The Traitor's Story (8 page)

They wanted Finn to deal with Karasek, who was currently raging because a girl he’d wanted had gone missing—a girl Finn had spirited away. They wanted Finn to pretend he was corrupt, that he was looking for a payoff, when he’d already had his payoff because, of course, he was corrupt.

“So the Russians get to intercept the shipment and take Karasek out in the process—assuming Karasek falls for it.”

“You’re persuasive, I’m sure he’ll fall for it.”

“But apart from taking Karasek out, I’m not sure what
we
get out of it.”

“Before I say any more, I need to know whether you’re in. Chances are, you’ll be seen as a traitor by your colleagues, you’ll leave under a cloud, and only a small number of people will know the service you’ll have rendered.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then, presumably, you’ll leave without blemish.”

Was that a threat? Was it an implicit warning that they did know about him and Naumenko, and that this was the price for them turning a blind eye? He had to assume it wasn’t, that it was actually Louisa’s subtle way of suggesting there were nobler things than a clean but undistinguished record.

He thought back to some of the things he’d learned about Karasek in the last year or so, and to the thing he’d learned about him in the
past couple of days, and said, “If it gives us a chance of removing Karasek from the face of the earth, I’ll take the fall.”

She smiled and raised her glass again, but this time she drank. Was she surprised? Pleased with herself? It was hard to tell. Then she became more somber and put the glass back down.

“For some time, we’ve suspected one of our people might be working with Karasek. It barely registered to begin with, only the slightest indications that something was amiss. Even now, we don’t have anything concrete, which is why we want you to help build a case. If all goes well, you’ll tell Karasek about the need for secrecy and you’ll get him to acknowledge the name of his man on our team. Acknowledge, no more than that—we don’t need to prosecute this person, just pin him down.”

Finn thought back to the face-to-face meetings he’d had with Karasek and said, “I wouldn’t be able to go in there wearing a wire. I presume we’d be meeting at his club? His guys are scrupulous—electronic scan, pat down.”

“That’s all being taken care of as we speak, and you won’t be wearing a wire. It’ll all be explained, but all you really need to do is get him to respond to one name.”

For some reason, Finn had been assuming it was someone from the embassy, but he realized now it was more likely one of their own, and his mind made a sudden and unexpected leap. It was based on instinct alone, but he felt it so strongly that he said, “It’s Ed Perry, isn’t it?”

“You see, you
were
cut out for this line of work. How did you know?”

Even though he’d guessed, he was shocked by her tacit confirmation. But he saw it clearly now, and was impressed at some level, that the touching concern for Harry and the others was all a sham. It even made him feel better about himself and his own foolishness.

“I’m not sure. Just the way he’s been acting the last few days.”

Finn noticed the driver become more alert then, and a moment later he heard voices himself, and a small party of red-faced and leery English guys piled through the door. One of them was wearing a sequined tutu and a wig. They were already drunk but harmless enough, and the driver relaxed again.

“Oh dear, I’d heard it wasn’t good at the weekend out here.”

Finn laughed and said, “Actually, they’re off the beaten track—some streets really are no-go zones come the weekend.”

Louisa pushed her drink toward the center of the table. “We do ruin everything, don’t we? Come on, let’s go.”

He stood, his mind still reeling—with what seemed like his own narrow escape, with the revelation that Perry was rotten, the realization that he’d signed up not only to ignominy but also to danger in the week ahead, and underpinning it all, with the knowledge that there was a girl in Harry’s apartment, a girl Finn had vowed to get to safety.

They stepped out into the cold, the English stag party raucously singing behind them. It was the sort of jolly rowdiness Finn usually viewed with contempt, but right now he envied those men, envied both them and everything they represented.

Chapter Ten

Sparrowhawk—a name that brought all its attendant ghosts with it. He walked back like a man tranquilized, only dimly aware of his body and its progress along the street, his thoughts flitting around without settling on anything in particular. The only thought that registered with any certainty was the realization that his new life was over, that the rebuilding effort had been in vain.

Like the message Gibson had apparently received, Finn too could forget about the Albigensian Crusade, because he doubted he would get to write that book. He immediately countered, asking himself what was to stop him—they wouldn’t kill him, or at least, they would have killed him already if that had been the plan, and they couldn’t try to pin anything on him now, not unless there had been some seismic shift in the hierarchy.

So why were they interested in him again? Either they’d found out that his activities had stretched beyond what had happened at Kaliningrad, crimes for which they
could
still prosecute, or he was misreading the situation completely and it wasn’t even his own people watching him.

