The Predators

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘What about tomorrow?’ asked Cool.

  Félicité extended a wavering finger, moving it back and forth between the assembled men before coming back to the schoolteacher. ‘You!’ she decided. ‘Unless, that is, I change my mind.’

  ‘We were all agreed, even before what happened today,’ reminded Smet. ‘So there’s nothing more to discuss, is there?’

  ‘Except who’s going to do it,’ said Gaston Mehre.

  ‘He likes it,’ said Smet, looking at the man’s brother. Gaston was holding Charles’s hand comfortingly. Charles appeared to have retreated into his private world, unaware of the discussion around him.

  ‘We’re all part of it, whoever actually kills her,’ said the other lawyer.

  ‘When?’ asked Gaston Mehre.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Smet. ‘We don’t know how long Félicité will stay at the house tonight.’

  ‘You’ve got to get rid of the body,’ insisted Gaston. ‘Charles can kill her but the rest of you must get rid of the body.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Blott, too eagerly.

  ‘I could have come to Antwerp,’ offered Lascelles. He was extremely thin as well as being tall and he held himself forward, so his body appeared concave. He had a soft, cajoling voice.

  ‘It won’t take me long to drive back.’ Their table was in a cubicle shielding them from the rest of the diners. She passed the brochure of the Namur château across to him. ‘This is it.’

  Lascelles studied the illustrations and said: ‘It looks magnificent. Have you shown Lebron?’

  ‘Two days ago. He was impressed. He’s probably bringing as many as ten of his people.’

  ‘I’ll probably have around the same. Maybe more. They’re looking forward to it.’

  ‘When will you make your snatch?’

  ‘Not until you give me a definite date.’

  ‘Certainly the weekend after next. Maybe sooner.’

  ‘You’ve caused a sensation.’

  Félicité smiled. ‘It’s exciting.’

  ‘You will be careful, won’t you?’

  ‘Don’t you lose your nerve, like the others.’

  It was still only nine o’clock when Félicité reached the Antwerp house overlooking the Schelde river. She smiled at the child waiting anxiously just inside the heavy door.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ said the woman. ‘Are you pleased to see me?’

  ‘Very glad,’ said Mary. She liked the woman being kind to her: kinder than her mother and father, who didn’t seem to care what was happening to her.

  In Brussels Blake finally got a call from Henri Sanglier, who said that after picking up the message from his secretariat he’d decided to go to Menen personally to ensure the surveillance was properly in place. He rang off before Blake could transfer the call to Claudine.

  At the city’s Zaventem airport the American embassy’s diplomatic bag arrived from Washington carrying the information John Norris had requested about McBride’s armaments corporation.

  At the café on the rue Guimard that the FBI had made their own Duncan McCulloch said: ‘If you won’t talk to Blake tomorrow I will. It’s fucking ridiculous.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ undertook Harding, finally overcoming his reluctance. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, he decided. And just three years before he would have been out of it all.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The depression was tangible at the first gathering of the day, people talking because they had to but knowing they weren’t offering anything to keep alive the brief hope of the previous day. The clandestine surveillance had produced nothing. Henri Sanglier had agreed with the Belgian squad at Menen that the café proprietor was uninvolved and approved direct questioning with the computer-drawn images of the wanted man and woman. The proprietor, a retired Customs officer, recognized neither. Nor did any of his regular users, whose names he’d offered before being asked. None of them resembled the couple or recognized them.

  Poncellet said the Belgian police record search had been extended to cover the entire country, not just Brussels. There was no computer graphic match with any arrest photograph in police archives. Nor was there on any Europol or Interpol register. Making up for his previous day’s ignorance the police commissioner said there were only two women with child sex convictions – both with boys, not girls – and neither bore any resemblance to the computer pictures. Both had witness-supported alibis for the day and time Mary Beth McBride had been snatched: one had been in Ghent, visiting a sick mother, the other at a hairdressing salon where she was well known. Both had nevertheless been detained for an identification parade that afternoon that both Johan Rompuy and René Lunckner had agreed to attend.

  There was nothing for Claudine to contribute. Although John Norris was saying nothing, either, there was more animation about the man: having so studiously ignored her the previous day he now appeared almost anxious to catch her eye, twice openly smiling. It was, Claudine decided, typical of the mood swings recorded against the severe obsessional condition from which she suspected Norris to be suffering. Claudine was anxious for Sanglier’s promised arrival that afternoon. She’d been circumspect on the police headquarters telephone but she’d ensured Sanglier understood the importance of coming direct from Menen to Brussels instead of returning to The Hague. By tonight, after the scheduled five o’clock embassy meeting with McBride, the problem with John Norris should be all over. It had been an unnecessary distraction but it had not interfered with what they were there to achieve. Claudine was dissatisfied. She’d drawn every conclusion she could from what evidence there was, which could practically be fitted on to a pinhead with room to spare for a football match with spectators. Until there was further contact there was absolutely nothing more she could think of doing. And if that contact was still by e-mail she was not certain there would be anything to add to the profile she’d already created. Their continued hope would have to be that Volker’s pursuit would be more successful the next time.

