Brian Freemantle - The Predators

‘No,’ declared Sanglier. No going back, he realized.

‘I repeat that I do not intend any offence,’ said Castille. ‘But neither do I intend to allow any risk to my election. Are you prepared for the party secretariat to investigate your past fully, to confirm that assurance independently?’

He had to take the risk about his father. What about Francoise? She was by far the greater danger, prowling too many public places like a bitch permanently on heat. Could he control her – persuade her to control herself – with the lure of being the wife of a government minister? Close to being an unrealistic question, he forced himself to admit. There’d been enough to lose – quite apart from the Sanglier reputation – when he was commissioner in Paris before the Europol appointment, and neither consideration had curbed her. It wasn’t Francoise or his father that gave him pause. Rather it was his determination to speak and act in every circumstance as they would expect, to prevent any doubt. Despite Castille’s caveat, they would expect him to be affronted. ‘Your apparent need to do so hardly fits with undertakings of personal honesty that we’ve pledged between ourselves.’

‘It fits with my intention to establish an administration above reproach,’ said Castille, a prepared retort.

‘ Do you object?’ said Bigot.

‘Of course not,’ said Sanglier. ‘I’m prepared to cooperate in any way.’

‘That’s reassuring,’ said Coty. ‘It’s going to give me great pleasure getting to know the son of a man I greatly admired.’

It was mid-afternoon before the meal ended. They parted with effusive handshakes and assurances of how much each was looking forward to working with the other.

Bigot was the first to speak after Sanglier left. ‘It’s a coup. And not just for the Sanglier name. His wife was a Dior model: spectacular woman. There’ll be a lot of good publicity around the two of them. We could maybe build them up as the perfect couple.’

Kurt Volker tracked the third message.

He wasn’t suffering any hangover from the previous night and was actually early at his embassy-linked terminals when the e-mail was delivered. Because he’d established a program of as many connections to Mary Beth McBride as possible the sender address instantly registered, which gave him at least forty seconds to follow backwards the stepping stones between sender and embassy before the disconnection.

Claudine and Blake arrived at their police headquarter offices as it was happening, unaware of the potential breakthrough until being beckoned urgently into the computer room by one of the early shift Belgian operators ploughing through the renewed incoming deluge prompted by the previous night’s TV appearance.

Several other operators had abandoned their stations, crowding round the German, but even their excitement was subdued. Volker himself appeared quite relaxed, although his hands were darting with astonishing coordination between the keyboards of three terminals in a semicircle in front of him. Claudine was once more reminded, as she had been on their first assignment together, of a theatre act to which she had been taken as a child to watch a man perform simultaneously upon three pianos. Completing the impression, Volker was humming, at first tunelessly but then something vaguely Wagnerian. No one else was making any sound.

Claudine had no idea what she was watching: didn’t try, even, to read the words and the instructions that kept appearing, becoming fainter each time, upon the main screen in front of the German. At one stage, like the theatre pianist, Volker operated his central keyboard with his left hand and with his other punched keys on the board to his right, conjuring e-mail addresses on to the connected screen.

‘Bah!’ he exclaimed, in final frustration, when the screen directly in front of him remained blank after the message faded. ‘Lost him!’

He spun the swivel chair, scattering the other operators, to face Claudine and Blake. ‘They’d buried themselves in at least four different systems, moving just as I thought in source-covering sequence from one to the other…’ He stabbed a finger at the last address on the side screen. ‘That’s where I lost them… at least I think I did. There’s an outside chance – a very outside chance – it could be where they’re operating from.’

‘Where is it, for Christ’s sake!’ demanded Blake urgently.

Volker turned another revolution, accessed INEX, and typed in the address. At once the screen filled with a blank home page of a computer cafe in Menen, on the Belgian-French border. ‘It would certainly be easy,’ said Volker, still looking at his screen. ‘You can be quite anonymous in places like this. You just go in, get allocated a terminal to surf wherever you want and simply walk away after you’ve paid.’

‘Get me the rest,’ demanded Blake, hurrying from the room.

Claudine followed, accepting that apart from analysing the latest message she was largely superfluous. And she didn’t hurry with the message.

Needing the operation-initiating authority of the Belgian Justice Ministry Blake first telephoned Jean Smet and asked for total surveillance to be placed upon the Menen cafe. Before disconnecting he cancelled that morning’s scheduled conference with the promise to reconvene at the already arranged afternoon time unless a new development intervened. He gave the same undertaking – and account – to Andre Poncellet and Paul Harding, in that order.

Finally Blake tried to reach Sanglier. Told the commissioner was unavailable, he sent a full account to the man’s secretariat, with a request for Sanglier to contact him as soon as possible.

By the time Blake finished, Volker had located the Internet-linked computers through which Mary Beth’s abductors had ridden Sinbad-like to reach the US embassy home page. From the specialized Menen cafe the message had travelled unseen and unsuspected to the Foreign Ministry system in Bonn. From there it had been sent to a Trojan Horse unknowingly installed in the mainframe computer of the American Express office at the foot of the Spanish Steps, in Rome. From there it had been automatically routed to the flagship of the Kempinski hotel chain on Berlin’s Kurfurstendamm. The last stage from there had been to the school on the rue du Canal from which Mary Beth McBride had disappeared, six days earlier, whose e-mail address Volker had put on to his search program.

Claudine realized her own need to talk to Sanglier had become secondary in the light of the morning’s developments, but remained determined to insist he use his authority to stop the nonsense degenerating any further. She wasn’t interested in playing silly games and using her knowledge of the tap to their own advantage. They had to recover a child and to achieve that a paranoid man had to be removed before he caused God knew how much damage.

By midday Blake’s flurry of activity had eased. Smet telephoned that the computer outlet was under intense observation and Volker had independently accessed the cafe’s system and attached tracers programmed to react to the embassy’s e-mail address.

Blake was at Claudine’s shoulder when she at last spread the print-out of the latest communication between them. It was written in two lines and read: WE DETERMINE HOW AND WHEN. YOU WAIT AND OBEY.

‘We’re not going to get much from that, are we?’ he said.

‘Enough,’ said Claudine gravely. ‘Maybe more than enough.’

‘What?’

‘I need to think more about it,’ Claudine said. ‘Make sure I’ve got all there is to get.’

Nothing occurred to alter the scheduled afternoon session and by the time they assembled disappointment had begun to erode the initial excitement of the cyberspace chase. Volker explained, stage by stage, stopping short only of his newly installed monitor of the cafe’s inward and outward traffic. As if on cue Smet said the Justice Ministry had asked Belgacom to suggest any electronic check that might be possible on the Menen outlet, completing the irony by pointing out that to attach an eavesdropping facility would be illegal, although they were seeking a ruling from a High Court judge. The physical surveillance was absolute, insisted the lawyer. Computer literate plainclothes officers had been drafted in to use the facility during the day, taking the observation actually inside the cafe to identify regular users, and there were rotating squads watching from outside. A separate team had been assigned to investigate the registered owners and all their known associates. If it was established the cafe’s use was innocent the owners and all its regular users would be specifically questioned about the computerized pictures. The cafe was on the outskirts of a pedestrian and shopping precinct and all security camera film was being collected, again for comparison with Volker’s digital images.