His own people! He didn’t have any people, not anymore. There was no one he could contact, no one who could help him find out what was going on. He could hardly put in a call to Louisa Whitman to ask if they’d had him under surveillance for the last year.

He neared his building and saw Ethan Portman standing in the window of their apartment. He seemed to respond to Finn’s appearance, and walked rapidly away. Finn hoped he wasn’t about to be intercepted. He needed time on his own, space to think through his own problems, not theirs, and only as he stepped into the elevator did he acknowledge to himself that the two were related.

How did he tell the Portmans about that? How did he tell them that their daughter’s disappearance might be linked to his own past? The simple answer was that he wouldn’t, that for the time being he would deploy the truth the same way he always had—to his own ends.

The elevator reached the floor below his and stopped. The door opened and, as he’d suspected, Ethan Portman was standing there.

“Hey, Finn, sorry to trouble you, but you did say to tell you if we found out anything.”

Ethan kept his finger on the button but stepped aside, suggesting it wasn’t a piece of information that could be quickly exchanged before allowing Finn on his way.

“Of course,” said Finn. He stepped out and followed Ethan back to the Portmans’ apartment.

Debbie Portman was sitting exactly as he’d last seen her, as if she hadn’t moved at all in the intervening period. She’d merely eroded a little more, become less herself. She struggled to find a smile for him.

Ethan said, “Sit down, Finn.” He reached into his pocket and took out a small piece of paper. “I spotted this in Hailey’s room earlier. It had fallen between the bed and the bedside table, and I guess she didn’t notice it.”

He held out the piece of paper, and Finn took it and studied it. She’d bought a hundred euros. He looked at Debbie, then up at Ethan, trying to gauge what this meant to them—a source of new hopes or of new fears.

Ethan sat down, and sounded like someone who’d found a big lead as he said, “It means she isn’t in Switzerland, but it’s not a lot of cash, so maybe she’s close by—France or Italy, Germany . . .”

“She could be anywhere,” said Debbie in a defeated tone.

She was right, too, though Finn wasn’t sure how even the three countries already mentioned could fill Ethan with any hope—he was talking about three large countries, all of which had their seedy corners.

“This is one receipt. There could be another five that she didn’t drop. Even if it’s the only one, she could be anywhere in the euro area—if she got a bus or a train from here, she wouldn’t need to use a lot of money until she got to where she was going.”

Ethan looked deflated.

They looked as though they needed to be left alone, but now that Finn was here he was eager to move things on. “I spoke to Jonas this evening—it seems there are a few things you didn’t tell me.”

They both looked at him, even Debbie appearing more alert in response.

Ethan said, “I don’t understand—what things?”

“I asked about your involvement with Gibson. Jonas says that a couple of weeks ago Gibson knocked on your door and asked if Hailey might have accidentally accessed his network.”

It was immediately obvious that it was true. Debbie looked horrified, seeing the incident in a new light, perhaps wondering if it should have been mentioned to the police. Ethan looked dismissive, but it was a veneer, not quite masking his nervous lack of certainty.

“It slipped our minds, I guess, no more than that. But Finn, it was nothing, he just knocked on the door one night, mentioned it, and that was it. He didn’t come in, didn’t seem unduly upset or concerned.”

“Did you ask Hailey if it was true?”

“Of course! It wasn’t.”

“It was,” said Finn. They looked shocked, defensive, and fearful. “Don’t worry about it—it’s the kind of thing kids do. Hailey and Jonas hacked into Gibson’s network, just to prove to themselves that they could.” Ethan looked ready to respond but Finn said, “You didn’t tell me that Hailey thought someone had searched her room.”

Debbie laughed, suddenly animated. “Finn, it was just some random comment she made—said and then forgotten. If you had children you’d soon learn to pay little attention to such things.”

“True, until that child disappears, leaving a note that you believe suggested she was in danger. As it happens, I don’t agree with that interpretation of the note, but given that you do, I’m amazed that you wouldn’t mention either of these things.”

He thought of bringing up the third omission, but didn’t, because he was certain they would have told him and the police if their daughter had claimed she’d been followed by a car. In truth, his instinct told him that both the curb-crawling car and the break-in had been fabricated by Hailey to justify her disappearance.

Debbie’s eyes were glistening now and Ethan shook his head slowly, as if they were both struggling to come to terms with their own petty failings.

“We should tell the police,” said Debbie.

Ethan looked at her, though Finn couldn’t see what passed between them.

