Stealing People

by Wilson, Robert

  ‘I don’t remember that name,’ said Forsyth, shaking his head, which Mercy could see was a lie. ‘Let me go and talk to Mrs Railton-Bass.’

  Forsyth left the room. Papadopoulos looked at Mercy, eyebrows in his hairline. Mercy put her finger to her lips. They waited; neither took a seat. Ten minutes went by. Papadopoulos walked over to a painting, stood there nodding at it.

  ‘Now you’re not going to tell me you don’t know who this is by?’ he said.

  ‘I am, George. I don’t have time for galleries.’

  ‘Picasso? Heard of him?’

  ‘I thought that was a car,’ said Mercy, flat with irony.

  ‘Very funny.’

  Papdopoulos transferred his attention to some drawings on the wall.

  ‘Goya,’ he said. ‘Nice.’

  Mercy rolled her eyes. Forsyth came back into the room.

  ‘She’ll see you,’ he said, pointing at Mercy, ‘and only you.’

  Mercy followed him out into a dark corridor. He shut the door behind them and turned.

  ‘I understand I’m reporting to you,’ she said. ‘Am I going to meet the other investigators, those CIA contractors you mentioned? Or are we not going to pool our resources? I’ve just met three CIA guys this morning and I’m not sure they were very excited at the idea of any collaboration.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. They’re operating at a different level,’ said Forsyth. ‘You’re on the ground, using your London knowledge. They’re putting out their feelers in the spook world looking at terrorist networks, criminal organizations, that kind of thing. If they give me intelligence that I think would be useful to you, and vice versa, I will facilitate it, but I doubt your paths will cross.’

  ‘This has all the feeling of a military operation about it,’ said Mercy. ‘You’ve got separate entities progressing towards a common goal with commanders in charge. I always think kidnaps work better with a more creative dynamic. That way we—’

  ‘Kinderman don’t care what you think. They just want you to do your job.’

  ‘You sound like you don’t trust me,’ said Siobhan.

  ‘My dad warned me, said you were at best economical with the truth.’

  ‘So you listen to your dad,’ said Siobhan, curious, ‘and obey everything he says, like a good little girl?’

  ‘He’s had to deal with some difficult people: nasty, violent, manipulative, untrustworthy, cunning, lying, treacherous little bastards … and that was just me when I was a teenager.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Siobhan, spurting with laughter, ‘I thought you were going grim on me.’

  ‘I listen to him because he’s not an idiot like most other dads I know, and I learn stuff from him, a lot of stuff. My mother, too.’

  ‘Can’t wait to meet her,’ said Siobhan. ‘Dinner must be a hoot around your place.’

  ‘So where did you go?’

  ‘I was following up a lead.’

  ‘Without telling the people you’ve asked to help you?’ said Amy, hardening. ‘Maybe you should tell me about this lead.’

  ‘I went to see a guy my father knows, someone from his world.’

  ‘Why wait until now?’

  ‘Because he’s not the sort of person you find very easily,’ said Siobhan. ‘You have to go through others, tell him what it’s about and be patient.’

  ‘When did you kick this off ?’

  ‘After I’d called Mark Rowlands.’

  ‘Does he know about this guy?’

  ‘No. He’s just the lawyer, he doesn’t know anything about the everyday work,’ said Siobhan. ‘My father always told me to call Mark Rowlands if there was a problem. He also told me where to find a telephone number I could use, but only in a crisis. Once the days went by and I found myself calling Mark for the fourth or fifth time, I knew it was a crisis, so I went to get the number.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘A dead drop. Know what one of them is?’

  ‘Got an idea. Sounds a bit olde worlde. Finding shit in bird boxes in parks.’

  ‘This is buried in code on a computer website, which they change every week,’ said Siobhan. ‘Anyway, some guy answered and asked for my name and number and told me I would hear from them. A few hours later somebody called me back and asked me the nature of my business. I told them Dad had disappeared and they said they’d get back to me … which they did, this morning.’

