Tracers (31 page)

‘How did it happen?’ Harry finally managed to ask.

‘He was knifed in the back about a hundred yards from this office. He died instantly.’ The words came with the unemotional tones of a newsreader, but behind it Harry detected a restrained sense of anger.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, knowing how lame it sounded. ‘When did this happen?’

‘Within the last hour. The people who found him thought he’d had a heart attack and got him to a hospital. He’d been dropped off by his driver to walk the last couple of hundred yards to the office, something he liked to do. We’re running CCTV footage of the street right now. I don’t hold out much hope of seeing anything to help us, though. Someone said they saw a biker on the same stretch of pavement, but it’s not much to go on. Whoever did this was a pro.’

‘
Dog
.’ Harry uttered the word dully, thinking of the crackle of exhaust at South Acres.

To his surprise, Ballatyne agreed. ‘We think so. We’re circulating pictures of him to all agencies. We believe he also killed another of our men earlier today, near Victoria Station. A knife in the ear. Our man had tracked him to a hostel. He got too close.’

‘You actually had him located?’ Harry felt a surge of anger at the idea that they had traced the man and had let him get away. To do this.

Ballatyne didn’t try defending the decision and Harry guessed he was already feeling as bad as a man could do over missed opportunities. ‘We messed up. At the time we didn’t know for sure what Dog’s involvement was, only that he’d dropped out of a contract assignment in Iraq while under investigation. He was on a watch list and appeared on the radar a couple of days ago. We’ve now got him on a Code Seven.’

‘What the hell is that?’ He was no longer familiar with all the security warning levels or their meanings. The world was changing too fast.

‘Locate and neutralize.’

‘You mean kill.’ He guessed from the man’s reticence that it was a Special Order, which needed neither Cabinet nor MOD approval to carry out.

‘It means what it says.’

‘What do we do now?’ Harry asked. ‘Did Marshall speak to you?’

‘Yes. Where are you?’

‘It doesn’t matter where we are. You just need to get Dog off our backs. We’ll do the rest.’

‘It’s Dog we need to talk about.’ Then a woman’s voice intruded at the other end and Ballatyne broke off. When he came back, he apologized. ‘Sorry – there’s a lot happening here. I’ll call again in ten.’ Then he was gone.

‘What’s going on?’ Rik looked wary.

Harry gave them the news about Marshall. They both looked stunned. ‘He didn’t say anything else . . . just that things were happening. He’ll call back.’ He wondered if Ballatyne was playing them along in order to find out where they were. But he decided it was unlikely; he was pretty sure they hadn’t been connected long enough for a firm trace to have been made. ‘Let’s give it time.’

Joanne had been looking increasingly nervous during the telephone conversation. She stood up and rubbed her stomach. ‘I need something from the car.’ She dropped her rucksack on the chair and pulled a face. ‘Girl stuff.’

Harry nodded and handed her the car keys, and he and Rik drank coffee and waited for Ballatyne to call back. The phone rang just as Joanne returned. Harry left it muted while Rik prowled the foyer.

‘Sorry,’ Ballatyne said. ‘Where were we?’

‘You mentioned Dog.’

‘Right. From what we’ve turned up in the last couple of hours, it looks like Dog may have been around on the same course that Miss Archer took before she went to Iraq. He was listed as still serving at the time, although he’d been out of the army for some months.’

‘Somebody fudged the paperwork?’

‘Either that or he was on a retained contract we knew nothing about. There are several departments running operations requiring specialist training sessions. But that’s the least of your problems. We believe he has help, but we don’t know what they look like. Two men, that’s all we know. There’s another matter we need to talk about, but that needs to be face to face.’

In the background, Joanne excused herself and walked towards the rear of the hotel, where the signs pointed to the washrooms.

Harry considered what Ballatyne had told him. If Ballatyne didn’t know what these other two men looked like, there was no chance that he, Rik or Joanne could even begin to know.

‘Can you give me a hint?’ Then his mind whirled off in another direction as he realized something: if Dog had been on the same course as Joanne, how was it she hadn’t recognized him from the photo she’d taken in Baghdad?

‘Miss Archer,’ Ballatyne continued with uncanny timing. ‘Is she still with you?’

