A Foreign Country (17 page)

As soon as François had left she was coming over, slipping off her stool, walking around the bar. Kell looked away in the direction of the portside windows, but there was soon a slice of dyed blonde hair in his peripheral vision, then the bottom of a skirt, a slash of thigh. She was standing beside him. Late thirties, slim, no wedding ring. Their eyes met and she produced a knowing smile.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

He didn’t. The accent was scrambled, originally French, but with long periods of exposure to North America. He had no idea where or when they might have met. Did she know him as ‘Thomas Kell’, or as another man, one of the myriad pseudonyms he had adopted down the years? Was he a spy to this woman, or a consultant? Was he a lawyer or a civil engineer? Had he met her when he was ‘attached to the Ministry of Defence’ in London or was she a student from his long-ago days at Exeter University? He could not remember anything about her, and was usually expert at such things. Perhaps she was connected to him via Claire: Kell had always had a blind spot for his wife’s colleagues, her cousins, her friends.

‘I’m afraid I don’t …’

‘It’s Madeleine. You remember? DC?’

Kell tried to keep his composure as his memory ran a showreel of highlights from numerous visits to the American capital: interminable meetings at the Pentagon; a rainy afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial; guided tours of the National Museum of American History; the firing range at Langley, where an over-excited training officer on the Farm had tried to instigate a shooting competition between SIS and the CIA. At no point could Kell recall a slim, bottle-blonde French woman with a scrambled accent playing any part in these proceedings.

‘DC?’ he repeated, buying time.

Had he met her at a dinner, in a bar, in a nightclub? Kell knew the names and faces of the eleven women he had been to bed with in the course of his life and this lady wasn’t one of them.

‘It’s Michael, isn’t it?’ she said.

He knew then that she had made a mistake. He had never used the legend ‘Michael’. Stephen, yes. Tim, Patrick, Paul. Never Michael.

‘I think you may have confused me with somebody else,’ he said. ‘I’m Stephen. Stephen Uniacke. From England. Good to meet you.’ Kell extended a friendly hand, because he did not want to embarrass her. It was perfectly plausible that she had invented an entire phantom story simply to break the ice.

‘How strange,’ she replied. ‘Are you sure?’ Her neck flushed red and the thump of ‘Rolling in the Deep’, the energy in the bar, seemed to isolate her. ‘I was certain it was you. I’m so sorry …’

She began to back away, heading towards her seat, as though she had asked a boy to dance and he had refused her. The barmaid seemed to be enjoying the atmosphere of embarrassment and was staring at the woman, probably storing up an anecdote for the later amusement of the crew. Kell was aware that any number of possibilities was still in play: ‘Madeleine’ could be part of a surveillance team watching François. If French Intelligence had found out about Malot’s relationship with Amelia, they would almost certainly have sent people to track him. Kell’s lengthy conversation with François at the bar would have been noted. Madeleine, on post in the entertainment lounge, would have known that she had a responsibility to find out more about him. Hence her ridiculous story about Washington: she had not had the time, nor perhaps the expertise, to think up a better cover.

‘Please, let me buy you a drink,’ he said, because it was now important for him to ascertain precisely who she was. He could not remember seeing Madeleine at either of the hotels in Tunisia, but that was of little consequence. Even a half-decent DGSE team would have remained under the radar.

‘I don’t want to bother you,’ she said, with an expression of neediness on her face that precisely contradicted that statement. ‘Are you sure?’

The barmaid was pretending to arrange glasses but was self-evidently still listening in. Kell was curt with her, ordering two red wines and hoping that they would be left in peace. He offered Madeleine the same stool that Malot had only recently vacated. If she was a spy, he could expect several things. Forensic initial questioning about his legend.
Who are you, Stephen? And what do you do for a living?
Then, perhaps, a period of small talk in which Kell would be able to relax and encouraged to drink more alcohol. Then further exchanges that would subtly test the integrity of his cover. For example: if he told Madeleine that Stephen Uniacke was a marketing consultant, he might expect later questions about the details of his job. If he mentioned Reading as his place of residence, an experienced spy would almost certainly say that she had visited the city and perhaps ask questions about local landmarks. If Kell hesitated on any answer, or was ignorant on a point of detail, it would untangle his legend.

