The Predators Part 42

Briefly Felicite stood naked in front of the child before putting on the dress. 'Zip me up, darling.'

Mary Beth did, awkwardly.

'Do you think I'm pretty?'

'Yes.'

'Tell me.'

'You're very pretty.'

Felicite put the pills in a tiny handbag, hesitating. 'Look!' she said, taking something from it. 'The lucky stone you gave me by the river. I said I'd always keep it, didn't I?'

'Can we go to the party now?'

'Yes,' said Felicite.

'You haven't put any u.p.'s on.'

'I'm not going to.'

The last message Harding got from the communications vehicle before disconnecting his earpiece outside the chateau was that the scanner had monitored the conversation between McBride and Felicite.

They carried overnight grips and bags that could have held masks or fantasy clothing and once away from the cars didn't stay together. Instead they straggled towards the huge entrance, heads lowered, strangers about to meet strangers. The door opened to Harding's knock and at once he pushed through, Blake and Rampling now tightly behind him.

The man just inside was small and thin, blinking behind thick-lensed spectacles. In French he said: 'Who are you with?'

Harding continued walking, bringing the man further into the huge hallway guarded by two pedestalled sets of armour and frowned down upon by the mounted heads of stags and boar and antelope. Behind, those in the second car, including the two Belgian detectives, followed smoothly but didn't come deeply into the hall. Instead they went immediately sideways, in both directions. Harding said: 'I didn't think we spoke of who we were with. You heard from the gatehouse, didn't you?'

Blake said: 'I'd like to change. Where can I do that?' and before the man could answer Rampling said: 'Yes. Where can we go?'

Both started moving away, in opposite directions. There was a lot of noise and music coming from a room at the end of the hall and two men, one dressed as a clown, the other as a harlequin and both masked by their make-up, turned from the bottom of the stairs towards the sound.

'I took the call,' said a voice.

Harding turned, guessing the figure to be Lascelles from the physical description they'd got at Eindhoven, although the man was wearing a tight, face-fitting mask.

'And that's why I was at the door,' said Georges Lebron.

Harding started back towards the small man but saw a fairy-dressed Mary Beth descending the stairs, holding Felicite's hand. The child immediately recognized him. She smiled and said: 'h.e.l.lo! Have you come to take me home?'

'Yes,' said Harding. He surged forward, spread-eagling Lebron as he pushed the French priest aside. Harding felt Lascelles' groping hands on his back but jerked free, continuing on.

'POLICE!' screamed Lebron, still on the floor, and pandemonium erupted.

Blake and Rampling ran towards the noise further along the corridor. Shouts and screams burst from other rooms and from upstairs there was a gunshot. From outside came the sound of over-revved cars slewing across the gravelled forecourt to block in already parked vehicles. And then helicopters, deafening, thunderous helicopters descending so close to the house the gravel and gra.s.s and plants were hurled against the windows in a man-made hurricane. Men and women flooded into the house.

Throughout those first few moments Felicite Galan remained frozen, disbelieving, as the chaos exploded around her in what seemed a slow-motion tableau. Harding was already climbing the stairs before Felicite grabbed out, enveloping Mary Beth. 'NO!' came out as a screaming wail. So tightly was the woman clinging to the child, holding her against her own body, that Harding couldn't immediately get his arms between the two, to pull Mary Beth away. He drove first his right then his left hand into them, careless of hurting either, at last dragging Mary Beth partially free.

The child was screaming, in pain from being pulled between two adults and fear at all the noise and people. As she began to lose her grip on Mary Beth, Felicite freed her right hand and clawed out, hysterically shouting: 'Mine! She's mine!' She missed gouging Harding's eyes by a fraction too difficult for surgeons later to calculate, but still marked him for life, so deeply did she rake her nails down the American's face from cheek to chin. The agony drove Harding back, making him loosen his hold, but only by one hand. Which he smashed, as hard as he could, into Felicite's face only inches away, feeling and hearing the sharply defined nose crush under his fist. The woman gurgled, falling backwards, finally releasing Mary Beth.

A green-masked man wearing a matching green tunic that ended at his waist, below which he was naked, ran towards the main door yelling: 'It's a trap! It's a trap!'

McCulloch said: 'I know. I'm part of it,' and doubled the man up with just one forearm side-swipe.

'Let me out!' wheezed the man.

'I will if you tell me where all the children are,' said McCulloch.

'In the party room,' groaned the man. 'Two upstairs, in the first bedroom.'

