An Agent of Deceit

by Chris Morgan Jones

  He went to press the button again. Please be in. For his sake be in.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Frau Gerstman, it’s Ben Webster.’ The words were thick in his mouth.

  Nina said nothing. He turned from the microphone and spat blood and dirt. He waited for her to speak but she wasn’t there. He buzzed again.

  ‘I do not want to see you, Mr Webster. Unless you have news for me.’

  He closed his eyes in pain and frustration. ‘I have to speak to you.’ His voice was earnest now, urgent. ‘I was with Richard Lock. He’s been taken.’

  ‘Please, Mr Webster. Go. I have had enough.’

  ‘Here, in your street. They knocked me out. The same men who broke into your home.’

  Nina was silent.

  ‘The same men who are calling you.’

  The door buzzed, just long enough for him to take his weight off the wall and push against it.

  Nina met him on the landing again, looking straight at him as he opened the gates to the lift, her arms crossed. She was still in black.

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘It’s OK. It’s not that bad.’

  She gave him a long, steady look and then without saying anything turned and went into her apartment. Webster wiped his feet on the mat and followed her down the corridor, the damp soles of his shoes still loud on the wooden floor.

  Before the sitting room she turned left into a bathroom, more modern than the rest of the flat, all marble and glass. She took a flannel from a rail, wet it under a tap and handed it to him.

  ‘Sit on the bath.’

  He pressed the cloth to the side of his head and felt the cold sting against the wound. It came away vivid with blood.

  ‘I let them take him. It’s happening again.’

  ‘Wait.’ Nina took another cloth from the rail and ran it under the tap. ‘Here.’ She stood by him and dabbed at the blood on his forehead, wiping it away.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We were coming to see you.’ He shook his head and felt the pain rolling inside it. ‘I don’t know where they came from. I never saw them. I never saw them.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you call the police?’

  ‘They won’t find him. I have to find him.’ He turned and looked her in the eye. ‘I need to bargain with them.’

  She said nothing, then broke his gaze and leaned in to him, cleaning blood from the side of his face. He pulled away.

  ‘Nina, I heard what Prock said to you. When did they break in?’

  She shook her head, threw the flannel in the bath and walked out of the room.

  ‘Nina.’ He followed her down the corridor. The afternoon had clouded, and the light in the sitting room was lowering. She turned on a floor lamp and sat in her chair, staring at the ground. He took a remote control from the coffee table and switched the television on, turning up the sound so that voices and music filled the room.

  He crouched by her chair and looked up at her, speaking softly. ‘Nina, listen. I’m scared. You know what’s happening. I need to know what Dmitry knew. Otherwise Richard is dead.’

  ‘I don’t know what he knew.’

  ‘These men have been in your flat. They’ve been calling you. They were out there this afternoon, watching. Christ, others may be there now. Until they’re convinced, they will go on. Give it up. When they know you don’t have it, they’ll stop.’

  She sighed abruptly, almost a sob.

  ‘I don’t want to remember him like this. Being chased for what he knew.’

  I have to get on, thought Webster. There isn’t time for this.

  ‘Nina, tell me something. Why do you want to hold on to it? What good will it do you?’

  ‘Dmitry didn’t want them to have it.’

  ‘Without Dmitry it means nothing.’

  Nina was silent. She looked down at her lap.

  He went on. ‘He’d have done this for Richard. They were friends.’

  She sniffed, looked up at him. ‘So you trade it for Lock?’

  ‘That’s right. If it’s not too late.’

  ‘And after that, what good is it? Lock is alive and Malin is what? The same.’ She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She sat like that for a while, and he didn’t disturb her. ‘It’s not mine to give,’ she said at last.

  ‘It’s the part of him you don’t want to remember. Let it go.’

  Nina nodded – once, deliberately – and left the room. When she came back she held a small piece of folded paper in her hand. Silently she gave it to Webster, who took it, opened it, folded it again and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Thank you. Call me on this if anything happens.’ He left her another card.

