Two calls. Two sets of technical data. But only one location.
They could have fled minutes after the last call was made. The trail could take me to a deserted building, an empty road. But if it does, why go to the trouble of deleting the record? Why bother, if there’s nothing there to find?
One location, and I’m going.
Don’t ask me to explain.
DAY 20: MONDAY
POWELL
Monday night, late, in the office again. More surveillance logs: new ones this time, on the movements of the man called Isidore.
They found him on Saturday, surprisingly easily, and just as Laidlaw had described him—slight, ferret faced, olive complexion, dark hair, even the brown jacket was the same—loitering by a market stall, an outfit selling mobile phone accessories, alongside a girl with bleached hair and poor skin. They tracked him all that day and into Sunday, then had him picked up off the street. An unofficial chat, that’s all it was: Powell playing it relaxed, unthreatening. (True janitor style, that: keep them off their guard. Wasted on this one, though.) Isidore Maksoud chewed gum, drank tea, nodded at his suit—“Nice, that, where’d you get it?”—and blanked at the name Knox. Then they let him go, but not before Mitch had confirmed the man’s flat was now bugged.
Since then they’ve watched him around the clock. The Section Chief’s idea, and all the reports are going to him, too. But it’s a waste of time and energy: Isidore’s suddenly restless, moving between locations constantly, and greeting almost everyone he sees—a word here, a handclasp there, a muttered aside … He knows we’re watching. He’s saturating us. Too many contacts to trace and identify, let alone follow, and any one of them could link to Knox.
We won’t find Knox like this.
So what then? Wait? How long? He doesn’t even know if Isidore passed the message on. Does Isidore have the first idea who Knox is? From what he knows of Knox, he doubts it. But what else has he got to go on?
And all the time, the same question as before lurks in the background: What if you don’t find Knox?
There are cases that open and never get closed. The mole you never find, the traitor you never name, the leak you can’t locate, that drips and drips from decade into decade—he’s seen cases like that, though he’s never had one, and he knows: they inhabit you, those cases, they suck your life like parasites, they take away your sleep, your marriage, your children’s childhood, and they leave you old and stinking of regret … He’s never had one, and he won’t start now. He won’t.
But what if you don’t find Knox?
His tea is cold. He gets up, goes out, locks his door, walks toward the kitchen. It’s late, but as he passes down the corridor, behind him another door opens. He glances back. It’s Leeson, mug in hand, heading for the kitchen, too. She smiles at him, briefly: the smile you’d give a polite stranger who’s held a door for you.
Leeson tonight. But it could be any of them, they’re all loitering around him. Carter, bluff and hearty as ever, We still haven’t had that drink. Kingman from Special Branch, respectful, keen, playing the same angle as before, I’ve heard so much about you; hints that he’d like to benefit from Powell’s experience. Morris watches him over her glasses, witchily; she gets closest to asking what he’s working on. Leeson holds back more, but she’s watching, too, and working all the hours. Heavy caseload? A big push?
Or because the Section Chief’s lie about his activities stuck?
He’s come to clean out the shit. What do they make of that? He’s going through their files? He can’t reassure them: janitors don’t share their cases, and everything on Knox is embargoed. Still, it would be nice to talk to someone. He thinks of Mitch’s pasted-on friendliness, Bethany’s cool recording-angel stare, noting his failures for some day of reckoning … Another flash of staggering loneliness. He smothers it.
He got too used to normality, didn’t he? Straight desk work, standard office hours. In Washington he advises on security, writes memos, reviews procedures, mentors people more junior than him. Works within a team. Goes home to Tori and Thea—Thea … The years passed, and he forgot what this job involved: the long hours and the isolation, and what those do to you. When he first moved over from MI5, they told him: Janitors are the loneliest people in intelligence. No sounding boards, no one to get it off your chest to. Get used to it.
He steps into the kitchen. Fills the kettle from the tap. Behind him Leeson slips through the doorway, nursing her mug. The room’s tiny, a glorified cupboard. He clicks the kettle on, turns to her. “You’re on the late shift, too?” Half question, half statement.