Of course, this worked both ways. Kell had been presented with a similar opportunity to make an assessment of Madeleine.
What did you do in Tunis? Why are you coming back on the ferry?
If the alcohol on her breath was anything to go by, she might prove easy to break down. It was just a matter of asking the right questions.

And so it began. The game. The dance. Yet for the best part of forty-five minutes Madeleine Brive exposed Stephen Uniacke only to the full glare of her blatant sexual desire. She was divorced. She had been on a ‘boring’ holiday in La Marsa with an ‘alcoholic’ friend whose husband had left her for a younger woman. She part-owned a clothing store in Tours that sold designer labels to rich Loire Valley housewives and was worried that her fourteen-year-old son was already smoking ‘a lot of fucking cannabis’. Kell was struck by the extent to which she seemed almost entirely interested in her own personality and circumstances, rather than in asking questions of her own. He gave Madeleine ample opportunity to probe Stephen Uniacke for details about his profession, his marital status, his home, but she did not seize any of them. Instead, as a second glass of wine slipped down, quickly becoming a third, the clock drifted past midnight and she made it clear that she wanted to go to bed with him, even to the point of touching his knee, in the manner of a guest on a talk show trying to ingratiate herself with the host.

‘I have a cabin,’ she said, a little hiccupy giggle accompanying the pass. ‘It’s very
big
.’

‘Me too,’ Kell replied, trying to kill the offer at source. ‘Mine is very small.’

It was a depressing, even emasculating feeling, but he had no desire to sleep with this woman, to thrash in the night on a bed only fractionally larger than a yoga mat.
No cat small enough to swing
. Madeleine Brive was beautiful, and lonely, and her perfume was the memory of other women. When she smiled at him, Kell felt the rush of her flattery, the relief of being taken for a normal man in normal circumstances engaged in the age-old cut-and-thrust of sex and desire. But his heart wasn’t in it. His heart was still attached to Claire. He was a still-married man on a boat in the middle of the sea with a responsibility to honour his estranged wife.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been sleeping lately. Will you forgive me if I slip away?’ It was an embarrassing excuse, but perhaps not out of character for Uniacke. ‘It was so interesting to meet you. Maybe we could have lunch in Marseille?’

To his surprise, Madeleine appeared almost relieved.

‘I would love that. I love Marseille. Will you be staying a night there?’

‘I haven’t decided.’ This, at least, was the truth.

So they swapped numbers – on a napkin and pen proffered by the frowning barmaid – and made tentative plans to meet for breakfast in the canteen. Madeleine knew the finest restaurant in Marseille for bouillabaisse and promised to take him there.

She left the disco before he did. The barmaid watched her leave and glowered at Kell, as if she had seen it all before.
You think nobody knows what’s going on? She’s given you the number of her cabin. You’ll head down there in five minutes when she’s had time to get into her negligée.
Kell flicked her a look and she went back to arranging her glasses.

Five minutes later he was in the bowels of the ship, close to the spacious cabin of the tempting Madeleine Brive, but standing at the door of his own room, tapping in his four-digit code.

An unsettling feeling was upon him, as though he had been tricked or humiliated. Something was not right. Kell cast his mind back to what he had seen at dinner, to the strange encounter between Luc and Malot. Why had the two men ignored one another when François had walked into the restaurant? Because they did not want to eat together – or because they did not want to be seen in one another’s company? François himself had turned out to be an unusually remote and delicate man, sensitive and vain, yet possessed of a quick intelligence and an underlying melancholy that Kell put down to grief. Had he been approached by Luc that afternoon? Was that what Kell had seen – an offer of recruitment from the DGSE? Six figures to tell us everything you know about Amelia Levene? Stranger things had happened. Of course, it was probable that there was zero threat on the ship. Most likely Madeleine was exactly who she said she was: the owner of a clothes shop in Tours looking for a quick fuck on the high seas. And Luc? Who was to say that he and François had not simply shared a run-of-the-mill conversation on the sun deck and then gone their separate ways? Yet as Kell opened the door of his cabin, something felt out of place, something as yet unknown to him. Something was wrong, yet he could not identify precisely what it was.

