The Confessor: a spy thriller (A Jayne Robinson Thriller, Book 3) by Andrew Turpin

Author:Andrew Turpin [Turpin, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788750400
Publisher: The Write Direction Publishing
Published: 2022-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Monday, July 4, 2016

Paris

There was a strained silence around the long oval table in the CIA station meeting room. It was always the same pattern inside intelligence agencies after a fatality during an operation, whether or not it involved one of the service’s own people.

Jayne and Rafael had just given an extensive briefing to Vic and Francine about what had happened on Rue de Saint-Simon, supplemented with a full contribution from Antonin, the only one of the three surveillance team members present. His colleagues Patrick and Dominique were still at the hospital, where doctors were stitching up Dominique’s head wound.

Even Avi Shiloah, who this time was the one joining by video conference from his office at Glilot Interchange, sat silently. The image on the huge wall-mounted monitor screen showed him with smoke curling in front of his face from his cigarette, making him look like some kind of ghostly overseer.

Incidents such as the death of Blondel were, sadly, all too frequent. It always made Jayne question the value of what she was doing and why, especially when it involved an innocent person caught up in a situation not of their own making. Blondel had simply been trying to help them.

The negative, self-flagellating thoughts revolving around her head had been well rehearsed over the years and decades.

All our fault—again. Yet another collateral casualty. Another body in the morgue. Probably another fatherless child somewhere. A broken, inconsolable widow.

Her stomach tightened, and she could feel her face muscles becoming rigid as her mind wandered. Then she chastised herself and told herself to concentrate on the others in the room and the task at hand.

Already the explosion and the death of Blondel were the lead items on television and radio news programs in Paris and, indeed, across France. Live reports from Rue de Saint-Simon were being broadcast on most channels, with TV reporters interviewing eyewitnesses from the heavily damaged Hôtel Duc de Saint-Simon, including the outraged owner and several guests.

Although a couple of the eyewitnesses described seeing a man and a woman with the dead property manager, Sebastian Blondel, outside the tailor shop, a police major admitted in a brief interview that he did not yet have any further information and said officers had not yet obtained CCTV footage and were unsure if any existed.

Jayne knew that, as was always the case when intelligence services were involved in such incidents on foreign soil where they were not meant to be operating, they would simply have to sit back and watch the subsequent inquiry unfold without being able to provide input. She found it very tough.

“Let’s try and look forward,” Vic said eventually, his rather dry tones breaking the vacuum. He looked around the room. “We can’t do anything about what happened, so let’s summarize where we’re at. Then we can decide where we’re going. What happened on Rue de Saint-Simon was a rather devastating confirmation that what you learned in Ramallah puts us on the right track. But it still doesn’t tell us why those cardinals were killed, or why Hezbollah is involved.

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