Tracers

by Adrian Magson

  Harry nodded. ‘Go to it. I’ll do the rest.’ He made his way upstairs and began working methodically through the rooms, beginning with the master bedroom. He wasn’t hopeful of finding anything because Mrs Param had made it clear that her husband’s domain was the study, and she knew for certain that he never left anything in his suits because she always checked. This had been said without a blink of embarrassment. He looked anyway, because as he knew from experience, even the most watchful of wives missed things. And an apparently innocuous scrap of paper was all he needed to give him a trail to follow.

  Twenty minutes later he closed the door to the main bedroom. The wardrobe held only clothes and the drawers contained smaller items and accessories. The en suite bathroom proved a similar blank, as did the other rooms and cupboards. If Param had left anything here, it was somewhere inside the furniture or concealed behind the walls, where nothing short of wholesale demolition would find it.

  He returned to the study where Rik was staring at the PC with a concentrated look of disgust.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Rik. ‘It’s a useless pile of crap. He cleaned it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He must have downloaded a wipe utility to sanitize the hard drive.’ He tapped the keyboard in frustration. ‘Kills all the data stone dead.’ He gestured at a laptop on the sideboard. ‘Same with that. No links to follow, either.’

  ‘Well, although I only understood half of what you just said,’ Harry murmured, ‘it means he wasn’t fooling. He was covering his tracks.’ It also meant that it killed any chances of Param having been coerced by a third party to defraud the funds. ‘We’ll have to do it the hard way.’ He began pulling drawers out of the large, ornate desk, and emptying them one by one, placing each item to one side after examination. There was also a sideboard, a drinks cupboard and a filing cabinet, all of which were places Param might have left something they could use. If they were lucky.

  Rik scowled, cheated of the opportunity to use his specialist skills. He selected a drawer and dumped the contents on a spare piece of carpet and began sifting through.

  TEN

  Two hours later, they adjourned to the kitchen for coffee and a conference. So far they had come up empty.

  If there was anything in the desk, they hadn’t found it. Every invoice, receipt or statement cross-referenced perfectly to a household or work expense, and those that didn’t, they had cross-checked with Saskia Param. It had taken several phone calls to elicit the details, along with repeated queries from her about why they needed to go through her private papers in this way.

  After the first three calls, Harry had given up explaining.

  ‘If you want to find out what happened to your husband,’ he’d said bluntly during the last call, ‘and get your house back, this is the only way.’ It had shut her up, although he guessed only for a while. He sensed she had already lined up a divorce lawyer ready for the fray, and was impatient for them to be out so that she could move in and begin the next phase of her life.

  ‘He’s clean,’ Harry said, staring into his coffee, adding in a way that made it sound an almost unhealthy trait in a grown man, ‘Too bloody clean, in fact.’

  ‘As in?’ Rik had come to rely on Harry’s judgement in these things. As straightforward as Harry liked to pretend to be, he had the ability to peer deep into the minds of his quarries and understand what they were thinking.

  ‘Param’s wealthy, married, no kids, great job. OK, his missus is as cold as custard, but nobody’s life is perfect, right? Then he goes walkabout with a ton of money. Also not uncommon . . . for a fraudster. But this was no spur of the moment thing. Too much planning went into it.’ He gestured around the spotless kitchen, a mocking reflection of what they had found everywhere else. ‘It’s like he sanitized the whole place before he bunked off. And that lot in there,’ he nodded towards the study, now littered with piles of papers, none of which had offered a single lead, ‘is uncanny. Nobody could work on a scam, then do a bunk and not leave something behind.’

  Rik shrugged easily. ‘Like you said, he planned it.’ He glanced at Harry, took a tour round the kitchen, then said casually, ‘Is this what you thought you’d be doing after Five, looking for runners who didn’t want to be found?’

