‘We’d better talk now.’
She told him her story. When she’d first decided to buy back the IPD400 and sell it on to Grey Tony, it had seemed exactly the sort of scheme a brilliant and ambitious young arms dealer should devise in response to the opportunity that fate had placed in her path. Now, explaining it all to James, it sounded not just absurd but unhinged. Was the naïve and avaricious woman she was telling him about really her, Natalya Kocharian? She ploughed on as quickly as she could, blaming herself, Grey Tony Schliemann, Claude Zender, in that order. Certain things, such as that she had been Zender’s lover, she left out as irrelevant.
When she came to her assault at the hands of the Mauritanian prince, Nat didn’t know what to say. The bare fact was that she’d escaped being raped, and that was good. It was a kind of reprieve. And yet the hours she’d spent alone in the prince’s tent, at the mercy of his prying hands, his foul indifference to her cries, and even to her contempt. . . And then again, though she was disgusted with herself for even allowing the thought to enter her head, she felt shamed by his impotence, and did not want to tell James what had happened. And so she said nothing, but a chill passed over her skin, as if Makhlani’s bony fingers had reached for her through the open window.
James listened hard and tried not to miss anything – his ears were still so beaten up it sounded as if she were speaking from another room. Nat’s face was full of apprehension. Her eyes kept searching his to see how he would take what she was telling him, and when she smiled, her smile faded quickly, as if she feared he might misconstrue. He could see that she expected him to react badly to the story of her wildly audacious scheme to waylay Little Sister, but instead he was touched by her candour. It was such an unexpected quality to find in someone hoping to deceive the likes of Zender and Schliemann.
‘So, now you know what the evil arms dealer has been up to,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, James.’
‘It wasn’t you who got the IPD400 out of the Grosvenor warehouse. And you didn’t invent the damn thing, either. They taught you to play a rotten game and you played it, that’s all.’
‘And lost. I’ve been behaving exactly like a trainee Claude Zender. Only I’m no good at it, and I don’t even want to be any more.’
‘I’m sorry I didn’t come with you when you left the compound that night.’
‘You’d probably have got us all killed.’
They fell silent, neither of them wishing to over-extend this moment of quiet apology. Eventually, James said:
‘You realise Clive Silk works for MI6?’
‘I heard rumours. And he has that smug, I-know-a-secret look.’
‘When I was in the Intelligence Corps, I was sent to Kosovo with an SAS unit. Silk was my liaison. He’s a prick.’
‘So, you’ve heard my side of it. Now it’s your turn.’
‘I was walking home to my flat in Camden a few weeks ago, and I noticed this girl was following me.’
He told his story, then said: ‘Nat, this isn’t over. MI6 started a war in the Western Sahara and suggested I get caught in the crossfire. I need to work out why before they find another way of keeping my mouth shut. Tony Schliemann wants you dead, and judging by what happened to your friend in LA, he’s not about to pick up the phone and tell you he’s only kidding. And we still don’t know who paid Zender to get hold of the IPD400.’
‘Do we want to know? Do we actually care? Let’s stay in Algiers and set up a kebab shop.’
‘I keep thinking about Sarah.’
‘Well don’t,’ said Nat. ‘She wasn’t thinking about you when she helped lure you to that house in Wembley. What she thought was, how rebellious and saintly I am! Anyway, you did what you could to save her.’
‘Did I, though?’
‘If you want to be gallant, James, there’s always me.’
She wrapped herself tight around him and they lay there for a while, enjoying the perfect warmth of each other’s skin. But James’s thoughts would not leave him alone and he grew restless.
‘Those files I told you about, the ones I downloaded to my cache in Mexico City, I need to get into them.’
So this was how her new lover planned to spend the day. She watched him dress in his indigo shirt, grey suit and uncomfortable woven-topped slip-ons.
‘I’ll be in my room,’ he said. ‘I’ll call.’
