Rogue Elements (23 page)

They ate lunch in a winstub with red and white checked tablecloths and dark panelled walls. Copper cauldrons hung from the rafters. An antique spinning wheel and sepia prints of the cathedral reinforced the theme. Klara ordered choucroute garnie, but spoke to the waiter in note-perfect French. Arkell chose steak tartare. The thought of a genuinely French meal after all these years, even one prepared in this Teutonic corner of the country, made his tongue prickle with anticipation.

His Legion French sounded like coarse sandpaper after hers.

She glanced up at the accent but said nothing. The black felt fedora, now accessorized with a delicate silver chain around its crown, was tilted over her left eye, emphasizing that off-centre gaze. He was still having difficulty reading her. Could this hurt creature continue to love a professional murderer? Arkell didn’t believe so, but Wraye had often warned him against making assumptions about women. ‘You don’t know us, Simon,’ she’d say. ‘You know tactics and mountains and ballistics, not women. You don’t know what we’re capable of.’ She said it even after he was married.

Without thinking, he reached across the table. ‘I know this must be difficult,’ he said.

Klara jerked her hand away as if he’d stung her.

‘Sorry . . .’ He leaned awkwardly back. ‘I just . . . I realize what I told you must have been a horrible shock.’

‘About the Dancing Plague?’ she said coolly. Her eyes were on one of the copper cauldrons, her fingers tightly gripped around her water glass.

He glanced around, out of habit noting the faces of the other diners. Two couples, one engrossed, one silently bored. A big family, preoccupied by their children. A pair of old men tucking in to an entrée of fois gras. A solitary businessman jabbing at a tablet as he ate. ‘If you want to talk about it . . . About Gavriel . . .’

‘Here?’ she shot back. ‘In front of these people?’

‘No, of course not.’ He felt, abruptly, that he’d lost his way with her.

‘I ask myself,’ she muttered eventually, ‘if he’s an assassin – what are you?’

She wanted time alone in the cathedral after lunch, and Arkell took the opportunity to call in on Danny. The young hacker had made himself at home in his boxlike hotel room, with towelling robes and room-service trays scattered either side of the unmade bed. The TV had been reconfigured to play music videos from YouTube, while an unrelated assortment of French rap was streaming on his laptop.

‘Nothing much out there,’ he said as Arkell muted the TV. ‘I mean, like, plenty of José Cumeses floating around South America, but you want the one who flew into Cyprus and rented a car from Hertz on Thursday, right?’ A brief, smug grin.

‘Right.’

‘Yeah, OK, so that one definitely isn’t a real person. I can give you his date of birth, but there isn’t a whole lot of point seeing as it’s only been associated with the name since April. Señor Cumes of Uruguay has travelled twice in his short life: to Canada and Brazil. I’ve put all the dates and hotel bookings on Dropbox for you. Nothing else to offer, unless you’ve got another name.’

‘Can you turn that down?’

‘Sure.’ Danny flipped the screen on his laptop, silencing the French rap.

‘Do what you did with me: look for last-minute flight bookings from any Cyprus airport, leaving on Friday. Male, travelling alone. Cross reference with flights into Strasbourg.’

‘You got it. Are you being nicer to your pretty German?’

‘I’ll see you later, Danny.’

‘European women like a bit of charm.’

He paused on the threshold. ‘What do you know about European women, Danny?’

‘So you do like her,’ he grinned.

Arkell turned on his heel. ‘At least let the maid make up your room.’

Concerned by the changing nature of US military interventionism in the twenty-first century, Madeleine Wraye had for a while taken a general interest in the Kentucky engineering and logistics group formerly known as American Metals and Bauxite. While stationed in Washington, she had heard occasional approving mentions of its three most prominent directors – David Atticus of South Carolina, Stephen Lambert of Kentucky and Hans-Rudolf Müller of Basel – although she never met them. Originally a mining business, AMB had quickly discovered it was more successful at digging stuff up than finding it in the first place. Consequently, the focus of the business shifted in the late twentieth century from exploration to the provision of engineering and logistics solutions to others. AMB grew to become a diversified services business, offering governments, mining firms and oil companies everything from construction, drilling, blasting and transport to process consultancy and security.

