A Foreign Country (30 page)

‘They should be coming past in less than a minute,’ Kell announced. He looked at Elsa’s face and she was suddenly a stranger to him, a hard edge in her expression, an absolute focus. Harold, so often the joker, was pacing in the kitchen, waiting for the word to go. Vigors, already outside in the garden, clicked his radio twice to confirm that he had seen CUCKOO and Amelia passing the Shand house on the lane.

‘Everybody OK?’ Kell asked, trying to convey a sense of calm and common purpose to the team even as he felt the under-skin crawl of disquiet. It was always like this; there was cruelty in waiting. Once they got into the house, once they were working, he would be fine.

Three clear clicks on the Vigors radio. That meant CUCKOO and Amelia were at the gate which connected the perimeter of the village to a meadow that ran west towards Ebbesbourne St John. Kell was in the hall. Harold came to the kitchen door and looked at him, waiting for the nod. He had one of the kitbags slung over his shoulder; Elsa was carrying the others. Kell counted to ten in his head, then opened the door.

It was ninety seconds from the Shand house to CUCKOO’s bedroom via the short-cut in the garden; Kell had timed it. Harold reached the dividing gate first, opening it up and then moving quickly across Amelia’s lawn to the house.

Barbara had already opened the back door. She said: ‘Shoes off,’ as they pulled up outside. She checked the bottoms of their trousers for mud, pronounced them clean, and within fifteen seconds, Elsa and Harold were in the CUCKOO bedroom.

‘SIM,’ said Kell.

Barbara had already been into CUCKOO’s room, picked up his denim jeans, looked in the ticket pocket and found the SIM. She passed it to Kell as they stood beside the grandfather clock.

‘All yours,’ she said.

He went up to the bedroom and handed it to Harold. He had left one of the kitbags outside in the corridor. He removed an old Security Service encoder, switched it on and inserted the SIM, setting the machine to copy. Kell left him to it. Meanwhile, Elsa had taken out a computer and several cables of varying colours and sizes, one of which she connected to the mains. She took CUCKOO’s laptop from the black leather holdall and flipped open the lid. Kell watched but did not disturb her. The plan was to crack the DGSE security encryption on the laptop and to transfer all hard-drive data on to her host machine. Harold had revisited the footage of CUCKOO tapping in the password in the bathroom, amplified the image and established three possible options.

Elsa tried the first of them – the French word ‘DIGESTIF’ followed by a three-number sequence – but the firewall remained in place. Her second attempt, substituting ‘2’ for ‘3’ at the start of the sequence, broke the security.

‘You had it right, Harold,’ Elsa said, but there was no sense of triumph or elation in her voice.

‘You’re in?’ he asked.

‘I am in, I think so, yes.’ She was speaking quickly, tripping on her words. ‘I tried the second code, it has put me through into a new interface.’

Kell looked around the room. The world of technology – of hard-drive encryptions, of phone triangulations – was as alien to him as some lost tribal dialect from the Amazon. Throughout his career, he had felt lamentably ill-informed in the presence of Tech-Ops teams and computer wizards. Leaving Elsa to begin transferring the data from CUCKOO’s laptop, he looked around the room, making a mental note of the objects on display. He saw many of the personal items from CUCKOO’s room at the Ramada: his 35mm camera; the gold cigarette lighter engraved with the initials ‘P.M.’; the framed photograph of Philippe and Jeannine Malot; the Moleskine diary, every page of which he had photographed and sent to Jimmy Marquand. Beside the bed was the Michael Dibdin
roman policier
translated into French, a bottle of Highland Spring water and a pair of earplugs. Kell opened up the novel and – sure enough – found the fake letter to François, dated 4 February 1999, supposedly written by Malot’s father. In a chest of drawers he found CUCKOO’s counterfeit passport resting on the socks and underpants that he had unpacked the night before. His black leather jacket was hanging on a hook behind the door, beside a white cotton dressing-gown. It was the same story in the bathroom: the same shaving products, the same pills, the same bottle of Valium that Kell had seen in Tunis. How easily he had been deceived.

‘How are you getting on?’ he asked Harold, still crouched over the encoder in the corridor, frowning.

‘At least another fifteen minutes,’ he said.

‘You?’

‘Same applies to me,’ Elsa replied. ‘Relax, Tom, please.’