  She nodded again. He hesitated, as if there was something more to be said. But he knew there was not, and with a single goodbye he left.

  From Nina’s flat Webster ran east in the direction of the hotel, the cold air rushing against him. He needed a payphone. How quickly the normal world could fall away and tip you into fear. He offered a brief prayer that Lock was all right; he didn’t often pray, but Lock did. In the dark the snow was still falling, heavily now, leaving a thin layer of powder on the ice all around.

  He found a phone on Steinplatz. It was open, a steel column with a small sheet of glass above his head by way of shelter. He pulled himself in under the canopy, put his credit card in the slot and called one of the numbers he knew best. As it rang he looked around the square. On this side a mother was wheeling a pushchair towards him; to his left two girls were sliding from long run-ups on the ice. His head pulsed with pain.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Ike, it’s Ben. Lock’s missing.’

  ‘Another midnight flit?’

  ‘No. Worse.’

  Hammer listened while Webster explained.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. Terrified but fine. Furious with myself. I need you to reach Malin.’

  ‘Through Onder?’

  ‘Through Onder. Or Tourna. He may have a number for him. Tell him we have what he wants and if anything happens to Lock we’ll send it straight to Hewson at The Times. If he lets us know Lock is safe then we’ll talk again. And talk to Yuri. One of the phones I bought for Lock has GPS. If he still has it we’ll know exactly where he is.’

  ‘All right. What about Gerstman’s stuff?’

  ‘Have a look at it. It’s in a hotmail account.’ He read out the details twice. A user name and a password to unlock the big secret. Please let it be good.

  ‘Got it.’ Hammer paused. ‘How did they find him?’

  ‘He called Nina. And Marina. Could have been either. It was stupid. I should have thought.’ He sighed. ‘This is my doing, Ike. I did this.’

  Hammer said nothing.

  ‘Would you call the police?’ asked Webster.

  ‘I would. Only because if something happens they’ll let you know. If something does, that means they’ll involve you. But that’s OK. You’d probably want them to.’

  ‘OK. Could you call George?’

  ‘To send some people out?’

  ‘Maybe just have them on standby.’

  ‘OK. I take it you’re calling me?’

  ‘Until I get a new phone, yes. I’ll call later this evening.’

  Webster put the phone down. His hand was freezing in the evening air. He put it deep in his coat pocket and ran off in search of a taxi.

  He had the cab stop two hundred yards short of the Daniel. Scanning both sides of the road he could see nothing suspicious, just empty cars. He walked past the hotel for some distance and found that clear, too.

  He had decided to enlist the manageress; he needed to get into Lock’s room and preferred not to risk being caught breaking in. Frau Werfel was not a woman to flap; she looked at his head with curiosity but nothing more. He explained, as best he could in halting German, that he had had an argument with Mr Green and had been knocked over by a moped as he chased after him across a busy road. When he had come to,
Green was not there, and this was worrying because he was prone to fits of depression, was depressed at the moment, and may not have taken his medication with him. It was the best he could do. Frau Werfel nodded gravely, as if she didn’t believe him but understood these things all too well. Had she seen him? She had not, but she had been busy this afternoon and had frequently been downstairs in the basement. Would she mind letting Webster into the room? She looked carefully at his face, weighing him up. She would not. Webster thanked her and followed her up the two flights of stairs to Lock’s floor, watching her thick ankles in their sheepskin-lined boots as they went up step by step. As he walked down the corridor, which was gloomy and hot, he had a violent vision of opening the door to find Lock hanging by his neck, his new shoes twisting in space. He shook his head to clear the thought.

  There was no one in Lock’s room. Frau Werfel let him in and he made a show of looking in the bathroom for the medication. But the moment the door had opened he had noticed on the desk an envelope he was sure had not been there earlier.

