House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(21)

Keller spent that night in a small hotel near the Old Port of Cannes and in the morning hired a car to take him to Marseilles. It was a few minutes after ten when he arrived; he entered the Société Générale in the Place de la Joliette and requested access to his safe-deposit box. The batteries of his computer and mobile phone were long dead. He recharged both on the TGV to Paris and discovered in his in-box several unread messages from Vauxhall Cross, the tone of which rose in an ascending scale of alarm. He waited until he was safely aboard his second train, a London-bound Eurostar, before informing his controller he was homeward bound. He doubted his reception would be pleasant.

There were no further messages from Vauxhall Cross until his train drew into St. Pancras International. It was then he received a bland six-word transmission stating that he would be met in the arrivals hall. His welcoming committee turned out to be Nigel Whitcombe, Graham Seymour’s youthful-looking aide-de-camp, food taster, and general factotum. Whitcombe spoke not a word as he drove Keller from Euston Street to a terrace of sooty postwar houses near the Stockwell Tube station. As Keller headed up the garden walk, clutching a stainless steel attaché case that contained sixty thousand euros of ISIS money, he composed the verbal report he would soon deliver to his chief. He had managed to find the ISIS operative known as the Scorpion and, as instructed, had tried to go into business with him. Regrettably, the first transaction had not gone as planned, and three members of an ISIS cell were now dead. Other than that, his first assignment as an officer of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service had been rather uneventful.





12





Stockwell, London



“Couldn’t you have missed?”

“I tried,” answered Keller. “But the damn fools jumped in front of my bullets.”

“Why were you even carrying a gun?”

“I considered bringing a bunch of daffodils, but I thought a gun would be better for my cover. After all, they were under the impression I sold them for a living.”

“Where is it now?”

“The gun? Back on Corsica, I suppose.”

“And the bodies?”

“A few miles to the west.”

Seymour gazed disconsolately around the little sitting room. It was furnished with all the charm of an airport departure lounge. The safe house was hardly one of MI6’s crown jewels—there were much grander Service properties in tony Mayfair and Belgravia—but Seymour used this one frequently owing to its proximity to Vauxhall Cross. The automatic recording system had long ago been disabled. Even so, he checked the power module to make certain the system had not been switched on by mistake. It was located in a cabinet in the galley kitchen. The lights and signal meters were darkened and lifeless.

He closed the cabinet and looked at Keller. “Did they really have to die?”

“They weren’t exactly pillars of the community, Graham. Besides, I didn’t have much choice in the matter. It was them or me.”

“I’d advise your friend the don to give that warehouse a thorough scrubbing. Blood lingers, you know.”

“Have you been watching CSI again?”

Seymour made no reply.

“The French police would never dare look in that warehouse,” said Keller, “because they’re on the don’s payroll. That’s the way it works in the real world. That’s why the bad guys never get caught. At least the smart ones.”

“But occasionally,” said Seymour, “even spies get caught. And when it involves murder, they sometimes go to jail.”

“Define murder.”

“The unlawful killing of another—”

“‘If we’d wanted to be in the Boy Scouts, we would have joined the Boy Scouts.’”

Seymour raised an eyebrow. “T. S. Eliot?”

“Richard Helms.”

“My father loathed him.”

“If you’d wanted the job handled by the book,” said Keller, “you would have given it to a career officer who had his eye on a controllerate. But you sent me instead.”

“I asked you to infiltrate the cell by posing as a Corsican arms dealer. I’m quite certain I never mentioned anything about killing three ISIS terrorists on French soil.”

“It wasn’t my intention going in. But let’s not pretend to be troubled by my methods, Graham. We’re beyond all that. We go back too far.”

“We do indeed,” said Seymour quietly. “All the way to a farmhouse in South Armagh.”

He opened another cabinet door and pulled down a bottle of Tanqueray and a second bottle of tonic. Next he opened the refrigerator and peered inside. It was empty except for two dried-out limes. Their skins were the color of a paper sack.

“Heresy.”

“What’s that?”

“A gin and tonic without lime.” Seymour grabbed a handful of ice from the freezer and divided it between two smudged tumblers. “Your actions are not without consequences. Chief among them is the fact that the one and only link between the attack and Saladin’s network is now lying on the bottom of the Mediterranean.”

“Where he won’t be able to kill anyone else.”

“Sometimes a live terrorist is more useful than a dead one.”