Private Wars (14 page)

Spreading out, filling the rest of the gulley around the tent, were the vendors, most of them with their wares displayed on dirty blankets or rugs, a few having gone so far as to raise canopies of one sort or another on sticks, to provide shelter and an illusion of privacy. Chace saw bootleg cassettes and CDs, old magazines, bits and pieces of machinery salvaged from who knew what, and piles upon piles of army surplus equipment. There were flashlights and entrenching tools and MREs and radios that she suspected would never be made to transmit or receive again. Most of the surplus was Soviet-era, but among them she spied bits and pieces of more modern equipment, matériel either bought or stolen from Coalition forces, even what appeared to be a set of NVGs. Three separate vendors were selling drugs, pot and hash and opium and their big brother, heroin.

And there were weapons, so many weapons. Not counting the ones being carried by the vendors and the shoppers, stacked precariously in makeshift displays, arrayed on their blankets, piled one upon the other. The collections spanned the ages, it seemed, weapons that had migrated throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia over the last sixty-plus years. From the Second World War through Korea and Vietnam, the tools of war that had survived and been passed on from one set of hands to another, with varying degrees of care. There were pistols from Vietnam and rifles from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, revolvers from Korea and knives from the Second World War. There were swords and spears and axes of indeterminate origin and provenance, and a wide selection of knives that at first glance seemed to be of local manufacture, and fairly high quality. Ammunition boxes formed makeshift barriers between stalls, labeled in Cyrillic and Mandarin and Uzbek and English. She saw grenades, she saw flak jackets, she saw collapsible batons, she saw submachine guns.

She stopped again, this time to orient herself, aware that she was drawing eyes. It didn’t alarm her; it was expected. There were perhaps some thirty to forty people around, either selling or buying. Almost all of them looked to be ethnic Uzbeks, though there were no doubt Kazakhs and Kyrgyzs among them.

And all were men, to the last of them, with the exception of the only other woman Chace could discern, standing at the closed flap of the tent. The men ranged in age from late teens to perhaps mid-fifties, most dressed in the traditional mix of cloaks and boots, a few in the post-Soviet work fashion, the majority with their heads covered. The woman—or girl—looked to be fifteen at the oldest, wearing a filthy robe. Her legs were bare, and Chace suspected that, beneath the robe, she wore nothing else. If she was cold, she did a good job of hiding it.

While Chace watched, the tent flap parted, and a squat man emerged, bearded, pulling up his trousers. Past him, inside, Chace could see two other girls, each naked, moving to cover themselves. The squat man exchanged words with another, seated at the table near the entrance, then stopped, looking her way. Another man, seated at one of the tables, rose and headed into the tent.

Chace heard movement behind her, ignored it for the moment. They still didn’t know what to make of her. No one would try anything, not yet.

She tried to put a cap on what she was feeling, forced herself to look away from the tent and back to the vendors, began walking around the circle, looking at the items on each blanket as she passed. She stopped briefly at a display of knives, seeing a bone-handled blade that caught her fancy, thinking that she would need one of her own. In her periphery, she counted three men following her as a group, staying perhaps fifteen feet back. Two of them carried Kalashnikovs on straps at the shoulders. The third, the eldest of the three, wore a pistol in a holster around his waist.

Chace continued working her way around the market, finally completing her counterclockwise circuit at the largest collection of weapons for sale, to the left of the tent entrance. A grumpy-looking Uzbek in overalls and a work shirt watched over the wares, eyeing her with an expression that seemed caught between suspicion and amusement, yet undecided. Chace passed his wares, which seemed to be grouped without rhyme or reason, then stopped and doubled back, her eye snagging on a pistol half buried in a stack near the back of the makeshift stall. It was a semiauto, what looked to be a Smith & Wesson Mk 39, but at this distance, she couldn’t be sure. The men following her stopped when she did.

Chace pointed. “Can I see that?” she asked in Russian.

“You’re not Russian,” the vendor said. It wasn’t quite accusatory, but it came close.

“That one,” Chace said, indicating the pistol again. “The Smith and Wesson.”

“You have money?”

She smiled.

“You come here alone?”

She let her smile grow a fraction.

The man smiled in return, revealing the fact that he was missing his upper two front teeth. “You should not come alone.”

“That one,” Chace repeated.

The man hesitated, and Chace saw his eyes flick past her, to her left, to the three men who had been following, and she knew what was coming, and she knew what the cue would be.

The vendor nodded, shrugged, and started to turn away from her, toward the indicated stack of weapons. As he did, she heard the movement, caught the motion in her periphery, the Kalashnikovs coming off of the shoulders of both men. There was no haste in their movement, and it gave her all the time she needed. Chace swept her right hand up, over her belly, and brought out the pistol Javlon had bought for her. She struck down the safety with her thumb as she freed the weapon, had her finger settled well on the trigger by the time she put her sights on the vendor’s back.

