The man’s picked up his pace. He’s five meters ahead of Johanssen now. “Slow down,” Johanssen calls out, but the man doesn’t stop or turn or look back. He walks through the gap between the buildings.
Johanssen’s just level with the gap when a door bursts open to his left, and a stranger comes rushing out toward him, head down, fists swinging.
The guy telegraphs the first blow long before it connects: Johanssen feints, drops back away from it and gets in a couple of punches of his own, but now there’s someone behind him and another coming head-on between the buildings—early twenties, pockmarked face, yellow wolfish teeth. A fourth one, scrawny and dark, barrels out of the doorway. Do some damage, try to get out of there? But the first one’s back on his feet now and the scrawny one—it might be a girl—has a knife.
He half turns, kicking out at the knife, and a blow from behind drops him.
They are on him in seconds, dragging him through the doorway, pinning him facedown. Hands empty his pockets. They’ve got his ID card. A voice—the voice of the fair-haired man?—says pleasantly, “Mr. Ryan Jackson … welcome to the Program.”
After that they force a hood over his head.
But he’s already seen their faces. This is for something else.
They tie his wrists behind his back and hobble him, then haul him to his feet. He sucks in air through the hood and tastes someone else’s saliva, someone else’s blood.
The man who spoke before says, “Watch him.” A door opens and closes.
He sways in the dark, straining into the silence, trying to gauge the size of the room, how many are left, if they’re moving toward him.
The first blow’s not a hard one, more of a slap. Then another, and this one’s harder. They’re close, circling him: when they laugh he can smell their breath through the hood. Someone kicks him, and he falls—that’s funny, too, so they kick him some more, and then someone says, “Hey, get him up,” and they pull him to his feet again and throw him against the wall—“Fucking stand up, fucking cretin, what are you? Fucking cretin,” and they laugh again.
He presses himself into the wall. The strap bites into his wrists.
More kicks and slaps, and then they turn him and punch him so that he doubles, and again so he’s on his knees. A hand grabs the hood and wrenches his head sideways. A whisper in his ear—“Know what we’re going to do to you?” The speaker’s mouth is inches away: Johanssen can smell his excitement, raw and chemical. “We’re going to piss on you and stamp on you, and then we’re going to get a big stick and fuck you with it—”
“Fuck him with it,” says a breathy echo, it might be the girl.
“Yeah, and then we’re going to pour petrol on you and set you alight—”
“You’re going to fucking burn, know that?”
“Fuck him with it,” says the echo again.
He closes himself down then. He’s no longer in the room. They’re talking to someone else. Someone else will take the blows, stand up when they tell him to, fall when they knock him down.
More slaps. More kicks. More threats. But there’s a point beyond which they don’t go, however much they want to.
Because this isn’t the main event. This is just the start.
DAY 7: TUESDAY
KARLA
Tuesday, 2:05 p.m. Johanssen’s in the Program now. Whitman phoned this morning to tell me so. “They had to make some calls.”
“Of course.” And we had it covered: memos on desks in the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Prison Service; and a call from someone in the States, senior, busy, making time—the information he holds could be crucial … your cooperation much appreciated … approval at the highest level … you appreciate the seriousness … absolute discretion required. The trick is to know who will ring whom and what questions will be asked, and then ensure those questions can be answered easily, simply, to everyone’s satisfaction. And that every person in that chain of checks and balances feels they cannot be held to account: that however much shit flies later, none of it can possibly hit them. That they can say, I did my job, I followed procedure, it’s someone else’s fault.
“They know it’s just temporary?” I ask.
“And that he’s out again in forty-eight hours.”
“And in the meantime if he needs to be lifted—?”
Whitman sighs. “I’ll be by the phone. He likely to have a problem in there, Laura?”
I bat it back at him. “The place is pretty stable.”
“But you still want me on standby.”
“Naturally. Oh, and phone calls are monitored.”
He sighs again. I wait.
He says, “Every contact I have with this guy raises his profile. I take him in and out of that place, people are going to talk. You know they are. People are going to ask questions—of me, which is fine, but not just me. Yeah, yeah, you’re keeping Washington out of the loop, you don’t want to make it official until you have to—”
Washington again. And Whitman knows how Washington works, he knows where the risks lie, where the screwups will come.
“We’ve got three weeks,” I remind him.
“You estimate. Could be sooner. And even if it isn’t—”
But Johanssen will be out of there by then, we’ll see to that. “I told you, we’ve got it covered.”
“And you’ll square it with them if you have to?”
“You know I will.” Another beat of silence, his skepticism humming down the line. “It’s a promise, Mike.” I wonder if he hears the lie.
But he hasn’t asked why I’ve put a man inside the Program. He doesn’t want to know.
So Whitman isn’t happy; and I’m not either, though for different reasons.
I wanted a delay. There’s no sign of the target through all the regular searches, and Finn still hasn’t got me that copy of inmate records yet, and that gap in my knowledge nags at me. We should have traced her days ago. But It doesn’t matter, Johanssen said, and it’s true, it doesn’t, not to him. I’m just checking it out. And he’s the client; the choice is his, not mine. So I’ve let him go, and now all I can do is wait.
