The Circle (42 page)

Servaz climbed out of the Jeep, locked it, and set off. The little street away from the centre was lined with tall private houses surrounded by gardens. A great many cars were parked along the pavement. He spotted a parking space, but there was a lamppost nearby; it was not yet lit, although night was beginning to fall.

He went by without stopping, then back to the centre of town, where he found a shop about to close that sold DIY supplies and fishing gear. The old man gave him a puzzled look when he explained that he was looking for a fishing rod with or without a reel, but it had to be sturdy, and a certain length. Finally, he came out with a telescoping rod in fibreglass and carbon fibre which when fully opened could extend to four metres.

Servaz went back to the quiet little street, his fishing pole on his shoulder. He walked along the pavement, looking discreetly to the right and to the left, then he stopped beneath the lamppost and gave it two quick powerful blows with the end of the fishing rod. The second blow was enough to smash the bulb. It hadn't taken more than three seconds. He left again immediately, just as nonchalant.

Five minutes later he parked the Jeep in the space, praying that no one had noticed his little act of vandalism. A few dark facades now had light in their windows, and twilight was descending slowly over the street.

Francis Van Acker lived in a big T-shaped house that dated from the beginning of the previous century, one house down from the parking space. Servaz could discern its outline through the branches of a pine tree and the foliage of a weeping willow. As it was set on a little bank, rising out of a dark mass of bushes and hedges, it seemed to overshadow all the surrounding houses. There was light in the triple bay window on the first floor, on the right-hand side of the house.

He mused that the villa suited its owner: it had the same haughtiness, the same pride. Apart from the light on the right-hand side, the house was shrouded in darkness. Servaz took out his cigarettes. He wondered what he was expecting from this surveillance. He wasn't about to come back here every evening. He thought about Vincent and Samira, and a tremor went down his spine. He trusted his two assistants: Vincent would take his mission seriously because he knew Margot well. And Samira was one of his best agents. Except that the adversary they were dealing with was nothing like those who ordinarily graced the police station or the courtrooms with their presence.

He spent the next two hours observing the house and the rare traffic in the street: for the most part he just saw neighbours coming home late from work, or taking out the dog or the dustbins. And gradually the glow of televisions began flickering in living rooms, and lights came on in upstairs windows. He wondered where he had read this sentence: ‘Wherever there is a television glowing there is someone staying up who does not read.' He would have liked to be at home listening to Mahler with the volume on low, a book open on his lap.

That night, Ziegler got home late. At the last minute she had had to deal with a drunken brawl in a bar in Auch: two men who didn't even have the strength to fight, they were so pissed, but capable enough to pull out a blade. They had felt so pathetically sorry for themselves by the time the law arrived that she wished there was a category of crime called ‘first-degree stupidity' so she could lock them away. She removed her uniform and stepped into the shower. When she came back out, she saw she had three texts from Zuzka. She winced. She didn't feel up to calling her girlfriend after such a god-awful, irritating day. She had nothing to tell her. And besides, another task was waiting.

Thank you, Martin. I can tell it won't be long before I start having major problems with my girlfriend. Consultant – yeah, right!

She opened the windows to let in the evening air, though it was hardly any cooler outside. A quiet atmosphere reigned in the building. She put the television on low, popped a pizza in the microwave, then crossed the living room in her pyjamas and sat down at her Mac.

She blew on the pizza to cool down the burning cheese, took a swallow of gin and tonic, and started typing.

Espérandieu had sent her a photograph of the letters ‘JH' which Martin had found carved into the tree trunk. She opened a second window, typed Marsac into Google maps, switched to satellite view and zoomed in on the north shore of the lake until she reached maximum enlargement. It was blurry, so she backtracked until three centimetres equalled fifty metres. She moved the cursor along the shore. Seen from above, some of the houses were veritable little castles: tennis courts, swimming pools and bathhouses, outbuildings, wooded parks, jetties on the lake for dinghies or motorboats, even greenhouses and children's playgrounds. There were only a dozen houses: the inhabited area of the lake was no longer than two kilometres. Marianne Bokhanowsky's house was the last one before the woods expanded into a forest that stretched for miles.

She moved the cursor until she found a road running through the forest, roughly 200 metres from the western edge of Marianne's garden. It was shaped like the letter J: the upper edge pointed north and the descending loop faced west. There was a parking area, with something that looked like two picnic tables, in the middle of the loop. She was willing to bet that Hirtmann had set off from there. Because the image was poorly defined and the foliage was dense she could not see whether there was a path. She decided to go and take a look the next day, if the usual troublemakers stayed calm despite the heat. The CSIs had explored the area around the stream: according to Espérandieu they hadn't found anything, but she doubted they had gone any further than that. She felt her excitement growing: there was a fresh lead. No need, now, to consult the information and files that others before her had pored over, data that had been sleeping in computers or gathering dust at the bottom of drawers for months: Martin had promised he would forward information to her as it came in. With the investigation in Marsac, he didn't have time to take care of it himself. And his two assistants were stuck with keeping watch over Margot.

This is your chance, my dear. It's up to you not to mess it up. You don't have a lot of time.

The cell in Paris hadn't sent anyone down there for the moment. One e-mail and two letters carved with a penknife into a tree trunk: that was a bit lightweight for them. But sooner or later Martin would stop having Margot watched, he'd wind up his investigation, and the police would take control again. If she could make a decisive breakthrough
before that, Martin was not the type to claim others' findings as his own. Her superiors would be angry that they hadn't been kept informed, but no one would be able to take away the fact that she'd made headway in a case where other investigators, dozens of them, had been working themselves into the ground for months.

