‘Was?’
‘Yes. He checked out two hours ago. A place on the Rue Jacob. He must have gone back there when we lost him. He got the receptionist to call him a taxi.’
‘Where was he going?’
‘The taxi company can’t reach the driver.’ She saw the disappointment on Isabelle’s face. ‘There’s more. We know the alias he’s using. It’s Pigot.’
‘Pigot?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t believe it.’ It was almost the exact name of Milraud’s Irish Republican customer – who had been gunned down attempting to escape from their hideout off the south coast of France. Calling himself after his dead colleague seemed a bad joke, unless Milraud was thumbing his nose at his pursuers.
Isabelle shook her head, trying to focus on what needed to be done. ‘I want the airlines contacted, and we need to check car rental agencies and the train stations.’
Madeline said mildly, ‘It’s all under way.’
‘Good,’ said Isabelle. ‘Could you ring my mother please? Ask her if she’ll keep Jean-Claude tonight. I’ll be here a while yet.’
Five minutes later Madeline came in again. ‘A Monsieur Pigot made a reservation on an Air France flight to Berlin. Business Class.’
‘That’s him all right,’ said Isabelle. Milraud had always liked the best; Seurat had once told her that his expenses had been legendary in the DGSE. ‘I want him arrested at the gate, and held at the airport until I get out there.’
‘Too late. The flight took off from Charles De Gaulle twenty minutes ago.’
Damn. Another tantalisingly close miss. But this time she knew exactly where Milraud was. ‘Get me the BfV on the phone – I want the Germans to be waiting for the plane when Milraud lands.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes. Book me on the first flight to Berlin in the morning.’ She paused for a moment, thinking of something. ‘Book two seats while you’re at it.’
She examined her options. What should she ask the Germans to do? Arrest Milraud? Martin Seurat would be delighted to lay hands on him but Liz would be worried that the trail to her case would go cold as a result. Milraud would be sure to have some plausible story about his meeting in the Luxembourg Gardens. So put him under surveillance instead? But did she dare risk losing him again?
Minutes later she was on the phone to her opposite number in the BfV, Germany’s security service, asking him to set up surveillance on an international arms dealer travelling under the name Pigot, who would land at Tegel in one hour. Photographs of the man were on their way. He was a former intelligence officer and highly surveillance-conscious.
Then she rang Martin Seurat.
Chapter 12
Hans Anspach of the BfV stifled a yawn as the flight information line on the board at Tegel airport flipped over. Air France 1134 from Paris had landed. Anspach signalled to his colleague, Pieter Dimitz, who was coming back from the terminal’s Starbucks with two cardboard cups of coffee in his hands. ‘You’d better dump those,’ he said.
The junior officer groaned. ‘Don’t tell me the flight’s on time.’
‘Yes. It’s just landed. And I bet our man will be one of the first through. Control has just told me that the French say he has no checked baggage on board.’
Anspach had been halfway home when the call had come, telling him to go to Tegel airport where a French arms dealer called Pigot would land at ten minutes past nine. Anspach and his hastily put together team were to follow Pigot wherever he went and stay with him till they were told to stand down. No reason was given at this stage, though according to the French he was likely to be alert for surveillance.
That probably means they screwed up and he saw them, thought Anspach grumpily. He was missing seeing his son’s school play and he was going to get hell from his wife when he eventually got home.
Sitting inconspicuously in a small interview room just behind the passport control desks, Gunter Beckerman was waiting for a buzzer to alert him that Pigot was at the passport desk. He would send a warning to Anspach’s phone, before following Pigot through Customs and into the Arrivals Hall.
There Anspach and Dimitz were taking up their positions. Dimitz wore a dark blue suit and had now put on a peaked cap. Holding a sign reading Herr Rossbach, he went to stand alongside the waiting chauffeurs next to the exit point from Customs.
Anspach stood further back at a newsstand, idly examining a copy of Der Spiegel. As he turned the pages he kept a deceptively casual eye on everyone emerging into the Hall. He wasn’t relying on Beckerman’s call to tell him the suspect was coming through, for it was perfectly possible that Monsieur Pigot might now have a different name, and a different passport, from those he had used to board in Paris.
His phone vibrated and he glanced down at its screen. Coming now. Brown leather coat, read the message attached to a photograph of a man in a leather coat and roll-neck sweater, carrying a laptop bag on one shoulder.
And then, not thirty seconds later, he spotted him.
Pigot was medium height, broad-shouldered, dressed in the smart casual clothes of a businessman. But, unlike a visiting businessman, he wasn’t carrying a suit bag, only the laptop case hanging from a shoulder strap. He was walking quickly – though not so quickly as to call attention to himself – and heading towards the far exit, under the sign for taxis. Anspach followed, knowing both Dimitz and Beckerman were behind him.
Outside, the sky was pitch-black, but the pavement was eerily illuminated by the series of sodium lights lining the front of the terminal’s façade. Anspach saw his quarry standing in the taxi queue, which was short this late at night. He waited until Dimitz passed him, no longer wearing his peaked chauffeur’s hat. Then both men got into the back of a Mercedes saloon parked by the kerb in which the final member of the team had been sitting in the driver’s seat. He’d prevented vigilant security and parking staff from having it towed away by waving his security pass at them.
From the car they watched Pigot enter a taxi. When it drove off they followed. Beckerman, having joined the taxi queue two behind Pigot, was in another taxi, not far behind. The convoy headed off on Route 11 for the centre of Berlin.
Ten minutes later a message flashed up on Anspach’s phone. ‘Booking in name of Pigot made two days ago at Westin Grand Hotel, Unter den Linden. 3 nights, arriving yesterday. Await further inquiries.’
‘What do they mean, “Await further inquiries”?’ muttered Anspach. ‘How can we await anything? We’re right behind the guy,’ and he tapped furiously on his phone.
Twenty minutes later as they drove, still in convoy, into the centre of Berlin, Anspach’s phone vibrated again. ‘A Madame Pigot checked out of Westin Grand this pm. No forwarding address. No trace so far of any other booking in central hotels in name of Pigot.’
‘Don’t lose that cab,’ said Anspach to the driver. ‘We don’t know where the hell we’re going now.’
‘Well, we’ll be on Unter den Linden in a minute,’ he replied. ‘So perhaps he’s rebooked.’
The lights were bright along the pavements of Unter den Linden, traditionally Berlin’s most glamorous avenue, but the atmosphere was marred by a darkened construction site running all the way down the street’s centre, where work was going on to connect the subway between the former west and east sectors of the city. The beautiful trees were virtually invisible behind the boards and railings; what could be seen of them was covered in white dust that each day’s excavations threw up.
‘If he gets out here and crosses the road we’ll lose him behind the hoardings,’ said Dimitz.