by Chris Ryan
In order to give Eve some privacy in the room, Slater said he would stay and have a last drink with Andreas. They raided the mini-bar, and had a malt whisky each. But they had run out of things to say, and in the end they sat in silence, staring out of the floor-to-ceiling window at the crawl of traffic on the motorway and the city of light that was Charles de Gaulle airport.
‘I guess I should practise the signature on that credit card,’ Andreas said eventually, and Slater nodded.
To his irritation, Slater discovered that his heart was pounding as the lift carried him up to the ninth floor. There would probably, he thought, be some slightly tense negotiation about who slept where. The simplest thing would be if he just crashed out on the floor. A sleeping-bag would come in handy – but would it be completely tasteless to borrow one of those presently enshrouding Antoine Fanon-Khayat?
The lift halted with a soft gasp and Slater felt for the key. Eve had it; was he going to have to knock like some old-fashioned corridor-creeping seducer?
He was. Sensibly, given that there was a dead man stuffed into a trunk at the foot of the bed, she had not left the door on the latch.
He knocked. She answered in French.
‘Eve!’ he said. ‘It’s me. Neil.’
The door opened on the chain and then – as soon as she had identified him – fully. She was wearing a pale blue T-shirt, and had a white hotel towel round her waist. She looked scrubbed, clean and younger than the twenty-nine years that her passport claimed for her. He looked at her for a moment and then came in.
Carefully, she doubled-locked the door behind him, then turned off the main light, leaving only a bedside lamp illuminated.
‘You take the bed,’ he said. ‘I’ll grab a couple of blankets and hit the floor.’
She nodded absently, staring beyond him as if not quite hearing what he was saying. He looked down at her short fair hair, the neat line of her shoulders, the fading brown of her arms. Then her gaze rose to meet his.
Impossible to say which of them reached for the other first, but they were suddenly and urgently devouring each other. He felt her hands in his hair and her mouth moving beneath his, and then his own hands found her waist and the warm sweep of her back. He kissed her mouth, her eyes, her neck, her hair, and as she buried her mouth in his shoulder felt the towel at her waist fall to the floor. Her hands scrabbled at his shirt-buttons and were then forced upwards as he pulled the T-shirt over her head.
‘This isn’t happening,’ she gasped, pulling his shirt open and pressing her breasts against his chest. ‘God, the state of you. You’re one solid bruise.’
‘Yeah,’ murmured Slater. ‘And still a bit tender in the bollock zone too.’
Her fingers found his belt. ‘Help me,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t get this . . .’
‘Sorry, it’s a bit stiff. A present from Debbie.’
They both laughed, and she gasped as he reached down, clasped her round the thighs, and lifted her up so that his tongue could scour her breasts. ‘Oh, please!’ she gasped, bracing her arms on his shoulders. ‘Oh, yes!’
Slowly he returned her to her feet and they kissed again, more slowly this time. Pulling back from her he looked at her closely, examined her in a way that politeness and their respective situations had previously made impossible. She looked quite different from how he remembered her – it was as if he was seeing her for the first time. She, in her turn, looked back unflinchingly at him.
They were both naked now, and taking a couple of steps backwards he lowered himself to a sitting position on the trunk at the end of the bed. She sat facing him, her thighs straddling him, her nipples hard against his chest, the dark triangle of her pubic hair damp against his stomach.
‘Just promise me,’ she said, ‘that this is happening to two different people. To Eve Benbow and Neil . . . what’s your ID again?’
‘Clissold,’ whispered Slater into her ear. ‘Not a name I’d have chosen, but . . .’
‘Promise me that you’ll never tell anyone. That this’ll never be mentioned. Ever. Promise me and then fuck me.’
‘I won’t tell a soul,’ said Slater, slipping his hand palm-upwards between her legs and parting her with his fingers. ‘I’ve signed the Official Secrets Act, remember?’
