Liberation day

by Andy McNab

  New cars, motorbikes, and motor scooters were crammed into every possible, and impossible, space, and their owners, the customers in the cafés, looked extremely cool and elegant in their sunglasses, smoking, drinking, just generally posing around the place.

  There were quite a few homeless around here as well. Fair: if I were homeless I’d want to sleep in a warm place with lots of good-looking people about, particularly if they were the sort to throw you a few bucks. A group of four or five bums were sitting on benches alongside a scruffy old mongrel with a red polka-dot scarf around its neck. One guy had a can of beer in his coat pocket, and as he bent over to pat the dog the contents were spilling onto the ground. His wino friends looked horror-struck.

  I’d never used this café to get online: normally, I drove to Cap 3000, a huge centre commercial on the outskirts of Nice. It was only about forty-five minutes away, driving within speed limits, which I was meticulous about, and always crowded. But this time I needed to tell George what I had found out immediately. I was leaving Cannes now anyway, so wouldn’t need to come here again.

  The place looked quite full, which was good. A group of twenty-somethings wearing designer leather jackets and shades posed near their motorbikes and scooters, or sat on shiny aluminum chairs and sipped glasses of beer. Most had a pack of Marlboros or Winstons on the table with a disposable lighter on top, alongside a cell phone that got picked up every few seconds in case they had missed a text message.

  I wove my way through the temple of cool, past walls lined with boring gray PCs, toward the rows of gleaming drinks signs and the steaming cappuccino machine that stood at the black, marble-topped bar.

  I pointed at the nearest PC and tried to make myself heard above the beat of the music. “I want to get online…. Er, parlez-vous anglais?”

  The guy behind the counter didn’t even look up from unloading the dishwasher. “Sure, log on, pay later. You want a drink?” He was dressed in black and sounded Scandinavian.

  “Café crème.”

  “Go, sit down.”

  I headed to a vacant PC station, perched myself on one of the very high stools, and logged on. The screen information was all in French, but I’d gotten the hang of it by now and went straight into Hotmail. George had set up an account for me that was registered in Poland. The user name was BB8642; George was BB97531, a sequence of numbers that even I couldn’t forget. He was as paranoid as I was, and he’d gone to quite a lot of trouble to make our correspondence untraceable. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d fixed it for Bill Gates to erase our messages personally, as soon as they’d been read.

  Signing in, I made sure the font size was the smallest possible so nobody could read over my shoulder, and checked my mailbox. He wasn’t getting information on this job from anywhere else. He just wanted it from me. I was his only line of information: anything else would have been dangerous. There was no other way of making contact: I’d never had a phone number for him, even when I was with Carrie, never even knew where he lived. I wasn’t sure if she did, these days.

  George’s e-mail asked me if I’d gotten his present, and said I mustn’t open it until Christmas. He was referring to the gear left for me at the DOP, and the drugs we were going to use to help the hawalladas on their way to the warship.

  I tapped away with my index fingers.

  Hello, thanks for the present, but I’m not too sure if I can wait till Christmas. Guess what? I just saw Jenny and she said that Susanna is coming to town on business, arriving tomorrow night. She’ll be in town until Sunday and has three meetings while she is here, one a day starting Friday. Jenny is finding out the details so she can arrange for all of us to get together and try that place you are always talking about, the one that serves great White Russians. I have so much to tell you. You were right, Susanna’s business is worth anything between 2.5 and 3 mill. Not bad! You’d better get in there quick before some stud moves in. I know she likes you! I’m around tomorrow, do you want to meet up for a drink, say 1 P.M.?

  My coffee arrived and I took a sip of froth without picking it up. This was the second e-mail I’d sent George since arriving in-country. Each time any contact was made, a color was used for authentication. The first was red, this one was white, the third, the brush contact tomorrow at one, would be blue. Then I’d start the color sequence again. All very Stars and Stripes, all very George, but these things needed to be simple or they were forgotten. Well, by me, anyway.