  ‘So, talk me through it.’

  ‘I had to go to a park bench on Highbury Fields, sit and wait. Eventually a guy came along, walked up behind me and asked me not to look at him. He sat at the other end of the bench, glanced across at me as you do, and then talked straight ahead, barely moving his mouth. I’d also told them I needed Percocet and he’d seen the damage to my face in the glance and asked me what had happened. I told him …’

  ‘Did you tell him it was something to do with your father? That they’d questioned you about him? Raped you?’

  ‘I said nothing about the rape, but I told him the rest. He said he would drop a glove when he left; the Percocet was inside, and I should take it and then come after him with the glove as if he was a stranger.’

  ‘Did he have any idea who it might have been who assaulted you?’

  ‘No, but I could see he was … not exactly showing concern, because these types don’t show anything, but there was a flicker. As if he knew who they were or who’d sent them or something like that.’

  ‘Did he have any news about Conrad?’

  ‘Nothing. He said: “It’s gone very silent out there.” As if normally there’d be something, like white noise at the very least, but this time there was a total blank.’

  ‘So what are our chances of finding him if these “friends” of Conrad can’t pick up anything on the airwaves?’ asked Amy.

  ‘I would say the chances of you finding him are small.’

  ‘Did they say they’d get back to you if they heard anything more? And … who are they anyway?’

  ‘They didn’t say they’d get back to me, but they did ask where I was living, as if they might be keeping an eye on me. Who are they? God knows. Dad worked with a lot of people and I suppose he built up a network of highly trusted amigos and these are the guys he can rely on when something goes wrong.’

  Boxer caught a bus to Green Park, took a call from Simon Deacon, who told him that Walden Garfinkle would be in touch. He was crossing the road to get the tube up to Highbury and Islington when a call came through from Garfinkle.

  ‘I’m told we should talk,’ said Garfinkle.

  ‘I’m on Piccadilly, if that helps.’

  ‘You know the Haymarket Hotel on Suffolk Place?’

  ‘No, but I can get there.’

  ‘Go to the concierge and tell him W. G. Grace sent you.’

  Boxer walked up Piccadilly to the Circus and down Haymarket to Suffolk Place. He spoke to the concierge, who called a porter and mumbled in his ear. He followed the porter through the hotel to a small private room in which there was coffee and cakes. He poured himself some coffee and some minutes later a man fitting Tanya Birch’s description of Garfinkle came into the room. They shook hands. Garfinkle’s was large, padded and soft, more like an animal’s paw that could produce claws if the occasion demanded. He poured himself some coffee and before taking a sip picked up a cake and put it whole into his mouth. He ate ruminatively with crumbs tumbling down his suit from his mouth. He sipped coffee again and repeated the process. Only then did he sit down, brushing flakes and crumbs from his suit.

  ‘No breakfast,’ he said, to explain his greed. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Boxer?’

  ‘Conrad Jensen disappeared on the twelfth of January and his daughter has asked me to find him,’ said Boxer, who’d decided to come clean; no clever stuff with this kind of operator. ‘You went to see him on New Year’s Day in a rented house in the Cotswolds. I was wondering if you could help me.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I understand Con was a contractor to
the US military and that among other things he was involved in black site interrogations, the Arab Spring and Edward Snowden. I was wondering if any of these activities could have made him feel the need to disappear,’ said Boxer. ‘You are someone who works in his world. I understand you solve personnel problems in the CIA. You saw him just over two weeks ago. I would be interested in any insight you could give me.’

  ‘You’re a kidnap consultant.’

  ‘That’s right. I also run a foundation called LOST for finding missing persons. Normally they are cold cases that the police have given up on, but Con’s daughter was sent to me by his lawyer, Mark Rowlands, and she persuaded me to help her.’

  ‘So you’re sure he hasn’t been kidnapped?’