Kell felt as though he was intruding on events over which he had no power or influence. He went downstairs, removed the shoes from the hall, and found Barbara dutifully dragging a Hoover up and down on the sitting-room carpet.

‘Any sign of CUCKOO’s phone?’ he asked.

‘None,’ she replied. ‘Must have taken it with him.’

Barbara was correct.

Pausing in front of the first stile in the meadow, about four hundred metres from the Shand house, CUCKOO reached into his trouser pocket and powered up his mobile phone.

‘I’m afraid you’re unlikely to get a signal,’ Amelia told him, asking for his hand so that he could steady her as she crossed over the stile. ‘I normally have to drive across to Fovant if I want to check my messages. Occasionally one can get a feeble signal on the hill.’

She pointed ahead of her, in the direction of Ebbesbourne St John.

‘Why don’t you have a booster fitted to your house?’ CUCKOO asked, an edge of surprise in his voice. ‘Don’t MI6 like to be in touch with you?’

‘That’s the whole point of this place.’ Amelia watched as CUCKOO swung a leg over the stile, following her. ‘Isolation. Retreat. I like to be somewhere that nobody can find me. My privacy is very important to me. You know what it’s like to be at the mercy of text messages, constant calls on one’s BlackBerry, endless emails from colleagues. My weekends are sacred. When I take over next month, they’ll be posting security guards in the lane, wiring the house for CCTV. These are the last moments of solitude you and I will know for years.’

It was a deft coda, planting CUCKOO with the idea that Amelia envisaged their relationship stretching far into the future. She found it curious to reflect on how much she was enjoying turning the tables; she had expected to feel physically ill in his presence, but after only a few minutes in the house, CUCKOO had become little more than a cipher to her. Those aspects of his character that she had once found endearing – his sensitivity, his shyness, his careful and enquiring intellect – she now viewed as faults, weaknesses. She considered most of his conversation to be repetitive and lacking in insight; anecdotes and jokes were already beginning to be repeated. His physical attractiveness, which she had once, embarrassingly, prided herself on, was now evidence only of an extreme vanity, bordering on narcissism. The process by which Amelia had come to loathe CUCKOO was not all that different, she reflected, to the process by which she came to resent her former lovers. Those things she had most adored about him were now those things that she abhorred. She felt only an unequivocal determination to destroy him, borne of shame and the desperate desire to find François.

‘
Merde
,’ said CUCKOO.

He was patting his trousers, front and back, searching the inside pockets of his Barbour.

‘What is it?’

‘I forgot my cigarettes.’

Amelia felt an itch of alarm.

‘Does it matter? I hate it when you smoke.’

He looked at her as though she had betrayed him, a sudden sullen expression of his contempt.

‘What? Even outside, in the open air?’ It was the first time that he had raised his voice against her. Why the shift in his mood? Did he suspect that something was going on at the house, the forgotten cigarettes a ruse to go back? But then CUCKOO seemed to remember the need for tact and good manners and his characteristic charm returned. ‘I just like to smoke as I walk. It helps me to think, to relax.’

‘Of course,’ Amelia said. ‘But we’ll be home fairly soon.’ She gestured ahead at a wooded glade about a quarter of a mile to the west. ‘We can turn around at the end.’

CUCKOO was shifting from foot to foot. ‘No, I’ll run back,’ he said, and before Amelia could stop him, he had vaulted over the stile and started jogging towards the house. At that speed he would be there in less than a minute. She looked back along the valley for a sign of Kevin Vigors. He was nowhere to be seen.

‘François!’

CUCKOO stopped and turned around, frowning.

‘What?’

Slowly, Amelia took herself back over the stile and walked towards him, buying time with every step. When she was a few metres away, she reached into her coat pocket and took out her keys.

‘You’ll need these.’

‘Barbara can let me in,’ he replied, turning and starting to jog. He called back: ‘I’ll only be five minutes.’

And all Amelia could do was watch and wait.

Less than two hundred metres away, secluded behind a screen of chestnut trees, Kevin Vigors saw CUCKOO running towards the house and immediately radioed through to Kell.

‘Serious problem,’ he said. ‘CUCKOO is coming back.’

‘What? Why?’

‘No idea. But get out of there. You’ve probably got less than a minute before he reaches the house.’

‘Can you stall him?’

‘He’ll smell a rat. Just get out of the bedroom.’