She smiles a platitude—“That’s the way it goes”—and slides her mug beside his. There’s a tea bag in it already. The kettle begins to mumble. He folds his arms, leans against the counter. They wait.
What if you don’t find Knox?
Should he bring Isidore in again? Lean on him? How much does he know? Not much, not Knox’s ID, but something. Someone hired him to deliver that package: someone with a name, a face … He’ll say he can’t remember, but people do, if you just bring the right pressure to bear, but what’s the right pressure?
He can’t afford to fail.
He’s tired … He rubs his face. Beside him Leeson stands, chin down, sunk in her thoughts, not looking at him. The kettle rumbles on its plinth, begins to steam.
He says, “I’ve got a subject who won’t talk,” and senses Leeson’s twitch of surprise. Her head comes up fractionally.
“He knows something. Not sure how much.” He shakes his head.
He hasn’t spoken to her like this before. To anyone in the building, even the Section Chief. It’s okay: he’s giving nothing away.
“We’ve had a chat. He’s smart. They’re always the worst, the smart ones, aren’t they?”
She doesn’t answer, but then, it’s not really a question. She doesn’t look at him either, and he’s grateful for that, for her allowing him the space to talk.
He says, “And there’s pressure for a result. Of course. Increasing the temptation to get the thumbscrews out.” Leeson shifts on her feet—uncomfortable?—but they’ve barely exchanged a word, she might not get his humor. “Only joking.”
The kettle clicks off. He turns and pours the water into their mugs. Leeson’s tea bag stains the water green and smells of peppermint.
But if we go in hard, and Knox finds out …
He takes a teaspoon, prods his own tea bag, then squeezes it against the side of the mug, scoops it out, drops it into the wastebasket. Opens the fridge and fishes out the milk.
You need Knox to know he can trust you. Don’t run at this too hard. You’ll only lose it.
He says, “You can become too obsessed with the risk of failure, can’t you? And ‘failure’ is such a dirty word.”
He glances across at her. She’s perfectly still, watching him. Then she gives a careful smile and reaches for her mug. She says, “It is”—it hits him, how controlled she is—and suddenly he remembers that other case: the MI5 ops list put out on the open market, the tip-off from Knox, the tech ops guy whose name she got too late, when he’d already fled … There’s a wound still open somewhere. He wants to say, We all have failures. Then he remembers he’s not supposed to know.
Back in his office, he sips his tea.
Threatening Isidore won’t work. So: wait and hope? For now, at any rate, until he comes up with a better plan. There’ll be another meeting with the Section Chief tomorrow. More pressure for a result. And another warning: that he’s to have no direct contact with Knox. Irrelevant, when we don’t know who he is. But the Section Chief’s antsy about that, as if Knox carries some contagious disease, and he could be infected, as Laidlaw was: begin a secret life, keep hidden records, and ally with his source against his masters.
He looks at his watch. In Washington, it’s half an hour to bedtime. Thea’s in pajamas, with her milk, ready for Daddy’s call, and then a story … He picks up the phone to dial, but another thought cuts in
—of Leeson, in her office, contemplating failure—and he feels a pang of guilt.
DAY 21: TUESDAY
JOHANSSEN
Run. You should have run.
A straight choice, no middle ground: either stay in and do the job or pull out immediately. And he saw you, didn’t he? He knows who you are. So go. Go now. Phone Whitman. Ask to be lifted. Walk to the nearest patrol and hand yourself over—
And then what? Phone Fielding? Tell him you’ve pulled out?
How many jobs in six years? And all clean, all fine, each one burying Terry Cunliffe a little deeper. But walk away from this one and then what?
And then what?
The job simply moves on to someone else. Because there’ll always be someone else—never mind what he said to Fielding, someone will find a way. Someone who won’t be careful or quick. A man with a knife. A man without rules. For a second he sees her—abused, bloody, thrashing in pain—Don’t. It’s not your problem.
