A Foreign Country

64

Luc’s email to Vincent had been seen almost instantaneously by Elsa Cassani in the Shand library, where she had saturation coverage of CUCKOO’s lines of communication. The message appeared on the dedicated DGSE server, where it would be encrypted the moment CUCKOO logged on.

They know about the second funeral. Stephen Uniacke is an MI6 officer named Thomas Kell. He found Delestre in Paris. Levene must know and is playing you. Abort immediately. Crash meeting, Sunday midnight.

‘Tom,’ she said. ‘Christ. You need to see this.’

Kell was in the kitchen. By now, Barbara had gone to Gatwick, en route home to Menton. Harold was upstairs in the Shand house watching 3:10 to Yuma.

‘What is it?’

Kell came into the library carrying a mug of tea. Elsa pointed at the third laptop, on the right-hand side of the oak table. The pressure of her index finger blurred the screen.

‘This just came through?’

‘Less than a minute ago. How do they know about you?’

Kell put the tea down on the table.

‘They must have bugged Delestre’s apartment,’ he said. It was the only possible solution he could think of.

‘But you were there on Monday. How can it have taken them so long?’

‘Manpower,’ Kell replied, knowing that, when it came to following up every lead, listening to every conversation, the French were just as stretched as the Security Service or SIS. ‘They probably have microphones all over Paris, checking Malot’s friends and colleagues. Could have taken them several days to work out I was there.’

‘I’m finding the name Vincent Cévennes all over CUCKOO’s files,’ said Elsa, drinking from a bottle of Evian. ‘Also Valerie de Serres, probable girlfriend of Luc Javeau. You think that’s an alias for Madeleine Brive?’

‘Almost certainly.’ Kell scribbled down the names on a piece of paper. ‘Where’s CUCKOO now?’

They looked up at the bookshelves, nine screens in rows of three, like a game of noughts and crosses. It was just after eight o’clock on Saturday evening, Amelia preparing a fish stew in the kitchen, CUCKOO reading Michael Dibdin in the sitting room.

‘Can you hold the message on the server?’ Kell asked.

‘I don’t think so.’ Elsa typed something into the lines of code on the second laptop. ‘I could delete it. That way he won’t find out until he leaves tomorrow. I guess they’ll be trying to call him on the phone.’

‘Harold!’

Kell shouted upstairs. There was a grunting noise through the floor, then the sound of Harold scraping away from his western and thumping downstairs.

‘Yes, guv?’

‘Can you take another look at CUCKOO’s mobile phone activity? Chances are there’s a text message or voicemail waiting for him, instructing him to abort.’

‘To what?’

‘They know about us. They know their operation is blown. They’re trying to tell him to go back to Paris.’

Kell made the decision to buy time and to delete the email from the DGSE server. He then sent a message across to Amelia telling her that the operation was blown. At breakfast, she was to tell CUCKOO that there was an SIS emergency in London and that a car was coming to pick her up. For security reasons, she could not offer ‘François’ a lift to St Pancras, but a pre-paid taxi had been booked to take him back to London. Kell knew that as soon as CUCKOO was a mile outside Chalke Bissett, he would come within range of a mobile phone signal and hear any of three messages left for him by Valerie de Serres. The first was explicit enough:

François, it’s Madeleine. I don’t know why you haven’t responded to your email but you must abort, OK? Call me immediately please. We will crash meet Sunday midnight. We can explain everything. I need to know that you have received this message and that you will be there.

Harold had hacked into CUCKOO’s voicemail, allowing Kell to re-acquaint himself with the tense, petulant voice of his ferry seductress, Madeleine Brive. CUCKOO, having heard the message, would then make every effort to evaporate into the English countryside, shaking off SIS surveillance as he did so. The trail to Amelia’s son would be lost.