A Foreign Country Read online

  It was afterwards estimated that they had been attacked by at least three men, each armed with knives and metal poles. Jeannine’s necklace had been torn away, scattering pearls on to the sand, and her gold wedding ring removed from her finger. Philippe had had a noose placed around his neck and been jerked upright as a second assailant sliced through his throat and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest and legs. He had bled to death within a few minutes. A torn bed sheet that had been stuffed into her mouth had muffled Jeannine’s screams. Her own throat was also slashed, her arms heavily bruised, her stomach and hips struck repeatedly by a metal pole.

  A young Canadian couple, honeymooning at a neighbouring hotel, had noticed the commotion and heard Madame Malot’s stifled cries, but could not see what was happening in the light of the waning moon. By the time they got there, the men who had attacked and murdered the elderly French couple had vanished into the night, leaving a scene of devastation that the Egyptian authorities quickly dismissed as a random act of violence, perpetrated by outsiders, which was ‘highly unlikely ever to happen again’.

  3

  Taking someone in the street is as easy as lighting a cigarette, they had told him, and as Akim Errachidi waited in the van, he knew that he had the balls to pull it off.

  It was a Monday night in late July. The target had been given a nickname – HOLST – and its movements monitored for fourteen days. Phone, email, bedroom, car: the team had everything covered. Akim had to hand it to the guys in charge – they were thorough and determined; they had thought through every detail. He was dealing with pros now and, yes, you really could tell the difference.

  Beside him, in the driver’s seat of the van, Slimane Nassah was tapping his fingers in time to some R&B on RFM and talking, in vivid detail, about what he wanted to do to Beyoncé Knowles.

  ‘What an ass, man. Just give me five minutes with that sweet ass.’ He made the shape of it with his hands, brought it down towards his circling groin. Akim laughed.

  ‘Turn that shit off,’ said the boss, crouched by the side door and ready to spring. Slimane switched off the radio. ‘HOLST in sight. Thirty seconds.’

  It was just as they had said it would be. The dark street, a well-known short-cut, most of Paris in bed. Akim saw the target on the opposite side of the street, about to cross at the postbox.

  ‘Ten seconds.’ The boss at his very best. ‘Remember, nobody is going to hurt anybody.’

  The trick, Akim knew, was to move as quickly as possible, making the minimum amount of noise. In the movies, it was always the opposite way: the smash-and-grab of a screaming, adrenalized SWAT team crashing through walls, lobbing stun grenades, shouldering jet-black assault rifles. Not us, said the boss. We do it quiet and we do it slick. We open the door, we get behind HOLST, we make sure nobody sees.

  ‘Five seconds.’

  On the radio, Akim heard the woman saying ‘Clear’ which meant that there were no civilians within sighting distance of the van.

  ‘OK. We go.’

  There was a kind of choreographed beauty to it. As HOLST strolled past Akim’s door, three things happened simultaneously: Slimane started the engine; Akim stepped out into the street; and the boss slid open the side panel of the van. If the target knew what was happening, there was no indication of it. Akim wrapped his left arm around HOLST’s neck, smothered the gaping mouth with his hand and, with his right arm, lifted the body up into the van. The boss did the rest, grabbing at the legs and pulling them inside. Akim then came in behind them, sliding the door shut, just as he had rehearsed a dozen times. They pushed the prisoner to the floor. He heard the boss say: ‘Go’, as calm and controlled as a man buying a ticket for a train, and Slimane pulled the van out into the street.

  The whole thing had taken less than twenty seconds.

  4

  Thomas Kell woke up in a strange bed, in a strange house, in a city with which he was all too familiar. It was eleven o’clock on an August morning in the eighth month of his enforced retirement from the Secret Intelligence Service. He was a forty-two-year-old man, estranged from his forty-three-year-old wife, with a hangover comparable in range and intensity to the reproduction Jackson Pollock hanging on the wall of his temporary bedroom.

  Where the hell was he? Kell had unreliable memories of a fortieth birthday party in Kensington, of a crowded cab to a bar in Dean Street, of a nightclub in the wilds of Hackney – after that, everything was a blank.

  He pulled back the duvet. He saw that he had fallen asleep in his clothes. Toys and magazines were piled up in one corner of the room. He climbed to his feet, searched in vain for a glass of water and opened the curtains. His mouth was dry, his head tight as a compress as he adjusted to the light.

