his own foolishness. He’d been thinking of horses and of Isabelle, of Pamela and of Maurice and the Villattes and his own people. Were there really Basque terrorists so short of explosives that they had to raid a quarry within shouting distance of the chateau where the summit was taking place? ETA had been in business for fifty years, despite everything the Spanish state could throw at them. They weren’t a bunch of amateurs. They’d have access to Semtex or some other plastic explosive. They could get hold of a sniper’s rifle on the black market. They might even have shoulder-launched missiles to attack the helicopters. Sticks of dynamite and cheap clock timers seemed like kids’ stuff, rather than the work of an experienced and professional terrorist organization. None of this felt right to Bruno, unless he and Isabelle and Carlos and the whole security operation were being deliberately encouraged to underestimate the opposition.
Putain de bordel, he’d been lazy and irresponsible, Bruno told himself. He’d forgotten the first rule he’d been taught in the army: know your enemy. He hadn’t even sat down to do some basic research on ETA and its methods here in France, let alone in Spain. He’d been going through the motions, content to let the brigadier and Carlos and Isabelle and the other specialists set the agenda and do all the work, while he sat back and thought about his farmers and that worryingly inexperienced new magistrate. He took a deep breath and picked up the phone to call Isabelle and ask her what intelligence data she had on ETA that she could share with him.
“It was dynamite, sure enough,” came a voice. Jeannot was coming toward him, Albert by his side. He was waving something in his hand. It fluttered as he walked. “And what’s more, it’s mine.”
“We walked around the perimeter and stopped where the slogan was painted,” Jeannot said. “Seemed a funny place to put it, away from the road where nobody would see it. But it would be the right place to put a bomb together, out of sight. They could even have used a flashlight to see what they were doing. We found this.”
He held out a strip of waxed brown paper, about eight inches long. It had numbers stamped on it.
“It’s wrapping from a dynamite stick. They pulled this end off when they put the detonator in. And those numbers are from the same batch that was stolen from us yesterday. I should know-I spent half the day filling in those same numbers on a stack of insurance forms.”
“Looks like we’ve solved your case, eh Bruno?” said Albert, looking pleased with himself.
“Could be,” said Bruno. “A pity you didn’t use gloves when you picked it up. It means we’ll have to fingerprint you, Jeannot, just to eliminate your prints from the inquiry.”
His doubts about this whole business redoubled. He could just about accept that a terrorist group might in desperation raid a local dynamite cache, but he couldn’t see them leaving such helpful clues scattered around the landscape. Somehow he was sure they were smarter than that.
His phone rang again. This time it was the mayor.
“I’ve just heard Philippe Delaron live on Radio Perigord talking about some animal rights bomb at the Gravelle place,” the mayor said. “And now Claire tells me I’ve got France Inter asking questions on the other line about a war on foie gras. That’s our bloody livelihood, Bruno. What the hell’s going on?”
Bruno ignored an incoming call and briefly explained, promising to return to the mairie as soon as his security meeting was over. Then he checked the number of the call he had missed. It was Pamela and he called her back.
“I’ve just had a call from Edinburgh,” she said, sounding distracted. “It’s Mother, she’s had a stroke. My aunt said it doesn’t look too serious but I have to get to Scotland.”
“I can drive you to Bergerac for the afternoon flight,” said Bruno, knowing how the coming of the daily Ryanair flights to the once-sleepy nearby airport had transformed the lives of the British in Perigord.
“Let me check connections to Edinburgh and call you back. I want to get there tonight so I may have to go via Bordeaux or Paris. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone,” Pamela said, her voice tense with dismay.
“Have you managed to speak to the hospital?” he asked.
“No, just to my aunt so far, but she had a brief meeting with the doctor and she’s at the hospital. It’s so unfair. She’s only in her sixties, never had a day’s illness and now this. Can you look after the horses? It might be easier if you and Gigi moved into my place…”
“Don’t worry, we’ll work it out,” he said, trying to calm her. Bruno had never heard Pamela like this, her voice gabbling, jumping from subject to subject. She must be in shock herself. “The important thing now is to get you there. Let me know about the flight times and I’ll drive you wherever you need to go.”
Part of his mind was wondering whether he’d be able to keep that promise, with security meetings and bombings, foie gras and Horst’s disappearance, the mayor and horses all clamoring for his attention.
“I’m very sorry about your mother. I hope she recovers soon. What time did it happen?”
“That’s just it. We don’t really know,” said Pamela, her voice cracking. Bruno heard her swallow hard. “They think it was sometime yesterday evening. She was in her normal clothes, and her bed hadn’t been slept in. If my aunt hadn’t arranged to visit her for coffee this morning she might have been lying there another day.”
“Are you alone now?” he asked.
“Yes, but I’m okay. I’ll get onto the Internet and call you back.” Pamela hung up, and Bruno, ignoring the buzz of an incoming text message, quickly rang Fabiola at the clinic to tell her the news and ask if she could go and keep Pamela company. Fabiola promised to go as soon as her last morning appointment was finished, probably not long after eleven.
18
Although it was the smallest of the security committee meetings so far, for the first time the video conference link with the ministry in Paris was being used, and Bruno looked at the brigadier’s familiar face on the screen with interest. Most unusually, the brigadier was smiling.
His voice was normal, but his image on screen kept jerking in a disconcerting way as he explained that Horst’s name had raised an alarm in Berlin. Bruno was startled to learn that the quiet archaeologist had been a student militant in the sixties and a suspected sympathizer with the Red Army Faktion in the seventies. Isabelle gasped when the brigadier said that Horst had a brother called Dieter, now believed dead, who was an associate of the Baader-Meinhof Group and possibly even an active member. The brother got to East Germany, and the Stasi files reported him dying of a heart attack in 1989, the year the Wall came down. There were no specific links to ETA from his known record, although there was a well-documented history of cooperation between ETA and the Red Army Faktion.
“This Dieter was known to have attended a Palestinian training camp in the Beka’a Valley in the seventies, at a time when several ETA militants were there,” the brigadier said, and looked up from the file. “I think we have a connection.”
“Perhaps Senor Gambara can get us some more information on this,” Isabelle interjected.
“We never came up with much on this so-called cooperation,” Carlos said. “There were personal contacts and some visits, stemming from those training camps in Libya and Lebanon, but no real collaboration. No joint operations, no sharing of munitions, nothing useful that we could get hold of. Remember those Palestinian training camps were over thirty years ago. But if you can get me the name of the camps and the dates, we’ll check from our side.”
“Our German colleagues have also tracked the father’s war record for us,” the brigadier went on. “He was Waffen SS, the military arm, and served his entire war in the Totenkopf armored division, which spent most of its time on the Eastern Front.”
“But there was a photo of him in France, on a tank with a Dunkerque signpost,” Bruno objected.
But that had been in 1940, when Heinrich Vogelstern was a junior officer, an Untersturmfuhrer, the brigadier explained. After the fall of France his unit was stationed south of Bordeaux near the Spanish frontier until April 1941. Then they were moved to the east, to take part in the invasion of Russia, where they stayed
until the end of the war. By 1945 he had risen to be a Standartenfuhrer, the equivalent of colonel, and was killed in Hungary at the end of the war, in March 1945.
“Anything known of his time in France, anti-Resistance operations or anything that could have made his son a target for vengeance?” Bruno asked.
“There wasn’t much Resistance at that time,” the brigadier said drily. Until quite late in the war, the Communists had dominated the Resistance. And until Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of 1941, the French
