‘You want cuttings too?’
‘You’re one step ahead of me, as always. International, as well as domestic, please.’
‘No problem.’
Straker felt that his research into the other side’s emotional starting point was now under way. His immediate priority, though, was protection. ‘Karen, who’s our head of legal?’
‘Stacey Krall,’ she replied.
‘Can you put me through?’
‘Sure, hang on.’
A deep voice soon said: ‘Stacey Krall.’
‘Hello Stacey, Matt Straker. We’ve not met. I’m a director of Quartech’s Competition Intelligence and Security – CIS. I’m on assignment with Ptarmigan.’
‘Yes, hello. I’ve just been processing your directorship papers with Companies House.’
‘Sorry I can’t come and see you – I’m on my way back from Belgium.’ Once again Straker looked around him to be sure no one was in earshot. ‘We’ve got an issue with a member of staff. Mr Quartano’s asked me to take out an injunction on him.’
‘Mr Backhouse – yes, I know – Mr Quartano’s already been on to me.’
‘That was quick.’
‘He doesn’t hang around on many things, least of all with breaches of trust.’
‘And?’
‘I’ve been through the Backhouse file. Unfortunately – and this didn’t go down well with Mr Quartano – his contract with Ptarmigan isn’t one of ours.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s an original – a pre-Quartech one. It’s not as robust as ours would be.’
‘Does that mean we can serve him or not?’
‘Afraid not.’
Straker found himself smiling. ‘So we’ve no way of stopping him going to Massarella?’
‘Not legitimately, no. We can threaten him with legal action – and put the frighteners on him.’
‘But in the meantime, we can’t stop him working for Massarella?’
‘No.’
Straker could only pull a face at his luck.
Once back in Britain, Straker went directly to the Ptarmigan factory in Oxfordshire. On arrival, he met Tahm Nazar who led him straight to the loading bay, serving as the examination space for the crash investigation of Helli Cunzer’s car.
Right across the polished white-painted floor were the recovered components of the wreckage, placed more or less in the same relational position to each other as on the original chassis. It reminded Straker of a technical illustration where bits of an object are expanded out and cut away to show its innards and workings. ‘To think there was a human being right in the middle of all this as it disintegrated,’ said Straker almost dreading the thought.
‘Amazing, yes,’ said the professorial-looking Nazar. ‘It’s a testament to modern design and safety standards that he lived. He suffered a serious wound to his thigh, and a couple of broken ribs – but that’s about it. He’s already back in part-time training.’
‘That’s extraordinary,’ breathed Straker.
‘He’s been up here on the simulator a couple of times – he’ll be fit to race again soon.’
The two men walked in among parts of the wreckage, and Straker looked at the twisted remains. ‘How much of the car do you think you’ve recovered?’ he asked, as he watched five men working intensely across the floor, measuring, scraping and weighing components, while a colleague was busy recording their findings into a computer to one side.
‘About eighty per cent.’
‘Will that be enough? What if we’re missing key bits?’
‘We won’t get an answer,’ replied Nazar flatly.
‘And there’s no indication, so far, of what caused the crash?’
The team boss shook his head. ‘Not yet, but these things take time, and they really only come together once the initial – time-consuming – recording is completed. We’re still in the assimilation phase.’
Nazar led Straker away, and up to his office. Treadwell was waiting for them there.
‘How’s Remy taken the news of Backhouse’s defection?’ Straker asked.
‘She’s mighty pissed off,’ replied Treadwell in surprisingly soft Australian. ‘She and Andy were incredibly close.’
‘How will you handle his departure?’
‘Ollie used to be one of our race engineers,’ offered Nazar.
‘Yeah, I’m going to work with her.’
‘Will she be okay with the disruption?’
‘Hope so.’
‘Good,’ said Straker sounding a little relieved.
‘How the hell did this happen?’ Nazar asked. ‘How did Backhouse crack – then defect?’
‘Maybe he never left Massarella,’ offered Treadwell suspiciously. ‘You know he was with them for ten years before he came here.’
Straker shrugged. ‘I do know he was pretty cut up about the threat to safety from the saboteur.’
‘That doesn’t wash,’ replied Nazar dismissively. ‘It might explain the resignation – but is completely inconsistent with his going to the team that we think’re behind the sabotage.’
‘Unless he only left Massarella in the first place to infiltrate us as part of some long-term deception?’
Straker shook his head. ‘It could just be more prosaic than that. When I came up here before and stayed with him, Backhouse was pretty open about his domestic affairs. He’s recently divorced. His wife cleaned him out financially as well as emotionally, taking the children. He lives in a pokey little terraced house in Tysoe. Drives an ancient Ford Focus. I can imagine Massarella would have offered him an appealing solution to his money troubles.’
‘We’ll only know for sure when we get to ask him, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon.’
‘Right,’ said Straker, taking the comment as a welcome cue to change the subject. ‘Can we talk about protecting ourselves, from now on, against Backhouse’s defection – and against Trifecta?’
‘I thought the Big Man was serving him with an injunction, even if it was only a phoney one?’ replied Treadwell.
