State Secrets

by Quintin Jardine

  I raised an eyebrow: not for effect, it was spontaneous. Were we starting to get somewhere? ‘I thought that was your project?’

  ‘Latterly, yes, but it was brought to Dad by a man called Sigmund Podolski. He had a proposal that needed funding for the creation of a new engine system. His vision was that it would power spacecraft and would advance man’s exploration of the solar system by decades, by slashing the time needed to reach planets. “Mars in a month,” he told my father, and gave him a video presentation that showed exactly how it would work.

  ‘Dad was very impressed; he asked me what I thought, first time ever. I told him that before we go to other worlds we need to master our own.’

  I nodded. ‘You saw the military capability right away, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course. I didn’t spell it out for my father, because I didn’t think I needed to. Wrong, John. A day or so later he told me that he was going to fund Podolski’s project, but that it would be vested in a trust that would be administered by an international commission for the benefit of all mankind. Not for the Balliol family and certainly not for the USA, oh no. In fact, he told me that he intended to structure all his wealth.

  ‘My future role would be as its manager if, he told me, I was up to it; if I wasn’t, he was going to leave me nine million dollars, one tenth of one per cent of his fortune, and his South Carolina golf course in the hope that one day I’d get down to single figures.’

  ‘Is that when you decided to kill him?’ I asked casually.

  He stared at me, then laughed. ‘You don’t expect me to admit to that, do you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘and frankly I don’t give a fuck one way or another; but you did, I know it, you know it. You paid one of his bodyguards to fake a robbery and kill him . . . maybe paid him around nine million dollars and a golf course, or the equivalent? There would be a degree of irony in that . . . before he could complete your disinheritance. Did the Korean live to enjoy his pay-off? Somehow I doubt that.’

  ‘Speculation, all of it,’ Balliol scoffed.

  ‘I told you,’ I repeated, ‘I don’t care. How about the man Podolski? Is he still alive?’

  ‘No, he died four months ago. There was an accident in Aldermaston; nothing made the press.’

  ‘Here’s some more speculation: by then his death didn’t matter. You had built your team in Brazil, and adapted Podolski’s engine for other purposes.’

  ‘Something like that,’ he admitted. ‘We hadn’t got all the way there. We needed more than was available in Brazil, and doing a deal with its government was out of the question.’

  ‘Why Britain? Why not simply take it to the Pentagon?’

  ‘God forbid. That really would have been besmirching my father’s memory. There’s one thing you may not know about him, because it was excised from all his official biographies.

  ‘He fought in Vietnam, in the early days of the war. No, “fought” is the wrong word. He was part of a three-man CIA assassination team sent into Cambodia in nineteen sixty-seven to assassinate Prince Sihanouk, because he was perceived to be pro-Chinese.

  ‘They failed; the other two guys were killed and Dad was captured. He was tortured, but he had very little to tell them, so they tried to use him for propaganda purposes. At first the US government denied his existence; then they said that he was a deserter from an infantry unit who had gone over to the other side, and they made no attempt to extract him. He was a prisoner for three years, until Sihanouk fell.

  ‘He was succeeded by a general called Lon Nol; he was pro-American, and sent Dad back to Saigon, quietly, without any fuss. Of course, he was an even bigger embarrassment then. The CIA continued to deny his existence; he was sent back to the States with a quarter of a million dollars in hush money, which he used to build his fortune . . . after he’d changed his name.’

  ‘He wasn’t always Balliol?’ John had been right; there had never been a whisper of this in anything I’d ever read about Everard, and some of that was classified.

  ‘No, he was born Everard Morrison. He took Balliol from one of my great-grandmothers, on his mother’s side. So you understand now why he was pathologically anti-American, and more than a little crazy, as you inferred. I didn’t like the son of a bitch, but it wasn’t his fault, not all of it.

  ‘Because of him I could never have taken what I had to a government as untrustworthy as the US. I did think about Russia, but not for long. Instead I approached the United Kingdom. They were only too pleased to see me, even though it was very hush-hush. I named my own price, which all in all I thought was pretty reasonable.’

