Present Danger

46

On the sixth day they cast anchor in mid-afternoon just off the coast near Marseilles. It had been a steady enough voyage, though they had lost half a day by putting in at a small harbour on the Portuguese coast to avoid a late winter storm that had moved in from the Azores. Mattapan III was well known there and Piggott had certain arrangements with the harbourmaster which ensured discreet service. Both Piggott and Milraud had contacts in a number of Mediterranean ports who regularly helped them hide their movements from the attention of the authorities. They did not grudge the expense; it was the only way to be successful in their business.

A similar storm had delayed them briefly off Cadiz, where they had ridden it out at sea, fearful of straying close to shore and smashing up on the rocks. As they passed the Balearic Islands Milraud had decided to take a risk and ring his wife. The rule they had was no communication when he was away on business, unless he initiated it. He had not spoken to her since he left France. ‘C’est moi,’ he’d announced when Annette answered the phone. ‘Have you missed me, ma cherie?’

Usually she replied in kind to his endearments, so he’d been surprised by the urgency in her voice. ‘Listen, Antoine. What’s been going on? There’s been a visitor here.’

‘Yes?’ He was impressed but not surprised that the British had moved so quickly. ‘Un anglais?’

‘Au contraire. A Frenchman. Someone you used to know very well in Paris. Your closest colleague—’

‘Enough!’ he said sharply, cutting her off. If the British had already roped in Seurat to help in the search, things were serious. Seurat was good and he was thorough. He would certainly have all angles covered and that meant that the phone line at the Bandol house was being intercepted. ‘Tell me later. Is all well otherwise?’

‘A bit lonely toute seule, and worried. Your colleague seems very determined.’

I bet he is, thought Milraud.

Two days after the call, as the sun began to go down, Milraud started up the engine of a small but powerful motor yacht moored in an unremarkable boatyard in the Marseilles docks. He steered the boat gently out to come alongside the larger and more splendid craft, lying at anchor off the harbour. On the offshore side, a swarthy man helped a pale-skinned, ill-looking figure to transfer from the larger to the smaller boat, which then in turn dropped an anchor. The large cruiser sailed slowly and carefully into the boatyard and slotted itself with some difficulty into the vacant mooring. Then two men in a dinghy sailed out to the smaller boat; the dinghy was hauled on board and in the gloom of the evening the smaller boat sailed on south-eastwards, hugging the shoreline until it passed Toulon.

Twenty minutes later Milraud could make out the shape of the island, then the hazy glow of light from the houses in its one hamlet on the north side, facing the mainland. He sat in the pilot’s seat with Piggott next to him. As they moved sharply south to the side of the island furthest from the mainland, the lights receded into the night-time black. Here on the south side the island was uninhabited, its shoreline composed of rocky crags rising sheer from the sea and bare of vegetation apart from the odd Corsican pine, clinging on by roots that had miraculously found a hold. As they neared the south-eastern tip of the island, Milraud turned on the boat’s powerful spotlight and saw what he was looking for – a small cove, the only possible landing place, sheltered on each side by rocks. Oustau de Dieu the locals called it. He knew that near the shore a boom lay across the mouth of the cove – a wooden beam, the length of a telegraph pole, designed to keep craft from landing. But he knew the trick of moving it because this was not the first time he’d landed here.

‘Voila,’ said Milraud, pointing to the dark shadow of the small cove, and as he slowed the boat down to idling speed, Piggott clambered back to the stern where Gonzales was beginning to lower the inflatable dinghy.

Two hours later Milraud sat on the rickety porch of an old farmhouse perched a hundred feet above the cove, on top of the rock that rose straight up from the sandy beach below. The house, the only one on this side of the island, was reached from the cove by a twisting path through the trees. It had taken Piggott and Gonzales twenty minutes to climb, half-carrying their barely conscious prisoner, while Milraud took his motor cruiser round to the other side of the island and moored it in the small marina where it was well known enough not to attract particular attention. He then walked back across the island, along familiar paths, guided by a torch.

The house had woods on either side, but on its inland-facing north end a small meadow fronted onto a now-wild vineyard that had been untended since the death of its owner. That was Annette’s father, who had also owned the house and woods; before him the property had belonged to his family for almost two hundred years. Yet, despite the long family ownership of the place, Annette claimed never to have liked it. She had spent all her holidays there as a child and Milraud suspected that it was only after her years in Paris that this rustic hideaway had lost its charm. After her father’s death, when she had inherited, Milraud had persuaded her to hang on to it and though Annette herself never visited nowadays, the property had served a useful purpose. He had probably spent less than ten hours in the house during the last five years, allowing it to fall even further into disrepair, but its outbuildings, which included a stout brick shed hidden in the woods, had proved an excellent site for storing items that would never be displayed in his antique shops. His boat, kept normally in the Marseilles boatyard, though modest in appearance, was deceptively fast and roomy. It could comfortably hold a dozen crates of assorted weapons, and sat so lightly in the water that it could come in close enough to shore for his North African employees to load and unload his cargoes, wading waist deep, carrying crates on their heads.

