Affairs of State Read Free Page A

wearing jogging suits, arrogantlittle machos. Noria takes them by the hand and leads them over to a bench, opposite the shop.
    ‘Noria Ghozali, police officer.’
    ‘Nasser,’ says the taller of the two.
    The introductions are now over.
    ‘The firecrackers in the dog shit up on the hill, is that you?’
    ‘What’s the problem? We’re not the first, and we’re not the only ones …’
    ‘But you’re the last. You stop, you tell your friends to stop, we’ll forget all about it. I’m sure you’ll find something else. You have to be flexible.’
     
    Back to HQ. Noria crosses the duty room, greeting the uniformed officers, starts going up the stairs to the offices on the first floor and stops. Pinned to the wall are three little photocopied posters: ‘No Arab scum in the French police’, and a target on a shape that resembles her. She stands rooted to the step. Alone.
Don’t give in. It’s not about you
. She makes her way slowly to the toilet, her body rigid, and locks herself in. She washes her hands thoroughly, then her face, staring at herself in the mirror and straightens her bun. Then she goes back to her office and writes her report. Authors of the attacks identified. Problem sorted.
    At the end of the day, she goes back down the stairs, her stomach in a knot. The posters are gone. She crosses the duty room, walking past the uniformed officers in silence.

Thursday 28 November
    A plane leaves a trail in an intense blue sky very high above a range of bare, snow-covered mountains and an opaque green lake. A standard ad for a budget airline company. And then the plane bursts into flames, explodes, and breaks up into a dozen huge fireballs shooting out stars before spinning down towards the earth amid a shower of burning debris. The noise of the explosion reverberates in the mountains, echoing endlessly.
     
    A comfortable sitting room in shades of beige and chestnut: two leather sofas, a few deep armchairs, a glass and steel coffee table, thick white wool carpeting, two large windows blocked out by heavy velvet curtains. On the wall, a mildly saucy earth-red chalk drawing by Boucher, lit by a spotlight, depicts a plump young nude being gracefully humped by a young man whose clothing is barely loosened. Men aged between forty and sixty, in deeply conventional dark suits and ties, chat and drink champagne, whisky and cocktails served by women aged between twenty and thirty moving from one to the other, smiling and attentive. They all look superb in their revealing, beautifully cut, figure-hugging dresses in dark colours with discreetly plunging necklines and tasteful jewellery, smiling all the time.
    The men have just closed a deal to sell arms to Iran, a thousand missiles. The sale is illegal, since the country is under an embargo, so naturally tensions are running high. Especiallysince the delivery date had had to be postponed for a few days at the last minute. Luga Airport in Malta, through which the cargo was to transit, had just been the scene of a pitched battle between Egypt’s special forces and a group of Palestinians who had taken the passengers and crew of an Egyptian aircraft hostage. Several dozen dead later, the airport was finally cleared, flights resumed yesterday, and this morning, the Boeing 747 cargo laden with missiles took off from Brussels-Zavantem heading for Tehran, via Valetta, Malta. It should already have landed in Tehran. And now, the deal done, it’s time to celebrate.
    Bornand plays the host. Tall, very slim, an attractive sixty-year-old with thick, wavy hair, more pepper than salt, and a long face whose features are emphasised by a network of vertical furrows and a thick, neatly trimmed, completely white moustache. His light grey tailored suit, cut to a neat fit, emphasises his slimness as he moves from group to group saying a few words, touching a shoulder, filling a glass.
    Flandin, the boss of the SEA, 3 the applied electronics company which sold the missiles to the Iranians,