With that, they had walked around the villa to the kitchen bin area. It was almost midday.
The noise was deafening.
It reverberated off all the buildings, walls and hard surfaces. What looked like brains were splattered all over the walls and surrounding trees. Dogs were barking, and alarms were screaming from several of the surrounding properties. There was devastation. Hundreds of tall cacti had been destroyed in the bomb blast, and their pulpy flesh was sprayed everywhere. There was no Jardin Majorelle left. Instead, there was a bomb crater and open views to where the beautiful, deep-blue walls of the villa had stood since 1923. The front wall was completely gone, and the furniture and contents chosen by Yves Saint Laurent were in pieces, sitting on what now looked like the stage of a theatre.
The Moroccan bomb disposal unit had spent several hours searching for a device, but they had found nothing. This was because the explosive had purposely been buried very deep two months earlier, so no trace remained on the surface. The Sahrawis had infiltrated the gardening staff, and long before the current terrorist campaign was launched, they had buried the explosives in anticipation of the G20 meeting.
The warning from Ramon and Mike via Josie had provided time to evacuate the area and move all of the world leaders to another venue. The hastily reorganised photo opportunity used a stretch of the pink city walls as a backdrop. They looked as if they were facing a firing squad. After a show of solidarity that lasted until the next day, there was an unseemly rush for the airport. Victor used the death of Queen Elizabeth II as the reason he needed to leave early; Conrad didn’t bother to offer an excuse.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
It was at the precise moment when the eighty-year-old cacti and bamboos were being reduced to pulp and splinters that, a thousand miles away, a gunman on a rooftop was preparing to squeeze the trigger of a state-of-the-art rifle; this was the gentle squeeze of the professional soldier. It was unlikely that anyone could hear anything, but he had whispered to Brendan, telling him that people had walked out onto the terrace of the villa opposite. Brendan had swivelled around and leant back against the chimney stack. Staring out across the trees to the Mediterranean Sea, he had warned Selim, using his phone, to bring up the Range Rover ready for the get-away, and then he had scrambled across the tiles like a crab so he was ready to retreat back down the brick stairs.
The crack from the rifle, when it came, wasn’t as loud as the bang in Marrakech, which could be heard halfway up the Atlas Mountains, but it also echoed around the villas and boundary walls. Two dogs barked, but this wasn’t an unusual occurrence in this neighbourhood. Deniz, given that his location was almost textbook, had a clear line of sight to his target and he didn’t miss. From that distance, viewed through an eyepiece, it was as if watching a film. Over the years in Syria, Yemen and, once, in Germany, it had been more difficult; this was well within his capabilities. He worked as only a professional can, knowing where speed becomes haste and mistakes can happen. He turned, slung the rifle over his shoulder and followed Brendan down the stairs, two steps at a time.
It was only twelve paces across the gravel to the boundary. They knew that the camera had been disabled and there were no alarms. So, it was with a feeling of satisfaction that they prepared to climb back over the boundary wall. Using a bin to gain a three-foot advantage, they had reached for the parapet and pulled themselves up. Brendan was the first to begin pushing his way through the spiky cypress branches that projected up above the wall. His Turkish sniper was right on his heels.
Brendan and Deniz never made it to the pavement alive. Brendan was killed as he jumped and Deniz as he tried to throw his rifle down before lowering himself. Selim and his colleague had seen the bodies hit the ground. He had instantly assessed that there was nothing he could do for them and had driven off at maximum speed, well aware that the Range Rover didn’t have bulletproof glass in the windows. This was proved when, in the mirror, he saw the rear windscreen’s glass shatter.
Jacqueline Bettancourt was stretched out in bed when her phone rang. It was her department in Paris telling her that Brendan and one of the Turkish hitmen had been killed after shooting Yves Dubuisson at his villa in Cannes.
She and her colleagues had always suspected the Minister of Energy, but nothing could ever be proven against him.
The French authorities had discovered that Yves Dubuisson and Johnny Musselwhite were part of a group standing to gain substantially from PEGASUS, which turned out to be a Russian-funded project masquerading as another Algerian gas connection to Europe. The Russians were trying to control yet more of the energy pipelines providing Europe with gas and oil.
