Brian Freemantle: The Predators

Pieter Lascelles said the postponement was unfortunate: his friends had been looking forward to it.

‘It won’t be for long,’ Felicite promised. ‘You’ll love what I’ve found in Namur. An actual medieval castle, with turrets and towers. And dungeons!’

‘How long?’ asked the surgeon.

‘A couple of weeks, that’s all.’

She gave the same reply to Georges Lebron. The priest said: ‘We’ll wait before we choose someone then. We don’t want to attract attention.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Felicite. ‘Do that.’

Hans Doorn, the Namur estate agent with whom Felicite had agreed the rental of what was, in fact, a sixteenth-century chateau, said he hoped it was only a postponement. Felicite reminded him that he already had the deposit. Doorn, reassured, hoped to hear from her soon. Felicite promised he would.

The ambassador’s study was overcrowded with people and wide-awake nightmares no one wanted or knew how to confront.

The very worst, obviously, was the every-parent horror of James and Hillary McBride. The ambassador was hunched at his enormous desk, all courtesy forgotten, his bird-like, sharp-featured, strident-voiced wife close beside him, her hand on his shoulder in what everyone mistook for reassurance. It was, in fact, to urge the man on. It was also the closest they had physically been to each other, publicly or privately, for years. And the first occasion for an equally long time that they’d come together with anything like an agreed purpose, apart from their consuming political ambitions.

Paul Harding, the portly, stray-haired resident FBI station chief, was moving jerkily about the room. He was engulfed by the scale of his own problem: just three years – three miserable fucking years! – from retirement from a damage-free Bureau career and his world was threatened with cosmic destruction. Just one misstep – the tiniest mistake – was all it would need.

William Boles accepted he had already been vaporized, despite having done everything strictly according to the book from the tyre-punctured car: being entirely blameless was no defence in an hysterical scapegoat hunt. That was in the book, too: just unwritten.

He’d explained this philosophy to Claude Luc on their nervous way back to the embassy, and the bewildered Belgian had already warned his wife that the job of a lifetime was probably over.

Harry Becker, the security dispatcher who’d taken Boles’s call, had four times lied unwaveringly that he had not made the confusing duplicate call to the school. He was ready to go on denying it, although he knew he wouldn’t survive.

Lance Rampling, the crew-cut, normally energetic CIA officer, hadn’t yet contributed to the discussion, for once not wanting to attract attention to himself. He wasn’t sure what the pecking order was in this situation and until he got guidance from Washington he was going to keep his head well below the parapet.

‘Let’s go through it one more time: we could have missed something,’ said McBride desperately.

‘I don’t think we have, sir,’ said Elliot Smith. The legal attache was a late arrival, behind all those actually involved whom McBride had assembled personally to cross-examine, to find culprits. The lawyer wasn’t yet endangered but he still wasn’t comfortable: when shit hit the fan it sprayed everywhere.

Burt Harrison, the chief of mission, was thinking the same thing, although not in such crude terms. As gently as possible, not wanting to cause Hillary McBride any further distress – although the woman actually wasn’t showing any – the plump career diplomat said: ‘I think it’s time we accepted it’s not a good situation.’

‘Five hours,’ agreed McBride dully, an unnecessary reminder. He was a large, beetle-browed, intimidating man who wore a thin moustache and an overly sweet cologne. Neither suited him. His bulk was exaggerated by the closeness of his wife. She was normally a neat, perfectly kept and preserved chatelaine of the embassy empire, colour-coordinated clothes never creased, scarlet nails impeccably polished, expertly tinted hair lacquered in wave-frozen ridges. Now the hair was disarrayed and her crumpled blouse had pulled free from her skirt on her left hip. She was chain-smoking the extra-long cigarettes she favoured.

‘It could still be a game,’ she said. ‘You know what she’s like. It’s the sort of thing she’d do.’

McBride abruptly emerged into the reality he had been trying to avoid, swinging from one extreme to the other. ‘No!’ he insisted brutally. ‘Someone’s got her. Some bastard…’ The self-absorption was unavoidable. ‘It’s to get at me.’

‘Get her back!’ said the woman, more an order than a plea.

‘We will,’ said Harding, unwilling to speak – to make any commitment he might not be able to keep – but knowing he had to because the ambassador’s wife was looking expectantly at him. Knowing, too, from the expression on McBride’s face that he hadn’t said the right thing.

‘Of course we’ll get her back!’ said the ambassador. ‘I don’t care what it costs or what it takes. Just do it! Now!’

‘I understand. Immediately,’ said Harrison, in too hurried agreement, wishing from the stare he got from McBride that he hadn’t spoken, either.

McBride went to speak but apparently changed his mind. Straightening further – recovering further – instead he said: ‘I’ve got to tell the President.’

It wasn’t an exaggerated, shock-affected remark. Political commentators in Washington DC had speculated openly that the Belgian ambassadorial posting was the first supposedly comfortable stepping stone to higher and more glittering rewards – maybe even the secretaryship of state – for the largest single financial contribution to the President’s successful first-term election. It certainly gave McBride personal access at the lift of a telephone.

Harding fervently thanked whatever guardian angel had prompted him to send an ‘alert-but-don’t-act’ message to the Bureau in Washington when he’d excused himself earlier to fetch the legal attache. He said: ‘I need to send a full report to Washington as soon as possible.’

‘What about the local authorities?’ asked the lawyer. It was Elliot Smith’s first embassy posting and he was uncomfortably aware that he looked too young for it, which was why he’d grown the moustache. Unfortunately, instead of giving the intended impression of maturity, it looked as if he’d glued it on for a costume party.

‘What about them?’ demanded McBride.

The young man steeled himself. ‘Belgium is a foreign country, part of the European Union. Neither the Bureau…’ he hesitated, indicating the silent Rampling ‘… nor the Agency has any operational jurisdiction here.’

Colour suffused McBride’s face and he rose further at his desk, as if physically meeting a challenge. ‘Are you telling me neither the Federal Bureau of Investigation nor the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America can do anything to find the missing daughter of one of its ambassadors?’

‘Don’t be damned ridiculous!’ said Hillary, in rare agreement with her husband. Another embassy tenet was that she was even more politically ambitious than her husband, to the extent of seeing the White House as a future mailing address. It was the only reason each remained married to the other, she to be the President’s wife, he to avoid the slightest electoral hindrance a divorce might create. Neither sought outside relationships. Totally focused political achievement was sex enough for both of them.

‘Of course every Bureau facility will be available,’ said Harding. ‘But Elliot’s right, sir: we’ve got no authority – no legal mandate – to work on the ground here. At best the Bureau is accepted as liaison