'What?'

'Things she would expect you to say.'

'I thought we'd been through all that.'

'Reminders,' said Claudine.

'It's time!'

'She'll make us wait.'

'How long?'

'As long as she likes. But she'll call.'

He started walking aimlessly again. Claudine said: 'It'll be better if you sit down. You've got to be ready.'

McBride completed a circle and came back to lower himself into his chair. It was so large his feet only just touched the ground. His hands were shaking and his forehead was sheened with perspiration. There were three concealed call b.u.t.tons, on the left of the knee recess. She wondered what they were for. The clock was registering four minutes after the time of yesterday's call.

McBride had got as far as 'She's not-' when the phone rang. All three jumped, McBride more than the women. Claudine knew the transfer from the main switchboard would have already been delayed for a few seconds, for the scan to begin. McBride stared at the instrument, transfixed.

'Pick it up,' said Claudine calmly.

McBride did so, hesitantly, but remembered to look sideways to her so that both receivers came off their cradles together. 'h.e.l.lo?'

'McBride?' The voice was faint.

'Yes.'

'How do I know?'

Claudine mouthed 'You must tell me' and the American repeated the words aloud.

'What's Granny McBride's birthday?' asked the caller.

'August second,' replied the amba.s.sador at once.

'And grandpa's?'

'Grandpa's dead.'

'When did he die?'

'Two years ago. November.'

There was a laugh, overlaid at the end by outside traffic noise. 'h.e.l.lo, Mr Amba.s.sador!'

Quickly Claudine slipped across the first of her notes. It read: 'Horror. She's maimed your child.'

McBride said: 'You've hurt Mary! Badly. Please give her back, so I can get her treated: get her to hospital!'

There was a pause at the other end. Claudine nodded approvingly to the man beside her. The line had been open for almost two minutes.

'She's been properly treated.'

'Who by?' mouthed Claudine.

'By a doctor?'

'How?'

'She's not in any pain.'

Claudine's second note read: Anger but not hatred. Frustration.

'b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' said McBride. 'Why? I want to pay to get her back: pay anything.' He was performing far better than Claudine could have hoped.

'I wanted you to know you've got to do everything I demand ...'

The line faded into silence and McBride said urgently: 'I didn't hear! The line's gone ...'

'... demand or something worse will happen to her,' echoed down the line as the volume returned.

'No!' protested McBride, unprompted. 'There's no need to hurt her any more. Just tell me what you want and I'll do it: let's just end this.'

'We want two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,' announced the woman.

Claudine had been making profile notes throughout. She pressed down at the ransom figure so heavily the pencil point broke. She switched to another, angry at her over-reaction, important though the demand was. Hurriedly she pa.s.sed another note.

Responding to it McBride said: 'You can have it now! Tonight! Tell me how to deliver it and you can have it tonight ... so I can get Mary back tonight ...'

Four minutes, Claudine saw. Surely with the sort of technical equipment at the other side of the emba.s.sy they would have got a fix by now!

'All in good time: I can't have us walking into a trap.'

'I promise ...'

Before Claudine's headshake registered with McBride the woman cut him off. 'I know that won't be true, so don't lie. You don't want Mary coming to any more harm, do you?'

The man opened his mourn to speak but Claudine held up a stopping hand, mouthing her instruction.

'I'm sorry ... I didn't mean ... I'm so desperate to get Mary back,' stumbled McBride obediently.

The volume collapsed into static. Almost six minutes, noted Claudine. The words were indistinct when the sound came back. Then the voice said: 'Guess you didn't hear that: I lost you too. And how's the clever lady today? I know you're there, Claudine!'

The remark reverberated through Claudine's head like a pistol shot. She'd been right in thinking she'd missed something but she wasn't missing it any more and the recognition was so astonishing that momentarily Claudine's mind blocked. She was conscious of McBride's startled expression and of his intention to speak and urgently shook her head. She said: 'I'm very well, Mercedes. Trying to be a clever lady yourself?'

The laugh was uneven. 'It was obvious you'd listen in. Just as it's obvious they'll be trying to trace this call. That's why I won't be talking to you much longer.'

Could she do it! She had to, Claudine told herself. There was a risk but she'd already made up her mind about the chances of getting Mary Beth back alive. Abandoning everything she'd rehea.r.s.ed with the amba.s.sador, she embarked on an approach she'd considered at the very beginning. 'We're having the toe scientifically examined, to establish if it's from Mary.' She held her free hand up against any interruption from McBride.

