A Foreign Country (38 page)

‘Stinks in here,’ he said. François had heard it all before.

Slimane was behind him, looking oddly detached, perhaps a little stoned. Usually he would mutter a few words, something spiteful or contemptuous, just to get his blood going, to ease his boredom. But tonight he stared into the middle-distance, his left eye still bruised and swollen, as though he had something else on his mind, like a sixth sense of imminent defeat.

A car passed on the track outside, cutting through from the south-east. Local knowledge; somebody who knew the rat run. Just then, from the first floor, François heard a woman shouting, not in panic or fear, but from a sense of outrage, of stunned surprise. Valerie. Jacques put the bucket on the floor, directly in front of François, looked at Slimane and went out into the hall, as if a fire alarm had gone off and he wasn’t sure if it was a test. Then François heard the sound of Valerie running downstairs. In that moment, the front door flew open and something was thrown into the hallway. The house inverted with noise. Slimane and François blocked their ears, the room screaming, as Jacques dropped to the ground. At first it looked as though he had tripped or slipped on the floor, but François saw blood on the wall behind him, the barrel of a rifle, then the outline of a man wearing body armour and a black balaclava. His ears were numb. He had kicked over the bucket and was staring at the urine as it pooled out in front of him. Even then, he thought that Slimane would make him clear it up.

Valerie had come to the bottom of the stairs. She looked into the cell and screamed at Slimane: ‘Shoot him!’ An instant later, blood had sprayed against the door of the cell as her body crumpled beside Jacques. The soldier had shot her point-blank in the head.

Slimane reached for the rear pocket of his jeans. This was where he kept his gun, the gun with which he had taunted François, the gun with which he had threatened him, day and night.

It was out and levelled at François’ chest in one quick, trained movement. François looked beyond Slimane, at the masked face of the soldier who had shot Jacques and Valerie. An instant later the soldier had swung his own weapon towards Slimane, but it was too late; the Arab had stepped towards François, grabbed and spun his body as easily as a man moving the branch of a tree, and pressed the cold steel of his gun against François’ right temple. Slimane’s arm flexed around François’ neck, he began to drag him backwards across the floor of the cell and away from the soldier.

François tried to twist free, but Slimane only held him tighter and pressed the barrel of the gun harder against his head, shouting: ‘You put your fucking gun down.’ It was not clear whether the soldier could understand. ‘Go back out of the door!’ the Arab screamed in French. ‘Get outside. I’m taking this prick with me and we’re leaving in the car.’

The grip on François’ neck momentarily slackened and he grabbed at a breath of air, gulping and coughing. There was a wet slick of sweat all over François’ face; it was as if the two men were transferring fear from skin to skin. To his dismay, François saw the soldier lower his rifle and step over Valerie’s dead body, moving backwards towards the door, seemingly in the act of surrender. As he did so, Slimane moved tentatively forward, his hips banging against François, shunting him towards the hall, all the time driving the gun into the side of his head like a screwdriver.

‘I’m going to kill you, you know that, don’t you?’ he whispered; it was as though he was enjoying himself, adrenalized by the scene playing out in front of him. Terrified that the trigger would give way, François watched as the soldier reached for the door, preparing to retreat on to the driveway. At the same time, Slimane forced François up into the hall, picking his way between the two dead bodies on the ground.

François became aware of the movement behind them before Slimane, perhaps because he was so attuned to every detail and characteristic of his prison. He sensed the near-silent removal of the metal bars securing the rear door of the cell; he heard the sudden twist and push on the door handle as a second soldier burst into the room behind them. François twisted his head to the right to try to see what was happening, opening up a tiny gap between his head and that of his captor which gave the second soldier a clear target area. It was then that François learned, finally, of his own courage, because he wrestled free of Slimane and tried to turn on him even as he registered that the Arab’s head had simply disintegrated before his eyes. François found himself tasting the warm blood, the brain tissue of his detested guard and began to spit it on to Valerie’s body.

‘Are you François?’ the soldier who had fired shouted in French. He was also in body armour but his tanned face was not concealed by a balaclava. François, still in a state of shock, answered: ‘Yes’ as the first soldier came back into the hall and fired a silenced shot into Slimane’s chest.

‘Get behind us,’ he barked in French. ‘Who else is here?’