  Harry had often asked himself the same question. Forced, like Rik, to leave the security service after surviving a posting to an office called Red Station in Georgia, where his name had been placed on a hit list by two renegade security services bosses, he had been in limbo. Since staying on at Thames House was a non-starter – there were too many embarrassed faces who didn’t wish to be reminded of the organization’s shortcomings – it had meant an end to the structure and order of his life. Even working undercover requires strict attention to habit and detail. In its place had come freedom and free choice, neither of which he had experienced much of before. Life since then had been a mix of security-related jobs and contracts, including two brief assignments in Iraq – a place he’d sworn never to go back to, but circumstances had demanded it – where Rik had learned some hard lessons in survival not normally experienced by security service IT personnel.

  Yet for Harry, the link with his old employers had never been irrevocably broken. For him, there was still some unfinished business to be resolved: namely, finding his former boss, Henry Paulton. The man had conspired with a senior MI6 officer, Sir Anthony Bellingham, to have Harry and the others in the station terminated by a team called the Hit. Saved by ironic circumstance as the Russians had moved across the border into South Ossetia in a so-called protective and supportive action, Harry, Rik and an MI6 officer named Clare Jardine had abandoned the station and headed home. Recognizing that his time was up, Paulton had slipped away. Bellingham was not so lucky; he had died by Clare Jardine’s hand on London’s Embankment before she, too, had vanished.

  Harry had no interest in Jardine. She had done what she thought was right for her. But Paulton was another matter. And that still rankled like toothache. It was something he’d never discussed with Rik, although he knew the day would come. But right now wasn’t the time.

  ‘Let’s do it again. Top to bottom.’ He rinsed his cup and left it on the side. It was down to sheer doggedness now, revisiting every nook and cranny, rechecking every item of furniture in the house, in case they’d missed something. If that didn’t work, they were stumped.

  After two more hours of effort, including a dusty trawl through the attic, Harry walked back into the study. He did a tour of the room, ticking off obvious places of interest. But it was a cosmetic exercise; there was nowhere left to look which hadn’t already been searched thoroughly. And he was now certain that Param would not have hidden anything in the walls, ceiling or floor without his eagle-eyed wife being aware of it. He left the room and picked up a set of car keys with a BMW fob from a table in the hallway.

  The garage was a double, brick-built affair with a concrete floor finished in a polished dark-green skim. It held one car – a blue 5 series BMW – and a few items of gardening equipment. Apart from that, it was immaculate and barren. Harry searched the car from front to boot, but found nothing. It looked as if it might have just been delivered from the showroom, with none of the usual accumulated car trash found in most vehicles.

  He returned to the study and dropped the keys on the desk, then rang Mrs Param and asked her for the registration numbers of the family cars. She gave him the details with customary reluctance and he rang off before she could bitch further about the invasion of her property.

  ‘Now there’s a thing,’ he said quietly, and felt the first buzz of something being not quite right. He went back to a drawer he had been working on earlier, checking and rechecking everything. Only this time he knew what he was looking for.

  ‘What have you got?’ Rik was showing signs of acute boredom, his spiked hair now limp. On Harry’s instructions he had already gone through the kitchen again with a fresh pair of eyes, emptying drawers and cupboards, e
ven poring over a pegboard of notes and postcards. So far it had produced nothing useful. Unlike Matuq, Raymond Param had shown no history of visiting isolated cottages in the depths of Norfolk or anywhere else.

  ‘The Params own two cars – a BMW for him and a Mazda for her,’ Harry explained, sitting back. ‘She’s got the Mazda with her and the Beemer’s in the garage – and it’s new-pin clean.’

  Rik pulled a face. ‘Why leave a car like that?’

  ‘Because driving it would be a dead giveaway. Like a sign round his neck saying, Here I am.’ Harry picked up a piece of paper from the drawer. ‘There’s a parking fine receipt here for a late-model Mini Cooper S, issued in Golden Square, London.’ He shrugged. ‘I saw it earlier but dismissed it. Now I’m wondering.’

  He picked up the phone and dialled a number, read out the registration number of the Mini and waited. Eventually, he stirred and made a scribbled note on the parking receipt. He cut the connection and scowled at the ceiling.

