by Henry Porter
He had no contact with her at GreenState – his was a lowly volunteer’s job replying to questions on the campaign website with a set of standard responses that were designed to elicit money – but he was in a position to observe her most of the day, and he was pretty certain that she had not yet noticed him. She was self-contained and never involved herself with office politics. Her colleagues were wary of her because of her sharp tongue and she was no respecter of status or the conventional NGO politesse where everyone’s opinion is indulged, however empty or lacking in evidence. He heard her murmur to GreenState’s director of campaigns, a man named Desmond who Samson heartily disliked, ‘We’re doing good work, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to call you out when you’re talking crap.’
Her behaviour was tolerated because she was good at what she did. She had fluent French and German and often appeared in the morning having completed, overnight, the work that would take others a couple of days. She wrote video scripts, advertising briefs and focused on GreenState’s messaging, for which reason she often took meetings outside the office with agencies providing their services free. No one asked where she was going, or why. Not even the ridiculous busybody Desmond.
Samson resigned himself to a fruitless wait and let his gaze travel the breadth of the five-street intersection. The regulars on the street were beginning to be familiar to him – addicts, with sleeping bags round their necks, scrambling for deals beneath the rail bridge, north of the Edgar Building; an abandoned young man handing out religious leaflets on the traffic island; two glacially moving homeless men; and the team of Roma beggars who looked as though they might all be related. The Junction was a twenty-minute walk from the vast wealth of the City of London, but a different universe. No one made much money here: the buildings were tired, rubbish was piled everywhere, and people struggled. But for all that, it had a palpable life force that Samson admired. It reminded him of the Middle East – his native Lebanon.
The thin drizzle outside turned into rain, but it was lunch hour and the streets weren’t any less busy. His phone went. It was one of Macy’s assistants, asking him for a meeting, or conference call, at 7 p.m. Samson opted for the meeting. He wanted to be in the room for the call with the States.
‘What’s going on, Imogen?’
She ignored him. ‘Seven p.m. prompt, Paul, so if you have any concern about not being here, I’ll send you the dial-in.’
Samson glanced at his watch – it was 1.30 p.m. – and he assured her he’d make it. ‘And you can tell Macy that we’ll need to review the current job,’ he added.
As he hung up, a big, freakish fellow wearing a black leather kilt, panel leggings and a filthy American sports blouson, appeared outside the café and looked through the window, trying to see past his reflection. His face was broad – vaguely Slavic. Samson noted a missing upper-left tooth and a pierced nose. The man turned away and, with a kind of jig, began thrusting a crumpled cup at passers-by, who had absolutely no problem ignoring him.
‘The state of that!’ said a woman behind the counter. ‘He was someone’s sweet little baby once. Imagine!’
Samson wasn’t interested. Something had made him straighten in his chair.
No conscious process in him asked: am I watching a surveillance operation here? But the conviction that he was arrived fully formed in his mind. Two men, across the street, one with his hand in an empty knapsack, kept glancing at the Edgar Building then looking away. An Asian couple on his side of the street pretended to talk but were surely communicating with others – both wore microphone earbuds. A fourth and maybe a fifth were separately threading their way through the stalled traffic towards the gates of Mo’s Tyre and Body Shop, which lay between the Edgar Building and a rail bridge to the north. The whole thing could be accidental, but the choreography looked right, and the operation seemed to be focused on the Edgar Building. He paid up without removing his eyes from the street then walked to the door. Still inside the café, he craned to see north and south of the Junction, wondered if either of the illegally parked vans was part of the surveillance team and whether the operation had been mounted by the police, MI5, or was a joint endeavour. There were at least eight watchers around the Junction and he even considered the beggar capering a few paces away might be part of the team.
The thought that he didn’t want Zoe walking into this situation arrived a few moments before a cab pulled up awkwardly at the mouth of Cooper’s Court, by which time he had taken out two phones, copied the number for Zoe that he had acquired at campaign headquarters from his personal phone into the field of a new text message on a burner phone and written, ‘Do NOT enter the Edgar. Leave the area now!’ As he looked up, the cab came to a halt and he saw someone paying. A flash of the suede coat inside the cab – it was Zoe. He sent the text. She got out and looked around in preparation to cross over to the Edgar Building. Samson decided he would have to break cover and get her away from the building – some change in the barometric pressure around the Junction, which maybe only a former intelligence officer would be aware of, told him that the team was ready to make a move. He stepped out of the café and went three paces, but saw that she had pulled out her phone and was reading as she walked. She stopped suddenly on the pedestrian crossing, looked around and turned to head back to Samson’s side of the road. He moved back. At the moment she reached the curb, as yet apparently without recognizing Samson, who was no more than a few metres away, he became aware of a blurred movement in his right field. The beggar was on the move and coming towards them fast. His hood was raised against the rain; both arms were bared and he now wore gloves. In his right hand, held low, there was a blade about six inches long.
