The IPD400 could not be operated without him, even if it did fall into the wrong hands. Had that already happened? It would surely be pig-headed not to connect its sudden disappearance with the equally sudden appearance in his life of a gullible twenty-year-old girl and her sinister handler. If only he had not been so wary of getting himself into trouble! At least he was one step ahead of them: Hamed could have no way of knowing that he had traced him to 28 Ashington Road – no one outside the intelligence community knew he had super-user access to the cellphone exchanges. It gave him a priceless advantage.
So use it. Pay Hamed a visit. Tonight.
The decision sent a tremor through him, like a hunting dog that feels a hand on the clip of its leash. You haven’t felt that since Kosovo. The mere possibility of hunting this man down was making the blood dance in his veins. A snapped wrist and a dislocated shoulder less than twenty-four hours ago – isn’t that enough? An aperitif, something to whet the appetite. It looked like the years of t’ai chi had been a waste of time after all.
He arrived in Wembley just after dusk, bought latex gloves and gaffer tape, headed for Ashington Road. A short street that whispered of fearful conformity. Narrow terraced houses with PVC windows clamped shut. Cars squeezed into squares of concrete out front.
There was a dim glow from the fanlight set into the front door of number 28, but no lights in any of the rooms. No dustbins by the gate. He walked on. Television screens flickered through net curtains, a faint smell of turmeric laced the damp air. A dog started barking as he passed a backyard behind an end-of-terrace house, its front paws scratching at the low wooden paling that fenced it in. A Doberman with a sharp, neurotic bark that didn’t stop until he was half way down the next street. The garden that backed onto number 28 belonged to a low block of flats with a short alley on one side – the original section of terrace had probably been demolished by a wartime bomb. A useful escape route. Was that why Hamed had chosen this house as his base? It was a common enough sight in a London street.
You should watch the house for at least an hour first.
There was no obvious vantage point and already the tension was getting to him, the muscles of his chest and shoulders drawn tight as steel hawsers. He re-entered Ashington Road, walked up the short path to number 28, rang the bell.
No answer.
He rang again, then rapped on the door. Footsteps in the street behind him: a woman wearing a full burqa hurrying past. Silence. He ran round to the alley by the flats, thinking he had flushed Hamed out. If so, his quarry had gone.
He crossed the patch of grass behind the flats and climbed the fence into the garden at the back of the house. There was a low-built rear extension with a half-glazed door. A strip light on in the kitchen, its drab, bluish glow illuminating the uneven line of paving stones at his feet. He stood by the back door and waited, listening, watching for signs of movement.
He pulled on the latex gloves, stuck strips of tape over the pane of glass to deaden the noise, then elbowed it in and reached inside for the latch. It turned, but the door was deadlocked. He picked out enough glass to get his hand in and feel around for a key. It was hanging on a nail hammered into the door frame.
The kitchen was a dismal place: badly fitted wood-effect units, a small fridge with rust spots on the door, grey vinyl flooring curling at the edges. Cooking oil, a bag of rice and two tins of sweetcorn beside the cooker. He moved swiftly through the rest of the house. In the front room, a dark brown wing chair stood in front of a portable TV on a low table. Gas fire, oatmeal carpet. Smell of damp plaster. Inhabited – just. A grimy bathroom off the narrow stairs, two bedrooms at the top. In the one at the back was a single mattress and a duvet with no cover. A computer was set up on a frayed offcut of the oatmeal carpet next to the mattress. James moved the mouse to wake the screen. A command line blinking in a black DOS console, asking which drive to format. What had the man been trying to hide? He’d known enough not to simply delete – computers don’t delete files, they just detach the metadata that the operating system uses to locate them. A re-format would make information on the hard drive much harder, perhaps impossible, to retrieve. But it seemed the computer had more than one partition and he’d neglected to specify which. Because he’d seen James patrolling the streets and had left in a panic? Compounding his carelessness, he’d left a Hotmail account open.
James sat on the mattress and started to look around.
