Demai seemed to read his mind. He scurried back a short way and carefully slid up the bank towards the fence, keeping his head and body close to the ground. When he was within arm’s reach of the metal uprights, he pointed to one of the main support posts and flapped his hand. Rocco followed him, smelling his body odour as he slid past. Then he saw what Demai was pointing at.
The fence was hinged. It was a gate, located conveniently between two clusters of security lights so that a shadow fell across this section of fencing. He moved closer. The next support post had a simple bolt attachment top and bottom, both of which could be slipped out to allow the gate to swing back. The bolts had simple locks inserted through them, but placed in a way that made them invisible to a casual observer.
He risked a quick look over the top of the bank, peering between the uprights. But the building blocked any view of the front, and all he could make out was a loading bay and a number of skips and wooden pallets half-hidden in the shadows.
And a light-coloured Citroen DS 19.
Rocco slid back and tugged at Demai’s sleeve. ‘You’ve done well. Let’s go.’ He didn’t know whether the man understood, but he followed quickly as if relieved to be on the move away from this place.
As they regained the police car waiting for them, Desmoulins touched Rocco’s arm. ‘I meant to tell you earlier, I got some information on that place, Ecoboras. I spoke to a friend who keeps an eye on the business pages. They’ve been going about five years, a subsidiary of a larger multinational business. They make electrical components for radio equipment.’
‘Military?’ If so, it would account for the contract and the protective shield from the Ministry.
‘Not so far. Ordinary household stuff. But they got a reputation for delivering on time and six months ago won a tender for assembling components on a new piece of kit for the army. There’s a whisper of friends in high places, but that’s nothing new, is it? It sounds pretty genuine to me.’
‘What about Wiegheim and Lambert?’
‘Well, that’s where it gets interesting. Marcel Wiegheim’s what he says: a plant manager. He makes things happen in production processes. But Fabien Lambert’s got some history…’
Fabien. Hell. The man was about as far from Rocco’s idea of a Fabien as he could get.
‘He doesn’t use the name, apparently. He’s known as Lambert, plain and simple. He’s down on paper as a director of the company, but less than five years ago he was kicked out of the army for “undisclosed activities not compatible with the French military”. He was with a specialist counterterrorist group at the time, but I couldn’t find anything more than that. Since then he’s been working in the security industry.’
Rocco nodded. That terminology had a number of meanings, ranging from watching building sites to ensure nobody ran off with the bricks, to working as a mercenary in Africa and other troubled hot spots. And ‘activities not compatible’ was usually a military euphemism for anything ranging from corruption or brutality through to selling military hardware. He was willing to lay good money that Algeria might have figured in Lambert’s service record.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Marc Casparon stood in a narrow doorway and watched the darkened street before him for signs of movement. He was in a narrow, cobbled cut-through just a short walk from the Rue de Rivoli near the Isle St-Louis, and the smell coming from the alcove behind him was pungent enough to choke a donkey. But he’d experienced worse — as had the working girl who was here when he first arrived. A few notes had persuaded her that she was better off elsewhere.
He shuffled his feet to keep warm. His position was only temporary at best. Sooner or later one of the hardened deadbeats who lived on the street would come looking to occupy this space for the night, and he’d have to move on. Such men had their own codes and weren’t afraid to stand up for themselves if they found a usurper in their place — even if the usurper was a cop. Caspar had no desire to get into a fight with a man looking for a place to doss down for the night.
He was tired. He’d spent the day trawling through his list of contacts in the Algerian community, both the pieds-noirs of the former, mainly European colonist community, and the recent ethnic-Algerian arrivals, mostly unskilled and poor, some of whom had gang connections here and back in Algeria. Carefully easing into conversation with the ones he trusted most, he’d found them willing enough to talk — but about everything except a man named Samir ‘Sami’ Farek. Distant though he was across the Med, the gang boss evidently commanded enough fear and respect to keep mouths firmly shut and opinions silent, and Caspar had found conversation dwindling fast the moment he mentioned the man’s name.
Now he was at the end of his list, with only one more contact he could rely on. He had so far heard only one brief mention of Farek’s name, and that was a snatch of conversation between two known gang enforcers. It had been brief, a rumble of gossip. But it was enough to tell him that Farek was on his way — and why. Having a wife run out on you was bad news in most societies. But in the world Farek lived in, he’d be seething with anger and outraged honour, thirsting for a way to demonstrably save face. Reason enough for such a man to risk exposure by coming here.
What he hadn’t learnt was how imminent was Farek’s arrival. If this final contact didn’t give him anything concrete he wasn’t sure what he could do to get the information Rocco was after. But he had to try. If he got lucky with this, Rocco might put in a good word for him and get him back into his old line of work. He’d have to take a medical and put in a stretch doing simple legwork so the bosses could say they’d done their bit. But better that than the slow death that consumed most former undercover cops who’d lost their jobs.
He slipped out from the doorway and made his way along the street, skidding on squashed fruit and kicking through scraps of newspaper. A breeze had got up and was cutting along the street, bringing with it the smell of the river and a hint of cooking from the gaggle of restaurants beyond this seedy ditch of a place. He nodded at two girls looking for punters. They were huddled under coats but with a flash of underclothes visible at a flick of the hand. They watched him go without giving the usual come-on.
They knew. The thought made his gut churn and he wondered how much further he could push this before he lost his nerve altogether.
He stopped outside a cafe with a faded curl of script above the window. Maison Louise: it sounded upmarket, but it was a dive where only the most naive of tourists wandering off Rivoli in search of local colour ever stayed longer than a few minutes. They usually ended up cleaned out by the riff-raff inside and could count themselves lucky if money was all they lost.
It was where his final contact spent much of his time. Karim Saoula was a low-level criminal who ran a few girls, sold a few drugs and traded in information. Most of the chatter was reliable, picked up over a few canons of cheap red or passed on by his girls while working their clients: who was talking to whom; who was moving goods through the ports and haulage depots surrounding Paris; which VIPs in French society were playing away from home or getting into debt through illicit gambling. Some of the information proved useful, some not. Caspar usually passed it on up the chain anyway, leaving his handlers to sift through the intelligence and decide what to do with it. Day-to-day, however, he had come to rely on Saoula over the years for his inside link to the gangs, to tell him who was rising or falling within the ranks of the various criminal factions around the city. It had never ceased to amaze him how much information the man picked up, most of it from loose talk among traditionally tight-lipped criminals. The man was a human sponge.