Berger was shaking. “What do you want to know?”
“How does Judas communicate?”
“I have a special mobile, that’s how he gave me the job of getting Riley out of Wandsworth. He talks personally.”
“Have you ever met him?”
“No, I was recruited by another Maccabee.”
Blake took over now. “So where does Judas operate from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come off it, son, I can’t believe that,” Dillon said.
Berger was close to breaking and it was obvious he was telling the truth. “I honestly don’t know. I don’t.”
There was a pause. Blake put a hand on his shoulder. “What about Chief Inspector Bernstein?”
“She was picked up outside her grandfather’s house in an ambulance by two Maccabees from Judas’s personal staff.”
“Names?” Dillon demanded.
“Aaron and Moshe.”
Dillon turned to Blake. “They’re the lads who knocked me off in Salinas.”
“Were you there?” Blake asked.
Berger nodded. “We took her down to a place on the other side of Flaxby in Sussex. There was one of those old overgrown bomber bases from the Second World War. They had a Citation jet waiting and flew off with her. My job was to dump the ambulance in Dorking.”
“And you don’t know where they’re flying to?” Blake asked.
“No idea, I swear it.”
It was obvious to both of them that he was telling the truth, and it was a sudden thought of Dillon’s that gave them what they needed.
“You said you were recruited by a Maccabee. Why was that?”
“I was at a conference on the future of the State of Israel. It was held at the University of Paris. I took part in a seminar, spoke out. I’ve always held strong views.”
“And?”
“I was approached by a lawyer. He said he’d admired my speech and asked me out to dinner.”
“A Maccabee?” Blake said.
“That’s right. We sat on one of those restaurant boats on the river and talked. I was there four days and saw him every day.”
“And he recruited you?”
“Haven’t you any idea how it sounded? God, I wanted to join, to be a part of it all.”
“Then Judas spoke to you, the Almighty himself,” Dillon said.
“He’s a great man. He loves his country.” Berger seemed to have recovered some of his courage.
Dillon said, “What was the name of the lawyer in Paris who recruited you, and don’t tell me you can’t remember.”
“Rocard – Michael Rocard.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Dillon turned to Blake Johnson. “The de Brissac family lawyer. He’s got to have been the leak to her identity in some way. Dammit, he even owned the cottage she was using in Corfu when she was kidnapped.”
“Paris next stop, it would seem,” Blake said. “What about him?”
Dillon turned to Berger. “Come on.” He pulled him up. “We’ll deliver him to the safehouse. They can hang on to him there until everything’s resolved, then we’ll see Ferguson.”
They started down Hawk’s Court, Berger in between, and passed his house. He said, “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? There’s no safehouse.”
Blake said, “Yes, there is, don’t be a fool.”
“You’re lying!” Berger said in a low voice, and suddenly ran away very fast.
They went after him. He reached the corner and made to cross Camden High Street on the run, head down, at the same moment as a double-decker bus approached. Collision was unavoidable and he was bounced into the air.
There was pandemonium as a crowd gathered and the driver of the bus dismounted in considerable distress. A police car pulled in and two officers got out and pushed through the crowd. One dropped to one knee beside Berger and examined him.
He looked up and said to his partner, “No good, he’s dead.”
There were expressions of shock from the crowd, and the wretched driver said, “It wasn’t my fault.”
Several people called, “He’s right, the man just ran into the road.”
At the back of the crowd, Dillon nodded to Blake. They walked back to the car and drove away.
The trip in the Citation had been uneventful. Hannah had kept herself-to-herself and as far away from Aaron and Moshe as possible. She accepted the coffee and sandwiches passed to her and leafed through a few magazines, a banal thing to do, but what else was there, except looking out of the window occasionally. Flying at thirty thousand feet with plenty of cloud below meant that she hadn’t the slightest idea where she was.
After three hours, there were glimpses of sea far below which could only be the Mediterranean. There was the coast of an island that could have been anywhere and then cloud again.
Moshe busied himself preparing more coffee and took some through to the pilots. Aaron ignored her, apparently deep in the book he’d been reading for the past three hours. Moshe returned and busied himself with refreshments again. He passed Aaron some sandwiches and coffee.
“The same for you, Chief Inspector?”
“No, just coffee.”
She peered out of the window again, catching a glimpse of another piece of land far below, and then the clouds blanketed everything. She turned to a tap on the shoulder and Moshe gave her the coffee.
As she drank it, she became aware of Aaron watching her as he sipped coffee himself, and there was a slight smile on his face, which of course irritated her.
“You find me amusing?”
“On the contrary, I think you are a very remarkable woman. Your grandfather a rabbi, father a great surgeon, a wealthy woman who goes to Cambridge, then joins the police and becomes a top Scotland Yard detective who is not afraid to kill when she has to. How many times? Is it two or three?”
God, how she hated him, and yet when she searched for the harsh reply, it wouldn’t come. He put down his cup in slow motion and reached for hers.
“I’ll take it, Chief Inspector,” he said. “You just lie back and go to sleep. We’re almost there, you see. Better for everyone if you don’t know where you are.”
The coffee. Too late, of course, far too late, and in the moment of realization she slipped into darkness.
In his flat at Cavendish Square, Ferguson sat by the fire and listened as Dillon and Blake Johnson filled him in between them. When they were finished, he sat there thinking about it, frowning.
“Strange, it all coming down at this stage to the de Brissac lawyer, this Michael Rocard.”
“Yes, but he’s managed the family affairs for years,” Dillon said. “If anyone would appear to be above suspicion, it would be he, and yet I suspect he must be the source of Marie’s true identity. He must have found out. Perhaps by accident.”
“Like we used to say in the FBI,” Blake told him, “if it’s murder, always check the family first. There is an interesting question here. Why would a man like Rocard, famous, part of the establishment, ever get involved with the Maccabees in the first place?”
Ferguson came to a decision. “I’m going to check him out.”
“Is that wise?” Dillon asked.
“Oh, yes. Conditions of the tightest security, man-to-man. I’m talking about Max Hernu.”
The French Secret Service had probably been more notorious than the KGB for years, and as the SDECE it had enjoyed a reputation for ruthless efficiency second to none. Under the Mitterand government it had been reorganized as the DGSE, which stood for Direction Générale de la Securité Extérieure.
It was still divided into five sections and numerous departments, and Section 5 was still Action Service, the department which had smashed the OAS in the old days and most illegal organizations since.
Colonel Max Hernu, who headed Section 5, had served as a paratrooper in Indochina, been taken prisoner at Dien Bien Phu, then afterwards fought a bitter and bloody war in Algiers, though not for the OAS that was supported by so many of his comrades, but for General Charles de Gaulle.