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” Finn had their attention again. “I just need a day or two more to piece things together. Besides, I don’t think the police will take seriously anything you say about Gibson now, and for what it’s worth, I don’t think he’s directly connected to her disappearance.”

Ethan said, “On what basis?”

“Instinct, which is fallible, of course.” Finn stood up. “Give me another day or two. I’ll find her.”

For the first time in the last two days, they looked as if they doubted him, perhaps only because he was making promises that seemed without foundation. And yet, also for the first time, he was determined he would find her, because the girl was carrying a memory stick that had the details of his past on it—and, in one way or another, the key to his future.

Ethan saw him to the door and Finn walked away toward the stairs, but once he heard the Portmans’ door closing, he strolled back along the corridor. He put his ear to Gibson’s door and stood for a while. It was silent.

Had they cleared out after all this time because they’d been rumbled by a couple of curious teenagers? Or was that just coincidence? For all Finn knew, they’d wound up the surveillance because they had whatever they wanted, or because they were moving into the next phase.

Finn briefly entertained the idea that they’d given up on him, but he doubted that. He’d witnessed plenty of waste and incompetence in his time, but they wouldn’t commit to a surveillance operation of at least a year—maybe two—unless they were after someone or something specific.

Whatever this was, he suspected it was only the beginning as far
as he was concerned. Beyond that, the only thing he knew for certain was what he’d learned from Jonas’s notebook, that they weren’t interested in his skills as a popular historian.

Chapter Eleven

The next morning, he started training again. He rescued his weights from the closet they’d been stored in for the last couple of years, then went for a run. Perhaps he would have done it anyway, shocked into action by his failure to keep up with Jonas the night before, but there was no question that he had to be in shape now.

The run proved less of a trial than he’d feared, and once he’d
relaxed into it he found his old pace coming back to him. He’d let
things slide over the last six years, but the memory of the fitter person he’d been was still there, and wouldn’t take long to be reactivated.

He knew, though, that reactivating the other part of his life would be tougher. He hoped the kid’s notebook would provide some clues, but he needed to get his hands on the memory stick if he was to have a real chance of finding out why they were interested in him again. Even then, he wasn’t sure how he could go about responding to that interest.

He went early to the coffee shop, but before he walked in he saw that Jonas was already there, one of the few customers during this hollow part of the afternoon. The waitress from the previous night was standing at his table, talking shyly, making lots of eye contact—she was pretty, Italian-looking, dark-haired.

Jonas waved at him as he walked in, even though they were only feet apart. He had a tall glass of some sort of fruit tea in front of him, and Finn smiled at the waitress and said, “I’ll have one of those, please.”

She smiled back and threw a glance at Jonas before walking off.

As he sat down he said, “How’s it going, Jonas?”

Jonas stared at him for a second, then said, “Hello.”

“Hello.”

Quietly, Jonas said, “She’s a university student, studying business law.”

“She’s very pretty. Does she know how old you are?”

Jonas looked at him askance. “Why would she need to know that?”

Finn looked across at the waitress as she put his fruit tea together, a more complex process than he’d anticipated.

“Jonas, she’s crazy about you.”

Jonas laughed a little, embarrassed, not so much for his own part but as if it was Finn making a fool of himself.

“No she isn’t! She was just telling me about her life—she doesn’t think she wants to do law anymore. I think she’s confused, that’s all.”

“Jonas, since I became a writer I’ve met a hell of a lot of women who just wanted to tell me about their lives and their problems, and I’ve met a much smaller number who were crazy about me—you’ll just have to trust that I’ve learned to spot the difference.”

“What about before you were a writer?”

He smiled at the way Jonas picked up on even the ballast of a sentence, and said, “The same, I suppose—I just meant that if you’re a writer, people want to tell you their life stories.”

“I’m not a writer.”

“No—she’s crazy about you.”

The waitress approached and placed his tea in front of him. He thanked her, and noticed that Jonas was on edge the whole time, perhaps fearing that Finn was about to say something to her, ask her outright, the kind of social death that only adults could handle flippantly.

Once she’d walked away, he visibly relaxed and said, “It’s quite awkward if she does think like that. Surely she can see that I’m a lot younger than her?”

Finn looked at him, sympathizing with the waitress, because Jonas could probably pass for eighteen, maybe even twenty. And within those shifting sands lay the secret of Hailey’s reinvention. At their age, nearly everyone looked either older or younger than they really were. Briefly, his memory flitted back to Katerina, but he banished it quickly, the attendant thoughts too troubling.

“What about you and Hailey?”

“What about us?”

“Are you a couple?”