  In rare and unsettling self-doubt Claudine wondered if she had been right to guide the ambassador’s public responses as she had. She was sure the messages conveyed disagreement among those holding the child, from which it logically followed one faction dominated the other. And if domination of any sort was a factor, which was a psychologically accepted characteristic of any kidnap, whether sexually initiated or not, then it was right initially to accede to it. But she’d always resisted obedience to supposedly rigid rules in something as inexact as psychology, which as a medical science remained as unexplored as life in outer space.

  One eroding doubt created another. Could she be so sure that no contact within twenty-four hours – not twenty-four any longer, little more than twelve – almost certainly meant that Mary Beth was dead? Claudine still thought so. She didn’t want to – it was, she accepted, the subconscious reason for her self-questioning – but after so long without a positive ransom demand, it had to be the strongest possibility. And if Mary Beth was dead, Claudine acknowledged that she’d failed. Others might not think it – Hillary certainly wouldn’t – but Claudine knew it would be so. Which brought her (know thyself! know thyself!) to the very nub of her problem: her reason for reflecting as she now did.

  As she’d stood in numbed horror in the doorway of their London home, looking at Warwick’s lifeless body slowly turning from his suicide rope, Claudine had determined never again to fail in a mental analysis, as she’d failed to realize until it was too late her work-stressed husband’s condition. Now she faced failure again but fought against accepting it, as she had before. Things hadn’t fallen out as she’d expected. To allow herself to think as she was thinking at that moment was to panic without cause. A fault she would be the first to criticize in anyone else: a fault that would endanger the child she had to save, if saving her was any longer possible.

  Throughout the self-examination Claudine had, as always, remained aware of the justifying discussion continuing all around and was not caught out when it s
ettled upon her. Her surprise, in fact, was that of all people the question came from Jean Smet, further establishing himself as the unelected but so far unquestioned coordinator of their daily, largely unproductive information-sharing. She saw no reason to question it either: someone had to coordinate.

  ‘Anything you’d like to add?’ asked the Belgian. He was getting the same satisfaction as on the previous day, enjoying himself.

  ‘I think we should now start to consider bringing them to us,’ announced Claudine, her mind filled with her most recent thoughts.

  The concentration upon her was immediate. Smet said: ‘Yesterday you said we should wait.’

  ‘Not indefinitely,’ qualified Claudine, wishing she’d earlier expressed herself more fully: wishing she’d thought about it more fully, earlier. ‘If there’s nothing by the end of the day, we should change our attitude.’

  ‘To what?’ demanded Smet.

  ‘To challenging,’ said Claudine.

  ‘I thought it was wrong to be confrontational?’ frowned Blake.

  ‘Initially,’ explained Claudine. ‘We’ve gone past that time now. We’ve got to face down the arrogance: tilt the balance away from them, towards us.’

  ‘After today?’ pressed Harding.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Claudine, guessing from the emphasis it was only half the question. She was conscious of Norris openly smiling, his head going back and forth between her and those questioning her.

  ‘By which time it’s more than likely she’ll be dead?’ the American finished.

  Claudine said: ‘We’ve got to accept that as the strongest possibility. But obviously we’ve got to go on acting in the belief that she’s still alive.’

  ‘She is,’ asserted John Norris suddenly. And by the end of the day he knew he was going to prove it. He was going to get her back, as well as discovering from James McBride what his corporation’s documented business dealings had been with the indicted Luigi della Sialvo three months before Saddam Hussein’s incursion into Kuwait.

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Smet. There had to be a secret agenda to which this man was working. That was the only possible reason for the American’s inexplicable but obvious uninterest – practically non-participation – in these sessions, empty though most of them were. Another uncertainty he wouldn’t have to worry about after tonight. He wanted Mary Beth dumped as far away as possible and believed he knew how that could be done, too. Gaston Mehre had demanded that others in the group dispose of her, but there was still the body of the Romanian rent boy in the cellar of his antique shop. Which was very much the brothers’ problem, no one else’s. Definitely not his. In their eagerness to avoid becoming physically involved the others would back his insistence that Charles and Gaston get rid of the girl as well as the boy at the same time and in the same place.

  ‘Something else I may be able to judge from whatever response I can generate,’ said Claudine. Now she was speaking in the first person, ignoring Norris, she realized.

  ‘You’re surely not thinking of the ambassador again?’ said Burt Harrison, coming into the discussion.

  ‘Not directly,’ said Claudine. ‘He – they – are just the route. From now on I want them to focus on me.’

  She had arranged to meet Henri Sanglier at the Metropole hotel to show him the two listening devices before he went to James McBride, and Claudine had expected Blake to return there with her. But as they broke up Blake said that although it would almost certainly be unproductive he thought he should attend the identification parade including the two convicted women sex offenders.

  ‘And Harding says there’s something he wants to talk to me about.’

  John Norris was tight with excitement, his overriding feeling oddly one of relief that he was at last going to achieve so much in such a short time. He didn’t have the slightest doubt that it would all fall into place precisely as he’d planned it would. That was all it needed, precise and detailed planning, and Norris had all that in order: all the sessions spaced out according to their priority, all the evidence assembled, memorized and ready to be presented. The ambassador first, then the Carter woman. The Iceman myth was going to be well and truly established after today.

