Akim’s answer lay in his silence. He did not reply to Kell’s questions because he could not do so without losing face.
‘What’s that?’ Kell stood up, went back to the sofa. ‘They haven’t promised you a share of the money?’
‘No. Only a fee.’
Akim answered in Arabic, as though to hide his shame from Aldrich and Drummond. Kell did not know if either man could understand as he said:
‘How much?’
‘Seventy thousand.’
‘Seventy thousand euros? That’s it?’
‘It was a lot of money.’
‘It was a lot of money when you started, but it’s not a lot of money now, is it? Luc and Valerie take off with five million euros sometime next week, making it impossible for you to work for the DGSE ever again. You’re being used. Tell me about them. Tell me about their relationship. They’ve already put three deaths on your conscience, maybe four if they make you shoot François as well.’
Akim sneered. Suddenly he had been handed a chance to retaliate.
‘I won’t be shooting François,’ he said. ‘Slimane, he wants to do it.’
76
François heard the noise of the key at eight fifteen. Sometimes they woke him earlier, sometimes – like when Akim was on duty – they let him sleep.
The first day he was there Luc had told him to remain on the bed whenever somebody knocked on the door. If he wasn’t sitting down when they came in, if François didn’t have his hands raised in the air, palms open to show that they were empty, they would throw his food across the floor and then there would be nothing to eat for the rest of the day. So François did what he had always done and remained on the bed and raised his arms above his head, like a soldier in the act of surrender.
It was Valerie this morning. That was unusual. Behind her, Luc. No sign of Slimane, no sign of Akim. In the middle of the night he had heard a car pulling up outside the house and thought that he recognized the voice of the man who came inside and was greeted by Luc in the hall. One of the temporary guards the weekend when Slimane and Akim had gone to Marseille; ex-Foreign Legion, a macho, stubble-headed Aryan named Jacques who couldn’t cook like the others, had a kind of lazy, ruthless stupidity. François assumed that he was coming back on duty. He prayed that Slimane had been given a few days off. He prayed that he had seen the last of him.
‘We need to make a film,’ Valerie said, indicating that François should remain on the bed. She was carrying a newspaper. Luc had an iPhone in his hand.
‘What kind of film?’
‘The kind that proves you’re alive,’ Luc replied bluntly. Their attitude towards him was brusque, even nervous. François had always tried to read his captors’ behaviour, feeling that it would bring him to a better understanding of their motives and designs. Whenever they were curt like this, whenever he felt that he was being treated badly, he feared it was because they were planning to kill him.
‘Hold this,’ said Valerie, handing him a copy of Le Figaro. It was that morning’s edition. There was a lead story about Sarkozy, an advertisement for holidays in Mexico, something on the right-hand side about Obama and funding in Washington. Luc dragged a wooden chair from the hall into the cell and sat on it, facing François and pointing the back of the iPhone at his bed.
‘Say who you are,’ he said. Valerie was standing over him and moved slightly to the left when Luc told her that she was blocking the light.
‘My name is François Malot.’ Inexplicably, François felt as though he had done something like this many times before. He looked up at Valerie. She was staring at the blank wall behind him.
‘What is the date today?’ Luc asked.
François turned the paper around and recited the date, then showed the front page to the lens.
‘This is fine,’ Valerie said and indicated to Luc that he should stop filming. ‘What else does she need to know?’
François looked at them, trying to ascertain what they were thinking. He knew that he was being ransomed; he had been told that his ‘mother’ would pay. He knew nothing of her, only what Slimane had whispered to him night after night through the door. He had not wanted to believe any of that. In the first few hours of his captivity, François had thought that he was a victim of false identity, that they had taken the wrong man, killed the wrong family. Now, less than a month after his parents’ murder, he had begun to feel free of them in a way that made him feel shameful and guilty. Surely he should still be grieving, even though they had grown so much apart? What sort of a son cared only for his own survival and felt relief that his mother and father had been killed? He wanted to speak to someone about it, to Christophe and Maria; he believed that he might be going slightly mad. They never tried to judge him. They always understood what he was trying to say.