If that weren’t bad enough, the third element of PEGASUS would have brought France into direct conflict with the rest of the EU, the UK, the USA and the UN. As much as France would like to receive and process such a reserve of phosphate, it was effectively being stolen from Western Sahara.
PEGASUS was, to all intents and purposes, cancelled. The French government wouldn’t permit the pipelines and cables to enter its territorial waters around Corsica or elsewhere, and permission wouldn’t be given for any phosphate-processing plants or distribution facilities.
A statement would be released to the effect that any French-funded scheme to deliver gas or electricity from Algeria in the future would be considered, but nothing backed financially by a hostile state or involving the transportation of phosphates would be entertained.
It had been decided to let the British search for the man known as Brendan. He was very likely to be working for the Moroccans, and it would be the Brits who had to deal with the political fallout. However, unless he was caught and he confessed, this story would quickly be kicked into the long grass. The problem never arose. MI6 had traced Brendan via Dublin to Nice and on to Cannes, where Yves Dubuisson lived. The UK and French working together had monitored his and his colleagues’ phones at their hotel. Yves had been tracked all the way back from his clandestine visit to Charles Yelland in Spain.
A special unit of officers and an armed response team had been keeping Yves under surveillance. This meant that they had also begun monitoring Brendan, his two Turkish mercenaries and the other driver at their hotel. They watched them check out and load their car. They never saw Brendan and Deniz enter the villa, having anticipated an attack through the front gate. By the time the armed team arrived, it was too late to save Yves Dubuisson, but they were in time to shoot two of his killers. The driver of the Range Rover and one other man escaped, but they were tracked to the Italian border fourteen miles away, where they were stopped and arrested.
There would be political fallout for a few days, but France no longer needed to worry about Yves Dubuisson and whatever else he had been up to. The explosion at the Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech would be the main story in the media.
She put the phone back on the coffee table, turned and smiled at Patrick, who was lying in bed next to her.
It was after lunch when Mike took the phone call from Tom that was passing on a message from Leonard. He explained what had happened in Cannes and that Brendan had been shot and killed. Leonard had also wanted her to know that the PEGASUS project had been very publicly cancelled by the French government. Tom told her that the bomb had gone off in Marrakech, but no one was injured, thanks to her efforts in Essaouira. Relief swept through the Yelland villa.
When Charles announced that they were flying back to the UK in two hours’ time, Angelica screamed and ran upstairs to pack – although what she was packing, as she had duplicates of almost everything in the villa that she had in Buckinghamshire, was not obvious. Maria was still half-sedated, but even she seemed to go up a gear.
“My work here is done,” Wazz said as he passed Mike on the stairs.
“One last debrief?” she asked.
“What you actually mean is that you’re looking for an excuse for a cigarette before getting on the plane, am I right?”
“True.”
And with that, they made their way to the space that wasn’t at the forefront of the Spanish architect’s mind when she had designed the whole villa complex and surrounds.
“When you said your work was done, did you think that you had actually done anything?” She was at her most provocative, to the extent that she had reversed their positions and was leaning on the large waste bin on which Wazz had been resting his elbows when they first met.
He inhaled and breathed out an enormous white puff from his e-cigarette, which smelt of rotting strawberries.
“At least they don’t need to worry about mosquitoes tonight,” she said, but he just smiled. “Does anything phase you?” she continued.
“Small spaces; otherwise, not much.”
“What’s next for you?”
“A trip to Agadir – ironically, to make sure three women aren’t molested on the beach. Then, I’m going to finish my degree. I can’t do this” – he looked around at the villa and gardens – “stuff for much longer.”
Mike removed a bit of paper from her lip and looked suspiciously at her cigarette. She was wondering about parallel lives and how, at that moment, she would like one in order to see where more time with Wazz might lead. Good men were hard to find, in her experience.
“How’s my favourite agent?” Leonard was at his most smug and annoying.
“You set me up … again.”