  ‘He seems to have taken it,’ he said, coming out of the bathroom, ‘which is good. Look, I’d go and try to find him but I have no idea where to look. His phone is turned off. I think I’ll wait here for him. I want to be sure to catch him if he comes back.’

  ‘I could tell you when he comes back in.’

  ‘But you’re busy, Frau Werfel. I don’t want to force you to be at your desk all evening.’

  She seemed ready to challenge him. But she merely nodded, wished him a good evening and left, closing the door behind her.

  The envelope was unmarked, off-white, small – the kind used for personal correspondence. It looked identical to the hotel stationery in the rack next to it. Webster took a sheet of paper from the rack and used it to flip the envelope over. It was not stuck down; the flap had been tucked inside. Webster tore the sheet of paper in two and using the two pieces to cover his fingers carefully pulled the flap back and out. There was a single sheet of paper inside, folded once. Still covering his fingers Webster removed it from the envelope and spread it out on the desk. It was a piece of Hotel Daniel writing paper. Its edges were a little bruised, as if it had been in the room a long time before being used.

  The paper was covered with an even longhand in royal-blue biro-ink. The script was regular but showed signs of flamboyance: a flourished tail to the ‘f’, the ‘g’ looping elegantly up into an ‘s’. Webster recognized the hand from the signatures on a hundred documents he had recently examined.

  Since my friend Dmitry Gerstman died I have been unhappy. I have lost a good friend. I lost my family long ago. In the courts and the newspapers I have lost my reputation. I have nothing. I do not want to continue.

  Webster read it again, and a third time, his heart beating heavily against his ribs. He read it once more but it yielded nothing new. He looked around the room to see if anything else had changed. Lock’s things were still in place: his old shoes with their water stains by the radiator, yesterday’s shirt hanging off the back of the chair by the desk. The bed had been made, and the bedside table tidied: on one side the two books, neatly against the wall; on the other the two bottles of Scotch and an empty bottle of gin, tightly together. The bottle of gin had not been there before, he was sure. Pulling his hand up inside the sleeve of his coat he picked it up by the cap. There was a trickle left in the bottom.

  Using a pen to dial, he called reception. Frau Werfel answered.

  ‘Frau Werfel, this is Mr Webster in Mr Green’s room. Could I ask when you were not at reception over the last hour? I’m sorry but it might be important.’

  Frau Werfel gave a small harrumph to let Webster know that she had been very helpful but was beginning to tire of all this irregularity. ‘I can’t say. Before you arrived I had been there for half an hour, I suppose, because some guests arrived at about half past four.’

  ‘And did anyone else come in in that half-hour?’

  ‘No one, Herr Webster. Is that all?’

  ‘That’s all. Thank you very much, Frau Werfel.’ He longed to be able to do something. He did the one thing that was of any practical use and called Berlin’s central police station. He explained to them that his friend had gone missing and that he had just found what looked like a suicide note in his hotel room. The police asked him whether he had tried to call his friend. Yes, of course. Did he have any idea where his friend might have gone? No, none; he understood that there was little the police could do, but they could find photographs of Richard Lock on the Internet and perhaps circulate them to their patrol cars. The German policeman snorted and said yes, they could do that.

  He hung up and looked out of the window. The street below looked the same as before. He could tell from the snow on their bonnets that all the cars he could see were cold and hadn’t recently moved. There was no movement; only the snow falling thickly, round flakes dropping like rain, sometimes flurrying in a gust of wind. He drew the curtains and stood for a moment with his hands together, gripping the material, his eyes closed. This cannot be happening again.

  He had to speak to Hammer but didn’t want to leave the room in case by some miracle Lock returned. He took a risk and used the hotel phone on the desk. Even Malin’s people weren’t agile enough to have tapped these lines by now. In any case, it didn’t really matter. Let them hear it.

  ‘Ike, it’s Ben.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m at the hotel. This isn’t a secure line. There’s a bogus suicide note and an empty bottle of gin that wasn’t here when we left four or five hours ago.’