‘Tonight will be our last night in the house,’ Valerie announced. ‘This time tomorrow, we move.’
‘Why?’ François asked.
‘Why?’ Luc repeated, imitating François’ voice and dragging the chair back out into the hall. François looked out beyond the open door and glimpsed Slimane in the living room. He had a lurching premonition that he would never see the morning.
‘Because too many people have been to this house, too many people know you were here,’ Valerie replied. Slimane turned and smiled at François, as if he had been listening to the conversation all along. ‘We are in the process of making everything very simple.’ Valerie crouched down and ran a hand through François’ hair. ‘Don’t worry, little boy. Mummy will soon be coming to get you.’
77
Kell finished the vodka and wondered if he had read Akim wrong. Drummond had reacted as the Arab said: ‘Slimane, he wants to do it’, coughing in surprise and then pretending to clear his throat. Aldrich, suddenly tired and edgy, took a step forward, closing up the space as if to make sure that Akim never said anything like that again.
‘You think it’s funny?’ Kell asked in English.
To his surprise, Akim replied in the same language: ‘No.’
Kell paused. He looked up at Drummond, glanced across at Aldrich. There was a tiny gap in the curtains and it was becoming light outside. I am the Americans with Yassin, he told himself. I can ask what I like, I can do what I like. None of it will ever leave this room. He wanted suddenly to strike at Akim, to land one good, jaw-smashing punch to his face. But he stuck to his principles. He knew that everything he wanted to learn from the Arab would come if only he took his time.
‘Do you have children, Mike?’
At first, Drummond didn’t react, but then, in his surprise at being addressed, said: ‘No, no I don’t’ so quickly that he almost tripped on the words.
‘Danny?’
‘Two, guv,’ said Aldrich.
‘Boys? Girls? One of each?’
‘A boy and a girl. Ashley’s eight, Kelley’s eleven.’ He stretched out a hand and indicated the difference in their heights. Kell turned to Akim.
‘How about you?’
‘Children? Me?’ It was as though Kell had asked if Akim believed in Father Christmas. ‘No.’
‘I’m a great evangelist for children,’ Kell continued. ‘I have two of my own. Changed my life.’ Neither Drummond nor Aldrich would know that this was not true. ‘Before I had them, I did not understand what it was to love selflessly. I had loved women, I love my wife, but with girls you always expect something in return, don’t you?’
Akim frowned, and Kell wondered if his French was being fully understood. But then the Arab nodded in tacit agreement.
‘When I go home, after a long trip like this, if it’s late at night, the first thing I’ll do is go into their bedrooms and see that they are safe. Sometimes I’ll sit there and just watch them for five or ten minutes. It calms me. I find it reassuring that there is something in my life that is larger than my own greed, my own petty concerns. The gift of my son, the gift of my daughter renews me.’ He used an Arabic word to emphasize this last phrase: tajdid. ‘It’s a
very difficult thing to convey to people who don’t have a young family. Children complete you. Not a wife, not a husband, not a lover. Children save you from yourself.’
Akim pulled a tissue from the pocket of his jeans and wiped his mouth. He had been offered a chocolate biscuit from a packet in the kitchen and eaten three in the space of a few minutes. Kell wondered if his strategy was having any effect.
‘Are your parents still alive, Akim?’
‘My mother died,’ he said. Before Kell had a chance to ask, he added: ‘I never met my father.’
It was a gift that Kell seized upon.
‘He abandoned your mother?’
Again, Akim’s sustained silence provided an answer.
‘And I guess you wouldn’t have much interest in meeting him now?’
A quick surge of pride forced its way through Akim’s body like a movement in dance and he said: ‘No way,’ even as his eyes, in a moment that passed in an instant, seemed to pray that Kell would somehow produce him.
‘But you have other family here in France? Brothers, sisters, cousins?’
‘Yes.’
He wanted him to be thinking about them. He wanted Akim to be picturing the laughing niece in the photograph on the phone, the sick grandfather in the hospital in Toulon.
