Then he saw the girl. She was standing inside the partly opened door of a one-story stable fronting the yard at a right angle to his barn. It occurred to him that she must have watched his arrival and didn’t mind being seen—at any rate, not by him. She now walked out into the yard and, looking up at him, said, “Interesting place.”
She was good-looking, except that she was a little too slim for his taste and her blue-gray eyes too noticing for beauty. He wondered if she was a lesbian. He climbed down the ladder and walked out into the yard.
“Looking around?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m considering buying the place.”
“You local?”
“Kind of.”
Suddenly he noticed something he might have seen before, but for interruptions. A woman’s sandal was lying at the edge of the yard just by the barn wall. A flip-flop he’d last seen on Phyllis’s foot when she’d left for the gym this morning. No wonder she’d been wearing trainers when she came home. She must have dropped it, or someone had pulled it off. He wrenched his eyes from it and tried to concentrate on the girl.
“You looking around as well?”
“Not really,” she said, looking carefully at him, as if to gauge his reaction. “I live here.”
“You live here? Are you Lukas’s wife?”
“Not exactly”
This was getting complicated.
“He’s gone.”
“Yes. I’m going, too.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“Not my business.”
“What exactly is your business?”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. —?”
“Pearson.”
“Right, Mr. Pearson. This is getting a bit personal. Let’s leave it there.”
She was wearing a parka. She zipped it up.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Pearson. Best of luck with your reconnaissance.”
She walked out of the yard and, a moment later, he heard a car start farther up the bridle path and drive off.
A little breeze swirled last autumn’s leaves. He’d seen enough, too much. He felt sick, ready to vomit. But he knew what he was going to do, come what may.
He went home, scarcely knowing which way his steps took him. He lifted the latch of his garden gate, passed the flattened turf where the Bentley convertible had stood, put his key in the lock, walked along the corridor, and kicked open the bedroom door. He tore the bedclothes off Phyllis, grabbed her by the hair, and started hitting her. He slapped her with his palm, then hit her with the back of his hand, then punched her with his fist, so her head jerked back. Then he paused, gathering his strength, and she kneed him hard in the groin, so he fell off the bed onto the floor, where she kicked him hard in the ribs.
“You bugger!” she said. “You absolute bugger!”
And that was all. He watched her while she piled some clothes and jewelry into a suitcase. Then, deliberately, slowly, she tidied her hair, applied some makeup, and walked out of the bedroom, pausing only to say, “I’ll be back for the rest. And the house.”
He heard the car leave.
He got slowly up, sat down again, and went over every action, every word, in the last four hours. His intention was fixed; he only wanted to be sure that he could do what he intended and stand a reasonable chance of getting away with it. One thing he knew—cold, furious as his wife might be, she would never offer evidence against him. Her own pride would stop her. As for the girl in the yard, she had lied when she’d said she lived in the place. He had never heard her or seen her, and she didn’t know him. What she had been doing there he could not imagine, but one thing was sure: she wasn’t police. Maybe she was just a rather intrusive sightseer.
The main question was, when would the bastard come back? He walked up the corridor, positioned a stepladder under the trapdoor in the ceiling, and drew down a long parcel. Calmly, he unwrapped it and laid the parts on the kitchen table, first drawing the curtains. He inspected and cleaned each one with a rag, fitted them carefully together, then slipped the complete gun into an old golf bag. He put the bag and its contents back into the loft, stroking it lovingly. His gun.
As he finished, he heard the noise of the Bentley, moving quite slowly up the drive. That was odd; when Lukas took the Bentley he was usually away for several days at a time. Other times, he used the Audi. Where had that been during his afternoon’s visit? Must have been in the stable, he decided. So the girl would have seen it. “So what?” he said aloud.
Tonight, then? No, not tonight. He was too done up, like a man without sleep for a fortnight, or maybe like a man whose wife has left him for good without a sausage in the refrigerator. He went to bed.
Next morning, Haddock got up, showered, breakfasted, and, taking his binoculars, followed a route identical to that of the previous afternoon, but he stopped in the shadow of the plantation. He sat on the ground, his back against a tree, warm sun on his left shoulder, and scrutinized the countryside inch by inch, pausing again and again on the two houses. Lukas was certainly there; at one point he emerged and walked into the stable, coming out with some piece of apparatus. Was that what the girl had been looking at? No one else seemed to be there and, above all, there was no sign of Phyllis. In fact, there was nothing moving in the whole of lazy Norfolk but a line of slowly turning wind turbines and the occasional vehicle on the road that passed his property.
Haddock went home, taking care to avoid observation. There was still plenty to do. He put on dark, loose clothing and soft-soled boots, first removing all labels. In a small rucksack he packed spare shoes, trousers, a pullover, and a T-shirt. He added a pencil torch, not to be used save in extremis. He readjusted his watch by the radio and sat down. At nine o’clock, he got the golf bag out of the loft, and at exactly a quarter past nine, he turned off all the lights.