It is a fact of industrial life that many of the world’s most valuable mining concessions are located in isolated and dangerous places. As a result AMB had developed, more or less unintentionally, a core competency in managing secure and efficient operations in challenging places. For decades, they had employed armed security guards; this branch of the AMB operation, once barely acknowledged, had gradually been professionalized with the help of veterans of several elite forces. Coupled with their ability to throw up prefabricated buildings and lay down instant infrastructure in hours rather than weeks, the disciplined but politically expendable security division had made AMB an obvious choice for US military contract work in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So lucrative, in the new world of privatized warfare, were those Pentagon contracts that AMB was soon deriving more than 65 per cent of its profits from conflict. In itself, that made the revelation that an SIS director with a great deal of influence in the Middle East was in the pay of AMB acutely disturbing. Joyce’s compilation of reports, data and news articles, however, added to Wraye’s concern. Following the USA’s lead, a dozen countries had contracted AMB to take the load off their military machines – quietly and efficiently performing all the dull but essential transport, catering, construction and facilities management work that so many armed forces screw up. Most impressively of all, AMB had managed to ride out the Arab Spring, ending up with more clients than ever in the region. If that was in part the work of George Vine, he was worth every cent they paid him.

Had AMB profited from increased US belligerence after GRIEVANCE? Unquestionably. Might AMB have facilitated – even instigated – a terrorist attack to create a suitably destabilized international environment in which to develop this bounteous revenue stream? It was conceivable. Billions of dollars in new business made anything conceivable.

In the afternoon they took the tram to the European Quarter. Neither of them had any more expectation of finding Yadin there than in the town centre. But the English spy seemed to think it was important to keep looking and Klara, who had never been to Strasbourg before, was curious to see this French heart of EU power.

They were allowed into the elliptical courtyard of the Parliament’s seemingly unfinished tower, but no further. Armed officers of the Police nationale were in evidence, reinforcing the Parliament’s own extensive security measures ahead of the premiers’ address. The riverside promenade around the great glass building was closed.

Architecturally, the Parliament left her cold. The white-and-black grid that paved the courtyard appealed more than the soaring pink piers and reflective glass. ‘Maybe you should see what the stones have to tell you,’ she suggested.

He took the mockery in good spirit. ‘Imagine the things that have happened on this spot,’ he said. ‘Roman soldiers watching for the Germanic hordes; Suebi waiting until the Rhine froze and then pouring across it in their thousands. Attila slaughtering everyone, burning the town to the ground. Charles the Bald and Louis the German joining forces here against the Holy Roman Emperor. Citizens forced to go to war with their own bishop. The world’s first newspaper, published here. Goethe at university, here. The Prussian army bombarding the city; mass evacuation in World War Two. Just imagine all the assignations, the celebrations, the terrors, the murders, the desperate schemes, the pacts, the heartbreaks, the moments of revelation that must have taken place on this one riverbank, long before the EU came along.’

Impossible not to be a little touched by his passion for those fragments of the past. ‘Do you find it difficult to relate to normal people?’ she asked.

He looked genuinely hurt, and before she knew what she was doing she had undermined her own taunt by smiling.

‘You’re cruel,’ he told her, smiling back.

She liked that smile. She liked a lot of things about him.

Crossing the canal, they followed the tramlines to the European Court of Human Rights, where pitiful howls against corruption or injustice were scrawled on placards lashed to the railings. Across the street a small camp of petitioners had formed, tents hung with further declarations of persecution and abuse that made Klara seethe at the appalling hand life had dealt these people. In silence, they passed them by, taking refuge in the Parc de l’Orangerie, where a cheerier Sunday crowd of families, lovers and pensioners was strolling and picnicking amongst the fountains and colourful flower beds.

‘What did you mean, you know how it feels?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘In the car, you said, “I know how it feels”. You know how
what
feels?’

He was visibly uncomfortable. ‘I suppose I meant losing someone you love.’

‘I haven’t lost someone,’ she said sharply. ‘I haven’t lost anyone.’

He didn’t answer.

‘Gavriel is not who you say he is. I’m only here with you to prove that.’

‘OK.’

She walked on ahead, needing the space to get a grip on her anger. When, a few minutes later, she felt calm, she turned to face him.

