Then he says, “Karla?” and the tension in his voice tells me it’s something else entirely.
Most of my clients may be criminals, but by and large we make our bargains and we stick to them: I get them what they want, and they pay me. Few get to see my face; and on those who do, I try to make sure I’ve enough information to wreck their lives comprehensively and forever. Still, there is between us something like trust.
But for five years and eight months I’ve worked for another client: a client I can’t afford to trust, a client I’ve never met, never spoken to, never communicated with except untraceably. A client who doesn’t even know me as Karla and who has never paid me.
His name is Peter Laidlaw, he works for British intelligence, and through the fog of my own shock Craigie is telling me that the night before last, with a terminal diagnosis in his pocket, he threw himself under a train.
DAY 5: SUNDAY
POWELL
Home, but with no sense of homecoming.
The call on Saturday morning. Something’s come up. You’re booked on a flight. Thea, dressed as a fairy, had a lunchtime party to go to; was engaged in complex negotiations with her mother over the wearing of wings with her coat. He hugged her before she left, inhaled her strawberry smell, wondered tightly how long he might be away. Promised himself, Not long, though he knew it was a promise he was in no position to make.
The 18:15 flight out of Dulles: the short transatlantic night—a little more than seven hours in the air—and then the touchdown at Heathrow, 06:20 GMT but winter dark, the runway lights winking across the tarmac, the airport corridors lit a washed-out low-voltage gray, the smell of the flight clinging to him like the aftermath of an illness. His body clock was still on Eastern Standard Time, and he hadn’t slept a wink.
There was a driver waiting for him with a sign. “Hotel?” he asked—he’d have liked a shower before they got started—but the man said, “Straight to the office, if that’s all right, sir,” and he nodded, because he expected as much.
Now they’re in the Long Room, the room overlooking the inner courtyard, its windows with their one-way glass baffled to guard against listening devices, the door reinforced so as soon as it’s closed no sound leaks in from the rest of the building, or out. Just him and the Section Chief, and between them a Sunday-morning pot of coffee and a plate of synthetic-looking pastries that ought to make things better but don’t.
“Laidlaw,” the Section Chief says. “Peter Laidlaw.” He adds sharply, “You know the name?”
Powell shakes his head. The name means nothing.
The Section Chief pushes a file across the table, two inches of paperwork; either Laidlaw is old, or he’s been busy. Powell flicks it open. Old, says the photograph in front of him. Early seventies, at a guess. He scans the page. Secret Intelligence Service—SIS. A Moscow Man, an agent handler, one of the old Sov Bloc master race, retired. Compromised—the assumption’s automatic—and then: How badly? Very badly, if they’ve brought him back from Washington. He looks back at the file.
Peter Laidlaw has been retired for years. Any secrets he could give up would be old secrets.
You wouldn’t have brought me back for that.
The Section Chief sits back in his chair and folds his arms, turning his head sideways toward the courtyard. He looks uncomfortable.
Powell asks, “What’s he done?”
The Section Chief says, “Where were you five years ago?”
“Here.”
Here in an office down the corridor with no name on the door. Here among the cleanup agents of the intelligence and security worlds: the janitors. Three years into the job. One year into his marriage. Thea a bright promise in the future. Everything possible.
“Five years and eight months ago Peter Laidlaw turned up on the doorstep of Thames House with a plastic bag, and refused to go away.”
Thames House: home of MI5, by Lambeth Bridge. Wrong building. Peter Laidlaw was SIS. But he didn’t go to his own, to the place where someone would have vouched for him. “Why not Vauxhall Cross? Why—”
The Section Chief says crisply, “Those were his instructions.”
“Instructions from …?”
The Section Chief gives him a look. “You sure you don’t know about this?” And Powell wonders, not for the first time, if that’s why they sent him to Washington after all. Because he’d handled one too many cases? Because he knew too much?
“Positive.”
