The Predators

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘She’s seen us, you and me,’ protested Cool, a burly, disordered man whose clothes never fitted. ‘She could identify us. And she was paying attention to how we got here, from Antwerp. I saw her in the mirror.’

  ‘Who said anything about letting her go?’ demanded the woman.

  ‘Henri’s right,’ said Blott, a glandularly fat man whose eyes blinked in constant nervousness behind wire-framed glasses. ‘It was a mistake, easily made. It’s no one’s fault. But now she should be killed.’

  There was no shock from any of them at the easy insistence upon murdering a child, as there hadn’t been when Cool and Dehane had made the same demand earlier. A year before a boy they’d snatched had died during a party in the house. Since then they had used child prostitutes, usually brought in from Amsterdam. Perhaps, she conceded, the idea upon which she was by now quite determined stemmed from the excitement she’d got then, knowing she was being hunted but always able to evade suspicion or capture because of how cleverly Smet had inveigled himself. Which he could do again now.

  ‘She knows we’re near Antwerp?’ asked Gaston Mehre.

  ‘She read a sign out when we passed it,’ confirmed Cool, taking off yet again thick-lensed, heavy-framed spectacles for another unnecessary polish.

  ‘Then it’s madness to keep her alive,’ said Dehane. He was a slightly built, self-effacing man always eager to follow where others led.

  ‘It’s an unnecessary danger,’ agreed Gaston Mehre. He and Charles had been born just nine months and seven days apart, both red-haired, their features practically matching, even to identically twisted teeth. It was Charles who had been with the rent boy when he’d died. He’d badly hurt another young male prostitute three months earlier.

  ‘What danger?’ said Félicité. ‘She’s in a cell, where she’s going to stay. And we can’t be traced to the house in which she’s being held.’ It had been Félicité’s idea that the houses they used should be owned by others with the same interests who lived in conveniently close neighbouring countries. The Antwerp beach house was registered in the name of Pieter Lascelles, a sixty-year-old Eindhoven surgeon. Georges Lebron, a parish priest in Lille, owned the country cottage near Herentals where the Dutch met, and Félicité had a bigger house at Goirle for larger parties.

  ‘James McBride is the American ambassador!’ implored Smet. ‘It’s his daughter downstairs! You can’t imagine what sort of outcry there’s going to be.’

  ‘Which is precisely why it’s going to be so exciting!’ said Félicité.

  ‘Before, it was the son of a bankrupt Jewish shopkeeper in Ghent and the investigation was handled by police who would have been overstrained by a bicycle theft!’ argued Smet. ‘This won’t be anything like that. This will be enormous!’

  ‘You’re just going to have to be as clever as you were last time,’ smiled Félicité, enjoying the man’s terror. She wondered if she would ever weary of the weakness of these men; the ease of manipulating them. She knew Marcel was becoming increasingly bored just before his heart attack. She still missed Marcel, not only for the loss of the sexual avenues along which he’d led her. Marcel would have seen the thrill – the pleasure – in what she wanted to do: might have tolerated this dispute, as she was tolerating it, but wouldn’t have allowed it to go on for so long.

  ‘What’s the point!’ demanded Dehane.

  ‘It’s something we haven’t done before,’ said Félicité simply.

  ‘The thought doesn’t excite me,’ said the lawyer.

  ‘Nor me,’ said Cool.

  ‘But it does me,’ insisted Félicité. ‘I got her. I decide what we do with her. And I’ve decided that before the party at which our ambassador’s little daughter will eventually be the star I’m going to organize the perfect crime, a kidnap.’

  ‘It’s an insane idea,’ protested Smet. ‘I won’t have it.’

  ‘You won’t have it?’ challenged Félicité, recognizing her moment.

  ‘Please!’ muttered the tall man, in immediate retreat.

  ‘I want you to do what you did before …’ She switched to Dehane. ‘And you must make it impossible for them to trace us when we start making our demands. It’s your chance, August, to show us all how clever you are …’

  She let her voice trail, looking around the assembled men, determined to end the dispute. ‘Who’s the link with Lille, taking the risks no one else does?’

  No one spoke immediately. Then Smet said: ‘You are.’

