by Iain Cameron
Matt nodded. ‘For sure. A lot of the time we’re hanging around for long periods before there’s an explosion of activity. The last thing we need at that stage is depleted energy levels.’
‘I understand. With that in mind, I’ve prepared this fact sheet; it’s only three pages, but it’s packed with good eating advice, most of it contributed by ambulance crews, doctors, and night-shift coppers.’
He went on to talk about how to buy nutritious food from burger vans and late-night cafés, and the best ways of avoiding overloading on sugars, salts, and fats.
‘Okay, now we’ve covered food, let’s discuss your injuries. Are you experiencing any problem from the wound in your thigh or the one in your shoulder?’
‘The shoulder wound is the most recent and it was giving me problems for a while afterwards, but it’s been fine these last few months.’
‘Good.’ He made a note. ‘What about the bruising on your arm? It looks new.’
When he’d dropped to the ground at Karl Tamplin’s place, his arm had struck something hard, a rock or a metal pipe. He ignored it at the time, in the rush to apprehend the suspect, and as it didn’t bother him much, he’d forgotten about it.
'I was involved in an altercation with a suspect a day or two back, but I don’t think anything’s broken or damaged.’
‘Let me check.’
He felt around the bruise and pressed his thumbs into Matt’s skin at various points.
‘Nothing’s broken as you say, Matt, just bad bruising. It will start to fade in a few days.’
The rest of the questionnaire was a breeze as nothing much had changed since his last assessment: he hadn’t developed any new disease; he still didn’t smoke; he hadn’t increased his alcohol intake; he didn’t take drugs, and on and on it went for the remaining four pages. The doc spent a bit of time discussing sleep, impressing on him the importance of it, and, while on a job, the benefit of short naps.
Matt walked out of the medical centre feeling as if he had acquitted himself well. He knew being in good physical shape was an important aspect of the job, but an agent’s mental state was equally imperative. He thought of Rosie as he passed the firing range. He hoped she would come down here before going out on the next operation. It would help to reduce her anxiety and increase her confidence, as the one area where Rosie excelled was her shooting ability.
Matt stepped into the lift and realised he was famished. He looked at his watch: 11:30am. Lunch, if he managed to stop for it, didn’t often happen before two, but what the hell, needs must. Rather than press the button to his floor, he pressed the one for the top floor instead, and headed into the cafeteria.
Hot meals were still in the process of being cooked for the anticipated 12:30pm rush, but he didn’t mind. There were still plenty of sandwiches, salads, cold meats and cold pasta dishes he could choose from instead.
A cup of hot coffee, a ham baguette, and he was tempted by the little pot of trifle to follow, but with the doc’s voice in his ear, he chose the fruit salad. He hoped Gill didn’t come up here. He wanted every agent to be engaged in the search for David Burke, as did Matt, but it wasn’t sensible to rub the need for downtime, food, or sleeping, in his face.
FIFTEEN
Matt left the cafeteria feeling a lot better than when he’d first walked in. He headed downstairs to the agents’ floor, and returned to the hot desk where he had deposited his laptop, but didn’t sit down. Instead, he dumped the gym bag, which he would come back for later. He checked his phone to ensure he hadn’t received a message cancelling his next appointment, before heading for the stairs and walking outside.
It was a typical autumnal day: cloudy, a finger of cold in the air, a gusting wind rattling the trees dotted along the pavement, leaves being blown around like confetti. He walked to the tube station and took the train to Temple. When he arrived, he exited the station and headed towards Victoria Embankment.
The Thames was a busy river, not so much with industrial traffic as it had been in the past, but still there were plenty of boats cruising up and down. Some were pleasure, showing tourists the sights of Richmond Palace or the Thames Barrier. Others were working boats: barges carrying goods, river taxis, and now and again he would spot the River Police, on their way to warn boat owners about illegal berthing, or to drag another poor sod out of the water.