Thomas Kell had been listening out for the first shot from the windmill and heard what he thought was the snap of Jeff’s silenced rifle just after seven o’clock. A second later he heard the sound of Luc’s body splashing into the swimming pool, then a scream as Valerie de Serres reacted to what had happened from her bedroom on the first floor. On that cue, Mike burst through the front door, tossing a stun grenade into the hall; Kell guessed that he had fired his weapon at least three times in quick succession. Thirty metres to the east, he saw White moving low and fast behind a screen of trees, then disappearing behind the house as he approached the rear entrance to the cell.

Kell had his instructions. He switched on the engine of the rental car, reversed it into the drive so that the vehicle was within twenty feet of the house, then opened the rear doors on both sides. As he stepped out of the car, he heard a commotion inside the house, a man shouting in French, screaming at Mike to drop his weapon. Kell took the Glock pistol from its holster, sweat suddenly enveloping his neck and chest like a rash; in more than twenty years as an intelligence officer, he had never fired a weapon on active duty. He looked back at the front door and saw Mike stepping out of the house, like a man being pushed backwards towards the edge of a cliff.

Just then, to his left, a movement. Coming from the direction of the pool, across the terrace at the northern end of the house. A man in swimming shorts, soaked from head to foot, and bleeding from a wound to his neck and shoulder. The wound was bright red but the blood had blackened where it reached the shorts. Luc. Kell spun towards him and raised the Glock, shouting at Javeau to stop, but it was clear that the Frenchman was utterly disorientated and functioning solely on survival instinct. He seemed to recognize Kell from the interview in Marseille, but then turned back in the direction of the terrace and began to walk across an expanse of unmown grass, twisting like a drunk towards the track. Kell again shouted at him to stop. He walked up the steps, but could not fire nor follow him, because at any moment he might be required to go back to the car and to drive François away from the house.

He heard a gunshot, then White’s voice, unintelligible. Kell looked back at the front door to see what was happening, then again at Luc who was still stumbling towards the road, now more than seventy metres away. In the next field, a tractor was obliviously ploughing. From the direction of the abandoned windmill, Jeff appeared at the edge of the terrace. Beginning to run, he raised his weapon to shoulder height and fired three shots at Luc’s back, dropping him like a stag. Kell, stunned by what he had seen, turned and went back to the vehicle as Jeff followed behind him in a fluid, continuous movement, heading towards the house.

Mike came out first, François tucked in behind him, White half a second later.

‘Move with me,’ Mike was saying, ‘stay behind me’, as White shouted ‘Clear!’ and sprinted ahead to the car. They had Amelia’s son on the floor of the back seat before Kell had even closed his own door. Jeff was the last one in, shooting out a tyre on the Land Cruiser as Kell put the Renault in gear.

‘Anybody hurt?’ he asked.

‘Status, Jeff,’ White replied, as though speaking into a radio.

‘All clear, boss. Targets down.’

Kell accelerated away from the house.

They waited on a bench in the centre of the square, a woman of fifty-three wearing a pretty skirt and a cream blouse, a man of forty-three in a linen suit that had seen better days, and a young French I.T. consultant wearing jeans and smoking a cigarette. He might have been their nephew, their son.

‘He’ll be here in a minute,’ Amelia said.

It was a Saturday morning, just before eleven o’clock, young children playing in a small park at the centre of the square under the dutiful, exhausted stares of fathers who had promised their wives and girlfriends a few hours’ respite from childcare. One of the children, a girl of about three or four, had a miniature pushchair in which she had placed a naked doll. She rattled it forward and back on the narrow path in front of the bench, falling once but immediately rising to her feet without fuss or tears, and without noticing that François had stood up from his seat to try to help her.

‘Brave girl,’ he said in French, sitting back down, but she did not appear to hear him.

Clockwise cars were circling the park, waiters at a brasserie on the far side of the square ferrying Perriers and
cafés au lait
to customers basking in the late summer sun. Kell turned and looked down Rue Carnot, glancing at his watch.

‘In a minute,’ Amelia replied and placed a hand on her son’s knee.