Samson’s basic knowledge of self-defence came from a course taken as an SIS officer. He’d only made use of it properly once – in Syria, a man came at him with a knife when he was carrying cash to help trace and free the Kurdish-American doctor Aysel Hisami. Samson had seen that attack coming and had had time to step outside the thrust of the knife, seize the man’s wrist with his right hand and go to work on his face, clawing at his eyes with his left. It had proved remarkably effective and he’d quickly disarmed and knocked out the young fighter, a member of his escort into ISIS-held territory who had been looking for an opportunity to get Samson alone for the previous twenty-four hours. Now Samson had less warning and he had no idea which way the man planned to go. He instinctively blocked the way to Zoe, on his left, and shouted for her to run, but that meant he was still inside the line of thrust. Someone screamed. Samson moved to his right, grabbing the man’s upper arm, forcing it away and, at the same time, delivering a punch to his Adam’s apple, then several rapid upward blows to his chin with the heel of his hand. He was much stronger than Samson and he easily wrestled his arm free. Samson moved back. The man came at him again and Samson aimed a kick at his groin and, taking hold of his upper arm for a second time, headbutted him in the face. These two blows did something to stall the attack, but he was aware that his back was against the café’s window and he had nowhere to go. People had scattered from the pavement and there was now no sign of Zoe. He ducked to his left, but the man pursued him with a boxer’s dance, jabbing the air with the knife. Samson was aware of two new sounds – a woman behind him shouting for the man to drop the knife and the roar of a motorbike that had mounted the pavement and skidded in a 180-degree turn to face away from him. He looked round to see one of the watchers aiming a gun at the beggar, feet splayed and both hands holding the gun. She was a police officer and knew what she was doing. He looked back for the man’s reaction. He simply shrugged and began to back away, smiling with the certainty that the officer could not possibly take a shot at him with so many people about. The beggar leapt on to the back of the bike, took the helmet handed to him by the driver and they sped along the pavement, cleaved a path in the lunchtime crowds then darted through a gap in the traffic and went south.
It was the same motorbike Samson h
ad seen waiting in the tunnel by Embankment station, a ten-year-old Suzuki with the maker’s blue-and-white livery beneath the grime – as old and unremarkable as his own lowly Honda. He had obviously been followed, because the knifeman had arrived outside the café before Zoe. This interested him, for at no stage on his journey from Embankment station had he seen the bike in his mirrors, which led him to one conclusion – his Honda must have been fitted with a tracking device. This thought was followed by a more arresting one – unless they were using him to lead them to Zoe, which was, at least, a possibility, he was the target. But this made no sense whatsoever. What mattered was that Zoe Freemantle had got away from the vicinity of the Edgar Building unharmed and unidentified by the police. That was what he was paid for.
The woman officer who had drawn her gun was anxious to get back to her operation and hurriedly took down his name and address and said someone would be along to talk to him about the ‘incident’. Samson gave her false details and, as soon as she had left, went to his bike, unlocked the helmet box and placed the key in the ignition. Whatever the police presence around the Junction, it wouldn’t be long before the bike, together with the tracker, was stolen from Cooper’s Court. He checked that no police had gone back to the café then left the area, noticing that the minor matter of a knife attack at the scene had not disrupted the surveillance operation.
He went straight back to Westminster because he needed to check whether the GreenState building was being watched and he also wanted to know Zoe’s reaction to finding him at the Junction. She may not have recognised him immediately, but he had shouted her name during the attack, so she was bound to have spotted him and it would be immediately obvious that he’d been shadowing her. That meant this particular job was over, which was a relief to him, yet there were questions he wanted answered. She took care with anti-surveillance routines, but was she aware of regular attempts to follow her? Had she ever seen the man in the black leather kilt before? And what was going on in the Edgar Building that interested the police so much?
There was no sign of any surveillance outside the building, so Samson entered and went back to his desk in the volunteer room, which also served as an overflow for the digital department, and returned to where he’d left off addressing inquiries to the organisation’s main site. GreenState’s purpose was to advocate a revolutionary new deal, zero-growth economy and a transformation of the way people live and consume. In reality, it was a number of different campaigns all housed in the same building – there were the GreenState Economics Foundation, GreenState Water, GreenState Climate Research, GS-STOP, which campaigned for a total ban on trophy hunting, and GSMedical, which sniped at big pharma. The organisation, Samson realised, was very large, given its humble origins as an NGO limited to activism in the state of California, very rich and also all rather opaque. But in its private mission, GreenState was unwaveringly clear. As a likeable volunteer organiser named Rob had explained during Samson’s first week, GreenState only gave a damn about three things: data, getting things for free and looking after its own image. Rob cheerfully admitted that the climate emergency and mass extinction of species probably came fairly low down the list of the organisation’s priorities because, well, it was like all campaigns – the success of the organisation rather than the crusade mattered most to the senior people.
