The Lucifer Network

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘You say it’s over with this Max Schenk bloke. Who ditched whom?’

  ‘I was the one who ended it.’

  It fitted with what he’d seen. He ran his fingers inside the pocket in the lid of the suitcase and pulled out an air ticket. Her return flight was on Friday. He checked the picture in her passport. Prettier in the flesh. Much prettier. Which had been the whole damned trouble. His anger flared again and he turned on her, pressing his face to within a few inches of hers.

  ‘Have you any idea what you’ve done to my life?’ he snarled.

  She looked down at her hands, biting her lip. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry . . .’ He leaned forward and flicked her chin up with his finger. ‘Because of you, someone tried to kill me last night.’

  Julie blinked, trying to grasp the enormity of what he was saying. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘They found out where I lived by watching the TV news.’

  ‘Who did?’

  Sam pulled back, shaking his head. He’d said too much. ‘And don’t you dare pass that little tit-bit on to your media friends.’

  ‘They’re not my friends,’ she demurred. ‘There was just the reporter from the Chronicle that I talked to and I had no idea it would lead to all this.’

  ‘No idea . . .’ Sam mouthed. ‘Pay well, do they, the Chronicle?’

  Julie closed her eyes, realising the impossibility of redeeming herself with him. ‘It wasn’t for money.’

  ‘What, then?’

  She took in a deep breath and let it out again. ‘I did it for my father. Because it was his last wish. I felt . . . I felt a duty to him.’ She arched her eyebrows in exasperation at herself. ‘God knows why. He never felt one to me.’

  Sam stood with his back to the curtained windows, arms tightly folded. Julie shot him a quick glance then stared at the floor, bunching together the lapels of the dressing gown.

  ‘I wish there was something I could do to make it up to you,’ she whispered meekly.

  Sam looked at her sitting there. She was infuriatingly attractive and convincingly contrite. He suspected that if he told her to take her clothes off she would comply. But it was something even more potent than sex that he wanted from her. Somewhere in that cotton wool mind of hers was, he suspected, a piece of information that could peel open her father’s secrets. He kept remembering Jackman’s dying words. Julie knows. And something about the certainty with which the old rogue had said it made him feel it wasn’t just because of the letter that he knew would be sent after his death. There’d been some other reason. Something to do with Julie being here in Vienna a year ago when the deal with Kovalenko was struck.

  ‘How long have you known Max?’ he asked, fumbling for a bigger picture.

  ‘We met last year. Here in Vienna. I came over for a conference.’

  Everything seemed to have happened a year ago. Too many simultaneous events to be coincidental.

  ‘And to see your father,’ he reminded her.

  ‘That was incidental.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ she hissed. ‘As I’ve said a million times, I have never had anything to do with his business activities.’

  ‘How did you meet Max?’

  ‘He’s a doctor. Has his own clinic. The hotel I was staying in was full of medical people. For the conference.’

  ‘So you met by chance. Locked eyes with him at a seminar and that was it?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Julie straightened her back and pulled the robe’s belt tighter round her waist. She had no wish to get into all this, but didn’t see an alternative. ‘Max was delivering a conference paper on viral mutation. I was just a lowly scientific officer, brought along by my boss to try to pick up tips about laboratory techniques. Max and I weren’t exactly moving in the same circles at the conference. But everyone was staying at the Intercontinental. And so, coincidentally, was my father. Most evenings there were social events connected with the conference, although I did manage to spend one with my father and his girlfriend – I told your colleagues.’

  ‘I know. Go on.’

  ‘Well, after dinner, I’d said goodnight to Dad and gone up to my room. Then a little later I realised I’d left a folder somewhere with my conference papers in it. I came downstairs to look around the bar and that’s when Max spoke to me. He knew my name. Said he’d seen me around and had made up his mind to get to know me. I was flattered. And he had my folder in his hand. Said he wouldn’t return it unless I had a drink with him.’

  ‘And the rest is history.’

