A Foreign Country

58

‘SIM,’ said Kell.

Barbara had already been into CUCKOO’s room, picked up his denim jeans, looked in the ticket pocket and found the SIM. She passed it to Kell as they stood beside the grandfather clock.

‘All yours,’ she said.

He went up to the bedroom and handed it to Harold. He had left one of the kitbags outside in the corridor. He removed an old Security Service encoder, switched it on and inserted the SIM, setting the machine to copy. Kell left him to it. Meanwhile, Elsa had taken out a computer and several cables of varying colours and sizes, one of which she connected to the mains. She took CUCKOO’s laptop from the black leather holdall and flipped open the lid. Kell watched but did not disturb her. The plan was to crack the DGSE security encryption on the laptop and to transfer all hard-drive data on to her host machine. Harold had revisited the footage of CUCKOO tapping in the password in the bathroom, amplified the image and established three possible options.

Elsa tried the first of them — the French word ‘DIGESTIF’ followed by a three-number sequence — but the firewall remained in place. Her second attempt, substituting ‘2’ for ‘3’ at the start of the sequence, broke the security.

‘You had it right, Harold,’ Elsa said, but there was no sense of triumph or elation in her voice.

‘You’re in?’ he asked.

‘I am in, I think so, yes.’ She was speaking quickly, tripping on her words. ‘I tried the second code, it has put me through into a new interface.’

Kell looked around the room. The world of technology — of hard-drive encryptions, of phone triangulations — was as alien to him as some lost tribal dialect from the Amazon. Throughout his career, he had felt lamentably ill-informed in the presence of Tech-Ops teams and computer wizards. Leaving Elsa to begin transferring the data from CUCKOO’s laptop, he looked around the room, making a mental note of the objects on display. He saw many of the personal items from CUCKOO’s room at the Ramada: his 35mm camera; the gold cigarette lighter engraved with the initials ‘P.M.’; the framed photograph of Philippe and Jeannine Malot; the Moleskine diary, every page of which he had photographed and sent to Jimmy Marquand. Beside the bed was the Michael Dibdin roman policier translated into French, a bottle of Highland Spring water and a pair of earplugs. Kell opened up the novel and — sure enough — found the fake letter to François, dated 4 February 1999, supposedly written by Malot’s father. In a chest of drawers he found CUCKOO’s counterfeit passport resting on the socks and underpants that he had unpacked the night before. His black leather jacket was hanging on a hook behind the door, beside a white cotton dressing-gown. It was the same story in the bathroom: the same shaving products, the same pills, the same bottle of Valium that Kell had seen in Tunis. How easily he had been deceived.

‘How are you getting on?’ he asked Harold, still crouched over the encoder in the corridor, frowning.

‘At least another fifteen minutes,’ he said.

‘You?’

‘Same applies to me,’ Elsa replied. ‘Relax, Tom, please.’

Kell felt as though he was intruding on events over which he had no power or influence. He went downstairs, removed the shoes from the hall, and found Barbara dutifully dragging a Hoover up and down on the sitting-room carpet.

‘Any sign of CUCKOO’s phone?’ he asked.

‘None,’ she replied. ‘Must have taken it with him.’