Still he hasn’t run.
Yesterday he came back to the compound and lay awake on his bunk—Did he recognize you? Can you be sure?—listening for the sound of footsteps on the stairs, Quillan’s men coming for him at last, Charlie Ross at their backs, pointing the finger: Yes, that’s him. Until the gates closed for the night and that was it, he was trapped there, in the clinic, watching the door, while the argument went back and forth in his head, though the answer was the same:
You should have run.
Midnight, then 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., 3:00. Riley smoking under the overhang. Vinnie mopping the floor and talking about the first meal he’s going to have when he gets out; and about his dog, of course, he loves his dog, he’s going to see his dog again—but his eyes keep going anxiously to Cate … Cate, still and closed off from everything, mouth thin and tight, eyes stained with sleeplessness. And Drill in a chair, his gaze flickering between their faces, his head tilted back as if he’s tasted Johanssen’s fear in the air and now he’s trying to trace it back to its source.
You can abort the job, for your own safety.
Or you swallow the risk, phone Karla, go ahead anyway.
It’s 4:00 a.m. before the third option comes to him:
Find Charlie Ross, and kill him.
He pulls on his boots at the foot of the stairs. Cate’s up in her room still. The yard is empty. He crosses to the gate. It’s opened, and out he goes.
Johanssen walks, and the tail walks with him. He stops, and the tail stops. He makes no effort to lose it—that would only make them suspicious—but he’s aware of it all the time, like a physical pressure.
He has given himself one day. One day in which to comb the Program for Charlie Ross, though the men behind him mustn’t guess: he has to make it look random, and aimless, and he can’t ask questions either because those questions, like everything else, will be reported back to Quillan. So: locate Ross, lose the tail, deal with him. Then make the call to Karla, confirming the job, and return to the compound as if nothing’s happened.
Or fail, and make the call to Whitman instead, and leave before the gates close.
He walks for an hour. Down the road from the Skills Development Center a refuse collection gang under armed guard tosses waste bags into the back of a crusher. A snatch takes up the rear. On the pavement by the white admin building, Quillan’s men barter cigarettes. Overhead rain clouds gather.
Charlie Ross is nowhere. Not hanging around outside the boarded-up chapel. Not watching the lads kicking a football on the waste ground. Not buying tobacco in a little shop, not shoveling food in the canteen, not loitering in the handout queues. Charlie Ross has ceased to exist. So who was the man in the fog? A ghost? But there’s no such thing as ghosts: if they existed they’d have haunted him long ago.
No: the Program has swallowed Charlie Ross whole.
Swallowed him up, but any second it may spit him out again.
It is now 11: 00 a.m. If he’s to get out before the gates close, he must phone Whitman at 4:00, latest.
Five hours in which to find Ross—and already he can feel it: the slow slide toward defeat.
Terry Cunliffe, disinterred, grins at him.
“Don’t look at this as a failure,” he says.
DAY 21: TUESDAY
KARLA
Docklands was already waking when I left the apartment at four this morning, lights moving on the roads, taxis dropping traders off at their glass fortresses, the early shift timed to pick up a Far East afternoon’s trade on the Nikkei and the Hang Seng. I took a cab toward central London, then doubled back to the garage block, antisurveillance drills all the way. I chose the small blue hatchback, the car bought to replace the black four-wheel-drive we had to scrap after Graves’s death, only because it had a full tank.
It took me two hours to drive here; another hour to get into position. Two more hours have passed since then. All I’ve done is watch.
I’m standing in a fringe of damp laurels. Twenty meters away, across a wintry lawn, a redbrick Edwardian house slumbers. It sits in an upmarket residential swath on the Berkshire-Surrey border, near Wentworth. Close by, corpulent stockbroker mansions squat behind high walls, but this house is smaller, less guarded. It’s tucked away down a leafy private drive with three other properties, all old houses on big plots. The other houses are out of sight, and silent, the inhabitants at work or on the golf course or the massage table. Occasionally the leathery leaves around me stir, or a blackbird alarm-calls in a neighboring garden, but there are no voices and no footsteps.