  ‘Well, yes. He impressed me. He’d done his homework. Knew a lot about me. Pressed the right buttons. He’s a nice man, actually. And I’d reached a point in my life when I was ready to meet one.’ Still was, she thought to herself.

  ‘How come Max knew so much about you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never really thought about it. Too busy enjoying the warmth of the attention he was giving me.’ She frowned. Delicate tramlines spread across her broad forehead.

  Sam’s antennae twitched.

  ‘What sort of things did he know about you?’

  ‘I don’t really remember.’

  ‘Try.’

  She shrugged. ‘Well . . . he seemed to know – or sense – that I’d had some bad experiences with men.’ She grimaced, unhappy about the way that had come out.

  ‘Where would he have got that from?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Professor Norton?’

  ‘No way. I’m not even sure he’s aware that I have a child.’

  Julie knows – Jackman’s words still niggled. Could it be, Sam wondered, that she didn’t yet know that she knew? But that her father had thought she did?

  ‘Is it possible your father could have told Max about you?’ he suggested, the words emerging simultaneously with the thought taking shape in his head.

  Julie looked at him as if he’d just appeared from outer space. ‘Max had no connection whatsoever with my dad,’ she said dismissively.

  ‘You quite sure?’

  ‘Totally.’

  Then the frown came back and Sam realised he’d got her thinking. She wasn’t sure at all. Not any more. He perched on the end of the bed and leaned towards her.

  ‘The men your father was doing business with a year ago – you told Denise Corby that you met some of them.’

  ‘Met is too strong. They just happened to be sitting in the same corner of the bar. I don’t remember anything about them.’

  Sam narrowed his eyes. ‘So, if you don’t remember anything about those men sitting in the bar with your father, Max Schenk might have been one of them.’

  Julie blinked as if blinded by what he’d just suggested. ‘I can’t believe that . . .’ she whispered.

  Sam stroked his chin. The trail he was following had no logic to it. Even if Schenk had for some reason been able to quiz Harry Jackman about his daughter it was hardly likely he’d have been the gun-runner’s partner in the illegal shipment of nuclear materials. The man was a doctor. He ran a clinic.

  But it was a lead. And one which made sense, if Jackman’s dying words had had more meaning to them than a reference to a letter not yet sent. And, if there was even the smallest chance that Max Schenk and Harry Jackman had been in conversation at the time the ‘red mercury’ deal was struck, then it needed investigating. Sam leaned forward and took hold of Julie’s hands.

  She saw that his eyes had become as soft as chocolate again. She had a nasty feeling she wasn’t going to like the reason for it.

  ‘A few minutes ago, Julie, you said you wished there was some way you could make up for what you did to me last weekend.’

  ‘Yes,’ she croaked, certain now that what he was about to ask of her was going to hurt.

  ‘I want you to see Max Schenk again.’

  16

  HMS Truculent

  Thursday

  THE SUBMARINE HAD rendezvoused on time with the Lynx from HMS Suffolk at midnight local,
surfacing under a starlit sky at a point on the chart precisely defined by the Global Positioning Satellites. The helicopter, its nav lights off, had homed in on their fin, using its thermal imager for guidance. The winch line had snaked down with a bag of mail, then jerked up again with the sack of tapes destined for GCHQ. Ten minutes. Another five for the satcom transmission of the voices detected by Arthur Harris and their sojourn on the surface had been completed. Now the boat was deep again, heading south to Crete and the crew’s first break ashore for ten weeks.

  Arthur Harris was troubled. For him the game was being abandoned prematurely. There was more to be uncovered. Four hours to the east of them a drama was unfolding, the outcome of which he was desperate to know. His gamble was that when the tape of the Russian voices was played back at Cheltenham the bosses would want to know it too.

  He lay on his mattress in the bomb shop surrounded by torpedoes, quite unable to sleep. In Truculent’s proper bunk spaces little curtains closed off the narrow shelves that passed for beds, keeping out the light, but here the fluorescent tubes in their shock-proof mounts between the loading rails blazed day and night. But it wasn’t the light that was keeping him awake, it was the memory of the voice he’d heard coming from that small island east of Lastovo.

