Luc: A Spy Thriller (30 page)

Giuttieri’s eyebrows went up and he splayed his hands. ‘What of it?’

‘She has told them everything.’ Steenhoek leaned forward. ‘
Everything
.’ He sat back and exhaled. He glanced to his left and noticed me. ‘Trust me, I’m not a violent man. I believe I’ve explained to the repellent Luc here that I only indulge in the behaviour when I’m driven to it. Well, I’ve been driven to it.’ Steenhoek looked up at Giuttieri. ‘I’m sorry, Ernesto. I apologise. We did warn. But it was either this or four hundred years in prison.’

Ernesto Giuttieri gazed down at Steenhoek with pity. ‘You should’ve taken the four hundred years,’ he said.

‘Don’t think I wasn’t tempted,’ Steenhoek said.

There were two muffled
phut
sounds and Steenhoek’s two men collapsed forward, sprawling on the ground. Blood began to creep from wounds in their heads. There was a pause. Steenhoek’s head twisted from body to body and then he tensed up solid. ‘Ah, crap it,’ he said.

Giuttieri looked ahead blankly.

There was another
phut
and Steenhoek shot forward out of the chair, his arms by his side and landed face first on the ground, sending up a cloud of dust.

Giuttieri indicated the cemetery. ‘There’s another one in there,’ he said to whoever had done the shooting. ‘Wait till he comes out and then kill him.’

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

The Star Ferry bobbed about on the water as we boarded. The people in front of me trooped to the front bench. I went to the rear bench and swung the seat back to face the way we were now heading. I sat at the end, near the water.

The moody clouds were dark and the air was stifling. Even though it was only half nine in the morning, the humidity was off the scale. We set off, heading for Central, and I gazed once again at the startling Hong Kong skyline. A new skyscraper is built seemingly every week.

The old man next to me wanted to practise his English and so we got talking and he started to chat about his family in Peking. He still called it Peking, not Beijing. And then as I wanted to practise my shaky Cantonese, we switched to that.

I looked around the ferry. A mix of tourists and locals. One English couple were marvelling at the cost of the ferry trip. ‘Ten cents. What’s that - tuppence?’ They laughed. ‘Brenda, we’re moving here.’

We docked at Central and I said goodbye to the old fella and took one of the covered walkways which stretch above the city. A lot more business people here and I admired the beautiful Oriental women in their white blouses and black pencil skirts striding past. I glanced left at the myriad traffic shooting by underneath us.

I descended the walkway and came out onto a busy street, yellow trams snaking past me, skyscrapers towering above.

I turned into a narrow alley and walked down about ten feet. I then turned round and grabbed the man behind me and pushed him up against the brick wall, my left forearm pushed under his chin. He was a shortish white man, stocky, dressed in blue linen shirt and black linen trousers. He wore boat shoes with no socks.

‘You’ve been following me since I left my hotel on Kowloon side,’ I said. ‘What were you planning to do, rob me?’

He looked back at me unconcerned. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was planning to recruit you.’

My neck went back. For a couple of seconds I didn’t say anything. ‘Excuse me?’

‘My name is Neil Wilson. I work for the British government.’

I stared at him for a moment. I shook my head and shrugged. ‘And?’

‘And we think you possess the necessary qualities that we need.’

I exhaled noisily. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘We’ve been observing you for a little while now. What we have seen is a man who is resourceful, logical, excellent with languages, can defend himself and others, and who has an inherent capacity for getting the job done. These are qualities we seek.’

I was frowning. ‘You’ve been observing me? What are you
talking
about?’

He placed a hand on my left arm and gently pushed down. ‘Would you mind? Apart from anything, let’s not attract too much attention.’

I looked around and reluctantly released my arm from his throat. He nodded and said, ‘Thank you,’ and then grabbed my shirt with his left fist, stamped his right heel into my left leg to disorientate me, twisted round in two paces so he was now in front of me and facing the wall, kicked my feet out from under me and drove his left fist down so my back slammed into the ground, the wind knocked from me.

‘Ouch,’ I said eventually.

He crouched beside me. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘you have strength and you can fight. But you lack finesse. Come on.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’

***

The man took a long drink from the bottle of water he’d just bought. ‘Man, the humidity here is something, right?’

‘When you said you’d buy me a drink I didn’t think you meant water.’

‘But I did say I worked for the British government.’

I nodded. ‘So what do you do for the government?’

‘I’ll come to that. Let’s stick with you for the time being.’ He looked across at me. ‘What the hell are you doing with your life, Luc?’

I looked at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I think you’re lost, my friend. You have all these skills, and what are you? What do you do? You move from crappy job to crappy job.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You walk away from every woman you’ve ever known. You are lost. You are searching for something.’

‘Very profound. I’m amazed.’

‘Joke all you want, you know it’s true.’

‘And you have the answer?’

‘You’ve been looking for us, just as we’ve been looking for you.’

I laughed. Almost. ‘So who are you?’ I asked.

‘I work for a small department within Whitehall.’

I straightened up and my eyes narrowed a little. ‘Sounds shadowy. You’re not going to tell me you’re a spy or something, are you?’

‘An unpleasant term. Our work is primarily to accumulate intelligence for our masters.’

‘Good god, you are a spy.’ I stared at him. ‘So what’s your secondary role?’ I asked.

He smiled and pulled a card from his shirt pocket and handed it to me. It was blank apart from a single word.

