He took one final look at the video feed and then clicked off. Instinct told him to ignore the call, though it would be impossible to pretend the house was uninhabited. The first floor was illuminated, a gash of yellowish light. The windows were too shiny, the front step swept clean of leaves. He was just about to wait it out when the doorbell rang again, the sound even uglier than the last time. The noise held and echoed before finally tapering back to silence.
Eventually, Vine decided that he would answer. There was something about the package that intrigued him. It was always possible – just possible – that this really was nothing more than it appeared to be. But somehow he couldn’t quite square that possibility. The logic didn’t fit. Very few people outside the Service knew he lived at this address. Spies weren’t encouraged to fatten their Rolodexes. If this was from Cosmo Newton, he would have biked it round with a Cabinet Office freelancer as he had with the laptop, stealing down the street and then dropping a message to the burner phone. The very normality of this worried him.
He reached the ground floor and treaded along the hallway, trying to blank out the flurry of cautionary tales that now suggested themselves, tales of operatives scuppered by one moment off their guard. He could still listen to the voice urging him to think again, though he knew his footfall on the stairs would already be enough to give him away to any agent attuned to such nuances.
Vine reached for the latch and drew back the door, faking a casual smile.
The man nodded silently and drew out a PDA. Vine waited for a name to be produced, the moment he could judge whether such a simple everyday exercise was truth or fiction. Technical wizardry meant the innocuous brown package could contain any number of ills: a bug, bomb, or bio-weapon of some kind that would slowly permeate the house and eat through his insides. Often he wished he could edit out such knowledge and hypotheses, but they stuck in his thoughts. He had eaten from the tree of knowledge too long ago.
‘Mr Joseph Woods?’
Vine felt his pulse beat harder, palms clammy and throat parched. He locked his features into a neutral expression, trained never to give anything away. But the name echoed through him as he clutched the thin stem of the electronic biro and squiggled letters on to the PDA’s surface. Then the package was handed over and, within seconds, Vine saw the man flash him a thin-lipped smile and move back down the steps and away.
He didn’t retreat into the safety of the hall but hovered in the doorway for a moment longer, weighing the package in his right palm first and then quickly assessing the shape of it. He glanced down at the label stuck on the front and saw the name Joseph Woods and his address printed in tidy black type. It looked slightly battered at the edges, as if the journey had been a long one. He checked finally for any other obvious signs of trouble – a professionalism in the sealing which suggested it had been manufactured in lab conditions – though saw none.
He closed the door, walked through into the kitchen and placed the package down on the table. He scrutinized it from all angles for one final time and then searched for a pair of scissors. All the while, those three words beat in a constant rhythm: Mr Joseph Woods. There were only a handful of people alive who had ever known him under that name. It had been one of his earliest operational assignments, joining up with officers from the CIA to hunt and capture key members of the al-Qaeda leadership in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers. The details of the operation, including operational aliases, had been limited to the grander incumbents of the fifth floor.
Vine steadied the object with his left hand and then carefully cut into the packaging with the tip of the scissors held in his right. He continued up in a straight line, watching as it split in two. From the recesses of memory, he could hear the stern warnings of the liaison officials from Porton Down, drilling into them the variety of ways hostile actors could embed biological weapons into everyday objects.
Vine reached the end and parted the packaging. It revealed the blank leather cover of a book, larger than a traditional hardback and covered with a light snowing of dust. He checked to make sure it really was dust, before gently inching the book out of the packaging completely and holding it up to the light. It had no jacket or insignia on the front, and no identification marks on the spine or back cover. But the binding looked pricey, and the texture felt smooth and cushiony to the touch.
He placed it back down on the table surface and then slowly opened the leather cover. The paper was thick and aged to a crinkled creamy-brown. He flicked through some empty pages until he saw the first marking, a circle shape with an arrow-like tail. What looked like the pages of a codex stood on the left and right, two crowns above and one underneath. Vine peered closer at the lettering around the frame of the circle and read: UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. Beneath that symbol stood a further line in italics: Oldsworth Prize 1999.
He turned again and found himself looking at a title page. It read: THE ODYSSEY. Then Vine saw the name and felt a rumble of surprise: The Honourable G. Wilde. Beneath it was another paragraph, this time handwritten in a flash of blue ink.
Vine took a breath and read the words, his mind fizzing with incomprehension:
Dear Solomon,
In case we don’t meet again, I want you to have this. All wisdom lies in this book. Take care of Rose for me.
Yours,
Gabriel
6
Vine stared at the inscription for several minutes, trying to compute the range of implications. He stood back from the table top and worked to calm his breathing.
The only people alive who knew him by the name of Joseph Woods were the Chief and Director of Global Operations at MI6; the Director of the National Clandestine Service at the CIA; and his partner on those operations, a fellow recruit from Fort Monckton, the Honourable Gabriel Wilde.
