Understrike

by James Barrington

  Barber opened his mouth to say something, but Novak beat him to it.

  ‘But there’s a lot more to it than that. It looks to me as if he probably died of a heart attack. The heart and the great vessels around it are far too badly damaged to be certain, so my diagnosis – if that’s the right word – is really based upon what I haven’t found. And what I haven’t found is any sign of a bullet wound or a cavity created by a knife or signs of strangulation or suffocation. What I can’t check because I don’t have the right equipment here is for any indication of poison being ingested, or a toxic gas breathed in, or anything like that. So the short version is that I can find no obvious signs of any assault upon this man’s body that would have been sufficiently serious to have killed him, assuming that the long cut down his body was done post-mortem, which it pretty much had to be.’

  ‘But if he died of a heart attack,’ Mason said, ‘why the hell would anyone haul him over twenty miles across the tundra, dump him by a snow cliff and then gut him?’

  Barber glanced at his companion, but it was the woman standing to one side of the table who replied.

  ‘I don’t think the doctor has quite finished yet,’ she said quietly, and looked enquiringly at Novak.

  ‘I hadn’t,’ Novak confirmed, nodding. ‘I said I couldn’t find any signs of serious assault on the victim, but what I did find was clear evidence that he had been assaulted. Or to put it another way, he’d been tortured.’

  ‘Wrist straps and ankle straps?’ Barber suggested, pointing at the unmistakable signs of bruising on the corpse.

  ‘Exactly. And if you look at the tips of the man’s fingers, you can see very clearly that he’s lost several of his nails and there are reddish serrated marks on most of his fingers and elsewhere on the body as well. Those are the kind of marks that would be left behind by someone using a pair of pliers to squeeze the skin. The same pliers would almost certainly have been used to pull out his fingernails. It’s not a sophisticated tool, but in the hands of someone who knows what he’s doing, the amount of pain that can be inflicted in certain places with pliers is almost beyond belief.’

  Novak pointed at the groin of the corpse. ‘I checked the testicles and the penis,’ he went on. ‘The right-hand testicle is badly damaged, probably ruptured, and the penis has got plier marks all over it. The soft skin and flesh between the thumb and forefinger on both hands has been crushed, and his nipples have had similar treatment. Somebody spent a long time with this man, slowly escalating the pain and switching between different parts of his body to prolong the agony. As I said, I can’t tell for certain because of the state of the body and the lack of testing equipment and facilities, but I think eventually the pain just got too much for him and his heart gave out, because I can find no other proximate cause for his death.’

  Barber nodded, as if he’d been expecting to hear something along those lines, and Mason just looked grim. The woman’s face remained expressionless.

  ‘Thanks, doc,’ Barber said. ‘We’ll make arrangements to get his body shipped out and repatriate it. We’ve got some contacts back in the States who can get that sorted.’

  ‘I pretty much guessed you might know the right person to call,’ Novak said.

  ‘Anything, ma’am?’ Barber asked, glancing at the woman, but she shook her head.

  ‘Look, I don’t know if it is relevant,’ Novak said, almost hesitantly, ‘and if it is relevant I really don’t know why, but I did find something else. It’s easiest if I show you.’

  The others all leaned forward as Novak pointed a blue latex-gloved finger into the wide-open torso of the corpse.

  ‘You see what I mean,’ Novak said, pointing at the anomaly that had disturbed him. ‘I don’t know if it’s important, but to me that doesn’t make any sense at all.’

  ‘It does make sense to me, unfortunately,’ Barber said. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘it’s a kind of confirmation, I guess, of what we suspected. Thanks for that, doc. Good job. Now it’s our problem.’

  Chapter 5

  Tuesday

  Hammersmith, London

  ‘Do you ski?’ Simpson asked, as Paul Richter ambled into his office and sat down in front of Simpson’s desk, the perimeter guarded, as usual, by a double row of unpleasant-looking cacti in individual red pots. Richter had never worked out if Simpson bred the things at home or in a greenhouse somewhere, though he couldn’t see his immaculate and fastidious boss literally getting his hands dirty as he grubbed about with pots and compost and gardening stuff. So he guessed Simpson just occasionally bought new ones to replace any that died, which would explain the few changes he had noticed over the years in the composition of the spiky protective border.

