A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming

Author:Charles Cumming
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Suspense, Espionage, Azizex666, Fiction
ISBN: 9780312591335
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

40

That Luc had bothered to shave off his beard told Kell everything he needed to know. Malot’s companion from the boat intended to interview him while impersonating a police officer and did not want to run the small risk that Kell would recognize him. He said: ‘Bonjour’ in an upbeat fashion, passed the shoulder bag to Laurent, and introduced himself as ‘Benedict Voltaire’, a pseudonym as preposterous as any Kell had ever encountered.

‘So what happened here please?’ he asked in English, settling into a chair that Alain had vacated, as though making way for a visiting dignitary. Kell noted the extra stripe on Luc’s shoulder, outranking his two putative colleagues. He was either a senior police official or, more likely, a French Intelligence officer who had persuaded Laurent and Alain to let him masquerade as a cop.

‘Monsieur Uniacke is a British national. He was visiting La Cité Radieuse when he was attacked by two Arab youths. They took his bag, but it looks like he got lucky.’

‘It does look like that, yes,’ Luc replied, this time in French. He had the cracked, gravelly voice of a heavy smoker and was studying Kell’s face intently, as though delaying the inevitable moment when he would expose him as a liar. Laurent had unzipped the bag.

‘Would you like to check that nothing is missing?’

He passed the bag across the desk and Kell quickly began to remove the contents and to place them, one by one, amid the paperwork and mugs in front of him. The laptop was the first item to emerge, not damaged in any way. Next came the camera, then the Marquand mobile, which was still switched on. He placed it beside his London phone on the table. The Scramble for Africa was at the bottom of the bag, wedged in next to a tourist map of Marseille. Finally, from a zip-up interior pocket, he retrieved the Uniacke wallet.

‘Two cell phones?’ said Luc, a rising note of suspicion in his voice. Kell knew that he was in a scrap potentially far more dangerous than his earlier fight in the corridor. The SIM would have been checked and traced and he prayed that Marquand had erased Uniacke’s trail through Nice. It was only by sheer luck that Kell’s London phone had not been stolen; had Luc been given access to that, it would have been game over.

‘That’s right,’ he said, picking up the Marquand phone and inspecting it. ‘I have one for work, one for personal stuff.’

There was an unread text message on the screen and he opened it. It was from Marquand himself:

You were right. Everyone safely back in town. See you next week.

‘Personal stuff,’ Luc repeated, in English, as though Kell had employed a euphemism. The smell of a recently extinguished cigarette was on his breath.

‘This is fantastic,’ Kell said, trying to ignore Luc’s cynicism by channelling the innocent relief and enthusiasm of Stephen Uniacke. ‘Everything seems to be here. My laptop, my camera …’ He checked the wallet next,

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