She’d slept the sleep of the dead.
She slumped in the armchair, a mug of coffee cooling by her side, and stared at the phone’s keypad, letting her mind relax. Calling a number regularly meant you relied as much on familiarity with the sequence of keys as you did on memory. Change the keypad layout and you could get thrown completely until the brain switched to the default of recalling the correct number. She had two numbers at the back of her mind: one she had used regularly, the other only recently. The first one was the one she wanted. But try as she might, it simply wouldn’t click into place. It belonged to a colleague and friend in Six named Alice Alanya. Alice had been a constant in her life for a while, closer than friends, yet not partners. Thanks to her, after returning from Red Station in Georgia, Clare had stayed out of the reaches of MI5 and MI6, moving constantly and staying away from her previous haunts. It had been Alice who had kept her secretly fed with information on potential hazards, at great risk to herself and in spite of the huge error of judgement Clare had made earlier which had led to her posting to Georgia in the first place. That same loyalty had led her to remain a friend after Clare had dealt with Sir Anthony Bellingham, the deputy operations director who had tried to have her silenced to protect himself.
The thought jogged another, darker part of her memory, and she felt instinctively in her pocket for the round shape that had become something of a talisman. She took it out and looked at it.
It was a powder compact. Bright pink and plastic, it was gaudy, cheap and repulsive. But she could no more have left it behind in the hospital than have jumped out of the window. She opened the lid. Inside was the application pad and powder in a shade of orange she couldn’t have worn if her life had depended on it. But that wasn’t the point of it.
Rik Ferris had bought it for her, and it had taken her all of two minutes, even in a post-operative haze, to see the irony. The MI5 IT nerd with the irritating haircut and loud T-shirts had sent it after she had lost her own compact, the one with a concealed blade that had saved all their lives. It hadn’t been a friendly gesture by Ferris, she knew that; but it had been one of appreciation.
She turned back to the mobile phone, hoping the distraction might have released the number. It was almost there, but the digits were floating just out of reach like fish in a pool.
She swore softly. The last person she wanted to call was the owner of the second number. Right now, though, she couldn’t see any option. Alice she could trust implicitly. But she couldn’t recall her home address, only that it was somewhere in north London, the details too scrambled to retrieve. The only way to contact her would be face-to-face in the street, close to where she worked.
The MI6 building.
She dismissed that immediately. Stupid idea. If they were watching Alice, they’d have her on camera before she got close and the heavy squad would scoop them both up. Even a brush contact was risky and likely to compromise her friend.
She ran her fingers across the keypad, and found the digits coming clear and fluidly. At last! It started to ring at the other end. Then a man’s voice answered, familiar and steady against a background rush of traffic.
‘Harry Tate.’
She couldn’t speak. Instead she cut the connection.
TEN
Harry stared at the small screen as he walked along Piccadilly towards Park Lane. The caller had hung up without speaking. He’d expected it to be Rik Ferris but the number on the screen was unfamiliar. Probably a misdial.
It reminded him that Rik was still looking for a way into HM Prison records, and if he became impatient, was likely to start cutting corners and delving into sites and files where he had no business. It was the reason he’d been kicked out of MI5 in the first place: in moments of boredom he’d gained access to files that the security services had wished to remain forgotten. No harm had been done, but, like Harry and Clare, his punishment had been a posting to Red Station and an intended ticket to a quiet oblivion.
He veered into the quieter sanctuary of Green Park and dialled Rik’s number, checking his surroundings. A few tourists were milling about, unfurling maps and sipping drinks, and early walkers and runners were making their way along the paths and across the grass. But nobody was close by.
‘Fong’s Restaurant. We hep yew?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Exactly what you asked,’ Rik replied, and switched to a Yoda voice. ‘No more it is, no less. Up against a hard place I am.’
‘Cut it out,’ Harry growled, ‘or I’ll confiscate your toys. You haven’t strayed from the brief, have you?’