  It was a grey morning, shiftless and damp. He appeared to be on the first floor of a semi-detached house of indetermin-ate location in a quiet residential street. A small pink bicycle was secured in the drive by a loop of black cable, thick as a python. A hundred metres away, a learner driver with Jackie’s School of Motoring had stalled midway through a three-point turn. Kell closed the curtains and listened for signs of life in the house. Slowly, like a half-remembered anecdote, fragments of the previous evening began to assemble in his mind. There had been trays of shots: absinthe and tequila. There had been dancing in a low-roofed basement. He had met a large group of Czech foreign students and talked at length about Mad Men and Don Draper. Kell was fairly sure that at a certain point he had shared a cab with an enormous man named Zoltan. Alcoholic blackouts had been a regular feature of his youth, but it had been many years since he had woken up with next to no recollection of a night’s events; twenty years in the secret world had taught him the advantage of being the last man standing.

  Kell was looking around for his trousers when his mobile phone began to ring. The number had been withheld.

  ‘Tom?’

  At first, through the fog of his hangover, Kell failed to recognize the voice. Then the familiar cadence came back to him.

  ‘Jimmy? Christ.’

  Jimmy Marquand was a former colleague of Kell’s, now one of the high priests of SIS. His was the last hand Kell had shaken before taking his leave of Vauxhall Cross on a crisp December morning eight months earlier.

  ‘We have a problem.’

  ‘No small talk?’ Kell said. ‘Don’t want to know how life is treating me in the private sector?’

  ‘This is serious, Tom. I’ve walked half a mile to a phone box in Lambeth so the call won’t be scooped. I need your help.’

  ‘Personal or professional?’ Kell located his trousers beneath a blanket on the back of a chair.

  ‘We’ve lost the Chief.’

  That stopped him. Kell reached out and put a hand against a wall in the bedroom. Suddenly he was as sober and clear-headed as a child.

  ‘You’ve what?’

  ‘Vanished. Five days ago. Nobody has any workable idea where the hell she’s gone or what’s happened to her.’

  ‘She?’ The anti-Rimington brigade within MI6 had long been allergic to the notion of a female Chief. It was almost beyond belief that the all-male inmates at Vauxhall Cross had finally allowed a woman to be appointed to the most prestigious position in British Intelligence. ‘When did that happen?’

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know,’ Marquand replied. ‘A lot that’s changed. I can’t say any more if we’re talking like this.’

  Then why are we talking at all? Kell thought. Do they want me to come back after everything that happened? Have Kabul and Yassin just been brushed under the carpet? ‘I’m not working for George Truscott,’ he said, saving Marquand the effort of asking the question. ‘I’m not coming back if Haynes still has his hands on the tiller.’

  ‘Just for this,’ Marquand replied.

  ‘For nothing.’

  It was almost the truth. Then Kell found himself saying: ‘I’m beginning to enjoy having nothing to do,’ which was an outright lie. There was a noise on the other end of the line that might have been
the extinguishing of Marquand’s hopes.

  ‘Tom, it’s important. We need a re-tread, somebody who knows the ropes. You’re the only one we can trust.’

  Who was ‘we’? The high priests? The same men who had turfed him out over Kabul? The same men who would happily have sacrificed him to the public inquiry currently assembling its tanks on the SIS lawn?

  ‘Trust?’ he replied, putting on a shoe.

  ‘Trust,’ said Marquand. It almost sounded as though he meant it.

  Kell went to the window and looked outside, at the pink bicycle, at Jackie’s learner driver, moving through the gears. What did the rest of his day hold? Aspirin and daytime TV. Hair-of-the-dog bloody Marys at the Greyhound Inn. He had spent eight months twiddling his thumbs; that was the truth of his new life in the ‘private sector’. Eight months watching black-and-white matinees on TCM and drinking his pay-off in the pub. Eight months struggling to salvage a marriage that would not be saved.

  ‘There must be somebody else who can do it,’ he said. He hoped that there was nobody else. He hoped that he was getting back in the game.