From my vantage point I can only see the rear of the house: at ground-floor level, a back door that must give onto a kitchen or a utility room with a window beside it, a pair of French doors, and another window. A patio with sheeted garden furniture runs the whole width of the house; at the far end of it, beyond the kitchen door, there are a couple of outbuildings in dark wood stained green with age.
No lights are on inside, and in two hours there’s been no movement. Maybe I’m already too late? Maybe they’ve gone, cleared out, and they won’t be coming back. But security cameras jut out from under the eaves: I daren’t cross the lawn to peer in through the windows. I’m hoping that, with the records of the calls deleted, whoever’s here thinks they’re still invisible. I can’t afford to let them know they’re not.
Years since I last did live surveillance: I’m out of practice, cold, and hungry. This morning’s cup of coffee is a distant memory, and the bottle of water I brought was empty by nine. The blood stopped circulating in my feet an hour ago; my lower limbs have locked. Still I wait. This address is all I have. The property’s held in the name of a shell company that also pays the bills; the directors are nobodies, stooges paid to put their names to a piece of paper. There’s no landline listed for the address, and no one on the electoral register. The trail begins and ends with the one simple physical fact that those calls were made and received in this house. There’s nowhere else to look.
I shift my position in an attempt to keep warm and stare at the windows.
Just after ten a lamp goes on inside, but it might just be a security light on a timer. No shadows cross behind the glass.
Around ten thirty it starts to rain.
I hear it before I feel it, pattering down on the laurels around me. Then it begins to seep its way through the leaves, dripping into my hair and down my neck. The temperature drops one degree, and then another.
You’re a fool. You’re here, alone, without support, watching a house that’s probably empty. And even if they come back—even if you get a shot of their face, even if you can ID them—what then?
Graves phoned them before he died; and they called him back. Now they’re covering their tracks. But that doesn’t make them Johanssen’s client. And unless you can trace that client, you are nowhere.
The rain peters out. I’m promising myself anything, anything at all, just to get through another hour, when a light goes on in the kitchen, and a man’s face appears briefly at the window.
My c
amera’s tucked inside my jacket. I fumble pulling it out. My fingers no longer work. I hold my breath.
Come back, come back, by everything that’s holy come back—
Another minute. Two. Nothing.
Risk approaching the house? Too dangerous.
A third minute, a fourth …
The kitchen door opens. A man walks out. I freeze.
I know him.
Dark at the back of a warehouse. A bright light. A man in his sixties with the handsome face of a patriarch, sweating through his golfer’s tan—and Craigie’s voice, steady, measured, the facts at his fingertips.
William Hamilton. William Hamilton, the ex–Big Pharma boss, the man who could have been one of Charlotte’s cronies with his expensive casual clothes, his cultured air. Less than three weeks ago I stood in that warehouse, not listening while he told us about his fraud.
He’s different in daylight, grayer somehow, older, more diminished. But it’s him.
He pauses on the terrace for a second, head back, breathing in the air. Music escapes behind him through the open door: a recording of a piano piece, something familiar and sad.
What’s he doing here?
And in the same instant, I know. This is a safe house, and we put him in it.
I haven’t moved or made a sound. But he turns and looks across the garden toward me, and for a frozen moment he seems to stare right at me. His face is pinched and strained, but there’s a resolve about him, too, as if he’s ready to take on all comers. Any second he’ll come across the lawn—
But then it begins to rain again, pattering down on the leaves around me, falling on Hamilton’s bare head. He looks up into the sky, then turns back to the house.
I step out of the cover of the laurels, into the open. “Mr. Hamilton. Do not turn around.”
Shock. An instant bracing against a coming blow, as if I might attack. A fraction of a second in which I’m sure he’ll turn. Then his shoulders drop.
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