He bent over the bed and kissed her. She thought of pulling him to her, but he looked in the mood to resist and then one of them would have to give way and a little ugliness would come between them. She watched him go, and before the door had clicked shut behind him, wanted him back.
She went to the bathroom to shower. At least James hadn’t walked out in a rage because of what she’d done. Dr dazed-and-limping Palatine. She thought of him standing shamefaced in Zender’s office at the compound, unable to admit that he actually wanted to stay and fight the Moroccans, the desolate clarity in his slate-blue eyes. He knew it was wrong but couldn’t help himself. A man trying to be good, but failing – was that how he saw himself? Did that apply to her, too? No, because the Natalya Kocharian in the story she’d told James had never even tried. How had she got this way, the girl from the ninth-floor apartment on Pyrochova Street with a copy of Vogue under her bed? What had she been dreaming of, really? She’d devoted herself to escaping the groggy grey suburbs of Kiev, but then? It felt as if she’d got so used to going round with her claws out and a come-and-get-me smile on her face that she’d overshot the mark and lost her way.
Palatine and Kocharian: what a pair.
She lay on her bed and listened to the early morning noises from the street, the doorman shouting for taxis, the rattle and scrape of crates being stacked on the pavement. Some trick of the light was casting reflections from the roofs of the vehicles below onto the ceiling of her room. It was peaceful to watch the succession of pale coloured oblongs slide out of the gloom to the right of the window, parade along the curtain rail, then slide back into shadow.
Her phone rang and she woke. James, asking her to come over and look through his secret files. It was midday – she’d been asleep for hours.
‘If the network here is half way decent, they should start to download straight away,’ he said, ushering her into his room. ‘Then we can get cracking.’
‘Hallelujah for that.’
‘They’ve been careless, or ignorant, or both. What we have here should tell us plenty.’
‘I’m ravenous,’ she said, opening the room service menu. ‘Do you want something?’
‘Sure. You choose.’
She rang through her order, then watched him pulling the plastic bags and blocks of polystyrene from around the computer he’d acquired, packing them carefully away in the cardboard box before arranging the hardware on the desk. He’s not a bad man, he’s a nerd, she told herself. A killer nerd. A killer nerd with a beautiful bum. She laughed and he turned and smiled at her. He’s really quite lovely when he does that, she thought.
‘James, just get on with it. For every ten minutes you take from now on, you have to take off a piece of clothing.’
Half an hour later he was sitting naked at the computer, scrolling through the first of the downloaded files. She watched his lacerated back rippling gently as his hands moved over the keyboard.
‘Come and look at this. I’m reading the instructions for my abduction – sent two weeks before Little Sister left Grosvenor.’
‘You already know what happened – you were there.’
‘The stuff I read on the computer in Wembley made it sound like I was being pursued by Islamic terrorists. When I found out al Bidayat was involved, it all seemed to tie up.’
‘It’s not al Bidayat, James, it’s Claude Zender. He knew everything about you. He knew you’d be able to trace that girl’s phone number and follow it to Wembley. He knew you’d go to Oran and try and get Little Sister back on your own, rather than calling the police or MI6.’
‘I took every piece of bait they laid out for me. Even
that stalled reformat. . . I thought I was one step ahead when in fact I was two steps behind. But what if I hadn’t?’
‘He’d have thought of something else.’
‘So why pretend it was an Islamic plot?’
‘Too weird for a government or a corporate – a little house in Wembley, a gay Arab and an odd English girl? Anyway, you fell for it.’
‘What a fool I was.’
‘It was clever, James. Zender used your strengths against you.’
‘What about Mansour Anzarane? Mansour is al Bidayat. He made no secret of it – and it’s all over the web.’
‘All Mansour and that other guy did was Taser you in Oran, escort you to the compound and cut you when you didn’t do what they wanted,’ she said. ‘On Zender’s orders, right?’
‘So you tell me: is Claude Zender a terrorist, the brains behind al Bidayat?’
‘No chance. He likes the world just the way it is.’
‘No sacred principles searing his soul?’
‘He doesn’t have a soul.’