  ‘The daughter has not had any such communication,’ said Boxer. ‘And if he had been kidnapped I would not be able to run the negotiation. That would have to be done by the Met’s kidnap unit.’

  ‘Why did the lawyer send Conrad’s daughter to you when, forgive me for saying so, there must be far more effective investigators in London?’

  ‘Possibly because I have a wide-ranging network of people I can draw on,’ said Boxer. ‘I would not be sitting here if I didn’t.’

  ‘I’d have thought Conrad would have some buddies he could rely on who would be far better connected than you and much more likely to be able to track him down. I mean, he knows some experts in their fields: espionage, terrorism, IT, interrogation, security, firearms, you name it, Conrad’s done it,’ said Garfinkle. ‘You thought about that, Mr Boxer?’

  Now he understood what Deacon meant about Walden Garfinkle.

  ‘I have,’ said Boxer. ‘The lawyer researched his possibilities and came up with me. Siobhan came to see me in some distress at being walked out on. She didn’t want the police involved, which told me something …’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘That we were talking about an individual who is operating below the radar part of the time and doesn’t want the authorities looking there because the people who pay him wouldn’t want the police looking there either.’

  ‘You mean us,’ said Garfinkle, tapping his chest, ‘when you say “the people who pay him”?’

  ‘Only you would know if you have an exclusive arrangement.’

  ‘So you think Conrad’s lawyer chose you because you’re not averse to operating outside the law of the land?’

  ‘I think he chose me because I have a reputation for getting things done,’ said Boxer. ‘And I don’t have any agenda other than finding him.’

  Garfinkle looked at him with the eyes of a man used to assessing complicated people: hooded diamonds of light looking out from under the exuberant growth of his eyebrows, which were tweaked upwards at the ends. Boxer had the feeling that his assessment was crucial as to whether he would get answers or leave empty-handed.

  ‘A conscience is a difficult thing in our business,’ said Garfinkle. ‘We need agents with conscience because to have them without would be like trying to shepherd a pack of psychopaths. Most of my problems with agents occur as a result of conscience. They reach a moral boundary too far.

  ‘When they took on the job as young men and women, they were happy in their blissful ignorance to swear by Almighty God that they would do anything for the president and our great country of the United States of America. But as time goes on, these agents get older and they become men and women of experience. They develop relationships and some of them produce children. Whatever happens, gradually their conscience comes into play with their work. They are no longer just thinking about themselves and how they appear to their employers. They are conscious of how they might appear to others. It’s not always easy to lie in bed next to someone when you’ve just killed a man or interrogated someone and be the same loving individual you were, especially when you cannot tell anyone what you have done.

  ‘Sometimes agents cope by using delusional strategies. These have the short-term benefit of getting them through their day but the long-term prognosis for a delusional is not good. They become unstable. They don’t know who they are any more. They lose sight of themselves. They behave strangely. They become unpredictable. They are oppressed by feelings of guilt that they don’t understand.’

  ‘Is this a state that Conrad Jensen had reached … in your opinion?’

  ‘The interesting thing is that he is not a young man. I would expect this kind of behaviour from an agent in his late thirties or early forties, but Conrad has already gone seventy.’

  ‘Did he start late?’

  ‘That’s an interesting point. The first time we made use of him was in Cuba in 1989. We wanted information on how Cuba was going to cope with withdrawal of Russian economic support. How unstable it might become. And Conrad had just started a relationship with a woman who worked on the sugar board. We approached him and asked if he could help, and he was a natural. He was in his mid forties then. So yes, a late starter.’

  ‘Do you know what he did before that?’ asked Boxer. ‘I mean, he was a man with a yacht, which means he’d made some money somewhere.’

  ‘Of course we checked him out and made sure that he hadn’t made his money from trafficking drugs or anything like that, and he was clean. He had a history of running businesses in the US, Europe and the Middle East and selling them on. He ran a number of IT companies developing database management software, which was big at the time. He spoke a lot of languages, including Arabic and Russian, which impressed us and made us wary too. We checked out his relationships to make sure there were no communist sympathies and again he was in the clear.

