Free A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming Page B

finished.
    Elsa eventually rang at five and they arranged to meet outside the Negresco Hotel.
    It was like meeting a different person. In the five hours that she had been analysing the hardware, Elsa appeared to have undergone a complete transformation. Her pale skin was suddenly ruddy with health, as though she had returned from a long walk along the beach, and her eyes, so lifeless in the café, sparkled in the dazzling summer light. Earlier, she had seemed nervous and closed-off; now she was animated and full of warmth. So easy was the rapport between them that Kell toyed with the idea that she had been ordered by Marquand to win his trust.
    ‘How was your afternoon?’ she asked as they walked in the direction of a dazzling sun.
    ‘Great,’ Kell lied, because he was glad of her company after the long afternoon and did not want to appear negative by complaining. ‘I had some lunch, went to a gallery, read a book …’
    ‘I really do not like Nice at all,’ Elsa declared, her English precise and musical.
    ‘Me neither.’ She looked across at him and smiled at the sudden fracturing in Kell’s composure. ‘It’s inexplicable. I love everything about France. The great cities – Paris, Marseille – the food, the wine, the movies …’
    ‘Blah blah blah …’ said Elsa.
    ‘… but Nice is like a theme park.’
    ‘It has no soul,’ she offered quickly.
    Kell contemplated this and said: ‘Precisely, yes. No soul.’
    A long line of rush-hour traffic was held at a set of lights and they crossed the Promenade des Anglais, pushed together by two teenage boys running in the opposite direction. A hooker in stilettos and a black leather skirt was climbing out of a car on the nearside lane of the central reservation.
    ‘There is nothing unusual on the SIM card,’ Elsa said, picking her way through a flock of mopeds. ‘I double-checked with Cheltenham.’
    ‘And the BlackBerry?’
    ‘It has been used to Skype.’
    Of course. In the absence of a secure line, Skype was the spy’s first port of call: near-impossible to bug, tricky to trace. A BlackBerry in this context was no different to an ordinary computer: all Amelia would have needed was a cheap plastic headset. She had probably borrowed one from reception.
    ‘Do you know who she spoke to?’
    ‘Yes. Always to the same account, always the same number. Three different conversations. The Skype address is registered to a French email.’
    ‘Is there a name associated with it?’
    ‘It’s to the same person. The name is François Malot.’
    ‘Who
is
this guy?’ Kell asked aloud, coming to a halt. He had assumed that the question was rhetorical, but Elsa had other ideas.
    ‘I think I may have the answer,’ she said, looking like a student who has solved a particularly knotty problem. She reached into her bag, rummaging around for the prize. ‘You speak French, yes?’ she asked, passing Kell a printout of a newspaper report.
    ‘I speak French,’ he replied.
    They were leaning on a balustrade, looking out over the beach, rollerbladers grinding past in the heat. The story, from
Le Monde
, reproduced the grisly facts of an attack in Sharm-el-Sheikh. Middle-class couple. Dream holiday. Married for thirty-five years. Brutally assaulted with knives and metal bars on a beach in Sinai.
    ‘Not such a nice way to die,’ she said, with graphic understatement. She took out a cigarette and lit it with her back to the wind.
    ‘Can I have one?’ Kell asked. She touched his hand and caught his eye in the flame of the lighter. Theirs was the sudden intimacy of strangers who find themselves in the same city, on the same job, sharing the same secrets. Kell knew the signs. He had been there many times before.
    ‘François Malot was their son,’ she said. ‘He lives in Paris. He has no brothers or sisters, no wife or girlfriend.’
    ‘Cheltenham told you this?’
    Elsa reacted haughtily. ‘I do not need Cheltenham,’ she said, exhaling a blast of smoke. ‘I can do