He headed west, but at a slow pace as he was early. He reached the steps leading up to Waterloo Bridge at the appointed time and, having studied the picture of Lauren that she had sent him, he looked around.
It was a good place for spooks to meet a contact, he realised. They couldn’t be spied upon from a car on the road as it was a Red Route which didn’t allow stopping. Plus, he could see several shadowy doorways in which to stand at nearby Somerset House, meaning any telephoto pictures taken from across the river would be grainy.
‘Matt Flynn?’
He turned to find Lauren Yates standing there. How did she do that, sneak up behind without him noticing? He reckoned she had been there all along, watching him from the shadows.
‘Lauren?’ he asked, holding out his hand, which she shook. ‘Good to meet you.’
‘Let’s walk,’ she said.
They walked east, a smart move for a spook as they now had their back to Waterloo Bridge and were shielded by trees from anyone who might be taking photographs or using a long-range microphone. Working with MI5 agents always did this to him, made him feel paranoid and encouraging him to think like a spy. When sitting in a pub or restaurant with David Burke, the MI5 man always took a seat where he could see his fellow patrons and would notice if someone fiddled with their jacket too long or repeatedly put their hands under the table.
Yates was late thirties, with shoulder-length blonde hair and a young-looking, round face. The word which came into Matt’s mind was ‘pleasant’. A nice girl to bring home for lunch, and providing she answered the question, What do you do, Lauren? with something innocuous like civil servant or administrative assistant in a government department, the meal would go well.
‘I’m concerned,’ she said. ‘David hasn’t been found which makes me think we must all be looking in the wrong places.’
‘We haven’t exhausted all our enquiries. As you know, we nabbed the guys who kidnapped him. We’re still working our way up the chain of responsibility to bigger and more important criminals.’
‘So I understand.’
‘If we could discover the motive for taking him,’ Matt said, ‘it would give us a clearer picture of who might be behind it. Knowing this, we might be able to circumvent a few of the links in the chain we’ve been targeting.’
‘This has been the problem all along. What I’m about to tell you is confidential, okay? From what David has told me about you, it sounds like he trusted you.’
‘We deal with many secrets ourselves. We’re used to being discreet.’
‘We’ve done analysis on the risk faced by delegates attending the Lancaster House Summit, and if David has been taken by a dissident group, it’s likely to be one of three.’
‘Why has none of this been forwarded to us or the Met?’
‘At the start, we at MI5 and MI6, wrongly perhaps, believed we were best placed to investigate them.’
Matt nodded. He’d got enough to do without becoming involved in a bun fight between competing agencies.
‘The first group are Kurdish separatists whose express aim is to assassinate the American president for betraying them in Syria. If you remember, they fought alongside the Americans against Assad. When it all got too hot for the US president at home, he decided to withdraw American troops from northeast Syria, giving the green light for Turkey to fill the void. When they invaded, they took the chance to suppress Kurdish nationalism with heavy bombardments and other forms of cruelty.’
‘I remember.’
‘Second, Chechen rebels who want revenge against the Soviet president for his invasion of their region in 1999.’
‘Okay.’
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‘Third, is a small but dangerous outfit called the TFF, Turkish Freedom fighters. They want to get rid of their president because of his repeated overtures towards the European Union to allow Turkey to join.’
‘So, we’ve got the assassination of the presidents of the US, Russia, and Turkey?’
‘With luck, not all three at once.’
‘Any one of these groups might be a candidate for the kidnapping of David. His knowledge of the route of each of the presidential motor cavalcades, the hotel their entourage would be staying in, and the size of their security detail, would be invaluable information for anyone wanting to kill them.’
‘I agree.’
‘Hang on, I thought the Lancaster House meeting was a Middle-East conference? What’s it got to do with Turkey and the EU?’
‘It’s essentially a Middle-East conference, but there are over three million Syrian refugees in Turkey. One of the conditions the Turkish government have specified for this state of affairs to continue, and not allowing the gates of the camps to open and flood refugees into Europe, is to give Turkey a firm date for joining the EU.’