  ‘And with Eindhoven?’

  ‘You,’ said the Justice Ministry lawyer.

  ‘What would happen to all of you if I abandoned you?’

  Gaston said: ‘Please don’t do that.’

  ‘Jean?’ she persisted.

  Smet shrugged. ‘It’s a good group.’

  ‘Which you don’t want broken up?’

  ‘No,’ he conceded weakly.

  ‘Good!’ said Félicité briskly. ‘So we’re agreed about what I want to do?’

  Their ‘Yes’ came as a muted chorus.

  Pieter Lascelles said the postponement was unfortunate: his friends had been looking forward to it.

  ‘It won’t be for long,’ Félicité promised. ‘You’ll love what I’ve found in Namur. An actual medieval castle, with turrets and towers. And dungeons!’

  ‘How long?’ asked the surgeon.

  ‘A couple of weeks, that’s all.’

  She gave the same reply to Georges Lebron. The priest said: ‘We’ll wait before we choose someone then. We don’t want to attract attention.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Félicité. ‘Do that.’

  Hans Doorn, the Namur estate agent with whom Félicité had agreed the rental of what was, in fact, a sixteenth-century château, said he hoped it was only a postponement. Félicité reminded him that he already had the deposit. Doorn, reassured, hoped to hear from her soon. Félicité promised he would.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The ambassador’s study was overcrowded with people and wide-awake nightmares no one wanted or knew how to confront.

  The very worst, obviously, was the every-parent horror of James and Hillary McBride. The ambassador was hunched at his enormous desk, all courtesy forgotten, his bird-like, sharp-featured, strident-voiced wife close beside him, her hand on his shoulder in what everyone mistook for reassurance. It was, in fact, to urge the man on. It was also the closest they had physically been to each other, publicly or privately, for years. And the first occasion for an equally long time that they’d come together with anything like an agreed purpose, apart from their consuming political ambitions.

  Paul Harding, the portly, stray-haired resident FBI station chief, was moving jerkily about the room. He was engulfed by the scale of his own problem: just three years – three miserable fucking years! – from retirement from a damage-free Bureau career and his world was threatened with cosmic destruction. Just one misstep – the tiniest mistake – was all it would need.

  William Boles accepted he had already been vaporized, despite having done everything strictly according to the book from the tyre-punctured car: being entirely blameless was no defence in an hysterical scapegoat hunt. That was in the book, too: just unwritten.

  He’d explained this philosophy to Claude Luc on their nervous way back to the embassy, and the bewildered Belgian had already warned his wife that the job of a lifetime was probably over.

  Harry Becker, the security dispatcher who’d taken Boles’s call, had four times lied unwaveringly that he had not made the confusing duplicate call to the school. He was ready to go on denying it, although he knew he wouldn’t survive.

  Lance Rampling, the crew-cut, normally energetic CIA officer, hadn’t yet contributed to the discussion, for once not wanting to attract attention to himself. He wasn’t sure what the pecking order was in this situation and until he got guidance from Washington he was going to keep his head well below the parapet.

  ‘Let’s go through it one more time: we could have missed something,’ said McBride
desperately.

  ‘I don’t think we have, sir,’ said Elliot Smith. The legal attaché was a late arrival, behind all those actually involved whom McBride had assembled personally to cross-examine, to find culprits. The lawyer wasn’t yet endangered but he still wasn’t comfortable: when shit hit the fan it sprayed everywhere.

  Burt Harrison, the chief of mission, was thinking the same thing, although not in such crude terms. As gently as possible, not wanting to cause Hillary McBride any further distress – although the woman actually wasn’t showing any – the plump career diplomat said: ‘I think it’s time we accepted it’s not a good situation.’

  ‘Five hours,’ agreed McBride dully, an unnecessary reminder. He was a large, beetle-browed, intimidating man who wore a thin moustache and an overly sweet cologne. Neither suited him. His bulk was exaggerated by the closeness of his wife. She was normally a neat, perfectly kept and preserved chatelaine of the embassy empire, colour-coordinated clothes never creased, scarlet nails impeccably polished, expertly tinted hair lacquered in wave-frozen ridges. Now the hair was disarrayed and her crumpled blouse had pulled free from her skirt on her left hip. She was chain-smoking the extra-long cigarettes she favoured.