‘Who did you lose?’

He flinched at her tone. ‘My wife.’

She hadn’t expected that. He didn’t seem the type. Too much of a loner.

‘She left you, that’s clear,’ she said, deliberately brutal.

‘She died.’

It was a beautiful summer’s afternoon in a historic city beside one of the world’s great rivers and, although the bitterness crumbled inside her, she couldn’t find an adequate way to apologize.

The apartment was on the sixth floor of a drab, off-white tower block near the university. Most of the block’s residents appeared to be students, and Joyce did not have to wait long for someone to hold open the communal door for him. Once inside, he quickly recognized that this was not an environment in which he could easily loiter. The corridors were plain and uncluttered. There were no cupboards to hide in, no open seating areas where he might act the older boyfriend waiting for his lover to return from a seminar. He would either have to approach the target directly or stand like a lemon by the elevators until some resident reported him to the police.

Edward Joyce faced the apartment door, fingers gripped around the moulded butt of the Sig Sauer in his pocket. The gun was a comfort for what it represented. Wraye had ordained that this particular weapon should be used to kill Gavriel Yadin. The fact that someone else’s finger was meant to pull the trigger could surely be overlooked. Joyce had already impersonated TALON with ease – the nervous little Czech outside the station had handed over the Sig Sauer, ammunition and suppressor without question on hearing the requisite code phrase. He had played Wraye’s golden boy once; he could do it again.

Joyce stared at the panelled door, thick with uneven white paint. He wondered how TALON would handle it. Probably just burst in and blast the place to hell.

He flexed his fingers.

No, he couldn’t do it. Not with a Mossad killer on the other side of the door.

Joyce stepped back from the apartment. Along the corridor, the elevator opened. Flicking the safety lever on the Sig Sauer, he shifted his feet into a shooting position. But it was a girl who emerged from the elevator. She walked towards him with a slight frown. He smiled at her, gave a vague nod towards Yadin’s door to explain himself. His thumb eased the safety lever back up.

She didn’t smile back. Visibly on edge, she unlocked an apartment door. Two away from Yadin. It was an opportunity, Joyce sensed immediately, a chance to get out of this impossible position. He waited until she had the door open before striding forward and snapping his left hand over her mouth. They were inside the apartment with the door shut in less than two seconds.

‘Anyone else here?’ he whispered, pressing the Sig to her ear. She was rigid under his grip. Mute. The only noise was the muffled trickle of her urine on the linoleum floor. ‘
Est-ce qu’il y a quelqu’un ici
?’ he tried again, hoping his shock at his own impulsiveness was coming across as an icy determination.

She shook her head.

‘Stay completely silent,’ he continued in classroom French. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

Releasing her, he saw the red mark around her mouth where he’d gripped her, and for a confused moment he thought of Sophie, and then of Maya and Jasmine waiting for their tree house. Grimacing, he used the Sig Sauer to wave her forward into the living space.

‘
Il faut
 . . .’ He was struggling with the French. ‘You speak English?’

She nodded blankly.

‘I have to stay here a few hours,’ he said, relieved in his confusion to be able to express himself properly. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. I just need the flat, understand?’

She wasn’t going to speak at all, he sensed.

‘Where’s the bathroom?’

The question evoked a new look of terror. She was pretty, except for a mole on her chin; tall, with very fine eyebrows and a trace of childhood still in her cheeks. Joyce realized that his stolen mission, supposed to be exhilarating, noble even, had turned sordid.

‘So you can clean up,’ he said impatiently. ‘Where is it?’

She led the way. He kept the door open and the gun raised as she used a towel to dry her bare legs. The lower part of her skirt was soaked, as was one ballet pump. He wanted her to change, but worried she might freak out if he suggested taking any clothes off. There was a towel rail, serving as drying rack, firmly fixed to the wall. He touched the metal to check it was cold, then bound her wrists to it with a pair of tights.

‘I’ll get you a chair,’ he offered, but when he came back with one of the two aluminium stools from the kitchen she wouldn’t sit on it. ‘Suit yourself,’ he muttered. He filled a mug with water and made her drink. Then he stuffed a sock from the rail in her mouth, checked she was breathing through her nose, and closed the door on her.