

‘What do you mean “coming later”?’

Akim sat in a chair facing the double bed. Vincent’s head had made a neat dent in one of the pillows on the left-hand side, like a kid had done a karate chop. There was a remote control on the bedcover, two miniature bottles of whisky beside the TV.

‘Are you going to answer me?’ Vincent placed himself between the bed and the chair, like it was Akim’s duty to tell him whatever he needed to know. ‘How did the British find out about me? Who told them? What’s happening with François?’

‘I thought
you
were François, Vincent?’ Akim replied, because he couldn’t resist it. They’d all laughed about how seriously Vincent had taken the job. ‘Brando’, Slimane called him, even to his face, because at the house he’d never once dropped out of character.

‘You making fun of me?’ Vincent said. He possessed some physical strength and his temper was quick, but he had no guts. Akim knew that about him. Nothing to respect.

‘Nobody would ever make fun of you, Vincent.’

Akim watched as Cévennes moved to the side of the bed and sat down. The Academy pin-up, the DGSE golden boy. Vincent had always had a high opinion of himself.

‘Where’s Luc?’ Vincent asked again.

Akim was already bored by the questions and decided to have more fun. ‘What about Valerie? Don’t you care about her, too?’

‘Luc’s the boss,’ Vincent replied quickly.

‘You reckon?’

There was silence between them now, time in which Vincent seemed to come to terms with the anomaly of Akim’s presence in his room.

‘What’s this about?’ he said. ‘You got a message for me?’

‘I do,’ Akim replied.

It was simple after that. Just a question of commitment. He unzipped the motorbike jacket, reached inside for the gun, moved it level with Vincent’s chest and fired a single silenced shot that lifted him back towards the wall. Akim stood up and stepped forward. Vincent’s eyes were drowning in the shock of what had been done to him; there were tears in his eyes. His face was white, blood gargling in his throat. Akim fired two further shots into his skull and heart; the first of them shutting Vincent down like a doll. He then picked up the spent cartridges, secured the gun inside the jacket and moved towards the door, checking that nothing had fallen out of his pockets when he had sat on the chair. He looked through the fish-eye lens, saw that the area outside was clear, and walked into the corridor.

Kell did not bother to call Amelia in London to get clearance for what he was about to do. He told Vigors to look for a security camera blind spot near the fifth-floor elevator and to wait for any sign of the Arab or other members of the DGSE team entering or leaving Vincent’s room. He instructed Aldrich to wait in the car outside and told Elsa to go to the room that Vigors had booked at the Lutetia.

‘There’s nothing more you can do,’ he told her. ‘Get some sleep. I may need you in the morning.’

Then he waited outside the hotel. He smoked a cigarette and paced the pavement. It was past one o’clock on a Monday morning in Paris, still warm and humid. A man in his mid-fifties came past Kell and walked up the steps of the hotel. Everybody a stranger, everybody a threat. Kell turned and looked at Aldrich, still as alert and as reliable as he had been all day long. The best of the best. They nodded at one another. A police car with yellowed headlights moved disinterestedly north along Raspail.

The Arab had been inside for less than ten minutes when Kell’s phone began to pulse in his pocket. It was Vigors.

‘He’s already leaving. Just took the stairs. I’m in the lift.’

‘You sure it was him?’

‘Same guy. Red-and-white motorcycle jacket, heading down. He’ll be there …’

The signal cut out. Kell motioned to Aldrich who started the engine on the Peugeot. He looked up the steps of the hotel and in the glass of the revolving door caught the movement of someone walking towards the entrance. He knew that Vigors would be ten seconds behind him. Eye contact with Aldrich. This was it.

The Arab came down the steps of the hotel, saw Kell to his right, did not appear to recognize him from Marseille but moved left, as if to avoid contact. This took him towards the Peugeot. Vigors had got out of the lift, run across the lobby and was already through the revolving doors. Kell waited until the Arab was two metres from the car, then ran at his back, driving his right hand into the upper section of his skull and steering him with his left as Vigors came past them, opened the rear door of the Peugeot and turned to help. Kell remembered the Arab’s weight, his wiry cunning, but Vigors was far stronger and with the element of surprise had forced him into the back seat of the car within seconds. Aldrich lurched out on to Boulevard Raspail as the door slammed shut behind him. Vigors pushed the boy’s head back as Kell encircled his body, trapping his arms against his chest. The Arab was shouting, struggling to get free, spit hitting Kell’s neck and face.