'Your idea?'

'Yes,' said Claudine. 'And I've got a lot more.' Bite! she thought desperately.

'The clever psychologist, imagining you know my mind!'

Claudine felt another sweep of disbelief. 'Oh, I know your mind very well, Mercedes: probably better than you know it yourself.' There was so much to think about: considerations to weigh. But later. Not now. Now her entire concentration had to be upon every nuance and word of this conversation.

'You're a conceited fool!'

Claudine was pleased at the irritated edge in the woman's voice. 'One of us is, Mercedes.' She hoped the woman discerned the contempt she was trying to infuse into her voice every time she uttered the ridiculous a.s.sumed name.

'Didn't you hear the warning I gave McBride about what would happen to Mary if he annoyed me?'

Once more Claudine shook her head against any interruption from the amba.s.sador. The door on the opposite side of the office opened softly but urgently. Without coming any further into the room Blake gave exaggerated nods to indicate a location followed by one of the familiar rolling gestures with his hands for the woman to be kept on the line. Trying to make the sneer in her voice as obvious as she could, Claudine said: 'You didn't actually say annoyed, Mercedes, but then I guess you're confused-'

'I'm not at all confused!' broke in the woman.

Dare she go on? If she were right and Claudine didn't doubt that she was there was another way, a much more effective way, for her to achieve what she wanted. McBride, beside her, was damp with sweat, smelling of it. 'It's a common belief ...' Claudine said, letting her voice trail. At the same time she slid another prompt sheet to the man.

McBride said: 'Let me speak to Mary. Talk to her to know she's all right.'

'Where's Claudine? I want Claudine!'

Claudine allowed the briefest of pauses, aware of the satisfaction surging through her: so much, so quickly. Dismissively, she demanded: 'What?'

'What's a common belief? What are you talking about?'

Quite irrespective of anything else, they'd kept the woman talking for a further three minutes: she had to be surrounded now, on the point of arrest. 'The amba.s.sador wants to talk to Mary.'

'You haven't answered my question!'

'The only thing we need to talk about is the arrangement for getting Mary back.'

'I'll-' began the woman loudly, but then stopped. There was a sound as if the instrument had been hurriedly dropped, and distant talking, in French too indistinct to decipher, but no police sirens or the shouts and yells Claudine would have expected at a moment of arrest.

'What ...?' started McBride, but Claudine gestured him down.

For precisely four more minutes, timed by the clock in front of them, the indistinct talking continued. Claudine thought she detected a child's voice and from the disbelieving look on his face she knew McBride had heard it too. Then there were sirens, a screaming cacophony, and the expected shouting began: there was definitely at least one child's voice among the screaming before all the noise was drowned by the whuck-whuck of descending helicopters.

'They've got her!' said McBride, his voice trembling. 'They've got the woman and they've got Mary back.'

'Come on!' shouted Claudine, already running towards the door.

Way was made for McBride and his wife to squeeze into the communications room, alongside Sanglier against the wall at the very rear. The only sound, the volume adjusted to be properly audible, not deafening, was relayed over an open channel that all could hear. It was in French. There was definitely a child's cry. Demands, clearly from the arresting officers, for the adults not to move and to keep their hands and arms visible. One voice kept repeating a threat to shoot. Claudine's first dip of uncertainty came with the sound of a man's voice, close to hysteria, demanding to know what was happening and pleading that no one shoot. And of a child screaming, hysterical too.

Blake was beside her. She leaned towards him and whispered: 'It's gone wrong.' He frowned back at her, not replying.

She looked intently at Poncellet, on the other side of the blond-haired man. It surely couldn't be the police chief? She hadn't thought whom she could continue to trust, until that moment: hadn't thought about anything, except her conviction. Now she did. She thought about how they could use what she'd learned and how she could keep Mary alive and wondered how much easier or more difficult it made everything. And she wondered who it was. There was only a small possible number. Through all the confusion and conflicting impressions Claudine abruptly felt very confident. She couldn't risk telling anyone her biggest and most immediate problem was deciding whom she could tell about anything but for the first time almost since the investigation started she believed there was a chance of getting Mary back alive. Just as she decided, suddenly, that Mary was still alive. If she'd been dead, it would have been Mary's toe in the backpack, not someone else's.

