“Where is she?”
The woman’s mouth tried to form words but could not.
“Where is she?” Gabriel repeated.
“I swear I don’t know.” The woman shivered. Her eyes were losing focus. “Please,” she whispered, “you have to help me.”
“When was she here last?”
“Two days ago. No, three.”
“Which was it?”
“I can’t remember. Please, please, you have to—”
“Was it before or after you and Brossard went to Aix?”
“How do you know we went to Aix?”
“Answer me,” said Gabriel, squeezing her hand again. “Was it before or after?”
“It was that night.”
“Who took her?”
“Paul.”
“Only Paul?”
“Yes.”
“Where did he take her?”
“To the other safe house.”
“Is that what he called it? A safe house?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me,” repeated Gabriel.
“Paul never told us where it was. He called it operational security.”
“Those were his exact words? Operational security?”
She nodded.
“How many safe houses are there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Two? Three?”
“Paul never told us that.”
“How long was she here?”
“From the beginning,” the woman said.
And then she died.
They laid the four bodies on the floor of the storage room and covered them in clean white linen. There was nothing to be done about the blood inside the house, but outside Gabriel quickly hosed down the paving stones of the garden to superficially erase the evidence of what had occurred there. He reckoned they had at least forty-eight hours; then the woman from L’Immobiliere du Lubéron would come calling to collect the keys from the departing clients and supervise the cleanup. After discovering the blood, she would immediately phone the gendarmes, who would in turn discover the four bodies in the owner’s private storage room—a storage room that had been emptied of its contents and converted into a cell for a kidnap victim. Forty-eight hours, thought Gabriel. Perhaps a bit longer, but not much.
It was beginning to get light when they hiked out of the valley and returned to the spot where they had left the motorbike and Keller’s old Renault. Gabriel paused for one last look; a single figure, a laborer, was moving through the vineyards but otherwise there was no activity in the valley below. They loaded the rucksacks into the trunk of Keller’s car and drove separately to the town of Buoux, where they stopped for brioche and café crème in a café filled with ruddy-faced locals. The smell of freshly baked bread made Gabriel feel slightly ill. He rang Graham Seymour in London and in cryptic language reported that the mission had failed, that Madeline had been in the villa once but had been moved approximately seventy-two hours earlier. The trail had reached a dead end, he said before ringing off. All they could do now was wait for Paul to make his demands.
“But what if he decides it’s too risky to make demands?” asked Keller. “What if he just kills her instead?”
“Why are you always so negative?”
“I suppose you’re beginning to rub off on me.”
They left the Lubéron by the same route they had taken the night they had followed René Brossard and the woman from Aix: down the slopes of the massif, across the river Durance, past the shore of the reservoir at Saint-Christophe, and, eventually, back to Marseilles. There was a ferry leaving for Corsica at noon. They each bought a ticket and then sat next to one another at separate tables at a café adjacent to the terminal. Gabriel drank tea, Keller beer. His mood was noticeably gloomy. It was not often he returned to Corsica having failed to fulfill his mission.
“It wasn’t your fault,” said Gabriel.
“I told you she was there,” he answered. “She wasn’t.”
“But it looked like she was.”
“Why?” Keller asked. “Why were the guards pulling night shifts when Madeline was already gone?”
Just then, Gabriel’s mobile phone vibrated. He raised it to his ear slowly, listened in silence, then returned it to the tabletop.
“Graham?” asked Keller.
Gabriel nodded. “Someone left a phone taped to the underside of a bench in Hyde Park last night.”
“Where’s the phone now?”
“Downing Street.”
“When is he supposed to call?”
“Five minutes.”
Keller finished his beer and immediately ordered another. Five minutes passed, then five more. From outside came an announcement that the ferry for Corsica was beginning to board. It nearly drowned out the sound of Gabriel’s phone buzzing against the tabletop. Again he raised it to his ear and listened in silence.
“Well?” asked Keller as Gabriel slipped the phone into his pocket.
“Paul made his demand.”
“How much does he want?”
“Ten million euros.”
“Is that all?”
“No,” said Gabriel. “The prime minister would like a word.”
Outside a line of cars was snaking into the belly of the ferry. Keller rose. Gabriel watched him go.