The Predators Read online

  Claudine was momentarily thrown by the obvious change of subject. ‘Big. The rumour is that he did something special in Northern Ireland but no one’s found out what it was.’

  ‘Maybe you will.’

  Claudine shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Did you like him?’

  Claudine began to concentrate, curious at the remark. ‘I’ve not really met him before. Haven’t now, really. I haven’t formed an opinion.’

  ‘If it becomes a proper case – kidnap, I mean, not anything professional as far as I’m concerned – maybe I could come down. Brussels isn’t far.’

  ‘Your choice,’ said Claudine. Heavily she added: ‘Like everything’s your choice. I just want you to make it.’

  Mary couldn’t understand why it was taking so long. She’d been held for almost a whole day from the time she’d been tricked into the car and dad still hadn’t got her out. Maybe the woman and the stupid men in masks had been caught. That could be it: caught while trying to collect the money and refusing to say where she was. Except that one man hadn’t been caught. The one who giggled a lot, like some of the girls at school, Martha especially, when they were nervous or expecting a surprise.

  She’d managed to make pee pee twice – and do the other thing – without him seeing her through the peephole. And she’d eaten all the bread he’d brought for breakfast and the roll at lunch. You couldn’t poison bread, could you? But she hadn’t drunk the soup. Or the milk that morning. Just in case. It wasn’t difficult to cup her hands and drink water from the sink faucet, in the cell.

  She wished dad would hurry up. She still wasn’t properly frightened, not all the time anyway. It was just boring, in this silly room. Silly room and silly men. She was glad the woman hadn’t come. She didn’t like the woman. Gently she put her tongue against her cut cheek. It still hurt.

  She jumped, startled at the sound of a key turning in the lock but had recovered by the time the heavy door swung open. The sniggering man blocked the opening.

  ‘Am I going home?’ Mary demanded at once.

  ‘You’ve got to come into the big room, for exercise,’ said Charles Mehre.

  He scarcely moved aside, forcing her to brush against him to get by. She didn’t like it. Mary looked cautiously around the huge underground chamber. It was empty, apart from the man, and not as hot as the previous day. There wasn’t the sweet smell, either. ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Not here.’

  ‘Where?’ Mary insisted.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘The police have probably got them,’ she declared.

  ‘I’d have known,’ said the man, although uncertainly.

  ‘How?’ persisted Mary.

  ‘I would,’ insisted the man, with child-like logic. ‘You’re to shower, in there.’ He pointed to a door, as if recalling a mislaid instruction.

  He’d probably look at her with no clothes on, through a peephole she couldn’t see. Mary said: ‘I don’t want to shower.’

  ‘She said you must. She doesn’t like smelly girls,’ protested Mehre.

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘No,’ said Mehre, looking away as if to avoid her direct stare. ‘Don’t shower if you don’t want to.’

  That had been easy, Mary decided. Easy and interesting.

  ‘You’re to walk around. Exercise,’ ordered the man, although weakly.

  Mary began at once, not to obey him but because she wanted to think, to see how far she could take things. She was right not to be frightened of this man. There was nothing to be frightened about. She could bully him, the way she made girls at school do things when she wanted. He stood in front of the large screen, making small grunting sounds, and Mary was sure he hadn’t realized she was gradually making her way towards the door leading up to the panelled hall. She was very close when she lunged at it, grabbing the handle and pulling at the same time. The door remained solid, unmoving, and behind her Mehre expanded his childish giggle into an open laugh. ‘I knew you’d do that. I locked it. I’m clever. But you’re a bad girl.’

  Mary, who hated appearing foolish in anything, turned furiously back into the room. Momentarily not knowing what to do, how to recover, she pointed to the huge screen and said: ‘I want to watch television.’

  There was a snicker. ‘We only watch special films.’

  ‘I’ll watch a film then.’

  ‘Not until you’re allowed. Until she says.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’s got to say so.’

  ‘Who?’ Mary tried again.