  He was almost certain he’d heard it before in one of the small Cheltenham listening booths used for updating CTs before a patrol. Most of the tapes played to them for this mission had been in the rough-tongued Serbo-Croat of Balkan military commanders, but dropped in amongst them like a pinch of spice was a long-distance phone conversation recorded by the Echelon satellites of the US National Security Agency at their base at Menwith Hill. The recipient of the call had been sitting in a small, single-storey house in Maryland, a Russian scientist who’d made the leap into the American economy three years earlier. The call had originated in a Moscow phone booth, placed by a disgruntled biochemist who’d rung his friend to test the water. ‘It’s impossible here,’ Harris remembered him saying, the voice heavy with disgust. ‘One way or another I’m going to leave Russia. But I need a job, Yuri. Don’t forget me. Otherwise I’ll go to the people we all know about that none of us wants to work for. I have to eat, Yuri. I have to have a life.’

  Chursin. Igor Chursin. An assistant director at the Russian State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology, known as VECTOR, based in Novosibirsk in Siberia. At the end of the Soviet era the laboratory had been the Moscow government’s main centre for biological weapons research. The work continued today, but in even greater secrecy.

  It had been the head of the Biological Warfare desk at GCHQ who’d slipped the tape into the briefing session. He’d done it as a ‘heads up’ to alert them. As far as anyone knew Chursin was still in Russia, but if he decided to carry out his threat to leave then he’d be a prime catch for any renegade nation looking to develop biological weapons. Iraq and Iran had been obvious candidates, but with Serbia suspected of preparing for war against NATO, it made sense to cast the net wide. However, the last place in the world any of them expected Chursin to turn up was on a barren lump of rock in the Adriatic.

  Which was why Harris had a sneaking suspicion that he could have been wrong. That it hadn’t been Chursin’s voice on the VHF. Cheltenham would know for sure. And in four hours’ time when they came back to periscope depth to receive the broadcast, the submarine would know too. There was nothing he could do until then. He turned his face away from the light and made a determined effort to sleep.

  Vienna

  Sam Packer was woken by the phone. He fumbled groggily for the handset.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Sam Packer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh dear. Sorry if I woke you up.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘The name’s de Vere Collins.’ The SIS head of station in Vienna. The accent was surprisingly downmarket. ‘A friend in London told me where to find you.’ Waddell – Sam had checked in with him when he arrived in Vienna. ‘And since I didn’t hear from you yesterday I thought I’d save you the trouble today.’

  He was being reprimanded for failing to make contact.

  ‘Good of you,’ Sam grunted. ‘My apologies.’ He should have rung.

  ‘Accepted. Now look, there’s been a development overnight. It stands everything on its head, rather.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ He was suddenly wide awake.

  ‘May I suggest we discuss it in the privacy of breakfast?’

  Sam focused on the bedside clock. It was just before nine. ‘Where?’

  ‘The Intercontinental does a good spread. It’s not more than ten minutes’ walk from where you are.’

  The hotel where Julie had met Max Schenk. Wouldn’t do any harm to look the place over, he decided. ‘Fine. Say half an hour?’

  ‘Spiffing, old chap.’ De Vere Collins said it fake posh. ‘I’ll be in the coffee shop. In the far corner, reading a copy of Newsweek.’

  Sam showered quickly and ran a shaver over his face.

  He tried to second-guess what development Collins might be talking about, but couldn’t concentrate, his mind preoccupied with last night’s encounter with Julie Jackman. To have such a strong urge for intimacy with someone who’d done him so much harm was a contradiction he was finding hard to rationalise.

  He dressed in the business suit he’d worn the day before. There were things to be done before Julie saw Max Schenk again – assuming she managed to tempt him into another date. He intended to ask Collins to find out if Austrian security had a file on the doctor. As he straightened his tie, the phone rang once more. This time it was Duncan Waddell.