That’s what I’m doing when Craigie arrives at my apartment. The CCTV feed on the screen in my office catches him crossing the lobby in his familiar dark gray overcoat, briefcase in hand, his narrow face angled away from the camera.
I show him in. “Let me get you a drink.”
“Tea would be fine.”
I keep three single malts in my cabinet; Craigie’s never touched one of them. But I suspect his whisky is a private pleasure, in the same way that pornography is for other lonely men.
When I come back from the kitchen he’s over by the window. The winter sun’s already dipping. To the south the office blocks are dazzling bronze mirrors; west, over the shoulders of the smaller buildings, the Thames is a curve of polished pewter. But he isn’t admiring the view: he’s gazing down toward the dock below my window. Forty-one stories down, matchstick figures people the walkways. The wind is gusting hard, tugging at their clothes, shattering the surface of the water in the dock. Craigie’s upper body angles toward them. He’s removed his overcoat. In his dark suit he looks like a question mark.
When I hand him his cup he says, “The man they’ve brought in to go through Laidlaw’s files? We have a name.”
Laidlaw is dead. Laidlaw is dead, and I shouldn’t be shocked. He was an old man, he’d lived his life, he’d made his decision, perhaps his time had come. But the fifty-nine hours that have elapsed since I first heard the news haven’t taken the edge off it.
Our alliance was triggered by a story, told to me by a troubled criminal contact and involving hospital plans and a woman called Eileen. I looked into it, and the more I looked, the more troubled I was, too. We’ve all seen the images: a London bus with its roof peeled back by the force of the blast, a burning skyscraper folding into dust. It’s the thing you don’t want to contemplate: that you knew, you knew all along, you could have stopped it,
and you didn’t.
Peter Laidlaw was the man I chose to give my information to.
He’d been an agent handler in the fag end of the Cold War: quiet, intent, good with secrets, cautious to a fault—he’d been in the inner circle that handled the Soviet mole Gordievsky, had contacts in MI5’s old K3 subdivision, and kept his job when the Wall came down and for a while the Russians were our new best friends. But by the time my package arrived on his doormat, he’d retired to read his books, sip warm beer in dark pubs, ignore his garden, and be bored out of his mind.
I picked him because I knew he’d be careful and tenacious and diligent—because I knew he wouldn’t rest until he found someone to take that package seriously.
And I picked him because I knew that everyone who wondered who I was would look east, to Laidlaw’s old contacts in the former Soviet Union, and not toward me.
At the time it was to be a one-off: I had no intention of becoming a source. Nine months and four contacts later, we had something like a relationship, or a habit. Perhaps it eased my conscience. Or perhaps I’d realized that if the security services ever knocked on my door, I wanted to be in a position to call in favors.
Peter Laidlaw wasn’t on my side. I never believed he was. He served his country all his life; that wasn’t about to change. But he was a Moscow Man, with suspicion rooted in his soul, and when MI5 bugged his house and began to follow him, he knew and liked it about as much as I did. I like to think we raised our games accordingly—that ours became an alliance of the wary, an unspoken contract between two people who didn’t trust each other but still found they shared a common adversary: the very people they were trying to help.
But in the end, he had me fooled. I hadn’t even known that he was ill.
“Powell,” Craigie says. “His name is Lucas Powell.”
The name means nothing to me. He must pick that up. “He was in Washington, on secondment. They’ve brought him back specially—you got the shots?”
Tall, black, good cheekbones, good suit. Officer class. I nod. “What do we know?”
Craigie says drily, “He’s not Laidlaw.”
“There’s a surprise.”
There will be no more Laidlaws. Laidlaw was the last of the old guard.
“So tell me about this Powell.”
“Straight as a die. Graduate intake, fast-tracked through the ranks. Careerist. Ambitious.” Craigie’s face is grim.
“Janitor?”
“Of course,” he says.
One of the tight crew of investigators—ex-MI5, ex-SIS, ex–Special Branch, belonging to none of them—who are brought in whenever their masters turn over a stone and find something they don’t like the look of. They operate in isolation and almost complete secrecy, can access files denied to most other security and intelligence personnel, and are incorruptible. No wonder it’s taken this long for Craigie to come up with a name.
“Are you picking up chatter?”
“He says he’s come to clean the Augean stables.”
“He actually said that?”
“So I hear.” Craigie adds, “Too clever to use the word ‘shit,’ evidently.” Craigie’s a grammar-school boy: he knows his classical allusions. Clearly, so does Powell.
“Thinks he’s Hercules, does he? Oxford or Cambridge?”
“Cambridge. A first. Then straight into the service.” A pause, then Craigie says, “He’s looking for Knox.”
“Of course he’s looking for Knox. Powell said it himself: he’s here to clean up any mess. Find out what was going on, tidy up, write a report. These people don’t like being in the dark about their own operations.”
Craigie’s shaking his head. “Twenty-two tip-offs in five years—”
“Not all of them led anywhere.”
He says darkly, “Some of them did. You’ve made yourself a prize, Karla. A prize, and Lucas Powell’s out to win it. He’s after you. He’s going to dig through Laidlaw’s past until he finds you.”