Suspicion was so deeply stitched into him that for a moment he wondered whether it was a hoax by one of the others on that list. In the days of the Cold War, the KGB had excelled in mind games as a way to wrong-foot opponents, unpicking an operative’s sanity by extrovert displays of power. There was something deeply personal about the book in front of him. It was Gabriel Wilde’s own translation of Homer’s Odyssey, the labour that had secured him the prestigious Oldsworth Prize during his penultimate year at Oxford. The reward was the volume that sat on the table top, Wilde’s translation printed in two special editions housed at the Bodleian. Vine had heard Wilde boast of it numerous times. It served as a sign of intellectual vigour for the initiated, far more exclusive than a degree certificate. The jab of unease surfaced again. Was someone with knowledge of Wilde’s whereabouts taunting him with their power, able to summon even the most intimate objects?
He looked at the title page, though saw nothing else there apart from three rows of numbers in pencil. He quickly checked them for any obvious mathematical pattern, but they were meaningless; probably library reference codes of some sort.
He scanned back up to the words. In case we don’t meet again, I want you to have this. All wisdom lies in this book. Take care of Rose for me. The voice sounded like Wilde, though the style was curter than he remembered, as if the youthful cadences had hardened over time to something more concerned with substance than verbal flourish. But what did it mean exactly? Each line seemed to contain its own enigma.
In case we don’t meet again, I want you to have this.
All wisdom lies in this book.
Take care of Rose for me.
Vine thought of the details of Wilde’s disappearance from the official report. All the evidence pointed to a surprise snatch job: the amount of Wilde’s blood that had been found in the flat, and the clinical way the snatch team had avoided leaving any forensic debris to identify themselves. But Vine rolled those six words around: In case we don’t meet again. They bristled with foreknowledge. Had he known? As Gabriel Wilde hunched over the title page and inscribed these words in the Turkish heat, had he known what was about to happen? Vine looked down at the words again. They seemed to have a newl
y confessional tone. He turned to the second sentence, a single clause that revelled in its own sense of Delphic mystery: All wisdom lies in this book. The confessional tone shifted to the satiric, leading the reader on, before ending with the shiftiest line of all. It seemed so simple, yet was freighted with emotional inconsistencies: Take care of Rose for me. The tone of it was off somehow: not just considering their own history, but in the phrasing of it.
He read the sentence out loud, remembering the lessons at the Fort on how to imitate a style. Nowadays it was easy, scanning through correspondence digitally to find out how to mimic the slant of a hand, and then using basic pattern analysis on the syntax to ensure it appeared authentic to anyone who knew Wilde’s voice. In a strange way, Vine saw that the very irregularity of the last line authenticated the whole. If someone had been trying to copy Wilde, they would have stuck more slavishly to his normal style. Only Wilde himself would dare use something that jarred so clearly with the pattern.
Vine took up the book again and began leafing through the rest of the pages. He wondered how long it had taken Wilde to complete the translation. There were over 400 pages, each busy with immaculate lines set out in grand, imposing type. Wilde had so often cultivated the air of the dilettante, yet this proved the opposite. The volume was treasured not just for the symbolic value it held, but for the elbow grease that had gone into the composition.
Reaching the end, he flicked through to the start again and lingered over the inscription, trying to silence the emotional feedback and return to first principles. He needed to understand the logic here and find the underlying architecture of the pattern. What was Gabriel Wilde trying to say? What did the inscription mean? Why was it sent? And how did it relate to Wilde’s disappearance?
Just as these questions began tumbling around in his subconscious, a noise struck up behind him. A waspy buzz from a burner phone.
Only one person had this number. They were instructed to text day or night with any information.
He picked it up and stared at the message pulsing from the screen.
I have news. We need to meet.
7
The main entrance of Guy’s hospital smelled fiercely of cleaning fluid and coffee. Shuffling bodies queued patiently to dose up on caffeine from the counter on the left. Phones bleeped at the reception desk on the right.
Vine made his way through the lobby, pausing at the bank of lifts. He pressed for the third floor, positioning himself as usual to check he wasn’t directly in the sightline of any CCTV cameras. These visits always required a change in appearance. The wingtip brogues and Oxford shirts were replaced by a more informal set-up. Scuffed jackets, jeans tearing at the knee, a Mets baseball cap and a pair of modishly rimmed glasses. It wouldn’t fool the latest facial recognition software, but it would be more than enough to stop a bored security contractor from spotting any irregularity.
Getting through the entrance was easy. The real pressure came here. With ongoing budget constraints, the Met could only afford one full-time officer to monitor Yousef. Vine had slowly built up a case file of sorts – name, habits, movements, hobbies. The key weakness was soon obvious: the guard took lunch every day at 1 p.m. on the dot. While he was meant to stay in post at all times – with a nurse ferrying him a takeaway sandwich – he had become lazy, the hospital canteen a welcome relief after hours jammed between the same two corridor walls.
Vine looked at his watch: 1.15 p.m. As the lift doors sighed open, he double-checked the hall was clear. There was no sign of the police guard. Then he began walking in the direction of Ward 9 and through another set of double doors until he was standing outside the right room. Screens crawled with colour on either side. A bed took up the centre of the room, the fragile-looking figure drowned by pillows.
