Rogue Elements (19 page)

Emily, what am I doing?

What are you doing to me?

He had long wondered if the SIS officer who had ordered his wife’s death alongside his own had ever met her. She’d attended one staff social to which spouses were apprehensively invited. Not at Head Office, of course; they’d borrowed rooms at the Honourable Artillery Company. What must it have been like, to be plunged into a throng of spooks for the first time? He had felt so proud of her, holding her own among people who valued others by the secrets they possessed, secrets entirely unknown to her. She got the balance just right, asking thoughtful questions that showed an interest without veering into political or confidential territory. And though she preferred not to dance with his colleagues, she drew their attention in her quiet, thoughtful way just as surely as she had drawn his in Covent Garden.

‘The main drawback for wives,’ George Vine had said, his Iranian tan glowing amongst the pallid faces of his colleagues, ‘is the status problem. Fine in the early years, but after a while it gets embarrassing when the husband never makes ambassador, never collects a gong for that long Whitehall service, never does anything noteworthy they can talk about.’

‘What about husbands?’ she’d asked.

‘Excuse me?’

‘How do spies’ husbands cope?’

‘Goodness, there you have me. I’ve been unthinkingly sexist, haven’t I?’ He glanced at Jane Saddle, at Madeleine Wraye. Lowering his voice, he said, ‘The evidence suggests not well, I’m afraid. But please don’t let that put you off joining us should the academic life pale.’

Could George Vine have possibly given the green light to Yadin when he knew Emily was in the house? When he had just heard her voice on the phone?

Jeremy Elphinstone she had met only briefly on arrival, hospitable and welcoming as host of the event, but quick to shift his attention to the next guests. Jane Saddle had been too busy trying to limit the bar bill to take any notice of a junior officer’s wife. Surprisingly, Emily had got on best with Martin de Vries. He was nothing if not sincere, and that was a quality Emily prized, especially in a room full of professional liars. Attempting to break the ice with the awkward Afrikaner, she had said lightly, ‘It’s brave of you all to let us outsiders see your faces. I suppose any one of us could be an enemy agent compiling a list of Britain’s top spies.’

‘You could be,’ he had agreed gravely. ‘That is the risk we have chosen to take, the price we must pay for a measure of family harmony.’

‘Would you prefer not to let spouses in?’

‘Look, it was agreed by the directors and I respect that team decision, whatever my own views on the security risks.’

Because he took it seriously, she took it seriously, and he seemed to appreciate that. Before long they were talking about her PhD thesis on networked behaviour, and Arkell was amazed to see how animated de Vries could become over a topic of no direct relevance to his own work.

‘But it is relevant,’ he’d insisted. ‘Our technology is driven by your pure science, just as surely as your science is advanced by breakthroughs in technology. The phenomena you observe in networks today, we will assuredly be exploiting in our software tomorrow.’

‘What a nice man,’ Emily had observed later, to Arkell’s surprise.

Had he been the one? Had he ordered Dr Emily Arkell blown up, torn into a thousand bloody fragments of bone and pulp and sinew?

It was late and Tony Watchman was drunk by the time they encountered him, red-faced and sweaty from the dance floor. ‘She’s a pretty one,’ he said, ambling towards them with a champagne bottle gripped like a weapon in one fist. He smiled luminously to dispel Emily’s frown. ‘Want some? Amazing what you can find locked away in Artillery cupboards. I’m Tony. And you must be the reason Simon’s always late to work.’

‘Actually, I hardly ever see him. He’s abroad all the time.’

‘Oh well.’ A wolfish grin. ‘Time on your hands.’

As if sensing trouble, Madeleine Wraye appeared at that moment. ‘Tony, you look dreadful.’

‘And you look wonderful as ever, Maddie. It’s good to see you let your hair down, literally if not figuratively. You’ve always had beautiful hair. Like this one,’ he said, deftly curling two fingers under a lock of Emily’s hair.

