‘It was nothing.’ Soran waved a vague hand. ‘And yes, we have everything back.’ He gave a humourless smile to show that he understood the reason behind the question. ‘We have a good relationship with the Jamaicans. They help us, we help them. Because nobody expects it, it works to our mutual satisfaction. You have need of these things again?’
Zubac nodded. ‘The guns, yes. But first we need these two.’ He lifted his chin to indicate the two younger men, who had so far remained silent, summoned by Soran to listen and be ready to follow instructions.
‘That is why they are here, brother.’
Ganic leaned forward. ‘Are they any good, though? They look very young to me, just out of school.’ He seemed less comfortable with the ritual Zubac had insisted they should observe, and more intent on getting down to business. He stared hard at the two young men, who blinked nervously before looking to Soran for guidance.
‘They are sons of my cousin,’ the older man rumbled, and looked calmly at Ganic as if daring him to question it further. The message was clear: these two are blood relations and therefore vouched for. ‘They have lived here two years and know the city well. They have also been trained in another place. They have many skills.’
Zubac nudged Ganic’s knee under the table, and the taller man shrugged and sat back with a muttered, ‘Very well.’
‘What do you want them for?’ asked Soran, eyes switching back to Zubac.
‘Surveillance work,’ Zubac replied. ‘That is all. Watch and report on a target. . on who comes, who goes, what she does. We will pay well for their time.’
‘She? You want them to watch a woman?’ Such an idea, Soran’s question implied, was both beneath them and could lead to trouble, in spite of the money offered. A man could only get so close to a woman for so long before someone noticed — usually the woman herself, if she had her wits about her.
‘Yes. Why? Is that a problem?’ Zubac spoke firmly but without heat. He knew that Soran was probably looking for any reason he could find to raise the fee. Having a difficult, even well-known target would make any surveillance all the more complex to carry out.
‘You tell me.’
There was silence, lengthening as wary looks were exchanged between Soran and his two men. Then Zubac added carefully, ‘She is nobody of importance, I give you my word. Simply a connection in a chain.’ He rolled a finger through the air as if winding in a length of string. ‘Watch her and we find the person we want.’ He smiled and lifted his chin. ‘Is that acceptable?’
Soran nodded. He wasn’t about to turn away valuable business. The young men, Antun and Davud, said nothing, their opinions not required. ‘You have a name and address for this woman?’
Zubac took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and slid it across the table. Soran picked it up and opened it. The paper had a small photo clipped to one corner. He read the details written down, his lips moving slowly, then slapped the piece of paper and photo down in front of the man named Davud.
‘It is agreed.’ He smiled as if he had signed an international treaty, and poured more juice. This time he included his cousin’s sons, who raised their glasses and drank in turn. ‘They will go immediately and watch and report on this woman of no importance,’ he said, eyes glinting with dry humour. ‘In the meantime, you can sleep if you wish. I have made arrangements.’ He jerked his head at the two young men and they got up and left the store without a word. Then he looked again at the paper and said, ‘This woman named — ’ he tilted his head to one side, curling his tongue with difficulty around the words — ‘Jean Fleming, a seller of flowers.’
FORTY-ONE
Six thirty next morning, and Harry found sleep elusive. It was too early to call Fort Knox, so he ran through Paulton’s details on the data stick. He came up for air at one point and phoned Rik to see how he was progressing with his search for Vanessa Tan.
‘Nothing yet,’ said Rik. ‘But it doesn’t mean there isn’t something out there.’ There was the sound of key taps in the background, then, ‘Point is, we’re not the only ones looking.’
Harry gripped the phone. ‘Explain.’
‘I put a couple of mates on to it. . told them it was a simple trace for an insurance job. More hands make light work, that sort of thing.’
‘And?’
‘They both came back with the same message. They’d bumped into other searches for the same name. Queries left on forums, the name Tan fed into search engines to see what came up — pretty much what I’ve been doing. There was even a back-door search made through an airline database, but it bombed out when the searcher tripped an alarm.’
The Protectory.
This had turned into a race. ‘What’s your best guess?’
‘If we haven’t found anything so far, it means she went off the grid as soon as she ran. In fact. .’ He paused. More taps on the keyboard.
‘What?’ Harry fought to remain patient. Rik often mused aloud as he typed, as if using his fingers to drive his thought processes. In Harry’s experience, it was best to let him mumble away, but this was getting urgent.
‘To have disappeared so completely, she’d have needed to stop leaving a trail way before that. But there’s nothing.’
‘How do you mean, nothing?’
‘You sure you want to hear this?’
‘Can you hear my hand coming down the line?’
‘It’s like she never existed.’
Harry was stumped. Not even the dead vanish so completely that they don’t leave some trace behind. Unless. .
‘Could someone have erased her back-trail, or whatever you call it?’
‘History. I don’t know. I’ve heard whispers about a programme that can do it, developed by webmasters working for the National Security Agency. They’d certainly have the budget and the means to carry it out, but it would be a hell of a task. If it’s true, though, it would be like a giant search engine which simply gobbles up any mention of the target name and wipes it off the records. There one second, gone the next. The main problem is, if they weren’t very careful, it would wipe out all other Tans, too. But I know that hasn’t happened.’
‘How?’
‘Easy. I fed the name into Google. If I told you how many hits it got, your head would explode. The main question is, even if they’ve managed to wipe out her individual history, why go to those extremes for one junior officer? What are they trying to hide?’
Another answer Harry didn’t have. But they couldn’t give up now, especially with the Protectory out there, too. ‘Keep looking.’
‘Sure. How deep do you want me to go?’ The question was casual, but the tone of voice wasn’t. Rik was getting impatient, both with not being able to turn up something useful and being cooped up nursing his shoulder. As Harry knew well, when that happened, he was in danger of letting his fingers do the walking into areas best left alone — the very thing that had got him assigned out of MI5 in the first place.
‘You know the answer to that,’ he said neutrally. Rik possessed skills that could save a lot of time and legwork. Preventing him using those skills for what could be a global search seemed a chronic waste of talent. But if he took care, what could be the harm? ‘Can you use a. . what is it called — a proxy?’
The smile was evident in Rik’s voice. ‘Oh, dude,’ he drawled, ‘you’re so beyond ancient it’s like. . prehistory. Fortunately, I know what you mean. I’ll get back to you.’
Harry switched off the phone and went back to studying the file on Paulton. It amounted to precious little, and nothing to get his teeth into. The official records had been pared down to the bare minimum, large chunks of text having no doubt been black-lined at source to conceal sensitive information. What was left contained no personal clues to the man behind the name — or names, in Paulton’s case — giving only a skeleton of facts from a life spent on the move, serving in various locations including Northern Ireland, the US, Afghanistan and Colombia — the last two on attachment with the Drug Enforcement Administration, waging war on the Cartels and other traffickers — and with many gaps in the narrative which Harry translated as working undercover, and therefore classified for all eternity. It seemed ironic to him that a man like Paulton, who had been running an illegal operation that broke all the rules of the Security Service, should now be protected by the official protocol he had so clearly despised.