‘Yes.’
‘Then you’ve found it. It’s the place next door.’
Harry walked back up the street to the site with the pennants. There were several vehicles on display, nearly all four-by-fours, most showing signs of a hard and brutal life. But no customers. He entered a small, bare office in one corner of the yard, and hit a bell on the counter.
A fat, balding man in greasy overalls appeared through a rear door, wiping his hands on a rag. ‘American?’ He clearly had no problem identifying foreigners, and Harry assumed that whatever the rental price had been, it had just taken a hike upwards.
‘You rented a car to an Englishman named Gulliver,’ he said, and spelled out the name. ‘A few weeks ago. He was supposed to take the car to your brother in Calais. Do you know when he arrived?’
‘Why you ask?’ The man’s eyes flicked past Harry to the yard outside. He seemed relaxed, but wary.
‘Because he never got home. His mother’s worried about him.’ He shrugged and smiled easily. ‘The family asked me to look into it… before our government takes the matter up with your Interior Ministry.’
The man stared at him for a long moment, then tossed the rag to one side. He licked his lips. ‘Why they do that? Is no concern to me what he does. Maybe he go for a holiday somewhere. Not my problem.’
‘Actually, it is your problem. You were the last person to see him. Want the police coming here and asking questions?’ He took out his wallet, counted out some US dollar notes. The man watched without expression. But his eyes stayed on the money.
‘All I need,’ said Harry quietly, ‘is to know when and if he arrived at your brother’s place in Calais.’ He stopped counting and slid the notes halfway across the counter, but kept his hand on them. ‘A phone call would do it. That’s all. Then I’m gone.’
The man shrugged. ‘Is easy. I don’t need to make phone call. He never arrive. Car is missing.’ He reached out and tugged the money from under Harry’s hand. ‘Maybe your friend is a thief.’
FORTY-EIGHT
‘ We got a problem, old son. Well, two, actually.’ Bellingham was sprawled behind his desk when Paulton was ushered up to his third floor office. The MI6 Operations Director looked flushed, and had it not been too early in the day, Paulton would have sworn he’d been drinking.
After responding to Bellingham’s call for an urgent meeting, it wasn’t the best of openings. Paulton felt his spirits sink. ‘What sort of problems?’
Bellingham flicked a sheet of paper across his desk. It was a photocopy of a press item. ‘This is circulating faster than the pox,’ he snarled. ‘How the hell did Whelan get hold of your man’s name?’
Paulton’s stomach gave a lurch. He’d already seen the report. ‘He hasn’t — didn’t,’ he answered. His voice came out an octave above its normal pitch on hearing the journalist’s name. ‘This doesn’t actually mention Tate’s name. It’s Whelan’s friend making wild claims.’
‘Don’t act the arse, George. I don’t care if he’s got Tate’s name sewn into his knicker elastic in gold thread. It’s the idea that Whelan might have been knocked off by the establishment that worries me — and should be scaring the buggery out of you.’ He sat back and clasped his hands over his belly. ‘See, I know what you did, George. You were covering your backside, weren’t you? You thought Whelan was getting too close so you decided to put him off. Permanently. Pity you didn’t tell me first.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’d have dealt with it a lot better, that’s why.’ He shifted in his chair. ‘Still, as long as nobody left Tate’s name lying around, we can deny it until the Second Coming and they’ll never be able to prove otherwise.’ He eyed Paulton carefully. ‘I take it there’s no chance of anything turning up, is there? No little clues that might drop you squarely in the kaka?’
‘Of course there isn’t!’ Paulton’s chest began pounding at a rate he was sure wasn’t good for him. The way Bellingham was talking made him wonder if this conversation was being recorded. If so, he was cooked; he’d already said too much.
‘Mmm. Good. Best forgotten, then.’
‘What else was there?’ Paulton asked him, anxious to get on and get out of here fast. There were things he needed to do.
‘What? Oh, the other thing, yes. Y’know that server thing we set up for Red Station — Clarion? Bloody thing’s worked well so far, absorbing useless messages from Mace’s motley crew like a baby’s nappy.’
‘What about it?’
‘I think somebody’s rumbled us.’
‘What?’ Paulton jumped in his chair as if he’d been stung. ‘Somebody here?’
‘No, not here, you idiot. I’m the only one with access, remember? Over there, in the arse-end of beyond. Some smart-Alec — probably that communications twerp you sent out there — sent a couple of silly messages, one of them a load of nonsense which any fool could see was a deliberate draw. He was testing the response. The other was real, asking about Russian troops in militia uniform, initiated by your man Tate. I missed the rubbish one and didn’t notice the second until it was too late. Other things on my plate.’
‘Can’t we explain away the situation — a communications malfunction or something, to keep them quiet?’
‘Nix. We’re too late.’
Paulton tried to think through the implications. His head suddenly felt inexplicably hot. It was one bloody thing on top of another. Ferris. Rik Ferris. A young IT graduate who’d got bored punching keys and saw things he shouldn’t have. Nothing critical, but enough to cause a stink if he’d gone public. He wondered what had prodded him into action after all this time. There could only be one answer.
Harry Tate.
‘Ferris — is that him?’ Bellingham was still chuntering on, and came to the same conclusion. ‘He’s been getting very pally with your man Tate, I hear. Therein lies the real problem.’
Paulton stared at his opposite number and wondered just how many lines of communication he had into Red Station. The man was like a fat spider, tugging on his web. ‘How do you know all this?’
Bellingham laid a finger alongside his fleshy nose. ‘Got spies everywhere, that’s how. Thing is, we overlooked one vital aspect of the people we were sending out there, you know that?’
‘Did we?’
‘They’re professionals, that’s what. Used to grubbing about in the muck and noticing stuff other people wouldn’t see. Can’t help themselves. See something and they have to report it. With all that’s going on over there, they’re starting to trip over raw intelligence they — and we — can’t ignore. So far, Mace has been fielding it. But he’s losing it, and now your man Tate has taken an interest in world events rather than his own sorry neck, and he’s stirring up trouble.’
‘What do we do?’
‘Well, we can’t just turn a blind eye. What would happen if they found a way of by-passing the comms channel into Clarion? Worse, we have no way of explaining where this raw intel’s coming from.’
‘Don’t you have any people on the ground?’ Paulton was feeling desperate. ‘You could attribute the source to them.’ This entire business wasn’t going the way Bellingham had said it would. In fact, it was beginning to unwind like a badly-knit jumper.
‘Weren’t you listening in that briefing the other day?’ Bellingham replied irritably. ‘They all got wiped out. The bloody forces of evil came along and nobbled them!’ He looked morose for a moment, then continued, ‘Apart from the embassy in Tbilisi, which is worse than useless, we haven’t got anyone. Freedom bloody Square, that embassy address — did you know that, George? So free, they’ve got security spotters sitting on their shoulders every minute of the day. Probably on Putin’s payroll, every damn one of them. As far as our lords and masters know, we’ve got bugger all over there, so we can hardly develop a new stream of intelligence chatter coming over official wires from the middle of nowhere, can we?’
‘You’ve got access to satellite coverage.’
‘We do. But it’s open-channel. Might as well advertise it as Shareware, let everyone take a peek. They do, anyway, so I can’t suddenly pop up with stuff nobody else can see. Might as well claim we’re using a sodding medium.’ He scowled. ‘No, it’s about time we recognized our limits, George. It was a nifty idea, but it’s outlived its usefulness.’