‘The mother of François Malot, my friend, my colleague, gave him up for adoption when she was just twenty years old. She never saw her baby again. That’s difficult even for me, a father, to imagine. Things are altogether more complicated between a mother and her child. That’s a bond that never leaves you, a cord going right back into the womb. What your organization did was to taunt her with the most basic feeling we possess, the most elemental and decent thing about us. A mother’s love for her children. Did you understand that when you agreed to help them?’
Akim wiped a crumb from his mouth and looked down at the floor. The moment had come.
‘I’m going to make you an offer,’ Kell said. ‘In two hours’ time, a chambermaid is going to knock on Vincent Cévennes’ door at the Hotel Lutetia. She’ll think he’s sleeping so she’ll leave him in peace. She’ll come back a couple of hours later and she’ll find his body. You were seen by three of my colleagues entering the hotel shortly before Mr Cévennes was killed. It’s almost certain that the French authorities will seize CCTV footage of your presence in the hotel. The last thing they’ll want is a scandal. But if, by some chance, they need to blame somebody for the shooting, if – say – the heat builds up from the British side about the kidnapping and murder of François Malot, say Paris needs to throw somebody to the wolves, we might be able to persuade them to release that footage. We also might be in the mood to show them audio and visual recordings of the conversation you and I have been enjoying for the last couple of hours.’ Akim looked up at the ceiling, then quickly to the door and window, as if he might see the very cameras and the microphones to which Kell was referring. ‘So you see where you stand? This man’ – he indicated Drummond – ‘works at the British Embassy in Paris. Within twelve hours, he can have you in a hotel room at Gatwick airport. Within twenty-four, he can issue you with a new EU identity and offer you permanent residence in the United Kingdom. Give me what I need to know and we will look after you. I see you as a victim in this, Akim. I don’t see you as the enemy.’
There was a long silence. Watching Akim’s face, his eyes distant and still, Kell began to wonder if he would ever speak again. He craved the answers to his questions. He craved success not only for Amelia, but for himself, as a salve against all the wretchedness and disappointment of the last dozen months.
Akim’s shaved head lolled to one side, then came up at Kell, like a boxer recovering in slow-motion.
‘Salles-sur-l’Hers,’ he said quietly. ‘The woman’s son is being held in a house near Salles-sur-l’Hers.’
78
Kell was on the TGV to Toulouse when Amelia called to tell him that she had received a video of François in his cell.
‘Proof of life,’ she said. ‘Filmed this morning. I’m sending it through to you now.’
Kell realized that it would have been the first time that Amelia had ever seen her son’s face. He could not imagine how she would have felt at such a moment. The immediate tug of a new devotion, or a reluctance to be drawn into the possibility of yet further pain, further betrayal? Perhaps François was just another face on just another screen. Could she have felt any connection with him after expending so much love on Vincent?
‘Any word from White?’ Amelia asked.
The three-man security unit had taken off from Stansted airport just before six o’clock. Their plane had landed at Carcassone two hours later. One of the team – referred to only as ‘Jeff’ – had driven to meet a contact in Perpignan and picked up some basic equipment and weapons. White and a second man – ‘Mike’ – had gone to Salles-sur-l’Hers to scout the location and to try to establish the number of people inside the house. After booking rooms at a hotel in Castelnaudary, they had driven west to Toulouse, meeting Kell’s train at two fifteen.
‘One thing,’ said Amelia. ‘As far as they’re concerned, I’m just another client. Any relationship they might have had with the Service in years gone by is history. We’ll have no operational control.’
Kell had assumed as much.
‘Everything will be fine,’ he reassured her, and thought that he could hear the voice of George Truscott in the background, barking orders to an underling at Vauxhall Cross. ‘If Akim’s product is accurate, we will have François out by tonight.’
