Liz Carlyle - 07 - The Geneva Trap (33 page)

‘
Inspector!
’ one of Fézard’s men said from the door. ‘I think you’ll want to see this.’

Dreading what they might find, Martin and Isobel followed Fézard down the corridor. The third and final door led to a small kitchen, fitted with a wall cupboard containing glasses and plates, a counter top with a microwave, a fridge, and a sink. The tap on the sink was running in a desultory stream.

On the linoleum floor a man was lying flat on his back. His eyes were closed and he wasn’t moving. He also looked to be Korean, but he wasn’t wearing the office uniform of black turtleneck and trousers – he was dressed in a suit and a shiny silk tie. It became obvious that he wasn’t breathing either.

Crouching down, Martin carefully reached into the inner pocket of the dead man’s jacket and drew out a wallet and a passport. The wallet contained 400 Euros and several credit cards. The passport was French and named the holder as Dong Shin-soo Wong, a French citizen. The photograph was of the same man who lay on the floor.

Fézard was on the phone, summoning a forensics team, when another of his men appeared in the doorway. ‘Sir, we’ve searched everywhere now. There’s no one else in these offices. All we’ve found is a safe, in a cupboard off the corridor. It’s locked.’

‘All right. Let’s get it open; maybe that will tell us who these people really are.’

It took forty minutes, by which time the silent mortuary was humming with activity. It seemed plain that someone else must have been here and administered the poison. Unless it was a suicide pact, which was possible but seemed unlikely. But how did the killers get in and out without being noticed by the surveillance team? Fézard had sent one of his officers to collect the surveillance logs and photographs, and while the forensics team, pathologist and photographers all went about their business, Fézard himself converted one end of the office into an interview room.

The owner of the building, summoned from his office in the town, said that as far as he knew, Technomatics Inc. was a South Korean computer consultancy. They had had good references and always paid their rent on time by direct debit on an account at a bank in Marseilles. There had been no problem with their tenancy.

The younger Monsieur Beauchêne, the wine merchant from the adjoining office, said he knew very little about his neighbours. He occasionally met one or two of them going in or out. He had the impression that they started work earlier than he and his father did and that they did not leave the building at lunchtime. He did know that they convened in the afternoon in their boardroom – ‘I called on them one afternoon when my water supply had stopped working, to see if they had the same problem. They hadn’t – it was something to do with our pipes. I found them all sitting around the table like the Apostles, sipping tea from tiny cups.’

The safe, opened at last, was empty except for two large envelopes. One contained 40,000 Swiss francs and $30,000 in hundred-dollar bills. The other held a number of passports. Martin examined them, sorting them into two piles. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘There seem to be two passports for each person. One is South Korean all right but the other looks to me as though it’s North Korean. The photos in them are identical and the names seem to match, but I guess one is real and the other’s a fake. It doesn’t take much imagination to work out which is which. This isn’t a South Korean computer consultancy at all, it’s something to do with North Korea.’

‘Bizarre,’ said Fézard. ‘They claimed their head office was in Seoul.’

‘More likely to be Pyongyang.’

‘But who murdered them?’ asked Isobel. ‘I realise they must have been poisoned, and probably by the tea they drank. But how could anyone do it without being spotted?’

‘Easily,’ said Martin. ‘Come have a look.’ He led the way down the hall to the conference room. From the doorway he pointed at the teacups on the table. ‘There are eleven cups.’

‘Yes,’ said Isobel, and looked at him a little curiously.

‘But only ten bodies.’

‘You think we’re missing a corpse then?’

‘No
.
’ He pointed at the table. ‘One of those cups is full. I think our killer was joining these unfortunate gentlemen for tea. Somehow he managed to put poison in the tea, and didn’t drink any himself.’

‘Oh, at first I thought you meant––’ And Isobel stopped.

He got her meaning. ‘I don’t think Liz was ever here. But the killer was, and I’d bet even money he’s the same person who’s grabbed her.’

‘If you’re right, why didn’t the surveillance see him?’ asked Isobel.

‘The pathologist says these men have been dead only a very short time,’ interrupted Fézard. ‘The logs and photos have arrived, so let’s get that receptionist up here and see what she has to say.’

The pretty receptionist looked a mess. She had been crying and her eye make-up was smudged. She had heard what had happened in the building and was shaking with a mixture of excitement and fear. Told by Fézard that her information would be of the utmost importance, she tried to pull herself together.

The Koreans had all arrived before nine o’clock when she started work, and had been let in by the night guard. She had not seen any of them go out again. She looked carefully at the surveillance pictures and was able to identify the workers in the other offices. The pictures showed that at 10.02 a delivery man had entered the building carrying a refill for a water cooler. Yes. That was for one of the offices on the second floor, she said. He had left it in reception to be collected. She had signed for it.

‘Were there any other deliveries?’ asked Martin. At about two o’clock, she told them, another delivery man had arrived with a parcel for Technomatics. ‘Did he leave it in reception?’ asked Seurat.

‘No, Monsieur. I rang through and they asked me to send him up.’

‘How long did he stay?’

‘He left not long before you all arrived.’

Isobel was already sorting through the photographs. 14.03. A short stocky man in a cap, worn pulled down over his eyes, was going through the door, carrying a square brown box. At 16.13, he was coming out, without the parcel.

‘That must be him,’ said Isobel, spreading the photos out on the table.

‘Have you seen this man before?’ she asked the receptionist.

‘Yes. Once or twice, bringing deliveries.’

‘It could be Kubiak,’ said Martin.

‘We have photographs of him which the Swiss sent when they asked us to put surveillance on him, and we have some we took ourselves during the surveillance,’ Fézard put in.