‘So, are you and MI6 taking the lead on monitoring these groups?’
‘Yes, but there’s something we’d like HSA to do.’
SIXTEEN
‘I hate driving into airport car parks,’ Matt said.
‘Why?’ Rosie asked beside him. ‘Are you spooked by inattentive drivers, thinking they’re still lying on that sunbed, or with too much booze in their systems having consumed too much of the in-flight hospitality?’
‘No. I associate coming here in a car with not going anywhere. I’m either picking somebody up or dropping them off. If it’s me going on holiday, I take a taxi.’
‘I’m closer to Stansted than Heathrow,’ Rosie said. ‘It’s a darn sight cheaper than this rip-off place.’
Matt found a space and parked. On the plus side, airport car parks were clean, well-lit, and monitored by numerous cameras, making them a safer place for a single woman to leave a car than a shopping centre or a town centre car park. On the negative side, any stay beyond the half-hour mark and the charges rose steeply.
Most airports were uncomfortably crowded, but Matt often found Terminal Five at Heathrow easier to move around. He wasn’t sure if this was because it was Heathrow’s newest terminal, and therefore ergonomically designed with the latest technologies. More likely, it was because it housed only British Airways and Iberia, and not the plethora of airlines based in the other four terminals.
They walked into the security area and after a manager took a good look at their credentials and made a phone call to check on the reason for them being there, he allowed them to go through. It was a good job they didn’t have to pass through the scanners. Their guns, and the knife Matt kept strapped against his leg, would have sent the machines haywire and the area would soon be flooded with security personnel.
A security officer met them airside and led them to the arrivals area and into a small office.
‘Can I get you folks something to drink while you wait? The plane’s running about fifteen minutes late.’
They put in their orders and the officer closed the door on his way out. Matt was used to the restrictive security of airports, and delays to incoming aircraft, and was prepared to be patient. Their cautionary approach was for the protection of all passengers and at times, this included him and Rosie.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked Rosie.
‘You asked me the same question about forty minutes ago, and the answer’s still the same. I’m fine. The couple of days I had off did me the world of good.’
‘I’m glad to hear it, but I meant because now we’re in an operational environment.’
‘I know we are, and I feel back to normal. Thanks for your concern, Matt, I do appreciate it, but it was a temporary wobble and I’m over it. In fact, to show you I’m back in the land of the living, why don’t I take the lead with our suspect?’
‘Be my guest, although I was about to suggest it myself. My last dealings with Locke had left a bad taste and I don’t think he’ll be pleased to see me.’
Matt hadn’t mentioned Rosie’s ‘wobble’ to anyone in the office, other than Joseph. If he did, and depending on its seriousness, it could initiate a meeting with Doctor Webb, the guy Matt saw yesterday morning. The next stage was an evaluation done by their resident psych, or a suspension pending a fuller psychiatric assessment. Ultimately, she could be invalided out of the agency. Matt took the same view as Rosie: it was a temporary aberration, the effects of a bad scare, but he would watch her back for the moment, looking for other signs. A slip would not only endanger Rosie’s life, but it could also put other agents in harm’s way too.
In his mind, the incident at the boxing gym would shock anyone, so a brief layoff didn’t set alarm bells ringing, but Matt knew Rosie hadn’t yet come to terms with her separation and inevitable divorce from Andrew. This issue was bubbling under the surface and, in his limited experience, he believed it could come to a head at an unexpected moment. He hoped it wasn’t at a critical moment in an operation.
The Security officer came back into the room with two coffees and a couple of snack bars from one of their vending machines. The snacks were welcome as it had been an early start this morning to meet the flight due in at 7:30am, and he couldn’t face breakfast. He still had the doc’s voice ringing in his ears about ‘food choices’ and ‘good nutrition’, but sometimes it simply wasn’t possible.