  ‘The new Chief isn’t just anybody,’ Marquand replied. ‘Amelia Levene made “C”. She was due to take over in six weeks.’ He had played his ace. Kell sat down on the bed, pitching slowly forwards. Throwing Amelia into the mix changed everything. ‘That’s why it has to be you, Tom. That’s why we need you to find her. You were the only person at the Office who really knew what made her tick.’ He sugared the pill, in case Kell was still wavering. ‘It’s what you’ve wanted, isn’t it? A second chance? Get this done and the file on Yassin will be closed. That’s coming from the highest levels. Find her and we can bring you in from the cold.’

  5

  Kell had returned to his bachelor’s bedsit in a near-derelict Fiat Punto driven by a moonlighting Sudanese cab driver who kept a packet of Lockets and a well-thumbed copy of the Koran on the dashboard. Pulling away from the house – which had indeed belonged to a genial, gym-addicted Pole named Zoltan with whom Kell had shared a drunken cab-ride from Hackney – he had recognized the shabby streets of Finsbury Park from a long-ago joint operation with MI5. He tried to remember the exact details of the job: an Irish Republican; a plot to blow up a department store; the convicted man later released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Amelia Levene had been his boss at the time.

  Her disappearance was unquestionably the gravest crisis MI6 had faced since the fiasco of WMD. Officers didn’t vanish, simple as that. They didn’t get kidnapped, they didn’t get murdered, they didn’t defect. In particular, they didn’t make a point of going AWOL six weeks before they were due to take over as Chief. If the news of Amelia’s disappearance leaked to the media – Christ, even if it leaked within the walls of Vauxhall Cross – the blowback would be incendiary.

  Kell had showered at home, eaten some leftover take-away Lebanese, levelled off his hangover with two codeine and a lukewarm half-litre of Coke. An hour later he was standing underneath a sycamore tree two hundred metres from the Serpentine Gallery, Jimmy Marquand striding towards him with a look on his face like his pension was on the line. He had come direct from Vauxhall Cross, wearing a suit and tie, but without the briefcase that usually accompanied him on official business. He was a slight man, a rangy weekend cyclist, tanned year-round and with a thick mop of lustrous hair that had earned him the nickname ‘Melvyn’ in the corridors of SIS. Kell had to remind himself that he had every right to refuse what Marquand was going to offer. But, of course, that was never going to happen. If Amelia was missing, he had to be the one to find her.

  They exchanged a brief handshake and turned north-west in the direction of Kensington Palace.

  ‘So how is life in the private sector?’ Marquand asked. Humour didn’t always come easily to him, particularly at times of stress. ‘Keeping busy? Behaving?’

  Kell wondered why he was making the effort. ‘Something like that,’ he said.

  ‘Reading all those nineteenth-century novels you promised yourself?’ Marquand sounded like a man speaking words that had been written for him. ‘Tending your garden? Tapping out the memoirs?’

  ‘The memoirs are finished,’ Kell said. ‘You come out of them very badly.’

  ‘No more than I deserve.’ Marquand appeared to run out of things to say. Kell knew that his apparent bonhomie was a mask concealing a grave, institutional panic over Amelia’s disappearance. He put him out of his misery.

  ‘How the fuck did this happen, Jimmy?’

  Marquand tried to circumvent the question.

  ‘Word came through from Number 10 shortly after you left,’ he said. ‘They wanted an Arabist, they wanted a woman. She’d impressed the Prime Minister on the JIC. He finds out we’ve lost her, it’s curtains.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I know that’s not what you meant.’ Marquand’s reply was terse and he looked away, as though ashamed that the crisis had happened on his watch. ‘Two weeks ago she had a briefing with Haynes, the traditional one-on-one in which the baton gets passed from one Chief to the next. Secrets exchanged, tall tales told, all the things that you and me and the good people of Britain are not supposed to know.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘What, then? Who shot JR? A fifth plane on 9/11? Give me the facts, Jimmy. What did he tell her? Let’s stop fucking around.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Marquand swept back his hair. ‘Sunday morning she announces that she has to go to Paris, for a funeral. Taking a couple of days off. Then, on Wednesday, we get another message. An email. She’s strung out after the funeral and has decided to take some holiday. South of France. No warning, just using up the rest of her allowance before the top job sucks all of her time. A painting course in Nice, something that she’d “always wanted to crack”.’ Kell thought that he caught a vapour of alcohol on Marquand’s breath. It could equally well have been his own. ‘Told us that she’d be back in two weeks, reachable on such-and-such a number at such-and-such a hotel in the event of any emergency.’

