CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Having predictably started, the irritating dispute between James McBride and his wife continued longer than it should have done but it didn’t delay the practical effort to find their daughter.
Miet Ulieff decreed the operation be centralized from the Namur police building and that the local police chief and the mayor, having mobilized their gendarmerie, meet him there. He added the warning that he would hold both personally responsible for the slightest public leak. Henri Sanglier, dismayed at having to share the potential glory for Mary Bern’s rescue but unable to argue against Ulieff’s presence, despatched almost half the task force by road, together with radio and telephone vans, before organizing the second helicopter airlift in less than twelve hours to ferry the remainder – and themselves – south. Also by helicopter went the mobile forensic and photographic facilities, as well as specialized cameras.
And through it all James and Hillary McBride fought over their child as a spoil of their own very personal war and yet again Claudine was unwillingly caught in the crossfire.
‘I must be there!’ insisted McBride. ‘She’d expect me to be.’
Hillary said nothing, having already heard most of the argument and Claudine’s reaction to it.
‘You can’t be,’ Claudine said. ‘We don’t know what we’re going to find in Namur. Mary Beth might not be there yet. Not be there at all. You’ve got to be in Brussels – just as I have – if things go wrong and Felicite Galan calls the embassy at the time she’s given. We could – literally – still be Mary Beth’s lifeline.’
‘And there really is no need for you to be there,’ said the perfectly prepared Hillary, who’d returned from the residency in another freshly pressed Action Woman safari outfit, jungle green like the first. ‘I’ll be there when Mary Beth is brought out.’
Having suffered what, wondered Claudine: the woman was talking like a Hollywood movie.
McBride said: ‘My authority might be needed on the ground. You stay and take the call.’ His attempts were getting weaker.
‘It’s you the Galan woman’s negotiated with up till now. Not me,’ Hillary pointed out. ‘You insisted on talking to her all the time, remember.’
It wasn’t until people began leaving the building for the NATO base and the waiting helicopters that McBride finally capitulated, personally demanding from both Harding and Rampling that the radio and telephone link from the mobile communications centre that Kurt Volker was going to monitor at the embassy remain permanently open for him to get a minute-by-minute account.
‘I’ll give Mary Beth your love,’ Hillary threw over her shoulder to her husband as she left.
‘Bitch!’ said McBride to the empty doorway, and for the first time Claudine thought that if Mary Beth existed in anything like this level of tension between her parents it would not have been difficult for Felicite Galan to insinuate herself into the child’s feelings.
Hans Doorn was a prematurely balding, complacently fat man of thirty who had inherited Namur’s most prestigious estate agency, along with its chairmanship, upon the death of his father and in whose comfortably settled, uneventful life nothing disturbing had ever occurred. The totally unannounced 7 a.m. doorstep arrival of the Belgian Justice Minister, a Europol commissioner and an assortment of field investigators was so unbelievable that it took Ulieff several minutes – and Rampling’s and Harding’s CIA and FBI shields – to convince the man he wasn’t the victim of an elaborate practical joke. It took him even longer to recognize the photograph of the sharp-featured, elegant woman that was thrust at him as Felicite Galan, who’d rented for the weekend one of their most imposing country properties – a chateau, no less – just outside the city near St Marc. She was, suggested Doorn, the sort of cultured and sophisticated person with whom his agency most liked to do business. Miet Ulieff s terse explanation of why they were there caused the night-shirted Doorn the biggest shock of all.
By seven twenty, dressed and no longer complacent, he was in their discreet convoy on his way into the city to provide photographs, floor plans and every other known detail of the chateau to a demanding Paul Harding.
Even while he was doing that the helicopters that had carried those in charge of the investigation and the ambassador’s wife from the Belgian capital made a high, reconnaissance pass over the identified mansion, which was set in expansive woodland almost two kilometres from the only public thoroughfare, a minor country road. From the air there was no sign of movement around the house, which was hardly surprising so early, nor of Pieter Lascelles’ Jaguar – or any other vehicle – which was less easily understandable, although the house plans showed extensive stabling converted into garages. They only risked one over-flight but managed to expose forty frames of high speed, high density film.
Ulieff commandeered the office of the local police chief, a nervous man who stuttered and didn’t bathe often enough, as autocratically as he had taken over Poncellet’s in Brussels, but sensibly deferred to local knowledge. Both the policeman and the mayor, who’d dressed in formal black, doubted that any surprise daylight assault could be made upon the chateau, an opinion quickly confirmed by the arrival of the aerial photographs which showed the outer boundaries thickly wooded but the area between the coppices and the turreted building totally open, in places for more than a hectare.
‘Helicopters would give us an element of surprise,’ suggested Blake, drawing upon his Northern Ireland experience.
Harding shook his head. ‘Doorn’s room plans are to describe the house to potential renters or buyers. The place was built over three hundred years ago and is honeycombed with escape passages and underground tunnels. When he first showed it to Felicite, five months ago, she asked particularly to see them: said she was interested in medieval architecture and the precautions people took for their safety all those years ago.’ He looked uncomfortably to the ambassador’s wife. ‘There are also some original dungeons and oublier wells. For the unfamiliar oublier means forget: oublier wells or holes were pits, sometimes bottomless, in which people who weren’t wanted any more were dropped and never seen again. Renters think crap like that is cute, apparently. Felicite spent a lot of time looking at it all, as part of her historical tour.’
‘He’s right,’ said Rampling, who’d shared the interview with the realtor. He indicated the photographs. ‘There’s a gatehouse that isn’t visible through the trees in any of these photographs and according to Doorn can’t be seen from the outside road either. It’s around the first bend in the drive. There’ll obviously be someone there, checking arrivals. We wouldn’t even clear the trees before they were warned, inside. OK, so we go in a different way. There isn’t one that isn’t wide open, for hundreds of yards. All they’d have to do is see us coming – which they will – to lock and bar the doors. Which according to Doorn are about a foot thick. By the time we got past them there wouldn’t be a person in the place.’
‘Surely all you’ve got to do is guard the tunnel and passage exits?’ protested Hillary McBride.
‘We could if we knew where they all were,’ agreed Harding. ‘Doorn told me of three and we’ve already got them covered but he thinks there’re more. He says there’re no reliable maps and that he doesn’t know of the existence of any.’
‘This is ridiculous!’ said Hillary. She was ignored.
‘The local legend is that some of the escape routes lead into the cave systems,’ offered the local police chief. ‘And that there are a lot of ancient skeletons at the bottom of the oublier wells. It’s supposed to be haunted, of course.’
‘If we know the entrances to three passages why can’t we go in along them?’ persisted the woman.
‘We’re trying that,’ sighed Harding. ‘The people who built the chateau thought of it, too. According to Doorn the doors are iron-ribbed on the inside and secured by iron crossbars, as well as by locks. The idea is to get out but not to get in.’