‘But he has a terrorist on the payroll.’
‘Maybe Mansour needed a day job.’
‘Al Bidayat is behind this. It must be. They paid Zender to get hold of Little Sister. That’s why Mansour was on the team that abducted me.’
‘And this explains why Sir Iain Strang tried to have you killed?’
‘No, but—’
‘You look quite silly sitting there with no clothes on and that confused expression on your face,’ said Nat, pulling her T-shirt over her head.
A steady flow of dishes was delivered to his room: coffee, eggs, fruit, skewered lamb with rice and stewed aubergine, yoghurt with honey and pistachio. Coconut cakes soused in Moscatel. Caramelised orange slices. Rice pudding, figs. Sweet, sour, salty, tart: their appetites could not be satisfied.
He said he had to put in a few hours’ proper work with the files, so she went back to her room and lay down. The S-shape of his body was still creased in the sheet beside her, like a swirl of silt in the bed of a dried-up stream. The room was dark and her mood swung again and she was frightened. Of Grey Tony, who’d been too timid to make a pass at her, but hadn’t balked at hiring a man to shoot her thousands of miles away in Marrakech. Of the Mauritanian prince and his skinny, dead-eyed men. Frightened that she would always remember how suddenly things could get worse. How much worse they could get.
She dressed quickly and went out, leaving the Do not Disturb sign on the door handle so the chambermaid would not erase the traces of James that lingered in her room. She went down in the lift, tying a dark green silk scarf around her head, then took a taxi to Rue Didouche Mourad. She bought a long gentian blue satin dress, a matching shawl embroidered with gold thread, and a small leather evening bag. The dress was a fine piece of couture, artfully cut around the waist and thighs. It would go perfectly with James’s indigo shirt. Tonight they’d dine somewhere splendid and James would make her feel beautiful again.
The entrance to the street on which the hotel stood was blocked by a delivery van, so she got out of her taxi at the corner. As she approached the entrance, the door to a black Jeep Cherokee was thrown open and a small man with close-cropped hair stepped out and blocked the narrow pavement.
‘Please, Mam’selle, we offer you the services of our driver.’
Nat shook her head and turned sideways to get past him. The man threw out an arm and shoved her towards the open door of the car. Big hands reached from within, seized her wrist, coiled round her waist. She thought she could brace herself against the body of the car, but the man behind pressed down on her shoulders and she went sprawling head first inside. The door slammed against her feet and the Jeep surged away from the kerb before she could even start to scream.
James turned to the square of illuminated plastic before him. His brain checked into the familiar state and set off like clockwork: analyse the data set, parse away the dross, look for the little flags that point to buried treasure. He wished Nat had not gone back to her room, even though he’d pretty much asked her to. The exchanges dealing with Zender’s arms business had a peculiar language of their own – low-visibility channels, premium inventory, stamp collectors and silent transfers – and were heavily salted with acronyms, some of which James recognised or guessed – GSP for Grosvenor Systems plc, T1RI for Tier 1 Restricted Item, DUI for Dual-Use Item – most of which he didn’t. He searched for anemone, the word which had appeared in the messages being copied from the compound network to MI6, but got zero results. That was wrong. The download had stalled – he had to identify the missing files and go back for them. That done, he launched a set of scripts that would yield lists of unusual words positioned in proximity to each other. Somewhere in the files, he’d find the malevolent hand of al Bidayat. The hourglass twirled on the screen and he was thinking of Nat, the feel of her limbs as she wrapped herself around him, the scent of her neck and armpits, the sweet taste of her mouth. . .
Anemone was back. There were dozens of instances, all identical to the one he’d already seen: REF ANEMONE, NO SIGNIFICANT ACTIVITY TO REPORT.