Everyone stopped, the men with the rifles and the ones shuffling at their blankets and the ones eating their meals.

“Alone,” Chace said. “Not stupid.”

The vendor turned around to face her slowly, and when he saw the pistol pointed at him, raised his hands, showing her his palms.

“They lower the guns,” Chace told him. “Or I shoot.”

The vendor nodded and spoke in Uzbek. Chace risked turning her head enough to see the three, and to confirm that they had complied.

“Have to try,” the vendor said by way of explanation, still showing her his hands, and working in a shrug for added effect.

She looked back at him. “I understand.”

“If you want, we can do business now.” He smiled hopefully, again revealing his missing teeth.

“Yes, please,” Chace agreed, and with her free hand, she pointed to the stack once more, and added, “It’s the one sticking out at the bottom.”

The vendor nodded, turning to retrieve the gun in question, and as he did, Chace threw the safety back into place on the pistol, and slid it once more into the front of her trousers. She felt as much as heard the tension lift from the market then, and by the time the vendor was showing her the Smith & Wesson, conversations were resuming.

It
took the better part of two hours to buy everything she thought she would need, or at least, to buy everything that they had that she thought she would need. When she was finished, the three men who had stalked her helped to carry her purchases back to the Range Rover, where she loaded them into the back. She’d bought three blankets off one of the vendors, and used them to cover the weapons, ammunition, and other equipment. Once everything was squared away, Chace walked back to the vendor with the missing teeth, and paid, in cash. No one bothered her, no one followed her as she returned to the car, poorer, but certainly better armed.

When
she returned to the spot where she’d left Javlon, he was gone, and the sun was dipping below the horizon.

Chace waited by the side of the road until darkness came.

The boy never came back.

CHAPTER 15

London—Hertfordshire—
Crocker Family Residence

18 February, 0910 Hours GMT

“Dad!”

“No,” Crocker said flatly, in much the same tone and with much the same malevolence he employed on personnel in the Ops Room. In the Ops Room, it was quite effective, and had the desired result of instantly and entirely closing down any further debate.

Here at home was another story and if anything, seemed to have the opposite effect, as his elder daughter, Sabrina, was about to demonstrate. It didn’t help matters that he was at the kitchen stove, still in his dressing gown, a skillet in his hand, and more concerned with not breaking the yolks on the eggs he was frying up for the family breakfast than in exerting his authority. It was a position that, he concluded, lacked the appropriate authority.

“I’ve had the tickets for
weeks
!”

“I’m sure you can find a friend who wants them.”

“That’s not the point, Dad!
Everyone’s
going! Everyone!”

“You’re not everyone.”

Sabrina slammed her hand on the kitchen counter in frustration, then played her trump card. “Mom!”

From the kitchen table, Jennie didn’t look up from her newspaper. “Paul, it’s Saturday. She’s had the tickets for weeks.”

“She also performed abysmally on her mock exams,” Crocker countered. “She has lessons, she has that tutor coming, and she’s looking at her A-levels come summer. She needs to study.”

“I have been studying!” Sabrina complained. “Just because you’re never here to see it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, Dad!”

I am going to lose this argument,
Crocker realized.

“Please don’t raise your voice at me,” he said.

Sabrina sulked, glowering at him. “I apologize.”

“Has she been studying?” Crocker asked his wife.

At the table, his younger daughter, Ariel, in imitation of her mother, didn’t look up from her book. “When she’s not online chatting with her mates.”

“Die,” Sabrina instructed her sister.

“She has been studying, Paul,” Jennie confirmed. “I already told her she could go. She’ll do fine on her exams. Making her miserable every weekend between now and when she takes them won’t improve that performance.”

“I thought we wanted better than fine.”

Jennie glanced up, warning him with her eyes. “I told her she can go.”

“Who is she going with?” Crocker tried. “Who are you going with?”

“Friends from school,” his daughter answered.

“I’d like names, if you don’t mind.”

“Are you going to check them?”

Crocker shot her a look. In the Ops Room, it would have sent its target running for cover, or at its best, dropped them in their tracks. Here, it reinforced Sabrina’s defiance, and she raised her chin slightly, her mouth tight, daring him to admit that, yes, he kept his family under surveillance. She might not have understood exactly what her father did for a living, but she knew enough to know it was for the Government. He never discussed his work in front of the children, and very rarely with Jennie, but Sabrina was old enough and smart enough to understand what that omission meant. If she thought of her father as James Bond, though, she remained unimpressed. He doubted she actually believed that he would go so far as to keep his wife and children under watch.

Crocker moved the skillet off the burner, began sliding portions of breakfast onto the waiting plates beside the stove. “Is that boy going to be there? Lancelot or whatever his name is?”

