Akim pulled a tissue from the pocket of his jeans and wiped his mouth. He had been offered a chocolate biscuit from a packet in the kitchen and eaten three in the space of a few minutes. Kell wondered if his strategy was having any effect.

‘Are your parents still alive, Akim?’

‘My mother died,’ he said. Before Kell had a chance to ask, he added: ‘I never met my father.’

It was a gift that Kell seized upon.

‘He abandoned your mother?’

Again, Akim’s sustained silence provided an answer.

‘And I guess you wouldn’t have much interest in meeting him now?’

A quick surge of pride forced its way through Akim’s body like a movement in dance and he said: ‘No way,’ even as his eyes, in a moment that passed in an instant, seemed to pray that Kell would somehow produce him.

‘But you have other family here in France? Brothers, sisters, cousins?’

‘Yes.’

He wanted him to be thinking about them. He wanted Akim to be picturing the laughing niece in the photograph on the phone, the sick grandfather in the hospital in Toulon.

‘The mother of François Malot, my friend, my colleague, gave him up for adoption when she was just twenty years old. She never saw her baby again. That’s difficult even for me, a father, to imagine. Things are altogether more complicated between a mother and her child. That’s a bond that never leaves you, a cord going right back into the womb. What your organization did was to taunt her with the most basic feeling we possess, the most elemental and decent thing about us. A mother’s love for her children. Did you understand that when you agreed to help them?’

Akim wiped a crumb from his mouth and looked down at the floor. The moment had come.

‘I’m going to make you an offer,’ Kell said. ‘In two hours’ time, a chambermaid is going to knock on Vincent Cévennes’ door at the Hotel Lutetia. She’ll think he’s sleeping so she’ll leave him in peace. She’ll come back a couple of hours later and she’ll find his body. You were seen by three of my colleagues entering the hotel shortly before Mr Cévennes was killed. It’s almost certain that the French authorities will seize CCTV footage of your presence in the hotel. The last thing they’ll want is a scandal. But if, by some chance, they need to blame somebody for the shooting, if – say – the heat builds up from the British side about the kidnapping and murder of François Malot, say Paris needs to throw somebody to the wolves, we might be able to persuade them to release that footage. We also might be in the mood to show them audio and visual recordings of the conversation you and I have been enjoying for the last couple of hours.’ Akim looked up at the ceiling, then quickly to the door and window, as if he might see the very cameras and the microphones to which Kell was referring. ‘So you see where you stand? This man’ – he indicated Drummond – ‘works at the British Embassy in Paris. Within twelve hours, he can have you in a hotel room at Gatwick airport. Within twenty-four, he can issue you with a new EU identity and offer you permanent residence in the United Kingdom. Give me what I need to know and we will look after you. I see you as a victim in this, Akim. I don’t see you as the enemy.’

There was a long silence. Watching Akim’s face, his eyes distant and still, Kell began to wonder if he would ever speak again. He craved the answers to his questions. He craved success not only for Amelia, but for himself, as a salve against all the wretchedness and disappointment of the last dozen months.

Akim’s shaved head lolled to one side, then came up at Kell, like a boxer recovering in slow-motion.

‘Salles-sur-l’Hers,’ he said quietly. ‘The woman’s son is being held in a house near Salles-sur-l’Hers.’

78

Kell was on the TGV to Toulouse when Amelia called to tell him that she had received a video of François in his cell.

‘Proof of life,’ she said. ‘Filmed this morning. I’m sending it through to you now.’

Kell realized that it would have been the first time that Amelia had ever seen her son’s face. He could not imagine how she would have felt at such a moment. The immediate tug of a new devotion, or a reluctance to be drawn into the possibility of yet further pain, further betrayal? Perhaps François was just another face on just another screen. Could she have felt any connection with him after expending so much love on Vincent?

‘Any word from White?’ Amelia asked.

The three-man security unit had taken off from Stansted airport just before six o’clock. Their plane had landed at Carcassone two hours later. One of the team – referred to only as ‘Jeff’ – had driven to meet a contact in Perpignan and picked up some basic equipment and weapons. White and a second man – ‘Mike’ – had gone to Salles-sur-l’Hers to scout the location and to try to establish the number of people inside the house. After booking rooms at a hotel in Castelnaudary, they had driven west to Toulouse, meeting Kell’s train at two fifteen.

‘One thing,’ said Amelia. ‘As far as they’re concerned, I’m just another client. Any relationship they might have had with the Service in years gone by is history. We’ll have no operational control.’

Kell had assumed as much.

‘Everything will be fine,’ he reassured her, and thought that he could hear the voice of George Truscott in the background, barking orders to an underling at Vauxhall Cross. ‘If Akim’s product is accurate, we will have François out by tonight.’

Kell was certain that Akim had been honest, not least because White’s initial diligence on the farmhouse fitted Akim’s description of the building precisely. Furthermore, Mike had been into a tabac in Villeneuve-la-Comptal and flashed a photograph of Akim at the proprietor and his elderly mother, who had recognized Akim as one of the two young Arabs who had been buying Lucky Strike cigarettes, newspapers and magazines from the shop for the previous three weeks. Her son reckoned they were living in the farmhouse on the hill, south-west of Salles-sur-l’Hers, which had once been occupied by the Thébault brothers and was now owned by ‘a businessman from Paris’. That was confirmation enough.

‘We took a look at the house this morning from a barn on the opposite side of the road.’ White was a fourteen-stone, six-foot old Etonian with a Baghdad tan whose security firm, Falcon, had made annual seven-figure profits out of the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. He talked about the operation as though it were no more complex than a routine dental appointment. ‘The layout matches the map you showed us. Exits east and west down the connecting track from the D625. Access from the south is foot only, but Jeff reckons he can use the windmill as sniper cover.’ To such a man, extracting a French national from a poorly guarded farmhouse in the middle of Languedoc-Roussillon was plainly money for old rope. ‘There’s the fenced-off area on the western side of the property where we assume François exercises. The swimming pool is exposed out front. It’s got to be the same place.’

‘Have you any idea how many people are in there?’ Kell asked. White and Mike were driving him east towards Castelnaudary on the A61 autoroute. ‘Akim said they sometimes use two ex-Foreign Legion as back-up guards. He knows Slimane is in the house. After that, it may just be Luc and the woman.’

White overtook a prehistoric 2CV and settled into the inside lane, sticking to the speed limit. ‘Jeff is still keeping an eye out. The worry in these situations is that they move the package on a regular basis. We haven’t seen any sign of life at the house since we got there. Judging by what you said on the phone, these people have been careful to make calls and to use computers away from the location, but they’ve been there a long time and might be looking for a change of scene. How many times have they tried to reach Akim since the Lutetia?’