Brian Freemantle - The Predators

Throughout those first few moments Felicite Galan remained frozen, disbelieving, as the chaos exploded around her in what seemed a slow-motion tableau. Harding was already climbing the stairs before Felicite grabbed out, enveloping Mary Beth. ‘NO!’ came out as a screaming wail. So tightly was the woman clinging to the child, holding her against her own body, that Harding couldn’t immediately get his arms between the two, to pull Mary Beth away. He drove first his right then his left hand into them, careless of hurting either, at last dragging Mary Beth partially free.

The child was screaming, in pain from being pulled between two adults and fear at all the noise and people. As she began to lose her grip on Mary Beth, Felicite freed her right hand and clawed out, hysterically shouting: ‘Mine! She’s mine!’ She missed gouging Harding’s eyes by a fraction too difficult for surgeons later to calculate, but still marked him for life, so deeply did she rake her nails down the American’s face from cheek to chin. The agony drove Harding back, making him loosen his hold, but only by one hand. Which he smashed, as hard as he could, into Felicite’s face only inches away, feeling and hearing the sharply defined nose crush under his fist. The woman gurgled, falling backwards, finally releasing Mary Beth.

A green-masked man wearing a matching green tunic that ended at his waist, below which he was naked, ran towards the main door yelling: ‘It’s a trap! It’s a trap!’

McCulloch said: ‘I know. I’m part of it,’ and doubled the man up with just one forearm side-swipe.

‘Let me out!’ wheezed the man.

‘I will if you tell me where all the children are,’ said McCulloch.

‘In the party room,’ groaned the man. ‘Two upstairs, in the first bedroom.’

‘I tell lies,’ said McCulloch, hitting him again although not intending to break the man’s jaw, which he did. He fractured two of his own knuckles as well. Wim no need any longer to keep the door open the Texan took the stairs two at a time, leaping over the moaning Felicite, and found a boy and a girl dressed as wood nymphs cowering in the first bedroom. ‘We’re going home,’ he said, scooping them up. Both began to fight him. The girl wet herself.

McCulloch held one child under each arm as he plunged back down the stairs. The groaning Felicite made what could have been a gesture to trip him but McCulloch kicked past.

Only when he got out into the forecourt was it established that the children he had rescued were Robert Flet and Yvette Piquette, the two snatched in Eindhoven. Blake had found a boy, later identified as Jacques Blom, a nine-year-old who had disappeared the previous day in Lille, in the party room. He, like the other two, was dressed as a wood nymph. All three were immediately handed over to a combined Belgian/American medical team.

Hillary McBride was refusing to surrender Mary Beth. She knelt in the very centre of the forecourt, crying and repeating: ‘Oh, my darling! My own darling!’

What else she said was drowned by the arrival of another helicopter, although it landed further away from the chateau than the others had done. McBride ran from it, arms in the air. He threw himself down to the kneeling woman and child, embracing Mary Beth as best he could without including Hillary. ‘I got you back, darling! I got you back.’

From between her parents Mary Beth said: ‘I want to go back inside and take this silly costume off. It’s got her blood on it, I’ve got some new clothes. I like them.’

Claudine was at the entrance to the chateau when the swollen-faced, bloodied woman was led out. She said: ‘You didn’t win after all, Felicite. You were never going to. I was never going to let you.’

Felicite took away the surgical dressing she had pressed to her face and spat, bloodily, but it missed.

‘Christ, you’re ugly,’ said Claudine.

A total of thirty-three men, including the man at the gatehouse, were arrested at the chateau and three more at the outside road block. Felicite Galan was the only woman. Among them were two tax inspectors, unknown to each other, another priest and a police inspector, from Lille. The gunshot had been an attempt by an airline pilot to kill himself. He failed but the bullet lodged in his brain, destroying the left lobe and his mentality.

The finding of the medical team, later confirmed at Namur hospital, was that none of the children had been sexually abused, although all of them, apart from Mary Beth McBride, were severely traumatized.

‘Makes you believe in miracles, doesn’t it?’ said Blake.

‘Only just,’ said Claudine. ‘They’ll still need a lot of counselling.’

‘Bastards!’ said the man. ‘At least we got them.’

‘There’re still too many left,’ said Claudine.

A disgruntled Henri Sanglier had to share the platform and the limelight with McBride and his wife, Miet Ulieff and the police chiefs of Brussels and Namur for the following day’s press conference. McBride described the operation as a brilliant example of international police co-operation and Ulieff said it proved the worth of an organization like Europol. A very dangerous, cross-border crime conspiracy preying upon children had been irrevocably smashed. Proceedings against those detained would take months, maybe even years. Hillary McBride said that although her daughter had been recovered completely unharmed she intended taking the child back to America to recuperate from what had been a horrifying experience, and thanked the media for the restraint she knew she could expect them to show towards the child.

Claudine didn’t attempt to contact Rosetti until after the weekend. When she failed to get a response from his apartment and found his answering machine turned off she called the medical division and was told that he’d taken leave for personal reasons, with no indication of a return date.

She was mildly unsettled by Blake’s dinner invitation but saw no reason to refuse. By coincidence he chose the restaurant by the lake to which Rosetti had taken her the first time they had gone out together.

‘It all got a bit hectic towards the end,’ he said. ‘How’s Hugo?’

‘He’s away, in Rome. His wife’s ill.’ Why was she offering explanations again?

‘Seriously?’

‘She won’t get better.’

‘Poor guy.’

‘Yes.’

‘You told me in Brussels you were lonely.’

‘Yes,’ she said again.

‘No reason why we shouldn’t be friends, is mere?’

‘No.’

‘Enjoy ourselves, without any serious commitment?’

‘No.’

‘Unless we wanted a serious commitment, that is.’

Why not? Claudine asked herself. The situation with Hugo was never going to resolve itself. And she’d decided she wasn’t going to wait for ever. ‘Why don’t we, just for a change, stop trying to analyse it and do just that. Enjoy ourselves?’

It was the third week of Rosetti’s absence – and Claudine’s affair with Blake – that the rumour began. Claudine heard it first from Kurt Volker, whose predilection for surfing into other people’s secret places made him a natural gossip. She was curious that he hadn’t already tiptoed down some darkened electronic alley to confirm it.

The Europol Commission did that at the beginning of the fourth week, in a formal announcement of Henri Sanglier’s resignation. It was timed to coincide with the Paris press conference at which Sanglier appeared flanked by Roger Castille and Guy Coty. Francoise, looking the epitome of French chic, was with him. There was a hugely enlarged photograph of Sanglier’s father being decorated by de Gaulle as a backdrop to remind television viewers of the family honour and Sanglier made an impressive vow to maintain that honour in a political career that had been declined by his father but he had decided to pursue. It was the cue for Castille to denounce the corruption of the present government that he would sweep aside in the coming election. Henri Sanglier, his intended Justice Minister, would be in the vanguard of every fight against crime, as he had been as the most famous of Europol’s governing commissioners.