Who gives a fuck about him anyway? Akim had gone to bed the previous night knowing that he might have to kill HOLST. Maybe that was what was bothering him. He didn’t want to have to do it but he knew that Luc or Valerie were crazy enough to give him the order, just to test his loyalty. At about seven o’clock, after he had finished his nightly swim, Luc had received a document from Paris that effectively ended the first phase of the operation. It was a transcript of a conversation at Christophe Delestre’s apartment in Montmartre, recorded by DGSE microphones five days earlier but only now, thanks to a typical Paris fuck-up, making its way to Luc. The conversation was between Delestre, his wife, and an MI6 officer calling himself ‘Thomas Kell’. Kell, Luc had realized instantly, was Stephen Uniacke, the same man who had talked to Vincent on the ferry, the same man Akim and Slimane had been instructed to rough up at Cité Radieuse. Kell had run Delestre to ground, shown him a photograph of Vincent and worked out that HOLST had been switched. Luc, running downstairs, a dressing-gown tied slackly around his belly, wet legs still dripping water on the floor, had shouted for Valerie.

‘Fucking MI6,’ he said. ‘Fucking Amelia Levene. I was right. She worked it out. She knows about the second funeral.’

There’d been an argument between the two of them, then Luc had dressed and driven north to Castelnaudary, where he’d bought himself half an hour at the Internet café and sent an email to Vincent’s dedicated server.

They know about the second funeral. Stephen Uniacke is an MI6 officer named Thomas Kell. He found Delestre in Paris. Levene must know and is playing you. Abort immediately. Crash meeting, Sunday midnight.

When he got back, at around nine, it had looked as though they were going to abort and go home. Then Valerie had done what she always did. She had talked Luc round.

‘Look, nothing has changed,’ she said, smiling the whole time like she knew everybody was going to agree with her in the end. ‘This operation was always top secret. Only six or seven of your colleagues in Paris knew the full extent of what you were trying to do. Even the Elysée was in the dark. Am I right?’

‘You’re right,’ Luc had said quietly.

‘Good. So you just close it down. You tell them François will be taken care of. Paris will be disappointed that they didn’t get their leverage against Levene and they’ll want to question you when you go back. But you don’t go back. Fuck Paris. We keep François alive for a few more days and send a ransom to Levene. He’s priceless to her.’

‘MI6 doesn’t pay kidnappers,’ Luc had replied, which was when Valerie had snapped.

‘Don’t give me that shit.’ Akim had looked across the room at Slimane who was grinning like it was all just a game. His face was still marked from the fight in Marseille, a blue-black stain under his injured eye. ‘Her husband is a millionaire. She has access to tens of millions of dollars in offshore MI6 accounts. She’ll pay up. She’ll pay because we make her pay. She knows that if she doesn’t, the boys will kill her son. That’s a motivation, wouldn’t you say?’ There had been all that sarcasm in the room, like a test of their courage, Luc looking defeated and uncomfortable and Slimane almost laughing in his face. ‘And when she finally pays’ – Valerie was lighting up a cigarette – ‘we give the guys their share, we take the money, we kill this prick’ – a flick of her blonde hair in the direction of HOLST’s cell – ‘and then you finally get to quit the job I’ve been trying to get you to quit for the last three years. Or are you scared about that? Are you worried your bosses will catch you out?’ It was a deliberate provocation in front of the team. Even Slimane looked at the ground.

‘I’m not scared, Valerie,’ Luc had replied, like he wanted to take the conversation next door. ‘I just want to be sure we know what we’re getting into.’

Akim could still picture what she did next. She stood up, walked across the room, and buried her tongue in Luc’s mouth, at the same time grinding her hand into his cock so that Akim felt himself grow hard.

‘I’ve always known what I’m doing,’ she had said. ‘All you guys have to do is follow me.’

Soon after that, Luc agreed to everything: the timing of the ransom; the date when they would kill HOLST; the sweetness of his revenge against Levene. Like Slimane always said, Luc was weak around Valerie, prepared to do whatever she wanted. There was a kind of flaw in his character that kept him permanently under her spell. Unlike with everybody else, he never argued back, never stood up for himself, never questioned her decisions. This tough guy of the DGSE seemed to be under a kind of hypnosis. It was embarrassing to watch a man behave like that. Slimane called him ‘the carpet’.

The toilet flushed next door and Akim heard Valerie padding back to the bedroom. He wanted to fuck her – he’d felt that way since they’d met – and lit a cigarette, pulling on his tracksuit and shoes. Then he opened the curtains. That amazing view down to the Pyrenees. Akim always liked looking at it first thing in the morning. Like a new country, a heaven. Then he went to work.

Slimane was asleep in the armchair at the bottom of the stairs, his hand down the front of his trousers, spittle coming out of one side of his mouth. Akim looked through the spyglass and saw that HOLST was lying on his bunk, eyes fixed on the ceiling. He woke Slimane, was sworn at for his efforts, then went into the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee. Moments later, Luc appeared, naked except for a pair of white cotton boxer shorts. There were tattoos on his biceps, flakes of sunburn on his shoulder blades. Akim caught the funk of their sex, like Luc wanted him to know that he’d just nailed Valerie. He opened the door out on to the back porch.

‘Big day.’ The boss went to the fridge. He took a long swig of orange juice direct from the carton. When he had finished, he put the carton on the kitchen table and fixed Akim with one of his lazy stares.

‘Vincent still isn’t responding,’ he said. ‘We’ve only had two emails from him since he got to St Pancras, one on Friday night, one yesterday morning when the housekeeper arrived. The message we sent to abort has gone from the server, so he must have seen it. Valerie has left a voicemail telling him to go to Paris, but there’s no reception for mobiles at the house.’

Slimane strolled into the kitchen, spotted the carton of orange juice and went to pick it up. Luc grabbed his forearm, holding it above the table like there was a flame underneath.

‘You two not listening to me?’ he said. He was stronger than Slimane, who had a look on his face like spilled acid. ‘We have a problem. Vincent was lured into a trap and we don’t know if he’s been arrested, if he’s still at the house or if he got the message to abort.’

‘Fine,’ said Slimane. ‘So you can tell him when he gets back to Paris.’

‘No.’ It was Valerie, coming in behind him in jeans and a T-shirt. ‘I want you to tell him, Akim.’

‘Me?’

Luc released Slimane. Valerie spread her arms to embrace the two Arabs, holding them around the neck. ‘We want you to talk to him.’ Akim enjoyed the feeling of her skin against his neck. ‘Find Vincent when he gets back to Paris. He’ll be holed up at the Lutetia. Find him and then do what you do best. Smartest thing we can do now is clear the trail.’

64

Luc’s email to Vincent had been seen almost instantaneously by Elsa Cassani in the Shand library, where she had saturation coverage of CUCKOO’s lines of communication. The message appeared on the dedicated DGSE server, where it would be encrypted the moment CUCKOO logged on.

They know about the second funeral. Stephen Uniacke is an MI6 officer named Thomas Kell. He found Delestre in Paris. Levene must know and is playing you. Abort immediately. Crash meeting, Sunday midnight.