  ‘Thought I’d better warn you the screw’s tightening,’ he cautioned. ‘I don’t know what you’ve done to the women of this world, but they’re out to get you.’

  ‘What’s happened now?’ Sam sighed, sinking onto the bed.

  ‘The Daily Chronicle’s struck again. This time it’s your real name up in lights. Not only that – the subjects you were good at at school, your favourite food at around the time your father started spying for the Russians . . .’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ The story about his father had finally leaked. ‘Where the hell’s all this personal crap come from?’

  ‘From your loving sister, mostly.’

  Sam groaned.

  ‘But the real culprit’s a man called Craigie who picked up a couple of grand for telling the Chronicle you’d been in Scotland looking for pictures of your father.’

  Sam put his head in his hands. He should have accepted the SIS security man’s offer to have the Scotsman taken out.

  ‘After getting that little tip-off, the hacks started digging,’ Waddell continued. ‘They traced your sister and she poured it all out like sick. She must really hate you.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not personal.’

  ‘Must hate your dad too.’

  ‘That part is.’

  ‘So, in a word, I’d say you’ve been stuffed again.’

  ‘Thanks a million.’

  ‘The government’s been “no commenting” ever since the first editions appeared. I’m afraid you’re not exactly popular with the bloke at Number Ten. Brains a lot bigger than mine are still trying to work out what to do with you. Best thing is to stay where you are for now. Ring me again around midday. And don’t go giving interviews to anyone.’

  ‘That I can’t promise,’ Sam replied sarcastically.

  ‘Oh. By the way. What did our friend Günther have to say for himself?’

  ‘Very little. His wife’s just died.’

  Sam outlined their conversation, saying that everything Hoffmann had said served to confirm his father had not given away anything sensitive.

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ Waddell grunted.

  ‘And Duncan . . . I met someone else last night.’

  ‘Not the man whose name begins with K?’

  ‘No. A woman whose name begins with J.’

  ‘Good God!’ There was a stunned silence at the other end. �
�What the hell’s she doing there?’

  ‘Kissing goodbye to a sugar daddy, apparently. Someone, it turns out, who may just possibly have had some connection with her dad.’

  Another short silence. ‘You don’t mean a connection of the nuclear kind . . .?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Jackman had many irons in the fire,’ Waddell warned. ‘Anyway, what d’you propose to do about it?’

  ‘I’m making further enquiries. With Julie’s co-operation.’

  ‘Co-operation?’ Waddell spluttered. ‘What is going on over there?’

  ‘The girl’s said sorry.’

  ‘I shouldn’t pay too much attention to that,’ Waddell warned. ‘You’re sure there’s no media around?’

  ‘As sure as I can be. Anyway, I propose to rope Collins in. I’m meeting him for breakfast in a few minutes.’

  ‘Make sure you explain exactly what you have in mind. He’s a stickler for doing things by the book. Which at this stage in your career is no bad thing.’

  ‘Point taken. By the way, he said there’d been a development overnight. What’s it about?’

  Waddell cleared his throat.

  ‘Nothing’s come across my desk,’ he replied cagily. ‘Ring me when you’ve spoken with him.’

  ‘I will.’

  He reached the Intercontinental by 9.35. To the left was the bar where Jackman must have sat with his cronies a year ago and where Julie had met Max Schenk. Clusters of armchairs around low tables. He turned his back on the bar then paused at the news-stand in the lobby in case the London papers were in. They weren’t.

  Collins had secured a remote table for two in the brasserie overlooking the Stadtpark. He recognised Sam and held up his magazine as a signal.

  ‘Pat Collins.’ They shook hands. ‘You’ve seen this, have you?’ He passed Sam a faxed copy of the morning’s Chronicle story.

  ‘Just been told about it,’ Sam grimaced. He skim-read a few paragraphs then put it aside. ‘If I read the rest it’ll ruin my breakfast.’

  ‘Why don’t you do the circuit,’ Collins suggested, pointing to the buffet, ‘then we can talk.’