Kell watched them, still not tired of their delight in one another’s company, and reflected on how skilfully Amelia had played her hand. Jimmy Marquand promoted and sent to Washington, with school fees paid, salary boosted, and a five-bedroom Georgetown mansion to help convince him that SIS really had been left in good hands, despite one or two misgivings he might have had about a woman running the Service. Simon Haynes too busy thanking the Prime Minister for his knighthood to wonder how long Amelia had been keeping her illegitimate son a secret. And George Truscott eased offshore to the top SIS job in Germany before he could start asking any awkward questions about the sudden appearance in London of Monsieur François Malot.

At Amelia’s instigation, Kell, Elsa and Drummond had spent two weeks looking into the possibility of a connection between Truscott and the elements in the DGSE who had carried out Malot’s abduction, but they had found nothing, not even evidence that Truscott had known about DENEUVE. On the other hand, their investigation suggested that Kell had been correct in his assumption that the operation was linked to waning French influence in North Africa. Elsa had obtained copies of two cables, originating in Paris, which confirmed that senior figures in the DGSE had been ‘extremely concerned’ about Amelia’s appointment as ‘C’. Their misgivings proved well founded: within days of taking over from Haynes, Amelia had shut down nineteen separate operations in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe and re-directed more than forty officers to burgeoning SIS Stations in Tripoli, Cairo, Tunis and Algiers. As Head of Station in Turkey, Paul Wallinger was given
carte blanche
to amplify SIS influence from Istanbul to Tehran, from Ankara to Jordan. In London, other Levene allies, on both sides of the river, were instructed to sell this regional re-shuffle to a Downing Street already keen to reap the economic and security benefits of the post-Arab Spring era. By the time elections were being called in Egypt, the French government was reported to be ‘paranoid’ about aggressive SIS recruitment of sources within the Muslim Brotherhood and ‘gravely concerned’ about Libyan oil resources slipping beyond the control of Total S.A.

Paris itself had also embarked on a shame-faced internal investigation into the behaviour of Luc Javeau, details of which were leaked to Vauxhall Cross by Amelia’s source in the DCRI. It was confirmed that Javeau had indeed been the officer tasked with cleaning up the mess left by DENEUVE’s treachery. The scandal had stalled his career, a setback he blamed squarely on Levene and which his superiors were only too happy to avenge by waving through Javeau’s plans for the Malot operation. In the aftermath of François’ release, more formal channels saw the DGSE distancing itself from the ‘unpredictable rogue elements’ that had threatened to break the ‘formidable and lasting intelligence relationship between our two countries’. Amelia’s opposite number in Paris also stressed the importance of keeping what had happened in Salles-sur-l’Hers a secret, both to protect Mrs Levene’s privacy but also ‘to avoid any complications with our respective governments’. It was taken for granted that Paris was outraged by the assassination of serving DGSE personnel on French soil by an unaccountable unit of British ex-Special Forces.

Information on Valerie de Serres was harder to come by, but it was demonstrated that she was a former GIPN officer, born in Montreal, who had met Luc while their respective agencies had been working on a joint counter-terrorism oper-ation. Amelia characterized her baleful influence over Luc as ‘Lady Macbeth stuff’, and it was generally accepted that Valerie had managed to convince Javeau to quit the DGSE and to ransom François for private gain.

As for Kell himself, his forty-third birthday brought no great change in his circumstances. With the Yassin trial scheduled for the new year, Amelia had made it clear that she could not be seen to bring him back into the Service without the good name of ‘Witness X’ being cleared in court and the incident wiped from Kell’s record. There had been no word from Claire since her return from California, so he continued to rent his bachelor bedsit in Kensal Rise, eating take-aways and watching old black-and-white movies on TCM. Amelia had arranged for Kell’s salary and pension to be reinstated, yet her gratitude towards him for facilitating the release of her son had not been as fulsome as perhaps Kell had anticipated. He felt like a man who had spent a fortune on a present for a close friend, only to see them tuck it away, unopened, in a cupboard, embarrassed by such an act of generosity. In this atmosphere, Kell occasionally began to resent the risks he had taken on Amelia’s behalf, the secrets he had consented to keep, but his affection and respect for her was such that he was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. Amelia’s behaviour was bound to have been affected by what had happened in France, as well as by the demands – and status – of her new position as Chief. In time, he told himself, she would bring him back into the fold and give him the pick of any overseas job that caught his eye. Kell looked forward to that day, not least because it might offer him some respite from London and from the collapse of his marriage to Claire.