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.