by Henry Porter
‘Sure you do. You’re still in the game. So you know that sometimes you go and find the secret, but other times the secret comes to you, and that’s usually when you don’t want it. Make no mistake: this secret is coming your way, pal, which means you will be in a position to harm them, just as Mr Hisami and Mr Harland were. That’s why they wound up dead and in a coma. And they want you dead. I don’t think they’ll be bothering with amateurs like Visser and Rajavic any longer. They’ll set someone really good on you.’
‘Thanks for the reassurance.’
‘We want to make friends with you for the time when the secret comes to you. We want to be the guys you share it with because you know we will do the right thing. Does that make sense?’ He offered his business card in the palms of both hands.
‘You keep saying “them”’, said Samson, taking the card. ‘Who do you think is them?’
‘I guess the them is a big part of the secret. Maybe that’s the whole goddamn secret, eh? It feels like that to me.’ He returned to his chair and leaned back with his hands clasped behind his head. ‘There’s one thing you need to do and that’s get the hell out of this shitty country. Go travel. It’s not good for you here. They have your entire life mapped out and someone high up here wants to nail you.’
Reiner rose and moved to the door. ‘I believe you were on your way to a meeting. Can we give you a ride?’
‘Yes, Mayfair,’ said Samson.
Toombs gave him a pitying look from his chair. ‘Myself, I don’t think you’re going to make it, but the number on the card is good for these two guys, also,’ he said, gesturing to the two young agents. ‘If you need protection, they’re the bubblewrap.’
Chapter 17
The Bird
Samson returned to Cedar and went to eat at the table he sometimes used at the rear of the restaurant by the kitchen entrance. It was still early and the surrounding tables were empty. Ivan reported no sightings of the Matador, but a police presence in the street had been noted earlier, although it was not clear whether it had been focused on Cedar. Samson could have gone round to Macy’s office immediately, but he needed to eat and ponder things. He’d reached a conclusion about Macy’s behaviour and that of his client, Denis Hisami, but the appearance of the FBI and the CIA in town and the odd nature of the meeting with them convinced him that they knew much more than they had let on. Toombs was right. He was still in the game, which is why he recognised that, as well as apparently bringing him into their investigation by sharing some of the mystery contained in Denis Hisami’s briefcase, they had tagged him and were basically waiting to see what happened. Toombs offered protection but, in reality, that was also surveillance.
He brought out his phone and texted Vuk Divjak with an offer of €7,500 for his information, then copied the text, along with Vuk’s bank details, which he had from a previous job, to Imogen. Vuk was a rogue, but in all the dealings Samson had had with him, he’d never lied. If he said he had information, it was worth having. Macy would kick up, but it was Hisami’s money and, besides, Samson was in no mood to spend carefully or, for that matter, to oblige bloody Macy Harp.
Then he brought up the photographs he’d taken in the Pit and was unsurprised to see that all traces of the words on the whiteboard exactly fitted the five words found in Hisami’s calendar. PIT was part of PITCH; EAR was what was left of PEARL; ORA of AURORA; R N of BERLIN; and S FRO of SAFFRON. He asked Ivan to fetch the laptop from his bags, now stowed in the restaurant’s cloakroom, ready for him to leave. He entered all five words in the search engine and found a link to something called Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours. Of course! They were all colours – pitch black; pearl grey; aurora red; Berlin blue and saffron yellow. He found the online version of the nomenclature. The first attempt at classifying colour had subsequently been refined by an Englishman, Patrick Syme, in 1814; the nomenclature was used by Charles Darwin in his scientific observations. Each colour was defined through references to nature, which Samson thought ingenious and also charming. Pearl grey was found on the backs of black-headed and kittiwake gulls and in a mineral called porcelain jasper; pitch black can be seen on the guillemot and in yenite mica; Berlin blue on the wing feathers of a jay; and saffron yellow in the tail coverts of the golden pheasant.
