‘I’m going to kill you, you know that, don’t you?’ he whispered; it was as though he was enjoying himself, adrenalized by the scene playing out in front of him. Terrified that the trigger would give way, François watched as the soldier reached for the door, preparing to retreat on to the driveway. At the same time, Slimane forced François up into the hall, picking his way between the two dead bodies on the ground.

François became aware of the movement behind them before Slimane, perhaps because he was so attuned to every detail and characteristic of his prison. He sensed the near-silent removal of the metal bars securing the rear door of the cell; he heard the sudden twist and push on the door handle as a second soldier burst into the room behind them. François twisted his head to the right to try to see what was happening, opening up a tiny gap between his head and that of his captor which gave the second soldier a clear target area. It was then that François learned, finally, of his own courage, because he wrestled free of Slimane and tried to turn on him even as he registered that the Arab’s head had simply disintegrated before his eyes. François found himself tasting the warm blood, the brain tissue of his detested guard and began to spit it on to Valerie’s body.

‘Are you François?’ the soldier who had fired shouted in French. He was also in body armour but his tanned face was not concealed by a balaclava. François, still in a state of shock, answered: ‘Yes’ as the first soldier came back into the hall and fired a silenced shot into Slimane’s chest.

‘Get behind us,’ he barked in French. ‘Who else is here?’

Thomas Kell had been listening out for the first shot from the windmill and heard what he thought was the snap of Jeff’s silenced rifle just after seven o’clock. A second later he heard the sound of Luc’s body splashing into the swimming pool, then a scream as Valerie de Serres reacted to what had happened from her bedroom on the first floor. On that cue, Mike burst through the front door, tossing a stun grenade into the hall; Kell guessed that he had fired his weapon at least three times in quick succession. Thirty metres to the east, he saw White moving low and fast behind a screen of trees, then disappearing behind the house as he approached the rear entrance to the cell.

Kell had his instructions. He switched on the engine of the rental car, reversed it into the drive so that the vehicle was within twenty feet of the house, then opened the rear doors on both sides. As he stepped out of the car, he heard a commotion inside the house, a man shouting in French, screaming at Mike to drop his weapon. Kell took the Glock pistol from its holster, sweat suddenly enveloping his neck and chest like a rash; in more than twenty years as an intelligence officer, he had never fired a weapon on active duty. He looked back at the front door and saw Mike stepping out of the house, like a man being pushed backwards towards the edge of a cliff.

Just then, to his left, a movement. Coming from the direction of the pool, across the terrace at the northern end of the house. A man in swimming shorts, soaked from head to foot, and bleeding from a wound to his neck and shoulder. The wound was bright red but the blood had blackened where it reached the shorts. Luc. Kell spun towards him and raised the Glock, shouting at Javeau to stop, but it was clear that the Frenchman was utterly disorientated and functioning solely on survival instinct. He seemed to recognize Kell from the interview in Marseille, but then turned back in the direction of the terrace and began to walk across an expanse of unmown grass, twisting like a drunk towards the track. Kell again shouted at him to stop. He walked up the steps, but could not fire nor follow him, because at any moment he might be required to go back to the car and to drive François away from the house.

He heard a gunshot, then White’s voice, unintelligible. Kell looked back at the front door to see what was happening, then again at Luc who was still stumbling towards the road, now more than seventy metres away. In the next field, a tractor was obliviously ploughing. From the direction of the abandoned windmill, Jeff appeared at the edge of the terrace. Beginning to run, he raised his weapon to shoulder height and fired three shots at Luc’s back, dropping him like a stag. Kell, stunned by what he had seen, turned and went back to the vehicle as Jeff followed behind him in a fluid, continuous movement, heading towards the house.

Mike came out first, François tucked in behind him, White half a second later.

‘Move with me,’ Mike was saying, ‘stay behind me’, as White shouted ‘Clear!’ and sprinted ahead to the car. They had Amelia’s son on the floor of the back seat before Kell had even closed his own door. Jeff was the last one in, shooting out a tyre on the Land Cruiser as Kell put the Renault in gear.

‘Anybody hurt?’ he asked.

‘Status, Jeff,’ White replied, as though speaking into a radio.

‘All clear, boss. Targets down.’

Kell accelerated away from the house.

Beaune, Three Weeks Later

80

They waited on a bench in the centre of the square, a woman of fifty-three wearing a pretty skirt and a cream blouse, a man of forty-three in a linen suit that had seen better days, and a young French I.T. consultant wearing jeans and smoking a cigarette. He might have been their nephew, their son.

‘He’ll be here in a minute,’ Amelia said.

It was a Saturday morning, just before eleven o’clock, young children playing in a small park at the centre of the square under the dutiful, exhausted stares of fathers who had promised their wives and girlfriends a few hours’ respite from childcare. One of the children, a girl of about three or four, had a miniature pushchair in which she had placed a naked doll. She rattled it forward and back on the narrow path in front of the bench, falling once but immediately rising to her feet without fuss or tears, and without noticing that François had stood up from his seat to try to help her.

‘Brave girl,’ he said in French, sitting back down, but she did not appear to hear him.

Clockwise cars were circling the park, waiters at a brasserie on the far side of the square ferrying Perriers and cafés au lait to customers basking in the late summer sun. Kell turned and looked down Rue Carnot, glancing at his watch.

‘In a minute,’ Amelia replied and placed a hand on her son’s knee.

Kell watched them, still not tired of their delight in one another’s company, and reflected on how skilfully Amelia had played her hand. Jimmy Marquand promoted and sent to Washington, with school fees paid, salary boosted, and a five-bedroom Georgetown mansion to help convince him that SIS really had been left in good hands, despite one or two misgivings he might have had about a woman running the Service. Simon Haynes too busy thanking the Prime Minister for his knighthood to wonder how long Amelia had been keeping her illegitimate son a secret. And George Truscott eased offshore to the top SIS job in Germany before he could start asking any awkward questions about the sudden appearance in London of Monsieur François Malot.

At Amelia’s instigation, Kell, Elsa and Drummond had spent two weeks looking into the possibility of a connection between Truscott and the elements in the DGSE who had carried out Malot’s abduction, but they had found nothing, not even evidence that Truscott had known about DENEUVE. On the other hand, their investigation suggested that Kell had been correct in his assumption that the operation was linked to waning French influence in North Africa. Elsa had obtained copies of two cables, originating in Paris, which confirmed that senior figures in the DGSE had been ‘extremely concerned’ about Amelia’s appointment as ‘C’. Their misgivings proved well founded: within days of taking over from Haynes, Amelia had shut down nineteen separate operations in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe and re-directed more than forty officers to burgeoning SIS Stations in Tripoli, Cairo, Tunis and Algiers. As Head of Station in Turkey, Paul Wallinger was given carte blanche to amplify SIS influence from Istanbul to Tehran, from Ankara to Jordan. In London, other Levene allies, on both sides of the river, were instructed to sell this regional re-shuffle to a Downing Street already keen to reap the economic and security benefits of the post-Arab Spring era. By the time elections were being called in Egypt, the French government was reported to be ‘paranoid’ about aggressive SIS recruitment of sources within the Muslim Brotherhood and ‘gravely concerned’ about Libyan oil resources slipping beyond the control of Total S.A.