  George now knew that I had met the source, the boat was coming in on Thursday night, and I wanted a brush contact tomorrow to pass over the collection details. Things like that are far too sensitive to send in clear, even if Bill Gates was in the good guys club.

  I finished the e-mail “Have a nice day.” After all, I was nearly an American now.

  Signing out of Hotmail, I reopened with the addresses I used to contact Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba.

  Anyone checking the subscriber would discover he lived in Canada.

  There was nothing in my mailbox from these two, which was good news. Like me, they were just waiting for the time to meet up and get on with the job.

  I invited each of them for coffee at four o’clock today. They’d be checking their boxes at one-ish, so they’d get the message in plenty of time.

  I wrapped a napkin around the coffee cup and took a sip while I worked out what to do next. I had to check out of the hotel, then go to Beaulieu-sur-Mer and do a recce before the boat arrived. I’d need to look at the vital ground before meeting up with Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba at the safe house at four.

  I took another slow sip. This was going to be my last quiet time before I started running around like a crazed dog.

  I wondered what Carrie was doing now, and spent a minute or two just staring at the keyboard, trying to shake that last image of her at the harbor out of my head. In the end I just logged off, and wiped the keys and cup rim clean with the napkin.

  My hotel was right next door to a synagogue, and above a kosher takeout pizza joint called Pizza Jacob. It had been perfect, not only because it was cheap but because the aging manager took cash. My fellow guests were a bunch of iffy-looking comb and pencil salesmen, trying to save money by sleeping in a room with no TV or phone, and very thin blankets.

  I checked out and threw my duffel bag into the trunk of the dark blue Renault Mégane. The garbage bag, still containing the bits of Greaseball’s newspaper I hadn’t already chewed up and swallowed, joined a couple of paper cups, three empty Coke cans, and napkins in the passenger footwell. I made what must have been about a sixty-point turn and eventually managed to squeeze out of the small and crowded parking lot at the rear. I put on my sunglasses and dark blue baseball cap before I emerged onto the street. The sun was bright, but it wasn’t what I was shielding myself from. CCTV cameras were everywhere along this coastline.

  I’d find myself a new hotel when I needed it, and if I had time.

  13

  I hit the coast road, turned east, and headed toward Nice, flanked by the train tracks and the sea. About a mile outside Cannes I pulled up, bumping the car half up onto the curb behind a row of others belonging to a bunch of rod fishermen down on the beach. Bad parking was so common here it didn’t draw a second glance, and it meant I could check to see if I’d picked up any tracking devices in the last twenty-four hours.

  I wasn’t expecting anything just yet, but I’d still taken precautions. I’d bought a little jar of silver enamel modeling paint and a brush, and had coated all the retaining screws on the bumpers and the license plates. If anybody had been tampering they would have had to cut the paint.

  I looked around the wheel arches and underneath the chassis. Then I had the hood up and checked the engine compartment.

  If I found a device, I’d simply walk away, and that would be the end of the job as far as I was concerned. The other two would have to carry on.

  But everything was fine. I got back behind the wheel and carried on along the coast road, passing through all sorts
of places I’d heard about in songs.

  The sea was almost totally still today, and shimmered in the sunlight. It all looked just like the South of France should look, except that the sand was heaped up in gigantic mounds. They imported it by the truckload from North Africa, and now was obviously the time of year when they gave the beach a makeover before the new season.

  Nobody was sunbathing but quite a lot of people were out blading, walking their dogs, and just generally enjoying the space. Stony beach took over again as I neared Nice proper. I skirted the airport and Cap 3000, my e-mail center and the place where the brush contact would happen tomorrow.

  The airport was right at the edge of the city, virtually on the beach. A new terminal was under construction, and large pictorial banners told me how wonderful it would be for the future of the area.

