Tracers

by Adrian Magson

  ‘He is – was – a professor of theology, I’m told. But that’s irrelevant. The cut was believed to be a domestic accident. I’ve included it only because he might need to visit a hospital to change the bandages.’

  ‘It’s not much to go on,’ said Harry. Actually, it was bugger all. He was beginning to feel depressed. ‘Are you sure this is it?’

  ‘I’m certain. Everything we have is in there. I’m reliably informed there was nothing worth considering in his home.’

  ‘But he’s a professor. The last academic’s office I saw was a mess of paper. They ooze the stuff. Confiscate their pads and pencils and they start biting the furniture.’

  Jennings remained unmoved. ‘As I said, it’s all we have.’

  Harry picked up the brown envelope. He tipped it up and a single piece of lined paper slid into his hand. It was brittle to the touch and brown along one edge. He lifted it to his nose and sniffed. It smelled charred. ‘Where did this come from?’

  ‘His office. A metal waste-bin. There was no explanation, but . . . they thought it might be helpful because they couldn’t explain it.’

  ‘They?’

  Jennings leaned forward, easing his neck clear of his shirt collar. ‘Silverman has certain connections. I cannot go any further.’

  ‘Connections,’ Harry echoed. ‘Israeli government connections?’ He studied the scrap of paper, which had a faint line of writing on one side.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘If he’s one of theirs,’ said Harry, ‘I’m surprised they haven’t provided more information. I’d have thought they’d be pleased to have help.’ As he was speaking, he heard a small click from a door at the rear of the office, behind Jennings’ shoulder. He’d assumed it led to an executive toilet, the kind of personal ego attachment a man like Jennings would value. But maybe not. The door was open a fraction, and he was sure he caught a small movement through the crack.

  Jennings was looking impatient and shifted in his chair. ‘There’s a condition attached to this job,’ he added seriously.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Silverman is not to be approached. You find him, you tell me where he is, you get paid, you don’t ask questions. End of job.’ He raised his eyebrows to invite understanding. ‘You don’t go near him. Merely report in as soon as you locate him.’

  ‘Because of his connections?’ Harry wondered what was going on. With no information other than a photo and the barest of details, he was on the back foot before he started. And any mention of Israeli government ‘connections’ automatically implied banging his head against a brick wall if he tried probing into Silverman’s background. ‘If he’s such a sensitive target,’ he pointed out, ‘why don’t the Israelis find him? They’re good enough at hunting down Nazi war criminals years after the event; they can pinpoint Hamas and Al Fatah targets whenever they feel like it. Tracking down a runaway university professor should be a doddle.’

  ‘Are you saying you don’t want this assignment?’ Jennings’ voice was cool with an edge of tension. ‘If so, I can always find someone else.’ He glanced at his watch as if indicating that doing so wouldn’t take more than a few minutes and a phone call.

  Harry reached for the folder and closed it with a slap. The door behind Jennings had now closed. ‘I can do it. Crossing the tees, that’s all.’

  ‘Good. Get on to it right away. Keep me informed.’

  ‘And Param?’

  ‘He’ll keep.’

  ‘If you say so.’ The lawyer had still asked no questions about Matuq’s location, nor made any reference to his murder. There had been nothing in the morning news, either. It was as if none of it had ever happened. ‘There’s a problem about Matuq.’

  ‘What kind of problem?’

  ‘I was the last to see him alive. Second to last. I might have been spotted in the area. It’s not a thriving metropolis and I wasn’t exactly keeping a low profile. Nor,’ he added grimly, ‘was I expecting him to get popped.’

  Jennings looked unconcerned and Harry wondered if the man had even considered the situation. The local police might have heard of a stranger seen driving up to the cottage and leaving. A water company van in the area would be common enough; they come and go all the time. Part of the street furniture almost. But a stranger in a high performance car late at night wasn’t that easy to miss – especially when a local visitor gets drilled by a professional hit.