Then he stood for a moment in the bedroom, asking himself whether he really wanted to go through with it. He didn’t, but he would. The chase, the hunt, immemorial passion had got to him. He had failed everything in life, his job, his business, his marriage, and now he was going to win. He knew himself to be the master of every technique needed for the job he intended to do.
Besides, he hated the bastard with a real, profound hatred. Lukas, the foreigner, the man who had destroyed his life, taken his wife, stolen his possession. Lukas was a robber. He, Haddock, was a cop.
He checked his watch and left the house by the side door, taking exactly the same route as before. The moon was rising, but it was pitch black in the plantation where he left his spare bundle and the empty golf bag. He pulled a balaclava over his face and adjusted the eyeholes. Then he set off down the track, planting his soles squarely on the surface to minimize noise. Not that it was exactly quiet on this May evening, with rabbits scurrying, bats squeaking, and the noise of an owl in the dark trees overlooking Lukas’s place.
Once in the yard, he was safe in the moon’s shadow by the barn. As he had expected, there was a light in the curtained ground-floor window of the house; the upper floor was unlit, curtains open. He’d be unlucky if he got no chance of a shot, and at that range, Haddock needed only one.
There was just one bad moment. The bridle track behind the barn was very little used by traffic. But now, just as he crouched in the barn’s shadow inside the yard, he heard a car moving quite slowly down it. He saw nothing but a passing gleam—almost as though it were unlit—and to his relief, it passed on, tires lightly crunching the ground, and out of earshot.
Haddock remained motionless for a minute, listening, and then slipped into the barn and up the wooden ladder. He laid down his gun carefully, flat on the timbers where he could see it by the refracted light of the moon. Then he moved to the back of the barn and carefully opened the upper door over the road, fixing it by its bar against the wall. He might need it for a line of retreat. For a moment, he peered into the silent wall of trees opposite, two arm lengths away, and finally moved back to the unglazed window. He squatted, picked up the gun, a
nd then lay on his stomach, his favorite position for accuracy, and trained the gun roughly in the direction of the unlighted window across the yard, which he calculated to be the bedroom.
As he lay there, a nasty thought came to him. When he had done what he intended, what should he do with the gun? He could leave it, but all his instincts were against that. Equally, to hide it anywhere in the neighborhood might indicate that whoever had used it was not far away. Should he take it with him and put it back in the loft? But there would be one hell of a hunt when they found Lukas missing half his head, with a bullet embedded in the opposite wall.
He was pondering this, when he had a shock so terrible that for an instant his heart seemed to circulate above his body and then plunge straight down into his stomach. “Hello.”
The voice was half-familiar, almost mocking. There was no body attached so far as he could see in the dim light. He heard a sort of moan. It was all the air escaping from his lungs.
“Do keep quiet,” the voice said. “We didn’t reckon on you joining the party. You’d better hand over that nasty thing you’ve brought with you. It looks dangerous.” He tried to speak but couldn’t. It was the girl, the girl he had seen that morning.
A deft hand reached out and picked up the gun from the floor and put it behind where she was crouching, clearly visible now, about three feet away. She leaned forward, so he could see her.
“My name is Liz,” she whispered. “Liz Carlyle. And you are going to be very quiet, Mr. Haddock. Quieter than you have been so far. Quiet as a mouse, please. Just lie there and watch.”
My God. She knew his name. He’d better do what she said. He lay there and watched, trembling slightly with shock.
In the window opposite, a light came on. A figure moved to the curtains, stretched, drew them. The guy was lucky, Haddock reflected. If he’d had the gun, he’d have shot him. Half his mind had come back, but not the half that would have told him he was pretty lucky himself.
It was a signal. Immediately all hell let loose. Beyond the conifer hedge on the other side of the house, a blinding light shone—from his own garden, Haddock realized. The yard below seemed suddenly full of figures. Two men in black, who seemed to have no faces, smashed open the farmhouse door. No problem in recognizing armed policemen. Haddock knew exactly what was going to happen. The two men reappeared half-carrying a struggling figure. They bundled him around the hedge out of Haddock’s view, and a car started up and drove off, accelerating.
Every light in the house was on now, plus a light from a generator that had appeared miraculously in the yard. The house was being ransacked from cellar to attic.
Haddock sighed. It seemed the only thing to do. “Who are you?” he asked the girl who was still in the barn.
“Government service.”
“You mean MI5?”
“It’s you who are going to do the explaining, Mr. Haddock.”
A torch shone.
“Where did you get this gun?”
“I had it.”
“So I’d thought. You were armed police yourself, weren’t you? Is that standard issue?”
“No.”
“Well, would you believe?”
