They met in a coffee shop beside the embassy. It was only vague information, the official stressed, unconfirmed, not corroborated, chaff in the air … It was the currency in which the agencies dealt. Because of events that had taken place nineteen years previously, a criminal contract had been taken out on the life of a British citizen. Of course, intelligence was an inexact science, but the name of the target was Harvey Gillot.
The Briton wrote briefly in his notepad, pocketed it, thanked the official, was thanked in turn for buying the coffee, and they parted.
‘What’s the money going to be?’
‘Can’t answer that, lad.’
‘I’m saying, Pop, that our kid doesn’t step out through his front door unless the money’s right and half up-front.’
They sat in the prison’s temporary visiting room – refurbishment had closed the hall that was normally used. The ‘kid’ was Robbie Cairns, ‘lad’ was his father, Jerry, and ‘Pop’ his grandfather. Every Monday, the elder Cairns of the dynasty travelled from Rotherhithe in south-east London by tube and bus to visit his son. Both had a history of success and failure as armed robbers; both were familiar with the visiting suites and conditions inside them; both were aware conversations were recorded on audio bugs. They sat in the centre of the area, with families all around them, encouraging the brats to bawl and yell as they talked quietly.
‘We consider very carefully any offer that comes through because of who pushed it our way.’
Neither father nor son had delusions of importance. The affluence they craved had eluded them – never as much in a wages van or a safe as they’d been told there would be. And there had been the cock-ups, fiascos, like when the getaway wheels’ engine had stalled on the Strand, which was Jerry’s closest shave with the ‘big one’, and his father being grassed up, then intercepted on the way to the snatch. Tales of ill luck littered their stories. Neither had ever been major league, but Lenny Grewcock was: he had a villa in Spain, a block of time shares outside Cannes, a casino in Bratislava and three restaurants on the Thames, the Bermondsey stretch. ‘Yes, Pop, we don’t piss him about.’
The surprise to father and son was that the ‘kid’ – little Robbie, no weight, no muscle, only those horrible piercing eyes – had been headhunted by a man with the prestige of Lenny Grewcock.
‘I tell you this, lad, for nothing. There was never anyone in our family before like Robbie.’
‘Fuck knows where he came from ’cause he scares me. Vern doesn’t, nor Leanne, and I’d swear on any Bible that Dot never touched another bloke, but fuck knows where the kid comes from.’
‘I’ll jack the money, squeeze what I can – but it’ll be Lenny Grewcock I’m squeezing. With me? The kid’ll do it well, and it’ll place us handily, having Lenny Grewcock a satisfied punter.’
‘Nice one, Pop.’
They talked some more. Jerry Cairns had trouble getting his head round the news that a village was buying the services of his son. What did he know about Croatia? Not a lot. Asked who the target was. His father tapped his nose – not the sort of information to be murmured over the table of the visitor’s room. ‘It’ll be a nice earner, lad.’
‘Because our kid’ll do a good clean job – always does.’
They had a little cuddle, and a father left his son behind the walls of HMP Wandsworth. He was glad to be shot of the place. He’d been in there, doing four and a half years for a blag – Fireworks Day, November 1959 – when they’d topped a German for shooting a police sergeant. He’d heard the sounds of the great gaol as it went about the business of putting a bloke to death. Mostly had heard the silence. Never had liked HMP Wandsworth from that day.
Anyway … He headed for the bus stop – the rheumatism was a bastard – and thought it pretty good that his grandson was in such demand. He had, almost, a smile on his leathered face. Didn’t concern him who the target was, what the target had done, why the target was marked. He had, of course, known plenty of Maltese and Cypriots, and more recently a few Albanians – outside gaol and in – who pimped girls. Some ran a string, and others lived off one hard worker. Pimp: not a nice word … Probably what he was. Granddad Cairns and Jerry Cairns: two pimps, both living reasonably satisfactorily off the kid’s earnings.
‘What relationship should an officer have with his assets?’