‘Take it seriously,’ Wraye told Arkell later. ‘I was watching the whole thing. There was a definite look behind your back.’

He had laughed. ‘Tony was wasted. He was giving looks to every woman in the room.’

‘I don’t mean Tony.’ She let it sink in. ‘He’s an attractive man, Simon, an intelligent man. A powerful man. Whatever his condition, your wife saw something she liked in him.’

Emily. What are you doing to me? Nine years in the ground, and still . . .

And still.

Did Tony kill you?

This time Arkell drove straight to Kolatch’s front door.

He had waited a long time in the marsh, feeling the muddy water seep into his boots and the cramp set into his tensed legs. He knew it was likely Yadin was long gone. But he also knew the Kidon combatant might be lying in wait in the timber yard, or on the road that lay between the marsh and the port. That’s what he would have done, after all.

Shortly after 1 a.m. he had checked into an anonymous three-star hotel, where he could clean up and catch a few hours’ much-needed sleep before heading to Larnaca airport for a 6 a.m. stake-out of the Aegean Airlines check-in. Yadin never showed up. With a little charm, he was able to elicit from the airline staff confirmation that passenger José Cumes had missed the flight.

Gavriel Yadin, it seemed, had made other arrangements to leave the island.

He’d pulled Madeleine Wraye out of bed to confess the outcome. ‘Let me get this straight,’ she said blearily. ‘You had Yadin and you let him walk away?’

‘I’ll get him,’ Arkell promised.

‘You said he gave the poisons to a sailor?’

‘I said he gave two boxes to a man in a bar near the port.’

‘Don’t get smart with me,’ she snapped. ‘You’ve lost the right.’

‘I’ll find out what I can from Kolatch,’ he offered.

‘Maybe you should go back to babysitting corporate executives,’ she said, hanging up on him.

The return drive to the west side of the island had done nothing to improve Arkell’s mood.

‘Yes?’ said Arni Kolatch, opening the door just enough to expose one eye.

Arkell slammed it open, pushed past him. ‘We need to talk.’

He went first to the laptop in the kitchen, inserted a flash drive and copied the mail files, internet history and document folders. Over Kolatch’s mounting protests, he picked up the mobile phone on the side table and copied all numbers and messages to the NN-3U. Finally, he sat the chemist down at his own kitchen table, picked up a steak knife and said, ‘I’ve got a headache, so let’s not piss about.’ He pressed the man’s limp arm to the table and held the steak knife over his wrist. ‘You know what your own people are capable of. I’m no different.’

‘I doubt that,’ said Kolatch softly.

‘Do you doubt my willingness to hurt you?’

The older man shook his head. ‘I heard what you did to Dejan.’

Arkell stared at him, revealing nothing.

‘You have a nice life here,’ he said. ‘I’d rather not wreck it. Please, make it easy for both of us.’

‘I intend to.’

Surprised, Arkell said, ‘You’ll tell me about Yadin?’

‘Whatever you want to know.’

He was instinctively suspicious. But, on the other hand, this man knew how to survive. Maybe cooperation was his secret weapon. ‘I need to know what was in the two boxes you gave him. And I need to know when and how he’ll use them.’

‘Ah,’ smiled Kolatch. ‘So it
was
you. He said he saw someone in the trees.’

Frowning, Arkell turned to the window. He could see, high up the hill, the edge of the vineyard, and level with it that clump of stunted trees. ‘I wasn’t in the –’

The window exploded.

Glass fragments burst around him. A sharp sting as three shards cut into his left arm and chest. Automatically he dropped to the floor, out of sight, trying to sense whether there was anything more, a leaden impact, a bullet in one of his vital organs.

But when he looked back, it was clear where the round had come to rest. The chemist’s face was a bleeding crater. His legs were sprawled over the chair, his shoulders on the floor in an expanding pool of blood.

Yadin?

Arkell didn’t believe it. He’d seen the two men embrace. And with a sniper’s rifle in Yadin’s hands, Kolatch would not have been the target.

