A Foreign Country (12 page)

Kell was shaving in his room when Sami called from the taxi rank.

‘The Frenchman just came into your hotel. I asked him if he wanted a cab when he comes out. He said “yes”.’

‘That’s great, Sami. Thank you. You’re doing a terrific job.’ The small compliments of agent-running were second nature to him. ‘Keep in touch, OK? He’s probably gone inside to collect Amelia. Let me know where they ask you to go.’

‘Sure.’

The conversation had left a smear of shaving foam on the mobile phone. Kell wiped it clean and, with half a dozen sweeps of the razor, cleared his chin of stubble. He dried his face, sprayed aftershave on to his chest, and looked back at his own reflection in the mirror. A momentary reckoning before moving on. He found a clean shirt on a hanger, locked his passport in the safe and picked up the key card for the Renault. As soon as Sami called to let him know that Amelia and Malot were on the road, he would follow in Marquand’s car. If they were meeting third parties, Kell would need to get a look at their faces. That was basic operational behaviour, a tidying up of loose ends.

He sat on the bed and waited. His heart was thumping and Kell tried to remember when he had last felt such a rush of adrenalin. Not for months now. He took a beer from the fridge and popped the cap with his teeth, a party trick he performed, even in private. Claire always used to say: ‘You’ll lose your fucking molars.’

The text came through just after eight fifteen. Sami had written it in English.

Man and woman both. La Goulette.

Kell typed ‘La Goulette’ into a search engine on his phone and discovered that it was a coastal suburb between Gammarth and downtown Tunis with restaurants and bars that were popular in the evenings. Amelia and Malot were doubtless heading there for supper.

He grabbed the camera and walked quickly towards the entrance of the hotel. The same bellboy who had earlier accompanied Kell into the hotel was still on duty. This time there was no lobby smile, no courtesy; he clipped past bearing a tray of mint tea and biscuits. Kell, grateful for his own anonymity, went out into the sun-baked car park, unlocked the Renault from twenty metres, plugged the keycard into the ignition slot and threw the camera on to the seat beside him.

The car wouldn’t start. He tried a second time, pushing his foot down on the clutch and again pressing the button marked ‘Start’. Still no luck. For a moment he considered the possibility that he had been spotted by Amelia and that she had disabled the car, but the notion seemed too far-fetched for serious consideration. This was more likely an electrical failure. Kell tried a third time, removing the card, putting it back into the slot, pressing the clutch and again pushing ‘Start’. Nothing.

‘Why can’t they just give you a fucking key?’ he muttered, resolving to take a taxi to La Goulette.

There were no cabs on the rank. Worse still, eight pensioners were huddled beside the traffic barrier at the entrance to the Ramada, each of them seemingly impatient for a cab. Four guests from the Valencia were also lined up. One of them – a man of about Kell’s age wearing chinos and a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt – began to walk towards the main intersection, in the hope of flagging down a taxi on the highway.

‘Where are all the cabs?’ Kell asked in French, rephrasing the question in English when he drew blank stares from the geriatrics.

‘Something is happening in La Marsa tonight,’ one of them replied. He was a genial, white-haired retiree with a walking stick and sweat patches under his arms. ‘Some sort of festival.’

So Kell went back to the Renault. He tried the keycard one more time, to no effect. Finally, swearing at the windscreen, he gave up on the possibility of making it to La Goulette. Sami could keep an eye on them. He had proved nerveless and efficient thus far; there was no reason to think that he would suddenly abandon the job, or confess to Amelia and Malot that he had been paid a small fortune to follow them. Besides, Malot’s absence from the hotel had presented Kell with an opportunity.

