Her restlessness was down to the adrenalin running through her veins, anticipating the events of the days ahead. Her rapprochement with the ambassador had been brief and functional. Nothing was mentioned about Colonel Palmer blocking her access to Sir Conrad, and he didn’t give any impression that he was anything less than delighted with her work. He’d asked her questions about the agenda at Versailles and how much faith she had in Special Agent White, and she’d reassured him. He’d been briefed separately by the Foreign Secretary, but she’d never know what conversations went on inside Downing Street about the engagement itinerary.
She didn’t need to. Her job now was to work with Peter Knowles and Roy White in order to make sure the summit went ahead without incident. As she went to leave the embassy to make her way to the Palace of Versailles, she was issued two firearms, plus ammo, by the ambassador’s armed guard, one for close quarter and the other for longer range. She signed them out and checked their weight and barrels, as well as how they handled in her grip. Later today, she’d meet the prime minister, who would arrive at Versailles with Sir Conrad.
Her mood was sombre. She’d been away from Paris all week, and it felt different somehow. She had a damn sight more answers than what she’d left with, but now, the mission had turned into something international, with her remit and boundaries unclear. It reminded her of a multinational collaboration, which she was familiar with, but with a twist of glaring uncertainty. She couldn’t remember ever having been involved in a direct threat to so many world leaders gathering at a summit before.
She was nervous.
It was en route that she found out that, at around two a.m. this morning, a man meeting the description of Jean-Luc Bisset had been reported speaking to some boat owners in La Rochelle, on France’s western coastal region of the Bay of Biscay. The sighting had been reported by a member of the public who recognised him from newspaper articles, read keenly as the gentleman followed the story of the abducted young man; he was himself of Algerian descent and took a personal interest. A quick-thinking local gendarme had called Interpol HQ, and the man had been arrested. Helen looked at the mugshot, taken inside a processing room near La Rochelle. It was him.
She’d previously briefed the ambassador’s head of security about the coming days, and it had gone smoothly. She’d worked closely with him during the Embassy security review two weeks ago. Was it only two weeks? It felt like six months. It was crazy, now she thought about it: she’d taken the Eurostar from St Pancras and read the log of the ambassador’s private security team during the time it took to get to Paris. Now she was hunting an international crook and facing responsibility for the life of the Prime Minister. And she’d seen Grant.
She needed a stiff gin.
She tried to relax and keep a clear head. She faced nothing she wasn’t professionally prepared for. The consensus so far between Peter Knowles and Roy White was that if the summit was to be hit, the best opportunity was travelling to and from the venue, and so everybody’s itinerary had been changed. All VIPs were to arrive separately with sizeable gaps between them. Also, each route had been altered and would be further changed mid-journey. Only Helen, Peter and Roy knew this for now.
It would take time and might cause inconvenience, but they could take no chances, and each government had approved the changes to the arrangements. Each entourage would be led by gendarmes on motorbikes and would be given live updates on which route to take. Only the two men on motorcycles would hear the instructions. Each pair of gendarmes had been handpicked by the office of the director general of the Police Nationale, with the approval of the French president’s personal-protection team. The highest security clearance vetting had been supplied on the gendarmes by the director general’s office to Roy White, who’d briefed the US president by video link as he crossed the Atlantic on Air Force One.
The hours before such an event, especially knowing that an incident was very likely to occur, was like waiting for the green light to deploy on an operation to lift a high-value target. The jumpiness in the pit of the stomach, the sweaty palms, the constricted throat, and the bare, naked, unmistakeable dazzling flashes of fear.
No one knew where Fawaz was. None of the intelligence services from any of the attendee countries had a clue where he’d gone to ground. Yes, they thought he was in France, but, according to what they’d revealed so far, this was a complex plot with many moving parts and many players. After the sighting by the cyclists, there’d been nothing. Rien.
Mustafa ibn Tafila was in custody in Marseilles. The raid on his workshop revealed kit perfect to make drones, but also capable of making a coffee machine or a model dog. The guy was obsessed with invention, like Maurice in Beauty and the Beast or Geppetto in Pinocchio. His workshop was a chaotic mess of stuff. So far, his interrogation had garnered a few titbits about what engineering projects he’d worked on with Fawaz over the years, but he did not admit to making drones.
Helen watched some of the interview footage via email as her driver neared the outskirts of Paris. She leant forward and studied the man who’d been loyal to Fawaz for over forty years. She wondered who else had displayed such allegiance and faith: Jean-Luc? According to Grant, Marie Bisset