Then who?

As blood oozed from the chemist’s head, Arkell pulled the slivers of glass from his own body and worked through the possibilities. Did Yadin have a support team? Had the Cypriot National Guard somehow got involved? Or had Wraye sent someone else, a moonlighting soldier from Dhekelia perhaps, to clean up Arkell’s mistakes?

None of those made sense.

After twenty minutes he decided to move. Whoever it was, he told himself, if they’d wanted him dead they’d have shot him first. He stood up and looked out of the shattered window. There was the clump of trees, but . . .

His eyes narrowed as he worked out the angles.

A shooter in the trees could not have seen – let alone killed – someone seated at the table. On the other hand . . .

He left the house at a fast run, and kept running all the way up the hill to the vineyard. Breathing hard, he came to a stop beside his trench.

There was the canvas, the shovel, the binoculars and the water, all just as he’d left them. Only one thing was different.

In the centre of the trench, provocatively balanced on its rear end, was the spent casing of a single .338 Lapua Magnum cartridge. A round much loved by US snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Arkell picked it up. A trace of heat remained in the rimless brass.

There were footprints, but they told him nothing. Two men, ordinary hiking boots. One of them had lain in his trench, making good use of his canvas, to eliminate his last lead.

And now? The footprints led to the same track Arkell had used the day before. He climbed the crest to confirm it: they were long gone.

Whoever they were.

‘Not the worst of the drug barons,’ H/NARC had summed up in his distinctive prose style, ‘but at the top of the second tier, with pretensions to the first. Rodrigo Salis may have more direct impact on UK interests than some of his mightier peers due to his relocation to Guinea-Bissau, bringing his operation closer to British business concerns in Africa as well as trade routes into the UK.’

The SIS file was bulky but insubstantial. Much of the supposed CX was really little more than open source reports or the stale crumbs charitably dispensed by other security services. Translated articles from Colombian newspapers rubbed shoulders with redacted DEA documents and colourful accounts from
Telegraph
and
Guardian
journalists on flying visits to Bissau. HMRC and Metropolitan Police arrest records detailed drug mules working for Salis’s organization who had swallowed as many of thirty balls of pure cocaine encased in layers of cling film and wax. A CIA report, also heavily redacted, on the drug wars in Mexico, gave a flavour of his marginal involvement in the battle for control of Juárez. Salis was said to have personally murdered both his uncle and his brother-in-law in the struggle for control of the family cocaine business. Non-family rivals were regularly eliminated, often in a pointedly bloody and shocking way.

As for his activities in Bissau, much less was known. The news articles claimed local people had been threatened, and a couple had disappeared, but they also conceded that plenty of Guinea-Bissauans were doing rather well out of Salis. Hard currency was trickling down all over the place, and no one was too concerned as to its provenance.

Some vital statistics were recorded: Salis was believed to be fifty-three years old, one metre seventy-four tall, with brown eyes, five children and an aversion to poultry. Wanted for murder in three countries, and for trafficking offences in fifty-six. His relationship with his moustache was unsettled: it appeared in three photographs; the other two showed him clean-shaven.

All potentially useful information, but none of it as compelling as the forensics report that accompanied the Salis file. Every single page, that was the conclusion. Every newspaper cutting, redacted report, arrest record, extradition request and NARC assessment bore traces of Anthony Watchman’s DNA and fingerprints.

It was impeccable proof, the strongest possible circumstantial evidence that Javier Diaz had correctly identified Watchman in Bissau. And even if there was a good reason for the Head of Counter-Terrorism to be taking such an interest in a Colombian drug baron, one peculiar detail made Watchman look guilty as hell. At the front of the file was a tag listing all the officers who had requisitioned SQ/83774. Neither Watchman nor any of his direct reports was named on that tag.

Arkell called Wraye the moment he landed at Frankfurt am Main airport. ‘You should know I’m still doing this. And I’m angry now.’