‘What Backhouse knows about our cars – now – is going to be out of date pretty quickly,’ said Nazar. ‘I’m not that fussed.’
‘Really?’ said Straker a little surprised. ‘Remind me to talk to you about our Fibonacci Blades when we’re done.’
‘I thought you said on the phone that you wanted to talk about Trifecta?’
Straker nodded. ‘I do. Our sabotage experience is becoming extensive. We’ve uncovered a number of people who seem to be involved in this. But I believe there is a clear common denominator. Somehow every incident we’ve suffered links back to Trifecta. Every one. It strikes me that we’ve either got to stop them, which would not be straightforward – or we have to remove them, completely, as any form of future threat.’
‘Couldn’t we just confront the senior management?’ suggested Treadwell. ‘Do we really believe the board are behind all this – even aware of, let alone sanction, these incidents? It’s a grown-up firm – with grown-up directors. Surely a word with any of them would cleanse the firm of any roguish activity?’
‘Fair point,’ Straker replied. ‘How big’s the company – how many staff?’
‘About a thousand.’
‘A security nightmare,’ observed Straker with conviction. ‘Far too big for us to be sure they’ve flushed out every rogue employee. And we’d still have the influence of Obrenovich, as a shareholder. I was thinking – can we not be more surgical? Can we not switch everything to another provider? That way, we would cut Trifecta out as a risk – once and for all.’
Treadwell scoffed. ‘Okay for things like our radios and data links, but Trifecta are integral to our engine management system. Starting again – in the middle of the season – could set our performance back months.’
Straker had already considered this difficulty. ‘Aren’t there other ECM contractors in the swim? Don’t other Benbecular runners use different firms?’
‘Yes,’ sai
d Nazar. ‘Valentines would be the biggest. Cohens are probably the more specialized.’
‘Can we not at least ask them some questions about their capabilities and discuss a possible switch to them?’
Treadwell looked decidedly unhappy.
‘We’ll look into it,’ said Nazar, with a hint of an overruling.
‘Good,’ said Straker. ‘I think that’s it, then, for now.’
‘Thanks for your help, Matt,’ said Nazar. Then, sounding slightly intrigued, he said: ‘Hang on. You asked us to remind you about our Fibonacci Blades?’
‘Oh yes,’ replied Straker, ‘should I be surprised to see precisely the same design on the front wing of the Massarella in Spa?’
‘What?’ asked Nazar, sounding genuinely taken aback. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Completely.’
‘How the hell did they get there?’
‘What about Andy fucking Backhouse?’ offered Treadwell, slumping back in his chair. ‘If he was only ever with us as a Massarella plant, why wouldn’t he have leaked our modifications and ideas back to them as well?’
THIRTY
Straker returned to Fulham.
But the empty flat didn’t do it for him. His sense of loss nearly prompted him to move out and stay in one of the shockingly retro bedrooms in his beloved Brooks’s.
In the end, though, his tiredness prevailed, and he fell asleep. But the talk of treachery and betrayal had clearly triggered Straker’s subconscious.
During the night, his psyche harked back to the last time he felt betrayal – his last encounter with Charlie Grant. He relived every moment of the night he had spent with her, in this flat, in London.
His mind swirled back to the morning after. It was all so vivid still. Leaving her sleeping, Straker had gone through to the kitchen to make breakfast for them both. He was wallowing in the afterglow of intimacy and first sex with this amazing new woman in his life.
But that feeling didn’t last.
Heart-stoppingly, he came across, entirely by accident, the woman’s ID card, lying on the floor, having fallen from her bag – collateral damage from their frenzied passion of the night before. He realized immediately that this serene beauty was not with him by accident. It was clear that she had deliberately targeted him, aiming to exploit information about his assignment – so as to thwart Quartech’s defence contract with Buhran and Quartano’s relationship with that regime. She turned out to be nothing less than an – as-yet-unmet – colleague in Quartech’s Competition Intelligence, his own department. Charlie Grant, he had discovered through her own proximity to him, turned out to be the traitor he had been tasked to uncover. She had been the one leaking highly secret and commercially sensitive data to outsiders. She was the reason the weapons contract with Buhran needed salvaging. She had been the one betraying the company.
Straker felt embarrassed and angry with himself. Angry he had been so clearly taken in, angry at his own sense of feeling betrayed and hugely embarrassed that he had failed to anticipate such tactics. All this hit him hard and taught him a serious lesson about the secretive and cutthroat competitiveness of the arms business. That episode with Charlie Grant also did something else. It stripped away any lingering naïveté he might have had about the likely practices he should expect from exponents of industrial espionage. That first assignment for Quartech saw him well and truly bloodied, in numerous senses of the word.
Now, in the immediate present, Straker couldn’t help but wonder what other havoc Charlie Grant might have wreaked against Ptarmigan? Such thoughts were alarmingly significant: throughout the period she had been so damagingly engaged in industrial espionage against Quartech’s weapons contract with Buhran, Charlie Grant had been officially on secondment to the company’s Formula One team.