  ‘What was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Didn’t they tell you?’ He looked surprised.

  I smiled. ‘Yes, they did,’ I admitted. ‘A billion and a passport.’

  ‘That was the headline figure, but there was something else. Ten per cent of all defence expenditure on Spitfire and all future orders for limited versions for export sales to friendly governments . . . including the US . . . will come to me.’

  That was news, but I wasn’t letting him see it. ‘You must have caught the Prime Minister on a good day,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t deal with Locheil,’ he replied. ‘I did my business with a cabinet subcommittee of three people: Kramer, who was Chancellor then, Monty Radley, Foreign Office, and Les Ellis, who was Defence Secretary.’

  In my head, more pieces began to move; the picture was almost complete. As I’d told him, he’d wanted to talk to me all along. He’d wanted to boast. He’d been easy, really.

  Up to that point.

  ‘So why in God’s name, when the whole project was about to be complete, did you go and kill Emily Repton?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he insisted.

  ‘Come on, John,’ I exclaimed, ‘you stuck a blade in her head.’

  ‘Then prove it; you can’t even prove I was there.’

  ‘You took a piss in her toilet, or was it a whizz? Did stabbing her scare the shit out of you, literally?’

  The slightly crazy eyes blazed, his mouth closed tight, and he settled into his chair. The interview was over.

  Or so he thought: I wasn’t quite ready to give up. ‘We can put you in the room, John,’ I insisted. ‘We have a fingerprint in the toilet.’

  ‘Maybe you do; but that won’t be enough. It doesn’t have a date stamp on it, does it?’

  ‘Then there’s the CCTV.’

  He laughed. ‘Oh yes?’ he challenged. His confidence had returned and that worried me.

  I nodded. ‘I know you’ve been told that’s been wiped, and it has, but we have the man who was coerced into wiping it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he retorted, ‘and what if he went home last night to his sad little divorced man bedsit to find a bag of cash, an air ticket to paradise, and a link to half a million dollars in a bank account that you will never trace? If that happened. whatever he told you yesterday he won’t be saying today, or ever again.’

  Fuck, I thought. We should have locked Coffrey up, for the mockery on his face told me he wasn’t lying.

  I tried to let nothing show on mine. ‘Also we have Mickey Satchell,’ I continued, ‘the MP who took you to the Prime Minister’s room.’

  ‘And you’re as sure about that,’ he said, ‘as you were about having the man you allege fixed a tape that I was never on?’

  ‘Are you boasting to me that something has happened to Dr Satchell?’ I leaned towards him. All of a sudden squeezing his baw-bag until those damned smug eyes popped right out of his head seemed like an attractive proposition.

  ‘I’m telling you nothing at all, Mr Skinner. Not one fucking thing . . . apart from this. You’re not going to believe it, and why should you because nobody else does. I . . . did . . . not . . . kill . . . Emily . . . Repton!’

  Forty

  I stomped
out of the little room, leaving Paul to guard our smug prisoner and went back to the drawing room, where Amanda was waiting with James Ellis. My phone was in my hand, calling Neil. I heard a hiss of tyre noise as he took my call.

  ‘Mickey Satchell,’ I told him urgently. ‘You need to find her; have people check the Commons but I doubt she’ll be there. If she isn’t, send officers to her home; tell them to kick the door in if they have to. I have grounds to fear for her safety. Use your own people if you can; if not, well . . . use your own judgement.’

  ‘Understood,’ he replied. ‘Did you get this from Balliol?’

  ‘Let’s just say that a suggestion was made. Check Joe Coffrey’s workplace and home as well, but I doubt that you’ll find him. There’s every chance he’s in warmer climes by now . . . unless he’s dead in a ditch on his way to Heathrow or Gatwick.’

  ‘They’re not kidding, are they?’ Neil grumbled.

  ‘No, they’re not, but I’m about to have a serious chat with the weak link. Let’s see what develops from that.’

