A Foreign Country

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.