‘Entangled how?’ Kell couldn’t tell whether she was implying a romantic or professional relationship. Amelia quickly provided an answer.

‘You remember in ’02 and ’03, the Office ran a fairly aggressive attack on the French team at the UN after Chirac turned his back on Blair and Bush.’ Kell had suspected that such an operation had been put in place, but its secrecy had prevented it from ever being confirmed in his hearing. ‘At the same time, I recruited a source at the Élysée Palace.’

‘You personally?’

‘Me personally. Known to us as DENEUVE.’

Kell was impressed, but not surprised. It was the sort of coup with which Amelia Levene had made her name.

‘And Luc found out about it? That’s the nature of the entanglement?’

Amelia stood up and began to walk towards the southern wall of the office, like a customer in a shop testing a new pair of shoes. Several seconds passed before she answered Kell’s question.

‘There was always a suspicion that DENEUVE was unreliable, but we were up against it in terms of time and needed whatever information we could get from Chirac’s people. When the invasion began, the relationship with DENEUVE quickly came to an end. We noticed that, within a few weeks, she had lost her job. If Luc is Luc Javeau, he was the DGSE officer in Paris tasked with covering up the DENEUVE leak. We think she named me as her SIS case officer in order to save her skin. Javeau actually called me up in person and warned me off any further French targets.’

‘That must have been an interesting conversation.’

‘Let’s just say that it didn’t end well. I denied all knowledge, of course, but as far as Javeau was concerned, it was now “open season” on London.’

Kell moved closer towards her, shutting down the space. ‘So you think there may be a possibility of payback in all this?’

Amelia was too smart, and too experienced, to pin the Malot operation on mere vengeance, without a greater burden of proof.

‘What else have you got?’ she asked.

‘Africa,’ Kell suggested.

‘Africa?’

It was a thesis that Kell had been turning over in his mind since Paris. ‘Arab Spring. The French know that Amelia Levene has prioritized greater British involvement in the region. They know that you have the ear of the PM. Either they were seeking to blackmail you, to get you to ease off Libya and Egypt, or they were simply going to expose you when François was subjected to vetting. Paris sees the Maghreb as their patch. They’ve already lost significant control of Francophone West Africa to the Chinese. The last thing they want is a new Chief of the SIS trying to roll back that influence still further.’

Amelia looked across the office at a shuttered window on the Queensway side. ‘So they get rid of me, George Truscott takes over, and the Moscow Men go back to a pre-9/11 mindset?’

‘Precisely.’ Kell was warming to his theme. ‘No movement on Libya, Egypt, Algeria when it falls. No meaningful strategy for China or India. Two officers and a dog in Brazil. Just keep kissing Washington’s arse and preserve the Cold War status quo. It’s no coincidence that the operation began as soon as you were appointed Chief. The DGSE may have known about François for years but only chose to act now. That tells us something. It tells us that they knew François’ existence, if taken advantage of effectively, had the potential to compromise you. Expose him and it could end your career.’

‘My career is already over, Tom.’

It was an uncharacteristically defeatist line.

‘Not necessarily.’ One of the strip-lights above Kell’s head began to flicker. He reached up and twisted the tube until it cut out. ‘Nobody knows about this. Nobody but me.’

Amelia looked at him sharply. ‘You haven’t told Marquand?’

‘He thinks you were in Tunis on a dirty weekend. He thinks you and François are fucking. They all do. Just another one of Amelia’s extra-marital affairs.’

Amelia winced and Kell saw that he had gone too far. Male hypocrisy writ large. Amelia took a sip of water, forgiving him with a glance, and Kell moved the subject on.

‘We have options,’ he said, because it had occurred to him, not for the first time, that he was saving her career as well as salvaging his own.

Amelia met his gaze. ‘Enlighten me.’

Kell arranged his pieces on the board. ‘We go after the DGSE,’ he said. ‘We go after the man who is masquerading as Malot. Let’s call him what he is: CUCKOO. A cuckoo in the nest.’ Kell drained his cup of water and set it on the table. ‘You invite him to stay with you in Chalke Bissett this weekend, a little mother-and-son bonding time. We get a team together, we soak his phones, his laptop, we find out who’s behind the operation. He eventually leads us to where they’re holding your son.’

‘You truly believe that François is still alive?’ she asked.

‘Of course. Think about it. They’ve known all along that they have an insurance plan. Even in the worst-case scenario, even if the operation gets blown, they still have François in captivity. Why would they kill someone who is so valuable to them?’

48

He was not afraid of dying, but he was afraid of Slimane Nassah.

He could stand the waiting, he could stand the loss of his privacy, but François feared Slimane because he was the only one among them who was completely unpredictable.

The tone had been set almost immediately, as soon as they had driven him down from Paris. Luc and Valerie keeping their distance, never looking him in the eye; Akim playing good cop with his soft, innocent eyes – and Slimane taking every opportunity that came his way to crawl under François’ skin, to probe for weaknesses, to taunt him with threats and insults. It was worst when the house was deserted. On only the third day, Akim had gone for provisions, Luc and Valerie for a walk in the garden. Slimane had come into the cell, closed the door, indicated to François not to make a sound – then grabbed at his nose, blocking the air so that he was forced to open his mouth to breathe. Next thing François knew there was some kind of cloth or handkerchief stuffed into his mouth, a taste of petrol on his tongue; he thought that Slimane was going to light it and burn his face away. Then he had bound his hands and feet and François had started to struggle. He’d stood up off the bed and shuffled around the cell, falling over on the cold ground. Slimane had opened the door of the cell, walked outside and come back with a knife, the blade heated on the gas stove in the kitchen. He was smiling as he picked François up and sat him upright on the bed. Then he had drawn circles around his eyes with the black steel, the heat on the tip of the blade opening up a cut above François’ left eye so that tears slipped down past his cheek and Slimane began to laugh, taunting him for crying ‘like a woman’. A few moments later, the gag had been removed from his mouth, his hands and legs untied, and Slimane had gone next door, securing the bolt and putting some Arabic rap on the iPod in the sitting room, a smell of marijuana drifting into the cell.

François had always thought of himself as a brave person, difficult to unsettle, self-sufficient. At fourteen, his parents had told him that he had been adopted, that he was the son of an English mother who had not been able to care for him. So François had grown up with the idea that he was somehow uncherished and temporary; no matter how much Philippe and Jeannine adored him – and they had been wonderful parents – they could never have loved him in the same way as his natural mother. This had bred in François a certain stubbornness allied to a profound distrust of people. Terrified of being hurt and abandoned, he had always kept his friends and colleagues – with only one or two exceptions – emotionally at arm’s length. He was an honest man, and liked for this by those who knew him, and, for the most part, his choice of a solitary life had suited him well. François had made sure to move around, from job to job and from place to place, so that he was not obliged to put roots down, nor to forge links with people for any length of time. What he hated most in his captivity was that Slimane understood a lot of this almost instinctively. François came to dread not the loneliness or the fear of his imprisonment, but the knowledge that Slimane could, at any moment, humiliate him for the accident of his birth.