He returned to his room and retrieved the copy of the
Herald Tribune
. He then walked across the street to the lobby of the Ramada and installed himself on a sofa with clear sight of the reception desk. His plan was simple. He needed to be seen. He wanted the staff, albeit unconsciously, to think of him as a resident, perhaps a husband waiting for his wife to come downstairs for supper. To that end, Kell began to flick through the pages of the newspaper. He read an article about post-Mubarak Egypt, another on the forthcoming elections in France. Behind him, installed at a grand piano in the centre of the lobby, was an elderly British guest, pink as a balloon, playing Cole Porter tunes with the lifeless accuracy of a retired music teacher. She appeared to be a fixture in the hotel, attracting smiles from passing staff. Beside her, a letter on SAGA writing paper had been tacked to a notice board: ‘Film Night. Monday.
Billy Elliot
.’ Kell began to feel as though he had signed up for a week at Butlins. On the stroke of nine o’clock, a small crowd gathered around the piano and the pink lady was encouraged to embark on her pièce de résistance: a rendition of Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’. Kell decided to make his move. He tucked the newspaper under his arm, checked that the desk was clear of guests, and walked towards the receptionists.

There were two of them, a man and a woman. Working on a hunch that the woman looked more likely to cooperate, he stood in front of her and rolled his fingers on the desk.

‘
Bonsoir
.’ Eye contact, an easy smile. Kell spoke in French. ‘I checked in this morning. Could you tell me what time the restaurant stops serving food?’

The receptionist could not have been more helpful. Drawing out a sheet of notepaper, she scribbled down an expansive summary of the hotel’s mealtimes and amenities, suggesting that ‘Sir’ might like to take a drink at the bar before dinner, and hinting that breakfast was often extended into the morning beyond the official cut-off time. Kell was even given a map. He listened intently, expressed his gratitude, and returned to the sofa to read his newspaper for a further fifteen minutes.

At nine twenty, he enacted the second phase of his plan. Again, the strategy was simple: to give the impression that he was a guest in the hotel, returning momentarily to his room. He walked towards the bank of escalators on the north side of the lobby, waited until he was certain that he had been spotted by the receptionist, then made his way to the second-floor landing where he killed time by telephoning Sami.

As usual, the call was greeted not by a ringtone but by a cacophony of North African music. Sami’s voice only became audible after several seconds of sustained wailing and screeching violins. It transpired that Amelia and Malot had arrived in La Goulette at half-past eight. Sami explained that they had gone for a drink at a bar on the beach and had asked him to wait until they had finished supper so that he could drive them back to the hotels.

‘That’s ideal,’ Kell told him. ‘Anybody else with them?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And are you OK? Have you had something to eat?’

‘I am well, thank you.’ Sami sounded guarded and tense, as though he was experiencing a sudden crisis of conscience. ‘We had a long conversation while they were in the back of the car.’

‘I’d like to hear about it.’ Kell peered over the balcony and saw that the reception desk was clear. ‘We can have a meeting in my room when you get back.’ A teenage girl emerged from one of the lifts and looked at the ground as she passed him. ‘Try to remember every detail of what they talk about on the way home. It could be important.’

‘Of course, sir.’

Time to go. Kell took the lift to the ground floor, timed his approach to the receptionist, and produced a weary but apologetic smile.

‘I have a problem,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I can’t find my room key. I rented a donkey on the beach this afternoon. I think it may have fallen out on to the sand. Would it be possible to have a replacement?’

‘Of course, sir. What was the room, please?’

‘Twelve fourteen.’

The receptionist keyed the number into the computer.

‘And the name, sir?’

‘Malot. François Malot.’

He was conceived as an act of love; to destroy him would be an act of hate.

Amelia remembered almost every word of the long-ago conversations with Joan, the to-and-fro of their arguments, her own steady conviction that she had no right to abort Jean-Marc’s child without his knowledge. Joan had at first advised her to terminate the pregnancy, to fly back to London and to chalk up the experience to the cruelties of youth. Once Amelia had convinced her of her determination to give birth to the child, however, the American had proved a priceless ally and unshakeable friend. It was Joan who had installed Amelia in a one-bedroomed apartment just two blocks from the Guttmann residence, an arrangement so secret that only David, Joan’s husband, had known anything about it. It was Joan who had put Amelia to work on American consular business so that she would have something with which to occupy herself in the seven months of the pregnancy. A few weeks after moving her into the apartment, the Guttmanns had taken Amelia to Spain for a fortnight, treating her as the daughter they had never had, showing her the treasures of the Prado, the splendours of Cordoba, even a bullfight at Las Ventas, during which David had rested his hand gently on Amelia’s stomach and said: ‘You sure a lady in your condition ought to be
watching
this stuff?’ And it had been Joan, once they were back in Tunis, who had first floated the notion of adoption through Père Blancs, an idea that Amelia had grasped at perhaps too readily, because she was so ambitious for herself at that age, so hungry for life, and terrified that a baby would rob her of all of the experiences and possibilities in her future.

