Liz Carlyle - 06 - Rip Tide (20 page)

So perhaps there was a spy in the office after all, one prepared to kill to keep their identity secret. Which meant they might kill again. Berger had not felt so exposed for several years, not since moving out of his risky former life and joining the calm backwaters of charitable work. Or rather, calm no longer; he kept wondering if Maria’s death was not an end but a beginning, and if the killer would continue to kill anyone who might get in the way. In the way of what, though? Berger didn’t know, but it had to include the hijacking of the UCSO shipments.

He wanted back-up – protection, yes, but also someone with a fresh perspective who might see what was going on here in a way that Berger couldn’t. The people from the British Embassy who’d sent Maria had been no help at all. They’d just told him to keep his head down and say nothing about them to the Greek police while they awaited instructions from London. He’d heard no more from them. That wasn’t good enough for him. He hated returning to his former way of life, but he hated being in danger again even more.

The switchboard put him through right away. ‘Trade Affairs,’ a flat Midwestern voice announced. ‘This is Hal Stimkin.’

‘My name is Mitchell Berger. I run the UCSO office here in Athens. I’m Brown Book status.’  This was the register of former employees. ‘I need a meet – ASAP.’

There was a pregnant pause. ‘Well, Mitch. Give me a minute or two and I’ll get back to you. What’s your number?’

Berger gave him a number and the phone went dead. He could imagine the process now put in train – the encrypted email to Virginia, the internal call, the email back. Three hours later he was still musing on how long it would take when his phone rang. It was Stimkin. ‘OK, Mitchell. Now here’s what we’re gonna do . . .’

He was preoccupied for the rest of the day – even Elena, his normally timid secretary, commented on it when she brought him coffee at four that afternoon. He did his best to focus on work affairs – after Maria’s death he had postponed the planned shipment but needed now to reschedule it – but he was glad when the clock showed six o’clock. By then the office had emptied and he had the lift to himself as he left the building.

He had an hour to kill so he walked. Spotting any surveillance in Athens at that time of night was well-nigh impossible, though he felt pretty sure that if anyone were watching him it would be an individual rather than an organisation, and would therefore be easier to shake off.

Fifty minutes later, as he circled around his destination, he was confident he wasn’t being followed. He was heading for the Venus de Milo, a luxury hotel situated only a few hundred yards from the Parthenon. He’d checked the pavements behind him carefully as he’d walked, and been alert for a front tail as well; he’d detoured through a large department store that stayed open late, taking the lift up and the stairs down, then had a quick espresso in a coffee bar with a good vantage point towards the street. He’d even searched himself, against the remote possibility that a tracking device had been planted on his clothes. Nothing, and no one.

The bar in the Venus de Milo was humming, full of tourists staying at the hotel and locals from the offices nearby, willing to pay over the odds for a cocktail in order to enjoy the air-conditioning. A long mahogany bar hugged one side of the low room on the hotel’s ground floor. Berger spotted a tall frosted glass of beer sitting on the bar top in front of two empty stools. He sat down on one of them, and as the barman approached pointed to the full glass. The barman drew another beer from the tap and, as he put it down in front of Berger, a tall, heavy-set man sat down next to him.

‘I’m Stimkin,’ the big man said, taking a long pull from his waiting glass of beer. He didn’t shake hands. ‘You checked out fine, Mitch, but this is your first contact in five years. So what’s the big emergency?’

Inwardly Berger sighed. He’d seen enough of the world not to stereotype people, but he’d seen an awful lot of versions of Hal Stimkin before, especially in the Agency. He would be a former jock, probably a former football player, possibly ex-military; he’d have joined the Agency on the heavy rather than the cerebral side, but shown enough polish to rise in the ranks and become a Head of Station. He’d be a self-proclaimed ‘straight shooter’, which really just meant he not only lacked sophistication but was proud of the deficit. All in all he was about as far as you could get from the Ivy League WASP who, both in the old days and in the popular imagination, staffed the higher ranks of the CIA.