The Section Chief says, “He sat in an office for two hours demanding to speak to an officer out of G branch. He wouldn’t go away. In the end they sent someone down just to get rid of him.” The Section Chief pauses.
There’s only one question to ask. “What was in the plastic bag?”
“This.”
He flicks open another file, spins a photograph across the tabletop. A familiar face looks out: a woman in her forties with an unrelenting stare.
Eileen Granger, the Maternity Unit Bomber.
“Laidlaw produced the tip-off on Granger?”
“The time, the place, her identity, everything. Granger was under everyone’s radar, ours, the American’s, everyone’s. Nobody knew what she had planned. Except Peter Laidlaw.”
“So how did he know?”
The Section Chief blinks, blandly. “Received it from an anonymous source.”
There’s a hare to be chased down, but it can wait. Powell sits back. “And then what?”
“Nothing for four months. By which time MI5 had scaled back surveillance on him: tired of following an old man on his errands. They’d decided it was a one-off when he turned up again.”
“Another plastic bag?”
“Envelope this time. Tip-off about a money trail: someone funding an extremist cell in the States. Two months further on, he’s got news that a source is about to be compromised. Another month … And so on. Of course by this time MI5’s watching him round the clock, because they’d like to know where all this is coming from.”
“And?”
“Whoever it is, plays by Moscow Rules. Tradecraft. Chalk marks on trees. Dead drops. We’re talking old-school, minimal technology.” The Section Chief pulls a sour face.
“And Laidlaw? What did he say?”
“He claimed he’d no idea.”
“Is that likely?”
The Section Chief doesn’t answer that one. He says, “It has to be intelligence community, and it has to be Russia.”
“Ident?”
“Laidlaw called them Knox.” He shakes his head. “MI5 took to diverting his mail.”
“And?”
“A note arrived, from Knox: Stop the diverts.”
“Knox knew?”
“Or guessed.”
“What did MI5 do?”
The Section Chief snorts humorlessly. “Backed off. Next thing they know, Laidlaw’s phoning them in the middle of the night. From a public phone box, of all places. There’s going to be a shooting in an Aiya Napa nightclub.”
“That was Knox?”
“That, and the Birmingham network they rolled up two years ago, and the ricin plotters.”
“All of those came from Knox?”
The Section Chief nods. “Though MI5 repackaged the product, made it look like it came from several sources, as you would. Tech stuff went out under the name Albatross. Al-Qaeda spin-offs were Alchemy. Money laundering was Green Man. Knox accounts for at least seven different brands. Last big spectacular was a year back: one of Five’s own tech ops guys obviously felt he wasn’t being paid enough. Put a list of all their live surveillance operations up for auction. Who was being watched, and how. Bidders were queuing up to get a look.” The Section Chief pauses. “Knox secured it for us.”
“And we still don’t know who Knox is?”
The Section Chief shakes his head.
“So how many people are up on this?”
“Apart from the MI5 high-ups? Very few. Laidlaw had his own handler—you can imagine, it wasn’t the easiest job in t
he world, handling a Moscow Man. A couple of analysts, a reports officer …”
“The Americans?”
“Saw the product. Didn’t know it all came from the one source.”
“Did we know about Knox?”
The Section Chief hesitates. This is an awkward point. “No,” he says at last. “We weren’t informed. MI5 felt they could handle it themselves.” Or they didn’t want to admit they were running a source they couldn’t validate. “Leeson—do you remember Leeson?—was assigned to the MI5 ops list auction; she identified the culprit. But no one told her the original tip had come from Knox. We didn’t even know Knox existed.”
“So what changed?”
The Section Chief says, “On Friday night Laidlaw threw himself in front of a train. Suicide.” He adds, “He had cancer. Brain tumor. Brutal … The news has been embargoed, but of course these things get out.”
He sighs. “As soon as they realized what they were up against, MI5 came to us.”
