garden, before dismissing Logan by turning his back and walking away. He was busy with something. That was good. It might mean he would forget their encounter.
Logan didn’t walk straight up the lane, however, but took a more circuitous route, through a horse’s meadow and past a tumbledown wood barn with a portable sawmill outside. The palm tree was visible, higher than the surrounding houses.
He crossed the lane. Heavy iron gates barred the entrance to the house—electrically operated, he noticed. That kind of security was nowhere else to be seen in the village. Through a crack in the join of the gates, he saw a light blue Mercedes parked in a dusty yard. That was what he needed.
Turning swiftly away, he walked round the other end of the village, away from the horse’s field and away from the bed and breakfast where the man had given him the directions. Behind the barn the red van was cooking in the sun where he had left it.
Now was the time to wait. He turned the van around, still concealed behind the barn, and pointed it towards the route down the winding hill to Uzes.
At six thirty, after nearly three hours in the sweltering car, with brief walks down into the vineyards to cool himself a little, he saw the blue Mercedes begin its descent to the flatter ground below the plateau and onto the straight road with the plane trees. Switching on the engine of the van, he began to follow it from a distance of about half a mile.
It was twenty-four hours since he’d met Plismy in Paris, and he felt the eagerness of the chase, the excitement of new momentum.
When they reached Uzes, he drove slowly around the road that circled and concealed the square behind old, high stone buildings. He finally caught sight of the blue Mercedes, parked at the side of the street. Its two occupants, he now saw, were a woman in a baseball cap and a small boy. They were going through the process of preparing to get out, the boy strapped in, the woman forgetting it, then the boy urgently needing some small toy from the floor of the car.
When they finally climbed out, the woman pressed the key fob for the car alarm as Logan passed without looking at them. He glimpsed through the corner of his eye the woman taking the boy’s hand on the pavement.
Logan kept going in the direction the two were walking until he was out of sight. He pulled the van into a parking space on the same side of the road, jumped out, and made for a cafe whose pavement tables led into a darker interior. He hoped they wouldn’t turn off before the cafe. They didn’t.
A few minutes later, he watched from the interior of the cafe as they drew level. The boy had stopped and was tugging the woman’s arm. He had dropped his plastic toy, and she turned back to pick it up. Logan saw them illuminated in the sunlight from the darkness of the bar.
She was in her mid- to late thirties, he guessed, and wore tight jeans and a green T-shirt. Her hair, which had been tucked under the cap, was now free and came halfway down her back. It was a rich brown and gold colour. Her face, as far he could tell in the bright sun, and in the brief moment he caught sight of it, had high cheekbones, smooth-skinned.
It was a face that startled him—a beautiful face. But then she stooped, picked up the toy, and gave it to the boy.
Logan left a few euros on the counter and took his coffee to a pavement seat, where he sat and watched their backs slowly retreating. The boy seemed to be constantly stopping and pointing, asking questions, trying to pick some object of interest up from the pavement, tugging his mother’s hand continually. And she was patient with him. They made slow progress.
A hundred yards ahead of them, Logan noted, if they stayed on the same path, was the electronic sign with the day’s date written on it.
He finished his coffee, picked up the map, and unfolded it, leaving it half open, as if he’d just been studying it. Then he crossed the street, twenty or thirty yards behind them, and walked along the far side, his camera slung over his shoulder and the map carried loosely by his side. He overtook them easily.
The two of them, he saw, as he flicked through a revolving postcard stand, were still making slow progress. She seemed in no hurry, and the relaxed fluidity of her movements, for a moment, mesmerised Logan. She seemed to him to walk like a dancer.
He checked the position of the electronic sign. Then he saw an alley with another cafe, its white plastic tables and chairs shaded by the buildings. Taking a seat, Logan produced the camera from its case and tested the light and the distance to the sign.
They arrived in stops and starts; the boy seemed to be singing absently and was now waving a twig with some wan leaves attached to it that he must have picked up from one of the trees that shaded the road.
As they drew level with the electronic sign, the woman seemed distracted. She was leaning down at the boy and saying something. The boy responded crossly. She gave him the baseball cap, and he seemed satisfied. Then she stood up, and as she did so, Logan pressed the shutter.
He developed the film later that night in a hotel room in Marseille. He didn’t know if the woman was a KGB colonel, an expat British divorcee, or the Queen of Sheba for that matter. But the photograph, he was relieved to see, gave a clear picture of her face, and those who wanted her would know. He made four copies of the picture, including one for himself. The other three were for his intended customers.
Then he fell asleep, exhausted, and dreamed of a terrified Plismy, surrounded by all the people he hated in the world, like some Benetton or Coca-Cola poster, but with the reverse message—a congregation of all the ethnic groups and religions in existence, closing in on the source of their persecution.
At eleven thirty the following morning, Logan mailed two copies of the picture, the first to the CIA station in Paris, the second to the SIS in London. He put a price on each picture of half a million dollars—in return for which he would reveal the location of its subject.
It was a high price. But if Plismy was right—and Logan sensed he was—then information about the woman was worth a lot of money.
Then he boarded an afternoon flight to Belgrade, to meet his third potential customer. As he took his seat on the plane, he opened up the Sunday edition of
He fell asleep, not waking until they touched down in Belgrade two and a half hours later.
Chapter 4
ADRIAN CAREW STEPPED INTO the chauffeured car outside his London apartment on Chelsea Green. It was a Sunday morning, and he usually only stayed here during the week.
He wished his driver Ray good morning in a way that suggested it wasn’t, and his demeanour dissuaded further conversation. Rarely in London at any time over a weekend, let alone on a Sunday, he was very irritable that he’d been called back from Hampshire.
At weekends, Adrian liked to be at his and Penny’s country home—or the Wine Cellar, as office wits referred to it—on the duke of Wellington’s estate in Hampshire. Only a crisis brought him back to London. But during the week he lived here, in Chelsea Green near the Barracks. It was an area of multimillion-pound homes and, like the country house, his apartment was courtesy of Penny’s private fortune. But this wealthy corner of London had been tiresomely invaded in the nineteenth century by a development for the homeless, put there by a do-gooder charity foundation. Adrian wasn’t a person who admired the efforts of other human beings to haul their way out of predicaments he didn’t share. Without giving it a great deal of thought, he instinctively condemned them—the alcoholics, the homeless, a wide range of such groups—for being in that position in the first place.
And now, as the black Mercedes pulled out of the side street, he noted with distaste the idling group of alcoholics who stood smoking cigarettes in the thin sunlight outside the housing project across the road. Normally he saw them on a Monday morning, for their meeting at seven thirty, he supposed. He now assumed they must also meet on Sundays at the same god-awful hour.
“JIC, Ray,” he said. His chauffeur had been sufficiently sympathetic to his mood not to ask where they were going.
A special session of the Joint Intelligence Committee was just what he didn’t need, not this weekend, not any