‘So,’ Rosie said when the officer had gone out of the room once again and closed the door, ‘your new friend Lauren has asked us to set up a surveillance operation on a gang of drug dealers in Hackney. They say they’re part of a terrorist group called the Turkish Freedom Fighters?’
‘Yep. It’s already been set up under Steph.’
‘This is the gang Five think are using the profits from sales to fund terrorism?’
‘Yep, ultimately, to assassinate the Turkish President at the Lancaster House conference.’
‘So, what does Ms Yates want us to do? Bring them in?’
‘No, not to bring them in. She wants us to do whatever is required to confirm or deny with a high degree of certainty whether they are keeping David hostage. It’s unlikely he’s at the house we’ve now got under surveillance, as Five were watching them even before David’s kidnap.’
‘Maybe they’re holding him in a place off-site, and when we think they go out for a night of dealing drugs, they’re going off to interrogate him.’
‘Five belive it's a possibility, so our team have the resources to follow the TFF crew whenever they leave the house.’
‘A lot has happened since I’ve been away.’
‘You know this business, Rosie, when we’re in the middle of a job, nothing stands still.’
A few minutes later, the door opened and Byron Locke was led inside. If Matt had been expecting trouble, he would have been standing at the arrivals gate in the company of several officers from airport security, but Locke was a sixty-three-year-old businessman, and not a twenty-five-year-old firebrand. He was known to be violent in the past, but now he could afford to employ others to do his bidding.
‘I hope this won’t take long,’ Locke said as he sat down. ‘My wife, wherever they’ve taken her, is desperate to go home for some sleep.’
The accent was posh, but get him annoyed and Matt knew the East End roots would show as clearly as a brunette’s blonde hair-do.
‘It won’t, Mr Locke,’ Rosie said. ‘We just want to ask you a few questions.’
‘And you are?’
‘Agents Fox and Flynn from Homeland Security.’
‘Oh, they’ve wheeled out the big boys. I must have done something naughty.’ He paused. ‘Flynn? Haven’t we crossed swords before? Are you the same Matt Flynn I first came across about five years back, when the Met had the impertinence to accuse me of murder?’
‘Very good, Mr Locke,’ Matt said. ‘I see you haven’t
lost your excellent memory.’
‘It’s served me well over the years. In fact, being able to recall key dates and places is the reason why you boys in the Met failed to obtain a conviction and paid me all that lovely money. I tell you, receiving payment from the police for making a cock-up gives me twice the satisfaction of earnings from anywhere else.’
Locke was tanned and healthy-looking, not surprising having just returned from a sunny holiday at his villa in Antigua. He was slim, a man who regarded eating as a necessity and not a pleasure, with a bald head and a dapper little moustache and beard, like a Renaissance painter. He had deep green eyes and an intense stare which was known to unnerve inexperienced interviewers.
‘We know you’ve been out of the UK for a while,’ Rosie continued, ‘but I’m sure you are aware that a senior MI5 officer has been kidnapped. We are trying to find him.’
‘I know about it,’ he said carefully, ‘not because I had anything to do with his disappearance, but BBC News is the home page on my laptop. However, I suspect the reason why you two tipped out of your beds so early in the morning to see me is that you believe somehow I’m involved.’
‘In the course of our enquiry, your name has been mentioned by a couple of witnesses.’
‘Witnesses? Who’s been telling lies about me? It’s not right, spreading scurrilous rumours without foundation. I sued The Sun a few years back for describing me as, and I quote, a master criminal when I was buying a chain of pubs. It was another good pay day, I have to admit. Tell me the name of the dirty bastards and I’ll do the same to them.’
Watching his face, Matt knew the sudden flash of anger was an act, a little theatrical show. Locke knew no one would dare connect him to a crime, that is, if they didn’t want to be taken to the cleaners by his lawyers, or thrown into a vat of hydrochloric acid alive by his goons.
