The Predators Part 30

The stunned, disbelieving reaction came from Harding. 'How in the name of Christ can you know that?'

Instead of replying Claudine depressed the play b.u.t.ton on the machine beside her. Into the room echoed her previous day's exchange.

I want McBride. The woman.

I'm speaking on his behalf. Claudine.

The wife?

No.

Ah, the clever little mind-reader!

Claudine stopped the tape, looked expectantly hopefully towards the men ranged in front of her. Rosetti had his head to one side, frowning in what she thought was half-awareness. Blake's face was blank. So were those of Sanglier and Harding. Harrison was looking to them for guidance. Rampling was still hunched over the transcript from which he'd followed the replay. There was a half-smile on the face of the always laterally thinking Volker.

Claudine minimally rewound the tape for just one sentence.

Ah, the clever little mind-reader!

'It's wrong!' declared Claudine urgently. 'She doesn't get McBride, whom she expects. Mrs McBride is an outside possibility, whom she doesn't get either. And when I deny it's Mrs McBride there's an immediate recognition: Ah, the clever little mind-reader! Not "Who are you?" Not "Put me on to McBride, he's the only one I want to talk to." No threats. No arguments, until much too late. She was waiting for me ...' Claudine started the tape again.

We want to negotiate.

Of course you do.

Tell me about Mary.

Demanding!

'But she doesn't demand in return,' insisted Claudine. 'She should have done had every reason to do so but she doesn't because she knows who I am! There'd been no public announcement of my being here: whether I was male or female. There's no way she could have known unless someone at the very highest level at our level told her.' She started the tape again, continuing the conversation. 'She accepts me, without question! Plays word games about names, needing to show me how clever she is: wanting to be cleverer than me. Having to regain control.'

'There is an acceptance, from the beginning,' said Volker.

'I'm not so sure,' disputed Blake.

Claudine rejected the first tape, fumbling in her eagerness to replace it with the second. She began it at the wrong section, fast forwarded to where she wanted to be.

The clever psychologist, imagining you know my mind! echoed into the room. Claudine said: 'There's been no public reference anywhere to a psychologist being part of the investigation. And I said exactly that at one of our meetings: that I was getting to know her mind.'

'"And how's the clever lady today? I know you're there, Claudine,"' challenged Rampling, reading from the transcript. He looked up. 'It was obvious you'd listen in. Just as it's obvious there'd have been a trained negotiator from the beginning. Hostage or kidnap negotiators are invariably psychologists. It's all intelligent reasoning.'

'It's not intelligent reasoning that the negotiator would be female,' persisted Claudine. 'The more likely reasoning, from a woman, would be that a negotiator would be male.'

'I don't think that's logical,' said Rosetti.

'How many other women are there in this room?' demanded Claudine. Going to Sanglier, then Harding, and finally Rampling, she said: 'How many female psychologists are there in Europol? Or the FBI? Or the CIA?' Why wasn't it as obvious to them as it was to her?

'You're being s.e.xist, we aren't,' said Sanglier inadequately. He didn't want her to be right: didn't want to become embroiled in the alternative that she was suggesting. It was too fraught with personal difficulties.

'Listen to today's conversation, in full!' pleaded Claudine 'Really listen!'

Total silence enclosed the room and Claudine didn't speak for several moments after the tape had finished. Finally she said: 'What's wrong?'

'You're antagonizing her,' Harrison suggested fatuously.

Claudine refused the bait. 'She challenged me, at the very beginning: announced that she knew I'd be listening in. But hear how she loses control the last thing she wanted to do: total anathema to her when I tell her I know her mind better than she does.'

'What's the significance of that?' queried Sanglier. She couldn't be right. It wasn't possible. Yet ...

'At this morning's conference I said she was mad, in layman's terms,' Claudine reminded him. 'Someone suffering from her psychopathy will never accept that they are mentally deranged: everyone else is mad, not them. Today's call wasn't to taunt the amba.s.sador or announce a ransom. It was to argue with me: prove to me that she wasn't mad.'

'Yes, I can see that,' said Volker.

'Me too,' agreed Rampling.

'But for someone in the group to be involved would be ...' Blake began.

'... inconceivable,' finished Claudine. 'But why? Paedophiles perhaps more than any other criminal category come from across the widest spectrum of society. More often than not they're from the professional cla.s.s. Look how clever they've been, with e-mail and now mobile phones ... that points to an executive expertise.'

'They abandoned their e-mail approach, switched to telephones, the moment I traced their route to Menen. Which only our group knew I'd done,' Volker pointed out. Heavily he added: 'And they haven't used it since.'

'How many in the control group could be involved?' demanded Rampling.

'Eight,' replied Harding at once. 'Poncellet and Smet. Or any one of the six clerks who've been keeping records on a rotational basis.'

'Three are women, two of them blond,' remembered Blake.

'Neither answers the description or looks anything like the videofit picture,' cautioned Volker.

'The source could also be anyone at police headquarters with a duplicate key to the incident room and all its records and transcripts,' suggested Blake.

'The transcript of this morning's meeting, when I called her mad, won't be in the incident room records yet,' Claudine pointed out. 'It can only be one of the eight.'

'If Dr Carter's interpretation is wrong the fall-out will be incalculable,' said Sanglier. How could a future Justice Minister answer for wrongly suspecting another Justice Ministry! It was precisely the sort of embarra.s.sment he'd been warned about in Paris. On the other hand, if her suspicions were right ... Why did things become so difficult just when he imagined they were becoming simpler!

