‘Justice Minister,’ declared Castille.
‘I would consider nothing less,’ said Sanglier. ‘I am well aware – and proud – of my achievements here in Paris…’ He paused, determined never to be treated lightly or underestimated. ‘Just as I am well aware – and perhaps even prouder – of the cachet that goes with my name.’
Coty smiled, a flinty expression, fitting another cigarette into its holder. ‘The art of politics is assembling maximum resources to achieve optimum advantage-’
‘-consistent with honesty,’ Castille hurried in.
‘I’m glad we’re fully understanding each other,’ said Sanglier, content with Coty’s admission that like all politicians these men were observing the golden rule of expediency. He recognized that he did not have a positive guarantee – anything in writing – but acknowledged that to expect that would be naive. ‘I have your promise?’
‘My absolute word,’ said Castille.
‘Do we have yours?’ demanded Coty.
Sanglier paused, at the very moment of commitment. ‘Yes,’ he said.
The venison Sanglier had chosen to follow the oysters was excellent, like the Margaux. With something to celebrate now, it was Coty who proposed the toast.
Castille said: ‘I have given you my solemn undertaking.’
‘Which I accept,’ said Sanglier, curiously.
‘Now I am seeking undertakings from you,’ announced the man. ‘I have no wish to cause offence. But there are questions I have to ask you. My platform, remember, is that of honesty, integrity and selflessness towards the people who will put us into office.’
‘Yes?’ If Sanglier hadn’t felt the first stir of uncertainty the unctuous hypocrisy would have been amusing.
Castille turned invitingly to Coty. The eminence grise of the party said: ‘Is there anything in your past that could emerge once we’re in power – once you held a ministerial portfolio – that could cause the sort of scandal that has besmirched the present government?’
‘No,’ declared Sanglier. No going back, he realized.
‘I repeat that I do not intend any offence,’ said Castille. ‘But neither do I intend to allow any risk to my election. Are you prepared for the party secretariat to investigate your past fully, to confirm that assurance independently?’
He had to take the risk about his father. What about Francoise? She was by far the greater danger, prowling too many public places like a bitch permanently on heat. Could he control her – persuade her to control herself – with the lure of being the wife of a government minister? Close to being an unrealistic question, he forced himself to admit. There’d been enough to lose – quite apart from the Sanglier reputation – when he was commissioner in Paris before the Europol appointment, and neither consideration had curbed her. It wasn’t Francoise or his father that gave him pause. Rather it was his determination to speak and act in every circumstance as they would expect, to prevent any doubt. Despite Castille’s caveat, they would expect him to be affronted. ‘Your apparent need to do so hardly fits with undertakings of personal honesty that we’ve pledged between ourselves.’
‘It fits with my intention to establish an administration above reproach,’ said Castille, a prepared retort.
‘ Do you object?’ said Bigot.
‘Of course not,’ said Sanglier. ‘I’m prepared to cooperate in any way.’
‘That’s reassuring,’ said Coty. ‘It’s going to give me great pleasure getting to know the son of a man I greatly admired.’
It was mid-afternoon before the meal ended. They parted with effusive handshakes and assurances of how much each was looking forward to working with the other.
Bigot was the first to speak after Sanglier left. ‘It’s a coup. And not just for the Sanglier name. His wife was a Dior modeclass="underline" spectacular woman. There’ll be a lot of good publicity around the two of them. We could maybe build them up as the perfect couple.’
Kurt Volker tracked the third message.
He wasn’t suffering any hangover from the previous night and was actually early at his embassy-linked terminals when the e-mail was delivered. Because he’d established a program of as many connections to Mary Beth McBride as possible the sender address instantly registered, which gave him at least forty seconds to follow backwards the stepping stones between sender and embassy before the disconnection.
Claudine and Blake arrived at their police headquarter offices as it was happening, unaware of the potential breakthrough until being beckoned urgently into the computer room by one of the early shift Belgian operators ploughing through the renewed incoming deluge prompted by the previous night’s TV appearance.
Several other operators had abandoned their stations, crowding round the German, but even their excitement was subdued. Volker himself appeared quite relaxed, although his hands were darting with astonishing coordination between the keyboards of three terminals in a semicircle in front of him. Claudine was once more reminded, as she had been on their first assignment together, of a theatre act to which she had been taken as a child to watch a man perform simultaneously upon three pianos. Completing the impression, Volker was humming, at first tunelessly but then something vaguely Wagnerian. No one else was making any sound.
Claudine had no idea what she was watching: didn’t try, even, to read the words and the instructions that kept appearing, becoming fainter each time, upon the main screen in front of the German. At one stage, like the theatre pianist, Volker operated his central keyboard with his left hand and with his other punched keys on the board to his right, conjuring e-mail addresses on to the connected screen.
‘Bah!’ he exclaimed, in final frustration, when the screen directly in front of him remained blank after the message faded. ‘Lost him!’
He spun the swivel chair, scattering the other operators, to face Claudine and Blake. ‘They’d buried themselves in at least four different systems, moving just as I thought in source-covering sequence from one to the other…’ He stabbed a finger at the last address on the side screen. ‘That’s where I lost them… at least I think I did. There’s an outside chance – a very outside chance – it could be where they’re operating from.’
‘Where is it, for Christ’s sake!’ demanded Blake urgently.
Volker turned another revolution, accessed INEX, and typed in the address. At once the screen filled with a blank home page of a computer cafe in Menen, on the Belgian-French border. ‘It would certainly be easy,’ said Volker, still looking at his screen. ‘You can be quite anonymous in places like this. You just go in, get allocated a terminal to surf wherever you want and simply walk away after you’ve paid.’
‘Get me the rest,’ demanded Blake, hurrying from the room.
Claudine followed, accepting that apart from analysing the latest message she was largely superfluous. And she didn’t hurry with the message.
Needing the operation-initiating authority of the Belgian Justice Ministry Blake first telephoned Jean Smet and asked for total surveillance to be placed upon the Menen cafe. Before disconnecting he cancelled that morning’s scheduled conference with the promise to reconvene at the already arranged afternoon time unless a new development intervened. He gave the same undertaking – and account – to Andre Poncellet and Paul Harding, in that order.
Finally Blake tried to reach Sanglier. Told the commissioner was unavailable, he sent a full account to the man’s secretariat, with a request for Sanglier to contact him as soon as possible.
By the time Blake finished, Volker had located the Internet-linked computers through which Mary Beth’s abductors had ridden Sinbad-like to reach the US embassy home page. From the specialized Menen cafe the message had travelled unseen and unsuspected to the Foreign Ministry system in Bonn. From there it had been sent to a Trojan Horse unknowingly installed in the mainframe computer of the American Express office at the foot of the Spanish Steps, in Rome. From there it had been automatically routed to the flagship of the Kempinski hotel chain on Berlin’s Kurfurstendamm. The last stage from there had been to the school on the rue du Canal from which Mary Beth McBride had disappeared, six days earlier, whose e-mail address Volker had put on to his search program.