James McBride chose the nearest convenient bank, on the rue de Louvain, and Claudine used the absence of both the ambassador and the accompanying Harrison to issue the warning. Only Rosetti wasn’t there to hear it, back at the mortuary to conclude his finding with the Belgian pathologist. She replayed that afternoon’s brief tape and Blake said: ‘Yes. She sounds very different.’
‘It’s resignation,’ identified Claudine. ‘Practically from the time she snatched Mary Beth she’s been living a fantasy, her own private idyll. She’s fallen in love with the child, convinced herself she’s protecting her from everyone else – it will have been the rest of the group at first, now it’s probably me as well – but today some reality has come back. There’s still more fantasy than anything else but she’s accepting, although she probably doesn’t want to, that it’s coming to an end.’
‘How bad?’ queried Harding.
‘As bad as it could be.’
‘You want to spell that out a little clearer?’ asked Rampling.
‘I hoped the ransom would be enough. That making her hate me and then letting her have the money – beating me – would be sufficient…’ Claudine hesitated, the admission thick in her throat. ‘I don’t think that any longer.’
‘So the ransom’s not important any more?’ frowned Rampling.
‘Yes it is! She still has to beat me with that. But when the money’s handed over, she’s won.’
‘So by paying it we kill Mary Beth?’
‘We were always going to,’ reminded Claudine. ‘That’s why I argued against it from the beginning: turned it instead into a way of delaying things until we found her. She’s beaten us by getting out of her house.’
‘But you say she loves Mary!’ protested Rampling. ‘You don’t kill people you love!’
‘You do, if that love is absolute, to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy. I’m the enemy.’
‘That’s fan-’ started Harding, stopping halfway through the protest.
‘Biblical, romantic fantasy,’ agreed Claudine. ‘I know. I wish I wasn’t so convinced I’m right.’
‘We don’t wait any longer,’ declared Harding. ‘We’ve got her house as tight as a drum, although she’s calling from some place outside the city. And we know where a bunch of them are going to be tonight. If Felicite isn’t back by then we hit Smet’s place. They’ll know where she’s got the kid. And we’ve got enough proof of murder to interrogate the shit out of them. They’ll tell us. And then we hit her.’
‘Tonight,’ agreed Rampling. ‘And we know Mary Beth’s safe until eleven thirty tomorrow morning. Everything’s going to work like clockwork.’
‘Let’s hope,’ said Claudine. It was five o’clock. It was going to be a long two hours.
Smet arrived home at 5.30 p.m. There was the familiar sound of decanter against glass. The television was switched on, in anticipation of the main evening newscast.
By then McBride had returned from depositing the $1,000,000 ransom to endorse (‘about goddamned time!’) the decision to raid the rue de Flandre and insist on being present at the rescue of his daughter. Hillary announced she would be there too. Claudine, concerned at the easy assumption that Mary Beth’s recovery was a foregone conclusion, didn’t explain her reasoning for recommending the assault and McBride didn’t ask. Instead he announced that he was going to speak to both State and the President by telephone. That guarantee of Washington support failed to reassure Elliot Smith, who remained uncertain of legal jurisdiction despite the assurance from Peter Blake that Europol, which he represented and from which, additionally, Commissioner Sanglier would shortly be arriving, had power of arrest in an EU country in which a serious crime had been committed and that the murder of the rent boy provided the justification.
‘After we get Mary Beth back the courts can argue about legality for as long as they like,’ dismissed McBride. ‘Do it!’
To provide his promised legal authority Blake went with Harding physically to take part in the entry. That wasn’t to be until Rampling, who remained as liaison at the embassy, was satisfied from what he overheard that everyone whom Smet expected had arrived. A speaker was installed in the ambassador’s suite to relay from the communications room every sound picked up from the bugged house. Smet’s listening to the six o’clock news, upon which that day’s press release predicting major developments within the next twenty-four hours in the kidnap of Mary Beth McBride was the lead item, provided the sound test. It was perfect.
Claudine attended each hurriedly convened discussion and contributed when asked – doubting there would be any physical resistance, although not ruling out a panicked suicide attempt – but fully accepted her subsidiary part in what was an operational field situation. She wasn’t, either, as affected as everyone else increasingly became by a tense, almost nervous, expectation. It wasn’t any real danger here, at the embassy, but on the ground mistakes were more likely in a nervous atmosphere.
Still with almost an hour to go before the gathering at Smet’s home, Claudine decided to combine the background Kurt Volker had compiled from what had been taken from Felicite Galan’s house with what she had suggested before the woman had been identified. Practically all of it dovetailed. Even the video-fit pictures created from the descriptions of the two kidnap witnesses were reasonable representations of the four actual photographs that had been copied.
Felicite’s passport put her at thirty-nine, to within three years of Claudine’s estimate. The town house, the itemized jewellery, the money in copied deposit and current bank accounts – in total the Belgian franc equivalent of almost $200,000 – as well as the dark green Mercedes attested to substantial wealth, which Claudine had also guessed. She had been prepared for Marcel still to be alive and one of the paedophile group but she wasn’t surprised to read in one of the several preserved obituary notices that Felicite’s late husband had been a leading Brussels stockbroker, the head of his own firm and a trading member of the city’s bourse. The several retained newspaper and magazine references to Felicite’s interest in and support for local charities didn’t surprise her, either. Nor that two of them involved the protection of children.
Volker entered the briefing room as she was finishing comparing the computer reproductions with Felicite’s photographs.
‘I thought that was disappointing,’ said the German. ‘Those witnesses’ descriptions were remarkably good. And she’s reasonably well known, from the newspaper cuttings. Yet we didn’t get a single recognition.’
‘That’s human nature,’ said Claudine. ‘No one thought it could be Felicite because she’s far too respectable. They were frightened of making fools of themselves.’
‘Although it doesn’t show paedophilia there’s someone remarkably similar in one of the pornographic films that arrived yesterday through the Amsterdam outlet,’ said Volker. ‘Come and see what you think.’
Only five operators remained in the computer room, now that the e-mail flood had dried to a trickle. They had been concentrated at the far end of the room, separated by a line of dead screens from Volker’s three-machine command post. There were two television sets immediately adjacent, a cassette still in the gate of one VCR.
It was a lesbian orgy. Most of the participants were totally naked, several with dildoes strapped to their crotch as penises, others with manual vibrators. Without exception all the women wore grotesquely ornate animal or occult half-masks that left their mouths free. In almost every shot there were scenes of cunnilingus.
‘There!’ said Volker, freezing the frame to point to a heavily busted woman in a satyr’s headpiece. She was one of the performers wearing a dildo.
Claudine made herself look away from another participant, studying the figure that had attracted Volker’s attention. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Look: there’s dark hair – brunette – showing beneath the mask at the forehead and at the nape of the neck. And the pubis is black.’