The Rift by Rachel Lynch (good book recommendations txt) 📕

from the La Croix-Rousse neighbourhood had picked up a van, travelling east along a one-way street, away from the address they’d raided. Helen opened the link the officer has sent across, and they watched the footage together.

‘Can we enlarge this?’ Helen asked.

‘It’s been done,’ the officer handed Helen an envelope. Inside were two photos of the occupants of the front seats of the van. Both men appeared to be of North African descent and both pictures were clear.

‘Fantastic, well done. Thank you.’

‘A notice has been handed to all borders in the Schengen area, ma’am. They won’t have left the EU by now unless they flew. We’re working on tracking the vehicle and mapping its progress now. I’ll notify you as soon as we have a trace.’

The officer left.

‘I was working on what else there was on Jean-Luc’s phone before he switched it off. No close-protection officer allows his phone to run out of juice, so I’m working with the theory that it was switched off on purpose. Hakim called his mother mid-air around two p.m. before he landed. She said he called to remind her to take his brother Farid to his water-polo practice, because over the summer, he’d been doing it,’ said Helen.

‘And?’ Sylvia asked.

‘That was after Jean-Luc switched his phone off, so my deduction is that Hakim wasn’t overpowered in the air. The pilots didn’t report a ruckus either, and they’re adamant that no one else was on the flight. They had no cabin crew. Besides, security is usually tight around passenger lists on aircraft coming into Europe. Private jets used to get away with all sorts before 9/11, but now they can’t, and it needs to be logged in advance.’

‘Ok, so we’ve got Jean-Luc switching his phone off without Hakim’s knowledge, and then what?’ Sylvia asked.

‘I’m more interested in before that. Jean-Luc’s phone was highly active in the period before going to the airport in Algiers, which is what you might expect when preparing to transport your principal. But there’s a series of short exchanges to mobile phone numbers that pinged off towers in Paris, and none of them are the registered numbers for the security Khalil was using here in France for his son. None of them are registered to a person, only remote servers. Also, all the lines are now dead, indicating they were single-use burner phones, not something anybody working legitimately for Khalil would be using.’

It was Sylvia’s turn to sigh. ‘Good work. Any phone activity on those numbers after Hakim’s plane landed on Sunday?’

‘One, this one here.’ Helen brought up the information on her screen. ‘It pinged off several masts between Paris and Lyon and then went dead. Look at the times.’

Sylvia looked at the screen. ‘Jesus,’ said Sylvia. ‘That’s pretty concrete – the timing coincided perfectly with the transportation of Hakim out of Paris, right here to Lyon. How is the forensic search of Jean-Luc’s mother’s house going?’

‘She’s been moved to a hotel, and the gendarmerie are preparing a second interview with her,’ Helen said.

‘Keep it up, Scott. Good work. I heard they call you “the Wrench” in the army. I’m beginning to see why.’

She left the room and Helen stared after her. That bombshell was a bolt out of the blue and a sure sign to Helen that Sylvia Drogan had spent a bit of time on her record. She cringed. She hated the name, not because it was derogatory – the opposite was true – but because it gave the impression of some gung-ho soldier swaggering about, showing everybody else up, which simply was not true. In this game, you couldn’t get anywhere alone; it had to be a team effort.

With that thought, she realised it was time to speak to Khalil Dalmani. She needed to ask him why he trusted one man alone to accompany Hakim back to college. It was crazy. She’d never come across a high-profile and wealthy family such as this one who’d ever considered taking such a risk. It wasn’t a matter of trust, but one of logistics and prudence. Drills and skills were the number one weapons of choice for close protection. Stick to the procedures or pay for it. With close protection, one couldn’t wing it and hope for the best. Jean-Luc was just a man; but he’d been treated like some kind of super-guard, immune to the pitfalls that the other mere mortals might encounter. He’d been given far too much credit.

She called the Ritz in Paris to see if she could speak with Khalil. Sylvia had tried a few times but was told that the man was always busy. She waited patiently. Over the last forty-eight hours, Sylvia had tried to set up a Zoom meeting with him three times already and it left them reliant upon what had been obtained by the team from Algiers. It wasn’t ideal.

The voice came back on the phone and agreed a time for her to use a secure video call, encrypted by Interpol, to have a meeting with him in ten minutes.

As well as the information supplied by Khalil to Interpol Algiers, she’d received his classified file from MI6, who kept a log of all persons of interest. Khalil had qualified for British intelligence attention when he was born, but now it might come in handy. She’d familiarised herself with it over the last day or so and absorbed everything she could about Khalil and his family. Shortly she’d come face to face with him, albeit electronically, but she was still undecided about who she trusted. Sir Conrad wanted to know if Khalil’s old associate was up to something, to put his mind at rest about the summit in Paris. They both knew that even if he did know something, Khalil wouldn’t simply deliver it to Interpol. She had to find an angle, and she reckoned it was Hakim himself. She looked at her watch and realised that her time was up, and she logged into the call, half expecting to see Grant in