At the table, Ariel giggled, then stifled the sound and studiously turned the page in her book. She was reading Brian Jacques’ latest, Crocker noted, yet another in a long sequence of novels about noble medieval mice.

“Tristan,” Sabrina corrected tightly. “No, I’m not seeing him anymore.”

“Who are you seeing?”

“Paul,” Jennie warned.

“I’m going with Trinnie, Dad. I’ll be spending the night at her place after the concert.”

“Trinnie’s the one with the spots?”

“It’s a mole, and she had it removed.”

“When will you be back?”

Sabrina smiled in quiet triumph, sensing the moment of capitulation. “Tomorrow morning.”

Crocker finished fixing the plates, moving them to the table. He had to clear his throat twice, loudly, before Ariel and Jennie would lower their respective reading materials to make room for the breakfasts. He set their food in front of them, and watched as each woman set about eating, without so much as the slightest acknowledgment of his culinary efforts.

“I have no authority in this house,” Crocker declared.

As if to confirm the statement, he got no response from any of them.

“Right,” he told his eldest. “Go. But you’re back by noon tomorrow.”

Sabrina kissed his cheek lightly, happy once more, and then was out of the room, a “thank you” drifting back toward him in her wake. He heard her feet thumping up the stairs, rushing back to her room. Apparently she had a wardrobe to plan.

Crocker poured himself a fresh cup of tea, then took his seat at the table. Jennie lowered her copy of the
Guardian,
smiling at him. Sometimes he thought his wife read the liberal paper just to annoy him.

From behind her book, Ariel asked, “So I’m supposed to have a broken leg, am I?”

Both Jennie and Crocker looked at her.

Ariel took her bookmark from where it rested beside her plate, set it between the pages, closed the book, and then looked at her parents. Her glasses, Crocker noticed, were smudged. Unlike Sabrina, Ariel went to great lengths not to care how she looked.

“Heard that, did you?” Jennie asked.

Ariel nodded. “I crashed my bicycle?”

“Tuesday,” Jennie said. “Yes, you narrowly avoided being hit by a car.”

“On Valentine’s Day?”

“You were distracted, obviously.”

Ariel made a face, disgusted by the thought of the kind of people who cared about things like boys and Valentine’s Day.

Crocker looked at Jennie. “Barclay called?”

“One of his assistants,” Jennie confirmed. “Last evening, before you got home.” She cast a glance to Ariel, then back to Crocker. “Little jugs have big ears.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this last night?”

“You did get home rather late, Paul. It slipped my mind.”

“Did he say why he was calling?”

“The assistant? He wanted to know if Ariel was all right. Said that Sir Frances was quite concerned.”

Ariel asked, “Who’s Sir Frances?”

“Daddy’s boss,” Jennie said.

“You lied to your boss? You told him I’d broken my leg?” Ariel asked Crocker.

“Yes.”

“Do I get a set of crutches, at least?”

Crocker didn’t respond, thinking. Jennie was looking at him, now mildly concerned.

Barclay’s checking the story,
Crocker thought.
Three days late, but he’s checking the story. Why now?

Crocker rose from the table, finishing his tea, leaving his breakfast half eaten. “I’m going to have to go into the office.”

Jennie nodded, which was bearable, but Ariel’s look of disappointment was bitter, and not.

“I’m sorry,” he told his younger daughter.

“You promised we’d go to the show at the Old Town Hall,” Ariel said softly. Like her mother, when Ariel was upset, she wouldn’t raise her voice. Rather, she lowered it until it was almost impossible to hear. “You promised we’d see the puppets, the ones from Japan.”

“I know. I
am
sorry, Ariel.”

“I’ll take you,” Jennie said. “We’ll have fun.”

“It’s not the same,” Ariel said, and then Crocker was out of the room, out of earshot.

The guilt dogged him all the way to London.

Ronald
Hodgson was at Duty Ops when Crocker entered the Operations Room, supervising a skeletal staff, as appropriate for a weekend without a major operation in the offing. Crocker thought he did an admirable job of concealing his surprise.

“D-Ops on the floor,” Ron declared when he’d recovered, then added, to Crocker, “Didn’t expect you to be coming in today, sir.”

“No,” Crocker agreed, taking a position beside the Duty Ops Desk so he could survey the plasma wall. Lankford’s job in Morocco was posted on the map, with a callout designating the operation as “Bowfiddle,” and a notation reading, “Running—Joint.” Otherwise, there was nothing of immediate interest. Two other minor operations, one in Argentina, surveillance for the MOD, the other in Gibraltar.

Crocker stuck a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, called out to Alexis Ferguson at the MCO Desk. “Have we seen an exchange of signals with Tashkent Station in the last twenty-four hours? Anything at all?”

