A Foreign Country. Charles Cumming

from the Hotel Gillespie, five minutes from Place Marshall. Kell walked there in the still of the night, a stranger on deserted French streets. He followed the same routine, going from floor to floor, pressing the infra-red key, looking for Amelia’s car.

      Finally he found it. She had parked on the second lower level. Kell was turning through three hundred and sixty degrees, eyes scanning every corner of the garage, when he saw a set of rear lights morsing in the distance. A dark blue Renault Clio squeezed in between a battered white van and a black Seat Altea with Marseilles plates. A film of dust on the windscreen. Kell went straight to the boot. There was an umbrella in the back and a pair of walking boots. He took them out, placed them on the ground, then lifted up the false floor in order to access the spare wheel. It was screwed in and secured by a plastic clip on a cable looped through the centre of the tyre.

      Kell pulled the tyre free, let it spin and rock on to the ground, and immediately saw a cloth package concealed in the hollow. Wrapped in a pillow case from the Hotel Gillespie were Amelia Levene’s passport, her driving licence, her credit cards and house keys. She had placed a SIM in a small protective cover, wrapped three hundred pounds sterling in an elastic band and put her BlackBerry, to which she was usually attached like a drip, inside a padded manila envelope.

      Kell put the SIM and the BlackBerry in the pocket of his coat and searched the rest of the car. She had barely driven it. There was a nearly crisp sheet of paper, emblazoned with the Avis logo, still protecting the footwell on the driver’s side. He could see mud on the surface, created by the soles of Amelia’s shoes. Kell replaced the spare wheel, put the pillow case, the umbrella and the walking boots back in the boot, and locked the car. He returned to street level, walked three hundred metres east along Boulevard Dubouchage and rang the doorbell of the Gillespie.

      ‘So, you feel ready to sleep now?’ Pierre asked him, looking at his watch like a bad actor.

      ‘Ready to sleep,’ Kell replied, and thought about yawning for effect. ‘Do me a favour, will you?’

      ‘Of course, Monsieur Uniacke.’

      ‘Cancel that alarm call. I’m going to need more than three hours’ sleep.’

      13

      Yet sleep never came.

      Thomas Kell took a shower, climbed into bed and tried to shut out the day’s events, even as they replayed continuously in his mind. He had called Marquand for an update on the French mobile and requested tech support on the BlackBerry SIM. It was already past 4 a.m. He knew that Marquand would call back before seven and that Cheltenham would have a fix on the French mobile within a few hours. There hardly seemed any point even in closing his eyes.

      The room then became strange to him, the quietness of it, the half-light. Kell felt his own solitude as intensely as he had known it at any stage since his departure from Vauxhall Cross. It occurred to him, as it often did in the depths of the night, that he knew only one way of being – a path that was separate to all others. Sometimes it felt as though his entire personality had grown out of a talent for the clandestine; he could not remember who he had been before the tap on the shoulder at twenty.

      What had become of the life he had dreamed of, the life he had promised himself on the other side of the river? Kell had told anyone prepared to listen that he was planning to write a book. He had convinced himself that he was going to study to become an architect. Both were notions that now seemed so absurd that he actually laughed against the silence of the room. He had tried, day after day in the grey winter months of a new year, to behave like an ordinary citizen, to become the sort of man who socialized and watched the football, who made small talk with strangers in pubs. He was determined to re-educate himself – to watch the films and the HBO box sets, to read the novels and the memoirs that had passed him by – but all he knew was the calling of the secret world. He had even believed, against all evidence, that he might finally become a father. But that particular dream was now as far away from him, as transient, as the whereabouts of Amelia Levene.

      He thought then of George Truscott, the man who surely stood to gain the most from Amelia’s continued absence. In the restlessness of his insomnia, Kell even wondered if Truscott himself had arranged for Amelia to disappear. Why else have her followed in Nice? Why else send Thomas Kell, of all people, to track her down? He opened his eyes to the blackened room and could make out only the faint yellow glow of a streetlamp in the window. He despised Truscott, not for his ambition, not for his cunning and trickery, but because he represented all that Kell loathed about the increasingly corporatized atmosphere within SIS; what mattered to Truscott was not the Service, not the defence of the realm, but his own personal advancement. With a lower IQ and a fractionally smaller ego, Truscott would likely have worked in some parallel career as a traffic warden or council inspector, dreaming at night of punching parking tickets and issuing directives against noise pollution. Kell would have laughed at the thought, but was too depressed by the prospect of Truscott ascending to ‘C’, bringing with him yet more apparatchiks, yet more corporate lawyers, while simultaneously sacrificing talented officers on the altar of his fastidiousness. Amelia Levene was almost certainly the last roadblock preventing SIS from turning into a branch of the Health and Safety Executive.

      In the end, it was the hotel that rang. Pierre had forgotten to cancel the wake-up call. Kell’s phone lurched him out of bed at exactly seven o’clock. He reckoned that he had been asleep for no more than half an hour. Ten minutes later, back in the shower, he heard the familiar ring of the mobile. His head swathed in shampoo, Kell swore under his breath, switched off the water and stepped out of the bath.

      It was Marquand, sounding chipper.

      ‘Bonjour, Thomas. Comment allez-vous?’

      Rule One of SIS was never to moan, never to show weakness. So Kell mirrored Marquand’s supercilious tone and said: ‘Je suis très bien merci, monsieur,’ as though he was addressing a French teacher at a primary school.

      ‘You found her BlackBerry?’

      ‘In the boot of a hire car. It was parked a quarter of a mile from the hotel.’

      ‘How did you get the keys?’

      ‘She left them in the safe in her room.’

      Marquand smelled a rat.

      ‘Reason for that?’ he asked.

      ‘Search me. Maybe she didn’t bank on George Truscott sending a team after her.’ He let that one sink in and pictured Marquand nervously adjusting his hair. ‘But she had time to pack, she wasn’t in a rush. There was no toothbrush in the bathroom, no perfume. Most of her clothes have gone AWOL as well. She’s travelling on an alias, probably wearing her glasses and carrying a leather overnight bag. It’s possible she left the key because she wanted me to find her, but that’s a long shot. Her passport and credit cards were wrapped up with the BlackBerry, her house keys, SIM card, the lot. All in a hire car that she obviously wasn’t worried might get nicked.’

      Kell wanted to have both the BlackBerry and the SIM analysed by someone who could break their SIS encryptions. Marquand, despite the early hour, had already been in touch with a source in Genoa and explained that she would reach Nice at around midday.

      ‘Elsa Cassani. Used to work for us in Rome. Freelance now. Worked out she can make a lot more money that way. Can do tech-ops, background checks, more contacts in more agencies than I care to think about. Feisty, smart, hyper-efficient. You’ll like her. Comes highly recommended.’

      ‘Tell her to call me when she gets into town.’ Kell reckoned he could grab a few hours’ sleep if Elsa left him undisturbed until twelve. ‘What else have you got?’

      ‘Cheltenham has been in touch. They’ve analysed the numbers you sent through. One of them was Amelia’s house in Wiltshire. She rang it three times over the course of two days. Must have spoken to Giles on each occasion because he’s been down there for the last week. As far as we know, he hadn’t heard from her since she vanished. Each conversation lasted less than five minutes.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘Giles probably