The patience and immobility of the two he was aware of their very lack of distinct or direct threat was more intimidating than action would have been. The summer storm splashed from the umbrella over the table as well as from the awning on to the cobbles.
He could leave now, of course go back to his office in the Commission casually, indifferently, as if he had never noticed the two men. After all, he couldn't barge into whichever conference suite they were using in the Hotel Amigo for their meeting. He'd seen them all arrive, including his own Commissioner, Etienne Rogier, whom he'd followed through the Brussels rush hour. Bryan Coulthard and David Winterborne from Aero UK, their equivalents from the French plane maker Balzac-Stendhal, various functionaries, the Commissioner for Urban Development he was something of a surprise but it probably meant nothing except more lobbying and assorted minions, hurrying under black umbrellas, the skirts of their trench coats or crinoline-full raincoats flapping and flying around their legs.
There had been no secrecy about their arrival… so why was he being watched? He tried to laugh off his mounting nerves as childish pique at the unfairness of it. It had been stupid to come — he'd thought it witty at the time, something to amuse Marian Pyott and to photograph them going into the hotel. That must have been how he had drawn their attention to himself.
The rain drummed on the sodden canvas over his head. A wet raincoat brushed his cheek as someone blundered past into the interior of the cafe, a look of surprise on his face as he saw Lloyd sitting outside in a rainstorm. He tried not to look at the parked car, or towards the windows of the cafe. Caught in the crossfire, he tried to joke. He thought the man in the car was using a mobile phone. He felt frightened, lost in a dark wood. Dante. Why Dante now, for God's sake? The wipers flicked again. Yes, he was using a phone. Summoning others?
And what had he seen, anyway? There was no hidden message, no secret pattern to be discerned. What had been worth attracting the attention of these people, whoever they were? They were not Commission security people, he was certain.
All he'd discovered was that EU Commissioners and a Euro MP for an
English constituency were meeting prominent businessmen. Great! They did it every day feathering their nests, aligning their post-Commission futures on the boards of major companies, creating their grand designs, dreaming their unrealisable dreams… Snouts in the trough or heads in the air, it was all so usual and expected.
His suspicions of the previous day, his sense of his Commissioner's nervous attempts at secrecy and deflection, now seemed ridiculous.
The man in the car, still on the phone, worried him to an unexpected and unnatural extent… '… about to piss himself, poor little sod."
There was a hard, barking laugh in Jessop's ear more like a dismissive cough than amusement.
"What's he up to, anyway?"
He flicked the wipers again and glimpsed Lloyd's slumped, tense figure through the rain. Fraser, talking to him now, was warm and dry in the hotel, unlike that poor pillock who thought he was playing detective or something… What was he taking pictures for? For whom? It hadn't done him much good, he was practically crapping himself with worry now, ever since Fraser had told him and Cobb to show themselves and their interest. Declaring their surveillance had frightened this bloke but not driven him off. So, what was he doing, and who was he doing it for?
The papers? Fraser wouldn't like that.
"What does the great white chief say?" Jessop asked.
"He's thinking."
"He's always doing that."
"Unlike you, Jessop." Fraser was a deeply unpleasant person. But he paid handsomely. At least, his boss did. Mind you, the stupidity of holding a very secret meeting in one of the best hotels in Brussels… not clever. But it was typical of Brussels bureaucrats if they were going to be seduced, they wanted the roses and the candlelit dinner and the best wine before they got into bed with you. They couldn't pass up a free lunch in the plushest surroundings for the life of them.
"Do you want us just to sit here, then?"
"If he moves, you move. Otherwise, sit tight. When he does go, find out who he is and who he represents. And don't bother me again until he does move."
Jessop put down the phone. He'd always disliked Fraser. Most people in the service had done. He was dangerous to be around because he didn't look after you.
In the private sector, Fraser was, if possible, even more dismissive and contemptuous of his subordinates. On the other hand, there was a certain new and definite ruthlessness attached to work in the private sector, after the restraints of the intelligence service. You didn't have prissy old farts like Aubrey running the show, forever worrying about the moral dimension and the weight of one death or more. A facility in the arrangement of untraceable, unsuspicious accidents was much more recognised and rewarded even if the game plan remained as mysterious and remote as ever. Fraser bullshit ted with the best, but he didn't know much, either.
Jessop lit a cigarette and idly flicked the wipers once more. There he still was, poor little bugger. Moving closer every minute to being turned off, he was… They'll follow me the moment I get up to go, Lloyd realised with a numbing fear. He seemed to look down on his hunched, immobile form from a height, seeing the ridiculous loneliness and isolation of his figure under the drenched table umbrella, the rain still lashing down, the parked car, the openness and betraying space of the Grand' Place at the end of the street. They'll follow me back to the office, back home, they'll know who I am… Rain had soaked his raincoat collar, that of his jacket, his shirt. He shivered, the coldness coming from inside him. Oh you idiot, you bloody idiot-!
Why had he thought it so clever to ring Marian Pyott, why had he denied, when she'd called him only hours ago, that there was anything wrong, that this meeting had nothing to do with her suspicions… when he had already begun to suspect that she might be right, after all? Her suspicions had put him here, she had seduced his curiosity and left him between the man in the car and the man in the cafe and at the mercy of whoever was on the other end of the phone.
Oh, shit It didn't happen. Not here, not like this, not that kind of thing… The flick of the wipers. The man had finished on the phone, he was smoking a cigarette. Before rain slid down the windscreen again, he saw a white hand wave. Instinctively, he turned his head.
Beside the clouded face in the cafe window was another waving white hand.
Both of them were waving at him Fraser caught the mood of the meeting as clearly as he would have sensed a threat to himself. His impressions were like listening to a bug that had developed an intermittent fault, but the quiet, suppressed desperation of the people in the conference room was evident. Their features and hunched furtiveness were unmistakable.
The door closed again. Find out, he had been ordered, who he is then find out his interest in this meeting. Fraser stood in the corridor that smelt of new carpet and recently tinted walls. Ten yards or so away, a maid fussed at her trolley of cleaning fluids, fresh towels and linen.
His mobile phone trilled in the pocket of his raincoat.
"Fraser."
"He's on the move." It was Jessop.
"You want us to follow him, right?"
"I want an ID, quick. Photograph, address, background."
"Is he important?"
"You tell me by lunchtime."
He snapped shut the mobile phone and leaned back against the wall. The unexpected surveillance worried him because it was unexpected and from an amateur. Jessop was certain of that. But not newspaper or TV. Yet there had been photographs… Fraser rubbed his smooth, blunt chin.