The Hidden Man (2003)

by Charles Cumming

  Now Mark squared up to him. He was taller than Ben, not stronger, but with an advantage of height and age.

  ‘Jesus Christ. You know what the trouble with artists is, don’t you? They have too much time to think. You invite misery on yourselves, fucking wallow in it. Then you marry a girl like Alice to justify your black moods. You’re endorsing one another. It’s pathetic. You wanna move on, brother. I thought you’d seen the light that night outside the pub, but I realize I was mistaken. Benjamin doesn’t change his nature that quickly, never has. He feels too sorry for himself. Why don’t you try growing up a bit? Just because I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve doesn’t mean I’m not feeling anything.’

  ‘What did you mean about Alice? What did you mean by that?’

  But Mark had backed off to the door, empty handed and set on leaving. Before long Ben would be blaming him for arranging the failed reunion with Keen, for making him betray their mother, for any small resentment or prejudice that had been troubling him over the past three weeks. That was the thing he dreaded, Ben needling his conscience with hideous expertise. Best just to get away and not see him for a while.

  ‘I’m gonna go,’ he said. ‘I’m not standing here taking this. You close up when you leave, do the lock. Next time we see each other maybe you’ll be better company. In the meantime, try not to drag us all down with you.’

  22

  ‘Why don’t I put you in the picture, Yerm, clear a few things up?’

  Macklin was walking east down Longacre with Vladimir Tamarov. He was at least six inches shorter than the Russian and they were moving quickly with a cold evening wind behind them.

  ‘Nightclubbing as a business in Britain is worth two billion quid a year. You want me to say that again? Two billion quid a year, mate. Turnover year-on-year has gone up seven and a half per cent. Wanna know why? It’s not the clubs, Yerm, it’s not your punters on the door. It’s diversification. My favourite fucking word in the English language. Clothing, accessories, books, magazines, radio stations, CD compilations. Even T-shirts, for Christ’s sake.’

  Tamarov nodded. He was thinking about going backto his hotel.

  ‘Merchandising, that’s what it’s all about. We make seventy per cent of our profits selling branded merchandise. The clubs are just a small part of it, and getting smaller in my humble opinion. I’ll tell you another lovely English word if you like. Sponsorship. About half of all the eighteen to twenty-five-year-olds in this country go clubbing on a Friday or a Saturday night. Millions of ‘em, mate. They’ve got disposable incomes, they’re fashion conscious, and they’re out to get pissed…’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tamarov said. ‘This word, please…?’

  ‘Pissed, mate. You know, drunk.’

  ‘OK,’ he replied, without bothering to smile.

  ‘So you’ve got your big corporations, your mobile phone companies, your clothing brands, your breweries, and all they dream about is access to that market. They want to reach out and touch the kids. Now how do they do that?’

  ‘Sponsorship,’ Tamarov said, like a student in a language class. If he was annoyed at being patronized by a supercilious English lawyer four years his junior then the Russian’s level tone of voice gave nothing away. In time it might be necessary to remind Macklin who was boss, to apply an element of physical or psychological pressure, but for now he would let him continue. From the pocket of his overcoat he extracted a pair of brown leather gloves and put them on.

  ‘Exactly.’ Macklin was leading him down Bow Street. ‘These companies pay for specific nights at the club. They put banners up on site. Not so’s it detracts from our brand, mind, but it gets what every boring blue-chip company craves. You got your latest digital WAP fax-modem espresso-making laptop associated with a brand like Libra, that buys you something priceless. It buys you credibility. Am I going too fast, mate?’

  Tamarov’s face was usefully inexpressive. He merely shookhis head and said, ‘No, no,’ breath clouding out in the air.

  ‘Good,’ Macklin said. And then his phone rang.

  Two hundred metres behind them, Michael Denby, a young MI 5 pavement artist on the Kukushkin team, saw Macklin come to a halt beside the entrance to the Royal Opera House. He immediately stopped and turned towards the window of a nearby shop. Called up as a last-minute replacement for a colleague whose husband had ‘taken ill’, Denby had forgotten to bring either a hat or gloves as protection against the cold. Mobile surveillance was the part of the job he least enjoyed. Taploe picked him, he knew, precisely because he was so ordinary - neither too tall nor too short, neither too fat nor too thin - and therefore less likely to be spotted by an alert target. He jangled coins in his pocket and thought of home as two teenage girls stopped beside him and peered into the window.

