“So,” he said. “Their plan is to make you beholden to them. The carrot is they stop beating you with the stick.”
“That’s the second carrot.”
Hammer looked quizzical.
“Senechal tried to offer me a bribe. He told me good work would not go unappreciated.”
“You’re sure?”
“If I’d looked greedy they’d have told the Italians to stand down. No question. It was a test. The whole Como trip.”
Hammer sat thinking a little longer. “It seems a lot of effort. I had no idea he cared so much.”
“Quite. His daughter thinks that we’re more important to him than we might imagine.”
“She was there?”
“Oh, they were all there. I suspect so that it wouldn’t look like the visit was all about me.”
Another deep breath. “If you’re right, we stop the case.”
Webster put his glass down and shook his head. “We can’t stop until we know what he’s scared of. What it is he thinks we’ll find. Otherwise he’ll carry on, and so will the Italians.”
Hammer paused to take a long sip of beer. “What have they got on you?”
Webster blinked and tried to hold Hammer’s look, but it was no use. “This and that.”
“What, precisely?”
“The PIs I used were…” He sighed. “They were thorough.”
“How thorough?”
Webster hesitated. “Some hacking.”
“In 2004? Pioneering work. Is that it?”
Webster looked up at him and after a pause gave his answer. “All the usual stuff. Banks. Phone records. I think they paid someone in the Polizia for his file. And they broke into his office.”
“Whose office?”
“Ruffino’s. Photographed everything they could get their hands on. You could say they exceeded their brief.”
Hammer’s fingers thrummed and his head bobbed. “The police know about that?”
“From something they said yesterday, it could come out, yes.”
“And you didn’t know what these idiots were doing?”
“None of it. Not until they gave me their report. But I’d have a job proving that.”
A pause. “When I hired you, you said all this was dead.”
“It was.”
Hammer took a drink and thought for a moment. “Why come here? If you don’t want to stop the case?”
Webster hesitated. What he had wanted was a blessing to fight fire with fire, to do anything necessary to expose Qazai; but he had expected Ike to be as exercised by the day’s events as he himself had been, and this coolness gave him pause.
“To talk it through. To get your support.”
“For what?”
Ike, as ever, knew what he wanted. “Nothing. I thought you should know our client—the one you were so keen to sign up—is a crook. After all.”
“You’re sure?”
“Jesus. How much do you want? They’re blackmailing me, for Christ’s sake. And they wouldn’t bother unless they saw me as a threat.”
Hammer stopped tapping. In the firelight his eyes were serious now, emphatic. “If you’re right, find something to nail him with. And if you can’t, you need to let go. I haven’t seen anything that convinces me either way. Did Senechal try to bribe you? I’m sure he did. He would. But set you up?” He paused. “Sounds to me like they may not have needed to.” He let the words register. “Your job is to tell the world whether he’s OK or not. But not on a hunch. You don’t get to crush a man like that without something really good. Meanwhile, he’s our client. He’s paid us a lot of money, and we owe him more than suspicions in return.”
Webster gulped his Scotch. He stood, peeled off Hammer’s cardigan, laid it on the back of the chair and made to leave.
“The first time I saw him I knew he was wrong,” he said. “I can’t believe you don’t see it.”
“I’m letting you do the seeing.”
Webster shook his head. “While you watch the fees? I understand.”
He gave perfunctory thanks for the drink and left, taking his damp jacket from the stand.
THE NEXT DAY, after a cool morning at home, Webster took Nancy to school and Daniel to nursery and made his furtive way to the Caledonian Road to see Dean Oliver, stopping in Queen’s Park to arrange for flowers to be sent to Elsa. They were a poor substitute for honesty but he couldn’t afford that, not yet. Throughout his time at Ikertu he had told her almost everything almost all the time, only leaving out the details that he thought would appall or bore her. This, though, would frighten her, and he persuaded himself, disingenuously, that he preferred to lie to her than see her scared. On his way he left a message for Constance, telling him that things had become more serious and asking him to call.
Webster had never been to Oliver’s office before; their two or three meetings had always been on neutral ground, where an illusion of distance might be maintained. He was not someone to be seen with, if it could be helped, and perhaps he understood this, because Oliver spent his days in a single room on a light industrial estate in an anonymous part of north London, four hundred yards from the prison—which may or may not have occupied his mind as he walked to work each morning.
Uniquely among that strange band of people who did occasional jobs for him, Webster knew nothing about Dean Oliver: where he lived, who he lived with, what he held dear; how he came to do the difficult and esoteric work that made him useful. Still less about his trade secrets, which was probably just as well. After every meeting Webster came away with the feeling that he had said rather too much, which left him at the same time unsettled and reassured.
Even Oliver’s face gave little away. It was tanned all year round to a suspicious evenness, and otherwise smooth and so featureless that it was hard to retain a strong impression of him without the original present. His cheeks were tight and always clean-shaven, his lips a little too full. That was all that was notable; all, in fact, that one could see. The rest of his face was covered by a swipe of thin brown hair across his forehead and a pair of metal-framed glasses whose tinted brown lenses were just dark enough to obscure his eyes. Sitting with him, it was impossible to know whether he was making some piercing survey of you or simply staring vacantly past your ear.
It was his voice that bore all the distinction: it was rich, in a quiet way, full of sympathy and invitation and gentle variations that irresistibly drew you in. A good thing, then, and no surprise, that he did all his work on the phone.
Oliver asked Webster whether he’d like coffee—“I wouldn’t, it’s not good”—and excused himself while he finished an e-mail. There were five phones in his office: two landlines and three mobiles, neatly laid out on a sixties wooden desk beside a laptop. Webster watched him type and found himself asking the same, unaired questions that always occurred to him when they met. Something about Oliver forbade inquiry: an aura of privateness, of a persona deliberately constructed to give nothing away. But Webster feared the answers more than the reaction. It was difficult to believe that this very particular man who performed such a very particular purpose had ever been a child, or cried to his mother, or worn shorts, or gone on holiday.
What was only too evident, though, was that Dean loved his work. From this anonymous bolt-hole he carried out silent raids on any organization foolish enough to think that it could keep its information secure. Banks, hospitals, councils, ministries, universities, the companies that sell us phones, power and credit: his job was to get inside them, take what he needed, and retreat without leaving a trace. He needed little more than cunning, and to every target he was someone else. To the local branch of Barclays, he was from the fraud department in London; to the person in the cell phone company call center who sent out copies of bills, he was the owner of that phone and that account; to the local tax office he was a colleague in another office looking to clarify an inconsistency. His work was a sequence of tiny masquerades. But despite his apparent hollowness, Oliver’s great talent was not acting but eliciting; he didn’t inhabit a role so much as simply create a space that others felt obliged to fill.