  ‘The others,’ he generalized.

  ‘Who are the others?’

  ‘You’re not allowed to know.’

  ‘What are your names?’

  ‘You’re not allowed to know that either.’

  ‘Do you know who my father is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s a very important man.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘He’ll be very angry.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘If you let me go I’ll tell him you were kind to me. I’ll tell him not to be angry at you as he is going to be at the others. At her.’

  ‘I think you should go back into your cell,’ said Mehre. ‘You’ve been bad. Naughty. Now you won’t get any supper.’ He held her wrist with one hand and put his other on her buttocks, but not to push her forward. Mary twisted away from the groping fingers before pulling her arm free to enter the cell by herself.

  She hadn’t liked the way the man had touched her bottom because it was rude but otherwise she felt very sure of herself. He was what mom called simple-minded: did what he was told. There was a gardener’s help like that back home in Virginia. She’d make this man do what she wanted, like the gardener’s boy. Trick him, so that she could get away, the way girls got away from bad people in the adventure books.

  He caught her making pee pee but she didn’t care. She had to let him look if he wanted: let him think there was nothing she could do. It wasn’t as if he could see anything. She didn’t want him to squeeze her bottom again, though.

  She hunched on the bunk, watching the second hand on her watch bring the time round to six o’clock. The time she usually fed Billy Boy. She couldn’t trick the silly man tonight. Maybe not even tomorrow. She hoped mom and dad weren’t arguing about her, as they often did: didn’t imagine that she’d run away on purpose. She couldn’t understand why no one was doing anything to get her away.

  A lot of people were preparing to.

  At Brussels airport the US military aircraft touched down carrying twenty-five FBI and CIA personnel, under the overall command of the Bureau’s deputy operational director and chief hostage negotiator John Norris.

  Paul Harding was waiting at the bottom of the ramp when Norris disembarked. Harding said: ‘There’s nothing new.’

  ‘If there had been you’d have patched it through to the plane, wouldn’t you?’ Norris was impatient with empty words and gestures.

  At her creeper-clad Brussels mansion off the Boulevard Anspach Félicité Galan personally poured the champagne for the two men with her and said: ‘So there! It’s all going to work perfectly.’ When neither replied, she said to Jean Smet: ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’ And to August Dehane: ‘You’ve done very well: very well indeed.’ Reluctantly they followed her lead, raising their glasses in a toast. ‘To something we haven’t done before,’ the woman declared.

  And Claudine Carter and Peter Blake reached the Metropole Hotel on the Place de Brouckère.

  ‘This is the first time I’ve arrived on a case without knowing what it was,’ said Claudine.

  ‘I’ve done it far too often,’ said Blake.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  John Norris, who tried hard to know everything, knew that more than once local FBI stations had been advised by Bureau headquarters of his impending arrival with the words The Iceman Cometh. And liked it, althoug
h there wasn’t any similarity between him and the way he operated and any of the has-been characters in O’Neill’s play, which he’d particularly gone to see when he discovered the intended in-house mockery. Norris didn’t see it as a lampoon of his style and character. He was quite happy to accept it as an accurate description.

  He was a sparse, bespectacled man who had learned totally to control what emotions he possessed, which were limited to begin with. He neither drank, smoked nor swore and his devotion to the Bureau was to the absolute exclusion of everything else: whenever he spoke of the Bureau’s founder Norris called him Mr Hoover. His marriage to a college sweetheart, his one and only relationship, had ended in divorce and her accusation that he preferred to be at Pennsylvania Avenue than at home with her. Norris had agreed with her. What little physical need he had was met once a month – usually on a Friday – always in the missionary position and lasting no more than fifteen minutes, by a discreet but expensive professional who worked out of an apartment in the Watergate complex. She’d long ago decided he’d get as much satisfaction riding an exercise bike but she was a working girl and wasn’t going to argue with how he spent his $500. He’d telephoned before leaving Washington, to tell her he was going out of town and couldn’t make that Friday. She’d said she’d miss him and to hurry back. He’d cancelled the paper and magazine delivery, too.