He went into the tiny bathroom, ducking his head through the door. He brushed his teeth, he took off his shirt. He then retrieved the camera from his suitcase, took out the memory card from his pocket and replaced it in its slot. He picked up the bottle of Macallan and poured himself a tooth mug of whisky to ease him into sleep.

The Spirit Level
was still open on the bed, face down, stretching the spine. Kell picked it up, planning to read ‘Postscript’ again in order to erase his questions, to change his mood and to shut out the operation for a few well-earned hours.

The earthed lightning of a flock of swans.

The book was on the wrong page. ‘Postscript’ was the final poem in the collection, but he was looking at ‘At the Wellhead’, four pages earlier. Somebody had picked up the book and put it back without due care. Somebody had been through the contents of his room.

If Kell was in any doubt that Madeleine Brive had been intent only on distracting Stephen Uniacke while a third party searched his room, it was dispelled by what happened next. As soon as he lifted the lid on the Marquand laptop, he saw that the encryption page installed by SIS had booted up: the small blue box in the centre of the screen was awaiting his sequence of passwords. A chambermaid, a cleaner, would not have done such a thing. Whoever had been into his room had attempted to boot the computer, only to encounter the password protection. Unable to shut it down, they had closed the lid and put the laptop back on the floor.

Kell lay on the narrow bed and considered his options. Was Uniacke blown? Not necessarily. If a DGSE team had control of the ship, they would know the names and cabin numbers of every passenger on board, including ‘Stephen Uniacke’. Madeleine would have been instructed to distract him with her little dance of the honeytrap so that one of her colleagues – Luc, perhaps – could go through his belongings. Accessing Kell’s cabin would have been as easy as breaking a pane of glass: a quick bribe of the concierge; a computer attack on the SNCM reservations system – either would have yielded the pin. And what would Luc have discovered? At worst, a camera with no memory card and a laptop with password protection. Hardly the stuff of conspiracy theories. The rest of his belongings were as mundane as they were blameless: clothes; toiletries; books.

Kell was suddenly aware – too late, perhaps – of a threat from visual surveillance. A basic, low-light camera might have been fitted in his cabin. He was still lying on the narrow bed, arms propped behind his head, and tried quickly to recall how he had behaved since entering the room. He had been into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. He had poured himself a whisky, opened and then closed the laptop. He had looked – too long and too hard, perhaps – at the book of poems. How would his behaviour have seemed to Luc, watching on a blurred surveillance screen in Cabin 4571? Suspicious? Kell doubted it. Any agitation he might have shown could more plausibly have been interpreted as regret for not following Madeleine to her cabin. Nevertheless, he set about going to bed, knowing, of course, that if there was a camera concealed in a light fitting, or hidden behind the mirror, that he could not go looking for it. Instead, he must behave naturally. Rising from the bed, as though he had been briefly distracted by an unsettling thought, Kell keyed the ten-digit password into the laptop and typed a random sequence of letters into the computer for several minutes, to give the appearance of writing up a report or filling in the pages of a journal. Next, he turned to
The Spirit Level
, studying a couple of poems intently, as though his earlier behaviour had been some indication of scholarly angst. He then stripped to his underpants, took a T-shirt from his suitcase, and climbed into bed.

It was a relief to turn out the light and to lie in the darkness unseen, a taste of whisky and toothpaste in his mouth. Kell’s beating heart kept time to the thrumming of the engine and he felt enclosed by the womb of the ship. As soon as the ferry came within signal range of the European coast, Kell knew that he would be obliged to call London with an update. He had three options. He could tell Jimmy Marquand that Amelia Levene, the Chief-designate of the Secret Intelligence Service, had an illegitimate son. This was the truth of the situation and would fulfil Kell’s formal obligation to SIS. He could also reveal his suspicion that French Intelligence had discovered Malot’s identity, followed him to Tunisia and perhaps even attempted to recruit him en route to Marseille. Of course, these revelations would be catastrophic for Amelia and lead to her immediate dismissal from the Service. As a consequence, the revival of his own career would be stillborn; with Truscott in charge, Kell would remain persona non grata.