They’d stayed in the Prince de Galle for three days after the events of the summit. After that, they’d both returned to London, agreeing to take a trip here, in the place where they’d skied as lovers and kept going back to. France had been the place they planned to settle once they were parents.
Grant soon returned to Algiers to sort out Khalil’s security, and Helen had attended her parents’ ruby wedding anniversary as guest of honour. Her parents’ friends had bombarded her with questions about the attack on Versailles, despite the fact Helen had specifically asked her parents not to divulge her involvement. Fat chance. She told Grant the stories of how she’d had to sit with an audience of oldies listening to her describe how she’d saved the prime minister.
‘Did he say thank you?’
‘Are you getting a damehood?’
‘Will you meet the Queen?’
‘Are you going to retire now?’
And so it went.
Grant told her about Hakim and his recovery. About the reaction of Farid and Samir when they saw their big brother. Helen had watched the funerals of the seven people who died at Versailles, on a TV in a London bar. The footage of her pointing her weapon at the treeline as Sir Conrad opened the car door to ask her to come in, had gone viral, but no one recognised her. She ate a club sandwich and walked along the river.
The seven fatalities were three Afghan interpreters, when one of the drones fixed on the face of the new president of Afghanistan, there to discuss his country’s future; and four security operators from Germany, who’d been checking last-minute details when the other drone detonated, when it successfully digitalised the face of the German chancellor, who’d had a suit jacket shoved over her head as she was forced to the ground in the moments of the carnage: that bodyguard died.
The news saw a seismic shift in counter terrorism, but Helen and Grant knew that it was just another piece in the hate puzzle. Attacks like it wouldn’t stop because someone was horrified and people died. Would Sir Conrad have sought vengeance if his son had died the same way as Rafik did?
But they weren’t here to weigh up political rights and wrongs.
They wore shorts and thin layers and applied plenty of sunscreen to combat the deceiving wind. Helen used a headband to keep her hair off her face. They wore sunglasses and strode away to the beginning of a rare walk on Mont Blanc that was relatively quiet. Few people knew about it. They were only made aware of it on an adventure training exercise they’d shared. The instructors scaled the peaks around here like mountain goats, but they also passed on their extraordinary knowledge.
No one would follow them where they were going.
Fawaz had had been pronounced dead at the scene in the Bois de Boulogne. Nabil Tradings was seized in name and assets by Operation Lionfish and the investigation was ongoing. Jean-Luc was rotting in a French prison somewhere near Calais, awaiting trial, and his mother was incarcerated in a female prison on the Swiss border. Ahmad Azzine had been shot by combined French and US security forces in the grounds of Versailles, along with six others, posing as caterers. The drones were constructed at night, in the great kitchen where she’d grabbed a sandwich. The catering company was fake and created by Nabil Tradings four years previously. Sniffer dogs hadn’t picked up the scent of C4 explosives because the material was stable for days as it sat inside boxes of dried spices. New training methods were now being tested on bomb-detecting dogs for scenarios when filaments of explosive are not directly released into the air.
Mustafa cooperated with Interpol and was spared prison for his information on how the drones were armed with facial-recognition technology, which was already being developed into weapons by the US military. He and his wife entered the witness-protection programme over there and were given a new life in LA.
Sir Conrad Temple-Cray retired and was replaced by a woman. Colonel Palmer moved to a desk job at the MOD. Helen had been asked to join a new mission at Interpol, and Whitehall was considering it. Sylvia Drogan was promoted to chief commissioner back home in Ireland, and Peter Knowles accepted the post of head of SO15, Counter Terrorism Command, in London.
The vetting of the driver of the prime minister’s car flagged up glaring anomalies: he’d been groomed by a cell on an estate in Wandsworth, then funded through college by money traced back to Morocco. He’d been the prime minister’s driver for four years: the amount of time investigators reckoned Fawaz had taken to plot the attack. During the autopsy, the driver was found to have a tracking device in his rectum.
After two hours of walking, they stopped to listen to the wind and eat chocolate bars.
‘Ready?’ Grant asked her. She nodded. She opened her bag and took out a box. They’d been asked to donate Luke’s body to medical science, but the thought of some scientist poking around their baby was too much, and they’d declined. The guilt was keen, but not as much as the pain. Their baby could have given valuable insight