Berger gave a terse account of recent events to Stimkin, ending in the death of the planted MI6 agent.

‘Why didn’t you flag Six’s involvement to us?’

Berger shrugged. ‘To be honest, it didn’t seem relevant. They were just helping sort out a criminal situation. Nothing of interest to Langley.’

‘Let Langley be the judge of that, pal. Six must have thought it was more than that or they wouldn’t have bothered.’

‘My boss is ex-Six. They were doing him a favour.’

‘Oh, really?’ asked Stimkin, gesturing to the barman for two more beers. ‘That would imply they’re a lot nicer than we are. And they’re not.’ The second implication was clear: Stimkin thought there was more to this than met the eye. Perhaps he wasn’t so stupid after all.

Their beers came and they waited for the barman to move away. Stimkin said, ‘So, what do you want from us?’

‘Help,’ said Berger bluntly. ‘I need my back watched.’

‘And in return?’

‘You know everything that happens.’

Stimkin grimaced. ‘A bunch of hoods are ripping off your ships. Do we care who they are?’

‘Not if it’s that simple. I’m not sure it is.’

Stimkin nodded. ‘You could be right, bud.’ The big man would have seen Berger’s Agency CV, or at least a précis of it. He’d know Berger wouldn’t have spent twenty years doing the things he had done for the Agency if he were some sort of crank. ‘OK, so let’s keep in touch. I’ll brief Langley.’

‘And I get back-up?’

‘Let’s see. For now, sit tight.’

Stimkin looked at the bill the barman had placed next to their beers. ‘I don’t believe the Brits are just going to give up because one of their people got iced. They’ll be back as soon as the Greek cops get out of the way. I want to know when they are, understood?’

Berger had had enough. He’d left the Agency after all, he hadn’t been pushed out. And now Stimkin was acting as if he were some sort of underling or, even worse, a dubious source. He decided to beat Stimkin to the punch, and got down off his stool before the big man did. He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got it, Hal.’ And he didn’t mean the bill; he figured Langley owed him that at least.

Chapter 29

This was weird. Peggy sighed and looked again at the CV in front of her. It was the third day she’d spent checking the credentials of the UCSO staff in London and Athens. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for – just anything that might mean someone was not who they appeared to be, and had joined the charity with an ulterior motive. It was as vague as that, but she hoped she’d recognise it when she saw it. So far all she had found were the sort of discrepancies that you might find in any organisation of fifty-five employees that wasn’t too careful about its recruitment processes.

And it looked as though UCSO was just such a one. Maybe charities didn’t bother too much, she thought. Maybe they were glad to get anyone to work for the modest salaries they paid.

A young woman called Wainwright had claimed an Honours degree in Anthropology from Cambridge, though a few simple enquiries produced the information that she had never completed a university course and had no formal qualifications at all. Cathy Etherington, a fund-raising assistant, claimed to have spent two years working for the Red Cross, but a phone call found no record of her employment there, and a check with a previous employer uncovered the fact that she had been fired for chronic absenteeism. Finally, the business analyst Sandy Warlock’s proud claim to have been a finalist in the Olympic trials in judo turned out to be complete phooey.

Though all this had revealed that UCSO was pretty careless, it had not set Peggy’s antennae vibrating. But what she was looking at now certainly did. It was the CV of Mitchell Berger, Head of the Athens office, that had made her sit up. It wasn’t that she had any reason to doubt the accuracy of the impressive list of previous posts he’d held – and it was impressive: as he’d said in his covering letter when he applied for the job in Athens, ‘
My background is a mix of military, diplomatic, journalism and NGO, and it has taken me to many parts of the world . . .’
It was something about the location of those posts and the dates that had sparked her interest.

As Peggy sat thinking about all this, her chin resting in her hands, her eyes drifted over her colleagues in the open-plan office where she worked. She thought how surprising it was that so many people seemed to lie about their past, about their qualifications. It would never have occurred to her to do that. In the Service, of course, you wouldn’t get away with it for five minutes: the vetting process would soon find you out.