  ‘Well?’ Rik looked as if he was contemplating taking a pickaxe to the furniture out of sheer spite.

  ‘A second.’ Harry went back to the drawers he had been working on and rummaged through the papers before pulling out a sheet with a triumphant smile. ‘What do we know of Param’s office colleagues?’

  ‘Not much. They’ve all been looked at by the police and the company’s own security people. Mostly long-time employees, no queries or big spending habits, no changes to daily routine.’ He frowned, realizing that Harry had found something. ‘The smug old git look really doesn’t suit you, by the way.’

  Harry ignored the jibe and flicked at the piece of paper he was holding. It was a dusty, creased sheet he’d discovered at the bottom of a drawer, caught up among other work-related clutter of seemingly little relevance.

  ‘This is an extract from minutes of a board meeting a couple of years back. Apologies for absence, dates of next meeting and so on. One of the notes refers to a vote of thanks to a Miss Yvonne Michaels, who served as a PA for Param and a couple of other directors. According to this, she was leaving London to go back to Cape Town, where her family lives. Sounds like they were sorry to see her go, good and faithful employee, loyal and so forth.’

  ‘South Africans come and go all the time. There’s a whole community of them here.’

  Harry nodded. As Australians and Kiwis had done for years before them, now it was kids from Johannesburg and Cape Town who piled in and out of London looking for opportunity and adventure, filling in by staffing pubs up and down the country.

  ‘The registration of the Mini Cooper S,’ he explained, teasing out his thoughts along with the facts, ‘booked for an overstay in Golden Square, London W1, is in the name of a Y. Michaels.’

  ‘Param paid the fine for her. Good bosses do that.’

  ‘The ticket was issued on the fifth of last month.’

  Rik lifted an eyebrow. ‘She must have come back.’

  ‘Or he’s using her old car. Or, she never left. Either way—’

  ‘Either way, why is the receipt in Param’s desk?’ Rik grinned. ‘Somebody’s been a naughty boy. Do we have an address?’

  ‘Yes, we do.’ Harry checked his watch. It was mid-afternoon and they hadn’t eaten. Much more of this and they’d be operating on reduced batteries. He hoped the Michaels address would lead somewhere and not dump them flat. ‘We’ll do it another time. We’ve pushed our luck with this one. I need you to do some work on this new job for me.’

  Rik jumped up and cracked his knuckles. ‘Suits me. After all this paper, I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. What’s the brief?’

  ‘There isn’t much.’ He reeled off from memory what little information he’d been given by Jennings.

  Rik looked doubtful. ‘Christ, you weren’t kidding, were you? I need more than that if I’m to get anything on the net.’

  ‘We’ve got a name. We’ll have to make do with that. Anyway, I thought you IT nerds liked a challenge.’

  ‘We do. But what happens if we can’t find anything? He might have disappeared completely.’

  Harry smiled. He knew Rik well enough to realize that he would wear his keyboard down to the wires before admitting defeat. ‘There’s no such thing as disappearing completely. You in or not?’

  ‘I’m in.’

  ELEVEN

  They drove to Rik’s flat near Paddington to ponder on the meagre scraps representing Professor Samuel Silverman’s recent life. With so little to go on, the usual audit was out. With none of the usual paperwork, they were missing their customary points of reference. A process which might normally take a couple of days, interspersed with numerous calls to check any detail that failed to match, now looked a non-starter. And with no family members or friends to speak to, usually a valuable source of information, gossip and speculation, they had no anecdotal hints to fall back on and broaden the search.

  Rik opened his laptop and began feeding Silverman’s name into various search engines. There were several Samuel Silvermans, some dead, some living, but none matching even remotely the kind of background to the missing professor. There were lawyers, financial experts, psychiatrists, scientists – even academics. Yet none that came close to the man they were looking for. Going on Jennings’ mention that Silverman had connections with the Israeli government, he also began tentative probing of certain restricted websites, and put out feelers to contacts in the hacking community.

