Rogue Elements (14 page)

The IONEC student tasked to research Martin de Vries had picked up some useful tittle-tattle from off-duty TOS officers. De Vries had missed his own birthday drinks at Head Office to make an unscheduled journey to Istanbul, reason unknown. He had requisitioned some valuable surveillance kit shortly before the Think Again conference, later declared lost. He had disciplined one of his secretaries for the trivial offence of searching for a pencil in his desk drawer. He had recently developed the habit of going out on to the terrace overlooking the Thames to make calls from a private mobile.

None of which, Wraye reflected, probably amounted to anything. There had always been unwarranted question marks hovering like tsetse flies around Martin de Vries. His initial SIS application, made just six months after his emigration from the newly christened Zimbabwe, had been rejected on grounds of questionable motivation. Some worried, after his time as a scout in the Rhodesian Bush War, that he might be a racist fanatic. Others took the opposite line: that he might hold a grudge against Britain over the sanctions regime, the Beira Patrol and the Lancaster House Agreement. Still others took against his Afrikaner roots and refugee odour, even though he held British citizenship.

He remained persistent and was tossed the odd freelance bone – hired to courier equipment behind the Iron Curtain or to install radio aerials in awkward places. When he proved capable, they gave him more taxing assignments – dead drops, radio repairs in the field, recovery of lost assets. Further successes brought him to the attention of senior officers with sufficient clout to overcome the quibbles of Personnel Department, and the stateless misanthrope was brought in-house. Once given full access to the Firm’s resources, de Vries had quickly shown a remarkable aptitude for design and engineering. Nevertheless, for years his loyalty continued to be questioned.

Wraye remembered how struck she had been on first meeting him by his extraordinary memory for objects, places and people. He was able to keep track of SIS equipment and weaponry right across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. If she was planning to meet an agent in a particular town in Romania, or Poland, or Yugoslavia, de Vries could tell her, without reference to the records, exactly where the nearest radio and survival pack were cached. And he would do it without pride or any obvious desire to be helpful; his style was always that of the academic contemplating an intellectual problem.

She found him at his favourite Battersea pub, seated at a table with four other men. Who were they? A secret informant network? His brothers visiting from South Africa and Australia? Fellow exiles reminiscing about a lost land?

‘My goodness, what a surprise!’ she said, avoiding using his name.

Martin de Vries did not bother to conceal his displeasure. He could do it – she had seen him dissemble masterfully when dealing with NSA liaison officers and certain government ministers – but he did not relish it as Vine and Elphinstone did. He marched her away from the table. ‘W-what do you w-want?’ he hissed.

‘Have you been on a diet, Martin? You look thin.’ She remembered him as a slender man, but now his eye sockets had taken on a cadaverous look and his cheekbones had grown painfully prominent. She wondered if he might have cancer.

‘You can’t just c-come up to me here,’ he protested.

‘Why not? You don’t imagine I’m going to be indiscreet, do you?’ She judged it finely – not so loud as to be audible to the drinkers, but loud enough to disconcert.

‘What do you want?’ he repeated.

‘Why wouldn’t you respond to my meeting request, Martin? So we could do this the civilized way?’

‘You’re out.’

‘And that makes me untouchable?’

‘You broke the law.’

‘I copied some files for my own personal reference.’

‘A flippant tone d-doesn’t make it any less illegal.’

‘Christ, Martin, everyone does it.’

‘
I
do not do it! My
team
does not do it.’ He looked genuinely furious. Was he dissembling now, she wondered. Was he, with his apparently black-and-white ethics, the best dissembler of them all? ‘The information on that flash drive could have blown a hundred agents. It could have made us vulnerable to our enemies in every arena. It was grossly irresponsible! You’re no better than Snowden – worse, considering your rank. That is why I will have nothing more to do with you.’

The blood had drained from his cheeks, leaving sunken white skin marked with a few brown spots, sun damage from his African youth. He looked entirely alien to her, a different species. She was starting to understand the nickname popularized by those who had failed to live up to his standards: Martin the Freeze. Yes, there was ice in the man.

‘All right, Martin, I’ll swallow your sanctimony. But you’re going to have to swallow my presence for a few more minutes. The more readily you answer my questions, the sooner you can get back to your pint.’