  ‘No,’ Richter replied. ‘I follow Groucho Marx.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Groucho Marx said that he’d never been interested in a sport where they offered you morphine and splints as part of the basic equipment, and that works for me.’

  ‘Right. And wrong at the same time.’

  Now Richter was puzzled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I quite agree with you about skiing,’ Simpson said. ‘Sodding dangerous to throw yourself down the side of a mountain with a couple of bits of wood tied to your feet, but Groucho Marx never actually said that. It was his friend Harry Kurnitz in a letter to Groucho Marx.’

  ‘I stand corrected, but I still don’t ski, and I reckon I’m now far too old to learn how to do it, if that’s what you’ve got in mind.’

  Richard Simpson shook his head and waved a hand airily in front of his face. He seemed to be in an unnaturally good mood, which immediately worried Richter.

  ‘Nothing of the sort. The ability to ski is unimportant where you’re going, though you will find plenty of snow about the place.’

  ‘And where’s that?’ Richter demanded suspiciously. ‘Father Christmas gone missing in Lapland, something along those lines?’

  Simpson smiled somewhat wolfishly, showing lots of teeth and ill-intent.

  ‘That’s not too far off the mark,’ he conceded, ‘but it’s not Father Christmas we’re worried about.’

  ‘I suppose that’s a relief,’ Richter muttered. ‘So when, where and why?’

  ‘No particular hurry with this one,’ Simpson replied, ‘because it’s a bit of a cold case.’ He smiled briefly, pleased with his choice of words, though the significance was lost on Richter at that moment. ‘You’re going up north,’ he continued. ‘A long way up north, in fact. About as far north as you can get without actually needing to wear snow-shoes and spend your time standing on a sled and looking straight up the arses of an entire flock of huskies if you want to go anywhere.’

  ‘Alaska? Iceland? Greenland?’ Richter suggested.

  ‘Close, but no cigar. Norway, or a bit of it, anyway. Ever heard of Svalbard?’

  Richter nodded. ‘It used to be called Spitsbergen, and I think the biggest island in the archipelago still is. It’s about halfway between here and the North Pole, but that’s pretty much all I know about it. And I’m going there why?’

  ‘There’s been a killing.’

  ‘A killing?’ Richter said, after a few moments. ‘I’m not a policeman, Simpson. We don’t get involved in that kind of thing.’

  ‘You’re right, we don’t, but this time we do.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because Vauxhall Cross has asked us to send someone. They have an interest in the victim.’

  ‘What kind of an interest? And if they are interested, why don’t they get up off their aristocratic arses and send one of their own blokes?’

  Simpson’s small unit, the Foreign Operations Executive – a nicely anonymous name that could mean more or less whatever he or anyone else wanted it to mean – was an unofficial part of the British security establishment, charged with carrying out deniable operations on behalf of, usually, the Secret Intelligence Service, the SIS, commonly and erroneously known as MI6, and referred to in the trade as Legoland because of the avant-
garde building it occupied at Vauxhall Cross on the Thames.

  ‘That’s a bit of a problem. They have an interest in the victim, but they don’t want anyone to know that they have an interest in him. If they sent somebody to Svalbard and he or she was recognized, that would complicate things, at least in the view of a number of pointy-heads at Legoland, and for reasons well above your pay grade.’

  Richter was silent for a few seconds, then he shook his head.

  ‘So I assume that, in your usual devious and roundabout fashion, you’re implying that the victim was an agent or operative of an intelligence service, friendly or hostile, and other members of that or a different service are already on the scene. And if a known face from Six pops up there, the CIA or the SVR or the FSB or the GRU or some other alphabet soup agency will know that we know who the dead guy was, and start asking questions that the wheels at Legoland don’t particularly want to answer. Something like that?’

