Liberation Day

Chapter 12

As I headed back along Boulevard Carnot, I knew I’d have to move from my hotel. It was far too close to Greaseball’s apartment, and I didn’t even want him to see me, let alone find out where I was staying.

I stopped at the laundromat and picked up my sheets. They were now on top of the washing machine, still wet. As I shoved them into the black garbage bag, the old woman jabbered at me for leaving them in when there were about four other people waiting. I’d obviously breached the laverie protocol big-time, so I just smiled my apologies to everyone as I finished my packing and left.

I set off down the hill toward the beach. I had to contact George and give him a sit rep, and that meant going to the Mondego, a cyber café, and getting online. He needed to know where the collectors were going to park their boat and, later on, where they were going to collect the cash. My surroundings got very smart very quickly. Luxury hotels that looked like giant wedding cakes lined the coast road, La Croisette, and Gucci shops sold everything from furs to baseball caps for dogs. I dumped the sheets into a street garbage, hanging on to the plastic bag. As I carried on walking, I screwed up the newspaper I’d taken from Greaseball’s apartment inside it.

This might have been the upscale end of town, but anything that stuck out of the sidewalk, like a parking meter or a tree, was decorated with fresh dog piss and a couple of brown lumps.

New cars, motorbikes, and motor scooters were crammed into every possible, and impossible, space, and their owners, the customers in the cafés, looked extremely cool and elegant in their sunglasses, smoking, drinking, just generally posing around the place.

There were quite a few homeless around here as well. Fair: if I were homeless I’d want to sleep in a warm place with lots of good-looking people about, particularly if they were the sort to throw you a few bucks. A group of four or five bums were sitting on benches alongside a scruffy old mongrel with a red polka-dot scarf around its neck. One guy had a can of beer in his coat pocket, and as he bent over to pat the dog the contents were spilling onto the ground. His wino friends looked horror-struck.

I’d never used this café to get online: normally, I drove to Cap 3000, a huge centre commercial on the outskirts of Nice. It was only about forty-five minutes away, driving within speed limits, which I was meticulous about, and always crowded. But this time I needed to tell George what I had found out immediately. I was leaving Cannes now anyway, so wouldn’t need to come here again.

The place looked quite full, which was good. A group of twenty-somethings wearing designer leather jackets and shades posed near their motorbikes and scooters, or sat on shiny aluminum chairs and sipped glasses of beer. Most had a pack of Marlboros or Winstons on the table with a disposable lighter on top, alongside a cell phone that got picked up every few seconds in case they had missed a text message.

I wove my way through the temple of cool, past walls lined with boring gray PCs, toward the rows of gleaming drinks signs and the steaming cappuccino machine that stood at the black, marble-topped bar.

I pointed at the nearest PC and tried to make myself heard above the beat of the music. “I want to get online…. Er, parlez-vous anglais?”

The guy behind the counter didn’t even look up from unloading the dishwasher. “Sure, log on, pay later. You want a drink?” He was dressed in black and sounded Scandinavian.

“Café crème.”

“Go, sit down.”

I headed to a vacant PC station, perched myself on one of the very high stools, and logged on. The screen information was all in French, but I’d gotten the hang of it by now and went straight into Hotmail. George had set up an account for me that was registered in Poland. The user name was BB8642; George was BB97531, a sequence of numbers that even I couldn’t forget. He was as paranoid as I was, and he’d gone to quite a lot of trouble to make our correspondence untraceable. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d fixed it for Bill Gates to erase our messages personally, as soon as they’d been read.

Signing in, I made sure the font size was the smallest possible so nobody could read over my shoulder, and checked my mailbox. He wasn’t getting information on this job from anywhere else. He just wanted it from me. I was his only line of information: anything else would have been dangerous. There was no other way of making contact: I’d never had a phone number for him, even when I was with Carrie, never even knew where he lived. I wasn’t sure if she did, these days.

George’s e-mail asked me if I’d gotten his present, and said I mustn’t open it until Christmas. He was referring to the gear left for me at the DOP, and the drugs we were going to use to help the hawalladas on their way to the warship.

I tapped away with my index fingers.

Hello, thanks for the present, but I’m not too sure if I can wait till Christmas. Guess what? I just saw Jenny and she said that Susanna is coming to town on business, arriving tomorrow night. She’ll be in town until Sunday and has three meetings while she is here, one a day starting Friday. Jenny is finding out the details so she can arrange for all of us to get together and try that place you are always talking about, the one that serves great White Russians. I have so much to tell you. You were right, Susanna’s business is worth anything between 2.5 and 3 mill. Not bad! You’d better get in there quick before some stud moves in. I know she likes you! I’m around tomorrow, do you want to meet up for a drink, say 1 P.M.?

My coffee arrived and I took a sip of froth without picking it up. This was the second e-mail I’d sent George since arriving in-country. Each time any contact was made, a color was used for authentication. The first was red, this one was white, the third, the brush contact tomorrow at one, would be blue. Then I’d start the color sequence again. All very Stars and Stripes, all very George, but these things needed to be simple or they were forgotten. Well, by me, anyway.

George now knew that I had met the source, the boat was coming in on Thursday night, and I wanted a brush contact tomorrow to pass over the collection details. Things like that are far too sensitive to send in clear, even if Bill Gates was in the good guys club.

I finished the e-mail “Have a nice day.” After all, I was nearly an American now.

Signing out of Hotmail, I reopened with the addresses I used to contact Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba.

Anyone checking the subscriber would discover he lived in Canada.

There was nothing in my mailbox from these two, which was good news. Like me, they were just waiting for the time to meet up and get on with the job.

I invited each of them for coffee at four o’clock today. They’d be checking their boxes at one-ish, so they’d get the message in plenty of time.

I wrapped a napkin around the coffee cup and took a sip while I worked out what to do next. I had to check out of the hotel, then go to Beaulieu-sur-Mer and do a recce before the boat arrived. I’d need to look at the vital ground before meeting up with Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba at the safe house at four.

I took another slow sip. This was going to be my last quiet time before I started running around like a crazed dog.

I wondered what Carrie was doing now, and spent a minute or two just staring at the keyboard, trying to shake that last image of her at the harbor out of my head. In the end I just logged off, and wiped the keys and cup rim clean with the napkin.

My hotel was right next door to a synagogue, and above a kosher takeout pizza joint called Pizza Jacob. It had been perfect, not only because it was cheap but because the aging manager took cash. My fellow guests were a bunch of iffy-looking comb and pencil salesmen, trying to save money by sleeping in a room with no TV or phone, and very thin blankets.

I checked out and threw my duffel bag into the trunk of the dark blue Renault Mégane. The garbage bag, still containing the bits of Greaseball’s newspaper I hadn’t already chewed up and swallowed, joined a couple of paper cups, three empty Coke cans, and napkins in the passenger footwell. I made what must have been about a sixty-point turn and eventually managed to squeeze out of the small and crowded parking lot at the rear. I put on my sunglasses and dark blue baseball cap before I emerged onto the street. The sun was bright, but it wasn’t what I was shielding myself from. CCTV cameras were everywhere along this coastline.

I’d find myself a new hotel when I needed it, and if I had time.