  ‘It could still be a game,’ she said. ‘You know what she’s like. It’s the sort of thing she’d do.’

  McBride abruptly emerged into the reality he had been trying to avoid, swinging from one extreme to the other. ‘No!’ he insisted brutally. ‘Someone’s got her. Some bastard …’ The self-absorption was unavoidable. ‘It’s to get at me.’

  ‘Get her back!’ said the woman, more an order than a plea.

  ‘We will,’ said Harding, unwilling to speak – to make any commitment he might not be able to keep – but knowing he had to because the ambassador’s wife was looking expectantly at him. Knowing, too, from the expression on McBride’s face that he hadn’t said the right thing.

  ‘Of course we’ll get her back!’ said the ambassador. ‘I don’t care what it costs or what it takes. Just do it! Now!’

  ‘I understand. Immediately,’ said Harrison, in too hurried agreement, wishing from the stare he got from McBride that he hadn’t spoken, either.

  McBride went to speak but apparently changed his mind. Straightening further – recovering further – instead he said: ‘I’ve got to tell the President.’

  It wasn’t an exaggerated, shock-affected remark. Political commentators in Washington DC had speculated openly that the Belgian ambassadorial posting was the first supposedly comfortable stepping stone to higher and more glittering rewards – maybe even the secretaryship of state – for the largest single financial contribution to the President’s successful first-term election. It certainly gave McBride personal access at the lift of a telephone.

  Harding fervently thanked whatever guardian angel had prompted him to send an ‘alert-but-don’t-act’ message to the Bureau in Washington when he’d excused himself earlier to fetch the legal attaché. He said: ‘I need to send a full report to Washington as soon as possible.’

  ‘What about the local authorities?’ asked the lawyer. It was Elliot Smith’s first embassy posting and he was uncomfortably aware that he looked too young for it, which was why he’d grown the moustache. Unfortunately, instead of giving the intended impression of maturity, it looked as if he’d glued it on for a costume party.

  ‘What about them?’ demanded McBride.

  The young man steeled himself. ‘Belgium is a foreign country, part of the European Union. Neither the Bureau …’ he hesitated, indicating the silent Rampling ‘… nor the Agency has any operational jurisdiction here.’

  Colour suffused McBride’s face and he rose further at his desk, as if physically meeting a challenge. ‘Are you telling me neither the Federal Bureau of Investigation nor the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America can do anything to find the missing daughter of one of its ambassadors?’

  ‘Don’t be damned ridiculous!’ said Hillary, in rare agreement with her husband. Another embassy tenet was that she was even more politically ambitious than her husband, to the extent of seeing the White House as a future mailing address. It was the only reason each remained married to the other, she to be the President’s wife, he to avoid the slightest electoral hindrance a divorce might create. Neither sought outside relationships. Totally focused political achievement was sex enough for both of them.

  ‘Of course every Bureau facility will be available,’ said Harding. ‘But Elliot’s right, sir: we’ve got no authority – no legal mandate – to work on the ground here. At best the Bureau is accepted as liaison …’ Seeing McBride’s colour deepen, he hurried on, speaking faster. ‘There’s only one requirement here: to get Mary Beth back. Safely. And quickly. So everything’s got to be done correctly from the very beginning. Trying to mount an investigation any other way will just obstruct things.’ He was pleased with the final, blurted reasoning: it would read well – sound well – at any later review.

  Knowing he had to contribute, Rampling said: ‘I need to talk to Langley, obviously. A task force will have to be assembled.’

  ‘And pretty damned quick,’ agreed Hillary. ‘So far I’m not impressed with how you guys are treating this.’

  McBride gave his wife an irritated side glance before switching his attention between the lawyer and the two intelligence officers. ‘Now listen up …’ he widened the audience to include Burt Harrison ‘… all of you. Listen good. If it’s necessary, diplomatically or for any other half-assed reason, to involve the Belgian police then do it. Do whatever you’ve got to do to find Mary Beth. But I want American investigators – Feds who know what they’re doing and know what’ll happen if they screw up – in charge of finding my baby. We all clear on that?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Harding and Rampling, in unison. Asshole, Harding thought.

