Brian Freemantle - The Predators

‘I can’t be bothered to help people get off listening to imagined James Bond exploits.’

‘Weren’t they James Bond exploits?’

He held his wine glass in both hands, staring at her over its rim. She was too strongly featured to be a beautiful woman but there was a very positive attractiveness he found intriguing. He liked the way she wore her black hair short, cut into her neck, and how the grey eyes met him, in neither challenge nor flirtation: if there was a message it was that they were equals. Strictly professional, he thought, remembering her remark at their first meeting. ‘I didn’t drink vodka martini, get seduced by any big-breasted virgins or drive a car that fired rockets.’

Claudine recognized the self-parody avoidance. She went only partially along with it. ‘But it was one bloody great gamble?’

Blake had been half smiling, inviting her to join in the mockery. Abruptly he became serious. ‘There was an attempt on you, during the serial killing investigation? An attack? I read the archives, after Sanglier’s briefing.’

‘I got trapped into some publicity: French police wanting their pictures on television. Mine was there too…’ Claudine slightly lifted her left arm, along which the knife scar ran from shoulder to wrist. ‘That’s why I have to wear long sleeves.’ The advice was to wait another year before considering cosmetic surgery. She looked steadily at him. ‘We were talking about you, in Ireland?’

‘No we’re not.’

There were mental scars and she guessed they were deep. ‘You’re not showing any signs.’

‘It took a while to get rid of them: to get rid of a lot.’

‘Inpatient?’

‘For three months.’

‘What about medication now?’

‘I carry it, as a precaution.’

‘Worried about the pressure of this?’

‘I don’t think so. It’ll be a lot different from what I did before.’

‘Sure you don’t want to talk about it?’

‘Positive. It’s locked away.’

Was there guilt, as well as stress: the sort of eroding remorse that a mentally well balanced person would suffer if he’d had to go as far as killing someone? Angrily she stopped the reflection: she was behaving – thinking at least – like his cocktail party interrogators. ‘If anything starts to become unlocked and you think I can help, professionally, while we’re here…’

‘It won’t,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve thrown away the key. But thanks.’

Claudine knew she should move on but she didn’t want to. It was impossible for her to make any proper judgement without knowing what he’d gone through, but in her professional opinion traumas weren’t adjusted to by sealing up the experience and pretending it never happened. She’d lost a husband who’d thought he could handle a mental problem like that. ‘How was it for your family?’

‘There isn’t one. No wife, current or prior. Only child. Both parents dead. I was well selected.’

There was bitterness, so the door wasn’t as securely bolted as he would have liked to imagine. ‘Selected?’ she challenged. ‘You would have had to have volunteered, surely?’

‘I did,’ he admitted.

‘So you got yourself into whatever it was. You weren’t pushed into it unwillingly.’

Blake nodded ruefully. ‘Thank you, doctor.’ There was a grin, to show there was no offence. ‘So far this has all been a bit one-sided, hasn’t it?’

Claudine didn’t mention it was through being an English representative at the Lyon-based Interpol that her father had met her mother. Nor did she mention that her father’s archival investigation into Sanglier’s father’s wartime heroism had created the fluke she was now convinced formed the basis of the man’s uneven and at times bewildering attitude towards her. She talked of her husband’s death but not that it had been suicide from work-stressed depression she’d been too professionally preoccupied even to notice. And she didn’t say anything about Hugo Rosetti.

‘And what about Kurt Volker?’ he demanded. ‘You seemed very keen to get him aboard?’

‘Kurt you’ve got to see for yourself!’

Blake regarded her with raised eyebrows. ‘Sorry if I’m venturing on a personal situation!’

‘You’re not. Not that way. Just wait, if this comes to anything. How do you want to handle tomorrow’s meeting?’ she asked, in a suddenly decided test. There’d been some distracting, who’s-in-charge problem with the French detective with whom she’d worked during the serial killing investigation.

He shrugged. ‘According to all the warnings about how Europol is viewed it looks as if it’s going to be you and me against the world. I think it should be a double act, don’t you?’

It wasn’t the reply Claudine had expected but she liked it. She thought she was going to enjoy working with this man. Only, of course, professionally.

‘Your fault!’ screamed Hillary.

‘You agreed Mary Beth should go to a local school,’ McBride yelled back.

‘I didn’t want it.’

‘It’s too late to talk like that now.’

‘If she’s dead – if anything happens to her – it’ll be your fault. On your conscience.’

John Norris and his squad swept through the American embassy with the Washington-backed force and disruption of a Force Nine hurricane. By 8 a.m. the following morning – less than twelve hours after their arrival in Brussels – the Boulevard du Regent legation as well as the official residence of James McBride was totally isolated, electronically as well as physically.

No telephone, fax or e-mail communication could be received or sent without passing through the specially installed, twenty-four-hour-manned communications centre complete with its own roof-mounted satellite dish.

All incoming letter mail, including the contents of the diplomatic bag, had first to be opened and examined in an adjoining room, transformed into a sorting office: Norris’s only concession was to agree to the demand from Burt Harrison, the chief of mission, for a member of his staff to be present when the supposedly inviolate diplomatic exchange was sifted.

Some of the thirty embassy staff whom Norris considered sufficiently senior to be blanket-monitored had been awakened overnight at their homes to agree to listening and recording devices being installed on their telephones and to their incoming personal packages and letters going through the embassy sorting procedure.

The assessment in the FBI’s much more comprehensive personal file upon Harry Becker, which was faxed in its entirety from Washington, was of a completely responsible and absolutely competent operative, but after only fifteen minutes’ interrogation by Norris the man broke down and confessed to lying about duplicating the call to Mary Beth McBride’s school. Upon Norris’s authority Becker was immediately suspended from duty but not as quickly repatriated, kept in Belgium – although virtually under embassy house arrest – to enable further investigation into his local associations and habits during his posting in the country. Norris personally briefed five of the agents who had arrived with him before assigning them to the task with the warning to forget Becker was – or had been – a colleague. ‘Whatever happens he’s finished. He isn’t any longer one of us: he doesn’t qualify.’

The full FBI evaluation of James Kilbright McBride was of a man fulfilling every requirement to be a United States’ ambassador, with nothing questionable in his prior personal or professional background. Norris responded with an ‘Action This Day’ priority demand for the armament-dealing background to be gone into again in greater depth.

Norris’s encounter with Lance Rampling, which the CIA station chief had entered believing it to be a meeting of equals, lasted precisely ten minutes. Rampling emerged, white-faced from a combination of fury and shocked bewilderment, to demand from Harding whether the sonofabitch was fucking real or not. Harding said he thought John Norris was a mutant alien from another planet, although he’d prefer not to be quoted.