  I drove into the city along a wide double-lane highway, punctuated by palm trees. The automatic sprinkler system threw up a series of pint-sized rainbows along the central divide. The traffic was funneled between glass and steel hotels and more construction sites. It got busier and busier, until it turned into the Wacky Races, with the contestants stopping and starting like maniacs, slaloming from lane to lane and leaning on their horns.

  I switched on the English-speaking Riviera Radio and listened to a Hugh Grant soundalike make his link from the closing bars of a Barbra Streisand weepy into a string of commercials for financial and yachting services. Before long I even knew the price of a barrel of Brent crude, and what was happening on the Nasdaq. It was obvious what type of Brit expatriates they were broadcasting to: the very rich kind. But I always listened to it because they had a review of the U.S. papers in the afternoon, and carried the BBC World Service hourly.

  I hit the Promenade des Anglais, the main drag along the coast. It was a glamorous stretch, lined with palm trees and glitzy old-world hotels. Even the buses were immaculate: they looked as though someone had just given them a good polish before they were allowed into town. I carried on around the harbor, which was heaving with pleasure cruisers and ferries en route to and from Corsica, and started to see signs for Beaulieu-sur-Mer.

  The road wound uphill until only the cliff edge and a hundred-foot drop separated it from the sea. As I got higher I could see mountain ranges inland that seemed to go on forever. I guessed Riviera Radio was right when it said you could be on the beach in the morning, and skiing in the afternoon.

  Nice disappeared behind me as the road snaked along the cliff. I felt like I’d been caught up in a late-night movie; I expected to turn a corner at any moment, and meet Grace Kelly in an Alpine Sports roadster coming the other way.

  I took a steep left-hand turn, and Villefranche and its huge deep-water bay lay spread out below me. Home of the U.S. Sixth Fleet until France decided to pull its military out of NATO, it was one of the biggest natural harbors in the world. American and British warships still dropped anchor there when on a courtesy visit—or when spiriting away heavily anesthetized hawalladas.

  The dull gray shape of the warship dominated the bay with its large registration number stenciled in white paint on the back. It had more domes and antennae than the Starship Enterprise, and a helipad on the back big enough to take a jumbo jet.

  The crew wouldn’t have a clue what was happening. The most they’d know was that an area was out of bounds, and some important guests were on board. Only the captain and a few officers would have been told what the goodwill visit was really all about. The guests were probably getting a sit rep from George this very minute, using the information I’d just sent. They’d be fired up now making their final preparations in some small, steel-walled room, out of screaming distance from the crew. I really hoped we were going to make it all worth their while.

  Beyond the warship was Cap Ferrat. It looked very green, and very opulent, with large houses surrounded by trees and high fences. I made my way around the bay, through Villefranche and past a small left-hand turn that hairpinned up to the mountains. Up that road and just over sixteen miles away, on the other side of a couple of small villages and the odd isolated house, was the DOP. It was an illegal dumping area, full of rusting freezers and household waste. It looked like it could host the biggest yard sale on the planet, and was just the place I needed.

  A few minutes later I was in Beaulieu-sur-Mer. The harbor was on the other side of the town, so I followed signs to the gare. It was a small cream-colored building with a taxi stand and flower beds that were so manicured they looked like they had a personal stylist. After a couple of circuits, I found a spot and parked. I got out and retrieved my digital camera from my duffel bag.

  The Mégane was a perfect vehicle for this sort of job: it was a dark color, a popular make, and about as nondescript as they come, once I’d peeled off the sticker from the dealership the rental company had bought it from. It was also small enough to park quickly, but big enough to hide a body in the trunk. Which was why, as well as my personal gear, I had two rolls of silver duct tape in the trunk. Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba also had some; we wanted to make sure that once we got a body inside a vehicle, it was there to stay.