He was there for two hours, wondering when he would be interrupted by the sound of the front door opening, footsteps on the stairs. But Hamed didn’t come back.
Hamed was taking instructions from someone who liked to garnish his emails with the verbal mannerisms of a devout Muslim – Insha’Allah’s and Masha’Allah’s aplenty. It all sounded a bit routine to James, but he was no expert. Hamed’s messages were addressed to ‘Honoured Sheikh’ or ‘Most Learned Sheikh’ or ‘Beloved Sheikh’, but the honoured, learned and beloved one’s replies were unsigned. James was referred to as the kufr – the unbeliever.
The kufr was undertaking work that was potentially of great value to their Holy Cause, and the Sheikh intended to secure James’s services – by any means necessary. The first step was to collect information about his habits, his working practices, his amorous proclivities and the state of his finances. Hamed complained that he did not have the resources for such delicate work. This provoked a torrent of sanctimonious rhetoric to the effect that he was to do the work of Allah with a willing heart and not place obstacles in His way – Hamed should remember how many others had already given their lives in the Holy Cause. It didn’t sound much like charitable work.
Hamed had submitted several reports about James’s doings over the previous week, but they seemed to have discovered very little about him. The locations where Sarah had seen him were duly noted, along with the fact that he’d withdrawn money from various cashpoint machines, and bought a copy of The Week in a Camden newsagent. He had not met up with anyone who could be identified as a sexual partner. There was no mention of the encounter between himself and Sarah the previous day.
The most recent communication said there had been a ‘highly significant development’, and summoned Hamed to a meeting on Thursday 25 September in Oran, Algeria. He was to wait in the Café Mouloudia in Avenue de Lamur at 10.00 a.m., where he would be met and taken to the rendezvous. The man who came for him would wear a black BMW logo baseball cap to identify himself.
The day after tomorrow. . .
He was being sized up at the behest of an irascible sheikh with an unspecified interest in how his work might further some unspecified ‘Holy Cause’. The man doing the job had ballsed it up so badly that his target was actually sitting in his bedroom reviewing the assignment and wondering what the significant development was and whether this meeting in Oran might just be something he ought to attend. Simultaneously, Little Sister had disappeared from the best secured warehouse in Europe. Who were these people?
He looked in the document folders and recycle bin, but found nothing of interest. He ran a series of wildcard searches to see if Hamed was storing personal data in a hidden folder. No. Nothing about the Children of Islam, either. He downloaded an application that would allow him to identify files that had been deleted and removed from the recycle bin. All he discovered was that Hamed’s nights were filled with fantasies about teenage boys of Teutonic appearance. There were dozens of them hidden away in the recesses of his hard drive.
James set the drive to re-format, completing the job Hamed had started so that if he came back, he’d think James had drawn a blank. Café Mouloudia, Avenue de Lamur, Oran, Algeria. You want to know who’s following you, follow them and find out. More than likely, you’ll find Little Sister waiting at the end of the rainbow.
Walking back to Wembley tube station, James told himself what a foolish idea that was. Hand this over to Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, let them sort it out. Except that he didn’t trust the Playpen – and his opinion o
f its importance and efficacy was the exact opposite of those who played in it. He didn’t trust them to do the right thing, or even to do the wrong thing well. A ‘cultural attaché’ would be dispatched from the consulate to monitor the rendezvous in Oran. This office junior would trot along to Avenue Lamur towing half a dozen Algerian DRS agents in his wake. Lo and behold, the meeting would be cancelled and that would be that.
Alternatively, if they did stumble upon Little Sister, they’d be constitutionally unable to resist the temptation to pretend they hadn’t. The residents of the Playpen had been furious—no, incandescent when they’d found out they couldn’t get their hands on it, and if an opportunity now arose to hide the prototype in an SIS vault, the Playpen would take it.
