An Agent of Deceit

by Chris Morgan Jones

  Webster kept a solemn face and said nothing.

  Lock smiled an unconvincing smile. ‘I’m beginning to wish that we’d hired you first.’ Webster gave a little nod of acknowledgement. ‘But what concerns me is that after Paris there’s . . . there’s no clarity. Too many courts, too many bloody lawyers – charging more than you, I should imagine. I think the best ending for everybody will be agreed outside court. Except the lawyers, perhaps. This thing is hurting my business and costing Aristotle money. A fortune if his fees are as bad as ours. But I’m finding it hard to get through to him. That’s where I thought you could help.’

  Webster nodded again, slowly. This was good: Lock was talking too much, offering too much. ‘And you think Tourna wants a settlement?’

  ‘If it’s the right amount, yes. That’s how it works.’

  ‘I’m not sure. I think he wants revenge. I’m not sure he cares about getting his money back. I may be wrong.’ Webster took a sip of thick brown tea. ‘And Malin? He wants one?’

  ‘Wants what?’

  ‘A settlement.’

  ‘That’s irrelevant. It’s my business. My dispute.’

  ‘Mr Lock . . .’

  ‘Richard.’

  ‘Richard. With respect, we won’t get anywhere with a settlement if you won’t be straight with me. I’m not wearing a wire. There’s no one else here.’ He looked round the room and then back at Lock. ‘These are not my people.’ A pause. ‘Anything you tell me stays with me. You have my word on that. I’m not here to trick you.’

  Lock scratched the beard on his cheek again, shaking his head. ‘I’m a businessman, Mr Webster. I have a business. When someone attacks that business it’s mine to protect. I’m not sure I understand what you mean.’

  ‘Richard, I think you do. You asked for this meeting and I’m happy to be here, but if we can’t be open with each other I’ll leave. I know a lot about you now. But I knew how you and Malin worked long ago – before I took on this case. I know Russia. I know how it works. Malin is the player, and you’re his bagman.’ Webster stopped for a moment to let Lock react. Lock had turned his head to one side and was looking down at the floor, his chin cupped in his hand, his elbow on the table. He didn’t want to hear this. We’re close. ‘Richard, I also know that that man outside your hotel room is not a bodyguard.’ Lock looked back at him. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t have had to run away from him last night.’

  Lock said nothing for a moment. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’ve been following you. I’m sorry. We saw you go to your wife’s house but we never saw you leave. Just now – what, an hour ago? – your two bodyguards or whatever they are had a word with your wife and then tore off. You haven’t been back to the hotel. We’ve checked.’

  Lock held Webster’s eye. Webster could see resentment in there but resilience too.

  ‘Richard, your time’s up. Every relationship like this, every one I’ve ever seen – you can’t break it. Konstantin can’t. He needs you as much as you need him. But the outside world can. The FBI can. They’re itching to tear you two apart.’ Lock had stopped looking at Webster. He was gazing at the table, appearing not to hear, but Webster went on. ‘Only, the final act, that tends to be down to the Russians. The guys like you always hang on too long. And when the Russians don’t trust them any more, you know what happens. I don’t need to tell you this, do I? You know it better than I do.’

  Lock pushed his chair back and made to stand up. With defiance he looked Webster in the eye. ‘I came here to talk business and you just . . . harangue me. I don’t need this. You have no idea how little I need this.’

  Webster leaned forward and put his hand flat on the table, a gesture of finality and trust. ‘Richard. I’m not here to offend you. But you’ve got a decision to make. You’re here in yesterday’s clothes with mud on your shoes for what? Because you thought it would be fun to jump over walls in the middle of the night? You’re not the man you were a week ago. Your life has changed.’

  Lock stood up. Webster went on.

  ‘Was it part of the plan, to bolt? Or blind panic? Or would your wife not let you stay?’

  Without looking at Webster, Lock walked away between tables and out of the door. His mug was still full of tea. Webster saw his face through the window as he turned onto the street. There was no trace of insult there, no anger; only fear, like a man pursued.

