Black Reef

by Nick Elliott

  I wasn’t surprised that Lopes had known. It hadn’t been difficult for me to discover what the ship was carrying and any ship’s agent worth his salt would have found out too, even though the ship was in international waters and not scheduled to discharge her cargo in Lisbon.

  ‘That they’re probably involved in the sale and purchase of illegal arms,’ I said. ‘And they don’t want anyone poking around in their business.’

  ‘Yes. At present that is all we can guess. And for what purpose you will ask. But I tell you this my friend, Banco Imperio and those who act on its behalf are not the kind of people you would want to sit down and have dinner with, never mind deposit your hard-earned money in. They are rich and powerful and they have a reputation for ruthless business dealings.

  ‘Who owns the bank?’

  ‘There is a veil drawn across their activities and the identity of their shareholders, even today. But there are rumoured to be Swiss banking interests involved, no doubt carefully hidden through proxies and heaven knows what. Just be careful in your investigations. Better stay away from them if I were you. Remember, this city also has a reputation. In the war German spies mingled in the same circles as British and American agents. Kidnappings and killings were commonplace. Some of that culture lingers still.’

  ‘I shall be warned, Pedro.’

  Chapter 3

  ‘So what’s your take on this, buddie?’

  ‘As far as the Dalmatia Star is concerned we wait, Grant, until we know where she’s going. But Claire needs to be in on this discussion. After I sent her my report I picked up something regarding the involvement of a local Portuguese bank. I need you both to know about it.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve read a summary of your report; the usual masterpiece of caveats and obfuscation.’

  ‘I didn’t know what I was looking for and I’m not going to speculate until we have more facts. You’ll appreciate that.’

  Grant Douglas was the CMM’s Chief Executive, an American lawyer who’d decided to make his home in Scotland whence, he was convinced, his forebears originated. Grant was very good at manipulating situations to suit his own preferences. Establishing himself in the well-paid role of CEO of a firm based in his beloved Scotland had been a masterstroke, and to be fair he’d breathed new life into an organisation that had been limping along at the tail-end of a highly competitive and sophisticated sector of the shipping industry. That, at least, was the cover, the legend. But things were not as they appeared. Things were opaque, as Grant liked to put it, though I was never sure whether he meant they were opaque by accident or design.

  ‘Alright, but let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘The ship loaded military vehicles and weaponry, none of which is accurately declared on the cargo documentation. And naturally the owner’s cagey as hell about it. We know they’re in financial trouble and we know why. It’s a question of determining our own, I mean the CMM’s role going forward. I think we’d best wait this one out. I’d like to know where that cargo’s headed though.’

  ‘Maybe a children’s adventure playground somewhere?’

  ‘Okay smartass. Now listen, we need to discuss your own role in this too. Things have become a little blurred lately, wouldn’t you say?’

  My only reason for being in Leith was to visit the CMM. They provided me with a cosy little flat near the office for when I was in town, which, as far as they were concerned, was not often enough, and from my own point of view was more than often enough.

  Leith Links had been white with an early frost that morning as I’d walked over. I’d met Grant as he was getting out of his Bentley, one of many such cars of that marque he owned, outside the entrance to the office. Cameron Leslie, the janitor, had just emerged from the building to park it for him. Grant had invited me up to his office on the top floor of the old building and instructed his PA, Phyllis, to bring us coffee.

  Grant had had his office redecorated since I’d last been here: all muted tones of grey with black furniture and some Impressionist prints on the wall. Few, if any, would know or guess that the whole building housed a covert intelligence agency funded by and under the wing of the Ministry of Defence.

  ‘If by blurred you mean that my position as a freelance claims handler is in conflict with that of field agent for the IMTF, then I’d agree,’ I said, hoping to get things straight and transparent at last.