  ‘Perspicacious as ever, Richter. Something, as you say, like that. In fact, it’s our Cousins from across the pond who are clattering about the place trying to make two and two add up to five or six, as usual.’

  ‘So who was the stiff?’

  ‘According to Legoland, the documentation and information he presented when he booked his flight and accommodation stated that he was a naturalist from New York named William Duke, and he was visiting Longyearbyen in Svalbard to observe polar bears.’

  Simpson’s lips twitched slightly, and Richter picked up on it.

  ‘There’s some kind of a joke here, I suppose,’ he said, ‘so why don’t you just spit it out?’

  ‘It was just that he did get to observe polar bears, and from a very short distance. In fact, he ended up as a light afternoon snack for a big male.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he found that particularly amusing,’ Richter said.

  ‘He probably wouldn’t have done, but in fact he was already dead by that time. You could argue that it means the man or men who killed him had a somewhat warped sense of humour, making his demise fit so closely with his cover. Anyway, again courtesy of Vauxhall Cross, his name was actually Walter Burdiss, and he was a case officer from the Company, the CIA.’

  ‘I do know that the Central Intelligence Agency is colloquially known as the Company, Simpson,’ Richter interjected.

  ‘I know you do. It was force of habit. I’ve been talking to a lot of politicians lately. Most of them have the attention span of a mentally subnormal newt, and about the same level of intelligence. You have to explain everything to them in words of one syllable, otherwise their eyes just glaze over. Anyway, we know who he was because The Box sussed him out when he climbed off a flight from Washington and walked through London Heathrow.’

  ‘The Box’ is the colloquial term for the Security Service, MI5, responsible for domestic counter-espionage, counter-terrorism and a whole lot more, the name being derived from its old postal address of PO Box 500, London. Since 1994 it’s been based at Thames House on Millbank in London, just north of Lambeth Bridge and on the opposite side – in all senses of the expression – to the SIS headquarters by Vauxhall Bridge.

  ‘They put tabs on him,’ Simpson added. ‘He was travelling on his genuine passport and it had a flag on it, just because of who he was.’

  ‘Why did they bother putting him under surveillance?’

  ‘Probably just idle curiosity, and also because Langley didn’t bother telling anyone here what he was doing on this side of the Atlantic. Professional courtesy means we should at least have been given a heads-up that a CIA man was heading our way, even if he was just passing through on his way to somewhere more interesting.’

  ‘And why didn’t he fly straight to Bergen or Oslo or somewhere? Or even Svalbard? Why did he bother coming to London?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Simpson admitted. ‘He checked into a hotel in west London and stayed there for a few days. The embassy watch people run by The Box confirmed he never went near the US Embassy, but their surveillance showed that he had two separate meetings on neutral ground – once in a coffee shops and once in a restaurant – with a couple of Embassy staff members. One of the people he met was William Bennett.’

  ‘The CIA Chief of Station.’

  ‘Exactly. We didn’t know the other Embassy man was CIA, so that gave Legoland and The Box another name to add to their watch lists. But Burdiss didn’t do anything much in London apart from attend those meetings, and the next significant thing he did was to walk into the departures hall at Heathrow to take a flight up to Bergen.’

  ‘How long was he here, exactly?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m interested. Just humour me.’

  Simpson looked at the pink Secret file in front of him and checked the information on the second page.

  ‘Three days in all, and that includes the day he arrived and the day he flew out.’

  ‘For only two meetings outside the Embassy? He could have done that the day he arrived here. I don’t buy that. Either he was doing something else that The Box didn’t know about or, more likely, he was waiting for a trigger, for something to happen. Was he under constant surveillance?’

  Again Simpson looked at the file.

  ‘Pretty much, yes. They didn’t bug his room, because that seemed a bit OTT, but they put a team with a laser mike in the building opposite, just in case he talked in his sleep or had anyone interesting up in his room, but that generated nothing significant. He enjoyed the company of an attractive and alarmingly pneumatic escort for a couple of hours on his second night in London, and after that he did a bit of sightseeing, but nothing that looked in any way suspicious. And The Box are pretty good at this kind of thing. If he’d been contacted or there’d been a brush pass or something like that, they’d probably have seen it.’

