Free Vagabond by Gerald Seymour Page B

No introduction, just the crisp voice.
    ‘I’m assuming that’s Dusty. Am I right?’
    He had not shown deference to any man in more than a dozen years. ‘Yes, sir, it is. Yes, Mr Bentinick, it’s Dusty Miller.’
    Where was Desperate?
    ‘He won’t be answering his mobile, Mr Bentinick. Later he’ll be at his hotel, the Ibis in Dunkirk. Right now you won’t get him because he’ll be having his supper, on the place Jean Bart. In the morning, he’s on the move with clients. Would you like me to tell him you called, Mr Bentinick?’
    ‘Don’t bother, Dusty. It’ll be a nice surprise for him when I catch up with him.’
    There was a pause on the line. Dusty could have sworn he heard gulls shrieking.
    If Mr Bentinick had come into the Ready Room, Dusty had always gone to attention, as if at a drill sergeant’s instruction. If Mr Bentinick had offered praise he’d always gone weak at the knees.
    ‘Yes, sir. Right, sir.’
    He thought the world had caved in.
     
    The plane, twin-engine propeller, was at the Louis Blériot airport.
    Matthew Bentinick told the pilot, pleasant young fellow – and he’d made a good fist of the cross winds coming in – how long he thought he would be. The tower had called for a taxi to take him into Dunkirk. He knew the pilot had the hours available and gave him a destination for when they took off again so that a routing could be prepared and the necessary fuel taken on.
    A desolate place, and there was no cover as he waited outside the building for the car to pitch up. Birds screamed and flew low over the runway. He thought it would have taken any of the new intake who currently flooded Thames House around a week to locate his man, but the Dragon had warmed to the job. In three hours, she’d produced phone numbers and an address, a street view of a property in Caen, the names of the owners, and the cross reference to Sword Tours: closed for the evening, but their on-line brochure said the tour started the next day in Dunkirk. He drew euros and had authorisation for the aircraft hire, using a firm operating from Northolt to the west of London.
    An idiot must have thrown some takeaway food onto the grass beside the step on which he waited. The gulls were like bats from hell, ferocious. He didn’t think he faced a problem. Bentinick never anticipated failure, didn’t countenance it – from himself or subordinates. Excitement flushed in him: he had set in motion a process that would draw in others, some he controlled, others who were allies and a few targets – some he knew and others he did not. It always bred in him a degree of exhilaration. The car came. He gave the address he wanted.
     
    She could have turned heads but did not. She had been told by those who directed her that she should dress down and rarely be noticed. She wore jeans that were ragged at the ankles and knees, shapeless trainers, T-shirts that disguised the shape of her body, and her hair was dragged into a ponytail. The anorak could have come from a charity shop. No makeup, no jewellery. At her home, high up the Malone road, an artery coming into Belfast’s centre, she was a source of frustration to her parents: her father managed a bank branch and her mother exercised influence in the Department of the Environment, specialising in Heritage. They would have liked their only child to demonstrate greater ambition and hunt harder for a meaningful career. Frances McKinney, aged twenty-four and with a degree in modern history from Queen’s, should have challenged herself.
    Her mobile trilled in her bag, which it shared with two MBA textbooks – Legal Environments and Ethical Law – a notepad and her laptop.
    Frankie was with the four Enniskillen girls: Protestants by inherited faith. She would have called herself ‘lapsed Catholic’, and in the new Ireland – north and south – there were enough of them. Most nights they were out. It could be the Fly, the Sultan’s Grill, the Elms or the subsidised bar at