  Yet Jennings wasn’t buying it. ‘A sleepy place like Norfolk? I doubt you were even noticed.’

  ‘I hope you’re right. Seeing the same car twice is probably a thrill a minute in those parts; murder must be way up with UFOs and fish on bicycles.’

  ‘It’s been taken care of,’ Jennings said eventually. ‘There will be no comeback.’ He indicated the door. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’

  Outside on the pavement, Harry flipped open the slim folder on Professor Samuel Silverman, late of Haifa, and wondered what Jennings wasn’t telling him. He also wondered who had been listening in on their conversation behind the door, and whether it had anything to do with Matuq’s early death.

  EIGHT

  Jennings watched the former MI5 officer cross the pavement to a muddy Saab parked in a residents-only bay, and felt a prickle of disquiet. Tate was an odd character. He had come on the recommendation of someone trusted, although with the proviso that he’d been round the block a few times and had a reputation for doing things his own way. There was also a whisper about something in his background which would have made interesting reading had his contact in the security services been able to gain access. But that part of his record was sealed. All his contact had been able to tell him was that Tate had left the service in mysterious circumstances, yet without a noticeable black mark, which was intriguing in itself. Since then, he had worked in private security here and overseas, occasionally hooking up with a former MI5 IT and communications expert named Ferris. Ferris also had a sealed record and had left the security service at the same time as Tate.

  Tate was a rebel, in other words, used to doing things his own way. Jennings didn’t mind that. For the right jobs, rebels had their uses.

  He turned as the door at the rear of the office opened, and a man entered. Dressed in a dark, ill-fitting suit, the newcomer was wiry and intense, with the compact build of a jockey. He looked oddly out of place in the confines of the office, like a caged animal, with eyes of cold grey set in a tanned and weather-beaten face. His mouth curled at one corner as if permanently snarling at the world, and his hair was cropped harshly at the sides and lank on top.

  The newcomer went by the name of Dog. It had been his call sign years ago in the back runs of Belfast and Londonderry, when personal names could mean the difference between life or sudden death. Jennings was one of the few people who knew the man’s real name of Gary Pellew, but he’d always thought there was something in his manner and appearance that suited the pseudonym much better.

  ‘He sounds like trouble,’ Dog murmured. ‘He questions things.’

  ‘Stay on him,’ said Jennings, ignoring the comment. ‘And keep me informed. I’ll let you know what action to take.’

  Dog turned and left without a word, and Jennings knew that his instructions would be followed to the letter. Unlike Tate, Dog didn’t have the same level of skills at tracing runners. But what he did have were certain rare attributes that would never get him any kind of desk job. It was these skills which gave Jennings cause to shiver whenever he was in the man’s presence, although he took great care not to show it.

  He was always quietly relieved that Dog was on his side, but never more so than when the man had left the building.

  Still, he couldn’t quite dispel an evidently shared feeling of unease about Tate, although he wasn’t about to tell Dog that he agreed with him. What particularly surprised him was the ease with which Tate had managed to track down Matuq. A week or ten days might have been the norm, given the Libyan’s head start. But Tate had hardly given him time to breathe before he
was on him like a rash. Maybe he had underestimated the man’s capabilities.

  He shook off his concerns and opened the middle desk drawer. Inside was a slip of paper bearing a name and telephone number. The number led to a contact deep inside the Ministry of Information in Libya’s capital city, Tripoli.

  It was time to confirm the successful completion of another assignment.

  NINE

  Raymond Param’s house stood in leafy seclusion at the end of a short cul-de-sac in London’s Highgate. With a double garage, large garden, eyelash gables and a majestic sweep of roof, it was impressive and solid in the evening sunlight, a fanfare to design, prosperity and the rewards of capitalist enterprise.

  It also had a brooding aura hovering over it like a dense cloud, as if the owner’s sudden change of status had infected the area, draining whatever light there may have been out of the atmosphere.