“
No
.” He feigned confusion, as if it were an outlandish suggestion, then sipped at his tea to avoid scrutiny. “We’re just friends.”

“Okay,” said Finn, not wanting to make him uncomfortable, particularly when it wasn’t something that mattered.

“You know . . .” Jonas hesitated and sipped at his tea again. Finn wondered if the kid had decided to share his feelings anyway, a thought that filled him with a certain dread, but Jonas took him by surprise yet again. “I think everyone’s trying to find this point in time where they fit, where everything’s right, where they fit into the universe. Me and Hailey, that girl”—he gestured toward the waitress—“we’re young, so we keep thinking it’s in the future and we’re running toward it. I guess people who are older, like you or like our parents, you keep thinking you missed it and it’s some place back in your past but you can’t pin it down. You know, we’re all looking for this same point of time and it always seems just out of reach—when we were happy, when things felt right, when we’ll fit into the universe, but maybe it’s out of reach because it’s not a point in time at all, it’s something else, something inside us. Like déjà vu.”

“Er, sure, you might be on to something.” Finn had forgotten what it was like to be that age, and even now he wasn’t certain that his thoughts had ever been that far out there. “But, do you have a reason for saying all that? I mean, does it relate to anything that we’ve been discussing?”

Jonas sounded hesitant, testing the question against his thoughts as he said, “I don’t think so. But it could. It’s just an idea I’ve been playing around with—I haven’t worked it out yet.”

Even as he spoke, Finn realized Jonas’s navel-gazing theory was possessed of something relevant. It probably summed up the real reasons for Hailey’s disappearance. She’d reached the apogee of teenage restlessness and had tried to escape into the future she was no longer willing to wait for.

“Jonas, I want to look at your notebook, but let me ask you something first. You said you didn’t know where Hailey had gone, and that’s all people have asked so you haven’t said more. But now I’m asking you—do you have any ideas about where she might have gone?”

“I have ideas about how she got there.” Finn looked at him questioningly and he added, “I think she went by train.”

“Because?”

“One day, a few weeks ago, I walked into her room and we were talking, and then I noticed she had the page up for InterRail on her computer. It’s like a pass you can use to travel anywhere in Europe for a month or something.”

“Yeah, they had them when I was . . . a student.”

“Really? Did you ever go on one?”

“Yeah, I did. It was okay, although kind of like your theory, probably better in the memory than it was in the moment.”

Jonas smiled, liking Finn’s last comment, and said, “She looked pretty embarrassed when I noticed it, but she covered up really well, said she was wondering if we should do it together between school and college, which is years away, but then Hailey’s a dreamer.”

A dreamer.

“Was this before or after you hacked Gibson’s network?”

Jonas thought for a moment. “After, but before all the other things that happened. Yes, in fact, that was also the day we tried and his network had been taken down.”

It backed up what Finn had been thinking more and more. There was no doubt that they’d felt threatened by Gibson, but Hailey had used that fear or concern as an excuse for organizing her own longed-for escape.

“So she went somewhere far away.”

“I didn’t say that. I really have no idea where she went.”

“No, I said it. I doubt she would have just planned to tour the rails for a month, and she mentioned in her note that she was with friends, which suggests she was going somewhere in particular. If it were somewhere close, she’d have bought a ticket to that place. Say she was going to Munich, she would have bought a ticket to Munich. The InterRail pass only makes sense financially if she had a long way to travel.”

Jonas stared at him for a moment, impressed at some level, but then, as if wanting to remind Finn of a crucial underlying fact, he said, “She left because she was scared of Gibson.”

“Maybe. But there are two separate issues here—why she left and where she went. Now, for the sake of her parents, the latter is the most crucial. I have to admit that, for my own purposes, the former is perhaps more interesting.”

“So you do think Gibson was spying on you!”

“I’m not sure—that’s why I want to find out what you put in your notebook.”

Jonas reached down into his jacket pocket, but looked doubtful as he said, “I didn’t make quite as many notes as I remembered, and I’m not sure how useful any of it will be.”

He produced the small Moleskine, opened it on a certain page and handed it across the table. Finn looked at the tiny scrawled notes and handed it back.

“You’ll have to read it to me—I can’t make out your writing.”

Jonas laughed, suggesting this was an accusation made quite often, and pored over the notes himself. “Okay, like I told you, Albigensian got mentioned once but then discounted. Sparrowhawk was mentioned six times, and on two of those occasions it was mentioned alongside someone called Karasek. He’s also mentioned separately in relation to Helsinki.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Jonas looked intrigued. “I’m certain—why is that strange?”