Of course, whoever had taken the IPD400 would never be able to get it running. He was sure of that – wasn’t he? But suppose he’d made an error? Suppose they defeated the layers of security by some fluke he hadn’t properly covered off? No one would know. They’d never get caught. The definitive principle of the IPD400’s modus operandi was that it was untraceable: it spirited itself into your network like a light breeze flitting through a brake of trees, and left behind no stray bits or bytes, no toolkits or phantom users, no telltale humming in the wires, no inkling that it had ever dropped in and had a look around. It gave you free rein to violate the digital sanctuaries of anyone you pleased, while remaining yourself inviolable.
He called directory enquiries and asked for the number of Air Algérie.
Oran. . . Wasn’t that the place where, at the end of the War of Independence in 1962, the entire population of Europeans had been massacred? A fine place for an autumn break.
Chapter Three
Nat lay on her back on the bed in her suite at the Riad des Ombres and surveyed the expansive dome of tawny belly beside her. It was a good thing the beds in this place were eight feet across or there wouldn’t have been room for her. She had her hands clasped behind her head so that her breasts stood up plump and irresistible, although Claude Zender couldn’t see them because he still had his eyes closed following the seismic tremors of pleasure she had just recently caused to rumble through his body. But if he did choose to glance over at her breasts, he would see how lovely they were.
It was exciting to play the courtesan to the legendary Claude Zender, whose fortune was said to rival that of Donald Trump and whose network of influence took in heads of state, police chiefs, warlords and corporate powerbrokers from here to Cape Town and beyond. Every arms trade in Africa passed at some point (and sometimes several) under his attentive nose, and Nat had originally succumbed to his elaborate seductions as a matter of good salesmanship. Then, over time, she had grown fond of him. Half fox, half jackal in business, he was a great big fussy bear in bed: enthusiastic about every detail of their lovemaking, full of demonstrative growls, snorts and howls, sure of his own pleasure and attentive to hers. Nat felt beautifully warm and invigorated; her thighs tingled.
‘My dear Natalya, that was very fine, very fine indeed,’ announced Claude Zender. ‘And now we shall have an enormous pot of tea and a tray of pastries, offering a prayer to any god you please that it is not Tigana’s day off. His ghoriba aux amandes is the second best reason for visiting the Riad des Ombres.’
‘And what is the first?’ asked Nat, because when a man is lining up a compliment it is always best to feed him his cue.
‘Why it is you, Natalya, as you very well know!’
‘It’s good to hear that you don’t prefer a nest of honey to a taste of fanny,’ Nat told him with dignity.
‘Ah ha,’ Claude bellowed in delight. ‘And I taste it still! What a priceless treasure you are, Miss Kocharian, what delicious wit. I swear nothing Tigana could compose will ever come near!’ And reaching over with one vast arm, he pulled her on top of him and wrapped her in a voluminous embrace.
Nat squirmed, luxuriating in the sense of being the merest little creature in his massive arms.
‘Hold tight, Claude, if I fall from here it will be the end of me!’ she exclaimed.
A thunderclap of laughter erupted from the belly beneath her and it felt so funny that she began to giggle too. It was a relief to be here in Marrakech, on her favourite bed in the whole world, bouncing around on top of this absurd, wobbling mountain of man! Tears were streaming down Claude’s cheeks; and the more he laughed, the more the reverberations tickled her. For a moment, they were beyond control.
‘Natalya, please, you are crushing me flat as a crepe,’ Claude managed to gasp, setting himself, and her, off all over again.
Nat rolled off him. Claude heaved himself into a sitting position, wiped his eyes, threw a glass of water down his throat, and reached for the phone to order his tea. Nat pulled on a dressing gown and went to run a bath. The one in her suite – a sunken oval rendered in pink terracotta and a good seven feet in diameter – took nearly an hour to fill, even allowing for the great volume of water that would be rendered superfluous by the bulk of Claude Zender.
‘Eh bien, veuillez expliquer à Monsieur Tigana que c’est Monsieur Claude Zender qui a commandé ces délices, hein? Il va me préparer les pâtisseries les plus fraîches, les plus légères, les plus douces, j’en suis certain. . . Très bien, à tout à l’heure.’
