Kell looked at Amelia. They were both thinking the same thing.

‘He must have had a passport cached in there,’ she said. ‘We need to know where he’s flying to. Can you get into the queue behind him?’

‘No chance,’ Aldrich replied. ‘Not a good idea to get that close after Reading. He’ll make me.’

‘You carrying any ID?’ Kell asked.

‘Sure.’

‘Then find a member of airport staff on the security side, preferably somebody high up the food chain. Tell them that they need to talk to whoever serves Vincent at the BA counter. Be discreet about it. Make sure he doesn’t see what’s going on. Get the flight number, get the name on the passport, credit-card details if he doesn’t pay cash. Can you manage that?’

‘No problem.’

Amelia nodded in mute agreement. ‘Nice idea,’ she said as Kell hung up. The Audi was parked on the second floor of a multi-storey short-term car park, less than a minute’s walk from where Aldrich was standing. Against the grinding roar of an aeroplane passing low overhead, Amelia adjusted her position in the passenger seat so that she was facing Kell at an angle. ‘Something has occurred to me,’ she said. Kell was reminded of a gesture Amelia had made at the office in Redan Place, a quiet resignation in her features. It was uncharacteristic of her to be so shaken. ‘I should go to Number 10. We should try to set up a line to the French, cut some sort of deal. Falling on my sword may be the only way to save François.’

Falling on my sword. Kell disliked the phrase for its pointless grandeur. Amelia was better than that.

‘That won’t save him,’ he said. ‘Whoever these people are, Paris will tip them off. Even if it’s a rogue operation, which I suspect it now is, there will be factions within the DGSE loyal to the perpetrators. There’ll be an internal leak, François will be killed, Luc and Valerie will catch the next boat to Guyana.’ When he saw that he was making no progress with his argument, Kell took a risk. ‘Besides, if you go, my career is finished. The minute Truscott gets his hands on the tiller, he’ll throw me to the wolves over Yassin Gharani. If you don’t survive, I’m looking at growing tomatoes for the next thirty years.’

To his surprise, Amelia smiled.

‘Then we’d better make sure nobody finds out what we’re up to,’ she said, reaching for his hand. It was as though she had been testing him and was now assured of his loyalty. ‘I’ll talk to some military friends, put a unit together in France. And get Kevin on the phone. We ought to send him up to St Pancras.’

69

It took Vincent Cévennes seven minutes to reach the front of the queue at the British Airways ticket desk, where he was observed looking at a flight schedule on the teller’s computer screen before handing over a French passport and a credit card, in return for a ticket. With CUCKOO’s attention fully occupied, Aldrich had taken the opportunity to flag down two patrolling police officers and to inform them that he was a surveillance officer with the Secret Intelligence Service. One of the officers agreed to approach the BA desk and to interview the female member of staff who had just sold CUCKOO a ticket. Aldrich made it clear that any conversation must take place out of sight of other passengers in the terminal.

They waited until CUCKOO had taken a lift upstairs to the duty-free shopping level. The more senior of the two policemen then approached the BA desk, indicated to the teller that he would like a discreet word, and managed to hold a brief conversation with her in a small staffroom secluded behind the ticket desks. The entire exchange took less than five minutes.

Aldrich called Kell with the news.

‘Right. Got a pen? CUCKOO is travelling under the name Gerard Taine. Just paid five hundred and eighty-four pounds on an American Express card for a business-class seat on the BA flight to Charles de Gaulle, leaving Terminal Five at eighteen fifteen.’

Kell, who was still in the car park, looked at his watch.

‘That’s in less than two hours. Get two tickets on the same plane. One for you, one for Elsa. Travel separately. When CUCKOO comes out the other side, I’ll try to be there.’

‘How are you going to manage that?’

Kell had looked at the list of flights leaving Heathrow for Paris before six.