'My function is to interpret words and behaviour,' Claudine said slowly. 'There are some interpretations of today's conversation that I've still got to suggest to you. But the most important is my total conviction that there is an informer, among us.' She was reluctant to challenge Sanglier openly, after the apparent relaxation of their earlier uneven relationship, but she couldn't avoid it. 'We surely can't risk the other incalculable: what's going to happen to Mary Beth if my interpretation is correct?'

He couldn't argue against her and he didn't want to go along with her, Sanglier thought desperately. Why had he stayed! Why hadn't he gone back to The Hague immediately after resolving the problem of the suicide? He would have been safe there, able to claim that operational details had been kept from him if there was a disaster.

'What are the other interpretations you mentioned?' asked Harrison.

'Princ.i.p.ally a further confirmation of what I've feared and warned against: probably the biggest,' said Claudine. 'She's seen McBride openly cry, on television. Knows his desperation. She knows, too, how rich he is. That he'll pay anything. Yet all she asks for is two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Which is derisory.'

'No intention of giving Mary back?' Blake realized.

'There never has been,' insisted Claudine. 'Now, for the first time, we've got a real chance to prevent that happening. Our first real chance, in fact, to get her back. But from now on our proper decision-making has got to be carried out like this: just by us, in this room. Our sessions at police headquarters have to be conducted solely to manipulate the woman and the people with her, through whoever their source is.'

'We need to do more than that,' insisted Harding, presented at last with an operational opportunity. 'There're only eight people to check out, for Christ's sake!'

'And we've got an army looking for work,' endorsed Rampling, equally enthusiastic.

'An American operation, you mean?' Sanglier said, trying to keep any eagerness from being obvious.

'We've been through the problem of legality,' Harding pointed out. 'I don't think the circ.u.mstances are the same any more.'

'We're straying into dangerous water,' protested Harrison, as diplomatically uneasy as Sanglier. 'In effect in fact! we'd be spying upon and investigating justice officials of a sovereign state actually in their own country.'

'That's exactly what we'll be doing,' said the aggressive Rampling, intentionally changing tense. 'And need to do.'

'Can you do it?' demanded Harrison of Claudine. 'Manipulate a response we'd recognize, I mean?'

'Very easily,' she a.s.sured him.

'And with Poncellet, Smet and at least three of the clerks at your meeting in the morning we know where more man half our suspects will be, don't we?' smiled Rampling.

'I don't think any positive action should be taken until we've fully a.s.sessed Dr Carter's success at the morning conference,' said Harrison.

'Neither do I,' said Sanglier, anxious to support the reluctant diplomat.

'I totally agree,' said Harding, not caring if the lie was obvious. What was even more obvious was what he had to do, as the operational commander. By this time tomorrow sooner if possible he wasn't just going to know the favourite breakfast cereal of eight near strangers, he'd be able to say in which hand they held the spoon.

By the end of the meal Claudine accepted she had been the only person with any real problem but believed she had lost it early enough for neither of them to have been aware of it. Blake appeared very much at ease and Rosetti, usually a reserved man, matched his friendliness. She'd wished Hugo hadn't been so territorially obvious, cupping her arm and holding out chairs and unfolding dinner napkins: twice she'd caught the curiosity on Blake's face. They ate at the hotel at the request of Claudine, who pleaded exhaustion at the end of such a crowded day, which was only part of the reason. It would, she decided, make it easier to leave both men at the end of the evening.

There was only the vaguest of tensions, each man competing to admire the profiling and a.n.a.lysis that had led to the breakthrough, which neither doubted. The more cynical Blake was genuinely funny parodying the desperation of Harrison and Sanglier, who'd gone off alone to eat together, to avoid any personal responsibility for whatever Harding and Rampling did.

'Let's just hope they do it well,' said Claudine, quickly cutting off the laughter.

Blake didn't look at her when he pleaded tiredness to excuse himself as soon as the meal ended, leaving her with Rosetti. Claudine felt a sudden warmth and hoped she hadn't coloured. That would have been ridiculous.

'Kurt told me about the American,' said Rosetti.

'I'm all right.'

'You sure?'

'I should have prevented it.'

'So you're not all right,' said the man.

'I'll be OK.'

'It would be wrong to blame yourself.'

'Easy to say.'

'But true. He wasn't your responsibility or your patient.'

'I said I'll be OK: I can function. I don't want to a.n.a.lyse it any more.' She regretted the sharpness.

'Peter's a nice guy.'

'Yes.'

'You obviously get on well.'

'I told you we did.' She felt a sudden sweep of anger.

'I remember.'

'I'm very tired. I'm going to bed.'

'Of course.'

She expected it to be Blake when her phone rang. 'You didn't tell me about you and Hugo.'

'There's nothing to tell.'

'It didn't look like that tonight.'

'We see each other. But we're not sleeping together.' Why was she defending herself: telling him that!

'Oh.'

'I really am tired.'

'How about lonely?'

'Yes,' she said. 'But no.'

'You sure?'

'Quite sure.' She hoped she hadn't created an unnecessary problem for herself.

Rosetti and Volker were at the bar and both drunk when Henri Sanglier got back to the Metropole. The German, emboldened by whisky, invited him to join them but Sanglier said he had calls to make.

'Things could really start to move tomorrow,' forecast Volker, carefully enunciating each word.

'I hope you're right,' said the Frenchman.

'We've done our best,' Volker a.s.sured him enigmatically.

'I don't want to know!'

In his suite Sanglier remained undecided for several moments before picking up the telephone to dial Francoise, to whom he hadn't spoken since Paris and hardly expected to reach now. He was actually surprised when she answered almost immediately. She appeared as surprised to hear from him. There was noise music and people in the background.

Instead of talking about Paris, which he'd intended, he said: 'What's going on?'

'Friends. A party.'