  ‘That’s what I wanted to talk about. But there’s something bigger in play.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I want Claire in on this so I don’t have to repeat myself. She knows some of what’s been going on but not the big picture.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said without reminding him that that was what I’d suggested ten minutes beforehand. He buzzed through to her office. Her PA answered, saying she was on a call. Whilst Grant’s PA, Phyllis, was a spinster in her late fifties who wore her grey hair in a bun and her glasses on a chain round her neck, Claire’s was a tall, good-looking young lawyer from Montreal whom she’d purloined from the claims department.

  ‘Tell her to come through when she’s done,’ Grant ordered.

  He got up from his desk and started roaming around the office. It was big enough to roam around in and he was the restless type, a tall rangy man in his sixties, silver-haired and suntanned. Today he was wearing his favoured blue shirt with white collar and cuffs, red bow tie and red braces that made him look distinctive if not distinguished, and just a little dated. Grant worked out in the basement gym every lunchtime, ate healthily and drank sparingly. In every sense he appeared a man in control. He turned back to me. I was sitting at the round conference table in the corner with a view over the Links where women were walking their dogs and kids were tearing around on scooters, bikes and skateboards.

  ‘There’re a few things you need to know,’ he said without sitting down. ‘Things that should have been explained a while back.’

  ‘So why weren’t they?’

  He picked up his coffee, carried it over to where I was sitting with mine and finally sat down.

  ‘Because the situation didn’t warrant it. Now it does.’

  ‘That sounds pretty opaque to me, Grant.’

  ‘Sure. So now it’s time to clarify things. Phyllis!’ he shouted. Phyllis scuttled in from her adjacent office.

  ‘Go tell Claire we need her in here now, will you.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Phyllis replied and left on her mission. Less than a minute later Claire walked in holding her own mug of coffee.

  ‘Morning, Grant,’ she said, carefully placing the mug on the table. I got up and we hugged. I hadn’t seen her for a few months and that was at the end of a case which had taken its toll on us both. We stood looking at each other for a moment, each of us wanting to say more than we could in Grant’s presence.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked her.

  ‘How are you, Angus?’ she replied, avoiding my question. ‘You’ve lost weight.’

  ‘I haven’t lost weight. It’s just better distributed. I’m fitter.’

  ‘Umm.’

  Grant interrupted: ‘Okay, when you two have finished discussing his health, can we get on with this? Things have changed, Gus. Tidied up you could say – within the IMTF I mean.’ He was looking out of the window now. ‘Big changes. So how does this affect you? In practical day-to-day terms, not a lot. Henceforth, your formal status is that of approved unofficial agent. It’s a term they use, so that should clear up any doubts you may have had.’

  ‘Oh really?’ I interrupted. I sensed Claire wincing. She knew my dealings with Grant were often fraught. ‘My understanding of AUA status is that it simply provides the powers above with plausible deniability. Anyway, in case I’m missing something here, Grant, since when has my status within the IMTF been anything to do with you?’

  ‘Whoa, just hold on, fella. The intelligence services aren’t organised to suit your convenience.’ That was rich I thought, coming from him.

  ‘Look, Claire, you know some of this but I want Gus in the loop
now, okay? So, first off, the IMTF is being subsumed.’

  ‘Subsumed into what?’ I asked in a reasonable tone of voice.

  ‘Amber Dove is retiring and so we’re taking the opportunity to do a bit of reorganising. That’s if it’s approved by Clark Kent here of course.’ Our relationship had always depended on a degree of mutual sarcasm. I told myself it was the best way to cope with each other’s cultural differences.

  ‘So who’s taking over? Six?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But day-to-day executive authority will rest here.’

  ‘With you?’

  ‘Yes, with me. Don’t sound so incredulous.’

  ‘No, that’s great. Congratulations, Grant,’ I said, feigning enthusiasm. ‘But beyond day-to-day, who’s in charge?’

  ‘This is all need-to-know, buddie. Can’t say more than I have.’

  ‘But is the MoD still involved or not?’ I pressed.

