Vanderveen turned his face into her fragrant hair, lowering his voice to a murmur. “I agree, but losing the gear means changing the plan, and it’s a little bit late in the game for that.”
Her eyes drifted away for a moment, and then she snapped back to reality. “I might be able to get what we need, but I’ll have to place a few calls.”
“You have a supplier in Germany?”
“Yes. I worked with a man in Dresden three years ago. If he’s still active, he should be able to meet our needs.”
He looked at her, questioning. This was the first time she had mentioned another possibility, a contact of her own. The information would have been useful earlier, but there was no point in getting into that now. “Okay. We’ll follow him out, but then I want you to walk away. Don’t go too far, and keep the phone… I’ll call you once it’s done.”
“Very well.” She was about to say something else, but the courier was back in the room, reaching for his suit jacket. He pulled it on, grabbed the black case, and moved to the door.
Vanderveen replaced the documents, sealed the envelope, and slipped it under his coat before following them out.
They left the hotel separately, as instructed. Khalil was the first to depart, nodding politely to the doorman as he stepped out into the rain. Raseen followed two minutes later, wearing the bright red anorak. As she approached the doors, she pulled the hood over her head and shot the doorman a little smile, which he eagerly returned. Vanderveen was wearing the black windbreaker, the ball cap pulled low over his blond hair. Raseen took a right after leaving the building, heading back down toward the Embankment, but Vanderveen crossed Savoy Street, poked around a newsstand for half a minute, then walked quickly back down the Strand.
He already knew why the courier had asked them to take a taxi. The British Museum was well out of the way, and the unnecessarily long trip could only mean that he intended to reach Charing Cross on foot. The station was located on the other end of the Strand, and if they had followed his instructions, they would have arrived at roughly the same time. Vanderveen’s suspicions were confirmed after a short while, when he again spotted the dark head of the man named Khalil weaving in and out of the crowd.
At least, it looked like the same man. Vanderveen knew he would have to get closer to make a positive identification, but he had done this kind of thing before, and he trusted his instincts. He was getting ready to close the gap when the courier solved the problem for him, pausing to examine a window display of expensive watches. A little break in the crowd gave Vanderveen a clear view of the other man’s profile. It wasn’t much, but enough to make a solid ID, and there was the last piece of evidence: the black case, dangling loosely from his right hand. The gap suddenly closed, obscuring the view. The street was no less busy now that the lunch hour was over, a great rush of humanity sweeping by on the sidewalk. The rain had started to clear a little as well, a few errant drops angling down from the low gray clouds.
He kept moving, letting the crowd carry him forward. Having spotted the courier, Vanderveen was now looking hard for signs of surveillance. The green Opel appeared on schedule, and this time, he got a good look at the license plate. He was slightly chilled to see that Raseen had been right; it was the same car. The sedan passed him once more in the space of five minutes, but it was the only visible sign. Vanderveen couldn’t pick out any familiar faces on foot, but that didn’t mean a thing; he could be surrounded by watchers and never know it. Unfortunately, he couldn’t drop back in the hopes of picking them out; Charing Cross was less than five minutes away. If he was going to act, it had to be now.
The courier was 30 feet ahead of him. He picked up the pace, closing the distance rapidly.
In the driver’s seat of the Opel, Ian Haines leaned on the horn, angrily scanning the traffic that was currently snarled along Maiden Lane. The rain had started to slow, so he flicked off the wipers and leaned back in the seat, where he took a deep breath and tried to resign himself to a long wait. He still couldn’t believe the Arab had decided to leave the hotel before the shift change. The fucking nerve of these people… If the inconsiderate bastard had stayed in his room for another five minutes, they would have had time to move the next team into position.
Unfortunately, it hadn’t worked out that way. Now they could easily end up spending the next several hours trailing him around the city, just waiting for an opportunity to switch out the surveillance teams. Judging by the terse, humorless transmissions coming over the radio, Scott was just as unhappy with the situation as he was.
“Ian, he’s still moving southwest on the Strand. Where the hell are you?”
“Maiden Lane. Some kind of accident… Christ, I don’t know. Any idea where he’s going?”
A crackle of static, then, “Your guess is as good as mine, mate. But I’ll tell you one thing. If he gets on the tube, we’re fucked.”
“Got that right,” Haines muttered to himself. In spite of the situation, he could console himself with one fact: if they ended up losing Banker, it probably wouldn’t mean much to the people in charge of “A” Branch, Section 4 at Thames House. After all, he reasoned, the man couldn’t be that important; if he was, a full team would have been tasked with trailing him. Then again, that might have been wishful thinking on his part. Haines knew the Service was spread too thin on the ground, despite the constant threat of terrorist activity and a marked upsurge in public interest following the London bombings of July 7, 2005. Manpower wasn’t the only problem, either. The Service was also badly in need of additional funding; the annual budget, which was shared with MI6 and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), had risen a scant 250 million pounds over the past year. At the same time, expectations had risen tenfold.
Yet another impediment was the public’s ignorance when it came to matters of national security.
Many people tended to forget that MI5 had no arrest powers, which meant that it was entirely dependent on actual government entities, such as Special Branch, to act on domestic intelligence.
Haines had learned firsthand how hard it was to let others take the credit after months of thankless surveillance, but generally speaking, he didn’t mind operating in the shadows, and he didn’t mind the hard work… at least not most of the time. Right now, however, he wanted nothing more than to get on with the weekend; the Temple Bar was calling his name. He shifted in his seat wearily. If the little shit would just sit down for a meal somewhere, they could bring in the next shift and get this over with….
Haines was jolted out of his daydream by a horn blared from behind. The traffic had cleared up ahead. Easing his foot off the clutch, he rolled forward and turned onto Southampton. Twenty seconds later, he stopped at another light, ready to make the right turn onto the Strand. He had just finished relaying his position to Scott when the light turned green, and he swung onto the busy street for the fifth time that day.
Vanderveen had closed to within 5 feet. Everything else had fallen away: the jostling crowd, the cacophony of voices, and the constant roar of the cars sweeping by. All he could see was the man named Khaliclass="underline" the elegant cut of his Savile Row suit, the attaché dangling from his right hand, the hair curling over the back of his collar. He had stopped somewhere to purchase an umbrella, a lime green monstrosity, which was now bobbing over his head. If he had put it up earlier, it would have made Vanderveen’s task much easier, but the rain was only now starting to increase in tempo and force.