  ‘Nice gaff,’ said Rik Ferris, studying the facade. He scrubbed at his head of spiky hair which refused to be tamed. A bit, Harry decided, like his unusual taste in T-shirts, although he’d toned them down a bit lately. The current one was dark blue with a vivid splash of orange across the chest. The blue matched the Audi TT they were sitting in. Rik had agreed to meet him outside the house for a briefing on Param’s background. ‘I thought you said Jennings wanted him left alone.’

  ‘So he did. But I haven’t yet sorted out how to start on the latest job he gave me. A runner named Silverman – I’ll tell you about it later. In the meantime, we might as well do something positive.’ Harry took out the briefing paper on Param and scanned the main points. Raymond Param, investment manager for Boulding Bartram, an investment partnership in London. Aged forty-three, Anglo-Indian, his mother British, he went to the London School of Economics, did some time in the States, then joined Bouldings. Married, no children. Solid performer, reliable, steady, then one day, gone. No notes, no goodbyes, no shoes on the beach. He checked a six-by-four photo which accompanied the briefing notes. It showed a sleek individual in a conservative pinstripe, with receding black hair and an easy smile.

  ‘Why are they hot to find him?’

  ‘His employers found a bunch of dummy offshore accounts after he’d skipped. All empty. They think he set them up so he could dump small amounts of money over several months, then cleared them out once he was ready to go.’

  ‘Small? Is it worth all the trouble, trying to get him back?’

  ‘The small amounts added up to about three million.’

  ‘Ouch. Painful. Sounds like their systems slipped up.’

  ‘Just a bit. No warning, out of character, never done this before, highest integrity, honest as the day is long, blah-di-blah. Now rich and on the lam.’ He passed Rik copies of the briefing documents. ‘We need to check out anything you can find on him; clubs, friends, recent trips, financials – the usual.’

  ‘No problem.’ Rik folded the sheets and put them in the glove box. Like Harry, he was a former employee of MI5. He had an extensive knowledge of government systems and a widespread hacking community he could use to blur the lines of any illicit searches he needed to conduct. It had been his misuse of IT resources that had led to his own downfall, and his posting to the same remote station where he and Harry had first met.

  ‘Where do we start the physical stuff?’

  ‘Right here. The wife’s staying with her sister, so we’ve got full run of the house to do the audit, including, with luck, his computer and financial records.’ The audit was the term Harry used for trawling through a runner’s background, checking every file, document, scrap of paper, phone and email records, financial detail, and even searching their clothing and cars, all in the hope of finding a clue to the runner’s whereabouts. Mostly, it worked. Like it had with Matuq, turning up a colour postcard of a cottage in Blakeney, Norfolk. It hadn’t been the one he’d been staying in, but enough to point Harry in the right direction. The rest had been down to Rik checking phone calls and emails made by the Libyan from his office and home. Harry looked at him. ‘First, though, I’d like to check the wife actually is with the sister and hasn’t snuck off to Las Vegas to join hubby Raymond on the blackjack tables.’

  ‘Cynic,’ Rik murmured drily. But he knew Harry was right; Param wouldn’t be the first partner or husband to skip with some ill-gotten gains with the connivance of his better half. He yawned. ‘Tomorrow first thing?’

  ‘Why – you got a hot date?’ Rik had a variety of girlfriends, none of whom seemed to last long. Most were victims of his irregular lifestyle and his obsession with technology . . . and possibly, Harry figured, his taste in garish T-shirts and his spiky hair. Their passing didn’t seem to bother him much.

  ‘I did. She blew me out. Something about visiting her sister in hospital.’

  Harry laughed. ‘Christ – they’re not still using that old chestnut, are they?’

  ‘At least I’m still finding out,’ Rik sneered. ‘When did you last go on a date?’