  I was looking at James Ellis as I spoke and as I put away my phone. ‘Crisis management, you said; you were bloody right there, mate, but this one is out of your control.’

  ‘Crisis management,’ he repeated. ‘Oh dear: Shafat.’

  I hoped he didn’t notice the tightening around my eyes. I had intended not to expose Neil’s man, although it would be difficult not to, but I might have given him away with one careless remark. ‘Who?’ I asked, doing my best to look puzzled ‘That’s one of the things your consultancy does, isn’t it? Crisis management?’

  ‘Yes,’ he murmured.

  ‘Then surely that’s why you’re here. We have a dead Prime Minister, a live prime suspect and you’re in his house, along with a semi-comatose man who was a member of the government twenty-four hours ago. If that’s not a crisis, Mr Ellis, I don’t know what is. So what is your function here?’

  ‘I was sent to advise Mr Balliol.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘His reaction to the Spitfire announcement when it’s made.’

  I’d dropped a small clanger earlier; his was a beauty.

  ‘You know about Spitfire?’ I asked him, slowly.

  He gulped, as he realised the extent of his mistake, and nodded.

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Dad. My father. The Chancellor.’

  ‘You make him sound like the Holy Trinity. Did he send you down here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What orders did he give you?’

  ‘He said that whatever happened I was to keep Balliol stable, and away from the media.’

  ‘Stable? He had doubts about his stability?’

  ‘The man killed the Prime Minister!’ Ellis shouted. ‘Does that sound normal to you?’

  The door was open. I reckoned that Balliol must have heard him but there was no sound from the other room.

  ‘He says he didn’t,’ I told him.

  ‘She was alive when he went in, she was dying when he left. That’s what Dad said.’

  ‘I see,’ I murmured. ‘The Chancellor believed that and he ordered you down here to look after him? My colleague and I interviewed Mr Ellis yesterday morning but he didn’t say a word about it to us. It looks as if we need to speak to him again, under caution this time.’ I paused. ‘Before we get there, though, were you aware of Nicholas Wheeler’s presence in this house?’

  ‘Only after I got here.’

  ‘Too bad you weren’t here earlier,’ I grunted. ‘You just missed Balliol’s call girl; seems she was quite a sight.’

  I’d thrown that one in, with all the subtlety of the old fisherman in Jaws chucking lumps of bait off the back of his boat. Ellis sank his teeth into it.

  ‘She wasn’t Balliol’s woman. He hired her, sure, but she was for Wheeler.’

  ‘Wheeler? He was out of his skull.’

  ‘I don’t imagine that’ll be clear in the photos the Korean took; he’ll look like any other bloke being fucked senseless by an expert.’

  Thank you, James, I thought, reading the same words in Amanda’s smile.

  ‘Who told you this?’ she asked.

  ‘John Balliol. He laughed about it.’

  ‘Which Korean took the photos?’

  ‘Three. They’re all called Kim,’ he explained. ‘Balliol calls them One, Two and Three, in order of seniority.’ He glanced at me. ‘Kim Three’s the chap your colleague damaged.’

  ‘I might damage him some more when I’m through with you,’ I murmured.

  Amanda stood. ‘I’ll take care of that,’ she said, briskly, ‘with Mark’s help. Those pictures will be secured. Then I might reach out to Señorita Tinker’s agent,’ she added, for Ellis’s benefit. ‘I suspect she’ll be happy to cooperate with us, to save her career.’

  ‘The man who came here this morning,’ I continued as she left, ‘the guy who has a sore leg now. Think about this, Mr Ellis, but do not think, for one second, about lying to me. Have you ever seen him before?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Where and when?’

  ‘He came to our house once, Dad’s house in Wimbledon, about three weeks ago. He was a protection officer, for Roland Kramer.’

  ‘Why was Kramer there?’

  ‘To meet with Dad.’

  ‘Anyone else?’ I ventured, trying to avoid Ellis guessing that I knew the story.