This was Harland all over. But the origin of the code was no great puzzle. Anyone wanting to know the relationship between them would simply put the words in a search engine and locate Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours. Odd that Toombs and Reiner hadn’t mentioned that. Maybe they were testing him, although there seemed no earthly point. The question, of course, was what did the five colours stand for? Having seen the board, Samson was sure that each represented a project and that progress on those five projects was logged in the room where Naji and Zoe Freemantle worked, the operations centre of the whole enterprise.
The phone rang. It was Vuk.
‘English pussy, I take deal – €8,000.’
‘I said €7,500,’ said Samson. ‘It’s on the way to your account.’
‘Vuk needs eight. Big expenses.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Money first. Talk later. This clear for you?’
Samson leaned into the phone. ‘Vuk, unless you tell me now, you won’t get any fucking money. There’s time for me to stop the transfer.’
‘Okay, I tell you English pussy first thing I know and this only. Name of man who kill Mr Bobby Harland is Nikolai Horobets. He is Ukrajinski.’
The name of the Ukrainian hadn’t been released to the media and there was no way Vuk could have read it anywhere. ‘Okay, so we’re on,’ said Samson. ‘What else can you tell me?’
‘Rajavic, Drasko and Dutch cunt Rossi, they work for Ukrajinski from Vojvodina. Ukrajinski drug lord.’
‘So, all three worked for one man. What is the drug lord’s name?’
‘Oret, but he is now not important. Oret is dead. He killed yesterday with wife.’
‘So, the link between them all and the man most likely to have hired them was murdered yesterday?’ Samson grabbed an order pad from one of his waiters and wrote down the name Oret.
‘Yes, I just say that.’
‘How?’
‘Shot in car by home.’
‘So who paid Oret?’
‘Man who is lion killer.’
Samson inhaled. ‘Vuk, what do you mean by “lion killer”?’ Then he understood. ‘Is he a big-game hunter?’
‘Yes, of course, very big game-hunter. Ruski. Maybe living in Kipar.’
‘Kipar? Ah yes, Cyprus. So, this individual you’ve heard about could be a Russian national based in Cyprus. Is he the person who arranged for the supply of the nerve agent?’
‘I do not know this. His name Anatoly Stepurin. Maybe he is GRU or maybe FSB.’
Samson made a note. ‘What makes you think this?’
‘His name in newspaper.’
‘Hold on a moment, Vuk. I’m just going to look this character up.’ He entered the name into the search engine and without too much trouble found Stepurin exposed in the French press as someone with a background in military intelligence and now an organiser of illegal big-game hunting. A French investigative journalism unit named Rochet had managed to trace his phone to dark facilities in and around Moscow that were particularly associated with ‘foreign actions’, which invariably meant assassinations.
‘This man is practically famous,’ said Samson. ‘Can you tie him to Oret?’
‘I have zero more information. But this is good for English pussy, no?’
‘Yes, it looks very good – thank you, Vuk.’
‘I go now to drink and fuck my girl. Cheerio, English pussy.’
Samson hung up and at that moment saw Ivan look round, hand Samson’s bags to a waiter to bring them over and then make urgent flapping motions with his hand below the desk. Samson got up and, without looking back, entered
the kitchen, walked past the half-dozen cooks, who took no notice of him, and moved to the side door. At the far end of the narrow passage between the two buildings he saw the blue and yellow of a police vehicle parked at the front of the restaurant. He turned left, squeezed past the bins and moved to the northern end of the passage, which opened into a mews, where he waited for the cab that he knew Ivan would send on the restaurant account. Fifteen minutes later, after a journey that took him a long route around Mayfair, he was standing in Macy Harp’s suite of offices, confronted by a man in his seventies who rose from one of the armchairs to greet him.
He had once been very tall. Even with the stoop of old age, he had a few centimetres on Samson and now looked down at him with watery blue eyes that had the playful, lunatic energy of a gun dog. His nose was long and bony; his cheeks were hollow and creased from a lifetime of manic grinning. On his scalp there was a light covering of sandy-grey hair that received no attention whatsoever. He was deeply tanned with liver spots on his hands and wrists, and on his forehead was evidence of the removal, by surgery, of at least one troubling lesion. He took Samson’s hand in an iron grip and, for a moment, his eyes stopped moving and he studied him with professional interest. Then he made a noise that was halfway between a bark and a laugh and managed to convey both pleasure and warmth.