  Webster drummed his fingers on the tabletop in thought. Ten more minutes with him was all he needed. He put his phone back together and waited for it to warm up. He needed to call Black and let him know that Lock had left and was heading east on Church Street. His tea was still warm, and he sat with the thick white mug in his hands. He could go after Lock now, catch him up along the street, or he could find him later, let his thoughts do the work. But it had to be today.

  His phone chimed awake, and as he picked it up the bell above the door jangled. Lock stood in the doorway with an odd look of contrition on his face. Webster looked up as Lock threaded his way between orange plastic chairs and sat down again. For a moment neither man spoke.

  ‘Can we discuss me?’ Lock said at last.

  Webster gave a small, understanding nod. ‘I think we should.’

  ‘I . . . I went to church this morning. That beautiful one on George Street. Do you know it?’ Webster shook his head. ‘You should go. Walk through the door and it’s like being in Italy. I thought that if I told someone everything then perhaps . . . But I couldn’t find a priest. And I wasn’t sure what I was there to confess.’

  ‘Sins of omission?’

  ‘Possibly. Yes. I have omitted rather a lot.’

  For the next half an hour, Lock talked. He talked about Cayman, and the horrifying spectre of the FBI. He talked about Malin and his growing impatience, about the bodyguards and the prison that Moscow had become. He talked about Gerstman, and the terror that still struck him whenever he imagined his death. He left very little out.

  It seemed to do him good. Webster listened closely, interrupting with the occasional question, and it occurred to him as Lock revived a little that in some respects his own profession was not so different from his wife’s. He had felt this before, the beginnings of a strange dependency, a stranger intimacy. Each needed to trust the other, whether that was wise or not.

  Then it was his turn. He told Lock what he knew about Malin, and what the FBI would come to know. Lock interjected that the Swiss were also interested, so he thought, and Webster said there would probably be more. He laid out what would happen next: how charges would be drawn up and international arrest warrants issued; how Lock would be forced to remain in Russia; how the newspapers, frankly quiet until now, would feed happily on it for months. He began to remind Lock of the precedents, the helicopter crashes, the drive-by shootings on motorbikes, until Lock cut him short.

  And then he described the alternative. Cooperate with law enforcement. Engage independent lawyers. Work against Malin; expose him. Go to prison, perhaps, but claim some small piece of your life as your own.

  Throughout, Lock sat and listened, nodding occasionally as if to stay in touch from somewhere far away. He seldom looked at Webster; he stared at the table, out of the window, at the other people in the cafe, which was busier now. He was still in his coat, and underneath its bulk his body looked shrunken and collapsed. When Webster was done he sat nodding steadily for several moments.

  ‘The trouble is,’ he said, finally looking at Webster, ‘I don’t think I know enough to be of use.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know enough. Never have. Kesler explained it to me. To hurt Malin you need to show he’s a criminal. I don’t know he’s a criminal. Or I can’t prove it. I just know that he’s a rich Russian and I own things for him.’ He leaned back and tried to find something in his trouser pocket; it sounded full of change. Eventually he pulled out a small plastic rectangle and held it up for Webster to see. ‘On here is everything I know. Every document from my files – every
transfer, every company, every instruction. I thought I should have it all somewhere safe in case I needed it. But the funny thing – do you know what it is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The funny thing, is that it’s so clean. Money goes from here to there, it buys things, it grows, but I don’t know where it’s from. Fifteen years I’ve been doing this and I don’t know – have no idea,’ Lock beat out the syllables on the table with the flat of his hand, ‘where any of it comes from. I guess, like you guess. But I don’t know.’

  Webster felt his stomach lift and fall. ‘So what did Gerstman know?’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘I saw him before he died.’

  Lock frowned a little, as if he was thinking something through for the first time. ‘So it was you.’

  ‘I like to think it wasn’t. He wouldn’t speak to me.’

  ‘Do you know how he died?’