He looks at Powell again, expectantly. Powell looks again at the photograph. Peter Laidlaw is jowly, humorless … A keeper of secrets, a details man. One of the old guard.
The Section Chief says, “They haven’t the first idea who Knox is. Their best source, and they’ve lost it.” He says again, “It has to be Russia, doesn’t it? Someone within the SVR, skimming off their own product—someone who knew Laidlaw, or knew of him. Anglophile, maybe.”
And doing it out of the goodness of their heart? Powell says, “Knox never asked for anything in return? Money? Promise of safe harbor?”
The Section Chief shakes his head.
They just haven’t got round to asking yet.
“You want me to find Knox.”
“Establish a means of contact. But don’t have any direct communication, is that clear? Anything you get, you send up to me immediately.”
Powell nods. Doesn’t ask why. The Section Chief wants this one for himself.
“Oh, and I want interim reports.”
Powell says, without thinking, “That’s not how we normally—”
The Section Chief says, “I know how we normally do things here, I do still run this place. I know you wouldn’t normally expect to file a report until your investigation’s complete. But nothing about Knox is normal. Nothing.” He shifts in his seat, uncomfortable again, then settles. “As for resources, just tell us what you need.” The Section Chief nods, as if that’s everything.
“Do the others know I’m back?” Powell asks.
“Of course not.”
“Who’s still here?”
“Morris, though she’s seven months off retirement. Carter. Leeson. Kingman—he’s after your time, I think. Ex–Special Branch.”
“What will they be told?”
“The usual,” the Section Chief says. He means, Nothing.
“And unofficially?”
“You’ve come to clean the Augean stables,” the Section Chief says. He allows himself a little smirk.
Powell says, “And what are they supposed to make of that?”
“Whatever they want,” the Section Chief says. “Whatever they want.”
Another office with no name on the door. A security pass on the desk. Beside it, a letter with the address of an apartment that will be his for the duration, however long that is.
He drops Peter Laidlaw’s file onto the desk. It lands heavily.
To the apartment; a few hours’ sleep; a shower; then back to work.
Nine thirty-five GMT. Four thirty-five Eastern Standard Time.
Thea has been in bed for hours. He never said good night.
DAY 7: TUESDAY
JOHANSSEN
Johanssen dreams of a man in an office. The man sits behind a desk, with his hands clasped on top of a file; the file has Johanssen’s name on it.
The man’s lips form words, but no sound comes out.
Johanssen wakes. The light filtering through the thin curtains is sodium yellow. The digital clock beside the bed reads 6:02. On the streets, traffic’s already stirring.
They brought him here yesterday, to a three-bedroom flat in a privatized South London housing block. Three men are with him, on rotating shifts, two on duty at any one time. The American, Whitman, is tall, bony, weary looking, seen it all; he pops antacids constantly, could have an ulcer on the way. The other two are younger, late twenties, British, experienced: Johanssen can smell army on both of them. They watch him warily. Given who he’s supposed to be, it’s little wonder.
Mostly he’s done nothing. But he’s used to waiting before a job: wearing the same clothes for days on end, living off tinned food, listening to others going about their lives—voices and TV and the thump of bass from a speaker … On one side they have a harassed single mum for a neighbor: he hasn’t set eyes on her, but her voice and the kid’s sound through the thin wall. The kid—boy or girl?—must be only three or four. Sometimes the mum sings along to the radio. She chain-smokes; the smell seeps through from next door. The kid has a smoker’s cough already.
No sound comes from the flat on the other side.
So he waits. Twenty-four hours is nothing. A lot of the time he simply clears his mind, blanks himself. Better not to think about what might happen. On a job like this you don’t want expectations, don’t want a picture in your head of how things will be. Nine times out of ten that picture will be wrong. He has focused instead on the facts, the map, Karla’s data—
There is no gas supply in the Program.
Chemicals are not supplied to residents if, in combination, they become combustible.