  All three vehicles had been fiddled with so that the backup and brake lights could be cut off. It was simple enough: we just sliced through the leads and added an on/off switch to the circuit. When we drove a hawallada into the DOP with the lights out, the last thing we wanted was for the brake or backup lights to kick in and show everyone around what we were up to. For the same reason, all the interior lightbulbs had been removed. We’d have to return the cars to Alamo, or wherever the other two had gotten theirs from, in the same condition we’d rented them, but it wouldn’t take more than an hour or so to change everything back.

  I wandered around between the post office and the station, making like a tourist, taking the odd snapshot while the taxi drivers stood around their Mercedes, preferring to talk and smoke rather than take a fare.

  The gare was immaculate, as French train stations always are. I glanced at the timetables—regular services in both directions along the coast, either back to Nice, Cannes, and Marseille, or on to Monaco and Italy.

  I bought myself nine francs’ worth of brewed-while-you-wait coffee from the machine and tried not to overexcite three small white hairy dogs that were tied by lengths of string to the newsstand on my left. They looked at me as if it were lunchtime. I stepped around them and went to look at the postcard carousel rack. Cards are a really good source of information for people like me, because they usually have shots of locations you can’t get to easily. It’s Standard Operating Procedure for most intelligence operators to collect them as they travel around the world, because the agencies want these things at hand. If there’s an incident, say, at an airport in the middle of Nowhereland, they just have to open their files and they’ve got a collection of visuals to refer to until more information is gathered.

  I picked up several pictures of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, which showed the marina from different angles and heights, all shot in fantastic sunlight, with beautiful women and sharply chiseled men strolling among the boats. Next to the carousel was a display of town maps, so I picked out three different ones. The vendor had a big round face and an annoyingly happy smile. I gave him my “Merci, au revoir” and walked away with the change, which the French never seem to put into your hand, but always on the counter, in case you’ve got some disease.

  I went back to the car.

  The marina was larger than I’d expected from the postcards. Two or three hundred shiny masts rocked and glinted in the sunlight.

  Just before turning through the entrance, I saw bus stops on either side of the road and a glass phone booth. Whoever was on the boat had chosen their location well: there were buses to both Monaco and Nice, and the train station was just a ten-minute walk away. The phone booth was certainly going to be a bonus for us.

  The large blue sign welcomed me, thanked me for my visit, looked forward to me coming back again, and gave me a list of available stores and services. I took a ri
ght onto the access road, a short avenue with neatly trimmed hedges on either side. There was a mini traffic circle ahead of me, and beyond that, the world’s largest supply of pleasure craft. I turned left toward the parking lot.

  14

  A one-story, flat-roofed building housed a promenade of stores and cafés that ran for maybe a hundred yards on each side of the mini traffic circle. I drove slowly over a succession of speed bumps, past fancy restaurants with glinting glasses and dazzlingly white linen tablecloths, all laid out for lunch. It was just after midday, so they’d be full pretty soon, once the boaters had emerged from the clothing stores, shopping bags bulging with Lacoste polo shirts and sweaters.

  Coffee drinkers sat at café tables just a few yards from the water’s edge, probably wishing they were sitting aboard the sleek and beautiful boats just out of reach to my right instead. The craft all seemed to have English names like Suntreader or Kathy’s Dreams, and it was obviously the time of day for their owners to be out on deck, to take an aperitif, and enjoy being envied.

  I reached the point where the promenade merged with a series of administration buildings that bordered the parking lot. I pulled up next to the deserted beach, by a sign saying “Petite Afrique,” probably because that was where the sand came from. I was alongside a little playground area, which was halfway through being given a facelift.

  Thanks to the postcards and what I’d seen so far, I now had a pretty good sense of how the boats were arranged. From the mini traffic circle, a central pier ran straight out into the middle of an open square, with four smaller piers branching off on each side at right angles. Another three piers jutted out from the quay by the stores, and three more from the opposite side. The place was jammed with row after row of boats, their masts, with whatever bits and pieces they had hanging off them, towering up to the sky. I had no idea where the Ninth of May was going to find room to park; it didn’t look like there was a space to be had.