  ‘There they are,’ one of them said, pointing at a pair of shoes. ‘Nice, aren’t they?’

  ‘Bit tarty,’ her friend replied.

  Denby glanced down the street. Macklin and the Russian were moving again, heading south into Wellington Street in the direction of the Strand.

  ‘So you’ve made up your mind then?’ Macklin was saying into the phone, his voice a rumble of disappointment.

  ”Fraid so, mate.’ Mark felt guilty that he was letting his friend down. But the argument with Ben had forced his hand: he just wanted to go home and get a decent night’s sleep. ‘There’s a lot of things I’ve got to clear up at the flat,’ he lied. ‘Then the police want a final inventory. I just don’t have time to come down.’

  ‘Fine. Whatever,’ Macklin said, and snapped the casing shut without adding goodbye. ‘Bad news, Yerm,’ he turned to Tamarov. ‘It’s just gonna be you and me, mate. Keeno’s had to cancel.’

  ‘This does not matter,’ Tamarov told him, after a moment of contemplation. ‘It does not matter at all. In fact it is better this way. I have important business that we need to discuss and then I would like to go home.’

  23

  Stephen Taploe was at a dead end. For the best part of six months he had assumed that the investigation into Libra’s activities would make his name within the Service. Secret dreams of promotion had raised him out of bed every morning; they had walked with him to the station and comforted him on the tube. He longed for the unfiltered approbation of his colleagues, their admiring smiles and whispered congratulations. But he could sense his entire career stalling on the fruitless search for conspiracy between Libra and Kukushkin. Six months of surveillance had produced - what? A thousand hours of phone taps and eavesdropped conversations revealing little more than Libra’s predictable determination to make a success of the Moscow operation. GCHQ had fax and email intercepts - letters to real-estate agents, tax lawyers, employment agencies - which were consistently mundane, simply the logistical pile-up of documents and contracts that would rain down on any company setting up a business in post-Soviet Russia. As well as occasional police reports from Moscow on the activities of known Kukushkin personnel, they had Watchers tracking Libra’s meetings in London - the last of them between Macklin and Tamarov filed by Michael Denby two days before, complete with a ninety-five pound attachment for ‘expenses’ accrued at a lap-dancing club in Finchley - none of which had revealed anything that could be termed abnormal or suspicious. Taploe had always held with the basic, optimistic belief that massive surveillance would, in the end, bear fruit. But what had Paul Quinn uncovered? The odd attempt by Macklin to exploit a loophole in British tax law and three Russians working on the bar at the club’s London site without adequate employment papers. Meagre tricks played by companies the world over, little ways of wriggling around the law. Taploe and Quinn needed something concrete, something with which to penetrate the cell structure of Russian organized crime in the United Kingdom. That was the purpose of pursuing the Libra connection, as a staging post into a much larger problem. And yet, increasingly, Taploe felt that he had missed his chance.

  From his desk- tidy and well organized, it betrayed none of the accumulating chaos of the opera
tion - he retrieved the initial police report into Christopher Keen’s murder. No clues, no leads, no theories. Another dead end. Just blind panic at Thames House that an agent had been murdered and threats to shut the entire operation down. Taploe, in his defence, had pointed out that Keen had not been tortured for information; nor was it a signature mob killing, the motorcycle assassin favoured by Viktor Kukushkin in Moscow. No, in a desperate bid to preserve control of the operation he had argued that Keen’s death was a fluke, a random accident in a season of bad luck. There was no need to over-react, no need to take his team off the case. Just give it time and they would unravel the mystery. Just give it time and they would bring Kukushkin down.

  His pleas had at least bought some time. Taploe, in effect, was now on final warning; without results in a matter of weeks, he would be back on Real IRA. He was convinced that a linkexisted between the shooting and Keen’s workfor Divisar, but it was impossible to prove it. Investigations had shown that in the weeks before he died, Keen had been assisting a private bankin Lausanne with clients in the St Petersburg underworld. Perhaps there was a link there. But how to establish that? Where to start?

  There was a knock at the door of his office, three floors up at the north-western corner of Thames House.