Veins ran in scarlet cobwebs on Benjie Arbuthnot’s cheeks, and above his shaggy eyebrows there was a mop of straggling white hair. He wore a suit but it had not recently been pressed and his shirt looked to have been in a drawer for six months. He did not care about appearances. He had addressed a group of around twenty recently recruited entrants to the Secret Intelligence Service at the Vauxhall Bridge Cross behemoth. It had become a habit of the last two director generals to invite him back once a year and let him loose on the incomers: something about ‘They should know that beyond their comfort zones there’s a real world, Benjie, which will be good for a pampered generation that doesn’t know about rough edges. They’re pretty squeamish these days.’ He had told anecdotes, reported scrapes behind the Wall in Berlin, talked about time up in the dusty Radfan wilderness north of the Aden Protectorate, about life in south Armagh in the early days when the Service had owned intelligence primacy in the province. The young people embarking on careers had looked at him with astonishment, as if he were an extinct creature dumped on them from a mythical ark – or broken free from a showcase in the Natural History Museum – but he had earned their respect. He would take, now, a few questions. It was a young woman who’d raised her arm.
‘Certainly not a relationship that implies affection. You’ll live sometimes cheek by jowl with the asset – agent, source, or “jo” – and he or she will moan and complain and you’ll have to protect that fragile petal, morale. You may give an impression of genuine concern for their welfare, and you’ll make promises, but it will never be a relationship of equals. You use him or her. You do not blanch from exploiting whatever the asset brings to the table. And when the usefulness is finished you walk away. They disappear from your life. You may have coerced them into recruitment, but that is their problem and their difficulty, for them to sort out. We’re not a marriage-guidance council or a job centre for the unemployed and unemployable. Neither do we provide protection for an endangered species … but we might stretch to advice on personal security and push the asset in the right direction for that. God help him or her.’
As he spoke, Benjie thought of the men and women who had jumped ever higher over the hurdles he had set, and how he was always challenging them for better results – Arabs, Afghans, central Europeans on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. He even thought of young Harvey Gillot, wet behind the ears, on the quayside at Rijeka. Looking at the faces in front of him, their owners hanging on his words and showing shock at the crude certainties of his message, he could be content that none believed he had put on a show to hold their attention. A man had his hand up, wore a corduroy jacket, no tie. He probably had a fine degree from a good university. Benjie had no degree but had been awarded a commission in a well-fancied cavalry unit before switching to the Service. He pointed to the man.
‘How do you work closely with an asset for whom you have little personal respect?’
‘Easily. It’s a job, not a popularity contest. We don’t only use the good eggs. It’s what they can achieve on our behalf, within the parameters of our interests, that matters to us. I’m not about to dub as a hero a junior cipher clerk in the KGB/FSB who volunteers to help us, a major in the Iranian Air Force or a Chinese foreign-ministry stenographer. We pay a good rate – not as much as the Americans but more than the Russians – we do the flattery well and massage an overworked ego. We always tell the asset we’ll help him get clear as soon as it gets hairy on the inside, but we’re never in a hurry to fulfil that guarantee. Always one more month, one more drop, one more … Gentlemen, ladies, I’m hoping you didn’t join the Service to be social workers with responsibilities to assets. One more.’
&n
bsp; ‘No responsibilities?’ the young man persisted.
‘None.’
From a girl in a full burqa, spoken with spirit: ‘Who decides where the national interest and the asset’s interest conflict?’
‘I do, colleagues do, and very soon you do … Look, there are always going to be little people in the way and unless they get booted sharply they may trip you up. I summarise. The asset has his moment. The moment is exploited. The asset is forgotten. It’s a hard world out there, believe it. I’ve never lost a night’s sleep over the future prospects or survival of an asset. Thank you.’
He went to the table and drank from his glass, and the director who oversaw recruitment thanked him, but there was no applause. He thought he had introduced them to a career of moral uncertainties – as there had been in so many places, in Rijeka, and with so many assets. Funny how little Harvey Gillot was lodged in his mind, grit in a boot.
So many phone calls came to the small, crowded desk of Megs Behan. It was a big day for her: she was finishing off the press release, two months in preparation, had been up half the night and—
‘Yes?’ She had snatched up the phone.
‘Is that Miss Behan?’
‘It is – yes.’
