He couldn’t quite understand why he was feeling so low. After all, he had achieved his ambition of capturing his old colleague Antoine Milraud, the man who had betrayed his friendship and his trust. Why wasn’t he feeling elated?
He supposed the trouble was that he did not yet have the pleasure of seeing the man in court, answering for his crimes. That pleasure had to wait until the operation in Britain was concluded. But he wasn’t directing that operation; he was having to leave that to Liz Carlyle, since it was happening on her turf. So at present he had only a minor role to play, keeping Annette sweet and monitoring the arrangements at the safe house in Montreuil.
He could hear the noise of workmen moving furniture around across the passage. He’d left his door open, and occasionally he saw one of the workmen passing by, carrying a chair or a cupboard. A colleague had returned from a posting in Taiwan and was moving into the vacant office. Funnily enough, that very room across the passage used to be Antoine Milraud’s office. Seurat had spent many an hour there, talking with his old friend and colleague, sometimes cracking open a bottle of Bordeaux if they had stayed working late enough to deserve a glass or two, talking quietly until the phone would ring and – Seurat could hear her voice from the other side of the room – Annette would demand to know when Antoine was coming home and did he really expect his dinner to be waiting when he did?
Annette was not so chirpy now, living with a guard in the small flat the Service kept in the Fifth Arrondissement, while her husband twiddled his thumbs in the Montreuil bungalow not far away from this office. Seurat had talked to Liz that morning and heard her account of her debriefing of Milraud in London. Both had agreed that he was still holding something back, and only superficially cooperating. Whatever it was the man was not saying was bound to be important, or why keep it secret? Maybe it was something that reflected badly on him. But why would he bother, considering the mess he was already in? Liz thought it most likely to concern Lester Jackson’s role in the whole affair, and Martin did not disagree.
The problem was there didn’t seem any obvious way to prise more information out of Milraud. He’d already been threatened with the prosecution of Annette, and had folded accordingly. They could always threaten him again, but to what end? Putting Annette in prison wasn’t going to tell them anything more about Lester Jackson or the young Arab whom Seurat still thought of as Zara. And in any case, after a while repeated threats failed to frighten, as if the ferocious dog barking from inside a house turned out, when the front door was opened, to be a chihuahua.
‘Monsieur?’
The voice was gentle but Seurat was startled none the less. Looking up, he found a young man in the doorway. At first he thought he must be one of the moving men, but no, this fellow had longish hair and wore a cotton jacket and chinos. He looked like a student rather than a workman.
‘What is it?’
‘Forgive me, Monsieur. I am Jacques Thibault. I have been helping out with Antoine Milraud.’
Seurat stared at Thibault; he seemed very young to be guarding his ex-colleague. Then he remembered. ‘Ah, of course. You are the computer genius.’
Thibault gave a modest shrug. ‘You are too kind.’
‘How goes it? Anything more to report?’
‘In fact, yes. As you know, I have control of Monsieur Milraud’s laptop and I read all his emails. That includes the recent communiqué asking him to come to London. He claims he wiped all the earlier emails on security grounds. What he doesn’t realise is that I have been working hard to find them nonetheless.’
Seurat saw the importance of this immediately. ‘And have you?’ he asked eagerly.
‘Only up to a point. I am sure you are familiar with reverse engineering.’
‘I think so. You go backwards to reconstruct a trail. It’s especially useful to see how something began, isn’t it?’
‘In a sense.’ Thibault had lost his air of diffidence and had come into the office, sitting down when Seurat pointed to the empty leather chair across from his desk. ‘But I would argue that it is most valuable when something has been destroyed rather than built.’
‘Really?’ said Seurat, trying to be patient.
Thibault nodded vigorously. ‘Suppose you are confronted with a brick house and want to see how it came to that state: through reverse engineering you gradually work your way back until the walls have come down and the first foundations are about to be poured – the bricks for the walls may not even have been delivered. Now that is a beautiful process in its own way, but it doesn’t tell you much if what you want to learn about is the finished house.’
Seurat nodded politely at this elaborate metaphor, but privately he wondered what point Thibault was trying to make. If Thibault sensed his doubts he gave no sign of it, and continued: ‘Think about it this way – what if this finished brick house is destroyed? Accidentally or on purpose, it doesn’t matter. Either way all the information you want is lost, irretrievably. Unless’ – and he started to smile – ‘you could reverse-engineer the act of destruction, slowly work your way back from the present position of crumbled walls and masonry dust to the house in its former glory.’
‘You can do this with Milraud’s emails?’
‘Yes.’ Thibault was sure of his ground, his voice entirely confident. ‘Not the whole house at first, more like one of its rooms. But in time I am certain it can all be reconstructed.’
‘Do we know anything yet?’
‘We do, but I don’t know how much of it is of value. The first exchange occurred when Milraud was in South America. I am not quite sure where.’
Caracas, thought Seurat, and motioned for Thibault to continue. He said, ‘I can be more precise about the sender of the email, however. His message came from Yemen. Not far outside the city of Sana’a.’
‘Hang on a minute. Was the sender the same person in England who’s contacted him recently?’
‘Yes, well, at least it is the same email address.’
Liz had told Seurat about Peggy Kinsolving’s fact-finding mission to the northern town of Eccles. Atiyah, apparently the real name of the young Arab they’d been calling Zara, had visited Yemen within the last year according to the neighbour. It all fitted. ‘What about more recent communications?’ he asked Thibault.
The young boffin shook his head. ‘Not yet. There is a large gap to be filled between these first exchanges and the last email, which we’ve already seen. I am confident of filling in this gap, but it will take some time.’
‘Oh,’ said Seurat, sounding disappointed. Thibault was obviously elated to have recovered even a small part of what had been deleted, but if it didn’t actually tell them much then there didn’t seem any reason to get excited.
Thibault said, ‘I will send you the transcripts of what I have managed to disinter.’
Seurat wondered if there was any point in passing this on to Liz. Probably not; the ‘breakthrough’ hadn’t amounted to much.
Thibault shifted in his armchair, ready to depart. Then he said, ‘There is one other thing that may be of interest. It’s a reference in the very first email from Yemen to the man who made the introduction to Milraud.’