Vercingetorix.

The man held up a hand to halt any questions from me.

‘If you are interested, take that card to the British Consulate in Supreme Court Road. Ask for a Stephen Douglas. Tell him your name and that you spoke to me.’

***

That night I kicked seven shades out of the bin in my hotel room.

I admit, I did it because the man had got to me. And he had got to me because he was right. What the hell was I doing with my life?

I was thirty years old. I had no permanent job. No permanent girlfriend. No permanent life.

I
was
searching for something.

But was I searching for what his ‘small department within Whitehall’ could offer?

The next morning I had made up my mind.

I boarded the Star Ferry again and took a red taxi to Supreme Court Road and stepped inside the massive British Consulate. Any lingering doubts that this was all made up, some loony in the street, was quickly dispelled when I eventually found myself in a meeting with the Consul General herself.

It all happened quickly then. The next morning I was on a plane back to London. While on board I signed the Official Secrets Act, a document handed to me by a slim, efficient woman in her thirties, who looked at me commandingly over her glasses. I was driven from Heathrow airport into Westminster and we parked in a small, square courtyard on Whitehall. I was taken through narrow corridors and up a winding, uneven staircase and shown into a small, cluttered office that smelled of centuries-old dust and parchment.

A man was there to greet me. His name, he said, was Baxter. A thin, navy blue-suited, bespectacled gentleman who revealed his intelligence in little asides, but who nevertheless asked me the oddest questions.

He also asked me about the card I had been given.

‘You remember there was a word on that card?’ he asked.

We were sitting on opposite sides of a mahogany desk. Fraying, old, black leather books stood inside glass-covered book cases all around us.

‘A name,’ I said. ‘Yes. Vercingetorix.’

‘You know who he was?’

‘A warrior. A chief of the Averni tribe. He united the Gauls against the invading Romans.’

‘Well done. You know your history,’ he said, almost superciliously.

I shook my head. ‘There’s a statue of him in the town I grew up in. Which I presume is why it’s on my card.’

‘Sort of. Actually, it’s the inscription on that statue that we’re more interested in.’

I glanced up to the left to recall it. ‘
J’ai pris les armes pour la liberte de tous.’
I said. ‘I took up arms for the liberty of all.’

He nodded.

He continued to stare at me.

‘I see,’ I said.

‘Do you?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Sort of the ethos around here, I take it.’

He didn’t answer that, just smiled a little.

‘And where is here?’ I asked. ‘I presume we’re something like MI5? MI6? Nobody’s actually told me.’

I wouldn’t be certain that I’ve ever heard anyone actually harrumph before. But at that moment, in that office, Baxter came very close.

‘They wouldn’t,’ he said, the smile disappearing from his face. ‘We are neither of the misnamed organisations you have just trotted out. For a start we go back a little further.

‘Our department was formed in 1854 shortly after the Battle of Balaclava. Naturally, our masters at the time were none too happy that we had lost our best supply road in the region. Not to mention the cock-up that led to the slaying of forty percent of the Light Brigade. Something needed to be done.’ He straightened his back.

‘The Secretary of State for War, the Duke of Newcastle, certainly thought so. He envisaged a group of well-trained men, and as it turned out, women, who could get into a country well ahead of the army and take on the enemy covertly.

‘Our role handed to us was quite clear: defend and promote the interests of this island nation
acta non verba
- through deeds not words. To do that we needed men and women who were not afraid to tell some lies, steal some treasure or spill some blood.

‘Lad, this department has a long and glorious history. One day you may even get to hear about it.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘And what is this department known as?’ I asked, genuinely absorbed.

‘We have been known for a century and a half to a few people by a single word. One day you may even get to know about that as well.

‘Listen, lad,’ he said again, his eyes narrowing. ‘This department is not hewn from modern sensibilities. When we were formed a twenty-year-old could be expected to travel halfway around the world and take charge of a company of men or an entire plantation. Spotty urchins barely out of school were treated as grown-ups and thus usually walked like men. Today…’ A pained expression appeared on his face. It seemed to be too much for him to contemplate any longer. He changed the subject.

‘You mentioned Vauxhall Cross.’ MI6.
Secret Intelligence Service
. ‘We’re a different kettle of fish. In this department we’re expected to get our hands a little more dirty,’ he said. ‘That the sort of ethos you can live with?’

I stared back at him. His blue eyes glinted. I was seeing the steel within him now and I wondered what his story was. Whether he’d been ‘out in the field’, as they all seemed to call it. It wouldn’t have surprised me.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘That is very much what I can live with.’

He nodded soberly.

A week later I was offered a job.

There then followed three months of intensive training in Wiltshire and Edinburgh.

Towards the end of the third month I was summoned back to London. I was called into Baxter’s office.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

I sat down opposite him, inhaling, once again, the history of the place.

I frowned because I was unsure what the meeting was about. ‘Everything’s been okay with my training, hasn’t it, sir?’ I asked.

Baxter leaned forward, clasping his hands on the desk. ‘Yesterday,’ he said, ignoring my question, ‘Neil Wilson was murdered on a routine assignment in Belize.’

I looked at him slightly aghast. I hadn’t expected that. Wilson had taken some of the classes in my training.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘You know by now we don’t nanny our people. We know your training is not finished, but we sometimes like to do this with new recruits.’

A fly landed on the light blue jotting pad in front of Baxter and began walking about. He made no attempt to flick it away.