One tap.
“When? Today? Thursday, 8th?”
Two taps.
“Tomorrow, Friday, 9th?”
One tap.
“Shit. At what time? Tap the hour.”
He tapped twelve times.
“At midday?”
One tap.
“I presume in Marrakech, but where? Give me the first letters.”
It took him a long time to tap out Y followed by S and L. He stopped.
“You just tapped out YSL, is that right?”
One tap.
They both heard a noise like a door opening and stopped communicating instantly. Mike slumped back onto the floor. Her wig caught on the chain and fell to the floor.
Walter had woken properly from his coma and had begun asking his own questions, with the first being, “When can I go home to the UK?” The FCO in London was already putting in place the arrangements to fly him back in order that he could be protected on British soil from any external threats. He could see the bright sky out of a window to his right and was imagining his flight back to London. It was a beautiful day in Colmar.
“It’s a pizza.”
A mile away, as they sat at a table in the Restaurant Magritte, the relationship between Patrick Redwood and Jacqueline Bettancourt was blossoming. They were having a very late lunch that showed no sign of ending any time soon, but this, perhaps, was no surprise – it was France, after all.
“Shhh!” she whispered, “You must never call it pizza in the Alsace. It’s tarte flambée, and it’s different. It’s Alsatian flatbread topped with fromage blanc, bacon and thinly sliced raw onions .”
“It’s a pizza.” He looked up at a Magritte painting of a pipe. “You see that? ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’ Magritte would agree with me: ‘This is not a pipe.’”
“He was Belgian.”
“A pipe is not always a pipe. Look at PEGASUS.” He paused. “Is Alsatian cuisine based on stealing other people’s ideas? Tarte flambée is just pizza and raclette is just a Swiss fondue.”
She smiled at him benevolently. “How have you lived this long?”
He ate a slice of tarte flambée and almost burnt the roof of his mouth. He started breathing out rapidly trying to cool the red-hot cheese.
“You see, there is a God,” Jaqueline declared.
“Wrong René; that’s René Descartes not René Magritte.”
“At least he was French.”
There was contented silence as two like-minded souls communed over a simple meal. After some sips of wine, their conversation inevitably returned to the case in hand.
“And you don’t think this is about pipes?” Patrick enquired.
“Mais, certainement.”
Their eyes met.
“Sadly, I shall be flying back once Walter is on British soil. There’s not much more evidence to gain here. It’s now about finding and prosecuting Brendan and his cronies. Mind you, we have to catch him first,” he clarified.
“It depends on who catches him, I expect. We will want to prosecute him for murder and attempted murder on French soil, and you will want to prosecute him for the same and spying, I expect.”
“Either way, it will be delicate given he has a Moroccan passport and appears to be working for Moroccan intelligence.”
“Thank you for passing on to me the information about his history and movements from your FCO. We will keep it very confidential.” She looked up at him.
“Thank you for giving me the information on his Moroccan passport and his movements in France. My commander is very happy.”
“Do we presume that he is on his way to Morocco via Ireland and Spain?”
“We’re still checking. The fear is that he has gone after the Yelland family in Málaga. Actually, the bigger fear is that he’s about to do something at the G20, but surely not; I can’t believe that Morocco wants anything other than good publicity from the meeting?”
“In confidence” – she leant a little closer and spoke quietly – “our investigations into Yves Dubuisson are taking precedence at the moment. He and Johnny Musselwhite stood to gain very substantially from this PEGASUS project, not just from the gas and electricity but also from the phosphates. There are others high up in the French government who quite like the idea of all of this coming to France.”
