Present Danger

12

Antoine Milraud stepped out of the tall double doors of his apricot-pink villa set high up above the little Provençal town of Bandol. He stood at the point where the drive, having wound upwards through the garden from the security gates, ended on a tarmac apron broad enough for a car to turn round. He was waiting for his driver, who was late, and he was annoyed. Milraud liked to be in control but there were some things he couldn’t do for himself. He needed the chauffeur; it wasn’t only driving that he required from him.

From where he stood Milraud could see over the tops of the umbrella pines towards the harbour where large white motor launches and yachts were moored alongside the art deco casino. Everything was dead at this time of the year, no tourists and very few residents around, and he liked it that way. If he turned to his left, he could look across the pine-clad hills towards the naval base at Toulon, and on a very clear day he might see the tall superstructure of a large warship. But today he could see no further than the first headland, for the clouds sat low on the hills, threatening rain. The mimosa flowers that covered the trees along his drive were being tossed by a January mistral, and as Milraud looked down at the road snaking into the village from the Marseilles/Toulon motorway he felt the sharp edge to the air. His car and driver should have been visible but there was still no sign of them. Shivering a little, he turned and went back into the house, firmly closing the doors behind him.

Milraud did not often think about his past. There had been too many episodes he would prefer to forget. After eleven years in Paris with his former bosses, chronic mutual fatigue had set in. The salary had been negligible, the suburb that was all he had been able to afford had not matched his self-image, and when his employers had accused him of overreacting, of using hammers to crack nuts, it had become increasingly obvious that his prospects for promotion were nil. He had managed to extricate himself from his post most advantageously, and the eight years since he had left had been good ones for Milraud.

He had his shop in Toulon, another in London’s Camden Market, and a third in Belfast. They did well: antique furniture had lost some of its cachet in the last few years, but the growing demand for antique weapons, swords, pistols, cannons, all Milraud’s speciality, had more than compensated for that downturn. All his shops brought in good profits, enough to justify employing a manager for each one, and now there was a catalogue business as well, which had gone online two years before and was thriving. His profits would have satisfied any dealer in the antiques trade, but Milraud wanted more: to pay his chauffeur’s salary and maintain the Mercedes limousine he was paid to drive; to keep up the villa in Bandol as well as to employ the staff who ran the place, and to pay for the designer clothes and jewellery that his wife (still asleep upstairs) loved to flaunt in the restaurants and clubs she patronised in Marseilles and Toulon, as well as on her trips to Paris and London.

So although his antique business was successful, his three shops and the catalogue did not underwrite his current lifestyle; nor were they the reason that his driver carried a 9 mm automatic pistol under his dark-blue uniform suit.

His second business, for which his antique shops provided cover, was not one in which you made many friends, so he took extensive precautions to protect himself – electric gates to his property, razor wire on top of its perimeter wall, a state-of-the art movement-sensor alarm and cameras, and a driver who doubled as a bodyguard. Yet to date the greatest danger he’d had to face had been flying through a sandstorm in a prop plane to the desert redoubt of a customer in the Emirates.

But he had recently begun to wonder whether someone was paying him unwanted attention. The telephone in his house had gone out of order and since the line had been restored, he seemed to hear a strange echo in the background whenever he used it; his banker, discreetly located in Lausanne, had told him of an inquiry from France that had been withdrawn when challenged; a permis de construire had been issued for a planned extension to his house but only after an inspection of the interior which seemed to be unnecessarily detailed.

Was someone probing his affairs? And if so, who? It might be anyone – including his former employers, of whom it had been said that though you could choose to leave them, you could not guarantee they would leave you.

Conceivably, all this suspect activity could be entirely innocent. When you are on the lookout, you see a lot of shadows. Milraud had been trained long ago to be suspicious of coincidences, but after all, he told himself, one must avoid paranoia. A life of fear was not a life.

The buzzer sounded in the hall. Milraud stepped outside again as the Mercedes rolled quietly to a halt on the apron. The driver got out to open the car’s door.

‘You’re late.’

‘I beg your pardon, monsieur. There was unexpected traffic coming out of town.’

‘Leave earlier next time,’ he said brusquely, and slid smoothly into the cream-coloured luxury of the rear seats for the short journey.