  The other two men nodded, not speaking.

  It was mid-evening when the Brussels police commissioner, André Poncellet, reached Belgian Justice Minister Miet Ulieff at home. They met there within the hour.

  ‘This is the tenth child to disappear without trace in eighteen months,’ Ulieff said without preamble.

  ‘I don’t need reminding,’ protested Poncellet.

  ‘Then let me remind you of something else,’ said the politician, a normally urbane, white-haired man who’d replaced the previous Justice Minister because of the ineffective investigations. ‘Unless we get her back, safe and well, we won’t have jobs.’

  ‘I know that, too,’ said the police chief, a fat, asthmatic man who perspired easily. He was sweating and wheezing now.

  Even before the emergency cabinet meeting that followed they decided there were overwhelming reasons for an investigation into the disappearance of an ambassador’s daughter to be headed by the European Union’s FBI, chief among them the need to spare themselves as much responsibility as possible if it ended in tragedy, which these sorts of cases invariably did.

  ‘But publicly we have to appear very much involved, insisted Ulieff.

  ‘We will be,’ promised Poncellet. ‘I’ll initiate all the obvious things before they arrive.’

  Mary accepted she was uncertain – but definitely not frightened – but thought she was hiding it well. Where the woman had put her and the men in scary masks had come to look at her was like a real cell, in a prison, as if they were going to lock her up for a long time. Its total quietness unsettled her most, the walls and door so thick she couldn’t hear anyone outside until the flap snapped open and unknown eyes stared at her, as if she were a pet – like her rabbit, Billy Boy – in a cage. There was a bed, with blankets and sheets, and a toilet which she didn’t want to use in case anyone looked in when she was going. And a table, in the middle of the room, with food on it that the strangely giggling man, also masked, had brought a long time ago. It was cold meat, sliced sausage, but she didn’t want to eat it even though she was hungry because it might be drugged or poisoned. She’d read books about people – wicked unc
les or mothers or witches – who drugged and poisoned children. She didn’t believe them, of course. They were just made-up stories, but what was happening to her wasn’t made up. It was real. Happening. She’d been kidnapped, like in the made-up stories. Although it had stopped bleeding her mouth hurt where the woman had hit her and she wanted to go home to her mother. Be in her own bed. She wouldn’t cry, though. She definitely wouldn’t cry. And she wouldn’t cheek the woman so much next time. She didn’t want to be hit again. It really did hurt. She slipped the brace off, to lessen the discomfort. She wanted very badly to make pee pee and knew she was going to have to, soon. She hoped mom remembered to feed Billy Boy.

  He’d do it, decided Henri Sanglier. He accepted they would be using him, for his name, but then he would be using them – and his name – for the same purpose. It meant he would initially continue to live as he’d always lived, in the shadow of his father, but politics would give him the opportunity to establish his own public recognition. Europol had served its purpose, as he’d always intended it should. This one last case would be the bridge from one career to the other. No mistakes and no misjudgements, like the ones in the past, he warned himself. That’s all he had to be careful of.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Coincidentally Claudine Carter approached the elevator to the executive floor at the same moment as Peter Blake. He smiled, slightly uncertain, and said: ‘Sanglier?’

  ‘Yes.’ An assignment, not a review of a previous case!

  ‘Any idea what it is?’

  ‘No.’ It didn’t matter what it was, she thought, entering the lift ahead of the English detective with whom, presumably, she was going to be partnered. Whatever it was, it would be an investigation in which she could totally immerse herself to the exclusion of everything and anything else. She was blurring her self-imposed boundaries, she realized. She had been appointed to the FBI of the European Union because of her unquestionable brilliance as a criminal psychologist, an ability she guarded jealously. The most essentially observed protection was never to allow anything in her personal life to become a professional consideration. Now she was permitting it to happen. She was eager to submerge herself in her job, hoping to shed for as long as possible the frustration of being in love with a man whom religion and honour prevented from letting their relationship become anything more than platonic.