  ‘Tea, boss,’ Ian Boyle said, setting a mug down on the desk. His tie hung at half-mast and the collar on his shirt was frayed.

  ‘Just leave it there.’

  ‘You all right, boss? Look a bit knackered.’

  Taploe ignored the question and conveyed with a twitch of his moustache that he felt it impertinent.

  ‘Get the file on Mark Keen, will you?’

  ‘Sure,’ Ian replied, and retreated towards the door.

  There was now a siege mentality about the operation, an imminent sense that a plug was about to be pulled. Something close to panic had begun to spread through the team, fanned by Taploe’s failure to redirect the investigation. It was like Ireland all over again: the boss looking downtrodden and frustrated, his ambition coming up against a wall of compromise and bad luck.

  Ian returned with the file five minutes later, set it down and left without speaking. Taploe exhaled heavily as the door clunked shut and immediately began flicking through the material: photographs, email printouts, credit-card receipts, phone logs, surveillance reports. In all probability, a file on an innocent man, just as Mark’s father had insisted.

  The idea, planted admittedly by Quinn, had been in his mind for three or four days. A last chance. The one person close to the centre with access to unambiguous information who could reveal the truth about Macklin and Roth.

  He picked up the phone and dialled Mark’s office direct. A secretary answered at Libra Soho, first ring, with a voice like an advertising jingle. In a single breath she said: ‘Good morning Libra International how may I help you?’

  ‘Mark Keen, please.’

  It felt like the final throw of the dice. To establish a source on the inside. Not the father, who could only ever have been peripheral, but the son.

  ‘Who shall I say is calling?’

  ‘My name is Bob Randall.’

  ‘Just putting you through now.’

  There was a two-second delay, then, ‘Hello. Mark Keen.’

  He recognized the voice like an old friend, the street consonants, the slackened vowels.

  ‘Mr Keen. Hello. My name is Bob Randall. I work for BT. Advanced telecommunications.’

  ‘Someone forget to pay our bill?’

  Taploe felt that he should laugh, and did so.

  ‘On the contrary, Mr Keen, on the contrary. Not at all. Actually I have a business proposition for you. A little venture that I think Libra might be interested in. I understand you’re the company’s executive director. How are you set for lunch next week?’

  24

  Sebastian Roth lived alone, in the palace of a self-made man. His Pimlico house, valued at PS2.4 million, was actually two properties knocked together, with staircases at opposite ends of the building, like reflections of one another. He had bought both houses as ruined shells, and their conversion, including the construction of a 40ft swimming pool in the basement, had taken eighteen months, a period in which Roth had lived in a suite at the Lanesborough Hotel whenever he was not travelling abroad.

  He had no wish to share his life with a woman, and yet he longed for the diversionary pleasure of an affair, something to distract him from the relentless tide and pressure of work. Since adolescence, Roth had designed his life as a series of obstacles to be overcome: win that award; make that first million; buy that rival’s company. The moral or social implications of his behaviour rarely troubled him. He simply did not calculate into any decision the possible repercussions for those around him. His was an almost sociopathic indifference. He would do as he pleased, and deny himself nothing. A man in such a position, anointed with the twin blessings of private wealth and perpetual cunning, can begin to feel untouchable, as if no harm can befall him. If Roth was vain, he did not recognize it; if he was cruel or mendacious, he did not care. The arc of his life was aimed solely at the pursuit of his own pleasure.

  As he was shaking her hand at the funeral, he had resolved to sleep with Alice Keen. It was as simple as that. This was just a challenge, something to lighten his days, the thrill of which would be derived as much in the planning as in the final seduction itself. The long, pale drawing room on the first floor of Roth’s house was scattered with deep suede sofas and expensive works of art. In the corner nestled a Bang & Olufsen hi-fi, in the wall a widescreen digital TV. Yet he no longer derived pleasure from them. Studying a prospectus for investments in St Petersburg, looking at spreadsheets for the Moscow operation, he cast his workto one side and busied himself with the first components of a plan. He would lure Alice with the promise of contacts and scoops, gradually allowing their relationship to assume a more personal character as her career thrived. At the funeral, he had witnessed the sheer opportunism in her eyes, a throttling ambition concealed by the trick of beauty. She was too good for Ben, Roth decided, and gave no further thought to their marriage. His only concern was that it would all prove too easy. His only dread was that his boredom might last.