She squirmed, and he felt his fingers slip inside. Steadily, gasping louder now, she began to move against the heel of his hand. Below them, the lock of the trunk set up a ticking squeak.
‘It’s Fanon-Khayat,’ Slater couldn’t resist murmuring. ‘He wants to join in!’
Eve groaned. ‘You really know how to sweet-talk a girl, don’t you? Did you bring any condoms with you?’
Slater froze. Stared at her. She smiled wearily back.
‘I was under the impression one could rely on the SAS to turn up with the right kit.’
He shook his head. ‘I didn’t know it was this sort of operation.’
‘It isn’t – none of this is actually happening, we’ve already established that. But why don’t you search the bathroom? These swanky hotels often have them hidden away somewhere.’
Slater did as Eve suggested, wrapping the towel round himself and searching the drawers and shelves. In the end, though, he had to admit defeat. Eve checked the bedside tables, but with no more success. Self-conscious now that the mood had changed, she had pulled on one of the hotel dressing gowns. Frustrated, Slater saw the moment slipping away.
‘I’ll go downstairs. There should be a gents with a machine. Will you wait?’
‘I’ll come down with you.’
Quickly, they both dressed themselves.
There was indeed a machine in the gents toilet next to the bar, but a sticker announced it ‘Hors Service’. Slater exited shaking his head.
Eve laughed. ‘I think next stop the airport.’
In the taxi they stared into each other’s eyes and held each other like love-struck teenagers. The journey was over in less than ten minutes, and soon they were wandering arm in arm through the echoing and largely empty departure halls. Outside an arcade of locked shops they kissed each other, enjoying the extended anticipation of what was to come.
‘You’re beautiful,’ Slater heard himself saying to her, and realised that he meant it.
‘We could fly away,’ she said. ‘We could choose a name off that departure list over there and go. Live near a beach somewhere, work in a bar, go for walks along the seashore, make love all night.’ She threw her arms round his neck. ‘Would you like that? Would that make you happy?’
He touched her cheek. ‘Yes. That would make me happy. I would be the finest barman on the Coast and you’d cook the best freshly caught snapper and we could have lots of illiterate children who could work as waiters and dream of life in London.’
‘You spoil everything,’ she reproved him. ‘You’re so unromantic!’
‘I’m not unromantic,’ he said, placing his hand inside her coat on her breast. ‘I want you here and now and as you are. Right here and right now. Up against this partition if necessary.’
‘Not before we’ve got what we came for. I don’t want to start having those illiterate children quite yet.’
Finally, Slater found a vending machine that worked, and for which he had the correct change. He held up the packet and she applauded.
‘Would you do that?’ he asked her in the taxi back to the hotel. ‘Seriously? Would you walk away from everything and come and live with me in the back of beyond?’
She closed her eyes and snuggled against him. ‘Until you ask me properly,’ she said demurely, ‘you’ll never know.’
In room 933, as Eve quickly undressed and climbed into bed, Slater examined the packaging of his purchase. ‘My French isn’t that brilliant,’ he said, ‘but these look as if they might be quite weird shapes and colours. Still, I guess they’ll match my balls.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Eve gently. ‘I’d say that one way and another we’ve pretty much broken the ice today, wouldn’t you?’
T
WELVE
Slater and Eve checked into the OP at the Hotel Grand Exelmans at 10.00am, after an extended breakfast in the sunny dining-room of the Inter-Lux. The Peugeot and the trunk, as Leon had suggested, went into the paying car-park on the Rue Jouvenet.
At the OP the mood was cautiously upbeat – Firewall’s main objective was achieved; all that remained now was the disposal of the body. And in Leon’s hands, that shouldn’t be a problem. This was his turf, after all. If anyone could make a dead arms-dealer vanish in northern France, Leon could.