  ‘Yes. Monty Radley, Nick Wheeler and John Balliol; they gathered to discuss Spitfire, to agree its deployment and to confirm the financial deal with Balliol.’

  ‘You know that much? Were you in the room?’

  ‘I took the minutes, typed them up when the meeting was over and gave everyone present a copy. All five people signed all five copies.’

  ‘What about the Prime Minister? Was she there?’

  ‘No, she didn’t want her hands on it, she had said. Nick Wheeler did volunteer that he was honour bound to report back to her. Kramer didn’t like that; there was an argument between them, in fact. It got heated, and that’s unusual for Nick.’

  ‘Did you keep a copy of the minute?’

  He shot me the look of a hunted man. ‘God, no. Dad even insisted that I destroy the notes I’d taken and the document I’d created on the computer, and watched me do it.’

  ‘What about the agenda?’

  ‘There was a technical report by Balliol, and a series of videos of Spitfire in action, including a simulated mission to Ascension Island filmed by an on-board camera: that’s around seven thousand miles and it took fifty minutes, including a period of deceleration for simulated payload delivery. It was breathtaking, unimaginable. When it was over, nobody could speak for a while.

  ‘When they could,’ he continued, ‘the final detail of the financial arrangement with Balliol was settled and included in the document and the name of the project was confirmed. Balliol wanted to call it “Ozymandias”, but everyone else agreed that was a terrible idea. Radley suggested “Thatcher” but he’d had a couple of drinks by them so nobody took any notice.’

  ‘Is there any way you could recover the document you typed?’ I asked.

  Ellis shrugged. ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied. ‘They say these things never vanish completely, but Dad had me trash it, then empty the trash can, and delete the entire history of the day’s activity. Maybe an expert could recover something even after all that, but the first problem he’d have to solve would be how to get hold of Dad’s laptop, for that’s what I used.’

  ‘That might be possible,’ I said, but with no optimism. ‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘Are we done or is there any other information you’re holding back?’

  ‘That’s all I know; I promise.’ He looked up at me. ‘Can I go now?’

  I laughed, a touch scornfully. ‘W
hat do you think?’

  Forty-One

  When Amanda returned, she was holding an SD memory card, and wearing a satisfied smile. ‘Our young friend with the sore nose didn’t take much persuading,’ she said. ‘He has no employment rights in the UK, and the prospect of deportation and repatriation didn’t appeal to him, possibly because he has a North Korean passport and defected from an international gymnastics event in Brazil two years ago.’

  ‘Did he say who ordered him to take the photos? Did he actually say it was Balliol?’

  ‘That he didn’t do; he said that the instructions came from Daffyd Evans, before he left here yesterday and before Señorita Tinker arrived.’

  ‘Translate that and he’s saying they came from Kramer. If I’d known that at the time I might not have let Neil give him that anaesthetic, not until I’d made him admit it. How secure is the guard on him?’

  ‘It’s secure until the Prime Minister or the Defence Secretary order it to stand down, or until the new Home Secretary removes me from office and cancels your commission.’

  ‘Any one of those things could happen,’ I said, ‘when word of what happened here gets back to Number Ten. So it had better not. Is there somewhere we can lock the Koreans, also Balliol, and our boy here?’ I added, jerking a thumb in the general direction of James Ellis. ‘I’m sure that Paul and Mark can handle themselves, but we’re looking at five against two when we go.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Wheeler’s place; there’s a document that I need to get my hands on. Balliol has a copy, but he’s not going to tell us where it is, not at the very earliest until Kramer stands up in the Commons and makes Spitfire official.’

  She pocketed the SD card and grabbed her bag. ‘Let’s go,’ she declared. ‘I’ll brief the boys.’ She hauled Ellis, who looked scared and bemused, to his feet. ‘You with me. I’ll drive,’ she added over her shoulder as she frog-marched him from the room, to hand him over to his guards.

  When she returned I made a show of protesting that I’m a terrible passenger, but she didn’t buy it. It was her car and she was the boss, so I was consigned to the front passenger seat.