Kell was certain that Akim had been honest, not least because White’s initial diligence on the farmhouse fitted Akim’s description of the building precisely. Furthermore, Mike had been into a tabac in Villeneuve-la-Comptal and flashed a photograph of Akim at the proprietor and his elderly mother, who had recognized Akim as one of the two young Arabs who had been buying Lucky Strike cigarettes, newspapers and magazines from the shop for the previous three weeks. Her son reckoned they were living in the farmhouse on the hill, south-west of Salles-sur-l’Hers, which had once been occupied by the Thébault brothers and was now owned by ‘a businessman from Paris’. That was confirmation enough.
‘We took a look at the house this morning from a barn on the opposite side of the road.’ White was a fourteen-stone, six-foot old Etonian with a Baghdad tan whose security firm, Falcon, had made annual seven-figure profits out of the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. He talked about the operation as though it were no more complex than a routine dental appointment. ‘The layout matches the map you showed us. Exits east and west down the connecting track from the D625. Access from the south is foot only, but Jeff reckons he can use the windmill as sniper cover.’ To such a man, extracting a French national from a poorly guarded farmhouse in the middle of Languedoc-Roussillon was plainly money for old rope. ‘There’s the fenced-off area on the western side of the property where we assume François exercises. The swimming pool is exposed out front. It’s got to be the same place.’
‘Have you any idea how many people are in there?’ Kell asked. White and Mike were driving him east towards Castelnaudary on the A61 autoroute. ‘Akim said they sometimes use two ex-Foreign Legion as back-up guards. He knows Slimane is in the house. After that, it may just be Luc and the woman.’
White overtook a prehistoric 2CV and settled into the inside lane, sticking to the speed limit. ‘Jeff is still keeping an eye out. The worry in these situations is that they move the package on a regular basis. We haven’t seen any sign of life at the house since we got there. Judging by what you said on the phone, these people have been careful to make calls and to use computers away from the location, but they’ve been there a long time and might be looking for a change of scene. How many times have they tried to reach Akim since the Lutetia?’
Luc had called Akim’s mobile shortly after eight o’clock. Akim had confirmed CUCKOO’s assassination by text message but Valerie had then rung back just after Kell had left for Austerlitz
station. Under Drummond’s instruction, Akim had ignored the call. Valerie had rung back an hour later, leaving a tetchy message.
‘Akim needs to talk to her or they’ll get suspicious,’ White said. ‘Did he mention anything about a second location?’
Kell shook his head. There was an unspoken warning in White’s analysis. We’re doing this as a favour to Amelia. Mate’s rates. Two days, max, then we can’t afford to stick around. If your boy isn’t in there, we’re going back to Stansted.
Just then, like an augur of success, Jeff phoned to say that he had seen a young Arab walking along the lane past the ruined windmill, about three hundred metres south-east of the house.
‘Slimane,’ said Kell.
There was also a car in the drive, a white Toyota Land Cruiser that had not been parked there earlier in the day. Perhaps Luc and Valerie had returned to the house after making their calls to Akim.
It was enough to green-light the operation. In two connecting rooms at the hotel in Castelnaudary, White set out the plan.
‘You said the boss likes to go for a swim in the evenings.’
‘Akim mentioned that, yes.’
‘Then we’ll go when he goes. Get close to the house, Luc comes out to the pool, that’s our trigger. Jeff takes him out in his Speedos from the windmill. If he stays indoors, fine, we’ll wait for the sun. Mrs Levene said live rounds, body count.’
‘She wants to send a message to Paris,’ Kell confirmed.
White nodded. A routine dental appointment. He then set out further details of the raid. Jeff – curly-haired, mid-forties, looking for all the world like a hearty landlord from a pub in Shropshire – would walk along the track from the south side and take cover in the ruined windmill, two hundred metres from the pool. Mike would go in through the front door and secure the cell. Simultaneously, White would enter through the exercise area, removing the metal bars at the rear entrypoint of the cell and extracting François through the back. Kell would be waiting to drive them out on to the D625. In spite of White’s insistence that the operation was ‘a piece of piss’, Kell had insisted on a role.
A Foreign Country Page 29