Vine stood watch, as he always did. It was like a vigil. As a British citizen, Ahmed Yousef had been flown straight back to Brize Norton, where he was immediately taken into the custody of the Met. He existed now like a cabinet of secrets, each piece of information still under lock and key.
Every time Vine arrived here, all he heard was that single line taunting him.
I know a secret … A secret that changes everything.
He could feel the familiar pangs of doubt consume him again. He had tortured himself with every possible logical construction but still couldn’t find a proof that worked elegantly enough. Someone, somehow, had set him up that day. He wasn’t even meant to have been in Istanbul. He had stepped into something he had yet to understand and had been paying the price for it ever since. He saw Wilde’s vehicle inch out of the car park, the feel of the concrete floor under his feet, the blood next to Yousef’s body.
Five minutes later, Vine heard steps echoing down the corridor. He turned and smiled as he saw her approach. She classed as the only asset he ran these days, his source on the floor where Yousef continued to hibernate, waiting to flicker back to full consciousness.
Vine put his phone away. He always had to remember to slip into character at this point. He was no longer Solomon Vine but Martin Wright, a freelance journalist willing to lunch anyone who would talk on a background basis.
‘Hello, stranger,’ he said, as she walked up to him. Becky Reith was twenty-two and had just finished her nursing degree. She now earned £21,000, had a rent of £800 a month and student debts north of £40,000. She didn’t say no to free lunches.
‘You look in need of some proper food.’
Her face creased with disapproval. ‘You know you really shouldn’t be up here. If someone caught you …’
Vine raised both hands in surrender. ‘Mea culpa,’ he said. ‘Curiosity got the better of me. I just wanted to get a proper look at our patient. See how he’s doing. You said there was news. I thought perhaps …’
Becky looked sheepish for a moment. Then she shook her head. ‘Not that good, I’m afraid.’
‘So,’ Vine said. ‘The usual?’
The usual was a run-down café on St Thomas Street, cheap yet with its own vinegary cheer. Agent-running was all about avoiding elementary character errors, making sure the asset felt you were on their side. There was no inquiry into her relationships or personal life. He kept it strictly professional, letting her make any moves.
Once inside the cramped shadows of the café, they ordered quickly. Vine listened as Becky continued one of her usual spiels about haughty surgeons, temperamental admin staff, problems with her flatmates. Eventually, Vine steered them back.
‘So your text said there had been a development?’ he asked, as he took another bite of his burger.
She smiled. ‘They think it’s nearly over.’
Vine swallowed. ‘A chance he might wake up soon, you mean?’
Becky shrugged. She picked up another chip and washed it down with Coke. ‘There’s always a chance. But they are already making preparations for when he wakes up fully … They think it could be any day now.’ She began pushing a molehill of coleslaw around her plate. ‘You’re not going to quote me, are you?’
Vine found himself lost for a moment. The thought was tantalizing. ‘What?’
‘Your article. I think I’d probably get into trouble. Don’t like us lowly nurses speaking out.’
He smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘If I do use anything, I won’t attribute it. You’re fine.’
They finished their main course, and Vine watched as Becky tucked into a pudding and coffee. Then he walked her back. As they neared the sprawl of the hospital campus, Vine said: ‘If he does wake up, I need to know as soon as it happens.’
Becky nodded. ‘I’ll definitely call.’
Vine watched her shuffle back inside, then looked at his phone. For some reason, the air felt scratchy and irritable on his skin. He needed to get out of here and wash himself clean.
As he reached the entrance to London Bridge station, a calendar reminder pinged on the screen. He looked down at his clothes, realizing he needed to change.
He drew out the card Cosmo Newton had g
iven him in St James’s Park and scanned the details. For his next appointment, he would have to pretend to be himself all over again.
8
The entrance to Portcullis House was heaving with visitors, the queue snaking out through the revolving doors and round the steps outside. Glazed-eyed policemen supervised the conveyor belt, the muddle of constituents and corporate lobbyists each patiently waiting to turn out their pockets, advertise their innocence.
Vine took off his jacket and placed his wallet and house keys in a grey tray, before walking through the full-body scanner and having a mug shot taken. Once given the nod by the policeman, he followed the line ahead, collected his items and arranged the paper pass with a hazy, colourless image of his face around his neck. He gave his name at reception and then took a seat.
He looked down at the card Newton had given to him: Olivia Cartier MP, Member of Parliament for Kensington. It had no photo, just a portcullis symbol in the right-hand corner. Vine had already done his research: Cheltenham Ladies’ College followed by Oxford, a former member of the Intelligence and Security Committee and now Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Defence Secretary. Who’s Who listed her fifteen-year career in the Foreign Office, serving in Paris, Rome and Washington. Her hobbies included history and travel. She was a typical Wilde courtier: socially fluent, stacks of private money, a good brain and plenty of ambition.
My Name Is Nobody Page 3