“Fine. Twenty minutes. I’ll call you then. At precisely two o’clock.”

He cut the connection and turned back to Martigny and the GIGN officer.

“Can you be ready to go in before that? Say fifteen minutes from now?”

The other two men had a brief muttered conference.

“Half an hour would be better,” Martigny said. “Forty-five minutes would be better still.”

“I wouldn’t advise that.”

“You don’t think you can persuade him to release Genevieve Hunter?”

“He has no intention of releasing either of them. Or using the car, or the plane. You heard him. He’s excited. He’s playing games.”

Rowland watched the decision be made. He watched the GIGN officer leave; he heard movement outside the van, the shouldering of weapons, the sound of footsteps moving off.

The psychologist passed his hand across his forehead. Martigny, sitting down, lit a cigarette.

All three men sat in silence. They watched the second hand of the clocks move forward; they watched the banks of tapes. They listened to the quiet relayed voice of the movement tracker, then a burst of static. Rowland froze: he had just heard Gini’s voice.

Martigny gave a sigh. “At last. They have the listening devices in place. When they go in—they’ll go in front and rear simultaneously. Thirty seconds before they go in, the telephone will ring. Fifteen seconds after that we kill every light in that apartment. Then…”

He did not need to continue. Rowland knew, in essence, what happened next. They would rappel down from the roof. Diversionary noise and blinding light; GIGN operatives, helmeted, in full body armor, each man with night sights and each man audio-linked. In theory their training enabled them to enter a strange room in darkness, at top speed, yet still distinguish who were the hostages and who was not. Rapidly, using automatic weapons, they would take Star out—and only Star. Sometimes this technique was successful, sometimes not.

Both Pascal Lamartine and Star, he thought, were of similar height; both had dark hair; one man was holding a weapon, the other was not.

He fixed his eyes on the clock face set into the side of the van above the banked tapes and equipment. The reception from the apartment was intermittent—like listening to a badly tuned radio station. Suddenly, after a burst of static, he heard Lamartine’s voice; he sounded cool, even relaxed.

“Not in here,” he said. “In your mother’s room—the pink room. There’s a wall of her pictures in there. If you stood back against that… I can try some long shots. It’s just—”

“What? What’s the problem?”

“For covers, I need a head shot. I’d need just one good close-up.”

“Covers?”

“Sure. Time. Newsweek. Paris Match. I need monochrome and color—monochrome for newspapers, color for magazines.”

“I don’t like that room. It’s my mother’s room. I don’t want—”

“Fine. Okay. We’ll do it here. It’s not as good—”

“No. No. We’ll go in there—just don’t try anything, okay, or I fucking fire, and she…”

The voices faded again. Inside the communications van there was absolute silence.