Terry, now sleeping off his night’s work, had also had a good result. He had identified the drug-dealer from the party as one Miko Pasquale, and confirmed that Branca Nikolic – now unknowingly a widow – had spent the night at his apartment close to the Bastille. At 8.30 she had emerged from the building and taken a taxi back to her late husband’s apartment. Right now she was less than 100 metres away.
At 10.30 Andreas joined them. To his relief his impersonation of Antoine Fanon-Khayat had been accepted without question. The check-out desk had been at its busiest in the mid-morning, as they had calculated, and the clerk had barely glanced at him as he had handed over the dead man’s platinum Amex card. ‘I might just go on a little shopping spree with that piece of plastic,’ he suggested, and feigned indignation when Chris held out her hand for all the dead man’s effects. ‘I think these are being withdrawn from circulation,’ she said firmly, taking the overnight bag from Andreas and stowing it next to the trunk.
Slater noticed that Chris was making a particular point of observing Eve and himself, and concentrated on giving the impression that a breezily normal professional relationship existed between them. The giveaway, he knew, was not too much closeness and eye contact but too little. People enjoying a passionate covert affair tended to avoid each other’s gaze in case any lingering intensity communicated itself to others. And they never made jokes.
So he did all those things, even making a point of saying that next time he and Eve posed as lovers it would be her turn to roll up in the duvet on the floor.
Would the night ever be repeated? He doubted it. It had come about as a result of a unique and very extreme set of circumstances. In the course of the preceding day both of them had looked violent death in the face more than once, and the experience had isolated them. They had found themselves in a world without rules, a dark and surreal place to which no outsider was permitted access. Their coming together had been inevitable, and it had been highly charged. They had reached for each other several times in the course of the night and it had been as if they were making love in an electric storm, with the air smouldering and crackling around them. He smiled to himself as he remembered the feel and taste of her body, and how she had suddenly looked so different to the person he had known up that moment. Perhaps this was what Chris had meant when she welcomed him to the ‘parallel universe’.
‘You look pleased with yourself,’ Andreas remarked.
‘I was thinking of those poor hotel porters staggering out to the car with the trunk. I gave the poor buggers fifty francs each but it should really have been more: there was a notice in the room saying that there was a fifteen hundred franc surcharge for supplementary guests.’
‘What did you say was in the trunk?’ asked Chris.
‘We didn’t,’ said Eve. ‘But we were going to say it was books.’
‘Holiday reading?’
‘Second-hand books. Which we collected.’
‘Cute,’ said Chris drily. ‘How many for coffee?’
Leon arrived ten minutes later, carrying maps, and congratulated the forward team on the success of the hit and of their smooth extraction from the hotel. ‘Now,’ he said briskly, pouring himself a cup from the steaming cafetière, ‘this is the plan. Four of us will go – it’s going to be heavy work so I’d suggest the four guys. Any objections to that idea?’
‘I’ll come,’ said Eve.
Leon nodded expressionlessly. As the team leader she had final say.
‘OK. Eve, Neil, Andreas and myself. Terry can grab a few more Zs, Chris’ll stay and run the OP.’
Everyone nodded. Chris examined her nails.
Leon spread out one of the maps. ‘The location is here – about seventy or eighty clicks outside Paris in a place called the Forêt de La Roche-Guyon. What we do is drive out of Paris at midday via the Porte d’Auteuil and then, keeping more or less parallel to the river, take the A13 motorway north-west to Bonnières-sur-Seine. We’ll take both cars – if we take one and it blows up with that trunk in it we’re in serious shit. At Bonnières we swing up northwards on this minor road via Freneuse, and then follow this . . . track, it must be, into the forest.
‘Switching to the local map you can see that the track continues for five or six clicks past Joigny, which looks as if it consists of a few farm buildings and not much else, and then peters out in the middle of nowhere. The nearest place apart from Joigny is Thieux, which is a good two clicks away and served by a different track. Thieux’s no Las Vegas, either.