Martin nodded grimly. They would wait for the photographs to provide confirmation, but he was already certain of the identity of the delivery man. It didn’t help to think that Liz had been abducted by a man who in Switzerland had proved he wouldn’t hesitate to dispose of anyone who got in his way.

Chapter 55

It was 6.30 in the evening in London, an hour earlier than Marseilles, and Andy Bokus’s expression said
I told you so
. Geoffrey Fane suppressed a sigh. It was difficult enough trying to make sense of this business – Liz Carlyle was missing, ten Koreans were dead in an office in Marseilles – without having to deal with his American colleague’s ego. He said curtly, ‘I don’t know why you’re looking so pleased with yourself, Andy. We’ve got a crisis on our hands.’

‘I appreciate that, Geoffrey. It’s just that I was thinking, this is a scenario you and I have seen before. The bloody Russians are at it again. One of our drones went out of control and blew itself up. Fortunately no one got hurt – believe me, we’d be retaliating if they had.’

‘Steady on––’ Fane began.

Bokus was having none of it. ‘I know you’re all excited about this supposed North Korean connection, but I think this guy Park Woo-jin has been working for our friends in Moscow, not Pyongyang. I know Carlyle thinks she got the truth out of him, but it may be that he himself didn’t even know who he was working for.’

‘Well, unfortunately she’s not here to tell us her reasoning. For all I know she’s––’ And Fane stopped, suddenly aghast at how close he’d come to saying what he feared most. People died, agents got killed; he was used to mortality. But the thought that Liz Carlyle had been abducted and might have been murdered suddenly seemed too much to bear. What’s wrong with me? he thought, trying to pull himself together, which only made it worse. He had an aching sense of unfinished business; he’d never told Liz how much he admired her, and that somehow made the possibility of her death even worse.

Bokus for once was sympathetic. ‘I know this is a tough one, Geoffrey,’ he said. ‘I just thought it best to focus on the larger picture.’

‘Of course,’ said Fane, regaining control of his emotions. He couldn’t bear the thought of Andy Bokus – clever in his way and a representative of Britain’s closest ally, but still essentially an
oaf
– pitying him. ‘Anyway, I agree with you that we need to lay our cards on the table and see what they have to say.’

Bokus looked surprised. ‘Who? You mean the Russians?’

‘I do. If you’re right, and they’re behind all this, then I want to make it clear that they’ve greatly overstepped the line. And that if they’ve touched a single hair on Liz Carlyle’s head, they’ll never hear the end of it. I’ll make it my personal mission to hound them all over the world. But I need you shoulder to shoulder with me on this one.’ Fane gave what he considered to be his most persuasive smile, gritted his teeth and said, ‘After all, you carry a lot more weight with them than we do.’

Summoned urgently, Viktor Kirov left the annual dinner of the British Manufacturing Association readily enough. It was nine o’clock when Bokus and Fane entered the Russian Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. They were escorted to a downstairs conference room by two smartly suited young men with holsters visible beneath their jackets. There they found Kirov, formal in dinner jacket and black tie, sitting at a table, sipping a cup of black coffee and smoking a small cheroot. He stood up when they came in, shaking hands before motioning them to seats across the table from him.

They had all met before, but not frequently. Since the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in a London hotel a few years previously, relations between their Services had cooled. Fane knew a lot about Kirov, who had been in London for three years as Head of Station. He was a long-term KGB man, nearing retirement (this would be his last posting), who had been posted in East Berlin during the height of the Cold War, and then in Poland where he had helped hound Lech Wałęsa and his followers. But he was a subtle clever man, not a thug, and had successfully made the transition in the post-1991 years to the leaner, still powerful SVR. A family man, whose grown-up children frequently visited London to see him and his wife Anya – an ex-dancer with the Bolshoi, if the Vauxhall Cross file were to be believed. Like Vladimir Putin, whom he was thought to resemble, Kirov was a diminutive man with receding hair, but like the Russian leader, he was known for his vigour.

All of this would be familiar to Bokus as well, and equally Kirov would know a lot about both of them. Which gave this meeting its oddly surreal element.

Kirov offered them coffee, which they declined. He sipped his slowly, then, addressing Fane, said with a twinkle in his eye, ‘Naturally it comes as a great disappointment to leave a dinner at the Guildhall and forgo the company of your eminent manufacturers. So I assume this must be urgent.’ He took a long drag on his cheroot and said, ‘How can I be of service?’

They had agreed that Fane should kick off. He steepled both hands, like a contemplative don, but when he spoke it was at a rapid pace. ‘We recently discovered that a foreign agent had been placed in our Ministry of Defence. His goal was to disrupt a defence project we are working on with Andy’s people. It was a cyber-attack.

‘At first we did not know who was behind this infiltration. Everything suggested the Chinese, who as we all know are busy waging cyber-warfare against all three of our countries, and many others as well. But by investigation we managed to catch this intruder, and it turned out that he was, of all things, North Korean.’

Kirov’s brows lifted momentarily in surprise. The North Koreans were nobody’s friends – not even the Chinese whose proximity meant they inevitably had some contact with their neighbour. But the North Korean Intelligence Services had always seemed more intent on defence than attack, and they rarely ventured into the West.

Fane went on, ‘We learned a few other things during our investigation. One was that information from our project was being sent to an office in Marseilles. We believe they used this information to sabotage some trials we were running on …’ he hesitated, again not wanting to say too much ‘… some innovations in aeronautics. We discovered this office was leased and manned by Koreans who were thought to be
South
Koreans – or that’s what they said they were. That was puzzling enough, but we’ve just learned they were in fact North Koreans.’

‘Interesting,’ said Kirov, with a note of professional appreciation. ‘No one would think of Marseilles as a likely place to find North Korean agents.’

‘Agreed. But we know that these activities are known to your own Service.’

‘Surely not,’ said Kirov, looking alert for the first time.