‘No, I haven’t. HMP only, just like you said. Honestly, between Five, Six and you, it’s like working in a goldfish bowl.’
‘Blame the digital revolution. It’s for your own good, anyway. I’ve got another brief for you.’ He gave him Tobinskiy’s details. ‘Run up everything you can on him, see if he had any friends in London.’
‘Sure. Anyone in particular?’
‘Yes. See if his world ever collided with Clare Jardine’s.’
‘Seriously?’ Rik sounded surprised. ‘Why would it? Anyway, if it had, it wouldn’t be public knowledge, would it? Ergo, nothing on the web.’
‘Maybe. It’s just a thought. Check his name for any images, and look for her face.’ It was a remote stretch, he knew. But stranger things had happened, such as a known face spotted in a crowd where no mention of them had been made in print. ‘I’m on my way to your place. I’ll tell you more when I get there.’ He had a thought and added, ‘You might also run Clare’s name through the mixer and see if you come up with anything. . friends, school. . social media contacts.’
‘I did that once before, but no joy. I’ll try again, though, see if anything’s leaked out. Are you saying she’s out in the wind by herself?’
‘If Ballatyne’s telling the truth, yes. She cut and ran.’
‘Jesus. That must hurt.’ Rik spoke with feeling. He’d been shot himself not long ago just a few hundred yards from where Harry was standing, and was well acquainted with the pain of a gunshot wound.
‘Put the kettle on. I’ll see you later.’
ELEVEN
‘So, how do we find this damned woman, can you tell me that?’ Sergei Gorelkin didn’t quite pound the table, but it was clear to the three men with him that he wanted to. Although smartly dressed as always, in a neat grey suit and white shirt, befitting his cover as a foreign businessman in London, to those who knew him Gorelkin was ruffled. ‘We have lost two days already. She could be anywhere in the world!’
He and his companions were seated in the corner of the Park Room in the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane. It was mid-morning and reasonably quiet, but a suitable tip to the service manager had ensured that nobody else would be seated near them, guaranteeing privacy.
And they needed it. Having dealt with Roman Tobinskiy, a relatively simple matter for men with the right skills, they were now faced with a much more urgent one: the disappearance of a patient in a room near Tobinskiy’s, who may have heard everything that had happened and could, if pushed, explode her news onto the world’s stage. That, as Gorelkin had warned them more than once, simply could not happen.
Alongside Gorelkin were Lt Votrukhin, the team leader, and next to him, toying uneasily with a sugar bowl, Sgt Serkhov. Gorelkin’s question, however, was addressed primarily to the fourth man at the table, who seemed unaffected by the senior Russian’s rancid mood.
‘We look in all the right places, Sergei.’ George Henry Paulton looked cheerily back at him and tapped the table, commanding attention. ‘You asked for my help in tracking someone down, and that’s what I’m here for.’ He shifted in his chair and gazed out of the window over the morning traffic in Park Lane, across to the green swathe of Hyde Park. He would have preferred being out there, feeling the springiness of the turf beneath his feet and breathing in the crisp morning air, rather than doing a grunt job of looking for some missing woman. But he had to be here with these three FSB
thugs instead. It wasn’t the best start to any day, but he’d had little choice when the phone call had come through. There were some people you didn’t say no to. And Gorelkin, an unwelcome echo from his own past which right now he could not afford to be made public, was one of them.
‘Did you know, gentlemen,’ he continued, ‘that London has one of the highest concentrations of CCTV cameras anywhere in the civilised world?’
‘What of it?’ Gorelkin murmured. ‘You British are paranoid. How does that help us with our problem?’
‘Let me give you an example: I could tell Corporal Serkhov here to walk a mile from here in any direction and, given a couple of hours, I could track him every step of the way. I could tell you what he was wearing, what the traffic was like, if the sun was shining — even when he looked rather too closely at a pretty girl along the way.’