  ‘Then what?’

  Marquand was holding his hair in place against the buffeting London wind. He came to a halt. A blue plastic bag cartwheeled beside him across a patch of unmown grass, snagging in a nearby tree. He lowered his voice, as though ashamed by what he was about to say.

  ‘George sent somebody after her. Off the books.’

  ‘Now why would he do a thing like that?’

  ‘He was suspicious that she’d arranged a holiday so soon after the download with Haynes. It seemed unusual.’

  Kell knew that George Truscott, as Assistant to the Chief, had been the man lined up to succeed Simon Haynes as ‘C’; as far as most observers were concerned, it was merely a question of the PM waving him through. Truscott would have had the suit made, the furniture fitted, the dye-stamped invitations waiting to go out in the post. But Amelia Levene had stolen his prize. A woman. A second-class citizen in the SIS firmament. His resentment towards her would have been toxic.

  ‘What’s unusual about taking a holiday at this time of year?’

  Kell felt that he knew the answer to his own question. Amelia’s story made no sense. It wasn’t like her to attend a painting course; a woman like that didn’t need a hobby. In all the years that he had known Amelia, she had used her holidays as opportunities for relaxation. Health spas, detox clinics, five-star lodges with salad bars and wall-to-wall masseurs. She had never spoken of a desire to paint. As Marquand contemplated his answer, Kell walked across the stretch of unmown ground, pulled the plastic bag clear of the tree and stuffed it into the back pocket of his jeans.

  ‘You’re a model citizen, Tom, a model citizen.’ Marquand looked down at his shoes and gave a heavy sigh, as if he was tired of making excuses for the failings of other men. ‘Of course there’s nothing unusual about taking a holiday this time of year. But usually we have more warning. Usually it goes in the diary several months in advance. This look
ed like a sudden decision, a reaction to something that Haynes had told her.’

  ‘What was Haynes’s view on that?’

  ‘He agreed with Truscott. So they asked some friends in Nice to keep an eye on her.’

  Again, Kell kept his counsel. Towards the end of his career, he had himself become a victim of the paranoid, near-delusional manoeuvrings of George Truscott, yet he was still privately astonished that the two most senior figures in the Service had green-lit a surveillance operation against one of their own.

  ‘Who are the friends in Nice? Liaison?’

  ‘Christ, no. Avoid the Frog at all costs. Re-treads. Ours. Bill Knight and his wife, Barbara. Retired to Menton in ’98. We got them to sign up for the painting course, they saw Amelia arrive on Wednesday afternoon, enjoyed a bit of a chat. Then Bill reported her missing when she failed to turn up three mornings in a row.’

  ‘What’s unusual about that?’

  Marquand frowned. ‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

  ‘Well, couldn’t Amelia have taken a couple of days off? Got sick?’

  ‘That’s just it. She didn’t call it in. Barbara rang the hotel, there was no sign of her. We telephoned Amelia’s husband –’

  ‘– Giles,’ said Kell.

  ‘Giles, yes, but he hasn’t heard from her since she left Wiltshire. Her mobile is switched off, she’s not responding to emails, there’s been no activity on her credit cards. It’s a total blackout.’

  ‘What about the police?’

  Marquand bounced his caterpillar eyebrows and said: ‘Bof ’ in a cod French accent. ‘They haven’t scraped her off a motorway or found her body floating in the Med, if that’s what you mean.’ He saw Kell’s reaction to this and felt compelled to apologize. ‘Sorry, that was tasteless. I didn’t mean to sound glib. This whole thing is a bloody mystery.’

  Kell ran through a list of possible explanations, as arbitrary as they were inexhaustible: Russian or Iranian interference in some aspect of Amelia’s personal affairs; a clandestine arrangement with the Yanks relating to Libya and the Arab Spring; a sudden crisis of faith engendered by something in the meeting with Haynes. In the run-up to Kell’s demise at SIS, Amelia had been knee-deep in Francophone West Africa, which might have aroused interest from the French or Chinese. Islamist involvement was a permanent concern.