‘I see you’ve already started to enjoy your cakes.’
‘And you are preparing our bath. Is there time in this world to sample all its pleasures, I wonder?’
‘What a poetic old man you are, Claude.’ She wrapped her hands behind his neck and kissed the leathery folds of his forehead, then batted away the large hand that was trying to reach inside her bathrobe. She went out onto the loggia, where a low sofa and table were set. Her room was on the second floor, and looked out on to a small garden of coarse grass, ornamental cacti and oleander swamped with ruby-coloured blooms. Zender followed.
‘Not like that,’ she said. ‘You’ll frighten the monkeys. Put a bathrobe on – there’s one hanging on the door.’
The oversized arms broker, more or less decent, padded out onto the loggia and lowered himself into the sofa beside her.
‘Enchanting,’ he said complacently. ‘But you haven’t yet told me to what unforeseen circumstance I owe the intoxicating delights of your company. Your last visit to Marrakech was a mere six weeks ago, as I recall, and you fleeced me quite disgracefully with various odds and ends from the Grosvenor scrapyard. I wonder you have the gall to show your face here again.’ He spoke amiably enough but, as usual when business was being discussed, his eyes had the serenely rapacious look of a crocodile resting its long chin on a muddy riverbank.
‘Everything Grosvenor sells is of the highest quality, as your clients expect. And no one knows better than me how demanding they are, Claude, because no one gets told it as often as I do. Anyway, I had nothing else to do so I came out here. I love Marrakech in autumn.’
‘You speak English better than the natives,’ Claude replied. ‘And yet the vowels will sometimes growl their allegiance to Mother Russia – it is most alluring. You are at a loose end, you say?’
‘Mother Ukraine,’ said Nat. ‘If you want to know, Grosvenor have suspended me. I’m on probation.’
‘Mais non, Natalya. They would not be so foolish.’
A monkey swung from a sprawling oleander onto the stone balustrade at the end of the loggia, sending a cascade of petals down to the lawn below. A second joined it, and the pair of them squatted side by side to watch the humans talk.
‘It’s good of you to be cross, Claude, but you know I’ve never really been one of them. I’m their secret bit on the side, terribly exciting and naughty – and easy to dump when things get difficult.’
‘They are even more idiotic than I imagined. Really I should be delighted that I won’t have to do business with you any more, for you are a remorseless tyrant who has several times nearly ruined me. But I am not. Your successor will be some foully charming Old Etonian. In your honour, I will refuse to deal with him. I suppose they have
some reason for biting the hand that feeds them with such unfailing generosity?’
Having learned the delicate art of being partial with the truth from the man beside her, Nat judged that this was an appropriate moment to put it to use.
‘The Foreign Office sent back one of our end-user certificates and asked for clarification,’ she said. ‘They’ve been going on and on about it, and now Sir Peter says Grosvenor have to show they are taking it seriously.’
There was a knock at the door. Nat went to answer it while Claude drummed the fat fingers of both hands on his fat knees. She returned with two boys carrying their tea. As soon as the monkeys saw the boys’ uniforms, they fled back into the oleander tree. One of the boys carried a glass jug filled to the brim with boiling hot water and packed with sprigs of fresh mint. He poured the tea from an extravagant height into two rose-coloured glasses in silver holders and the sweetly scented vapour drifted on the air. The other boy put down a silver platter of pastries. Claude’s eyes assessed them expertly.
‘So there is a fake EUC on file?’ he said after the boys had gone. He picked a pastry from the platter, regarded it briefly with a wistful expression and delivered it into his mouth. ‘Oh, this is quite superbe. I beg to know if there is any such thing as a genuine one.’
‘Not in the pile they’re looking at: they all have Monsieur Claude Zender down as agent.’
‘What a dreadful tease you are!’ said the man in question, who had a morbid fear of bureaucrats – and especially of their archives and filing cabinets. He laughed unenthusiastically and chose two more sweetmeats from the platter.
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 5