He double-checked the headers: all the messages were going to the Playpen’s servers. Little Sister blinked appealingly from the floor beside his desk. The accursed device with its blood-drenched keyboard. What was the secret so dangerous that Strang thought it justified persuading the Polisario that they’d be better off if he were dead? What was Anemone? Little Sister could tell him – might be the only worthwhile thing it would ever do. He swung the case onto the desk and started the configuration routine. The SIS network was impregnable to an IPD400 hack – in anyone else’s hands. But he’d installed a trapdoor for himself. It was second nature in his line of work. Artfully concealed inside a standard operating system routine that checked the integrity of archived data – run the routine with certain parameters, and it temporarily disabled the IPD400 alert and allowed him to slip inside the server array like a puff of smoke through a wire mesh screen.
He checked the IP routing to London, then sent a sequence of data trailblazers down the wires to see how the land lay. Within twenty minutes, he had the path mapped out: no obvious bottlenecks, low incidence of disruptive traffic. Like closing a motorway lane for a visiting president. He keyed in the IP data for an off-site server that was used for emergency backup, watched the data packets being identified, pried open, inspected, shut. It took just over four minutes to break into MI6.
UNLOCK COMPLETE.
Nat unleashed everything on the man who had hold of her wrists, and the pain and humiliation and betrayal she had suffered gave such wild strength to her limbs that for a moment she broke free. She drove her fingers into the skin beneath his jaw and reached for the door handle, but he rolled her and pinned her face down to the seat.
‘Ligotes ses mains, Etienne.’
The man with close-cropped hair leaned over from the passenger seat and tied her wrists with a length of cord and she couldn’t stop him. They pulled her upright and she spat in the face of the man beside her. He made as if to slap her but the one called Etienne said something and he stopped and grimaced.
‘You fuckers!’
She hurled abuse at them for a few minutes but they ignored her. They were driving up into the hills, along an avenue of French colonial mansions with steep roofs and tall, shuttered windows. She looked desperately for a street name but there was none, nor any numbers to identify the houses. The Jeep pulled up outside one of the largest, set back from the road behind an espaliered fig tree with leaves like huge, flapping hands. They hustled her across a stone-paved courtyard and up to a set of double doors, which opened immediately, as if he’d been standing behind it.
‘Ma chère Mam’selle, to grace my house at such short notice – I am touched beyond words.’
‘Fuck you, Claude Zender.’
Behind him was a sombre hallway with a green and white tiled floor and a grand, red-carpeted staircase. The men escorted her into a high-ceilinged room, lit by
an undersized chandelier and two brass standard lamps with pink hessian shades. They lowered her onto a rose-coloured sofa and untied her hands.
‘I must apologise for the less than decorous invitation,’ Zender said. ‘Time is rather short and I thought it prudent to pre-empt any resistance you might feel to spending an evening in my company.’
‘Why the fuck would I feel that?’ She stood up. ‘I refuse your invitation. Have these dickheads take me back to the hotel.’
He was searching her handbag, extracting her cellphone and handing it to one of his men, whose neck was livid where she’d scratched it.
‘Of course. But first we have business to do, then we will dine together. I have the services of a very fine chef here in Algiers, a man for whom one’s taste buds are akin to the keys of a musical instrument, which I do assure you he plays like a maestro.’
‘Why are you talking to me as if nothing has happened?’
Zender dismissed the two men. Nat started to follow them out, but Zender locked the door.
‘My dear Natalya, I implore you not to make difficulties. I intend a satisfactory outcome to this affair, but you must allow me to make the arrangements.’
‘No.’
There were French doors to the garden on the other side of the room. She ran over and tried them.
‘There is no way out,’ he said. ‘All the doors and windows are securely locked. Sit down, please, and allow me to present you with a glass of Champagne – acquired in its infancy in 1996 and I swear it has not moved one millimetre since.’
She was trapped, then, with Claude Zender, in this dreadful house with no address in a suburb of a city where she knew no one – except James, who was back at the hotel and didn’t even know what had happened to her. She looked around at the olive green walls and lumpen mahogany furniture. The room bore a depressing similarity to Zender’s office at the compound, except that here there was a fireplace of veined marble that jutted into the room like the butchered ribs of a giant bull.
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 39