  While Rik was Googling, Harry went out for sandwiches, coffee and cake to spur on their thinking. After being cooped up in Param’s place, the car and now here, he was glad to get out into the open, and took his time. He had a feeling there would be a lot more of being cooped up to come.

  On his return, he handed Rik his brain food and prowled the room deep in thought. The furnishings were minimal and mixed, evidence of impulse buying by Rik following his recent move from home, where he’d lived with his mother. There was an L-shaped sofa, a glass-topped table with four matching chairs, a space-age steel-and-glass coffee table, a flat-screen television and music centre, but little else. The floor was woodblock and polished to a high gleam. Discreet wall lights completed the modernistic, almost clinical effect.

  ‘God bless IKEA,’ Harry commented.

  ‘It’s a place to chill, not a character statement,’ retorted Rik, who had clearly been waiting for some form of comment. ‘Anyway, I’ve had no complaints.’ He smirked and fluttered his eyebrows.

  Harry walked over to the window. His own place in Islington was like a second-hand shop in comparison, the furniture gathered at various times without much thought given to style or fashion, the result of a life on the move with little time spent at home. Anything matching was by chance, whereas he guessed Rik had chosen his furnishings with an instinctive leaning towards how they might look to a third party.

  He peered down three floors to a twin row of shops. The area was busy, cars jostling with delivery vans to find space at the kerb, while pedestrians crossed wherever and whenever the spirit took them, instinctive survivors of a busy thoroughfare. The aftermath of an earlier fruit and vegetable market lay in the gutter like battle scars, blood-red segments of pulp and skin mixed with traces of paper bags and splinters of wooden boxes.

  ‘How is it,’ said Rik, sprawling on the sofa, waiting for the machine to do something, ‘that Silverman’s “people” didn’t supply any financials? No bank statements, no credit card slips, no receipts, no work stuff, like letters, academic notes, agendas or jottings. There’s usually too much crap, not too little. This bloke has nothing.’ He balanced the disposable mug on the arm of the sofa and ripped the ends off paper tubes of sugar, stirring in the contents and glumly considering the lack of data they had to work with. Rik’s IT-trained mind preferred to see something tangible to fasten on to, not a dribble of detail that led nowhere. ‘Makes you wonder how hard they looked.’

  Harry was only half listening. He was studying a nondescript saloon at the kerb a hundred yards up the street. It was parked behind
a battered delivery van and contained a solitary figure – a man – but he couldn’t see any other detail. A tired shopper, maybe. Or a patient husband, killing time while his wife did the weekly market run. It could be either, but after years of undercover work, he had built up a security man’s instinctive suspicion of lone figures in parked cars.

  ‘Unless he destroyed everything before walking away,’ he said vaguely. Some runners did that. Binned or burned everything. It was as much a psychological severing of all ties with their past life as it was an attempt to conceal any clues pointing to their new one.

  ‘He couldn’t destroy bank or tax records,’ Rik countered. ‘Not possible.’

  Harry waited for a sign of movement. He’d noticed the car earlier, when he’d gone for coffee. Something about it had snagged at the edge of his attention without quite gelling. Yet there was nothing he could put his finger on. Maybe it was an aura he’d become attuned to over the years, a marker only those with the right instincts might pick up on. Yet why should it concern him? He didn’t even live here. He put his coffee down. Sometimes you had to follow your instincts. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  He ran downstairs, slowing to a stroll as he hit the street. He stopped at a fruit stall that was still packing up and bought some grapes, then continued along the street, eyeing the windows and pausing occasionally to peer at a display. As he drew level with the delivery van, he turned and faced the nearest shop window and chewed some grapes, studying a rack of audio equipment on special offer. He bent as if taking in the specifications. The angle gave him an ideal background against which he could see the driver in the saloon behind the van.

  It was a man. Medium build, jowly, with dark hair and heavy eyebrows over a pasty face. He was staring down the street, eyes fixed on a point somewhere in front of him.

  It was a look Harry had seen too many times to be mistaken: the driver was watching someone. He turned and followed the line of the man’s focus, but there was too much clutter to be able to pick out any one object. Or person.