He liked the feeling of her arms around his waist but it didn’t last long. In a few moments they were limping off to their separate rooms.
Gatinois was almost hoping his phone would ring again to give him an excuse to extricate himself from his brother-in-law. The man, a wealthy blow-hard with a gaudy apartment, was some kind of international currency trader. The fellow had given him the particulars of his job a hundred times but Gatinois shut his mind off whenever his jowly face began to yammer on about weak euros and strong dollars and the like. The idea of making money by electronically shifting pots of currency from here to there struck him as parasitic. What did the man do? For the greater good? For his country?
His wife and sister-in-law seemed engaged enough by whatever he was saying, attentively sipping cognac, a final round of drinks after a Sunday night dinner celebrating the man’s promotion to chief of one of his bank’s divisions.
Gatinois had no doubt what he did for his country. Today he’d spent hours on the phone, even made an unprecedented Sunday visit to The Piscine for a personal briefing by his staff.
He’d been absolutely correct about Bonnet’s ruthlessness and he liberally reminded Marolles of his prediction. Over the past two weeks he had absorbed each piece of news from Ruac with grim admiration. Now the campsite. The old boy liked his blood.
Well, more power to him.
Almost as if he’d willed it to life, his phone began to ring. He gratefully leaped up, and excused himself to take the call in the library.
His wife told her sister, ‘He’s been on the phone to his office all day!’
The banker seemed sorry his audience had diminished. ‘Oh well. I suppose we’ll never know what Andre really does for a living, but he’s keeping us all safe in our beds, I’m quite sure of that. More cognac?’
Gatinois sank into one of the banker’s library chairs. The book-cases were stacked with old leather-bound volumes, touched by the cleaner’s feather duster and nothing else.
Marolles sounded weary. ‘Bonnet’s been at it again.’
‘Does he ever rest?’ Gatinois asked incredulously. ‘What now?’
‘There was just an attempt to run down Simard and Mallory on a city street in Cambridge. One of our men saw it with his own eyes. They were only lightly hurt. The driver got away clean.’
Gatinois snorted. ‘So his tentacles reach all the way to England! Amazing, really. He’s got balls, I’ll give him that.’
‘What should we do?’ Marolles asked.
‘About what?’
‘ Our plans.’
‘Absolutely nothing!’ Gatinois exclaimed. ‘This has nothing to do with our plans. Don’t change a single operational detail. Not one detail!’
TWENTY-ONE
Monday Morning
The meeting at PlantaGenetics with Fred Prentice, Sara’s biologist friend was set for 9 a.m. The biotech company, founded by a Cambridge University botany professor, was in the business of finding new biologically active molecules from plant extracts. Their labs hummed round the clock with the whirring sound of hundreds of robotic arms bobbing up and down, pipetting specimens extracted from plants collected around the world and sent to Cambridge for analysis.
Sara and Fred travelled in the same botany circles and though they’d never had a chance to collaborate, they followed each other’s work and saw each other at conferences. Truth be told, she knew he fancied her. He had once shyly asked her to dinner once at a congress in New Orleans. She accepted the invitation because he was a sweet man and seemed lonely, and she was saved from a goodnight kiss by his allergic reaction to a spice in his gumbo.
Sitting in the taxi that morning, both of them looked like B-movie zombies. Luc’s forearm and hand were wrapped in a gauze bandage and his hip smarted. Sara had a few Band-Aids here and there. They’d skipped breakfast and met each other in the lobby, both running late. They hurried to get a cab. When they finally got a gander at each other in the back seat they had to laugh.
‘How long will it take to get there?’ Luc asked the driver.
‘Just ten minutes, up the Milton Road to the Science Park. You running late?’
‘A little,’ Sara said. It was already nine.
‘Should you call?’ Luc asked.
Sara took the suggestion.
‘Hello, Fred, it’s Sara,’ she said trying to sound cheery. ‘Sorry, but we’re running a few minutes…’
In the distance there was a flash, magnesium-bright. Then a shuddering percussive whump.
A dome of white smoke rose from the top of the trees.
‘Jesus!’ the taxi driver yelped. ‘That can’t be too far from where we’re heading!’
Sara had her phone to her ear. ‘Fred? Fred?’
They never made it to the Science Park. Emergency Services had the road blocked off and all traffic was diverted.
All they could do was return to their hotel, turn to the news on the lobby TV and watch live reports on Sky and ITV accompanied by the noise of helicopters overhead and the wail of sirens.
The explosion had devastated a wing at the Science Park. By 11 a.m. a reporter from Sky read out a list of companies located in the building. One of them was PlantaGenetics.
There was talk of a gas leak or a chemical explosion. The possibility that it was a terrorist attack was mentioned. The wing was a smouldering mess. There were multiple casualties. Burns units in Cambridgeshire and beyond were filling up. Blood donors were needed.
Then at noon, Sara’s phone rang.
She looked at the caller ID and said, ‘Oh my God, Luc, it’s Fred!’
They returned to the Casualty Department at Nuffield. The night before, the waiting area had been speckled with patients with minor problems.
Today it was a war zone. It was a small hospital, only fifty beds and it was melting down in the crisis.
After fighting their way inside, Luc and Sara eventually got the attention of a nurse to tell her they were friends of one of the blast victims. ‘Hang on a minute, luv,’ they were told and then they were left hanging for half an hour as a people chaotically pulsed around them. After several attempts, a young man pushing an empty wheelchair took pity on them and pulled them through the casualty doors to search the stretcher-choked corridors for their Mr Prentice.
It was quite a scene, a hospital at its breaking point. Luc followed along as Sara gazed at each victim, searching for Fred’s face. Past the Radiology Department she found him, his arm and shoulder in an elaborate plaster cast. Both feet were also casted to the calves. He was in his early forties with widow-peaked hair and a complexion as colourless as the plaster. He had the squint of a man who had lost his glasses.
‘There you are!’ he said to Sara.
‘Oh, Fred! Look at you! I was so worried.’
He was sweet and caring as usual. He insisted on exchanging polite introductions with Luc, as though they were meeting at his conference table. ‘Thank goodness both of you were late,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, you’d have been caught up in all this mess.’
He had been in the lavatory. He was embarrassed because his pants had been around his ankles when she rang.
The next thing he remembered he was being stretchered out by a fire crew with unbearable pain in his feet and his shoulder. A morphine jab in the car park cheered him up no end, he assured them, and other than the mental torture of not knowing the fate of several colleagues and friends, he was doing well enough.
Sara held his good hand and asked if she could do anything for him.
