The Rift, Rachel Lynch [books recommended by bts .txt] 📗

‘If you can’t fly – and I can’t imagine why, if you have enough money – and you can’t take the ferry to Spain because you can’t enter Europe, then the only other way is via Mauritania and Mali, which is crazy, as it’d take four or five days.’

‘Assuming one couldn’t fly because then they’d have to declare the goods on board,’ Grant added.

‘Goods?’ Levi asked. The penny dropped. ‘You want me to take a look at AlGaz’s shipping lanes?’

Grant didn’t answer straight away. And when he did, he changed the subject.

‘Do you know anyone in the military attaché’s office in Paris?’ he asked.

‘Of course, Colonel Palmer is the current defence attaché, and a friend of a friend works in his office. In fact my wife wants me to transfer there so I can take her to tea in the sodding garden.’

‘Christ, Palmer? How the hell did he get promoted so quickly? How is he a colonel now?’ Grant remembered Palmer’s oily face and slippery fat hands as he tried to charm Helen, as many fellow officers did.

‘Yes. The slippery pole is easier to climb if you can cling on for long enough,’ Levi said.

‘Can you ask your contact in his office to see how Helen Scott ended up working for Interpol?’ Grant asked.

‘I already know the answer to that question, mate,’ he said. ‘She was sent to Paris to conduct a security review of the embassy for the NATO summit at Versailles. So, I guess she was conveniently available when Interpol requested a close-protection specialist. Sir Conrad sent her to Lyon.’

Grant couldn’t help himself swell with pride: she was doing well.

‘One more thing,’ Grant said.

‘Go for it,’ Levi replied.

‘If I email you a close-up of a man, can you try to identify him for me? I suspect he’s on some database somewhere,’ Grant said.

‘Send it over, mate,’ Levi said.

‘Thanks. How’s Algiers?’ Grant asked. ‘I miss happy hour.’

‘I’m sitting outside on the balcony now.’

‘You avoiding going home?’ Grant asked.

Levi sighed and puffed on his cigarette. ‘Yup. You did the right thing, never marrying, mate.’

‘Speak soon,’ Grant said, and they hung up.

Chapter 36

The man was in his late sixties, with grey hair covering his head. His fingers worked meticulously and rhythmically. He had tiny glasses perched on the end of his nose, and his body was hunched over his computer, turning to the side and wheeling himself over to the other corner of the desk, after checking something. He scanned documents and checked measurements, before picking up a small circuit board and tweaking it with tiny tweezers. His spectacles magnified everything and, occasionally, he’d forget that they were on his face and had to remove them to see ordinary items around the room, like his teacup.

He sipped the hot liquid and placed the cup down on any available space on the work surface, which was minimal. The tables near him were covered in gadgetry, circuits, nuts, bolts, antennae, mini-propellers and brightly coloured wires. He was testing different configurations and worked quietly.

A woman came into the room and brought him more tea, and he thanked her in French. Marseilles had been their home for almost fifty years. She was his childhood sweetheart, but they’d been forbidden to marry because she was of lower class. They left Marrakech as teenagers and he hid her under tarpaulin in the back of a lorry bound for Tangier. He’d spent every penny he had on taking her to Europe with him. Passage back then, in the seventies, was much easier. The lack of technology, fewer predators looking to make a profit, lax border controls and little communication between border forces meant that migration from Africa was not as controlled. Europe was glad of the labour then; not like now, where gangs of immigrants and asylum seekers terrorised the imagination of delicate white sensitivities. Yes, they were useful back then, when France and Britain wanted foreign workers to clean their toilets and drive their buses. But now they made a difference in elections and brought their own sense of culture to the forefront of modern politics, they were seen as a threat: the biggest threat to Western civilisation since Hitler one newspaper had said. It made him chuckle. To think that his people had the politicians shaking in their boots.

They’d settled in an immigrant neighbourhood upon reaching France and had never left. They felt more comfortable among their own people. They were looked down upon by pure French and spoken about on TV as if they were carrion or some type of inferior beast. It still pained him after all these years.

His wife, no doubt about to admonish him for hunching over, came to him, resting a hand on his shoulder blade.

‘Mustafa, what are you thinking about? You look perturbed, like you do when you lose money on horses at le hippodrome,’ she said. He stopped what he was doing and looked at her over his glasses, thanking her for the tea and placing it among the plethora of equipment. She tutted and collected cups in various stages of abandonment. She counted eight.

‘When was the last time you tidied this desk?’ she asked. It was the same conversation they had most days when she came into his workshop.

His first job in France was at the docks in Marseilles. France’s second largest city had always been sneered at because of its uncomfortable proximity to Africa and its working-class population. That was what kept Mustafa and Fatima there. They refused to climb upwards socially as a result of his success. Instead, they stayed where they had grown a family. They still heard on TV the familiar but ancient joke: ‘What is the first Arab port the Paris–Dakar passes through?’ Answer: ‘Marseilles’. Of course, the Paris-Dakar Rally never passed through Marseilles, and had now been transferred to South America anyway, but the derogatory assumption was that Marseilles was more African than Africa itself.

‘You know me too well, my love. I tried that strap you ordered