‘What about her?’ Harry had a sinking feeling in his chest. This wasn’t going to be good news.

‘We’ve checked all the security logs in Baghdad over the period Gordon Humphries was killed. There’s no record of Humphries having logged an outgoing call to her, asking for a meeting on the day he died. The day of the bombing.’

‘So he forgot. It happens.’ Even as he spoke, Harry knew he was barking at the moon. Humphries would have been under enormous stress in Baghdad, and missing the odd piece of paperwork would not have been unreasonable. But everything his sister had told them about her brother indicated that Humphries had been far too professional to make that kind of slip.

‘He might have,’ Ballatyne agreed reasonably. ‘But there was one
incoming
call for him logged that morning.’

‘Do you know who from?’

‘Not yet. There was an insurgent attack on the base perimeter at the time, and the comms corporal responsible for the log had to drop everything. We’re waiting to confirm details.’

Harry stared across the lounge in the direction Joanne had disappeared, his mind in a whirl. Had Joanne called her handler?

He glanced at the chair where she had been sitting.

Her rucksack was gone.

FIFTY

H
arry cut the connection and stood up. While Rik went out to scan the street, he found the washrooms and checked the cubicles. Other than a startled woman in a business suit repairing some damage to her make-up in the mirror, there was no sign of Joanne or her rucksack.

He asked the receptionist if there were any other washrooms close by, but she shook her head. He thanked her and met Rik coming in from the street.

‘A black cab was just off up the road,’ Rik reported. ‘I couldn’t see who was inside. What do we do now?’

‘You heard what Ballatyne said about Dog and the others. Either Joanne’s part of this or she simply doesn’t trust anyone enough – us included – to hang around. Maybe she’s closer to the edge than she seemed.’ And maybe, he thought, the meeting with Marshall had been a step too far.

Rik looked sceptical. ‘I thought she seemed pretty together most of the time. Then she just takes off. Weird.’

‘She’s been under a lot of strain.’ He led the way towards the rear entrance. ‘Come on.’

‘Where to?’

‘Ballatyne’s agreed to meet us on neutral ground.’

Rik pursed his lips. ‘Do you trust him?’

‘As much as I trust anyone.’ He gave Rik a straight look, aware that his friend would follow his lead. ‘We’ve got to bite the bullet sooner or later. Now he knows who we are, he’ll have our photos and service records from Thames House in circulation. We either go in voluntarily or we wait to get picked up. I don’t fancy facing a bunch of nervous firearms officers with itchy fingers, do you?’

Richard Ballatyne was waiting for them at the rear of an Italian restaurant just off Wigmore Street. An elderly man in a waiter’s jacket admitted them, then spun the ‘Closed’ sign to face out, before disappearing behind a curtain at the back. There were no other staff, no indications that the place was open for business.

Ballatyne was of medium height, with dark hair and heavy glasses. He had the slightly owlish air of an academic, but his hands resting on the white tablecloth looked strong and capable.

He nodded a greeting and stood up, gesturing to the chairs opposite. ‘Can I get you coffee?’ A pot and cups were on the next table.

Harry shook his head. He glanced around at the decor of plastic vines, ceramic tiles and numerous Chianti bottles in raffia jackets. A chiller cabinet loaded with bottles of white wine, San Pellegrino and soft drinks hummed in the background, and the buzz of traffic, building by now towards the early evening rush, was muted.

‘Bit garish for MI6, isn’t it? I take it you are Six?’

‘Yes.’ Ballatyne gave a bleak smile. It was sufficient to change his face from serious to almost friendly. Harry guessed he was still reeling from Marshall’s death and remembered to go easy on him. Unless he pushed them too hard.

Rik walked over to the table and poured himself a coffee, then sat slightly to one side. The move wasn’t lost on Ballatyne.

‘No Miss Archer?’ he said.

‘She’s indisposed,’ said Harry. He had no intention just yet of telling Ballatyne that Joanne had disappeared. It could keep.

‘I see. Well, in that case, it makes what I have to say rather easier.’ He tapped softly on the table and seemed to be measuring his words. ‘GCHQ here and at their other installations have been intercepting a series of phone calls made to international numbers over the past few months. They were on a watch and listen list, and connected with a variety of current and past investigations which I can’t go into.’