This turned out to be Cuth Avocet, a contemporary of Robert Harland and Macy Harp’s in SIS and an early partner in Hendricks Harp, though, for one reason or another, he had found it necessary to remove himself to a ranch fifty miles from the town of Broom in Western Australia, where he’d remained for three decades, building a nature reserve and bringing up a second family. He was known as the Bird. Most people assumed that the Bird was dead, and that was the way he liked it. Looking at this SIS dinosaur, with his bush jacket, silver snake bangle, and enormous feet shod in giant-sized trainers, Samson decided he was one of the upper class’s natural killers, a man who’d blow up a bridge or slit a throat with the same ease as casting a trout line on some posh friend’s stretch of water.
Before they sat down, he told them that the police were about to arrest him and he had very little time. ‘Won’t your friend be bored by all this? It’s going to be detailed, I’m afraid,’ he said to Macy.
‘Cuth is up to speed and has some things to tell you,’ said Macy.
‘I want more on Zoe Freemantle, Macy, and no bullshit. My assumption is that she was hacking GreenState’s system. She never left the office without her laptop, always took it with her to the washroom or a meeting. It was never out of her sight. Do you know whether she had any help on the inside?’
‘No.’
‘You weren’t protecting anyone else and you’re not aware of any other part of operation Harland and Hisami?’
‘No, though I was aware that Denis and Bobby were working on a broad canvas.’
‘But you know nothing of that.’
‘No.’
‘Who was Zoe reporting to?’
‘Ultimately, Denis. But there must have been an intermediary.’
‘And you didn’t know who that was?’
Macy shook his head.
Samson didn’t believe him. ‘But we can assume,’ he continued, ‘that GreenState is the vital part of this investigation and that there was reason to believe Zoe was at increased risk, which is why I was employed. But instead of pursuing Zoe, who was, after all, working for Denis and Bobby, they twice tried to kill me. How does that make sense?’
‘I think it may simply be a mistake. Your connection with Bobby and Denis is known. When you showed up at GreenState, it was assumed that you were the person they had to fear.’
The Bird’s leg was jigging. He cleared his throat and looked at Macy mischievously. He had already got there.
‘You put me in as a decoy,’ said Samson.
‘That may have been their plan,’ said Macy, ‘but I had no idea. They assumed you could look after yourself, and it was for a very short period of time. And let’s not forget, you were being handsomely rewarded.’
‘You put me in as a bloody decoy,’ Samson repeated, only just keeping his temper, ‘and ever since I have been taking the heat. Two attempts on my life, my friend was nearly killed, and now the police and both the Bureau and the Agency are on my case, while Zoe Freemantle freely flits here and there without the slightest problem. I have to admit, it worked very well.’ He stopped and examined them both with some irritation, then, to Macy, he said, ‘Are you going to give me a drink?’ The wine he’d had with his meal had eased the pain in his leg, but it was now returning. Macy got up and poured them each a whisky, which in the Bird’s case was downed in one.
‘Then there is Naji,’ said Samson, studying Macy closely for a reaction. ‘What do you know about his involvement?’
‘The boy you chased around Macedonia? I know nothing of his involvement. Is he here, in London?’
‘He was working in the place that Zoe visited in east London. They’ve cleared it out now, but I saw him there, and that would fit with the level of sophisticated communications that GCHQ had traced coming from the area. Harland and Naji got on well. He spotted the talent and bloody well groomed him for the job.’
The Bird nodded. That evidently sounded like his old friend. A silence ensued as Samson thought. The two older men watched him. ‘Maybe,’ he said at length, ‘we’re looking at something that’s a rushed job. Maybe the person who ordered these killings was moving very rapidly because they were trying to stop something from happening. The best way of doing that was immediately killing the people they considered were the principals. Is that a fair conclusion?’
