Текст книги "A Foreign Country"
Автор книги: Charles Cumming
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 24 страниц)
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.
‘As soon as we go in, block the track at the eastern intersection,’ White told him. ‘Something goes wrong and they come out and try for the Land Cruiser, get in the way and take out the tyres. Don’t shoot anywhere higher than the bumper. Your boy might be in there if they’ve seen us coming.’
‘Are they going to see you coming?’
Jeff laughed. Mike, who still had the build and buzzcut of the Regiment, looked like a cowboy preparing to spit a wad of tobacco on the floor. White smiled and passed Kell a Glock pistol. ‘Fired one of these before?’
‘Didn’t you get the memo?’ Kell replied, touching the barrel. ‘That’s all MI6 does nowadays. Assassinations.’
79
François was sitting on his bed when he heard Luc coming downstairs and telling Valerie that he was going for a swim. It was just before seven o’clock in the evening, probably another ten minutes before Slimane or Jacques brought him supper. It would be his last meal in the cell. He had heard the sounds of the house being packed up, boxes placed in the Land Cruiser outside, the slamming of car boots, the zipping of cases. At any moment François was expecting to be taken from his room and driven to a new prison, a new terror, one from which he would never be returned.
Five minutes passed. He heard the door of the microwave clunking shut and knew that he could expect another frozen meal: rice in a bag; sinewed cuts of beef or pork in a supermarket sauce. Sure enough, a few minutes later he heard the ping of the timer, then either Jacques or Slimane loading the food on to a plate. One of them would carry a tray into the cell, the other would watch to make sure that François made no attempt to escape.
Footsteps outside, the knock on the door. François raised his hands above his head and heard the padlock clunk against the door as the key was inserted. Jacques came in, glanced at the television, dumped the tray on the floor and walked across the room to pick up the bucket of urine.
‘Stinks in here,’ he said. François had heard it all before.
Slimane was behind him, looking oddly detached, perhaps a little stoned. Usually he would mutter a few words, something spiteful or contemptuous, just to get his blood going, to ease his boredom. But tonight he stared into the middle-distance, his left eye still bruised and swollen, as though he had something else on his mind, like a sixth sense of imminent defeat.
A car passed on the track outside, cutting through from the south-east. Local knowledge; somebody who knew the rat run. Just then, from the first floor, François heard a woman shouting, not in panic or fear, but from a sense of outrage, of stunned surprise. Valerie. Jacques put the bucket on the floor, directly in front of François, looked at Slimane and went out into the hall, as if a fire alarm had gone off and he wasn’t sure if it was a test. Then François heard the sound of Valerie running downstairs. In that moment, the front door flew open and something was thrown into the hallway. The house inverted with noise. Slimane and François blocked their ears, the room screaming, as Jacques dropped to the ground. At first it looked as though he had tripped or slipped on the floor, but François saw blood on the wall behind him, the barrel of a rifle, then the outline of a man wearing body armour and a black balaclava. His ears were numb. He had kicked over the bucket and was staring at the urine as it pooled out in front of him. Even then, he thought that Slimane would make him clear it up.
Valerie had come to the bottom of the stairs. She looked into the cell and screamed at Slimane: ‘Shoot him!’ An instant later, blood had sprayed against the door of the cell as her body crumpled beside Jacques. The soldier had shot her point-blank in the head.
Slimane reached for the rear pocket of his jeans. This was where he kept his gun, the gun with which he had taunted François, the gun with which he had threatened him, day and night.
It was out and levelled at François’ chest in one quick, trained movement. François looked beyond Slimane, at the masked face of the soldier who had shot Jacques and Valerie. An instant later the soldier had swung his own weapon towards Slimane, but it was too late; the Arab had stepped towards François, grabbed and spun his body as easily as a man moving the branch of a tree, and pressed the cold steel of his gun against François’ right temple. Slimane’s arm flexed around François’ neck, he began to drag him backwards across the floor of the cell and away from the soldier.
François tried to twist free, but Slimane only held him tighter and pressed the barrel of the gun harder against his head, shouting: ‘You put your fucking gun down.’ It was not clear whether the soldier could understand. ‘Go back out of the door!’ the Arab screamed in French. ‘Get outside. I’m taking this prick with me and we’re leaving in the car.’
