The receptionist studied Richter’s passport. ‘Who did you wish to see, sir?’
‘Michael Watkinson.’
‘Please take a seat. I’ll see if he’s available.’
Richter nodded his thanks and retrieved his passport. All he’d been given by Hammersmith was the man’s name, so he had no idea what Watkinson’s official title was, but he presumed he was one of the handful of SIS officers based in Dubai.
A few minutes later a tall dark-haired man appeared in the reception area and approached him.
‘Mr Richter? I’m Michael Watkinson. May I see your passport, please?’ Richter handed it over for perusal. ‘Do you have any other form of identification?’
‘If you’re asking if I’ve got a neat little leather folder issued at Legoland,’ Richter said in a low voice, ‘well I haven’t, because I’m not actually employed at Vauxhall Cross.’
Watkinson looked somewhat taken aback. ‘So where do you work then? We were expecting a Six officer.’
‘Somewhere in the backstreets of Hammersmith. If you haven’t heard of my section, it’s because you haven’t needed to know about it. We get lumbered with all the shitty little jobs nobody else wants. And this is one of them.’
‘Right,’ Watkinson said, returning the passport. ‘You’d better follow me.’ He led the way to a doorway in one corner, waved a card at a portal reader and pushed open the steel-lined door. Richter followed him down a corridor to a small office containing a desk, three chairs, six filing cabinets and an air-conditioner that sounded as if it was fighting a losing battle with the heat outside.
Watkinson slid behind his desk and gestured vaguely towards the other chairs. ‘Take a seat,’ he said. ‘We were expecting you a couple of days ago.’
‘I was retasked, which meant I got sent out to Bahrain to run an identity check that never happened because the subject died, and then they held me in Manama because of the bomb threat. I only got back here this morning.’
Watkinson nodded. ‘And how is George Caxton these days?’
‘His name is Julian, as I think you know perfectly well. He seems fine. Bill Evans and Carole-Anne Jackson also send you their best wishes.’
‘Thank you. I’m satisfied you are who you say you are.’
‘Oh, good,’ Richter murmured.
‘You know we have to take precautions, especially with people who turn up without the normal documentation. Now, about Holden — you’ve been briefed, obviously?’
Watkinson stood up, opened the top drawer of one of the filing cabinets, removed a beige folder and passed it across his desk. File covers are colour-coded: Secret is red; Confidential is green, and Restricted and Unclassified are both beige. Richter glanced down at the title, ‘HOLDEN, James’, and confirmed the classification: ‘Restricted’.
‘He lives in a small apartment in the Al-Ramool district, just south of the International Airport. I’ve had a couple of my people keeping an eye on him, but we don’t have the manpower for total surveillance, and it’s difficult to justify spending too much time watching him.’
‘The result?’
‘Nothing.’ Watkinson shook his head. ‘Or at least nothing suspicious. His daily routine is depressingly predictable. He works part-time as a waiter, so he’s out most evenings and rarely arrives home before midnight. He gets up quite late and always leaves his apartment during the morning to walk to the local shop where he buys a newspaper — he’s a Daily Express man. Then he goes to a café where he has coffee and a couple of cigarettes while he reads it.
‘He returns to his apartment before lunch. If he goes out at all in the afternoon, it’s just to do some shopping. In the early evening he leaves home again to walk to the restaurant. He doesn’t seem to have any close friends, and never goes to visit anyone. Even at the café he never spends any time talking to people. He just marches in, orders his coffee, takes it over to a table and sits down with his newspaper, always keeping to himself.’
‘The newspaper?’
Watkinson nodded. ‘We thought about that, too, but there’s nothing there. The shop has a daily delivery of most British papers and Holden simply grabs the front one from the rack. We’ve had people there watching him, and we’ve three times taken the front copy of the Express immediately before he arrives. We’ve never found anything in the paper, no hidden messages, no enclosures, and Holden never seems bothered if somebody removes a copy just before him. That daily newspaper, we’re quite sure, is just a newspaper.’
He smiled slightly. ‘Thanks to the Dubai police, we’ve also had a tap placed on his phone. They gave us the tapes, but there was nothing interesting apart from his estranged wife calling him every couple of days to complain about something.’
‘Any idea why she left?’
‘If his routine is anything to go by, probably just terminal boredom.’
‘There’s not much left.’ Richter shrugged. ‘Did you do a mail intercept?’
‘No. Mail intercepts out here need legal backing. The phone tap we managed quietly on the “old boy” basis.’
‘Did you bug his apartment?’
‘No, for the same reason as the mail intercept. An illegal bug isn’t worth the risk. I’m a firm believer in the Special Theory of Cock-ups as it relates to Sod’s Law. If we’d placed a bug and Holden had discovered it and gone to the authorities, we’d have been dumped in the shit up to our necks.’
Richter thought for a moment. ‘Has he got a computer?’
‘Yes. It’s a fairly standard desktop running Windows and protected by a password. We sent a couple of people in to his apartment one evening. They were trained in burglary, not computer science, but they had a boot disk that enabled them to circumvent the password and a big external hard drive. They copied the contents of Holden’s entire hard disk. My resident computer expert checked the copy but it looks as if there’s nothing there.’
‘Anything else in his apartment?’
‘Not that we could find. My men took pictures of every room and they’re in the file in front of you.’
‘OK, I’ll look at them later. You checked the restaurant, too?’
‘Yes. We’ve had people there several times. Holden’s a waiter. He takes orders, carries plates to the tables and delivers the bills. The clientele is mixed, and he never pays anyone any special attention. If he’s receiving messages from customers, we don’t know how he’s doing it. And even if somebody is somehow passing information to him, then you have to ask the other obvious question.’
‘Exactly,’ Richter nodded. ‘Where are they getting it from?’
‘That’s the real problem here. Maybe James Holden is a genuine seer, and all he’s doing is telling us exactly what he’s dreaming.’
Richter grunted. ‘Do you really believe that?’
‘No,’ Watkinson replied, with a rueful smile. ‘I’m a rational man, with a degree in physics. My personal belief is that time only flows one way, and I can’t see how anyone can witness an event that hasn’t happened yet. Another possible angle — which seems just about as unlikely — is that Holden is telepathic. He’s somehow able to access the minds of the people who are placing these devices, and so what he’s “seeing” is not the actual explosion itself but the way the perpetrators visualize it happening.’
‘That’s just replacing one unproven paranormal technique with another one that’s equally unproven,’ Richter objected.
‘I agree. None of this makes sense. The only other way Holden could be getting his information is obvious, but then there’s the problem of motive.’