And now Logan embarked on the embroidered story he had prepared for the Frenchman.
“Last week,” Logan continued, “a man was abducted in Vienna, in the trunk of a car hired by a KGB sleeper who works in an Austrian bank. He was taken to the outskirts of the city, roughed up by a couple of KGB hoods, threatened with worse, and ordered to do a job for the Russians.”
“What job?” Plismy asked.
“To cause a run on one of your biggest banks,” Logan said. “To crash it, effectively.”
“So the man abducted is a banker.”
“Yes. A very influential foreign banker.”
Plismy whistled softly. “They haven’t abducted people like that since before Gorbachev came to power,” he said. “Since the early eighties.”
“Right. They’re turning to the attack.”
The taxi drew up at yet another bar, in the seedy district below the Sacre-Coeur. It was after one o’clock in the morning, and Plismy now needed a little help getting to his feet. Logan led the way into the bar and ordered a coffee to clear his head. Plismy had a cognac. They withdrew to the farthest table, though the bar was almost empty.
Plismy wasn’t going to ask which French bank, or which influential banker had been abducted, Logan noted. Not yet. He would know there was a trade involved.
As the time wore on towards one thirty and Plismy’s roaming conversation was broken up by numerous interruptions, it turned out that the French did have some very senior KGB officers on the run from Putin’s regime. There were two or three, perhaps, Logan guessed, correctly assessing Plismy’s propensity for exaggeration.
Plismy was talking about women in general—a subject he constantly returned to—and then about one woman in particular.
“You should see her!” the Frenchman said, apropos of nothing. “Every inch a Russian princess. They say Gosfilm in Moscow was always trying to get her into the movies. But she was already taken for greater things. KGB father, uncle inside the Kremlin. She trained at Yasenevo for the SVR, right in the heart of the Russian foreign intelligence operations. Department S. She’s a gold mine, believe me.”
“You didn’t get her into bed, did you?” Logan said with a fabricated leer.
“No, no. Not yet, anyway. She’s still grieving the loss of her husband. British. Very peculiar. One of our kind, he was, Logan. SIS. I’m hands-off with her for now. But who knows? One day maybe. One day when she needs a favour, she’ll have to come through me.”
“You mean her Brit husband walked off?” Logan said, feeling a heat rising inside him, an instinctive feeling that he was close to something very important.
“He didn’t walk off!” Plismy scoffed, as if he’d already told Logan all about the woman, a fact that Logan noted. “He was killed. Here in Paris. By the Russians, of course.” He leaned in at the small table by the window. “Nerve agent,” he muttered. “On the steering wheel of his car. All hushed up from the press, of course.”
“No wonder she needs protecting,” Logan said. “They must be after her too. She defected to you, to the French, did she?”
“The Russians are after her, and yes, she should be very grateful to us.”
“Why didn’t she go to the British?” Logan said.
“Because her husband had, let’s say, blotted his copybook with London. Gone out on his own. But we have her safe and sound, tucked up under our wing now. Not far from where I grew up, actually.”
Plismy was from Marseille.
“You won’t hide her from the KGB for long,” Logan said.
“Oh, but we will. It’s a very out-of-the-way spot in the
The
“We should pay her a visit, by the sound of it,” Logan said. “She sounds fabulous.”
Plismy took on the look of exaggerated surprise that only a man who’s drunk too much can manage.
“To the village,” Logan prompted. “Where you have her.”
Logan saw Plismy putting up his guard. No matter how much Plismy drank, he had a line over which he never stepped.
It was another half hour before Logan could lead him back to where they’d been. It was a rambling story, with many discursions about the beauty of the Russian colonel. But finally there she was again, as if emerging from a mist; a KGB colonel, a woman. She was a figure “everybody wants,” according to Plismy. “You, the British, and, most of all of course, the Russians,” Plismy stated. The French had given her a new name, a new identity. She was very valuable, very key to something-or-other, which Plismy had been vague about and clearly didn’t know, Logan thought.
Then Plismy had dropped a name—Fougieres—before Logan saw him mentally retrace his steps.
“That’s her cover name,” Plismy said.
“You’ll have to kill me now you’ve told me that,” Logan joked, and Plismy forgot his reticence and laughed until tears poured down his cheeks.
Logan then deftly guided Plismy away from the subject of the Russian colonel, but the talking soon died off. It was the natural end to the evening. Plismy was exhausted from the effort of projecting his own importance and from the drink.
Logan helped him into a taxi and threw his briefcase in after him. He hadn’t even needed to follow up his lie about the French bank. Then he returned to the bar and ordered another coffee.
He sat and thought for a long time before returning to his hotel in the Marais. There he used the hotel’s computer to check for the first flight south to Nimes in the morning—a Saturday. There was one leaving in just over five hours’ time.
Then he asked the night porter for an atlas of France, and one was finally found with an index of place names at the back. Logan drew his finger down the page until he found it. Fougieres. It was a place name, not a code name. Fougieres was a small village about an hour’s drive north of Nimes.
That was what he’d detected in Plismy’s voice, and in his withdrawal from the subject altogether after he’d spoken the name; a cover-up. It was a smooth cover-up of a mistake, one that would have gone unnoticed by anyone without Logan’s antennae. An inflection in Plismy’s voice, a little too much haste in the explanation, perhaps. But that was the answer. Fougieres was a place, not the code name for the woman.
Logan felt the heat rise again. Unless Thomas Plismy, newly elevated, drunk, sexually satisfied, and heady with new opportunities, was lying better than Logan had ever seen anyone lie, then Logan had gained a handhold from the evening. The French oil company was a story to cover his expenses, perhaps.
But the woman, the KGB colonel “everyone wants,” might be the nugget of gold he was such an expert at seeing through the dirt. That was a handhold that might help him to reach much higher up the mountain.
Chapter 2
THERE WAS NO WIND down at the foot of the tower block, just the hot stillness, as if the air itself had died.
But that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be a wind thirty-three floors up—a crosswind, perhaps, strong enough to affect his aim. He couldn’t say until he was up there. And it would make all the difference.
Thick clouds, dirty grey around the edges, hung low over London and smothered the already breathless city. The stationary air was sultry with trapped August heat, and combined with the city’s usual palpitating energy, it had forced the temperature into the eighties.
The man calling himself Lars shrugged. There was nothing he could do about it. There was no way he would know if it was going to work—if the stillness down here prevailed up there in the sky—until he reached the top of the tower block.
He slung the tattered holdall, stained with cement powder, grease, working stains of various kinds, back over