Truculence came back to Haddock and washed over him in a warm, familiar wave. He grabbed some of it, like a drowning man grabs water. “Why should I answer your questions? You aren’t police. Anyway, you seem to know a lot already. How do you know my name?”
“I know your wife.”
“You know my wife?” It didn’t make sense.
“And that’s the reason we could just be able to deal with this unofficially. You haven’t actually done anything, after all. Or we could hand you over. There are plenty of your old pals milling around. Please yourself.”
“How do you know Phyllis?”
“Well, she’s on our payroll, for one thing. Part-time. She retired when she married you. Or rather, she didn’t. Come on down the ladder, and maybe I’ll explain.”
They were standing now on the cobblestones of the yard. His legs felt so shaky, he nearly fell down.
“Right, then,” said the girl. “We have been watching this man for quite some time—on and off, of course. That’s where Phyllis came in. That’s why you live in your present house. I suppose Phyllis didn’t explain that. Know what a ‘sleeper’ is?”
“Someone that sleeps around?”
“You aren’t that dumb, Mr. Haddock. A sleeper is a spy, an intelligence agent, who does nothing till he gets his instructions. Then he acts as required. As sleepers go, Lukas was pretty active. He’d had his instructions and he was carrying them out. Our technique if we find a sleeper is to watch and wait. We learn a lot that way, so long as we are satisfied they aren’t dangerous, of course. We may even feed them information, to keep their bosses happy. But we have to keep close to them—it doesn’t do to lose sight. So that’s how Phyllis got her part-time job. She watched and reported. She was around here with me this morning.”
“I know she was here. I found her flip-flop.”
“Did you? She must be getting out of practice.”
“I thought she was having it off with Lukas.”
“You do have rather a habit of jumping to conclusions, don’t you, Mr. Haddock? We did think of bringing you into it all. But we decided it might be too much for you—and you do have rather a complicated past.”
Haddock rubbed the back of his neck, then spat his chewing gum onto the floor and ground his teeth. He didn’t like this girl. She was making him feel stupid, and he suspected she was laughing at him. He’d quite like to hit her but he didn’t dare. Nothing else came into his head for a bit. Then he said, “Phyllis. Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. You have work to do with her, Mr. Haddock, if the opportunity comes your way. In your own interests, I’d give her a miss for quite some time.”
“You mean, I don’t call her, she calls me?”
“Yes and no.”
“Oh, hell. Can I go now?”
“Yes and no. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”
He went. They found him in the morning in the plantation. He was fast asleep with his head on his golf bag, snoring.
<
* * * *
YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON
Olen Steinhauer
PAUL
What troubled him most was that he was afraid to die. Paul believed, though he had no evidence of it, that other spies did not suffer from this. But evidence holds little sway over belief, and so it was for him.
He thought of Sam. The last time they’d spoken had been in Geneva, in the international lounge before Sam’s flight back here to Kenya. Years before, they had trained together, and while Paul had done better than Sam on the written tests, it was on the course that Sam had shown himself superior. Later, when he heard rumors that Sam was plagued by suicidal tendencies, he understood. Those unafraid of death usually were better on the course.
But the visit was a surprise. After Rome, the only way he’d expected to hear from Sam was via a disciplinary cable or at the head of a Langley tribunal. But Sam’s unexpected invitation to the Aeroport International de Geneve had included no threats or reprimands.
“You’re just following,” Sam told him in the airport. “You’re the money, a banker; I’m the deal maker. I’ll use my Wallis papers—remember that. You won’t have to say a thing, and they’ll want to keep you well so you can take care of the transfer. It’s a walk in the park.” When Paul, wondering if any operation in Africa could legitimately be called a walk in the park, didn’t answer, Sam raised his right index finger and added, “Besides, I’ll be right there beside you. Nothing works without this fingerprint.”
The target was Aslim Taslam, a six-month-old Somali splinter group formed after an ideological dispute within Al-Shabaab. Over the last month Aslim Taslam had begun an intense drive to raise cash and extend its contacts in preparation for some large-scale action—details unknown. “We’re going to nip them in the bud,” was the wa
y Sam put it.
Sam had come across them in Rome, just after things had gone to hell—perhaps because things had gone to hell. Aslim Taslam was in Italy to establish an alliance with Ansar al-Islam, the very group that he, Paul, Lorenzo, Said, and Natalia had been performing surveillance on.
Now, their cover was information. Sam—energetic, perpetual-motion-machine Sam—had contacted Aslim Taslam’s Italian envoy with an offer of two million euros for information on the Somali pirates who had been plaguing the Gulf of Aden shipping lanes. Which was why he’d called this rushed meeting in the airport. In three days—on Thursday—Paul would show up in Nairobi as a bank employee. He would carry a small black briefcase, empty. His contact at the hotel would have an identical case containing the special computer. “Once we make the transfer, you board the plane back to Geneva. Simple.”
Agents of Treachery Page 40