Alexis tapped her keyboard, quickly bringing up the log, scanning the entries. She was tall and quite thin, with a crown of short black hair, and she had to bend to peer at her monitor. “One exchange, sir, initiated nineteen-twenty-seven hours last night, London to Tashkent, with a reply logged as of oh-thirty-three, local.”

“Whose office initiated the communication?”

“The Deputy Chief, sir. Response by Station Number One, Craig Gillard.”

Crocker scowled, shook his head. Alison Gordon-Palmer had left the building before him the previous night. Unless she’d turned around and come back—which was entirely possible—the inquiry hadn’t been from her office. More to the point, if she was as deep into Sir Walter Seccombe’s pocket as Crocker was now beginning to suspect, she wouldn’t have risked tipping Chace’s run. Which meant that, while the communication appeared to have been initiated by the DC, it most likely hadn’t been.

Which left only two others who could make it look like the communication had come from the DC. Either D-Int, or C.

And Crocker couldn’t imagine why Simon Rayburn would want to hide any communication with a Station, let alone a communication to Tashkent, something he had both the authority and right to do whenever it suited him.

Which left C.

“We have a copy?” Crocker asked.

Alexis began tapping at her console again, then paused. After a moment, she resumed typing, faster, then paused again.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, slowly. “I can’t find a copy.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not here. It may have been purged to the server already.”

I doubt that,
Crocker thought. “Who had MCO before you came on shift, Lex?”

“William Teagle, sir. He’s forty-eight hours off, due back Monday morning.”

Crocker turned back to Ron. “Is C in the building?”

One of the phones in the bank at the Duty Ops Desk began ringing, and Ron moved to answer it, saying, “I believe so, sir, yes.”

Crocker grunted, tapping the edge of his cigarette into the ashtray at Ron’s desk, waiting for him to finish with the call. Ron listened, murmured an assent, then hung up.

“C most definitely
is
in the building, sir,” Ron told him. “He’d like you to join him in his office, in fact.”

“Bloody hell,” was the only thing Crocker could think to say.

In
almost every instance prior, Crocker had entered Barclay’s territory to find the other man firmly entrenched, either reigning from behind his desk or in the sitting area, where he would occupy the largest of the leather upholstered chairs arrayed around the coffee table. Barclay, like Crocker, like Seccombe, like Gordon-Palmer, like a thousand others throughout Whitehall, understood the power of the Desk, and the etiquette surrounding its use. Meet an underling while sitting behind it, you demonstrated your superiority in the chain of command; decline to stand upon receiving a guest, you indicated displeasure, or possibly even contempt; rise and move around it to greet, perhaps going so far as to offer a hand for the shaking, you declared anything from camaraderie to gratitude to friendship.

The etiquette of the desk, the ways it could be used, even abused, were legion. Crocker had sometimes thought, in his lighter moments, that the FCO and the Home Office could collaborate on a joint publication to be delivered to all senior civil servants.
Your Desk and You: Strategies in Management,
or something along those lines.

In the imagined publication, Crocker always imagined Barclay writing the foreword.

Entering the office on this Saturday morning, though, Crocker wondered if a new chapter mightn’t be in order. Sir Frances Barclay wasn’t behind the desk. He was waiting in front of it.

“You wanted to see me, sir?” Crocker said.

Barclay nodded, then gestured vaguely in the direction of the sitting area. Instead of preceding Crocker, he followed. He even went so far as to remain standing until after Crocker had taken a seat on the couch.

“None of my PAs are in, I’m afraid,” Barclay said. “Else I’d offer you something.”

“I’m fine, sir.”

“I suppose we could have a drink from the bar, though it seems early yet.”

“A touch, yes.”

“Well, then,” Barclay said, and stood for a moment longer before almost reluctantly taking his customary seat. He positioned himself sitting on the edge, leaning forward. He adjusted his eyeglasses, then exhaled, resolving himself. “I assume you know that Daniel called your home, and spoke to your wife.”

“You didn’t believe my daughter had broken her leg.”

“It isn’t beyond you to employ your family in a deception.”

“Why would I deceive you?”

Barclay made a single noise, the start of an abortive laugh. “Paul, I don’t think that really deserves a response.”

“Perhaps I should rephrase, then, sir. What would I be deceiving you about this time?”

“I don’t know,” Barclay replied, suddenly frank. “But I do know you’ve been to see the PUS at the FCO twice in the past week. And I know that when I make inquiries into the purpose of those visits, the answers I receive are, at best, evasive.”

“It’s as I told you before, sir. Sir Walter has been soliciting my input regarding the fiasco in KL.”

“I don’t believe you.” Barclay finally leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers together, setting his hands in his lap. He looked at Crocker. “And unfortunately, I seem to have no way to compel the truth from you, considering that you’ve little over a week left in this job.”