He didn’t respond. It was a kind of acquiescence. She led the way out of the bar, away from curious ears.

‘A few years ago, you took a six-month secondment with SOCA. Why?’

‘They needed specialist support. Why not?’

‘What areas of investigation were you primarily involved in?’

‘Counter-Narcotics.’

‘That’s what I thought. Must have seemed trivial stuff after the work you’d been doing on Pakistan.’

‘On the contrary. It had an immediate relevance and effectiveness that was appealing.’

‘Stopping a couple of shipments of coke, so advertising execs in Soho have to fork out a few quid more?’ Her laughter was gently mocking, not unkind.

‘I see you take as careless a view of our controlled substances legislation as of Section 8 of the Official Secrets Act.’

‘Quite right,’ she smiled. ‘The law’s the law.’

‘I happen to think,’ he said, rising to her bait, ‘that heroin and cocaine are the most pernicious influences in our society today. I am very proud of the contribution I made to stemming their flow.’

‘Whatever must you have to say about Think Again?’

‘Dangerous lunatics,’ he snapped.

‘Best dead?’

He stared at her. ‘Are we finished?’

‘We haven’t started, Martin. That was just warm-up chit-chat.’

‘For God’s sake, get on with it.’

‘I want to take you back to a particular directors’ meeting.’ She gave the date. ‘Primarily we discussed WMD, but there was another agenda item that might place it for that prodigious memory of yours: an argument about replacing a broken table football machine in the junior officers’ rec room.’

‘Yes.’

‘At that meeting, you made a surprisingly impassioned statement about disciplining officers who operate unilaterally without regard to correct protocol in the field. It was quite random. We were all left wondering who you were talking about. Do you remember?’

‘I do.’

‘Was it one of my officers?’

‘It was A-A-rkell.’

‘You had been provoked by his leaving Yemen without consulting London?’

‘C-correct.’

‘Are you all right, Martin? You’ve started stammering again. Is something disturbing you?’

‘
You
are disturbing me,’ he said, with a great effort. ‘As you well know. What is your point?’

She folded her arms. ‘The thing is, Martin, when I later made my inquiries into Arkell’s death, you denied earlier knowledge of his off-piste activities, claiming you only heard about his unauthorized itinerary after he was killed.’ Fixing his wavering eyes with her own rock solid gaze, she said, ‘Now why would a man of your integrity lie about a little matter like that?’

His expression had turned sullen. ‘I don’t recall.’

‘You remember the table football, but not why you covered up your personal investigation into Simon Arkell’s journey back to the UK?’

‘Perhaps it felt in-d-decent,’ he spat, ‘to question the behaviour of a man who had just been killed in the service of his country.’

‘That’s all you have? Good taste? That’s your explanation?’

‘Like I say. I don’t remember.’

‘All right. Then I’d like to take you further back. Riyadh, two weeks before GRIEVANCE. You requested an expedited Saudi visa and access to the diplomatic quarter for a declared courier with a package for the Ambassador. The courier was travelling under the name of Sidney Dawson. In the TOS log, the
Purpose
column is blank –’

‘How did you get access to the log?’ he demanded.

‘Don’t worry, I haven’t kept a copy. Why didn’t you state the purpose?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Because it was sensitive?’

‘Extremely.’

‘What was Sidney Dawson’s real identity?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Martin, you dispatched him!’

‘I did
not
. The courier was not one of our people. My only involvement was the Saudi clearance and the last-minute plane ticket.’

‘Then who sent the courier?’

‘You are no longer entitled to such information.’

‘Oh save it, Martin, or do you want me to go in there and repeat the question in front of your friends?’

He regarded her with deep loathing. ‘It was an exceptional arrangement for Counter-Terrorism,’ he said at last. ‘The courier was sent by Anthony Watchman.’