  25

  Bob Randall arranged to meet Mark not at BT’s head office in Newgate Street, but at the Whiteley’s shopping centre in Queensway, a vast Americanized mall heaving with coffee bars and marble.

  ‘Will that be all right?’ he had asked on the phone.

  ‘It’s just that there are one or two individuals at my company - how can I put this? - that I’d prefer were left in the darkabout our meeting. Sorry to be so mysterious. I can explain everything when we’re introduced.’

  Taploe enjoyed the Randall alias: the role allowed him to loosen the tie of his self-restraint. When, for example, he shook Mark’s hand at the top of the Whiteley’s second floor escalators, he felt almost hearty, and there was an uncharacteristic swagger in his walkas the pair made their way to a half-empty Mexican restaurant near by. Taploe felt that he had made mistakes in his recruitment of Keen, mistakes that he was determined to avoid a second time round. Too often he had surrendered control, allowed his contempt for SIS to cloud his better judgment. This time things would be different: Mark would respect him from the word go, and differences of class or status would not become an issue. With an understanding of who was boss, Taploe was sure they could get things done. Indeed, he ordered two lagers from the waitress and felt very optimistic about it.

  ‘So who at your company knows that we are meeting here this afternoon?’ he asked.

  Mark was still settling down in his seat and said, ‘Nobody. Just Sam, my office manager.’

  ‘It’s in your desk diary?’

  ‘Palmtop, probably. Why?’

  They were facing each other across a tile-topped table, laughter echoing in the mall. Taploe preferred to make a target ‘conscious’ of his identity at an early juncture in any conversation of this kind.

  ‘Let me come
clean right away,’ he said. ‘It was necessary to employ a little subterfuge to lure you here today. I don’t workfor British Telecom. I’m actually an officer with the Security Service.’

  Taploe waited for an appropriate reaction, but Mark’s response unnerved him. He simply said, ‘OK,’ and removed his corduroy jacket.

  ‘I workfor MI5,’ Taploe explained, as if he had failed to understand.

  ‘I’d gathered that,’ Mark said. ‘And you’re investigating my father’s murder?’

  ‘Among other things, yes.’

  Their waitress, a tired-looking eastern European woman wearing thick black eyeliner, set two bottles of lager on the table and walked off. Mark’s eyes followed her and then came backto the table.

  ‘Other things?’ he said.

  Taploe poured the lager carefully into his glass and made an effort to compose himself. He felt that he had already lost ground.

  ‘What do you know about my organization?’ he asked.

  ‘Back of a stamp,’ Mark replied, rubbing two days of stubble on his jaw. Taploe was worried that he looked bored.

  ‘Right.’ He pushed up his sleeves. His arms were creamy and hairless and dotted with pale red freckles. He pushed them backdown again. ‘Our taskis to root out criminal organizations working in the United Kingdom. Excise fraud, human trafficking, prostitution. We go after drugs smugglers, money launderers, football hooligans, any individual or group of individuals who may pose a threat to national security.’

  ‘You must be busy then,’ Mark joked and, like a ghost, Taploe caught a family resemblance in the grin that flashed across his eyes.

  ‘Very,’ he replied.

  ‘So how does my father fit in?’

  ‘Well, why don’t we order first?’ By delaying his response, Taploe hoped to generate a little suspense. This, after all, was the part of the job he most enjoyed: the power afforded by privileged information. Let him feel that he is about to become involved in something beyond the commonplace. Let him sense that he is at the edge of his father’s secret trade. Over time, Paul Quinn had been able to build up a comprehensive profile of Mark Keen, a psychology that suggested he would comply with today’s pitch. Where Keen had been stubborn, Mark was biddable and kind; where the father had been haughty, the son was more modest and conscientious. Taploe also knew, from recent phone and email intercepts, of the ongoing argument with Ben. The two brothers had not spoken for days. Mark would be anxious to prove, if only to himself, that he had been affected by their father’s murder. What better way to prove that than to worktowards tracking down his killer? A song began playing out of a speaker above his head and Taploe felt rejuvenated, more able to control his adrenalin. Beckoning the waitress over he ordered extensively from the menu, while Mark opted for the set lunch. When she was out of earshot, he continued.