Milraud was gently swirling the contents of a small balloon glass. It was cold out here, but it was even colder in the house and the Calvados was pleasantly warming. There was a wood-burning stove in the sitting room, but he’d insisted it should not be used – smoke from the chimney might be visible on the other side of the island. He took another sip as he considered his next moves. The MI5 man was safely confined to the cellar; no chance of his breaking out of there. Above him, in a small, draughty bedroom, Gonzales sat playing patience in his shirtsleeves, with a holstered 9 mm pistol under one arm. Piggott was in the sitting room, with his laptop open, doing God knows what.

So Milraud had come out here on the southern side of the house, overlooking the cove, where they had tied the dinghy up under some bushes at the edge of the small beach. Peering out over the top of the rock cliff, he could just make out the black well of the Mediterranean, which stretched directly south all the way to the North African shoreline of Algeria. As he finished his drink he pondered the situation. Ever since Gonzales had pulled a gun on Willis in the Belfast shop, he had been managing a fast unravelling crisis, acting by instinct. Now that they had arrived at the house, for the first time he had a chance to look calmly at what had happened and think what to do next.

Maybe if Willis had admitted straight away to being an MI5 officer the situation could have been saved. Milraud could have apologised for Gonzales’ behaviour, put it down to a mistake, claimed perhaps that they’d thought he was a crook trying to get his hands on illegal weapons and let him go. But Willis had denied it, putting on a professional, almost convincing performance. Milraud had been in the same profession once and he recognised the drill. Willis had done well in an impossible situation.

Piggott had wanted to kill Willis without more ado and Gonzales was just waiting to pull the trigger. But Milraud knew that if they had killed him there and then, the sky would have fallen in on all of them. And if Piggott had allowed Gonzales to kill Willis, why wouldn’t they have killed him too? He didn’t think for a moment that his long working relationship with Piggott would have saved him if he’d been in the way. Milraud had needed to get control of a situation that was rapidly running away from him and the only way that he could think of at the time was to do what he’d done: persuade Piggott that a better plan to damage British intelligence and to save themselves at the same time was to transfer Willis to another group as a hostage. The publicity that would then result, he had persuaded Piggott, would ruin the reputation of MI5 for good.

Piggott had bought the plan and agreed to come here to the island house which Milraud had described as a safe base where they could hide out while he arranged the onward transfer of Willis. And that’s what Piggott was expecting him to do now. He felt fairly sure he could do it too. He had mentally drawn up a list: the FARC – the Colombian rebels with their longstanding links to the IRA; the Basque separatist movement ETA, weakened now but not to be underestimated and in need of a coup; an Al Qaeda cell who would be natural customers though he had little faith in their internal security; the emissary from Hezbollah he had done business with once before.

But this would take time to arrange and even from his short conversation with Annette it was quite clear that there was little time left. The British, helped by his former colleagues, were on their tail. There was no time for the complexities of a hostage transfer, though he had no intention of telling Piggott that. Particularly because he was convinced now that Piggott was unhinged. He had started ranting in an excited fashion that was untypical of the steely character Milraud had known for years. ‘We’ve struck a blow against the Brits they won’t forget,’ he’d crowed as he stood at the helm of Mattapan III, and in his exuberance he’d revved the throttle up so high it crossed the red danger line on the cockpit dial. ‘The prime minister himself will know what we’ve done.’ And now, having just arrived, he was already talking about leaving the island, blithely mentioning a possible run to North Africa to buy drugs, before returning with the shipment to Northern Ireland – where he seemed to forget that the province’s entire security forces were looking for him.

No. Milraud made up his mind. There was only one way out for him and that meant acting fast. He’d need Annette’s help. For all her Paris-acquired chic, she was still a girl with a steely rustic core – she’d always helped him, pulled him clear when doubt threatened to paralyse him, always kept his eyes firmly fixed on what to do next. Probably she was already under surveillance, but the encrypted email he’d send her in the morning would warn her of this, and tell her that they needed to meet, but only if she could be confident she wasn’t being followed. There were ferries from the mainland to this island all day long, but it wasn’t worth the risk unless she knew she was alone. She should make a trial run, he’d told her, just as far as Toulon to flush them out, see if they were onto her already, and more important, see if she could shake them off. Well, at least they could communicate now, to make a plan, even if they couldn’t meet. It would take Seurat and the Brits some time to get into his email.