  During the drive back to the embassy Norris waited, testingly, for the chief of mission to refer to his impending appointment with the ambassador but Burt Harrison said nothing, which Norris regarded as important. McBride obviously hadn’t mentioned it, anxious to contain things between the two of them. A further indicator, Norris decided, to go with the familiar uncertainty he’d detected in McBride’s voice when the ambassador had agreed to see him, that hesitant intonation of nervous guilt he’d heard a thousand times and never once been wrong about.

  There was still time to spare when they got back to the embassy and Norris went first to the FBI office, determined everything should be ready there. He carelessly cleared Harding’s desk, with only one exception, opening and filling drawers at random until all that remained on its top was an unmarked blotter, a multi-lined telephone and the overnight Washington dossier he intended carrying intimidatingly into his confrontation with the ambassador. The exception was the top right-hand drawer of Harding’s desk, which Norris withdrew and closed several times to ensure its smoothness before installing its unaccustomed contents, the tape recorder uppermost. His final act, before leaving the room, was to position a single chair directly opposite the one he would occupy on the far side of the desk.

  James McBride was alone, stiffly upright and blank-faced behind his overpowering desk, which by comparison with the one Norris had just left was cluttered with papers and files and documents. Norris at once identified the ploy, the workplace of a busy man with little time to spare. It was all so predictable, like a soap opera script.

  ‘What is it you want me to do?’ demanded McBride briskly.

  Clever, conceded Norris: predictable again but still clever. ‘I’d like you to help me about certain things.’ Abruptly there was the briefest sweep of dizziness, gone as quickly as it had come.

  ‘Harrison’s just told me there were no real developments this morning?’

  ‘It’s not about your daughter.’ This was what he’d always liked best, the thrust and parry of interrogation. He had it all marshalled in his mind, dates and times ready for any challenge or evasion. He felt very hot: probably the reason for the dizziness.

  ‘Mr Norris,’ said McBride, with threatening condescension. ‘As well as being a very busy man I’m also a very worried one. There is, in fact, only one concern on my mind at the moment and only one thing I want to talk to you about. And that’s Mary Beth: our only necessary point of contact. I’ll give you all the time you want if it’s to do with her. But if it isn’t I’m going to have to ask you to let me get on with being an ambassador.’

  Time to kick the struts away, to bring everything crashing down. ‘Can you tell me about Luigi della Sialvo?’

  The question was like a physical blow, low in the stomach: McBride actually came close to feeling breathless. ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t you know a Luigi della Sialvo?’

  He’d already said he was too busy to discuss anything but Mary Beth, so he could demand the man leave. But if he did that he wouldn’t learn just how much Norris – or the FBI back home – knew. ‘I don’t recognize the name. Who is he? What’s this about?’

  That wasn’t right: not the reaction it should have been. McBride should have been more unsteady when the name was thrown at him. It was important to keep up the pressure. He went to speak but then didn’t, his mind suddenly thick, as if it was filled with mush. Forcing himself, he said: ‘Illegal arms dealing.’

  McBride told himself not to panic; not to betray any awareness. Not yet. He had to wait for the accusation: demand the proof. Even then he could deny knowing the man, pleading the passage of time. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Luigi della Sialvo is currently under Grand Jury indictment on five counts of illegal arms dealing with the regime of
Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. A fugitive, in fact.’ That was better. Clear-headed again. Everything assembled in his mind.

  Fugitive! McBride seized on the word. Not under arrest, likely to horse-trade or plea-bargain, spilling his guts for a lenient sentence. The sensation of breathlessness began to recede. ‘All my stock is in a blind trust escrow account, but I would have been informed of any investigation into my former corporation …’

  Norris had wanted a definite sign by now: the twitching shiftiness that always came just before a collapse. ‘Your own records show your corporation actively traded with Luigi della Sialvo five months prior to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.’ Was it five or seven? The dates he’d wanted to be so pedantic about, showing he knew everything, wouldn’t come. ‘Two deals worth about …’ Norris’s mind blanked again, stranding him ‘… worth many millions of dollars.’

  It was right that he should show total shock, decided McBride: appear to be momentarily unable to respond. When he did speak it was loudly, in furious indignation. ‘Are you accusing me – executives in my corporation – of illegal arms dealings? Telling me my companies are under investigation?’

  The response came half formed in Norris’s mind, then slipped away again. ‘No accusation … just asking about a man currently under indictment. There isn’t an investigation yet.’

  Yet, thought McBride. It was a fishing expedition: the bastard was looking for a confession! ‘On whose authority or instructions did you request this meeting?’

  ‘I am ranked as a senior field executive of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a deputy division director. I have sufficient personal authority.’ That was better: thinking properly again. He wished the muzziness would stop coming and going: that it wasn’t so hot in the room.

  The man had left himself wide open, thought McBride. So which course should he take? Outraged, ambassadorial-level dismissal, or the astonished disbelief of an innocent man at a horrifying possibility of embarrassment? He’d learn more playing the innocent. ‘Which company is named in the indictments against this man?’