  ‘So there’s a pattern.’

  ‘There’s a pattern.’

  ‘Do the police know?’

  ‘They know he’s missing and depressed.’

  ‘OK. I just left a voicemail message for our fat Russian friend. Our favourite Etonian had a number for him. I didn’t want to involve the client yet. I don’t know which of his mobiles it is. I could try the client but I figured that he wouldn’t have any number we didn’t already have.’

  Webster grunted in agreement. ‘What about Lock’s phone?’

  ‘The signal’s dead.’

  ‘Christ.’ Webster pinched his eyes closed with his free hand. ‘The files?’

  ‘They’re next.’ Hammer paused. ‘I don’t know what else we can do.’

  ‘There’s nothing else.’

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘No. I’m tired of making mistakes.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Hammer. ‘When did Lock call Nina?’

  ‘Yesterday morning. Marina the night before.’

  ‘And by the afternoon there’s someone tailing him? That’s quick work.’

  ‘I think they were PIs. Locals.’

  ‘Locals don’t fake suicides. Not the ones I know anyway.’

  ‘The Russians could have got here late yesterday.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  Webster thought for a moment. ‘Might be worth checking.’

  ‘That’s not easy.’

  ‘Have our travel-agent friend check for last-minute bookings.’

  ‘What about private flights?’

  ‘Yuri should be able to help.’

  ‘OK.’ Hammer paused. ‘What are you doing now?’

  ‘I’m going to stay here and go quietly nuts. He may come back. If you need me call the Hotel Daniel and ask for Mr Green in room 205.’

  ‘OK. Don’t do anything stupid.’

  ‘OK.’

  There was nothing else to do.

  He sat on the bed and picked up Lock’s copy of Middle-march. The spine was broken about a hundred pages in and the book fell open naturally. Six hundred pages left. He wondered whether Lock would have the chance to finish it.

  Where was he now? In a dark basement somewhere; in a van barrelling out of Berlin; in the river, deep under the squares of ice that flowed on its surface like cold fat. How would they do it this time? Throw him under a train; off a bridge; from a window? He saw L
ock, stupid and terrified, pulled along by two slab-like faceless men, his eyes wide and red, knowing and not knowing what was next; Lock in a bright cell, his clothes filthy, a crowd around him, the only colour in the scene the red line across his throat.

  And for what? A vain quest for some distant, flickering justice that Webster knew he would never grasp.

  He jerked his head back and beat it against the wall. Fresh pain stabbed at his wound. He did it again, his eyes looking up to the heavens, imploring them, filling with angry tears. And again, harder.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Even before he opened his eyes Lock was conscious of motion. He was lying down, he knew that, and shaking gently, unevenly, sharply jolting every now and then. A rumbling sound went through him. His knees were up and his feet pressed against something solid. He tried to move his hand to his head but his arm felt weighed down, as if no amount of effort would release it. He was hot and wanted air; he wanted to take air deep into his lungs but something was stopping him and each breath was short, tight, painful as he inhaled. Everywhere – in his head, in his stomach, rising into his throat – he felt nausea: surging, ebbing, always there.

  Against his instincts, he opened his eyes a crack. It was dark, but orange light was pulsing across his vision. He opened them wider and with pain lifted his head an inch or two. He was in a tight space. One arm he couldn’t move at all, the other only a few inches. He could see his knees, and beyond them things were racing, lights were flashing past, white lights and yellow lights. They were spinning round him. He forced himself to watch for a while and slowly the space grew sharper. He made out a tree between the lights, and windows, and a wall. That was the world. Then where was he? He looked to his right. A man’s head, and the man was sitting down. He was in a car. He was being driven, at night, like a small child who has been told he can sleep on the back seat.

  His body wanted him to be sick. He shut his eyes and resisted it, but he couldn’t control the urge. He rolled on his side and felt all his muscles lock in a violent spasm. Then he collapsed onto his back once more.