  ‘He was very friendly with a couple in Damascus, a Syrian businessman who ran flour mills all over west Africa and the Middle East and was married to a Russian woman, which we assume is how he learnt those two languages. He made a lot of connections through the Syrian and was trading chemicals out of Libya and oil products out of Tunisia, and he even spent a few years trading sheanut out of Ghana and Benin. But that still doesn’t mean I know precisely what he was doing before he was engaged. We didn’t have a complete life history. That’s what we’re looking at now. All I know is that when he was employed he was not a communist and he was a businessman with no criminal record in any country prepared to tell us. When the War on Terror started back in 2001 he was in the perfect position to help us, which was when he set up his company, Jensen Security, and became an official CIA contractor.’

  ‘Have you always employed him directly or have you ever used his services through another contractor?’

  ‘That’s a strange question, Mr Boxer.’

  ‘I’m talking particularly about a company called Pavis Risk Management, run by a guy called Martin Fox.’

  ‘I’ll look into it. I don’t associate the name with Conrad, but you have to understand I am not his operations officer.’

  ‘You were talking about conscience in relation to Conrad. Was that what you went to talk to him about on New Year’s Day?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I spoke to his partner, Tanya Birch, who told me that he seemed thoughtful after your visit. He sat in a room on his own for quite some time in a contemplative state,’ said Boxer. ‘I learnt from my friend Simon Deacon that Con had worked in a black site outside Rabat conducting interrogations in 2005. If anything was going to stimulate your conscience I’d have thought it would be something like that, but nothing happened for, what, another nine years? Was there something else that tipped him over the edge?’

  ‘I understand from his operations officer that he wanted greater US involvement in Syria. When things really began to go off the rails in late 2011, he started getting angry because of US inaction. He could see that if something wasn’t done, the whole country, whose people define themselves by their religion, was going to break up and splinter into factions, which would give the Islamic extremists their opportunity. But,’ said Walden, holding up a fat, hairy finger, ‘he also understood our position after the horror of Iraq and Afghanistan. He kn
ew there was little appetite for it from either the government or the American public. He could also see the alarming possibility that it could develop into something confrontational with Russia. So he wasn’t happy about it, but he accepted the US position.’

  ‘And Snowden?’

  ‘Look, I think he admired Snowden for having the guts to come out about something he felt was deeply wrong, but you have to understand that Conrad had been instrumental in putting together software teams to write the programs that would ultimately give the US government these internet surveillance powers. Conrad made a lot of money developing IT systems for the US government. He was part of the problem that had made Snowden angry enough to blow the lid on it.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he couldn’t develop a conscience about it,’ said Boxer.

  ‘No, that’s true,’ said Garfinkle.

  ‘But clearly what you’re saying is that none of these areas of difficulty were why you went to see him on New Year’s Day.’

  ‘My aim on New Year’s Day was to find out what was on his mind,’ said Garfinkle. ‘I’d been warned by his operations officer that something was troubling him. I’d met him a number of times over the years. I was especially active when we were operating the black sites, as this was clearly a step over a moral boundary that even the operations officers weren’t happy about. We’ve had lengthy discussions over the years covering all areas of potential anxiety. Conrad was never a concern to me. Perhaps it was his maturity. I’m only a few years younger than him. We saw eye to eye on a lot of things. But I take it seriously when someone like Conrad appears to be unhappy. He knows a lot about our operations and some of them would be classified by the media as unsavoury to say the least.’

  ‘You mean you’re worried that he might be about to blow something open in the media?’

  ‘When somebody does a disappearing act like this, we’re always worried.’

  ‘So how did you get on with him on New Year’s Day?’

  ‘We got on fine, as always. He just didn’t tell me anything. I’ve understood more from you telling me that Tanya said he was very contemplative after I left,’ said Garfinkle. ‘That makes me think that he might be about to embark on something risky.’