Paris seemed to have been waiting for her. The humid summer streets were crowded with tourists, the pavement cafés alive with bustle and conversation. Sometimes, arriving in a new city, Amelia would feel an immediate and underlying sense of threat, as though she had been displaced into an alien environment, a home to bad luck. She was well aware that this was not much more than a hunch, a superstition, the sort of thing that her colleagues would laugh at if she had ever shared it with them. Yet a sixth sense – call it intuition – had been with her throughout her career, serving her, for the most part, very well. As an SIS officer working under diplomatic cover in Cairo, for example, or during her years in Baghdad, Amelia had reckoned that she needed fifty per cent more cunning and persistence than her male equivalents, simply to survive in such hostile environments. But France had always embraced her. In Paris she was always something close to her old self, the self before Tunis, the twenty-year-old Amelia Weldon with the world at her feet. As soon as they had taken François from her – it had been an immediate thing, she had never held or even seen her own child – the process of constructing a new and invulnerable personality had begun. Lovers were betrayed, colleagues discarded, friends forgotten or ignored. The double life of SIS had presented Amelia with what she looked back on as ideal laboratory conditions in which to re-make herself in the image of a woman who would never fail again.

Yet she was failing now. Failing to keep calm, failing to maintain whatever decorum she had brought with her across the Channel. She longed for the slow hours to quicken and to be in a room with her boy, just the two of them, and yet she dreaded what she might discover: a person unknown to her, a young man with whom she had nothing in common but their shared contempt for a mother who had abandoned him at birth.

There was a message waiting at her hotel, sent by the adoption agency and addressed to ‘Madame Weldon’. The concierge had been reluctant to hand it over, because Amelia had booked her room under the name ‘Levene’, but when she explained that ‘Weldon’ was her maiden name, he relented. François had contacted the agency and requested that Amelia go to his apartment at four o’clock on Monday afternoon. He did not wish to speak to her by telephone beforehand, nor to communicate with her in any way prior to their first meeting. Without hesitation, Amelia rang the agency to confirm, because she was predisposed to cooperate with all of their instructions, yet she worried that the arrangement was a sign of François’ anger. What if he told her, face-to-face, that she could never replace the mother who had been killed? What if he had lured her to Paris merely to wound her? All her life, Amelia had been blessed with an ability to assess people and to develop a quick and intuitive understanding of their circumstances. She could sense when she was being lied to; she knew when she was being manipulated. Some of this gift had been taught, as a necessary skill for a career in which human relationships were at the core of the work, but mostly it was a talent as innate as the ability to kick a ball or to capture the play of light on a canvas. Yet now, faced with what might become the most important relationship of her life, Amelia was almost helpless.

There was so much time to kill. The waiting was slower, the anticipation more sickening, than any intelligence operation she could recall. So many times in her career she had sat in hotel rooms, in safe houses, in offices that ticked like clocks, waiting for word from a joe. But this was quite different. There was no team, no chain of command, no tradecraft. She was just a private citizen, a tourist in Paris, one of ten thousand women with a secret. She had unpacked her suitcase and overnight bag within minutes of arriving, hanging the black suit from Peter Jones in a cupboard and putting the dress that she had picked out for the reunion on a chair in the corner of the room, so that she could look at it and try to decide if it was the correct choice for such an occasion. As if François would be concerned about her clothes! It was her face that he would want to see, her eyes into which he would pour his questions. For an hour Amelia tried to read one of the novels she had brought, to watch the news on CNN, but it was impossible to concentrate for more than a few minutes. Like a memory of her former self, she longed to speak to Joan again, to tell her what was about to happen, but could not trust the security of the line from the hotel. She thought of Thomas Kell, of all people, her confidant in matters of marriage and children, the one colleague in whom she might have confided. But Kell was long gone, forced into disgrace and a stubborn retirement by the same men whom she had leapfrogged to ‘C’. Would Tom even know about her triumph? She doubted it.