‘Hello, thanks for your time, Miss Behan. I much admire the work you do. First class. I saw on the net your top-ten piece, in which Harvey Gillot was named. I’m a freelancer and I want to do a piece, hope to challenge that man. Can you help me?’
‘I’ll try – I’m really pushed right now.’
‘Have you an address for him to get me started? Then I’ll be out of your hair.’
‘Can do.’ She flicked keys, slipped in an extra password to bypass security blocks, scrolled, then let the cursor rest. ‘It’s Lulworth View, Easton. That’s on Portland but—’
‘Thanks.’
The line was cut. What had Megs Behan forgotten to ask the caller? ‘But who am I speaking to, please?’ She gulped down a lungful of air. The woman had claimed to be a freelance hack, had spoken with a London accent. Wait, wait. It had been the address of Harvey Gillot: arms dealer, purveyor of death, misery-maker. Big deal? Hardly … Was she going to feel guilty for infringing Harvey Gillot’s privacy, or was she going to crack on with the last tidy-up of the press release?
She had it up on her screen. There was a shout from behind her. ‘Megs, I’m not a nagger, promise. When?’
‘Ten minutes, if you get off my back.’
And he wouldn’t have minded, Megs reckoned, if she’d been on her back and him on her … Oh, shit. She swivelled in her chair, giggled, and beaded on her project manager. So, he had the lecher look, so … She had rolled up her T-shirt at the waist and dragged it down at the throat because Planet Protection didn’t do air-conditioning and most of the windows were sealed – years of paint, rust and pigeon shit on the outside. Not a bad-looking bloke, but at least eight years younger than her and he’d been all clumsy and frantic. Didn’t matter. She’d heard them talking about her once, a guy and two of the girls. She hadn’t had her cubicle light on and she was reading, quiet, not keyboard bashing. All hearsay, of course, because she hadn’t bedded the guy, who was straight out of college and had a good brain to go with an acne problem. One of the girls had been with a man who had now left, so he must have been the top source. Well, Megs had shagged that man, and he must have done some pillow talk. The word from the other side of the partition was … the bullet points needed a run-over.
The global arms trade is out of control and brings in more than thirty billion American dollars a year for manufacturers of weapons and munitions.
She looked good, but underneath the god-awful clothes she wore, she was sensational. Brilliant body, hell of a waist.
Nine million more small arms are produced every year and are swallowed by an already satiated market. Five hundred thousand people are killed each year by small arms throughout the world.
She was great in bed – if she could be bothered – and made an art form of it.
In excess of sixteen billion bullets come off factory production lines every twelve months: two are available for every man, woman and child on the planet.
Apparently the down-side of relationships with her was the post-coital behaviour. Stop grunting, sit up, have a laugh, reach out. Find the cigarette paper and the tobacco pouch, roll one, light it, puff without sharing, then start spouting, as if everybody was as fanatical as she was about the crime that was the arms trade.
Half a million people, the huge majority of them civilians, are killed each year by conventional weapons, which is equal to one person dying of gunshot injuries every minute of the day and night.
Short, sweet – and not forgotten: the conclusion played in her ears.
The United Kingdom, our country, our government to whom we pay our taxes, is the fourth largest exporter of weapons in the world.
She didn’t have a guy at the moment, didn’t have time for one, and wasn’t fussed.
Beyond the bullet points there were paragraphs of explanation, additional statistics and a little rhetoric. The scratch in her mind – the phone call, giving an address, not getting a name – slipped to a back place in her priority queue. She wondered if she should have done a section on child soldiers and scanned in a photograph of some little Rwandan mite holding an AK that was nearly as big as himself. Yes. Megs held up the whole process, and the bullet line was:
Today there are three hundred thousand child soldiers involved in conflicts and all are armed by the international dealers in death, and they kill and are killed.
She thought it read pretty well, and would have loved to slip on to the balcony above the fire escape for a quick roll and a smoke.
She hit the buttons, sent it to him.
It came into the building when the day was winding down and landed on a chief inspector’s desk. Not much there, but enough for him to curse the timing, get off his chair and shout at his door for Mark Roscoe. He liked the young sergeant, although he suffered from problems of attitude and might not be a ninety-minute team player. He called him in because he had no option. Roscoe was the only one with the clout, experience and reputation to carry this – the others were out, had shipped off home or gone down the pub.