The grip on François’ neck momentarily slackened and he grabbed at a breath of air, gulping and coughing. There was a wet slick of sweat all over François’ face; it was as if the two men were transferring fear from skin to skin. To his dismay, François saw the soldier lower his rifle and step over Valerie’s dead body, moving backwards towards the door, seemingly in the act of surrender. As he did so, Slimane moved tentatively forward, his hips banging against François, shunting him towards the hall, all the time driving the gun into the side of his head like a screwdriver.
‘I’m going to kill you, you know that, don’t you?’ he whispered; it was as though he was enjoying himself, adrenalized by the scene playing out in front of him. Terrified that the trigger would give way, François watched as the soldier reached for the door, preparing to retreat on to the driveway. At the same time, Slimane forced François up into the hall, picking his way between the two dead bodies on the ground.
François became aware of the movement behind them before Slimane, perhaps because he was so attuned to every detail and characteristic of his prison. He sensed the near-silent removal of the metal bars securing the rear door of the cell; he heard the sudden twist and push on the door handle as a second soldier burst into the room behind them. François twisted his head to the right to try to see what was happening, opening up a tiny gap between his head and that of his captor which gave the second soldier a clear target area. It was then that François learned, finally, of his own courage, because he wrestled free of Slimane and tried to turn on him even as he registered that the Arab’s head had simply disintegrated before his eyes. François found himself tasting the warm blood, the brain tissue of his detested guard and began to spit it on to Valerie’s body.
‘Are you François?’ the soldier who had fired shouted in French. He was also in body armour but his tanned face was not concealed by a balaclava. François, still in a state of shock, answered: ‘Yes’ as the first soldier came back into the hall and fired a silenced shot into Slimane’s chest.
‘Get behind us,’ he barked in French. ‘Who else is here?’
Thomas Kell had been listening out for the first shot from the windmill and heard what he thought was the snap of Jeff’s silenced rifle just after seven o’clock. A second later he heard the sound of Luc’s body splashing into the swimming pool, then a scream as Valerie de Serres reacted to what had happened from her bedroom on the first floor. On that cue, Mike burst through the front door, tossing a stun grenade into the hall; Kell guessed that he had fired his weapon at least three times in quick succession. Thirty metres to the east, he saw White moving low and fast behind a screen of trees, then disappearing behind the house as he approached the rear entrance to the cell.
Kell had his instructions. He switched on the engine of the rental car, reversed it into the drive so that the vehicle was within twenty feet of the house, then opened the rear doors on both sides. As he stepped out of the car, he heard a commotion inside the house, a man shouting in French, screaming at Mike to drop his weapon. Kell took the Glock pistol from its holster, sweat suddenly enveloping his neck and chest like a rash; in more than twenty years as an intelligence officer, he had never fired a weapon on active duty. He looked back at the front door and saw Mike stepping out of the house, like a man being pushed backwards towards the edge of a cliff.
Just then, to his left, a movement. Coming from the direction of the pool, across the terrace at the northern end of the house. A man in swimming shorts, soaked from head to foot, and bleeding from a wound to his neck and shoulder. The wound was bright red but the blood had blackened where it reached the shorts. Luc. Kell spun towards him and raised the Glock, shouting at Javeau to stop, but it was clear that the Frenchman was utterly disorientated and functioning solely on survival instinct. He seemed to recognize Kell from the interview in Marseille, but then turned back in the direction of the terrace and began to walk across an expanse of unmown grass, twisting like a drunk towards the track. Kell again shouted at him to stop. He walked up the steps, but could not fire nor follow him, because at any moment he might be required to go back to the car and to drive François away from the house.
He heard a gunshot, then White’s voice, unintelligible. Kell looked back at the front door to see what was happening, then again at Luc who was still stumbling towards the road, now more than seventy metres away. In the next field, a tractor was obliviously ploughing. From the direction of the abandoned windmill, Jeff appeared at the edge of the terrace. Beginning to run, he raised his weapon to shoulder height and fired three shots at Luc’s back, dropping him like a stag. Kell, stunned by what he had seen, turned and went back to the vehicle as Jeff followed behind him in a fluid, continuous movement, heading towards the house.
Mike came out first, François tucked in behind him, White half a second later.
‘Move with me,’ Mike was saying, ‘stay behind me’, as White shouted ‘Clear!’ and sprinted ahead to the car. They had Amelia’s son on the floor of the back seat before Kell had even closed his own door. Jeff was the last one in, shooting out a tyre on the Land Cruiser as Kell put the Renault in gear.
‘Anybody hurt?’ he asked.
‘Status, Jeff,’ White replied, as though speaking into a radio.
‘All clear, boss. Targets down.’
Kell accelerated away from the house.