Macy nodded.
‘So,’ continued Samson, ‘they were trying to protect someone or something from an imminent threat that stemmed from the investigation at GreenState. And GreenState is vital; otherwise I wouldn’t have been used as a decoy. Have you learned anything more about Zoe Freemantle, Macy?’
‘No.’
‘I watched her leave her apartment last night. The place was part of her backstory – not her real home. She knows what happened to Bobby and Denis and she was in the street when I was attacked the first time, so we can assume that she’s either gone to ground or has skipped the country because she’s in great danger.’
The Bird made a snorting noise and looked up good-naturedly at Samson.
‘Cuth has a theory, but he also has some information,’ said Macy. ‘Tell Samson, Cuth.’
The Bird’s gaze locked on to a vase of flowers on the coffee table in front of him. ‘I talked to Bobby a couple of weeks ago. We were friends from a long time back, like Macy here.’ He looked up and offered him a comradely smile, which was reciprocated. ‘When he got cancer, I rang quite a bit. These last few weeks, he knew he was out of time, and that makes me think that Bobby wanted to see some results from what he and your friend Mr Hisami were doing. So, I believe you’re spot on when you say it was a rushed job. Rushed on both sides – these Balkan cut-throats were obviously recruited in a blind panic.’
Macy interrupted. ‘Stop waffling, Cuth, and tell him your bloody information.’
The Bird’s great hands came together and he rubbed his knuckles as though trying to restore the circulation. ‘It all goes back to Berlin. You know that the three of us – Bobby, Macy and me – were part of the operation to extract an Arab terrorist named Abu Jemal in ’89 and, subsequently, we helped Bobby exfiltrate his two agents on the night the Wall came down. Their names were Rudi Rosenharte and Ulrike Klaar. You probably know that they married and then Rudi was murdered by ex-Stasi assassins and Ulrike ended up marrying Bobby.’
‘Yes, she told me the story.’
‘Well, they were both invited back to Berlin for the thirtieth-anniversary celebrations. Very discreet, very low key, no bloody journalists – a lunch with some old faces, a few veterans from the GDR networks, heads of the German intelligence services
, station chiefs, the mayor of the city, and so forth. I gather the German Chancellor looked in and was very sweet to one and all. Of course, she was from the East, as you know.’
‘They told me about it,’ said Samson. ‘He asked me there for the anniversary and I had dinner with Bobby, Ulrike and her son that evening.’
‘Really! Anyway, sometime during that weekend he laid eyes on an individual he thought was dead. He called this person the “Ghost from the East”. Ulrike may know who it was, but he certainly wouldn’t tell me. He never spoke about this again to me, but I knew it was terribly important to him.’
Macy got up from his desk, moved to the drinks cabinet and waggled the decanter at them. Samson shook his head. ‘This all may seem like history to you,’ continued the Bird, ‘but very soon after that weekend in Berlin, Denis and Bobby, who had already met, came together and started cooking up something. Denis funded it and Bobby acted as director.’
‘Good of you to bloody well tell me all this,’ said Samson to Macy.
‘It wasn’t in my power to do so. It was Denis’s decision, and he would have told you everything in the call he’d arranged.’ He looked embarrassed, swirled the whisky in his glass before knocking it back in one. ‘What’re you going to do?’
‘I’m going to have to talk with Nikolai Horobets, the man who killed Harland.’
‘They’ve got him locked down in that hospital.’
‘Not for me he isn’t.’ He stopped. ‘I will need money – a lot of it. You have the bank details for Aymen Malek and Claude Rameau. Tell Tulliver this is for my expenses. I’ll need 10k initially. More later.’
‘Anastasia is running the show now. We’ll have to ask her.’
‘Fine, you talk to her.’
‘I’ll give her your new number. How are you planning to get out of the country? Imogen said the police were here three hours ago. They told her they’d be back.’
‘Ferry to Belfast, drive to Dublin then ferry to France. I’ll use the Belgian ID.’