Sergeant Serkhov muttered something uncomplimentary under his breath at the implied demotion, but it wasn’t entirely directed at Paulton. As a long-time FSB operative, he had no love of cameras.
‘We have them in Moscow, too.’ Votrukhin put in, sounding almost defensive. ‘Are you saying you can use them to find this woman? That will take forever!’
‘Not all of them, no. Just a few key locations to show us which direction she took, beginning with the area around the hospital. From there we track her progress, playing leapfrog.’
Serkhov looked puzzled, and Votrukhin explained what it meant.
‘It’s quicker than going through them all. Once we have one sighting, there’s a new piece of body recognition software that takes care of the rest.’ He smiled at their doubting expressions. ‘It acts like a template, picking out any figure with similar characteristics, even in a football crowd.’
‘You sound very sure of yourself,’ said Gorelkin.
‘I am. This is my turf, don’t forget. I can use that to my advantage.’
Serkhov frowned. ‘Turf? What is that?’
‘He means it’s his back garden,’ Votrukhin muttered sourly. ‘He knows it like he knows his home.’
‘Quite right, Fyodor.’ Paulton was indifferent to the lieutenant’s tone. ‘I have a feel for this city. I also know how frightened people think. . how they react when they’re on the run. I know all the likely places they’d run to.’ He tapped the table again. ‘But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. You still haven’t told me the name of the person you’re looking for.’
Gorelkin gestured at Votrukhin to go ahead, and the lieutenant said, ‘The name on the hospital chart was Jardine. Clare Jardine.’
A few moments went by, and Paulton felt the air contract about his head as the name came whistling back out of the past. But he kept his face carefully blank as his mind raced over the possibilities. A giant coincidence? Or the playful hand of fate?
Jardine — if it was the same one — was just a name; he’d never had the dubious pleasure of meeting its owner. But clearly something these Russian clowns weren’t aware of was that the woman they had mislaid, the same woman who had been in an adjacent room to where the troublesome Tobinskiy had breathed his final breath, could in all likelihood be a former MI6 operative who had killed her own boss with a concealed knife blade. Given half a chance, she would undoubtedly like to add his name to the list, too, if she ever laid eyes on him. The thought made his bowels twitch.
He also knew that Jardine had helped Harry Tate not so long ago on a job that had very nearly ended with Paulton’s capture. He’d been lucky to escape that by the narrowest margin. Jardine, however, had been shot and very nearly killed by a Bosnian gunman working with Paulton. He hadn’t given a thought afterwards about where she had gone to. Now, it seemed, he had a possible answer. How many Clare Jardines could there be, after all, being treated for gunshot wounds in specialist medical units?
He swore silently while pretending to run the name through his mental database. He could kid himself that if he’d known from the outset who he was being asked to trace, he would have refused to come. But deep down he knew that was a lie. In spite of staying below the radar, Gorelkin had been able to get in touch with him quite easily to make this demand. It would have been simple, had Paulton refused, for the FSB man to have passed on details of his whereabouts to MI5 and MI6, both of which had his name on search-and-detain lists.
In any case, he had to confirm first of all that it was the same woman. Even knowing something deep down wasn’t enough; always check and double-check, a basic rule of intelligence work.
‘Can you do this?’ Gorelkin interrupted his thoughts. The Russian sounded excited. In his senior position in the Division for the Defence of the Constitution, he undoubtedly received a regular flood of information culled from all over the world about new technological advances, much of it aimed at security, surveillance, espionage and law enforcement. He would have heard of this latest digital development, might even have seen it working.
‘I don’t actually have access to it myself,’ Paulton told him smoothly. ‘But I have a contact in the Metropolitan Police who can arrange for a search to be made.’ He rubbed his thumb and fingers together. ‘It would take a small fee, of course, but I’m sure that’s not a problem, is it?’
‘How much?’ Gorelkin’s sour mood had evaporated, as if fanned away by the promise of positive action, and he was now almost jovial, like an indulgent parent being asked for pocket money by a child.
