Brian Freemantle: The Predators

…’ Seeing McBride’s colour deepen, he hurried on, speaking faster. ‘There’s only one requirement here: to get Mary Beth back. Safely. And quickly. So everything’s got to be done correctly from the very beginning. Trying to mount an investigation any other way will just obstruct things.’ He was pleased with the final, blurted reasoning: it would read well – sound well – at any later review.

Knowing he had to contribute, Rampling said: ‘I need to talk to Langley, obviously. A task force will have to be assembled.’

‘And pretty damned quick,’ agreed Hillary. ‘So far I’m not impressed with how you guys are treating this.’

McBride gave his wife an irritated side glance before switching his attention between the lawyer and the two intelligence officers. ‘Now listen up…’ he widened the audience to include Burt Harrison ‘… all of you. Listen good. If it’s necessary, diplomatically or for any other half-assed reason, to involve the Belgian police then do it. Do whatever you’ve got to do to find Mary Beth. But I want American investigators – Feds who know what they’re doing and know what’ll happen if they screw up – in charge of finding my baby. We all clear on that?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Harding and Rampling, in unison. Asshole, Harding thought.

The other two men nodded, not speaking.

It was mid-evening when the Brussels police commissioner, Andre Poncellet, reached Belgian Justice Minister Miet Ulieff at home. They met there within the hour.

‘This is the tenth child to disappear without trace in eighteen months,’ Ulieff said without preamble.

‘I don’t need reminding,’ protested Poncellet.

‘Then let me remind you of something else,’ said the politician, a normally urbane, white-haired man who’d replaced the previous Justice Minister because of the ineffective investigations. ‘Unless we get her back, safe and well, we won’t have jobs.’

‘I know that, too,’ said the police chief, a fat, asthmatic man who perspired easily. He was sweating and wheezing now.

Even before the emergency cabinet meeting that followed they decided there were overwhelming reasons for an investigation into the disappearance of an ambassador’s daughter to be headed by the European Union’s FBI, chief among them the need to spare themselves as much responsibility as possible if it ended in tragedy, which these sorts of cases invariably did.

‘But publicly we have to appear very much involved, insisted Ulieff.

‘We will be,’ promised Poncellet. ‘I’ll initiate all the obvious things before they arrive.’

Mary accepted she was uncertain – but definitely not frightened – but thought she was hiding it well. Where the woman had put her and the men in scary masks had come to look at her was like a real cell, in a prison, as if they were going to lock her up for a long time. Its total quietness unsettled her most, the walls and door so thick she couldn’t hear anyone outside until the flap snapped open and unknown eyes stared at her, as if she were a pet – like her rabbit, Billy Boy – in a cage. There was a bed, with blankets and sheets, and a toilet which she didn’t want to use in case anyone looked in when she was going. And a table, in the middle of the room, with food on it that the strangely giggling man, also masked, had brought a long time ago. It was cold meat, sliced sausage, but she didn’t want to eat it even though she was hungry because it might be drugged or poisoned. She’d read books about people – wicked uncles or mothers or witches – who drugged and poisoned children. She didn’t believe them, of course. They were just made-up stories, but what was happening to her wasn’t made up. It was real. Happening. She’d been kidnapped, like in the made-up stories. Although it had stopped bleeding her mouth hurt where the woman had hit her and she wanted to go home to her mother. Be in her own bed. She wouldn’t cry, though. She definitely wouldn’t cry. And she wouldn’t cheek the woman so much next time. She didn’t want to be hit again. It really did hurt. She slipped the brace off, to lessen the discomfort. She wanted very badly to make pee pee and knew she was going to have to, soon. She hoped mom remembered to feed Billy Boy.

He’d do it, decided Henri Sanglier. He accepted they would be using him, for his name, but then he would be using them – and his name – for the same purpose. It meant he would initially continue to live as he’d always lived, in the shadow of his father, but politics would give him the opportunity to establish his own public recognition. Europol had served its purpose, as he’d always intended it should. This one last case would be the bridge from one career to the other. No mistakes and no misjudgements, like the ones in the past, he warned himself. That’s all he had to be careful of.

Coincidentally Claudine Carter approached the elevator to the executive floor at the same moment as Peter Blake. He smiled, slightly uncertain, and said: ‘Sanglier?’

‘Yes.’ An assignment, not a review of a previous case!

‘Any idea what it is?’

‘No.’ It didn’t matter what it was, she thought, entering the lift ahead of the English detective with whom, presumably, she was going to be partnered. Whatever it was, it would be an investigation in which she could totally immerse herself to the exclusion of everything and anything else. She was blurring her self-imposed boundaries, she realized. She had been appointed to the FBI of the European Union because of her unquestionable brilliance as a criminal psychologist, an ability she guarded jealously. The most essentially observed protection was never to allow anything in her personal life to become a professional consideration. Now she was permitting it to happen. She was eager to submerge herself in her job, hoping to shed for as long as possible the frustration of being in love with a man whom religion and honour prevented from letting their relationship become anything more than platonic.

Claudine wedged herself into the corner of the elevator, facing the Englishman. Blake was a tall, heavy man with a lot of blond hair he still wore long, from the time he’d spent under cover on Special Branch secondment in Northern Ireland, for which he’d been promoted to Detective Chief Superintendent. He’d been the lead witness at a trial the prosecution claimed had virtually destroyed the IRA’s Army Council, and although he’d given his evidence anonymously and shielded behind screens he’d been transferred to Europol immediately afterwards for his own protection. It was understandable – although contrary to the homogeneous intention of a police organization empowered to operate anywhere in the European Union – that each of the fifteen nationalities formed its own social ghetto. Claudine was not antisocial, simply not a group person, but on the few occasions she’d been among the English crowd she’d twice heard Blake asked about infiltrating terrorist cells knowing just one mistake would be his death sentence. He’d avoided the questions, turning the conversation aside with an amusing anecdote against himself. As the lift started to ascend she wondered if he found The Hague – Holland itself – boring after the Irish experience. Certainly she couldn’t professionally detect inherent signs of stress. But it was fatuous to attempt a psychological assessment from their few brief encounters, automatic though it always was for her to try.

‘What’s Sanglier like?’

Claudine was known to be the only criminal psychologist in Europol to have worked operationally with the French commissioner and guessed she had been asked that question as many times as Blake had been pressed about Northern Ireland. ‘Likes to play by the rules. It’s a useful name to have when dealing with national police forces that resent a federal organization like ours, which all of them do.’