A Foreign Country

52

She buried her hate, tamped it down, hid it somewhere inside herself where it couldn’t get out.

She’d always been good at that. Compartmentalizing. Adjusting. Surviving. Ever since Tunis.

When she saw CUCKOO climb out of the cab, for a split second Amelia experienced the same untrammelled joy she had felt in Paris at seeing her beautiful son for the first time. Then it passed and the man she had known as François was an affront to her, a malign presence in her home. Yet she showed none of this with her eyes. Instead she reached out to hug him and found that she could easily say her lines.

‘Darling! You made it! I can’t believe you’re here.’

Even the smell of him was a betrayal, the aftershave he had worn at the hotels, his oils beside the pool. At times Amelia had felt an almost sexual desire to hold this man, to touch his skin, the sweet ache of a mother’s love for her child. She had thought of him as so handsome and sophisticated; she had marvelled at the job Philippe and Jeannine had done in raising such an interesting young man. And now this. An agent of French Intelligence in her own home, seeping into every crevice of her privacy and self-esteem. The days since Kell had broken the news to her in London had been, without question, the most wretched of her adult life; worse than the months following François’ adoption; worse than the death of her brother. She had only two consolations: the knowledge that she was a better liar than Luc Javeau, the snake Paris had sent to deceive her; and the real possibility that François was alive and that Kell could get to him in his captivity.

‘Come inside and unpack,’ she said, the taxi driver heading further down the narrow lane in order to find space outside the Shand house in which to turn around and set off on the long journey back to London. ‘We have the whole weekend ahead of us. Nothing in the world to worry about. What will you have to drink?’

At first, Kell did not recognize the voice; it was almost as though he had been speaking to a different man in the ferry disco. But then the cadences, the slick phrasing, the bizarre self-confidence of the CUCKOO personality came back to him, and he realized that he was listening to a master liar, a man who had all but absorbed another personality and embodied that which he had been instructed to impersonate. It was one of the quiet, shaming secrets of their secret trade; how quickly the spy wanted to set his own character aside and to inhabit a separate self. Why was that? Kell had no answer to it. He remembered how much his dissembling, the layers of his persona, had distressed Claire. He thought of her in America, far away among vineyards and Californians, and had to force off a surge of jealousy.

Elsa was beside him at the table, staring at the live feed from Amelia’s sitting room, listening to CUCKOO’s conversation through the speakers that Harold had set up in the library.

‘Who’s hungry?’ Harold asked, standing in the doorway holding a stack of ready-made pizzas.

‘This is not pizza,’ Elsa replied, looking at the boxes and making a clicking noise with her tongue. ‘This food is a disgrace. Wherever you get this, Tom, the supermarket should be closed down.’

‘Hang on a minute …’

One of the screens had caught Kell’s eye. Two white lights were flickering along the lane in what might have been a replay of the final stages of CUCKOO’s journey.

‘Who the fuck is that?’ Kell said. The car was moving steadily towards them, about thirty seconds from the parking area above Amelia’s garden. ‘Get Kevin on the phone.’

‘No reception,’ Harold said.

‘He’s got a radio, hasn’t he?’ Kell felt his temper rising, the threat of the operation going wrong almost before it had begun. ‘Elsa, check the radio.’

She scraped away from the table, found the radio in the kitchen, came back into the room.

‘Switched off,’ she said.

Kell couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He swore at Harold, because the link to Vigors had been a Tech-Ops responsibility. Harold was still holding the pizzas, like a delivery man waiting for a tip. ‘Put the fucking food down, Harold. Find out who this is.’

He pointed at the screen, the car now moving past Amelia’s house, beyond the scope of CCTV. Kell could hear the low growl of the engine as it approached.

‘It could just be people coming to supper next door,’ Barbara suggested. ‘Might even be the taxi. CUCKOO may have left something in the cab.’

‘It could be anybody,’ Kell replied, and ran outside.