  ‘Let’s just say they’re still very much involved at committee level. Now let’s move on shall we?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I’d ask Claire later. ‘But where does that leave me? I have a business to run back in Greece, largely for the benefit of the CMM.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you don’t do well out of it, and these AUA field jobs you get called in for. I thought they brightened up your day.’

  I let it go. The last job had just about killed me. ‘So do I report to you or to Claire?’

  ‘Claire of course. But I’ll have oversight.’ Oversight or interference, I wondered.

  ‘Shall we get on with this?’ Claire interjected. ‘I’ve read your report from Lisbon, Angus. So what’s new?’

  I filled them in on my conversation with Pedro Fernandes. ‘So what happens now?’ I concluded. ‘Do you want to wait this out? I’m not sure it’s relevant from the CMM’s perspective.’ I wanted Grant to admit at the outset that this was more than just a CMM case we were discussing.

  ‘Okay,’ said Grant. ‘So this isn’t about the CMM; superficially perhaps, but there are matters of strategic importance in play here as well. I’m telling you now because I’ll be working closely and directly with you both on this one.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I know you’re our ace field man, buddie, but I don’t feel I need to give a detailed explanation to you on everything I decide to do.’

  ‘It would be helpful, Grant,’ Claire said. ‘Then we’ll know where we all stand.’

  He started prowling around the office again. Finally, he replied. ‘It’s straightforward enough. My people have an interest in these legacy cases you’re handling, Claire. Some of their hostile takeover victims were American firms. Some were operating in the South China Sea oilfields. I’m not saying Dalmatia Shipping was one of those but we’re interested in them all.’

  Turning to me he said, ‘I trust this explanation meets with your approval. I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of Mr Kent here.’

  ‘Fine with me,’ I said, ‘as long as we all know what each of us is supposed to be doing.’

  ‘Sure, so keep me in the loop, okay.’

  ‘Likewise, Grant.’

  Before he could respond Claire opened her hand and produced a flash drive as if performing a conjuring trick. She handed it to Grant. ‘This is the CMM file. It includes Angus’s report, not this latest stuff about Banco Imperio of course.’ She glanced at me before continuing. ‘Grant, you understand we’re going to need some kind of authorisation on this don’t you. You know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Sure. You’ll get it. I just wanted to draw you a little diagram before we get too deeply into this case. But you’ll be hearing from your naval pals, don’t worry.’

  He looked pointedly across the table at each of us. ‘Right, now all you need to know is that we’re all on the same side.’

  I didn’t find what he was saying at all reassuring but we left it like that even though we hadn’t got a proper answer from him, like who he was really working for. But then I hadn’t really expected one. People in this business didn’t make a habit of disclosing their employer’s names and addresses.

  I went next door to Claire’s office. As we chatted, I wrote a note on a scrap of paper and passed it across the desk. It said: Tonight at 7. Conan Doyle. Leave your phones here. She just nodded. I didn’t think her office would be bugged but in light of what Grant Douglas had just been saying, I didn’t want to risk speaking openly to Claire.

  Chapter 4

  The Conan Doyle is close to the great man’s birthplace at the point where Leith joins Edinburgh, and not too far from the CMM’s offices. In the past, Claire and I had met at The Shore, an old waterside pub just a ten-minute walk from the office, but on our last visit we’d encountered a crowd of CMM people rowdily celebrating someone’s birthday. The nature of our conversations demanded that we met somewhere discreet. I’d told her to leave her phones behind, and I’d left mine back in my flat because I was uneasy about Grant’s sudden interest in the case and the possibility that he might track our whereabouts. Despite the banter and sarcasm, we both respected him. But that was in his role as boss of the CMM. It was Grant who’d been largely responsible for Claire’s rapid ascent to her present position as Chief Operating Officer, and on a previous occasion he’d dug me out of a hole which, though not of my own making, had threatened to bring an abrupt end to my relationship with the CMM.