  ‘I have an idea. He didn’t strike me as the type to kill himself. Or to do it in that way. So either he knew something, or it was a message.’

  ‘To me.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Webster watched Lock take this in. Either way, he thought, one of us precipitated his death. He didn’t say it. ‘So what did he know?’

  ‘More than me, I suppose. He was a Russian, for a start. He knew where the money came from. Or some of it.’

  ‘Enough to make him dangerous?’

  ‘Dmitry was much too clever to be a danger to those people. He did everything he could to show Konstantin that. I thought he believed him.’

  Webster waited a second or two. His fingers drummed on the table, his foot tapped on the floor. There was a gamble in this next move, since it was still possible that Lock was here on Malin’s behalf. Look at him, though, with the livid dark bags under his eyes and the fear in his face; he needs me.

  There was something he had to clear first. He looked Lock in the eye. ‘Tell me. Do you remember an article about Faringdon? From ten years ago. In English. The only one there’s really been. It said that you were buying things for the Russian state.’

  Lock frowned, as if rooting through his memory. ‘No. There’s never been anything. Not until you started.’

  ‘It was by a friend of mine. A Russian woman.’

  ‘No.’ Lock shook his head. ‘I would have remembered. Is it important?’

  Lock was no actor; his face was empty; it meant nothing to him.

  ‘Probably not.’ It was strange how a single piece of information could suddenly reveal a person. In that moment Webster understood that Lock was not the sort of man to be told things, but the sort who serves a purpose. A standard component of a more complex mechanism. The realization freed him. ‘I went to see Nina Gerstman.’

  Lock sat back and crossed his arms. ‘Was that decent?’

  Webster shrugged. ‘I thought I could help her. She thinks it was Malin.’

  ‘Of course it was Malin. How does that help?’

  ‘Perhaps we can show that it was.’ Lock waited for Webster to go on. ‘I think that Dmitry had some sort of file on Malin. I also think that someone searched his flat a week or so before he died. Prock mentioned it but thought I wouldn’t understand. Do you know Prock?’

  Lock shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Dmitry’s partner. An unlikely match.’ He paused. ‘Maybe she’d show it to you.’

  ‘Nina?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why would she show it to me?’

  ‘Because you’re the man who can bring down her husband’s killer. Because Dmitry liked you.’

  Lock sighed, exhaling through his nose and mouth. ‘You’re sure there’s something there?’

  ‘I think there is. Something that will hurt Malin. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.’

  ‘What if there isn’t?’

  ‘Then everyone will still want to talk to you, you’ll just have less to tell them. You can go back to Russia or talk to the FBI. I’ll help you.’

  Lock thought for a moment. ‘Is she in Berlin?’

  ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘So I go, she gives me this file, this information, whatever it is, and then I come back. What does it do for me?’

  ‘It makes you valuable. Simple as that. Christ, you can take it back to Malin if you like and he’ll pat you on the head and love you again. Maybe let you go around on your own. If that’s what you want. Otherwise it’s the difference between wanting to nail him and actually doing it.’

  ‘It’ll never happen. It never happens.’

  ‘It happens. I’ve seen it. And you’re the only one who can do it.’

  ‘And you don’t care if I run off?’

  ‘You’re not mine to control. But if you do I’ll know you got something.’

  Lock sighed again, looking round the room at the stallholders coming in for their lunch.

  ‘I’m not very good at this sort of thing.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘I’m no spy. I tried it in Moscow and screwed it up. I have no talent for subterfuge.’ He laughed a cold laugh. ‘Funny. Under the circumstances.’

  ‘I’m quite good at it,’ said Webster. ‘Let me help.’

  There and then Webster made a plan, writing and sketching, angling his notebook on the table so that Lock could make it out. Lock ate a bacon sandwich; Webster left his to go cold as he scribbled and talked.

