A Foreign Country. Charles Cumming
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‘… but Nice is like a theme park.’
‘It has no soul,’ she offered quickly.
Kell contemplated this and said: ‘Precisely, yes. No soul.’
A long line of rush-hour traffic was held at a set of lights and they crossed the Promenade des Anglais, pushed together by two teenage boys running in the opposite direction. A hooker in stilettos and a black leather skirt was climbing out of a car on the nearside lane of the central reservation.
‘There is nothing unusual on the SIM card,’ Elsa said, picking her way through a flock of mopeds. ‘I double-checked with Cheltenham.’
‘And the BlackBerry?’
‘It has been used to Skype.’
Of course. In the absence of a secure line, Skype was the spy’s first port of call: near-impossible to bug, tricky to trace. A BlackBerry in this context was no different to an ordinary computer: all Amelia would have needed was a cheap plastic headset. She had probably borrowed one from reception.
‘Do you know who she spoke to?’
‘Yes. Always to the same account, always the same number. Three different conversations. The Skype address is registered to a French email.’
‘Is there a name associated with it?’
‘It’s to the same person. The name is François Malot.’
‘Who is this guy?’ Kell asked aloud, coming to a halt. He had assumed that the question was rhetorical, but Elsa had other ideas.
‘I think I may have the answer,’ she said, looking like a student who has solved a particularly knotty problem. She reached into her bag, rummaging around for the prize. ‘You speak French, yes?’ she asked, passing Kell a printout of a newspaper report.
‘I speak French,’ he replied.
They were leaning on a balustrade, looking out over the beach, rollerbladers grinding past in the heat. The story, from Le Monde, reproduced the grisly facts of an attack in Sharm-el-Sheikh. Middle-class couple. Dream holiday. Married for thirty-five years. Brutally assaulted with knives and metal bars on a beach in Sinai.
‘Not such a nice way to die,’ she said, with graphic understatement. She took out a cigarette and lit it with her back to the wind.
‘Can I have one?’ Kell asked. She touched his hand and caught his eye in the flame of the lighter. Theirs was the sudden intimacy of strangers who find themselves in the same city, on the same job, sharing the same secrets. Kell knew the signs. He had been there many times before.
‘François Malot was their son,’ she said. ‘He lives in Paris. He has no brothers or sisters, no wife or girlfriend.’
‘Cheltenham told you this?’
Elsa reacted haughtily. ‘I do not need Cheltenham,’ she said, exhaling a blast of smoke. ‘I can do this kind of research on my own.’
He was surprised by the sudden flash of petulance but understood that she was probably keen to impress him. A good report back to London was always useful to a stringer.
‘So where did you get the information? Facebook? Myspace?’
Elsa turned and faced the beach. A man in a white shirt was making his way towards the sea, walking briskly in a straight line as though he intended to stop only when he reached Algeria. ‘From sources in France. Myspace is not so popular any more,’ she said, as if Kell was the last person in Europe not to know this. ‘In France they use the Facebook or the Twitter. As far as I can see, François does not have a social networking account of any kind. Either he is too private or he is too …’ She could not find the English word for ‘cool’ and used an Italian substitute: ‘Figo.’
An ambulance approached from the east, yellow lights strobing soundlessly through the fronds of the palm trees. Kell, since childhood, had felt an almost superstitious despair at the passing of an ambulance, and watched it accelerate out of sight with a feeling of dread in his gut.
‘Is there anything else?’ he asked. ‘Anything unusual on the BlackBerry?’
‘Of course.’ Elsa’s reply hinted at a bottomless reservoir of secret activity. ‘The user accessed the websites of two airlines. Air France and Tunisair.’
Kell remembered Amelia’s file, but could make no meaningful connection between her year as an au pair in Tunis and her sudden disappearance more than thirty years later. Was SIS secretly working on a leverage operation, possibly in conjunction with the Americans? Post-Ben Ali, Tunisia was ripe for picking. ‘Did she buy a flight?’
‘This is hard to say.’ Elsa frowned and ground out the cigarette, as if Marlboro was to blame. ‘It’s not precise, but there was a credit-card transaction of some kind with Tunisair.’
‘What was the name on the credit card?’
‘I do not know. No amount in the transaction, either. When there is encryption by a bank, everything is much more difficult. But I have passed all of the details that I have found to my contacts and I am sure that they will be able to track the identity.’
Kell tried to fit together the remaining pieces of the puzzle. The fact that Amelia had left her hire car in Nice indicated that she had almost certainly flown overseas. It seemed logical, given the footprints on her BlackBerry, that she had gone to Tunisia. But why? And where to? Long ago, SIS had kept a small station in Monastir. Or was she in Tunis itself? Elsa provided him with the answer.
‘There is one other thing that is vital,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘The mobile telephone of François Malot. My contacts have tracked it. It would seem that he is no longer in Paris. It would seem that he is taking a holiday in Tunisia. The signal has been triangulated to Carthage.’
15
Kell took Amelia’s BlackBerry and SIM back to the underground car park, replaced them in the boot of her hire car and returned to the Hotel Gillespie. He put the car keys back in the safe, ensured that the rest of the room remained as he had first found it, then booked a flight to Tunis on the Marquand laptop. By seven o’clock the following morning he was en route to Nice airport, dumping the Citroën at Hertz.
A French baggage handlers’ strike was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., but Kell’s flight took off shortly after ten o’clock and he had landed in the white heat of Tunis-Carthage less than an hour later. GCHQ were certain that François Malot was staying in Gammarth, an upmarket seaside suburb popular with package tourists, financiers and diplomats looking to escape the bustle of downtown Tunis. The signal from Malot’s mobile had been fixed to a short stretch of the Mediterranean coast in which two five-star hotels wrestled for space in an area adjacent to a nine-hole golf course. Malot could have been staying in either hotel. The first of them – the Valencia Carthage – had no record of a guest of that name in the register, but the second, the Ramada Plaza, which Kell called from a phone booth at Nice airport, was only too happy to connect him to Mr Malot’s room. Kell got the number of the room – 1214 – but hung up before the call was put through. He then rang back three minutes later, spoke to a different receptionist, and attempted to book a room of his own.
There was just one problem. It was high summer and the Ramada was full. At Tunis airport, Kell tried again, calling from the tourism desk in Arrivals in the hope that there had been a cancellation while he was in the air. The receptionist was adamant; no rooms would be free for at least four days. Might she suggest trying the Valencia Carthage hotel, just along the beach? Kell thanked her for the tip-off, called the Valencia a second time, and booked six nights full board on a Uniacke credit card.
The Valencia should have been half an hour by car from the airport but Kell’s taxi became congealed in thick traffic heading north-east towards the coast. Vehicles on the two-lane highway