The following morning, Straker made it in to Quartech’s London global headquarters in Cavendish Square. Having not spent any proper time in his department office since his previous assignment, it was strangely comforting. With his domestic difficulties, and the hollowness of being on his own in their marital flat, this felt more like home than home did.
Walking into the Competition Intelligence and Security offices on the ninth floor, he saw the cityscape of London through the ceiling-to-floor plate-glass windows. In the morning sun, which had now burned off all the earlier mist, the capital appeared warm and inviting to Straker – something he never thought possible after leaving his outdoor life in the Marines.
Karen was already at her desk. They caught up, particularly given the dramatic goings-on in Belgium.
Straker slipped off his coat and hung it over the back of his chair. ‘Have you managed to get anywhere with Charlie’s phone?’
‘A bit. It’s really weird prying into her affairs.’
Straker nodded his sympathy. ‘I appreciate that. Sadly, Karen, she was up to things that did us a fair amount of harm. Now, her phone can help us.’
‘There are loads of numbers in there, and I.T. have said that most of them are entered as nicknames or some sort of code name.’
‘I saw that. Okay, we need to do something about it. Let’s try this. Can you rope in some of the research team and get them to call each of the entries that aren’t fully named? But they’re only to call using a Caller ID Withheld number – so there’s no way we can be identified.’
‘Okay? And what do you want them to say?’
‘Let’s think … What about that they’ve found the phone – as lost property, or something – and are trying to identify its owner by ringing some of the numbers in its directory?’
‘Okay, Matt. I’ll get on to it.’
‘Good. How did the all-sources search go?’
Karen pointed to a lever arch file placed in the middle of his desk.
Straker opened it to find a contents page, dividers and comprehensive index references. ‘Immaculate,’ he said looking up to meet her eye.
She smiled coyly and returned to her screen.
Straker offered to get her a cup of coffee, which she accepted. Having put it on her desk, he went back and poured one for himself which he then carried along with the folder into a quiet room in the corner of their floor. This room had its own eye-catching views of the City of London and Canary Wharf in one direction, and the Victoria Tower of the Palace of Westminster and the London Eye Ferris wheel through the other.
The whole Formula One scene and the extraordinary sabotage incidents were about to become a whole lot murkier.
He started with the earlier press cuttings which referenced Massarella and Van Der Vaal.
MASSARELLA’S VAN DER VAAL SAYS OPPORTUNITIES BEING LOST, read one headline from two years before.
VAN DER VAAL ATTACKS GRIP OF F1 POWER, read another.
TOO MUCH POWER IN TOO FEW HANDS was published at the end of the previous season but one.
Van Der Vaal, it seemed, had been constantly criticizing and sniping at the governance of Formula One.
Then, in the middle of last season, Straker noticed the angle of Van Der Vaal’s comments began to change. This seemed predicated on the story headlined: MASSARELLA LANDS OBRENOVICH MILLIONS.
There were dozens more like this. Among them: VAN DER VAAL + F1 + OBRENOVICH = THE MIDAS TOUCH.
A few months after that, Straker picked up a new theme which Van Der Vaal was clearly encouraging – or at least doing little to discourage. One article summed it up:
VAN DER VAAL: THE FUTURE TSAR OF F1?
““F1 is only successful – turning over billions of pounds a year – because of the teams,” says an emphatic Van Der Vaal, 54, Massarella’s burly South African team boss. “The teams put up the money. We take all the risks. For too long the commercial rights holder has been taking commercial advantage of the spectacle and sport we provide.”
Mr Van Der Vaal seems well qualified to talk about the sport’s finances, having recently landed substantial investment in his Massarella team from billionaire Russian oligarch Avel Obrenovich. “Formula One could grow so mu
ch more quickly – and equitably – if only it showed itself to be more modern and professional.”
When asked whether these comments meant he saw himself in a future leadership role of F1, Mr Van Der Vaal declined to answer.”
‘Bloody hell,’ said Straker out loud.
HOW I WOULD RUN F1, SAYS VAN DER VAAL, was the headline above an interview in which Van Der Vaal launched his strongest diatribe yet against Motor Racing Promotions Limited and the commercial interests of the sport. The quote that caught his eye was: “I’m the man to run Formula One.”
Talk about a blatant challenge. Van Der Vaal’s chutzpah was amazing.
Straker read on.
MASSARELLA WELCOMES QUARTECH TO F1
“Eugene Van Der Vaal, 54, the boerish (sic) team boss of Massarella Formula One, today welcomed Ptarmigan’s new owner, Quartech International, to the ranks of the sport. “If there’s anything I can do to help them get started,” said Van Der Vaal, “I’ll be delighted to do so. As I’m sure’s the case with the other teams, I’m ready to help Quartech find their feet.””
Big of him, thought Straker. The ego which gave Van Der Vaal the status of self-elected leader of the group was quite remarkable.
And then everything changed.
Literally overnight.
Remy Sabatino came on the scene.
The moment Quartano signed her to Ptarmigan, the press coverage exploded. Most of the subsequent references were unreservedly positive – praising the excitement of adding a female driver to the Formula One grid. They applauded the huge increase in public interest this was creating. Quartech was hailed for its imagination, innovation, and ability to advance the sport.
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