Klara Richter lived on the eleventh floor of a 1970s apartment block, a short walk from the old city centre. Arkell watched the entrance for fifteen minutes before making his approach. He was dressed quite differently now. Gone were the desert boots and jeans. In their place he wore a crumpled black suit and black shoes, together with a priest’s black clergy shirt and clerical collar from an ecclesiastical supplies store in Berlin. Within the intelligence community there is an unwritten rule that officers should avoid posing as NGO staff or members of the clergy, to prevent real priests and aid-workers coming under suspicion of espionage. Arkell no longer considered himself a member of the intelligence community, and besides, Hamburg was hardly Equatorial Guinea.

It wasn’t for the disguise that Arkell had made the detour to Berlin. Over the course of nine years as a lone operator, he had grown proficient at finding his own sources of equipment for the various private assignments he had undertaken. It was never as straightforward as ordering kit from the Directorate of Special Support, but then there were no bureaucratic hurdles to jump, nor reprimands for damage or loss. And often the hardware available on the open market – in this case from a former Stasi officer – was better than equivalent items expensively developed in-house.

At the entrance to the apartment block, Arkell studied the rank of buzzers. Sensing a woman behind him, he put his finger to one at random. The woman hesitated until she saw the clerical collar, whereupon she unlocked the glass door and held it open for him.

‘Danke,’ he smiled, insisting she go first.

He followed her to the elevators, let her choose a button first, then pressed 9. When she got out at the fourth floor, he waited for the doors to close before selecting 11.

He was already fully prepared. He knew which pocket held which device. And he knew his story inside out. Still, he rehearsed one more time. His fingers checked the bugs as his face settled into a look of hapless concern. The effusive apologies at wasting her time.
Entschuldigung, Fräulein, I’’m in a bit of a mess. I’m borrowing a friend’s apartment and I’ve gone and let the washing machine flood . . .

The words were still running through his mind as the elevator doors opened on the eleventh floor. He stepped out into a long corridor of light grey paintwork and dark grey carpeting. As he did so, a man took his place in the elevator. Arkell turned, faintly surprised by the sudden proximity of another human being, but the man was facing away from him and the elevator doors closed a second later.

Entschuldigung, Fräulein, I’’m in a bit of a mess . . .

Number 86. He knocked, and was surprised again, this time by the speed with which the door opened.

‘I didn’t mean it, my darling, I promise I . . .’ Accented English. The woman broke off when she saw Arkell. ‘
Wer sind Sie?
’

Arkell stared at her: the smudged mascara, the rumpled hair, the silk dressing gown hurriedly drawn closed, the red welts on her neck that it didn’t quite hide.

‘I’m so sorry . . .’ he muttered, turning abruptly.
You’re a priest: walk, don’t run
.

The man in the elevator. Dark, cropped hair. Very fit, a strong neck. The image was back in Arkell’s mind, fresher and clearer than before. Black leather jacket, small brown messenger bag. Free hand lightly curled. And as he stepped past? A momentary impression of a face, the same side-view captured by a studio camera in Tobago.

He ploughed through the swing door to the stairs and ran down four steps at a time, cursing himself for not considering this possibility. Yadin,
here
! He had no weapon. The shoes were hopeless: a loose fit, and slippery leather soles. The clerical collar constricted his throat. Four storeys down. Five. How fast did the elevator move? Seven storeys. Eight. His foot slid out of control on the worn concrete, and he had to catch himself on the railing. More than anything, he needed the unfailing grip of his desert combat boots.

Bursting out of the stairwell, he sprinted to the elevators. Open and empty. Into the street, but no sign of Yadin. The Kidon combatant had left a car parked outside. Or he’d hailed a taxi. Or he’d set off at a fast march to one of the nearby U-bahn stations. Whichever way, he was gone. Arkell ran the 800 metres to the main railway station. He scanned passengers climbing out of taxis, milling around the concourse, boarding the S-bahn train to the airport.

No Yadin.

Reluctantly, Arkell had to admit he had just let slip a golden opportunity.

When Simon Arkell presented himself for the second time at Klara Richter’s door, she was fully dressed in jeans and branded T-shirt, with fresh make-up around hazel eyes. Her long sun-kissed hair, still damp from the shower, was partly covered by a loose knit beret. A silk scarf, yellow stripes on grey, hid the marks on her neck. Her tanned feet were bare.

