Milraud was gently swirling the contents of a small balloon glass. It was cold out here, but it was even colder in the house and the Calvados was pleasantly warming. There was a wood-burning stove in the sitting room, but he’d insisted it should not be used – smoke from the chimney might be visible on the other side of the island. He took another sip as he considered his next moves. The MI5 man was safely confined to the cellar; no chance of his breaking out of there. Above him, in a small, draughty bedroom, Gonzales sat playing patience in his shirtsleeves, with a holstered 9 mm pistol under one arm. Piggott was in the sitting room, with his laptop open, doing God knows what.
So Milraud had come out here on the southern side of the house, overlooking the cove, where they had tied the dinghy up under some bushes at the edge of the small beach. Peering out over the top of the rock cliff, he could just make out the black well of the Mediterranean, which stretched directly south all the way to the North African shoreline of Algeria. As he finished his drink he pondered the situation. Ever since Gonzales had pulled a gun on Willis in the Belfast shop, he had been managing a fast unravelling crisis, acting by instinct. Now that they had arrived at the house, for the first time he had a chance to look calmly at what had happened and think what to do next.
Maybe if Willis had admitted straight away to being an MI5 officer the situation could have been saved. Milraud could have apologised for Gonzales’ behaviour, put it down to a mistake, claimed perhaps that they’d thought he was a crook trying to get his hands on illegal weapons and let him go. But Willis had denied it, putting on a professional, almost convincing performance. Milraud had been in the same profession once and he recognised the drill. Willis had done well in an impossible situation.
Piggott had wanted to kill Willis without more ado and Gonzales was just waiting to pull the trigger. But Milraud knew that if they had killed him there and then, the sky would have fallen in on all of them. And if Piggott had allowed Gonzales to kill Willis, why wouldn’t they have killed him too? He didn’t think for a moment that his long working relationship with Piggott would have saved him if he’d been in the way. Milraud had needed to get control of a situation that was rapidly running away from him and the only way that he could think of at the time was to do what he’d done: persuade Piggott that a better plan to damage British intelligence and to save themselves at the same time was to transfer Willis to another group as a hostage. The publicity that would then result, he had persuaded Piggott, would ruin the reputation of MI5 for good.
Piggott had bought the plan and agreed to come here to the island house which Milraud had described as a safe base where they could hide out while he arranged the onward transfer of Willis. And that’s what Piggott was expecting him to do now. He felt fairly sure he could do it too. He had mentally drawn up a list: the FARC – the Colombian rebels with their longstanding links to the IRA; the Basque separatist movement ETA, weakened now but not to be underestimated and in need of a coup; an Al Qaeda cell who would be natural customers though he had little faith in their internal security; the emissary from Hezbollah he had done business with once before.
But this would take time to arrange and even from his short conversation with Annette it was quite clear that there was little time left. The British, helped by his former colleagues, were on their tail. There was no time for the complexities of a hostage transfer, though he had no intention of telling Piggott that. Particularly because he was convinced now that Piggott was unhinged. He had started ranting in an excited fashion that was untypical of the steely character Milraud had known for years. ‘We’ve struck a blow against the Brits they won’t forget,’ he’d crowed as he stood at the helm of Mattapan III, and in his exuberance he’d revved the throttle up so high it crossed the red danger line on the cockpit dial. ‘The prime minister himself will know what we’ve done.’ And now, having just arrived, he was already talking about leaving the island, blithely mentioning a possible run to North Africa to buy drugs, before returning with the shipment to Northern Ireland – where he seemed to forget that the province’s entire security forces were looking for him.
No. Milraud made up his mind. There was only one way out for him and that meant acting fast. He’d need Annette’s help. For all her Paris-acquired chic, she was still a girl with a steely rustic core – she’d always helped him, pulled him clear when doubt threatened to paralyse him, always kept his eyes firmly fixed on what to do next. Probably she was already under surveillance, but the encrypted email he’d send her in the morning would warn her of this, and tell her that they needed to meet, but only if she could be confident she wasn’t being followed. There were ferries from the mainland to this island all day long, but it wasn’t worth the risk unless she knew she was alone. She should make a trial run, he’d told her, just as far as Toulon to flush them out, see if they were onto her already, and more important, see if she could shake them off. Well, at least they could communicate now, to make a plan, even if they couldn’t meet. It would take Seurat and the Brits some time to get into his email.
47
Martin Seurat put down the phone. The poor girl. She sounds distressed, he thought, looking out of the window of his office at the thin sprinkling of late snow that lay like powdered sugar on the old parade ground. Not surprising. She seems to have a mass murderer loose in Belfast, bodies buried in the countryside and her colleague still missing. Unfortunately he had nothing new to tell her. There had still been no sign of Mattapan III in French waters and Isabelle had so far turned up nothing useful from the checks in Bandol and Toulon. Milraud and Piggott, if they were together, seemed to have disappeared, along with Liz Carlyle’s colleague. He couldn’t understand what had got into Milraud.
Liz Carlyle had wanted to know if Milraud had a boat. There was nothing on his files about a boat, though given where Milraud lived and the business he was in, he must have one.
Seurat was just about to pick up the phone to the DCRI to pass on the enquiry to Isabelle when his phone rang again.
It was Isabelle. ‘I have some news for your Liz Carlyle. Milraud has been in touch with his wife. The conversation was most uninformative and it’s clear they know we are listening. The call came from Majorca, so yesterday he was in the Mediterranean region. You can tell her we’re happy to share the information with the Spanish if she wants to involve them.’
‘Many thanks, Isabelle. I’ll pass that on. Just before you phoned, she rang to ask whether Milraud owned a boat. I have no record here of such a thing. But could Milraud have been at sea when he made that call?’
‘Possibly. But I have something else for your Liz. Tell me, how well do you know the wines of Provence?’
‘What?’ he said, puzzled. ‘What’s that to do with Liz?’
‘Seriously, Martin, have you ever come across a wine called Chateau Fermette?’
A small farmhouse chateau – the name a joke, he supposed. He sighed. ‘No, Isabelle, I haven’t. Are you doing a crossword puzzle?’