“Then good luck to him. I’m not in Laidlaw’s past. That’s the whole point.”
Craigie’s still stony faced. “We don’t know what records Laidlaw kept.”
“Laidlaw was old school; his sort didn’t make notes.”
Craigie says, “You sure about that? He was an old man. His memory was failing.” Then, “What about the flat in Ealing?” Owned by Laidlaw, under a different name, and kept for his occasional private use.
“Has Powell found it yet?” I ask.
“Not yet.”
“Then let’s have it watched.” But I say it too dismissively for Craigie.
“You’re not worried about this?”
“If Laidlaw knew who I was, he’d have found me himself. Craigie, we sanitized everything.”
Twenty-two drop points in more than five years, never the same one twice. Calls from clean phones, single use, untraceable numbers. Goods and services paid for by credit cards registered to shell companies. A briefcase in a bar, no prints. Once we even sent him information in a box of mail-order shoes. That was how Laidlaw and I did business, because he was old school: the setup precisely calculated to appeal to him and to reinforce the message that I was old school, too. Craigie hated it. But the traffic was all one way. Laidlaw couldn’t contact me. We made sure of that.
Now Craigie’s look tells me he doesn’t believe it.
For a moment we fall silent. Above the City’s profile fat gray clouds are piling up, pregnant with rain, and the Thames has changed from pewter to lead.
“And Simon Johanssen?” he asks.
“Went into the Program this morning.”
His mouth tightens, but he says nothing. Shortly afterward he leaves.
At 3:15 p.m. an icon winks onto my computer screen. At last: Finn.
Finn, and a read-only copy of the Program’s inmate records, cloned from a government server. Names and reference numbers, criminal records, psychological profiles, DNA data. And photos.
We’re in business.
I’ve already reduced the target’s image to biometrics: to the computer she’s a series of measurements. All I have to do is match that data to the corresponding inmate record. Any minute now I’ll know exactly who she is.
While the timer counts down, I leave my desk and walk into the main room. In doorways forty-one stories below my window, office workers snatch at cigarettes, huddled against the January wind. Muffled tourists idle across the lime-green metal bridge that spans the dock; a toddler chases pigeons. In the office blocks, behind the reinforced glass, people make money out of money. West toward the City, everything is sky.
When I walk back into the office, the search program has run its course. The answer sits squarely on the screen. No match.
My data must have corrupted. I pull up the scan of the original image, click on BIOMETRIC BREAKDOWN and EXPORT. On the screen a new timer counts down. Done. I reopen the inmate file, click COMPARE. This time I don’t leave my desk.
No match.
Something cold settles in my stomach.
But there’s a further list: deceased inmates. I pull it up, run the data once more.
No match. The woman in the picture is not on the Program’s inmate list.
But there are other explanations. Maybe she’s being held elsewhere, on the point of being transferred, or maybe she’s already in transit, her data in a virtual pipeline, migrating from one system to another …
Or maybe she’s a nobody, a face plucked at random for a job that doesn’t exist.
I attach the biometrics I’ve generated.
A pause, and then the usual response:
For once it isn’t good enough.
I call Fielding. The phone rings seven, eight times before he answers. When he hears my voice he grunts. I don’t wait for the put-down.
“She’s not listed in there. You sai
d your client was sound. So are you lying? Or are they?”
Three seconds of silence, which I don’t like, before Fielding says, “She’s in there.”
“She’s not on the inmate list.”
“She’s in there,” he says again.
“Wrong, Fielding. Who’s the client? Not someone fronting up for John Quillan, by any chance?”
Fielding doesn’t answer. Instead the line goes dead.
It is now 3:46 p.m. Just over two hours to go before the gates close, and the Program goes into its unofficial lockdown. I call Whitman.
“We may have a problem. I need you to get our man out of there.”
There’s a short silence from Whitman. Then he says, “Laura, he’s only been in—”
“Now, Mike. Now.”
Four p.m. comes and goes. Four fifteen. Four thirty. Time. It all takes time. I pace out the three-million-pound views of my apartment. I sit on my sofa. I make coffee, fail to drink it, throw it away. The light fades. The streetlamps come on. Whitman doesn’t call.
But perhaps she isn’t an inmate at all, perhaps she’s a volunteer or a social worker, perhaps she’s security.
How long before I get a result?
Five p.m. On the walkways forty-one stories down, the office workers have started their homeward stream, little dark-colored specks of humanity drawn in swaths across the pavements like iron filings following the pull of a magnet.
Still Whitman doesn’t call back.
I stand by the window, and I try to focus on the lights of Docklands, but the clockface across the room seems to pulse like a clot on the edge of my vision, and the tiny sliver of wristwatch is heavy on my arm.
Five thirty. Five forty-five. Nothing from Whitman. He’s cutting it fine, that’s all.
Five fifty-eight, five fifty-nine, six o’clock. The gates close. But maybe Johanssen’s being processed now: sitting in an empty room while they recheck his ID. Any minute now, and Whitman will phone to say he’s out—any minute now—
The phone rings, and I snatch it up.
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