It was a drive of only fifteen minutes to Toulon, where Madame Dipeau would be opening up the shop at any moment. The route took them parallel to the coast for twelve kilometres, and then down into the town. Every few minutes, Milraud turned and glanced out of the back window. Once he saw a telephone company van which seemed to be following them, but it turned off before he could be sure. Shrugging his shoulders, as if to rid himself of unwelcome thoughts, he sat straight in his seat and looked out of the side window as the car swung past the long, arcaded Maison des Cordes, past the elegant pink and white naval headquarters building behind its massive security gates manned by tough-looking sailors, past the great pillared doors of the Musée de la Marine, and into the avenue de la République, where it drew up at the end of a small side street of eighteenth-century buildings, the rue d’Alger.

Here Milraud got out and leaned down to speak through the front window. ‘Come back at twelve,’ he ordered. ‘I am having lunch in Marseilles.’

He walked halfway up the street, through a weathered stone doorway and into the shop where Madame Dipeau was bringing out a pair of fine silver duelling pistols from the vault. She was a widow of indeterminate years, perhaps sixty, possibly seventy-five, who had made herself expert in eighteenth-century weapons. Even more important from Milraud’s point of view, she was careful and discreet.

‘Bonjour monsieur,’ she said quietly now, with the nasal twang of the south. ‘There has been a telephone call for you. A Monsieur Donovan. He said he would call again.’

‘Merci madame,’ he said, and went to his office in the rear of the shop, closing the door behind him. He turned on the small laptop he had brought with him, for much of the detail of his non-antiques transactions was too sensitive to be arranged on the telephone. Sitting down at his desk with yesterday’s local paper, he lit a Disque Bleu, and waited.

Twenty minutes later the phone on his desk trilled faintly. He picked it up at once. ‘Oui,’ he said.

‘It’s me,’ said the man calling himself Donovan. Though the name was unfamiliar to Milraud, the flat accent was unmistakable. Milraud knew immediately who his caller was.

‘Bonjour,’ said Milraud. ‘It’s been a while.’ They had met during a negotiation in Spain several years before, and since then they had kept in touch.

‘Too long. It would be good to meet.’

‘Oui?’ said Milraud cautiously.

‘Yes. Were you planning to be over here any time soon?

‘Franchement non.’ He’d visited Northern Ireland before Christmas and his next trip was planned for June. Business there was at best intermittent. Certainly not what it had been.

‘That’s a pity.’

‘I can always alter my plans,’ said Milraud, reaching for his diary. He respected Piggott. Piggott didn’t waste time. His own or other people’s.

‘It could be worth your while. I may have some business for you.’

‘Would this be a distance requirement, or close by?’ he said, carefully avoiding any word that might trigger a listening device. He knew the man would understand his meaning.

‘Both, actually. Not a big deal but important to make it happen.’

The best, thought Milraud. He knew what ‘making it happen’ meant, and it would cost the other man. He looked at the open page of his diary. There was nothing he could not cancel or postpone. ‘I can be there the day after tomorrow. How does that sound?’

‘Good. Ring me when you’ve arrived.’ And the other phone went dead.

The next morning Milraud flew business class from Marseilles to Paris, where he broke his journey to visit a small office on the avenue Foch. It was run by a veteran of the trade, a Dr Emil Picard, whose business ran from East Timor to Colombia. Milraud was confident he could fill ‘Mr Donovan’s’ requirements from his own holdings, but some back up was always prudent.

After establishing the position with Dr Picard, Milraud checked into his hotel near the Place de la Concorde, had an excellent dinner in its restaurant, then entertained a visitor from an escort agency in the privacy of his room upstairs.

He continued his journey next day, catching an Aer Lingus flight that landed in Belfast in the early afternoon. He had reserved a car at the airport and he drove it to the Belfast Hilton, a concrete tower right on the River Lagan in the middle of the city, where he had booked a small suite. At precisely five o’clock he phoned a number he had memorised, and arranged a meeting at an office nearby for the following day at eleven o’clock. From his bedroom window, Milraud could just see the street where the meeting would take place. He ignored the magnificent view of the distant hills and drew the curtains. He had work to do.

It would not have been surprising to find an antiques dealer scrutinising the thick catalogue of a recent sale at Bonham’s in London, but if anyone had looked closely, a few of the pages would have seemed at the least odd. The detailed specifications and prices listed there evidently referred to more sophisticated and up to date goods than those listed in the rest of the catalogue. Donovan must be planning something big, Milraud told himself. He mentally added a nought to his own prospective invoice.