  Lock should leave London straight away. There was no point in delaying. He should take a flight to Amsterdam or Rotterdam. That far he could be traced, but once there he would create a little diversion. Using his credit card he would buy a train ticket to Noordwijk, where his father lived, so that anyone watching would assume he was going home. But he would drive to Berlin in a hire car paid for by Ikertu through an innocent-sounding front company. That way no one would have any idea of his true destination.

  From Amsterdam to Berlin was a journey of four hundred miles, probably a seven-hour drive. He could stay overnight in Hannover or push for Berlin in one go. There he would check in to a hotel that Ikertu had again found and paid for. He would be Mr Richard Green, and would be careful not to present his passport when checking in.

  ‘What do I say if they ask?’ said Lock.

  ‘Tell them you had your briefcase stolen at the airport and you don’t have it. You’re going to the embassy in the morning. We’ll find you a hotel that won’t care.’

  Money was important. He should withdraw as much as he could today, in London and Holland, and use cash for everything once he landed in Europe. Phones, too. Lock volunteered that he had dismantled his old ones yesterday.

  ‘Good. Leave them that way. Before you go we’ll get you a pay-as-you-go,’ said Webster.

  And then he should see Nina. Lock should plan his own approach. He knew her, and he could decide what would work best. Webster gave him her address and phone number.

  ‘How do I get back?’

  ‘You arrive at the airport and book yourself on the next plane back to London. Leave it very late, just before check-in closes. I’ll meet you at the other end and take you somewhere safe.’

  ‘What if they find me?’

  ‘They won’t. You’re not leaving a trace.’

  Lock sat for a moment, leaning on the table with his hands clasped together, his thumbs pressed against each other.

  ‘When did you start following me?’

  The question surprised Webster but he was happy to answer. ‘When you arrived yesterday.’

  ‘No, not this time. I mean, when did you first start following me?’

  ‘Yesterday.’ Lock gave Webster an appraising look. ‘Really. We had no reason to before.’

  ‘OK. OK.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. The last time I was here I thought someone was following me. Maybe I imagined it.’ Lock sat back and rubbed his cheek. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’

  Webster sat back, as if the planning was complete. With Yuri’s help he would know exactly where Lock was, but to go wi
th him now was to risk overloading this delicate new trust between them. He needed Lock to think he was in control.

  ‘I could. But this is your mission. I’ll be a phone call away. We’ll make a spy of you yet.’ He smiled, the sort of smile that says everything will turn out fine, no matter how unlikely that might seem.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Thirty-five years before, it must have been, Lock had travelled across Germany on roads like this to Altenau, a lake town in the Harz mountains. They had left at night to avoid traffic, his father driving, his mother and sister asleep. Opera played loud on the cassette, the high notes tinny and distorted. Lock stayed awake and watched the car’s softly glowing instruments reflected in the window against the dark. On the straight roads his father sat almost perfectly still, his arms locked and steady on the wheel.

  That was their second holiday in the mountains. The first they had spent in tents, sometimes in campsites, sometimes in the wilderness, but that year Lock’s mother had insisted on a roof and a bath, and Everhart had booked them into a guest house on the edge of town by the lake. They were the only family there, everyone else was there to walk, and Lock and his sister, waking early and playing, were often in trouble for disturbing the other guests. Everhart seemed quietly pleased that they were bringing some life to the place.

  For two weeks they walked, and swam, and took day trips to pretty towns. Some time in the second week Everhart declared that he and his son were going for a proper walk, a long one, and early the next day they set off, Everhart leading the way around the edge of the lake through densely planted pines, the needles dry under their feet. Lock’s scuffed white tennis shoes slipped on the slopes, and he followed in awe the unerring tread of his father’s sturdy leather boots. Even now he could remember every moment of that day. They walked for hours, saying little. Everhart moved quickly, but not so quickly that with the occasional run and skip Lock couldn’t keep up. At lunch, the lake by now a long way behind them, they sat in the forest by a stream, ate their sandwiches, and talked about the future: where Lock would go to school, what he might study at university, what he would do to earn a living, where he wanted to live. Everhart shared his tea in the cap of the Thermos flask.