'I tell lies,' said McCulloch, hitting him again although not intending to break the man's jaw, which he did. He fractured two of his own knuckles as well. Wim no need any longer to keep the door open the Texan took the stairs two at a time, leaping over the moaning Felicite, and found a boy and a girl dressed as wood nymphs cowering in the first bedroom. 'We're going home,' he said, scooping them up. Both began to fight him. The girl wet herself.

McCulloch held one child under each arm as he plunged back down the stairs. The groaning Felicite made what could have been a gesture to trip him but McCulloch kicked past.

Only when he got out into the forecourt was it established that the children he had rescued were Robert Flet and Yvette Piquette, the two s.n.a.t.c.hed in Eindhoven. Blake had found a boy, later identified as Jacques Blom, a nine-year-old who had disappeared the previous day in Lille, in the party room. He, like the other two, was dressed as a wood nymph. All three were immediately handed over to a combined Belgian/American medical team.

Hillary McBride was refusing to surrender Mary Beth. She knelt in the very centre of the forecourt, crying and repeating: 'Oh, my darling! My own darling!'

What else she said was drowned by the arrival of another helicopter, although it landed further away from the chateau than the others had done. McBride ran from it, arms in the air. He threw himself down to the kneeling woman and child, embracing Mary Beth as best he could without including Hillary. 'I got you back, darling! I got you back.'

From between her parents Mary Beth said: 'I want to go back inside and take this silly costume off. It's got her blood on it, I've got some new clothes. I like them.'

Claudine was at the entrance to the chateau when the swollen-faced, bloodied woman was led out. She said: 'You didn't win after all, Felicite. You were never going to. I was never going to let you.'

Felicite took away the surgical dressing she had pressed to her face and spat, bloodily, but it missed.

'Christ, you're ugly,' said Claudine.

A total of thirty-three men, including the man at the gatehouse, were arrested at the chateau and three more at the outside road block. Felicite Galan was the only woman. Among them were two tax inspectors, unknown to each other, another priest and a police inspector, from Lille. The gunshot had been an attempt by an airline pilot to kill himself. He failed but the bullet lodged in his brain, destroying the left lobe and his mentality.

The finding of the medical team, later confirmed at Namur hospital, was that none of the children had been s.e.xually abused, although all of them, apart from Mary Beth McBride, were severely traumatized.

'Makes you believe in miracles, doesn't it?' said Blake.

'Only just,' said Claudine. 'They'll still need a lot of counselling.'

'b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!' said the man. 'At least we got them.'

'There're still too many left,' said Claudine.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE.

A disgruntled Henri Sanglier had to share the platform and the limelight with McBride and his wife, Miet Ulieff and the police chiefs of Brussels and Namur for the following day's press conference. McBride described the operation as a brilliant example of international police co-operation and Ulieff said it proved the worth of an organization like Europol. A very dangerous, cross-border crime conspiracy preying upon children had been irrevocably smashed. Proceedings against those detained would take months, maybe even years. Hillary McBride said that although her daughter had been recovered completely unharmed she intended taking the child back to America to recuperate from what had been a horrifying experience, and thanked the media for the restraint she knew she could expect them to show towards the child.

Claudine didn't attempt to contact Rosetti until after the weekend. When she failed to get a response from his apartment and found his answering machine turned off she called the medical division and was told that he'd taken leave for personal reasons, with no indication of a return date.

She was mildly unsettled by Blake's dinner invitation but saw no reason to refuse. By coincidence he chose the restaurant by the lake to which Rosetti had taken her the first time they had gone out together.

'It all got a bit hectic towards the end,' he said. 'How's Hugo?'

'He's away, in Rome. His wife's ill.' Why was she offering explanations again?

'Seriously?'

'She won't get better.'

'Poor guy.'

'Yes.'

'You told me in Brussels you were lonely.'

'Yes,' she said again.

'No reason why we shouldn't be friends, is mere?'

'No.'

'Enjoy ourselves, without any serious commitment?'

'No.'

'Unless we wanted a serious commitment, that is.'

Why not? Claudine asked herself. The situation with Hugo was never going to resolve itself. And she'd decided she wasn't going to wait for ever. 'Why don't we, just for a change, stop trying to a.n.a.lyse it and do just that. Enjoy ourselves?'

It was the third week of Rosetti's absence and Claudine's affair with Blake that the rumour began. Claudine heard it first from Kurt Volker, whose predilection for surfing into other people's secret places made him a natural gossip. She was curious that he hadn't already tiptoed down some darkened electronic alley to confirm it.

