‘You like the action, don’t you?’ Sylvia commented.
Helen shrugged. ‘You got me there.’ She couldn’t help feeling that the synopsis of her career sounded like an incessant thrusting charge towards promotion, which she admitted it was.
Sylvia seemed satisfied for now and offered to make her a coffee.
Helen turned back to her computer and looked at the intelligence gathered so far on Jean-Luc Bisset. His mother had been put under surveillance and had also been interviewed, and Helen read the transcript. Marie Bisset swore she hadn’t seen her son, but the local authorities had obtained a warrant to search her apartment anyway. Interpol, no matter where their operation was based, tried to use the local police where possible, and the French gendarmerie was up there with the best. Helen read the report of the search and noticed that DNA samples had been taken from the apartment and matched to Jean-Luc. They had his profile from an overnight bag found on the private jet on which he’d flown with Hakim. Curiously, the bag was packed with toiletries and a few T-shirts but contained no ID, documents, phone or sentimental items one might take away for a trip.
Like any organic matter, DNA degrades over time, depending upon the conditions and circumstances under which it’s found. Exposed to oxygen inside Madame Bisset’s flat, any residual DNA would degrade in a matter of weeks, so to find a trace of Jean-Luc in there meant that it was recent.
From the notes of Khalil’s interview with Interpol Algiers, there was no log of his bodyguard visiting his mother in Lyon in the last few months. Jean-Luc hadn’t been to Paris since Hakim’s final term before the summer break. It was solid evidence that Jean-Luc had been to Lyon without the knowledge of his boss.
She turned her attention to traffic at Le Bourget Airport. CCTV from the airport, of vehicles leaving Le Bourget between two thirty p.m. and three p.m. flagged up several of interest. One of the pilots of Khalil’s private jet recalled that he’d seen a black four-by-four in the vicinity of their parking allocation as they taxied, but thought it irrelevant at the time. They had seven vehicles matching that description leaving the airport, but only one – a black Range Rover – had blacked-out windows, and they’d traced it to a company registered in Paris. Traffic alerts had caught the same vehicle travelling south towards Lyon and it had entered the city at seven thirty Sunday night. From the entry point, they’d lost it, until it was picked up again, leaving the city and heading back to Paris. However, it had carried on its journey north, heading for Calais, where it had been dumped near the Eurotunnel entry point. It was burned out.
Their best estimate was that Hakim was here in Lyon, right under their noses.
Next she searched through Khalil’s security records, checking all of his staff against what intelligence they had internationally. Jean-Luc had a clean record, but two members of his household staff, one responsible for the maintenance of fences and the other a gardener, had family ties to Morocco. Both men had gone AWOL. Fawaz Nabil was Moroccan; it could be important. It was a question for Khalil Dalmani directly. Members of staff didn’t disappear coincidentally during times of family tragedy. It was a red flag, and she made notes of their names. She checked for any discrepancies in the data regarding Khalil’s movements, logged by his security tracking, as well as anomalies in files that noted the assigned weapons, body armour and listening devices to his personal bodyguards.
On the day that Hakim had disappeared, two weapons and three radios had been marked as in use, but she couldn’t find any evidence of them being logged back in. The information, supplied willingly by Khalil himself, said one of two things: either tracking of weapons and radios under household security was slovenly, or they’d disappeared along with the staff. Helen was impressed that Khalil kept such tight records, and it didn’t indicate a man who was careless. It was in his best interests to be transparent. After all, they were trying to find his son.
Next, she listened to the cockpit voice recorder from the flight to Paris, also provided by Khalil’s people, and it was without incident. The pilots were relaxed. They followed procedure and switched it off after landing safely and taxiing to their designated spot, when it would be set up for the next flight. She questioned why Hakim had travelled with only one bodyguard and had been told that this was normal, but it was far from regular in her book, and she decided to find out how long this had been going on. The answer Interpol had been given was that Khalil trusted Jean-Luc and Hakim was happy with him, but, to her, it was a massive lapse in security. Which is why she ordered tracing the other vehicles leaving Le Bourget at around the same time as the black Range Rover.
A forensic arson team had been sent to examine the vehicle dumped at Calais, but it would take time to run tests on the blackened shell. The car had entered Lyon from Mâcon on the E15 and the A6, and had travelled all the way into the city, crossing the Saône into La Croix-Rousse, from where it disappeared into the notorious alleyways, not covered by CCTV. Whoever was driving was either very clever or very stupid. A Range Rover with blacked-out windows should be memorable in that area of the city, but who cared? Who might remember? Their only positive lead was that one other vehicle that left Le Bourget Airport around the same time was also traced to Lyon by the same route. It was a