  But now he’d more or less confirmed what we’d long suspected: that he was a deep cover intelligence officer working or the Americans. While he was an inactive sleeper we hadn’t bothered to dig into his covert life, but now that he’d come out and announced his involvement with the IMTF and the interest of his “people”, along with his intention of directing the Dalmatia Star case, alarm bells were ringing.

  Of course, Grant knew of Claire’s role in the IMTF and of my own more recent enrolment. But while he would certainly have known the details of the cases we were involved in, he had never interfered. Now, it seemed all that was changing.

  As for the Dalmatia Star, you didn’t need to be Sherlock Homes to deduce that there was a serious intelligence dimension to the case by virtue of the ship’s cargo.

  Claire was my case officer but I’d missed the chance to talk to her before I was cornered by Grant that morning. Now suddenly he was acting like he knew more about the case than I did.

  I arrived early, ordered my pint and, glass in hand, moved around the pub slowly until I was satisfied there was no one there I knew or who looked out of place. Then I found a quiet corner, sat down and waited for Claire.

  She was ten minutes late and entered in a rush, pulling off her woolly hat and shaking her dark hair loose before she spotted me. She slipped out of her coat as she came over. ‘God, it’s freezing out there,’ she said holding her hand against my face to prove it.

  ‘What are you having?’

  ‘Glass of Chablis if they have it please.’

  I went to the bar, ordered her wine and returned to find her with her back to the radiator. She took a sip, looking at me over the rim of the glass. At forty she was as attractive as she had been when I’d first met her fifteen years earlier: petite, with fine features, big brown eyes and lightly tanned skin. I’d sometimes wondered if she had Mediterranean blood, though her temperament did not suggest it. She was one of the calmest people I knew, but that hadn’t always been so. Fifteen years ago she’d been a headstrong young case handler for the CMM who’d got herself into a dangerous situation in the Black Sea port of Poti. Operating as I did, out of Piraeus, I’d been asked to go and fetch her out. In the course of doing so we’d become lovers and despite her subsequent marriage and my own long-term involvement with a Greek girl, Claire and I had remained very close, to the point that neither of us seemed able to break off our affair, something that plagued both of us with guilt. The situation had been further complicated by my getting dragged into working for the IMTF, whereby I reported to her. As I
looked at her now I still didn’t know how to reconcile these conflicts.

  ‘So what’s going on?’ I asked, keeping my voice low.

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to bring you up to date, darling,’ she began, speaking softly, the way she always did. ‘So, where to start? You need to know what’s happening at the IMTF. They’re under fire, Angus. It looks like Six will take them over within the next month, max. This was all going on in the background when you were on that last gig in Hong Kong.’

  ‘Don’t tell me: Ben Wood was a plant, right?’

  ‘Yes. I think we always suspected it. He was seconded to us from Six but there was a hidden agenda. Only it wasn’t particularly well hidden, was it!’

  ‘So where does that leave Amber?’ Commodore Amber Dove was the head of the IMTF. She was a long-serving Royal Navy officer who’d been with the IMTF since it was spun off from Naval Intelligence into Defence Intelligence years before. I guessed the answer before Claire said it.

  ‘She’s retired: pensioned off after that last case. I don’t think her masters were too impressed by the way she wrapped it up, but they were just looking for an excuse. Six has had their eye on us for years. Amber was a scapegoat.’

  ‘Is it a bad thing?’

  ‘What I hear is they want to take over our cases and absorb us completely – consolidation they call it – the standard euphemism for a takeover of course. Where that leaves you and me I’m not sure, but I gather having the CMM as a cover for the IMTF’s work suits the powers that be both in Vauxhall Cross and with our friends in Langley. There are plenty of precedents. Ben Wood was working for a well-known British Bank in Tehran at one point in his career. You know how they like to keep people like us hidden away.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not too concerned for myself,’ I said. ‘I still feel I got dragged into this business. It wasn’t exactly a career choice. What about you? Do you relish these changes?’