  His Masters degree was in psychology. As the Bureau’s foremost expert on hostage, siege and kidnap negotiations Norris lectured on behavioural science at the FBI’s National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime at their training academy at Quantico when his operational commitments allowed. He knew the Iceman tag was common knowledge there. It was useful, being preceded by a hard man reputation: saved time having to make people understand that when John Norris said jump they had to jump through fire, hoops, hell and high water. He didn’t take prisoners. He got them released.

  From the nervous way he was driving, both hands white-knuckled around the wheel, it was obvious Paul Harding had heard about the Iceman: idly Norris wondered if the term had even been used in the overnight advisory cable. He listened in disconcerting, unmoving silence while Harding obeyed his instruction to go verbally through everything that had happened since the first alarm at the embassy. People sometimes spoke more openly – more carelessly – trying to express themselves verbally than they did writing official reports. Listening without movement or interruption – letting echoing silences into conversations – hurried people into unthought revelations.

  ‘I don’t like it that there hasn’t been any contact by now. That doesn’t fit,’ said Norris. He had a nasal, New England accent.

  ‘You think she’s dead?’

  ‘I will do if there’s nothing in the next twenty-four hours.’

  ‘I hit the button the moment it became a crisis,’ Harding reminded him quickly.

  Back-covering time, recognized Norris. ‘What about the others? Our man, Boles? And the local driver, Luc? They clean?’

  ‘Absolutely. It was a puncture, pure and simple.’

  ‘How?’

  Harding snatched a frowning glance across the car. ‘How?’

  Norris sighed impatiently. ‘You’ve got to understand something about me, Paul. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in coincidences. I don’t believe in accidents. I don’t believe there are good people, only bad people. I work on the principle – so you’ll work on that principle too – that everyone’s guilty until I – me, no one else – decide otherwise. And it takes a lot for me to decide otherwise. You got all that neatly memorized, so there won’t be any misunderstandings between us?’

  Two positive indications that he was going to remain part of the investigation, realized Harding, relieved. ‘I got it.’

  ‘So. How?’

  ‘Single nail.’

  ‘Wall or tread of the tyre?’

  ‘Tread.’

  ‘Just the nail? No base to keep it upright in the path of the car?’

  ‘Just the nail.’

  ‘You’ve kept it, of course, as evidence? Haven’t had the wheel fixed?’

  Harding swallowed with fresh relief. ‘All kept.’

  ‘Good. Very good. What about the school? Anything wrong there?’

  Harding hesitated, knowing there was no way of avoiding the answer but wishing he could. ‘Vetted the place myself, before the kid was enrolled. Quite a few embassies use it so the principal and the governors are as careful as hell, knowing what there is to lose. They’re shitting themselves over what’s happened.’

  Norris winced at the profanity. ‘So they should. Who made the mistake with the duplicate call?’

  Survival time, thought Harding: sorry, Harry. ‘Becker says he didn’t but he was on security dispatch duty. Boles says it was Harry he spoke to from the car.’

  ‘You checked Becker’s background?’

  ‘I’ve gone through everything we’ve got locally, at the embassy. He’s been here for two years. There’s never been any trouble.’

  ‘He drink?’

  ‘No more than anyone else.’

  There was the impatient sigh again. ‘So he drinks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Gamble?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Local friends?’

  ‘None that I know.’

  ‘The ambassador’s been told I want to see him immediately?’

  ‘He’s waiting.’

  ‘I want you to sit in on that. As soon as it’s over, I want you to check Becker again but better than you already have. I want everything Washington’s got on him, for starters. Take as many people as you want, from those I brought in. I want to know if he’s in debt or has got a drink problem or is involved with a local woman – or man if he’s gay. I want to know anything that could have compromised Becker: exposed him to blackmail. Any problem with that?’

