Close Call

Chapter 38

Milraud watched as Annette got up from the bed, dressed in a silk slip and nothing else. She took a cigarette from the packet on the bedside table, lit it with the Cartier lighter he had given her years ago, and then went to the window, where she stood staring down at the narrow street that snaked along until, just out of sight, it reached the Seine.

He sat up in the bed, so that his back was cushioned by the pillows that he’d propped against the headboard. He said softly, ‘Chérie, it is good to be with you.’

‘Yes, my darling,’ she said, but there was a hint of sadness in her voice and she didn’t turn round.

He said, ‘Martin is no fool, you know.’

Now she did turn round, and looked at him, her eyes filling with tears.

He went on, ‘He let me come to see you because he knew how much I wanted to. Enough to tell him what he wants, in the hope that he will let us stay together.’

‘Yes,’ acknowledged Annette. ‘But better this time together than no time at all.’ She had been surprised, sitting in the flat, reading an old paperback novel she had found on a shelf and trying to ignore the guard who was making tea in the kitchen, when Antoine had arrived. He told her that he had suddenly been told to grab his coat and go for a drive; he’d had no idea that he was being taken into Paris to see his wife. In a rare tactful act, the now-combined force of armed escorts had left them alone, though they were hovering nearby – in the hall outside the flat, on the ground floor with the concierge, and outside by the parked Mercedes that had chauffeured Antoine from Montreuil.

Milraud looked at his wife, still as attractive to him as she’d been when they’d first met some twenty years before. He tried not to think of what prison would do to her figure, and to her spirited approach to life. It would do the same to him, no doubt, but he had already resigned himself to a long spell behind bars.

‘Are there important things you haven’t told Martin?’ she asked.

Milraud raised his eyes towards the ceiling. He assumed the flat was bugged, especially if they’d let him see Annette here. She understood, and came back to the bed, stopping to turn on the radio on the bedside table. The station was playing Edith Piaf and they both laughed as they heard the song in mid-flow – ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’.

Annette lay down next to Antoine and whispered, ‘So are there?’

‘Of course. But why are you asking now? Has Seurat put you up to this?’ He only slightly lowered his voice; he didn’t care if the microphone picked this up over the radio; he was angry that they were being manipulated.

She didn’t waver, whispering right away, ‘He says the people you are supplying are much worse than you realise. They’re not rebels fighting in the Middle East. He said they’re al-Qaeda or their equivalent, and they’re planning a terrorist attack.’

Milraud shifted uneasily on the bed, moving an inch or two away from his wife. ‘How does he know?’ He realised he had not spent any time questioning the intentions of the young Arab he had first met in the Luxembourg Gardens. His initial introduction to the man had come from Minister Baakrime, whom he had dealt with often before. He had simply assumed that the Minister had either been bribed by Yemen’s insurgents to help them get arms, or was actually a secret sympathiser with the rebels.

He realised now that he had been naïve, but what did it matter? He had never made judgements about his clients, and he had helped arm revolutionaries across most of the world. There was no telling which side was right and which wrong, and if someone in his trade tried to make those sort of judgements they’d soon go mad or out of business. These affairs often ended in a place no one had foreseen. Look at Iraq now, or Libya, or Syria.

He was about to say as much to Annette, when she put a firm finger to his lips. ‘Listen to me, Antoine. Naturally, Martin wanted me to talk to you; of course he wants me to persuade you to tell him everything you know. I would never hide what he said from you. I don’t think we have any choice. If you know more about what’s going on, then you should tell me and I will tell Martin.’

‘But then I have nothing left to bargain with.’

‘We are in no position to bargain, chéri. But even if we were, I have to tell you that if Martin is telling the truth – and I think he is – then I don’t want you to help these people. They are killers; they kill children and their mothers. They have no just cause, only hate.’

Milraud lay back, his head against the pillow, and stared at the ceiling while he thought about this. Had Annette gone soft on him? It seemed improbable – if anything she had always been the tougher of the two of them, more businesslike, never very concerned about the morality of his trade. He knew she was scared of going to prison, but he also knew that she was very loyal to him – and her concern about what this young Yemeni, if that’s what he was, was going to do with the weapons he was supplying was genuine. And he had to admit it did alarm him too – the thought of this character and his followers or colleagues killing dozens of innocents in Western Europe was appalling.

‘OK,’ he said at last, though he didn’t look at his wife, but kept his eyes on the ceiling, as if addressing a deity or, he was pretty certain, the listening ears of his former colleagues in the DGSE. ‘I’ll tell him what I know. But it’s not much.’

‘I expect anything will help,’ said Annette lightly.

Milraud turned on the bed and looked at her at last. ‘The originator of the contact in Paris was a Yemeni minister. That’s why I thought this was legit.’ Legit struck him as a funny way to describe the transaction, but he knew Annette would understand what he meant – he had thought he was simply supplying one side of the innumerable civil wars that seemed to be proliferating all over the region.

‘I understand. But now?’

‘What Martin has told you could make sense. I haven’t told him everything I know. I haven’t told him exactly where the shipment is being assembled, though he knows the country. He doesn’t know anything about the onward shipping arrangements. He knows there’s a British person involved but he doesn’t know that the order is now to be delivered to England. And he doesn’t know that originally it was to go somewhere else.’

‘Where?’

‘Here,’ he said simply. ‘Paris.’

Annette looked shocked. ‘So what changed?’

Milraud shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But if Martin’s right about these people, it means the target’s changed. Now it must be in Britain.’