What makes you think you're going to do it?
She spent the next two hours preparing her hack of the computer network at the prison where Lisa Ferney was interned. It took her a while, but in the end, she found herself with a made-to-measure variant of the famous Zeus software, the king of the Trojan horse programs (
The ancient world is never far away
, she mused). Zeus had already infected and besieged millions of computers the world over, including those of the Bank of America and NASA. The second manoeuvre consisted of finding a breach in the prison's computer network. But she had the e-mail address of the director himself. She had asked him for it before leaving. She incorporated the botnet into a PDF document, invisible to the Ministry of Justice's multiple firewalls and antivirus software, and then she moved on to phase three: social engineering, which consisted – here too, as in the famous scene from antiquity – in convincing the victim to activate the trap she had set. She sent the file to the director in an e-mail explaining that in the attachment there was some urgent information regarding an inmate. The only weakness in her method was having to use her own e-mail address. It was a calculated risk. If someone realised it was an attack, she could claim she too had been infected. When the director opened the document, Zeus would lodge itself in his hard drive system files without him realising a thing. He would open the file, see an error message, and he would either delete the e-mail or call her for an explanation. Too late. The program would already have made its nest.

Once it was installed, her personal version of Zeus would chart a map of the prison's computer system and she would receive it the moment the director went online. Ziegler could then read the map and target the files that interested her. She would place her order on the server, Zeus would read it, and at the next connection, Zeus would send her the files she had requested. And so on, until she had all the information she needed. Then she would send Zeus the order to self-destruct, and the software would vanish. There was no way anyone would ever know there had been an attack. No way to trace anything back to her.

When she had completed this task, she moved onto the next one. She felt a fleeting pang of guilt as she logged on to Martin's computer, but she consoled herself with the fact that she was acting on behalf of all of them, and that by getting her information directly from the source rather than waiting for him to pass it on she was saving time for everyone. Besides, it was his work computer. She supposed that if he had anything to hide, he would keep it for his computer at home. She went through his e-mail, then continued to the hard drive. Pouring the last drops of gin and tonic down her throat, she quickly scrolled through a number of files contained in C:\Windows, then frowned.
That software wasn't there last time
… Ziegler had an extraordinary memory for that sort of thing. Maybe it was nothing. She dug further and again raised an eyebrow:
another suspicious file.
She launched a scan of the hard drive and went to pour another gin and tonic. When she came back to her computer, she was puzzled by what she found. The Ministry of the Interior's security would not have let malicious software get through, and Martin wasn't the type to neglect security directives. If he had received a suspicious e-mail, or one coming from someone he didn't know, he would certainly not have opened it. So the only possibility was that the malware had been directly introduced by someone who was physically on-site.

She wondered how to proceed. She should warn Martin – but how could she do that without revealing how she had obtained the information? How would he react if he found out? She ran her fingers through her hair, pensively, her eyes riveted to the screen. First of all, she had to find out who had downloaded the software. She reached for a pad and pen and began to make a list of possibilities, but there weren't many:

In the last two cases, it was unlikely that Martin would have left them on their own long enough for them to be able to get anything done. She added one last possibility:

In the Darkness

At around eleven o'clock at night, an old man took his dog out and gave Servaz a suspicious look, which he then transferred to the broken lamppost two metres from the car. Servaz hoped he wasn't going to call the gendarmes. Not taking his eyes from the house, he made two calls, one to Vincent and the other to Samira. The window on the first floor was still lit.

Shortly before midnight, his attention sharpened when a silhouette walked past the window. Then that light went out and another one came on behind a small stained-glass window where the two wings met, which must have been where the staircase was. Then a third window was lit on the ground floor. Servaz twisted his neck to watch the entrance. A few seconds later he saw the light in the vestibule come on, then the front door opened and Francis's head and shoulders appeared above the hedge. The last light went off inside the house. Van Acker was going out.

Servaz slid lower into his seat as he watched Van Acker come down the garden, open the gate, and emerge on the pavement twenty metres from his bumper. He saw his erstwhile friend head towards his car, a red Alfa Romeo Spider roadster parked a bit further along. With his hand on the ignition, he waited for Francis to start the car and drive to the end of the street before he turned the key and pulled out. He told himself that if Van Acker was on the defensive, it would be difficult to follow him without being noticed. But Van Acker hadn't seemed interested in what was going on in the street: he'd headed straight for the car without once looking around him.

Servaz came to the end of the street in time to see the car on his right, turning left
100
metres further on. He accelerated and turned at the same spot. Ahead of him, the roadster took the rue du 4 Septembre as far as the place Gambetta, and then headed southeast.
As he drove past the church, Servaz saw a student vomiting in the shadow of the presbytery; two schoolmates were waiting for him, laughing. The Spider sped past the lowered iron shutters of the little shopping streets, bouncing over the cobblestones, then round the fountain and onto the D939. He was leaving town. Servaz followed suit. The full moon shone on the dark wooded hillsides, and after a long straight line, the road went uphill and began to wind through the woods. Servaz kept a good distance, and he regularly lost the two rear lights before seeing them again as he came out of a bend. His GPS told him there would be no crossroads for four kilometres, so it would be useless to stay within sight, but Van Acker was driving fast and he must be careful not to allow too much distance between them.

It was obvious that Van Acker enjoyed testing the performance of his sports car, and he was driving well above the speed limit. Francis had never given a damn about the rules – except the ones that he himself established.

The road went up and downhill, winding like a snake. They were going so fast that the wheels of the Jeep tossed up dead leaves and gravel at every turn. Servaz got the impression that they must be audible from miles around. In the beam of the headlights he could see that the woods were getting thicker. From time to time he saw the full moon, but most of the time it was hidden by the vault of greenery. Twice, maybe three times, Servaz thought he saw headlights in his rearview mirror – but he was focused on what was happening in front of him, not behind.