  ‘The hooker?’

  ‘The Box checked her out. She’s a known working girl, high class and very expensive. She earns about double what the prime minister gets and even takes credit cards if her Johns are a bit short of cash, according to one of the brighter sparks working at Thames House. I didn’t ask exactly how he knows that, but I presume she has a website somewhere. Either that, or perhaps that desk officer will have a few unexpected questions to answer the next time he’s vetted. She’s never had any kind of contact with anyone else from any intelligence agency in the past, as far as they could find out, but they’ve put her under low-level surveillance, just in case something comes out of the woodwork about her. Oh,’ Simpson paused. ‘Were you asking about her in a professional sense, or did you just want her phone number?’

  ‘No thanks. I probably couldn’t afford her. So five gets you ten Burdiss was waiting for something to happen. And if he was a case officer he was probably waiting for one of his assets to do something that he needed to be there for, like defect or request exfiltration or attend an emergency meeting.’

  ‘You could be right, but the short version is nobody knows. When he flew up to Bergen he used his Duke identity and passport, so presumably whatever he was waiting for – if you’re right about that – must have happened by then.’

  ‘I presume his Duke passport was genuine?’

  ‘It was.’ Simpson nodded. ‘Issued by the State Department a couple of years ago. Why?’

  Richter shrugged.

  ‘If it was the real thing, it means whatever he was doing wasn’t off the books. He wasn’t on some freelance op, so he must have either been tasked by Langley or at least got his boss’s approval for his trip. That’s borne out by the meetings he had in London. The CIA COS wouldn’t have been anywhere near him if he’d gone rogue.’

  ‘So? Now you know pretty much the same as I do, what’s your take on this?’

  Richter didn’t respond immediately, collecting his thoughts and working through the possible options. Then he gave Simpson his best guess.

  ‘OK. He was a case officer, so he would have been running or working assets because that’s his job, or a pretty major part of it, so it’s f
airly obvious that one of his people needed an urgent meeting or was going to surface somewhere and wanted help when he did. Because of where his asset was undercover, Burdiss either knew or guessed that he would appear somewhere in Europe, or at least on this side of the pond, so he flew to London so that he’d be in the right part of the world. He waited in London for news that his asset was running, or some other piece of information, and then headed to Bergen and then went on up to Svalbard to do whatever it was he had to do. And then it all turned to rat-shit and he ended up as a polar bear’s lunch.’

  ‘As I said, more of a light snack, really.’

  ‘Whatever. He died in Svalbard, so that’s presumably where his asset was waiting for him, or at least where he was going to appear, but I still don’t see why Legoland are getting involved. Or more accurately why they’re trying to get us involved. Burdiss obviously ran into some bad guys and came off worst. Presumably whatever he knew about the asset died with him, apart from whatever content he might have passed on during the briefings he gave the London COS, so I don’t see how sending me up to the frozen north is going to help anyone. I’ll probably find out nothing useful and come back with frostbite on the end of my knob and three toes missing.’

  ‘Then you’d better wrap up warmly,’ Simpson said, ‘because that’s where you’re going.’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  Simpson slid a brown envelope across the desk towards Richter.

  ‘Here are the briefing notes. You need to book your own flights, but we’ve already prepared a route for you. You’ll fly out of Heathrow at lunchtime tomorrow with SAS – that’s the airline, not your boyfriends from Hereford – and you’ll arrive in Longyearbyen the next day.’

  ‘The next day?’ Richter demanded. ‘How far away is this bleeding lump of frozen tundra?’

  ‘Not that far, but you’ll be overnighting in Oslo, which will give you nice time to buy some proper winter woollies to keep your dangly bits cosily intact. You’ll get the real stuff up there, not the stupid designer label crap you find here.’