She looked at Denise from the library who was standing talking to an agent runner who’d just walked into the room. There was no chance at all that Denise didn’t have the degree in library science or whatever professional qualification she claimed to have, or that the agent runner, who was now rather obviously flirting with her, had an undeclared wife somewhere.

On the other hand, there were spies working within the intelligence services. People who led a double life for years without being discovered. The most famous British ones, the Cambridge spies, were recruited before there was any kind of vetting. They just recruited each other. But there had been others much more recently, in Britain as well as in America.

She looked down again at the CV on her desk. She’d better talk to Liz about Mr Berger.

Liz was on the phone but she waved Peggy into her office and, while she waited, she stood by the window, looking down. The sun was out, and the Thames looked blue and sparkling and much cleaner than it really was – though she’d read that fish were now coming up the river as far as Westminster. Perhaps MPs, she thought, smiling to herself, would soon be fishing from the terrace of the House of Commons.

Liz put the phone down. ‘What’s amusing you?’ she asked. ‘Don’t say there’s some good news for a change.’

‘I wondered what you’d make of this.’ Peggy put the sheet of paper on the desk and sat down opposite her.

‘Mitchell Berger,’ Liz said aloud in surprise. ‘Don’t tell me he didn’t go to college either?’

‘No, everything checks out so far. He was in the military, he did some contract work for the State Department, and he’s worked for a bunch of NGOs. He was even a journalist – I found a couple of articles by him in the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘It’s where he was – and when. I’ve highlighted the dates and places on his CV.’

Liz looked carefully at the document. ‘El Salvador and Nicaragua in the seventies; Lebanon . . . that was when the Marines got blown up there, wasn’t it? Haiti. What was going on there then?

‘A coup.’

Liz nodded. ‘Then the Dominican Republic. That must have been a few months before Reagan sent troops in. Then Kosovo in the nineties, and Afghanistan after nine-eleven. And now Athens?’ She looked up at Peggy with a hint of a smile. ‘Bit of a soft option after all that. He must have got tired of hot spots. But I see what you mean.’

‘It’s as if he’s always wanted to be where the action is. A cynic might say he had a death wish.’

‘Or else that he was paid to go there.’ Liz raised her eyes from the CV and looked at Peggy. ‘I know what you’re thinking. This is either the résumé of a retired CIA officer or someone who’s gone to almost inconceivable lengths to pretend he’s one. I know which option my money’s on.’

‘Do you think Blakey knows?’

‘He didn’t say anything to me, but you’d think he’d have spotted it when he appointed the chap. Blakey is ex-Six, after all.’

‘What I was wondering is whether he appointed him
because
of it. Does that mean there’s something going on in UCSO that we don’t know about? And do you think Geoffrey Fane knows?’

Liz sighed deeply. ‘He didn’t mention it. Which, with Fane, doesn’t mean he doesn’t know.’

‘Do you want me to do anything?’

Liz put her head in her hands. ‘No. I’ll have to go and talk to Geoffrey. And I was hoping not to have to see him for a while . . . fat chance of that now!’

Chapter 30

It was eleven o’clock and Technical Ted and his colleague, Sammy de Silva, were strolling down the street where Boatman’s uncle had his hardware shop. Ted, the Service’s electronic wizard, had abandoned his favourite working clothes (biker boots and leather jacket), had removed his gold earring, and had tied back his long black dyed hair in a pony tail. He was dressed now, as was Sammy, in unremarkable shirt and jeans. Carrying their leather bags in their hands, they might have been tradesmen of any kind.

They stopped outside a café and seemed to be discussing whether they should go in. It was a café run by a Muslim family, which during the day was frequented by all and sundry from the flats, shops and offices along the street. In the evening, though, when the offices were closed, rather like Tahira’s shop its customers were mainly Asian youths.