‘Well, good.’

‘I’m sending you a package of data from Kolatch’s computer. Nothing on Yadin but there’s plenty of other interesting material you can sell to your clients. Consider it a gift of atonement.’

‘That’s appreciated.’

‘You should also know Kolatch was killed. Not by me.’ He hesitated. ‘Is there anything from the girlfriend?’

‘Nothing. No one has visited the apartment – the bugs are working fine, but it’s just footsteps and the occasional scraping chair. She’s tried to call Dejan four times. A few other trivial calls to local businesses and friends. The GPS puts her in a physiotherapy clinic on Burchardstrasse most of the day. She’s a dead-end.’

‘How about ships leaving Limassol?’

‘Too many to search without very good reason. Sailing time to Italy is two to three days, so there’d be plenty of time to get Kolatch’s poisons to Strasbourg for the parliamentary address on the sixteenth. How was he killed?’

‘Sniper. Right in front of me. There’s another team out there.’

‘I’ll ask around. Be careful, Simon.’

‘I will. And Madeleine – for Strasbourg – I’ll accept your offer of a weapon.’

Arkell cleared Immigration and headed for the arrivals hall. At the barriers, he found himself staring into the grinning face of a young Jewish American called Danny.

‘
How
 . . . ?’ It was so ridiculous, so utterly unlikely, that Arkell’s mind instantly worked it out. But still he had to pose the question. ‘In a moment, I’m going to ask you what the hell you think you’re doing,’ he threatened. ‘But first . . . How did you find me?’

Danny looked ridiculously pleased with himself. ‘You’re Richard Warwick. I got ya! English names leaving Amman, purchasing a ticket on the day of travel. Yours was the only one that day. I mean, it’s pretty unusual, right? Like, who goes to Amman airport and thinks, “Hey, maybe I’ll fly someplace today”?’

‘And you found this information . . . ?’

‘It’s not so hard hacking into Amadeus.’

‘Yes, it is,’ muttered Arkell, recalling a lecture given by Martin de Vries on the subject.

‘Then I just waited for your next flight. OK, so not the next one: Cyprus is kind of far, but I figured I’d meet you when you came back to Europe. I mean, I guess Cyprus
is
officially Europe, but like,
real
Europe. Man, you really love booking last minute, huh? I had to haul ass to get here.’

Horrified as he was that a kid had been able to track him, after nine years of staying off the grid, he had to admit a grudging admiration. He made a mental note to ditch the Warwick passport along with his Michel Jamoulle identity. ‘Why were you so determined to find me?’

‘Like I said.’ The boy’s smile had faded. He looked suddenly nervous. ‘You saved my life.’

‘They weren’t going to kill you, Danny.’

‘Still. I owe you. I want to help.’

‘I don’t need your help.’

‘So, like, tracking someone who doesn’t want to be found – that’s not a skill you could use?’

Arkell was silent. It was just possible this kid could do stuff even Wraye’s people couldn’t. Hacking the Amadeus flight booking network. Emptying an oligarch’s bank account. These were not small achievements.

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘Don’t lie to me.’

‘I am! It’s a Jewish thing. We look younger than we are.’

‘Uh-huh. How old are you?’

Danny met his intense stare. ‘Twenty,’ he confessed.

‘You’re in college.’

‘Awh, I wasn’t learning anything. I was teaching the professors, mostly.’

‘Modest.’

Danny shrugged. ‘I won’t get in the way.’ He tapped the laptop under his arm. ‘Just set me up with wireless and tell me what you want to know.’

The lives of a prime minister and a president were on the line. And, after all, what was Arkell doing at twenty? How many men had he killed for France by then?

‘As it happens, there is someone I’m looking for.’

‘All right!’ nodded Danny excitedly. ‘What’s the name?’

‘Good question,’ Arkell muttered, leading the way to the car rental desks. ‘You’d better start with José Cumes.’