  Harry didn’t rise to the bait. He was beyond dates. Dates were for new beginnings, tentative relationships with a faint whiff of potential failure about them. He was more into a relaxed night in with a decent bottle of wine. And Jean. Fortunately, she concurred wholeheartedly with that. The willowy owner of an upmarket flower business, she had an easy grin and an earthy laugh and actually concurred very nicely. But not tonight. She was out with friends at a hen party in the Cotswolds. ‘You haven’t said anything about the Libyan . . . Matuq? How’d it go?’ The electronic sweep Rik had conducted had provided nothing useful, save that his credit cards and bank account had not been used. With no other identifiable source of money, they had concluded that he was using a pre-drawn fund of cash on which to exist until the fuss died down.

  ‘I found him. He’s dead.’ Harry described briefly what had happened.

  ‘Jeez, that’s tough. Remind me never to steal anything from Colonel Gaddafi.’

  The house looked no less imposing the following morning at nine thirty. The local school run was over, always a time when nobody had time to notice anything, in Harry’s experience, as he led the way through the front door and across a broad hallway to a small green box on one wall.

  ‘You have twenty seconds to key in the number,’ a tearless and artfully ‘traumatized’ Mrs Param had told him half an hour earlier. It was all the time they had, she had warned, sitting regally in her sister’s front room, before the private security company she had insisted her husband use came to investigate.

  She had given grudging permission for them to look around, but only after the intervention of her husband’s former employers.

  ‘How long do I have to put up with this?’ she had demanded coldly. She was attractive in a glossy, brittle way and, if she had shed any tears at her husband’s disappearance, there was little evidence in her manner or the precision of her make-up. Harry thought she needed a swift kick up the pants, but kept his thoughts to himself. Somehow, given the acerbic comments voiced by her sister about her absent brother-in-law being nothing but a gambler and wastrel, he doubted it would be long before Mrs Param returned to clear the place out for a quick and vengeful sale.

  ‘A few hours,’ Harry had told her. ‘A day at most.’ He hadn’t mentioned that if they had to enter the fabric of the house to see if her husband had hidden files or documents inside the walls or beneath the flooring, it could take a lot longer. That sort of decision was down to Jennings and his client.

  After keying in the security code, he stood and breathed in the atmosphere for a moment before walking through the house. Rik hung back, humming quietly. This was Harry’s area of expertise, a time to acclimatize himself to the feel of the place and soak up the colour and tone of Raymond Param’s former life.

  The house was richly furnished and comfortable, with gold-embroidered chairs and sofas set with precision around a large living room overlooking a neat rear garden and patio. The carpet was pale and expensive throughout. Apart from a huge kitchen, a utility room, dining room, stu
dy and a downstairs bathroom completed the ground floor layout, like the pages of a property catalogue. It was the domain of a childless couple: no clutter, no toys, no signs of disarray from careless teenagers or rampaging tots.

  But there were signs that the police had been through the house, evidenced by the minute shift of certain items, the slightly opened drawers and small depressions in the carpet where furniture had been moved and put back a fraction out of place.

  There were a few photos, carefully positioned for maximum effect, like exhibits in a gallery. Other than people who were probably unnamed members of the extended Param family on both sides, they were mostly of Param and his wife, Saskia, arms artfully entwined and heads close but never quite touching. None of the shots displayed any obvious warmth between them. It was as if they had been concentrating more on the professional than the personal touch, like mannequins in a photo shoot. Raymond Param was athletic, well dressed and groomed, from the brushed hair and crisp shirts, to the display of a large Rolex and the chunky cufflinks at his wrists. His wife wore her clothes and make-up with the ease of a professional model, smiling carefully at the camera but not once at her husband.

  ‘Nothing blindingly obvious,’ said Harry. There had been little in the way of clues or suggestions from Saskia Param as to where her husband might have gone, and he’d dismissed further questioning of her as a waste of time. It was down to sifting through whatever they could find in the hopes of uncovering a lead. The one thing he was sure of was that this house had ceased to be a centre of marital bliss a long time ago.

  ‘I’ll start on the study.’ Rik was looking through the doorway at a grey PC sitting on a desk.