The Europol Commission did that at the beginning of the fourth week, in a formal announcement of Henri Sanglier's resignation. It was timed to coincide with the Paris press conference at which Sanglier appeared flanked by Roger Castille and Guy Coty. Francoise, looking the epitome of French chic, was with him. There was a hugely enlarged photograph of Sanglier's father being decorated by de Gaulle as a backdrop to remind television viewers of the family honour and Sanglier made an impressive vow to maintain that honour in a political career that had been declined by his father but he had decided to pursue. It was the cue for Castille to denounce the corruption of the present government that he would sweep aside in the coming election. Henri Sanglier, his intended Justice Minister, would be in the vanguard of every fight against crime, as he had been as the most famous of Europol's governing commissioners.

It was only at the end of the televised conference that Claudine was reminded, annoyed that she hadn't remembered it earlier. She actually considered telephoning Volker that night but decided there was no urgency. She did, however, call him as soon as she got into the Europol building the following morning.

'I'm just tidying up my final report on the Mary Beth kidnap,' she said.

'I've already filed mine,' said the German.

'I was wondering about all that p.o.r.nography you got in?' she said, recalling the miniature bird tattoo on the thigh of a masked Francoise parading in Sanglier's house.

'What about it?' asked Volker.

'I know it's hardly necessary to remind you, but the regulations are that it's got to be destroyed. With all the chaos at the end I thought you might have overlooked it.'

'No,' said the German, unoffended. 'I intended to.'

'Intended?'

'Sanglier asked for it all. When he said p.o.r.nography was going to be his next priority I thought he meant here, in Europol. He meant when he becomes the French Justice Minister, obviously.'

'Obviously,' agreed Claudine.

Rosetti returned at the end of that week. He'd called from Rome, to warn her, and they met that night. It was virtually the only one she hadn't spent with Blake.

'Flavia died,' he announced bluntly. 'We actually thought there was going to be a recovery. Her eyes opened and there was some movement but it came down to muscle reflexes: even the squeezing of my hand.'

'I'm sorry. So very sorry.'

'The priest said it was for the best. So did the doctors. And they're right.'

'Yes.'

'So now there's us.'

Claudine didn't reply.

'I love you. I want to wait, obviously. Out of respect. But I'm asking you to marry me.'

'Yes,' said Claudine. 'You should wait.' Her period was already more than a week late. Now she didn't think she should put off the pregnancy test any longer. That was the easy decision. The more difficult one was whether she still wanted to marry Hugo Rosetti.

A Biography of Brian Freemantle.

Brian Freemantle (b. 1936) is one of Britain's most prolific and accomplished authors of spy fiction. His novels have sold more than ten million copies worldwide, and have been optioned for numerous film and television adaptations.

Born in Southampton, on the southern coast of England, Freemantle began his career as a journalist. In 1975, as the foreign editor at the Daily Mail, he made headlines during the American evacuation of Saigon: As the North Vietnamese closed in on the city, Freemantle became worried about the future of the city's orphans. He lobbied his superiors at the paper to take action, and they agreed to fund an evacuation for the children. In three days, Freemantle organized a thirty-six-hour helicopter airlift for ninety-nine children, who were transported to Britain. In a flash of dramatic inspiration, he changed nearly one hundred lives-and sold a bundle of newspapers.

Although he began writing espionage fiction in the late 1960s, he first won fame in 1977, with Charlie M. That book introduced the world to Charlie m.u.f.fin-a disheveled spy with a skill set more bureaucratic than Bond-like. The novel, which drew favorable comparisons to the work of John Le Carre, was a hit, and Freemantle began writing sequels. The sixth in the series, The Blind Run, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. To date, Freemantle has penned fourteen t.i.tles in the Charlie m.u.f.fin series, the most recent of which is Red Star Rising (2010), which brought back the popular spy after a nine-year absence.

In addition to the stories of Charlie m.u.f.fin, Freemantle has written more than two dozen standalone novels, many of them under pseudonyms including Jonathan Evans and Andrea Hart. Freemantle's other series include two books about Sebastian Holmes, an illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes, and the four Cowley and Danilov books, which were written in the years after the end of the Cold War and follow an odd pair of detectives-an FBI operative and the head of Russia's organized crime bureau.

Freemantle lives and works in London, England.

A school photograph of Brian Freemantle at age twelve.

Brian Freemantle, at age fourteen, with his mother, Violet, at the country estate of a family acquaintance, Major Mears.

Freemantle's parents, Harold and Violet Freemantle, at the country estate of Major Mears.