A Foreign Country. Charles Cumming

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      15

      Kell took Amelia’s BlackBerry and SIM back to the underground car park, replaced them in the boot of her hire car and returned to the Hotel Gillespie. He put the car keys back in the safe, ensured that the rest of the room remained as he had first found it, then booked a flight to Tunis on the Marquand laptop. By seven o’clock the following morning he was en route to Nice airport, dumping the Citroën at Hertz.

      A French baggage handlers’ strike was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., but Kell’s flight took off shortly after ten o’clock and he had landed in the white heat of Tunis-Carthage less than an hour later. GCHQ were certain that François Malot was staying in Gammarth, an upmarket seaside suburb popular with package tourists, financiers and diplomats looking to escape the bustle of downtown Tunis. The signal from Malot’s mobile had been fixed to a short stretch of the Mediterranean coast in which two five-star hotels wrestled for space in an area adjacent to a nine-hole golf course. Malot could have been staying in either hotel. The first of them – the Valencia Carthage – had no record of a guest of that name in the register, but the second, the Ramada Plaza, which Kell called from a phone booth at Nice airport, was only too happy to connect him to Mr Malot’s room. Kell got the number of the room – 1214 – but hung up before the call was put through. He then rang back three minutes later, spoke to a different receptionist, and attempted to book a room of his own.

      There was just one problem. It was high summer and the Ramada was full. At Tunis airport, Kell tried again, calling from the tourism desk in Arrivals in the hope that there had been a cancellation while he was in the air. The receptionist was adamant; no rooms would be free for at least four days. Might she suggest trying the Valencia Carthage hotel, just along the beach? Kell thanked her for the tip-off, called the Valencia a second time, and booked six nights full board on a Uniacke credit card.

      The Valencia should have been half an hour by car from the airport but Kell’s taxi became congealed in thick traffic heading north-east towards the coast. Vehicles on the two-lane highway spilled out on to the hard shoulder, mounted the central reservation and even faced down oncoming traffic in an effort to escape the jams. Africa, Kell thought, and sat back to enjoy the show. His driver, an old man with a split windscreen and a taste for mid-period George Michael, weaved and shunted as best he could, views on either side of the cab of tilled fields bordered by the breeze-block shells of half-forgotten construction projects. Men, young and old, wandered at the sides of the road to no discernible purpose, the din of over-revved engines and horns, predictable and ceaseless.

      Eventually they escaped the worst of the tailbacks and arrived on the outskirts of La Marsa, Kell’s taxi gliding along a coastal road dotted with diplomatic residences. Access to both the Ramada Plaza and Valencia Carthage was controlled by a roadblock at a roundabout on the highway. Three soldiers wearing khaki uniforms, each carrying an automatic weapon, had been ordered to check any vehicle approaching the complex of hotels and nightclubs that lined the beach; the last thing Tunisia needed in the wake of the Arab Spring was an Islamist fanatic setting off a suicide bomb in the car park of a seaside hotel. The youngest of the soldiers peered into the back seat and made studious eye contact with Kell. Kell nodded back, managed half a smile, and was duly waved on his way.

      The Valencia was located on a forty-acre lot directly adjacent to the Ramada. Marquand had arranged for a Renault Megane to be left in the car park. Kell knew the colour and number plate and found it quickly, the keys nestled, as agreed with London, inside the exhaust pipe. A porter with closely cropped black hair, wearing dark trousers and a burgundy waistcoat, saw Kell coming towards the hotel and greeted him like a long-lost brother. Despite Kell’s objections, his bag was placed on a trolley for the short journey up a ramp to the entrance of the hotel. Once inside, in the blessed relief of air conditioning, he tipped the porter, left the bag on the trolley and took a stroll around before checking in.

      The lobby was vast: three storeys high and finished in custard yellow. To Kell’s eyes it resembled a Mexican restaurant in a suburban shopping mall blown up to the size of an aircraft hangar. There were two dining areas on the ground floor, as well as a jazz-themed piano bar and a small, mocked-up Moorish café. Kell peered inside. A couple of baseball-capped tourists were drinking glasses of mint tea and smoking fruit tobacco from a shisha pipe, apparently under the illusion that they were experiencing the authentic Tunisian souk. Next door, Kell found a gift shop selling camels on key rings and overpriced bottles of suntan lotion. He bought a copy of the Herald Tribune then joined the queue checking in and out of the hotel. To the left of the reception desk, accessed through a second internal lobby, was a vast spa complex offering hammams, massage rooms and a saltwater plunge pool. More guests, most in white hotel dressing-gowns, were funnelling past. One of them had a bandage applied across her nose, as did a middle-aged Italian woman waiting in the check-in queue ahead of Kell. The bags beneath her eyes were black and bruised, as though she had been punched in a jealous rage. At the front desk, Kell asked what was going on.

      ‘Why is everybody walking around with facial injuries?’

      ‘Excuse me, sir?’

      ‘The bandages,’ he said, indicating his face. ‘The guests with broken noses. It’s like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. What’s the story?’

      The receptionist, a young Tunisian woman wearing a blue headscarf, spoke good English and smiled as she replied:

      ‘The hotel has a relationship with a plastic surgery clinic in Italy, Mr Uniacke. Their clients often come here in order to recuperate after an operation.’

      Kell nodded, trying to remember the architecture of the Amelia Levene nose and concluding that it was beyond all possibility that the Chief-designate of the Secret Intelligence Service was hiding out in North Africa in the wake of a nose job.

      His room was located towards the end of a three-hundred-metre-long corridor on the western flank of the hotel overlooking СКАЧАТЬ