  ‘None at all,’ lied Harding, glad they would soon be at the embassy. It was difficult to conceive the problems he was going to have with this dead-faced, rigor-mortised sonofabitch. It was chilling just being close to. Determined not to be caught between a rock and a hard place, Harding said: ‘The CIA station here – Lance Rampling’s the resident-in-charge – are pissed off not being included in the meeting with the ambassador.’

  ‘Langley’s been told who’s running the show. Rampling should have been messaged by now, making it clear they’re subsidiary. I’ll see him after the ambassador: straighten him out.’

  ‘He asked for a meeting.’

  Dismissive of any CIA distraction, Norris said: ‘What about the kid herself?’

  ‘Awkward little brat. Knows she’s the daughter of an ambassador and doesn’t let anyone forget it. Makes a lot of people’s lives a misery …’ Anticipating the question seconds before Norris asked it, Harding added hurriedly: ‘But definitely not enough to make anyone snatch her: do her any real harm. She just needs her ass slapped.’

  ‘Is she wilful enough to have run away: staged the whole business?’

  ‘That was my first thought. Like I said, I didn’t wait to hit the button, but I expected her to show up with some fancy story. But she wouldn’t have stayed away this long.’

  Norris remained silent for several minutes. ‘So what’s the local situation?’

  ‘We’ve been given total Belgian cooperation, guaranteed at Justice Minister level. The police commissioner, André Poncellet, is personally involving himself. And they’ve called in Europol, which is—’

  ‘I know what Europol is,’ snapped the other man. ‘We advised, when they were set up. Same rules as with the local force. We’ll take everything they’ve got to offer but I don’t want them getting in the way of our investigating.’ He shifted in his seat for the first time. ‘That means maintaining the closest, day-to-day contact: officially we accept they’re in charge, running the operation. You know how big a force Europol are committing?’

  ‘No. I haven’t got any names, either. Just know they’re coming in tonight. I’
ve scheduled a leaders’ conference at the embassy tomorrow. Included Poncellet.’

  ‘Good deal,’ said the thin man. ‘Anything else that needs saying?’

  ‘Not that I can think of.’ At last they reached the Boulevard du Régent. Harding gestured ahead and said: ‘There’s the embassy.’

  ‘We’ve filled in the journey very well,’ said Norris. ‘Got to know each other. That’s good.’

  Paul Harding couldn’t remember a man who’d made him feel so unsettled, ever in his career. And that included three proven killers, one with a .375 magnum in his hand. Ever conscious of retirement just three years away, he said: ‘It has been good. I’ve enjoyed it.’

  Liar, thought Norris.

  James McBride was waiting in his study, jacket off, tie loosened around an unbuttoned collar. Hillary sat some way away, the customary distance re-established, in contrast perfectly composed, perfectly dressed, every hair starchily in place. The ambassador already had a large Jack Daniel’s on the desk in front of him and gestured them towards the open cabinet while the introductions were made. Harding was already going towards it before he realized Norris had refused and thought, fuck it! With no alternative he carried on, desperately seeking a soda. Then again he thought fuck it, defiant this time, and took at least three fingers of Jack Daniel’s, too. It looked even larger from the amount of ice he added. It had been one hell of a drive. The following days were going to be hell as well. Maybe worse.

  ‘I heard through State that you’re the Bureau’s chief negotiator,’ said McBride. ‘That’s good. That’s how it’s got to be.’ His hand was visibly shaking when he lifted the whisky glass.

  ‘Everyone with me is an expert in his field,’ assured Norris. He sat primly and very upright, his concentration absolute on the politically appointed diplomat with more back-door clout than anyone in the new administration.

  ‘We want our daughter back, Mr Norris,’ said Hillary. There was a note of impatience in her voice.

  ‘I’ll get her back for you, ma’am. All I need is the contact.’ There was no doubt in the man’s voice.

  The head-on ego clash was deafening, thought Harding.