GreenState had a thirst for data, for which reason Samson’s job this past three weeks had been to answer every incoming email with a customised appeal for money, followed by a request, delivered in the most unctuous and manipulative language, for the correspondent to complete a questionnaire on their lifestyle, beliefs, income, social-media engagement and environmental activism that would allow GreenState ‘to better serve the planet and its people’. It was surprising how many of those who turned down the request for an immediate donation were happy to complete the detailed survey. ‘If we don’t get them to donate now, we get them later,’ Rob told him while going through the procedures for replying to emails and Web enquiries. ‘Whenever there are floods, wildfires, news stories about the unprecedented release of methane from the tundra, etcetera, we bang out appeals to different groups of respondents based on the data they’ve given us in the questionnaire. It’s pretty goddamn effective.’ In the guileless responses, which included mobile numbers, private email addresses and income, and at times ready donations, Samson saw Rob was right. GreenState was a cash cow with a lot of political power that could be deployed internationally, nationally, or at constituency level, although it never actually caused much trouble to the government. ‘We work on the inside to reform,’ said Rob.
The operation intrigued Samson and when he was waiting for Zoe to make a move he researched the company structure. He used to do this in his brief career as a banker before being recruited by SIS, and he was surprised to find that there were no annual reports because GreenState was now owned by a series of private companies, the original evangelicals having long since been removed. The whole was controlled by an American parent company called GreenSpace Dynamics US Inc., which in turn was run by a tiny board of business figures, about whom there was also very little public information. GreenState made a lot of noise about the good it was doing but was remarkably silent about its own affairs.
Late in the afternoon, Zoe appeared in the office, looking stricken. Samson wasn’t close enough to see if she had been crying, but thought she might have been – maybe she had been shocked by the attack in the street and thought that she was the target, but that didn’t seem in keeping with the character he’d observed. Instead of removing her coat, she strode down the aisle of the open-plan campaign centre with her bag slung over her shoulder. A few minutes later she came back and went straight to the exit without stopping. He couldn’t follow without making it obvious and, besides, she seemed too upset to have the conversation he wanted.
A minute or two later, Desmond appeared. ‘A word with you, Mr Ash, if you wouldn’t mind.’ He signalled to the two youths from Digital, who made themselves scarce, and checked his reflection in the glass partition. He sucked the ends of his reading glasses, toyed with one of the grey curls that framed his face then regretfully left his reflection to its own devices. ‘We have had a complaint, Mr Ash. I’m afraid I have no alternative, as Director of Campaigns, but to ask you to leave.’
Samson said nothing.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘Yes, that’s fine – I’ll leave.’
‘You don’t want to hear the nature of the complaint?’
Samson shook his head, got up and hooked his jacket over his shoulder.
The Director of Campaigns was not going to be deprived of the pleasure. ‘I’ll tell you anyway. We’ve had a complaint from a member of staff – a much-valued and trusted member of staff – that you have been stalking her during your time here and that, further, she believes you volunteered at GreenState in order to carry out your campaign of harassment. It will be obvious to you that we cannot allow this situation to continue. I will inform Security that if you try to gain entry to these offices, or are seen loitering in the vicinity, they should call the police. Is that clear?’
Samson shrugged and smiled.
‘Have you nothing to say?’
‘Nope,’ said Samson, brushing past him.
‘There’s one other thing. We’re aware that you have used your time here to investigate the organisation – Web searches are recorded, as I’m sure you know. We had you marked down as an undesirable and you would, in any case, have been told we no longer required your services at the end of the week. GreenState will defend itself, Mr Ash. Do not trifle with us.’
Desmond’s neck was flushed and his Adam’s apple was working furiously. Samson smiled from the doorway. ‘You look like you need a rest, Desmond. Have a good evening.’
As he left the building, the burner phone in his pocket pinged with a message from Zoe. ‘Now please fuck off, whoever you are, and leave this to
me.’
He replied, ‘Thanks for that. Whatever you’re doing in the Edgar, you’re being watched. Stay safe.’
Chapter 3
Survivors of the Bridge
It was still raining when he arrived in Mayfair. The bookings for his restaurant, Cedar, were not good for that evening and it seemed unlikely that there would be any change, unless there was late trade from the Curzon Cinema nearby. Ivan, who had worked for Samson’s parents before him, and without whom he couldn’t run what was described as Mayfair’s premier Lebanese restaurant, appeared five minutes later and hovered at the door to the office as Samson began to go through the day’s invoices. ‘What is it, my friend?’
‘Mr Nyman is downstairs. He’s been waiting half an hour. I have served him coffee.’
‘Jesus, that’s all I need. Let’s make him wait a bit longer.’
‘He knows you’re here.’
‘Tell him I’m busy. I don’t want him thinking he can drop in any time.’
‘He’s booked a table for later. He is to be joined by a lady friend.’
‘Nyman with a woman! It can only be his sidekick, Sonia Fell. Make sure they order the ’89 Musar. That should deter him from coming again.’ The materialisation in his life of Peter Nyman, now of indeterminate status at SIS but always capable of making trouble, was never good news. After being shot or, rather, winged in a street in Tallinn, Nyman and his colleagues had tried to put the blame on Samson and have him arrested by the Estonian authorities. The last time Samson saw him, he was cowering in the street outside the club when Adam Crane – aka Aleksis Chumak – was lifted two years before.