Kell was standing in the sitting room. He went into the kitchen, opened the bin, pulled out the contents and handed them to Barbara.

‘Get outside,’ he said, grabbing a pile of papers from the kitchen table, as well as Elsa and Harold’s shoes and a recipe book from the shelf above the Aga. He stuffed them into the bin liner until it was full. ‘Walk down the lane towards the Shand house. There are black dustbins between the two houses. CUCKOO is coming back. You’ll have to stall him or we won’t have time to clear out. Get him to help you with the bin.’

Barbara nodded but said nothing. She went to the door, walked up the stone steps towards the lane and headed slowly downhill in the direction of the Shand house. At the same time, Kell grabbed the vacuum cleaner from the sitting room and ran upstairs, holding it in his arms like an outsized child.

‘Get the fuck out of there right now,’ he called to Elsa and Harold, plugging the Hoover into a socket in the corridor. ‘Grab everything. We are going into Amelia’s room.’ He was scooping up one of the kitbags in the corridor. He heard Harold say: ‘Jesus fucking Christ’ and watched as he picked up the encoder and took it past him, down the passage. Harold then came back into CUCKOO’s bedroom and threw the rest of his hardware into a second bag that he slung over his shoulder and removed to the master bedroom.

Kell heard three clicks on the radio. CUCKOO was at the gate. In twenty seconds he would be opposite the Shand front door, in forty, at the back door of Amelia’s house.

Elsa, repeatedly whispering ‘Shit, shit’ in Italian, had shut down the DGSE laptop and was putting it back in the leather carrying case.

‘Hurry,’ Kell hissed at her, coiling loose cables into the third bag. He unplugged her computer from the mains and ushered her out of the room, bundling the bag into her arms. He left the Hoover in the corridor to make it look as though Barbara had been cleaning upstairs. ‘Go, go,’ he said.

CUCKOO’s bedroom was now empty. Kell checked the carpet. There was a small piece of yellow plastic beside the chest of drawers that he picked up and put in his pocket. There seemed to be a strong odour of work and sweat, but he could not decide whether the smell of Elsa’s perfume was in the room or in his memory. He opened the window, on the basis that Barbara could have done so, and ensured that the team had left no trace of themselves in the bathroom.

Two clicks on the radio. CUCKOO was passing the Shand house.

Kell looked out of the bathroom window and saw him coming. He turned, walked into the corridor, reached the landing, went into Amelia’s bedroom and closed the door.

It was only then that he realized they had not replaced the SIM in CUCKOO’s jeans.

Barbara saw CUCKOO as she reached the dustbins. He had stopped jogging and was walking towards her, passing the Shand house and frowning in surprise at the sight of Amelia’s cleaning lady struggling down the lane under the weight of a bin bag.

‘You are OK?’ he called out.

Barbara, tilting to one side for maximum visual impact, nodded her head in a demonstration of unbuckled stoicism and moved forward towards the dustbins.

‘What are you doing back here, love?’ she asked, resting the sack in the centre of the road so that CUCKOO’s path was partially blocked.

‘Smoke,’ he said, miming a cigarette going in and out of his mouth. ‘I help you?’

At least he’s got some manners
, Barbara thought, breaking into an effusive speech of gratitude as CUCKOO lifted the bag from the lane and carried it the short distance to the large black dustbins at the edge of the road.

‘
C’est lourd
,’ he said.
It’s heavy
. As if to confirm this, the Frenchman held his bicep as though he had suffered a sprain. For a split second, Barbara was about to reply in fluent French, the language of her life in Menton, but she checked herself and instead continued in her role.

‘That’s so kind of you, François,’ she said, slowing her words down, as though talking to a child. ‘Thank goodness I ran into you.’ She was aware that, no more than ten metres away, behind the windows on the first floor of the house, Kell, Elsa and Harold were most probably in a perfect storm of panic, clearing out of the bedroom as fast as possible. She drew CUCKOO’s eyes down towards the ground with a stern warning: ‘Now, I don’t want you going into the house with those muddy boots on.’

It was to the Service’s advantage that CUCKOO was obliged to pretend that he did not understand what she had said.

‘What, please?’ he said. ‘I not follow.’

Barbara repeated the warning, buying yet more precious time as she slowly explained, in nursery-level English, that she would not allow dirty footwear in Mrs Levene’s home.