—he’s tried to ground himself in that and not imagine what anything might be like. Imagination, like expectation, is a flaw.
So some of the time he thinks of Karla’s data. But some of the time he thinks of Karla.
When she called to fix the briefing she asked him straight out, and sharply: “Do you have my address? Do you know where I live?” And he said yes because it was the truth, even though it was information he shouldn’t have. He didn’t expect her to say, “Then come here.”
Two hours of antisurveillance drills is his standard; that night he did three, for her.
She opened the door herself, and when she showed him into the apartment’s main room—cool, pale, vast, he could have fitted his current flat in that one room with space to spare—there was nobody else waiting; nobody he could see, anyway. Perhaps they were tucked away in a side room: a bodyguard, or the Scot who answered the old number. He couldn’t say. At least she’d wanted the illusion they were alone.
But there were no pleasantries, no small talk, nothing to suggest he was anything but another client; except once or twice, while he was reading the files, he thought he sensed her measuring the distance between them. As if she might cross it? But as soon as he finished with the last file, she began to talk about the patrols, and they might as well have been in a warehouse again, with her behind the lights, invisible.
So many years he thought about the place where she might live. Thought about being there with her—waking up beside her in a clean quiet room and finding her still asleep, her face relaxed, her hair cloudy against the pillow, her breathing slow.
But you don’t belong there. You never will.
At 6:30 a.m. Whitman comes in, escorts him to the bathroom where he pisses, then back into the bedroom to dress.
In the kitchen he’s given cereal with milk and some lukewarm tea. He finishes the meal and that’s it. They’re leaving.
They’d cuff him, but they don’t want to attract attention. Instead Whitman explains, again, what will happen if he tries to run.
Outside the early light’s gray. The radio’s on in the next-door flat, the mum singing, then the kid starts acting up, and she starts to shout. Still no sound from the other side: it’s empty, or the occupants keep different hours.
Ryan Jackson has a dad alive in a small Lancashire town, but they’re not in touch. No old friends in contact either. Unlikely anyone would go to the trou
ble of springing him. Still, the younger guys mark him all the way down to the car, eyes everywhere. One of them opens a rear door. Johanssen gets in, and the man gets in beside him.
Where civilian contractors are required, they work under the protection of armed security.
Armored vehicles patrol the streets, operating from secure command posts.
Whitman and the other man get in the front, the engine starts, and they’re away.
You can tell it’s coming before you see it. You know, because everything starts to die.
It shows in the ex–council housing on the other side of the four-lane highway: alongside the outbreaks of stone cladding and the tacked-on porches there are weeds in the drives, peeling paintwork, gray steel anti-vandal boards at the windows. The stain of neglect. A few businesses cling to life in the little row of shops—a discount furniture dealer, a hairdresser, a pound shop slewing bright plastic goods across the pavement—but most of the shops are boarded up. There’s a curry house and an ugly barnlike pub offering cheap lager and big-screen sporting events, but the only place doing any real business is the drive-through restaurant up on the main road, shoveling out fast food to people who have to eat but don’t want to stop.
From the flyover, a small newish light-industrial park looks like a reminder of a forlorn hope. The signboards are mostly blank, and only two cars sit in the car park.
Then the highway turns and there it is: Karla’s map made real.
First there’s the waste ground, the areas of land they cleared around the main site but never built on: weeds sprout among the concrete footprints of demolished buildings. Inside that: parking areas, storage hangars, warehouses. Everything’s still new and clean. Signs point to Visitor Reception, Administrative Services, the Staff Restaurant. A big green modern block has the word INDUCTION on a board by the entrance. A smaller blue unit calls itself the Emergency Medical Center. There’s a helipad beside it. The whole thing might be a modern commercial estate, one that houses particularly nervy businesses: the roads are dotted with checkpoints, yellow sentry boxes, red-and-white barriers, and cameras on poles monitor all the approaches.
The Distance: A Thriller Page 5