Claudine was briefly thrown off balance, for just seconds, by the implications of that awareness, sickening but at the same time hopeful though it was. I'm not sure I want to give her back yet. I've become attached to her. There could be another interpretation of that remark, as obscene but not as life-threatening as her first. Bizarre though it might be to a rational mind which she already knew the woman didn't possess but totally in keeping with the s.e.xual deviancy of paedophilia, Claudine thought it more than likely that the unknown woman had fallen in love with Mary Beth McBride. Which, while posing a terrible s.e.xual danger, meant that she wouldn't, for the moment at least, be subjected to any other physical danger. Rather, bizarre upon the bizarre, that she would be protected from it.

Poncellet leaned from Claudine's other side and said: 'This doesn't sound right.'

'It isn't,' said Claudine. 'She's beaten us.'

The family was brought to the US emba.s.sy because that was where the investigation was concentrated, but long before their arrival there was an explanation of crushing disappointment.

There was no reason whatsoever for embarra.s.sment or recrimination, because the location operation had worked perfectly. But there was a squabble of accusations between the Belgian, American and Europol squads, particularly among those who'd first arrived at the supermarket car park in the Gansh.o.r.en suburb of the city.

Paradoxically, Hortense, the daughter of Horst and Sonia Eind.i.c.ks, was the same age as Mary Beth McBride to within a day. The family always did their major supermarket shopping on the last Friday of every month, when Horst got paid. Neither parent could remember the Mercedes parked next to them when they'd emerged to unpack their trolleys, but Hortense said she was sure the nice lady who'd taken one of their trolleys instead of getting one for herself and given her the deposit money had yellow hair. Certainly none of them had seen her drop the telephone, still connected to the emba.s.sy, among the plastic bags in the back of the family Ford.

'And while we all went one way she went the other,' said Poncellet bitterly.

Harding paid double for the trolley coin to be sent for forensic a.n.a.lysis, along with the abandoned telephone. The Eind.i.c.ks family, awed by the sensation in which they had become so innocently involved, accepted apologies for earlier being terrorized.

It was not until the family was being escorted from the emba.s.sy that Claudine had the opportunity to draw Sanglier aside.

'We've got to have a meeting but without Poncellet,' she said urgently.

'What about?'

'The person who knows who's got Mary,' said Claudine simply.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

It didn't take long to organize, after the departure of Andre Poncellet, but there was a lot of questioning impatience from everyone, particularly Sanglier, after Claudine's dramatic announcement. Sanglier demanded a preliminary explanation, which Claudine avoided by insisting that they needed complete transcripts as well as the tapes of both her conversations with the woman to understand her discovery.

Unable to gauge how serious the leak was and with the bugging of her hotel room very much in mind she asked to remain at the emba.s.sy instead of returning to their police headquarters accommodation, claiming it might no longer be safe. That a.s.sertion heightened the drama and increased the demands.

The delay of transcribing and then copying the second tape gave time for Rosetti and Volker to arrive from the hotel. Both men made contributions to an investigation far beyond their individual disciplines, but observing her know thyself dictum Claudine acknowledged a determination to present something that would turn the entire investigation on its head to both Hugo Rosetti and Peter Blake. She at once confronted the self-examination. It wasn't immaturity, although maybe there was a small, disturbing element. It was, instead, the far deeper need after John Norris's suicide to prove herself not just to two men to whom she felt emotionally attracted but to everyone else as well. Including herself. She wanted to stage a performance, almost literally, in front of them all. Gain their plaudits. She didn't like the awareness. It was good cathartic that she'd diagnosed it but she had to rid herself of it.

They used the CIA quarters, which meant Lance Rampling had to be included. Because of the possible political consequences Claudine had considered including the amba.s.sador as well, and there was no doubt his larger office would have been far more comfortable. However, she decided it was unnecessary as well as wrong to cause McBride and his wife any more distress. Hopefully Burt Harrison could a.s.sess the political repercussions far more dispa.s.sionately.

Belatedly trying to minimize the stage-like appearance, Claudine did not actually sit behind Rampling's desk but perched casually on its side edge. Even so, as Rosetti and Volker finally entered, Sanglier said testily: 'I hope you can justify all this mystery: we're supposed to be working with the Belgians, not against them.'

Claudine decided she could not have sought a better cue. 'As they're supposed to be working with us. But someone isn't.'

'What?' That was Harrison.

'The people who've got Mary are aware of every word we've spoken and every move we've considered making against them, virtually from the start of this investigation.'