‘Terrorism, you mean?’ Rik suggested.

Ballatyne nodded. ‘One caller in the past few days was identified several times. It probably wouldn’t have been noted, except that the calls originated from London and from a number they hadn’t seen before. The caller was a man. Tracking back the listed subscriber proved useless; the phone was stolen or cloned. Then a name was mentioned. It was just the one time, but it rang a number of bells.’ He paused for effect, then added, ‘The caller was Subhi Rafa’i.’

Neither Harry nor Rik responded, both trying to work out the significance of this development. They waited for Ballatyne to go on.

‘For a survivor of an assassination attempt, Rafa’i’s been making a lot of international calls. Geneva, Frankfurt, Paris . . . and quite a few to Baghdad. Each of the numbers he called corresponds to a banking or finance house with strong links to the Middle East, or to individuals who control funds with Middle East connections. It was the latter who turned out to be the most interesting.’

‘Are these known terrorist connections?’ asked Harry.

‘Yes.’ Ballatyne scratched at the tablecloth. ‘We think he’s been gathering funds. Dirty money.’

‘To do what?’ Harry was certain MI6 would have already worked that one out, but whether Ballatyne would share that knowledge was another matter. He wasn’t disappointed.

‘We’re not sure.’ The answer was smooth and practised, a deflection. ‘We’re still analysing the calls to work out the significance of all the people he was talking to and what role they might be playing. It takes time to get their profiles together . . . they’re not all in one place.’

Harry knew what he meant. ‘You have to ask the Americans for the data.’

‘And the French . . . the Germans . . . the Israelis.’

‘But you think he’s been fund-gathering.’

‘Without a doubt. And where there’s money like that, there are firewalls. It takes time to get through them.’ He looked at Rik as he said it, a small but important signal that he knew their backgrounds. ‘The money we can deal with. If it leaves a trace, we can backtrack and find the source and, hopefully, the destination. Cut it off at both ends. The support is something else, though. I believe you know of Rafa’i’s standing with the Coalition?’

‘Yeah, we know,’ said Harry.

Ballatyne grunted. ‘I think we can dispense with that notion altogether. There’s been a change in the wind. But he’s still a name to treat with caution in that part of the world.’

‘But he’s dead,’ Rik interjected. ‘At least, CNN thinks so.’

‘Quite correct, Mr Ferris. To the outside world, Subhi Rafa’i died in the bombing of the compound in the Al-Jamia district of Baghdad.’ He squeezed a fold of tablecloth between his thumb and forefinger. ‘What we don’t know is how many people know the real truth.’

‘No chatter on the net?’ Harry was referring to the intelligence network plugged into the Arab world. Any talk about Rafa’i’s survival would have become known very quickly and spread like wildfire. News like that would inevitably leak somewhere through friendly sources or careless talk.

‘Nothing. Lamentations about his death, sad loss to Iraq, conspiracy theories about Coalition involvement – all of that. But that’s all.’ He glanced at the two men in turn with a glimmer of understanding. ‘You don’t know where he is,’ he said softly. ‘Do you?’

‘What makes you think that?’ said Rik, defensive.

Ballatyne shrugged. ‘Call it a lucky guess. Somehow, I think if you’d spent any time with him, you’d have developed an opinion about him. He’s very persuasive – even charismatic. I doubt you’ve even met him.’

‘So what’s HMG’s position?’ said Harry.

‘My masters are currently discussing that issue against the wider background in Iraq. There are complications.’

‘Such as?’

‘Exactly what he might be up to is the main one. Why he’s here in the UK and how long he plans staying is another. And what happens if his presence here ever gets out.’

‘I’ll give you another,’ Rik muttered. ‘What if he gets bumped off here? That won’t go down well back home, will it?’

Ballatyne looked pained. It was clearly not the first time he had considered that scenario. ‘That would be . . . unfortunate.’

‘Nightmarish, more like.’ Rik gave him a sour look. ‘Don’t patronize us, Ballatyne. We can work out what the damages are just as quick as you. If he gets sliced and diced in central London, there’ll be an international riot. The extremists would use it to the hilt, whether they liked him or not.’