‘It depends how badly — and how quickly — you want to find her.’
Gorelkin gave a cold smile. ‘Very badly and right now. Good enough?’
Paulton nodded and took out a mobile phone. ‘That’s what I like to hear.’ He excused himself and walked away, leaving the three Russians staring at each other.
‘Can we trust this pompous little shit?’ asked Votrukhin sourly. He was still smarting from being held responsible for not seeing a possible threat from the Jardine woman. And now this Englishman with the all-knowing attitude was making the job look like a walk in the park across the way. ‘Where does he get his expertise and contacts?’
Gorelkin looked at him. ‘There was a time, Votrukhin, my friend, when that pompous little shit, as you call him, would have been tracking you right now through this city. He would have had a discreet mobile team around you the moment you stepped off the plane and would have known where you went, who you saw, when you scratched your arse and on which side. And you wouldn’t have known they were there. And all that without this — ’ he waved a circular finger in the air — ‘fancy camera technology. Paulton used to be an operations director for MI5. And he was very good at what he did.’
‘So why is he helping us now?’ asked Serkhov.
‘He’s a capitalist at heart; he joined the private sector. I believe it pays better and he gets to choose what he does.’
‘So we’re paying him?’ Serkhov looked puzzled by the idea. He was more accustomed to telling people what to do; if they complied, which was nearly always, it was because he had the means and information that left them with little choice. Life was simple that way.
‘In a manner of speaking.’ Gorelkin considered the matter for a moment. ‘Let me put it this way: Paulton owes me one or two favours. I helped keep him out of jail once he left his position in MI5, and he performed certain. . tasks for me in return. Tasks his former masters would almost certainly not approve of. Paulton knows I like bargains to be kept, and his payment for helping us now is that he gets to live a little longer.’ He glanced at Votrukhin as Paulton walked back into the room, slipping his mobile into his pocket. ‘As to your question about whether we can trust him, not in a million years. He’s a traitor born and bred. You should bear that in mind.’
Paulton sensed, as he returned to the table, that the Russians had been talking about him. It didn’t bother him; he’d have been amazed if they hadn’t. He was, after all, a former enemy, even though he was now helping them out in their dirty hour of need. Suspicions would be natural on both sides. But he was determined that this would be the last time Gor
elkin crooked his finger at him like a master summoning a servant. He’d do this one job, but not merely because Gorelkin had demanded it. He had a much broader plan in mind; one which would see him triumph over adversity. He hadn’t yet finalised the full details, but the framework was there.
Then a great many people would find the tables turned.
He’d made a call to his contact in the Met, just as he’d told the Russians. It added slightly to the risk of exposure, but his choices were limited if he wanted to make this visit as productive as possible. What Gorelkin and his goons didn’t know was that he’d made a second call, this to a person high up the food chain, a person with the means and position in the intelligence community to assist his return to the UK — and not under a false flag and a silly beard, either.
That same person had also given him the information he was after: it was indeed former MI6 killer Clare Jardine who had been in King’s College until the other night. Not that he was about to tell the Russians just yet. Better to keep some things back and retain a home advantage. But the information made his next course of action quite simple: find Jardine, turn her over to Gorelkin and his thugs, then set about selling them all as part of his retirement plan to come back home for good.
It made using his contact in the Met Police even more urgent. It might burn the man if anyone caught him with his hands on the CCTV search button, but that was too bad. He’d have to make it worth his while.
He was tired of running. Tired of looking over his shoulder. Tired of wondering if Harry Tate — no, knowing — was out there somewhere, waiting to take him down.
It was time to come in.
All he needed was a bargaining tool that they simply couldn’t turn down.
‘She’s got nowhere to run,’ he announced as he sat down. ‘She’s the product of a care home. She got caught in a gang shooting in Streatham, south London and King’s College was the nearest unit.’
‘But she understood Russian,’ Gorelkin muttered. ‘How is that possible for a girl from a care home?’
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