‘Hello, yes, sorry, me again,’ he smiled sheepishly. ‘Apologies for interrupting earlier. Wrong flat. Sixty-eight, I was after. You’re eighty-six. Stupid mistake, but then we put the verb at the end in German, don’t we, so why not numbers too? You do speak English, don’t you, Fräulein? I think you spoke English when I . . .’ He broke off, summoning a quick blush, a trick Wraye had taught him in DC.

Her questioning gaze was direct but very slightly off centre, so that one eye seemed brighter than the other. ‘Is there something you need? Can I help you?’ she said in perfect English. The accent was almost undetectable now. Perhaps it only emerged at moments of stress. Also lacking was any suggestion of warmth or welcome. The clerical garb had won Arkell a few moments’ formal politeness, but he needed a way in fast. The washing-machine story was unusable now.

‘Really, I was wondering if I could help
you
,’ he said, the smile starting to sag. ‘I couldn’t help noticing earlier . . .’ An embarrassed gesture towards her neck. ‘And the truth is I see a lot of high spirits on the base, the lads always ending up with scrapes and bruises, but when they’re laughing about it you know they’ll be all right. On the other hand, you seemed . . .’ Pausing, as if to choose the right word: ‘. . .
Distressed
.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Klara Richter with quiet dignity. Her long brown fingers tightened on the door, a second from closing it. One silver thumb ring; an adventurous mulberry nail varnish lapping against chewed cuticles. ‘Thank you.’

Arkell’s hand joined hers on the door, firmly insisting.
Don’t use a foot
, he’d told himself. A chaplain wouldn’t use a foot. ‘The thing is, Ms . . . ?’

No response other than a deepening frown at his obstructive hand.

‘The thing is, as a servant of God I have a duty really, let’s call it an obligation, not to walk by on the other side. You know the parable of the Good Samaritan?’

A reluctant nod from her. Dialogue.

‘First thing they teach you in theology school: it’s the people who don’t want to talk about it who most need our help. So even if it seems like an invasion of privacy, we really have no choice. My name’s Anthony, by the way. Strictly speaking, it’s the Reverend Anthony Pearson, Chaplain to the Forces, third class, but everyone just calls me Padre. And it’s honestly just a three-minute chat, an emotional check-up if you like.’

‘Look, Mr Pearson . . .’ she began wearily.

‘Or I could ask a German priest to visit if you’d prefer?’ he said brightly, as if he’d only just thought of it. ‘I know a couple of excellent fellows here in Hamburg, both visit us regularly at Bergen-Hohne. I can rely on them to see you’re all right, and in German, too –’

It wasn’t exactly a threat. Wraye used to call that kind of well-meaning promise of future hassle
an incentive to cooperate in the present
. It found its mark with the assassin’s girlfriend. Exasperated, she shook her head and let him in.

The living room was spacious and airy, with a floor of laminated ash and high windows framed by floral print curtains. None of which was as interesting to Arkell as the location of her mobile phone, on a side table near a small cane armchair. Klara gestured him towards a couch, but he pointed to the armchair, saying, ‘That looks like it might be kinder to my back. If you don’t mind?’

She nodded and he took the chair. ‘We don’t carry weapons, of course, but they still like to put us through the same assault courses as the regular troops. My lumbar vertebrae have never recovered from falling off something they call the “confidence pole”. Nor has my confidence, if I’m honest,’ he laughed awkwardly. The laugh turned into a cough, dry and rasping.

‘Do you want some water?’ A half-hearted offer, but he seized on it.

‘Tea would be lovely if you have it, actually. Black, green, peppermint . . . Anything hot. Helps my throat. We were out all night on exercise last week and I still haven’t thrown off this cold. Not that it’s infectious.’

With a resigned nod, she drifted through a side door into the kitchen.

Arkell had her mobile phone in his hand within a second. The NN-3U from Berlin was already switched on and ready to use. He plugged its universal connector into the data port, and the device began two tasks simultaneously. While it copied every saved number, every text and all records of received, dialled and missed calls, it also uploaded a small program to the phone. Henceforth every text sent and received on it would be copied to the NN-3U and every call relayed.

It was done in thirteen seconds, long before any kettle could boil.