‘What I think we should do is park up at the end of the track so that we’re in the empty countryside between between Joigny and Thieux. It looks as if you can get down to the river quite easily from there, and according to the map this is one of the widest and deepest parts for miles in either direction. There’s also this jetty going out, perhaps for barges to tie up to, and for my money that’s where we want to drop our friend off. It’s the only way – short of stealing a boat with an outboard and waking everyone up within miles – of getting him out to deep water. I’d suggest swimming or rowing him out, but I know that area and it’s one fat mother of a river up there. It’s deep, it’s dirty and the current is very strong.’
‘What about weights and so on?’ asked Andreas.
‘I’ve got all the kit we’ll need in the car.’
Item by item, he went through this with them until they were all certain that nothing had been overlooked. ‘I’ve also bought four pairs of night-vision goggles. The moon’s on the wane, but there should be some ambient light. The routine is going to have to be two of us on the dump-and-splash detail, two on stag. We’re going to need the comms kits, warm clothing, sensible footwear, rations and a cover-story in case we’re bumped by the local police. There’s no reason to suppose that’s going to happen, but just in case it does – if someone saw us, for example, and thought we were burglars – I think we should leave all the weapons here. Explaining away a midnight walk by the river is one thing, explaining away the fact that we’re armed to the teeth is quite another.’
He looked around questioningly. The others nodded.
‘Ideally we get to the place about three this afternoon, park up, and have a recce. Then we finalise details and wait till dark. I’ve included a couple of sleeping bags and bivvies in the kit so that if we’re challenged we can say that we’re looking for somewhere to camp. The first thing we’ve got to do though – and do fast – is buy ourselves some sensible outdoor clothing. It’s Sunday, so it’s going to have to be supermarket stuff. There’s a place on the Périphérique about fifteen minutes away.’
On the journey, Slater made a point of sharing the lead car with Leon. Not to avoid Eve, but to try and get to know a fellow team-member with whom, indirectly, he felt he had much in common. Leon drove, having devised the route to the disposal location. He ran the Mercedes fast but with care, ensuring that the Peugeot was no more than a car or two behind them at any time.
At the same time both he and Slater scanned the traffic at intervals for signs that they were being followed. Their fear – expressed by neither of them but felt by both – was that the French DGSE might be on to them. Had the DGSE been watching Fanon-Khayat too? Was there an anti-Serbian element in the French secret services – there was certainly an anti-British element.
At this moment, carrying the body with them as they were, the team were acutely vulnerable, and they knew it. One nosy traffic-cop asking them to unlock the trunk and they were fin
ished. To Slater even the flat suburban countryside was spooked territory. The sooner Fanon-Khayat’s body was deep beneath the mud-brown surface of the Seine, the better.
To distract himself, and to pass the time, Slater asked Leon about his life.
Leon’s story was an unusual one. After leaving school on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius he had found himself in some sort of ‘trouble’ – upon which he chose not to elaborate – and had worked his passage to Europe in the kitchens of a cruise liner. Poorly paid domestic and ‘protection’ work had followed in France, and when the Marseilles pimp who had hired him was arrested and imprisoned on charges of corrupting minors Leon had hitchhiked to Castelnaudary and offered his services to the Foreign Legion. After a short, sharp initiation period at Aubagne which he described as ‘interesting’, Leon had been dispatched to Canjuers and Orange to undergo basic training and selection. Six months and several violent beatings later he had passed out top of his cadre, and had chosen to join the Legion’s parachute regiment at Calvi in Corsica.
There, in counterpoint to the chronic drunkenness and whoring enjoyed by his fellow Legionaries, Leon studied contemporary European history by correspondence course. To make his studies more challenging, and to improve his English, he signed up with the Open University.
The Deuxième Régiment Etranger de Parachutistes did not discourage Leon in these academic activities. Within two years he had been promoted, and as a Junior NCO accompanied the 2nd REP to Rwanda where they were involved in the covert training of militia forces.