‘There’s an Air France to Charles de Gaulle leaving Terminal Four fifteen minutes before you take off. We’re going there now, I’ll try to get on board.’ Kell had already started the engine and was pulling out of the parking bay. ‘Kevin is en route to St Pancras. Amelia will stay here and organize hire cars at Gare du Nord and Charles de Gaulle. If we’re delayed or you don’t hear from me, try to stay on CUCKOO’s tail as long as you can. He’ll probably take the Metro, try to shake you off in Paris. If we get lucky, he’ll hail a cab.’

Fifteen minutes later, Kell was barging the queue at the Air France desk in Terminal Four and hustling himself on to a packed Sunday-night flight to Paris, shelling out more than seven hundred euros for the last seat on the plane. By eight fifteen local time he had touched down at Charles de Gaulle, only to be told that CUCKOO’s BA flight was delayed by half an hour. That gave him time to pick up the hire car and to drive it in loops around the airport, waiting for a call from Aldrich with the number plate of whatever taxi CUCKOO hailed outside the terminal. In the end, CUCKOO caught an RER train to the city, standing for the duration of the journey just three rows from Elsa Cassani, looking, for all the world, like any other washed-out twenty-something Italian returning from a hedonistic weekend in London. Danny Aldrich boarded an Air France bus to Etoile. Kell took the A3 autoroute south-west into Paris, but his Renault became snarled in peripherique traffic and he lost contact with the RER. By the time Elsa had pulled into Chatelet ten minutes later, she was the only member of the team within two miles of the target.

CUCKOO lost her in less than fifteen minutes. Emerging from Chatelet, he crossed the Seine and boarded a metro at St Michel, heading south towards Porte d’Orleans. At Denfert-Rochereau station, having spotted Elsa three times since Charles de Gaulle – once on the RER, once while crossing the Pont Notre Dame and once in his carriage between Saint-Sulpice and St-Placide – CUCKOO forced open the doors as they were closing and jumped out on to the platform, watching Elsa glide past him in a state of mute obliviousness.

Five minutes later she had surfaced at Mouton Duvernet and called Kell with the news.

‘Tom, I am so, so sorry,’ she said. ‘I lost him. I lost CUCKOO.’

70

My name is Gerard Taine. I am no longer François Malot. I work for the Ministry of Defence. I live in a small village outside Nantes. My wife is a schoolteacher. We have three children, twin girls of two and a son who is five years old. I am no longer François Malot.

Vincent remembered the mantra of his emergency cover but did not know Taine in the way that he had known François. He knew nothing of his interests, nothing of his proclivities; he could not imagine the grammar, the architecture of his soul. He had given no thought to him in the way that he had thought about François, day and night, for months. Taine was just a fallback; Malot had been his life.

Vincent sat on the bed in the Hotel Lutetia, unsure if the British had followed him, unsure if Luc or Valerie would ever come. He felt as though he would never leave this place. He felt as though he was a shell, a failure, a man who was being made to pay the heaviest price for a sin he had never committed. It was like that time at high school when he was fourteen and his whole class, every friend he had ever made, every girl he had ever liked, turned on him because he had reported a case of bullying to a teacher. Vincent had been trying to do the right thing. He had been trying to save his closest friend from the turmoil of the older children’s attacks, but was betrayed by the very teacher in whom he had confided. As a result, they had all rounded on him – even the friend whose neck Vincent had tried to save – and for many months afterwards had humiliated him in the classroom, caking his clothes in food and shit as he walked home, screaming ‘Bitch!’ and ‘Rat!’ whenever he passed. Vincent’s whole sense of justice, of right and wrong, had been inverted by that experience. He had learned that there was no truth, there was no kindness. Even his own father had disowned him. You never betray your comrades, he had said. You never betray your friends, as though Vincent was one of the soldiers he had fought alongside in Algeria. But he was just a fourteen-year-old schoolboy with no mother, no sister, no brother to love or understand him. They were hurting my friend, Papa, he said, but the old man hadn’t listened and now he was long dead and Vincent wished that he was in the hotel room so that he could tell him what had happened in England, what had happened to François, and maybe try to explain all over again that all he had ever wanted to do was protect his friend and to make his father proud.