By the time she returned with a cup of black tea, no milk, Arkell had also planted two microphone transmitters the size of aspirins. One bug went under the cane chair, the other in amongst the wiring behind her stereo. He was rubbing his back when she entered, stopping the moment he saw her and standing to take the tea with an abundance of gratitude.

He gestured at the photographs on the wall. ‘These are very good. Yours?’

‘Yes.’

Each was framed in black lacquered wood. Arkell recognized Hausa, Tuareg, Aborigine and Quechua faces. The others, he guessed, were Mongolian and Papuan. In each photograph, the subjects were posed naturally but alertly, reaching beyond the lens with their eyes. It was uncanny, that reaching expression, replicated on four continents. What direction had she given them to achieve it?

‘Are you a professional?’

‘Photographer?’ She snorted. ‘I wish I could be. I’m training as a physiotherapist.’

He steered clear of the Hausa faces – too close to his own story. ‘I’ve been to Peru. Beautiful, beautiful land. Is that where you took these ones?’

‘Ecuador.’

‘Ah. The Galapagos!’

‘No.’

His face fell. Another trick Wraye had taught him.
Make them feel bad for not sharing your enthusiasm
. ‘I’m sorry, you must think me the most awful busybody.’

She looked down, as if wishing to hide her thoughts behind the lopsided beret. ‘My boyfriend is a little bit . . . physical, that’s all,’ she said, one hand brushing tangled golden strands of hair from her cheek. ‘It’s nothing serious. Just his way.’

‘His way to hurt you?’

‘It doesn’t hurt.’

‘Before I joined the army, my parish was in south London. A number of young women told me they didn’t mind their boyfriends hitting them. Then one of the women killed herself.’

She laughed abruptly. ‘I’m not going to kill myself!’ Her hand flew to her mouth in dismay. ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t laughing at her death.’

‘That’s all right.’ He sipped the tea. It was strong and bitter, and reminded him of patrols in Chad. ‘I just want to make sure you know what you’re doing.’

‘We love each other. The rest is not important.’ That direct gaze, off-centre again, with the same dominant eye commanding all attention. The full mouth remained slightly open, as if anxiously awaiting his reaction, two white incisors the only teeth visible between her lightly glossed lips. She had an irregular dusting of freckles, he noticed, on her nose, to go with the Caribbean tan.

‘Does he get angry with you?’

‘Never with me . . . with life, perhaps. Gavriel said something once – that we should have “contempt” for life, to make death easier. He said, “We are buried in our coffins already.” I don’t think he believes it. His parents died when he was a boy . . . it’s hard for him, sometimes.’

Yadin had given her his real name. Perhaps it was serious, then. ‘How did you meet? He’s not German?’

‘In London, four years ago. I was studying for a masters.’

Arkell pictured a studious girl bent over her books in some Bloomsbury café, catching the eye of the assassin on his way to a covert meet with ASH. ‘Not in physio?’

‘I wanted to work at the British Museum, so I took the UCL MA in Artefact Studies. A childish dream, but my English is better for it.’

‘Fragments of the past,’ he smiled.

‘Why do you say that?’ she said curiously.

‘I . . .’ He realized he’d slipped briefly out of character. Looking into Klara Richter’s sincere, searching face, he couldn’t help being himself a moment longer. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time trying to piece together random bits of history from those fragments,’ he admitted. ‘Just as an amateur,’ he added hurriedly.

‘What period?’

‘It’s about the place, not the period,’ he found himself saying. Why this sudden openness? ‘Wherever I am, I like to find out the local history, as far back as possible. It helps me understand the place. And the people.’

‘It does.’ She was smiling too now. ‘What about Hamburg?’

‘Like I say, I’m just an amateur.’

‘You know how it began?’

He hesitated. It wasn’t an act this time. ‘Charlemagne? His castle, Hammaburg, defending the confluence of the Alster and the Elbe.’

‘Bravo!’ She clapped delightedly, and for half a second her approval made Arkell forget why he was here, what he was meant to be, most importantly who had been making love to this spirited woman just an hour earlier. That off-centre gaze had shifted minutely, and in that brief moment there was a perfect balance between her two rounded eyes, symmetry so flawless and unexpected that the effect was blinding. ‘And Hohne?’