Roscoe peered over his shoulder as he tapped it up for him to look at.
‘Wouldn’t call them chatty, would you, Guv’nor?’
‘Spooks talking to lesser creatures – us. We’re honoured they even know of our existence,’ he said drily.
It had been passed from Vauxhall Bridge Cross to what they knew as Box 500, the Security Service, and from their headquarters overlooking the river it had come to this outpost of SCD7. Little explanation covered it.
We understand you deal in such matters. Our sister agency informs us that sources known to them, and regarded as generally reliable, report a plot, believed still in the planning stages, for the killing of a British national, HERBERT DAVID GILLOT (now calling himself Harvey David Gillot), of Lulworth View, Easton, Isle of Portland. A contract has been taken out, we understand, for the assassination by a community in Croatia. Gillot’s occupation is self-employed dealer, broker in arms. No further details are available to us.
‘Doesn’t exactly weigh us down with intelligence,’ Roscoe murmured.
‘Or with what authority the intelligence travels. But it’s logged, timed and dated, and if friend Gillot ends up in a box, my balls will probably be in it with him. Not to be ignored.’
‘No.’
‘What do you know about the arms trade?’
‘That it arouses powerful passions, is generally legitimate, is distasteful until British-based jobs are at stake, and then it’s in the national interest. I would imagine it falls into two categories. There’s government to friendly government and …’
‘… there’s the verminous creature who sells where he can find a marketplace, which is what I assume Gillot to be.’
He thought Roscoe hesitated, as if unsure of sharing a confidence
. He prided himself on leading his team well and having time for them. He hid impatience, let it dribble.
A wry smile played on Roscoe’s face. ‘I was back home for a weekend with my parents in the spring – a couple of years ago they moved to the Lake District. They joined everything and are stalwarts in their village. Anyway, at the primary school they had a good-causes fair while I was up there, in aid of the church roof. My mother was doing cakes, buns and jam, but on the next stall to hers there was an Amnesty International girl. The way she talked it up, the arms trade is pretty vile. Believe me, Guv’nor, I’m not a crusader but I doubt there’s much difference between drugs-trafficking and moving illegal arms. That’s about the limit of what I know.’
‘But he’d have to be protected,’ the chief inspector said, a calculated throwaway.
‘Of course.’
The package had been deftly placed in the hands of his detective sergeant. Most of the small squad’s work involved intervention to prevent the murder of some of the more despicable men in the capital’s organised-crime world. He didn’t reckon that an arms dealer, self-employed, would be out of place in that company. It was part of the job description that his guys and girls had to put the same work ethic into saving the life of a bad guy as they would into ensuring that of a law-abiding citizen. There was a procedure to be followed, so he would drag in a superior to act as Gold Commander and head up the business, then call together the necessary agencies – not the spooks because they wouldn’t give him the time of day, and certainly wouldn’t admit to holding a file on Gillot if they had one. He suggested to Roscoe that he contact HM Revenue and Customs and ask for the Alpha team.
Not much to start with, but often they had less.
Penny Laing took a call. She had cleared her desk, closed down her screen and had been about to head for the underground. She’d thought, when she was home and it was cooler, that she’d jog, shower, eat and then … She had nothing to do that interfered with picking up her telephone. And the first five minutes of the conversation was taken up with her name. Yes, she was Penny Laing. Yes, her surname was pronounced as if it was spelled LA-N-E. Yes, she was called Penny, not Penelope, and it was because of the Beatles song. Her parents had met at a UK Hydrographic Office party and had first danced to that tune. Yes, she did know that Penny – after whom the Lane had been named – was an anti-abolitionist and confirmed friend of the slave trade, which was about as politically incorrect as a man or woman could be, and she’d almost been laughing. Yes, she knew who Harvey Gillot was, and had an address, could have a phone number in five minutes and would call back with it. She could come to a meeting chaired by a Gold Commander instead of breakfast in the morning.
The Dealer and the Dead Page 12