She began to walk.
Bridge wiped her mouth, tasting vomit on the back of her tongue, and looked up through her fringe as two police cars, lights blazing and bright even at this time of the morning, screeched to a halt outside the hospital. About time, she thought, and collapsed in the road.
65
“My name is Bridget Short. I’m a British civil servant. I was visiting a friend when a madman took us hostage. I want to call the British embassy in Paris.”
“Your French is impeccable. So let me say this clearly: bullshit.”
“My name is Bridget Short. I’m a British civil servant. I was visiting a friend…”
Bridge lost count after the fourth gendarme interrogator. It didn’t matter how many they sent. The first rule of being interrogated, whether by police or security services, was remarkably simple. No matter what you think they might know, no matter what they claim to have on you, say nothing and demand a lawyer. Simple, but surprisingly difficult to follow. Interrogators were practised at bluffing, stretching the truth, sensing weakness and giving the impression they already knew what had happened, they just needed to hear it in your own words, and telling all now would make things so much easier later… But in fact, most of the time they knew very little. They relied on educated guesswork, knowledge of the criminal mind, and outright lies to convince prisoners their situation was hopeless and confession was inevitable.
Bridge knew how that felt. She’d screwed up so much, she was just about ready to throw in the towel anyway. Killing Montgomery had forced her to go on the run; fleeing to Izzy had brought Novak to them, and endangered her sister’s family; killing Novak had exposed her to the authorities, and blew whatever cover she still had left. And she still didn’t know how bad the Exphoria leak was, or what Montgomery had actually stolen.
She had one thing to do before returning to London, but then she was done. Giles had been wrong about her. She should never have gone OIT in the first place. Not three years ago, not now. All she did was screw everything up.
And then François Voclaine walked in the door, smiled at her, and lit a cigarette.
Memories, images, and fragments of conversation flooded Bridge’s mind. A carefully placed word here, a cautious silence there, his interrogation, the moment when he defiantly destroyed his phone. And his disappearance from police custody, which Bridge had all but forgotten about in the frantic, violent madness that followed.
“Oh, balls,” she sighed, making sense of it all. “You’re DGSI.” The Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure was France’s internal partner to the Extérieure DGSE, just like MI5 to SIS, or the FBI to the CIA. And they’d sent their own mole hunter to Agenbeux. “Why didn’t you tell us? For God’s sake, we could have worked together.”
Voclaine reached over to unlock Bridge’s handcuffs, and snorted. “I could say the same to you. A British spy, operating in France without our knowledge or consent? Naughty, naughty.”
“So now what?” said Bridge, rubbing her newly freed wrists.
Voclaine handed her his cigarette. “Now you come with me, and smoke this instead of talking.”
He led her out of the station, past gendarmes whose eyes held nothing but hatred and suspicion. One senior officer looked like he might try to prevent them leaving, but Voclaine fixed him with a defiant stare and the man backed off. Outside, Voclaine opened the passenger door of a blue Peugeot, and made sure Bridge saw the gun holstered under his coat as he closed the door. The message was clear: don’t even think about running.
In the three seconds it took him to walk round to the driver’s side, Bridge ran through many of the possibilities ahead of her. Voclaine was taking her to his bosses at DGSI HQ in Paris, who would place her under extrajudicial arrest at Château d’If (oh, the irony) and return her to England only in return for political favours. Or he would take her to Henri Mourad, with an offer to cover up the two murders Bridge had recently committed on French soil in return for everything the British had regarding Exphoria. Or perhaps he was simply going to drive to a quiet spot in the woods and shoot her in the back of the head.
What she didn’t expect was for him to climb in the driver’s seat, reach into a briefcase on the back seat, and hand her a new passport. “Novak was carrying your ‘Catherine Pritchard’ backup when you killed him. It’s ruined. Use this instead.” It featured the same picture as her Bridget Short passport, but now she was called ‘Fleur Simpson’. Voclaine pulled the car away, nodding at the glove compartment as they approached the main road. She opened it to find, among the log books and driving gloves, a roll of cash held tight by an elastic band. “One thousand euros. You’ll use it to buy a flight to London; no paper trail. Once you’re back in England, you’re not my problem any more.”
“Am I your problem now?”
“Too fucking right you are.” Voclaine lit two cigarettes, and passed one to her. “Mourad is busy elsewhere, according to your boss Dunston.”
Bridge didn’t correct him. Voclaine was trying to demonstrate he was in command, that he had enough knowledge about the situation that she shouldn’t question him. So let him believe she worked for Emily. The more he thought he knew everything, the more he might talk. “Only myself and two senior officers know who you are, and what you’re doing here. The faster you leave France, the easier it will be to keep it that way. Understand?”
Bridge nodded. “How are you going to explain Novak’s death? Won’t the gendarmerie want revenge?” Voclaine gave her a quizzical look, and Bridge swore quietly as she realised how many assumptions she’d made in the heat of the moment. She’d been a bloody idiot. “Oh — Novak wasn’t police at all,