Finn wasn’t sure there was anything strange about it. He wondered if Karasek had relocated from Tallinn—it made sense in a way, just a short hop across the water, and things had been getting tougher for him in Estonia.

“It’s not strange. I knew a Karasek, that’s all, and I don’t connect him with Helsinki.”

Jonas took in that information, looked at his notes again, and said,
“I’m curious. If Gibson works for an intelligence agency and they were
spying on you, why were they talking so openly? Shouldn’t they have been using code names or something?”

“One would think so. Of course, all of these words
could
be code. Sparrowhawk is the most obvious, but even Helsinki could be code for something else.”

“So, Sparrowhawk doesn’t mean anything to you?”

“No. Does it mean anything to you?”

“It’s a bird of prey.” Jonas stared at Finn for a second, then back at his notebook. “There were lots of sequences of numbers, which could be code, I guess, and then this sentence:
Imperative to identify Jerry de Borg
. Does that name mean anything to you?”

Finn reached out and took the book again. Jerry de Borg—even in the kid’s crabby handwriting the name was quite visible. Finn kept looking at it, not because the scribbled words could tell him anything more, but because he didn’t know what to say, was struggling even to think what it meant to see that name there.

Only one other person had ever known about Jerry de Borg—and, joke that it was, it made no sense for either one of them to have ever spoken of it. Finn never had, which made it stranger still that the name should reappear, because the other person had been Harry Simons.

“What’s wrong?”

Finn shook his head, doubtful, and said, “I don’t know, and I couldn’t say if I did, but seeing that name makes me think someone I’ve long believed dead is actually still alive.”

“Wow.” Jonas took the notebook and sat in silence, apparently stunned by the realization that what everyone had said about Finn was true. Finally he said, “What kind of spy were you?”

Finn looked at him, guessing it was pointless to deny it now, and said, “Not a very good one.” Jonas laughed. “I’m serious. I wasn’t incompetent, but I was . . . corrupt, for want of a better word.”

Jonas still looked bemused. “No, I mean, who did you work for?”

“Oh. Well, I can’t answer that, even now, even after everything that’s happened.”

Jonas nodded and looked at his watch. “I’ll have to go quite soon.”

“Okay.” Finn’s mind leapt back to the other side of the equation they were dealing with, reminded again that as well as
wanting
to find Hailey Portman, he also
needed
to find her if he was to stand any chance of getting to the truth of why they were watching him. Thinking back to a question he’d asked Ethan and Debbie, he said, “Are you and Hailey on any of the social networking sites?”

“Officially, we think they’re lame. For older people, you know.”

“Unofficially?”

“I think Hailey’s on Facebook.” Jonas looked at the dregs of his tea, but decided against drinking it. “She was talking one day about some really stupid game on Facebook, and when I asked her how she’d seen it, she said she was just browsing, but you know, it’s a closed site—you can’t browse properly unless you’re a member.”

Finn smiled. He wasn’t sure if it was the kid’s intelligence or his infatuation with Hailey that gave him this attention to detail, but he couldn’t help but admire it. And it undoubtedly offered the key, because there weren’t many reasons why Hailey would join a social networking site without telling her best friend about it.

“Okay, I need to find and access her Facebook page.”

Jonas nodded vigorously and wrote something on a page in his notebook, then tore it out and put it on the table.

“I think I can do that. Meet me at that Internet café at eight o’clock.” Before Finn could answer he added, “We can’t use your computer—if they’re monitoring you, we don’t want to give Hailey’s location away. And we can’t use mine. I mean, my parents are pretty cool, but they’d be freaked out if I brought you home with me.”

“I suppose they would,” said Finn, and took the piece of paper. Jonas had written in block capitals for Finn’s benefit. “Thanks for your help.”

Jonas smiled crookedly, as if he thought the thanks were inappropriate, then glanced toward the waitress.

Finn said, “No, I’ll get this—you paid last night, remember?”

Jonas stood and said, “Eight o’clock.”

“See you then.”

Finn sat for a moment after Jonas had left, then looked at the waitress. She came over and handed him the bill, then said, “Could I ask you something?” Finn looked up at her, offering encouragement. She looked uneasy, though, not wanting to hear the answer even before she’d put the question. “How old is your friend?”

“He’s fifteen.”

It didn’t seem to surprise her, but rather confirm her suspicions. Perhaps she’d watched him as they’d talked, lopping years off him as the conversation had gone on. She shrugged, looking a little embarrassed.