The Lucifer Network

by Geoffrey Archer

  Five minutes into the journey, the Land Rover’s brake lights flickered and the vehicle lurched over to the side of the road. Sam overtook, expecting it to fall in behind like a tail gunner, but when he looked in the mirror the lights had been doused. His antennae twitched.

  When the tail lights of Jackman’s Mercedes also disappeared he began to feel distinctly uneasy, but then they reappeared as he rounded a bend. He accelerated to close the gap. Suddenly, further ahead, there were other lights in the road. A red lamp being swung. A road block. Army or police. The Merc’s brake lights blazed and Sam also touched the pedal, telling himself there was no need for alarm. Random traffic checks were normal on Zambian roads. Part of the government’s anti-crime programme. The fact that the men involved used them to extort ‘fines’ from guiltless car drivers was just an inconvenient fact of life. He fingered his wallet for a suitable note.

  As the two vehicles approached the checkpoint in tandem, Sam braked harder. Suddenly a man in fatigues sprinted forward, shouting at him to stop short of the other car and to switch off his lights. An icy chill came over him – the soldier wore a black cloth hood with holes for eyes and mouth. This was no ordinary road block.

  Jackman’s car had stopped twenty yards in front of his. A spotlamp on the roof of an army truck lit up its pale cream paint. Sam’s window was half open. The soldier who’d stopped him rested his rifle barrel on the top of the glass. A strong body odour wafted in, leavened by eucalyptus from the roadside trees.

  His unease growing by the second, Sam watched Jackman being dragged from his car, a gun at his chest. The old expat still seemed unconcerned, extracting a wad of banknotes from a hip pocket. Sam told himself they’d be okay. A robbery on a larger scale than usual perhaps, but if they stayed cool and let the men have what they wanted . . .

  Then a shot rang out, echoing through the trees like the sound of splitting timber. Jackman buckled and fell.

  ‘Shit . . .’ Sam grabbed at the door handle to open it, but felt the cold of the gun press against his temple.

  A second shot had Sam thinking his own brains had been blasted. But it was Jackman again. Spread-eagled on the tarmac, a vivid red bubbled from his chest. Then the spotlight turned on Sam, blinding him.

  His throat tightened. He couldn’t speak or breathe. Any moment now they’d do the same to him. There’d been times before when he’d faced death, and he knew there was no way to manage it. No way to control that cringing feel as you waited for the hit.

  Two more shots, each sending shocks through his body, but not touching him. He heard air hiss from a tyre. There was a shout of impatience and the lorry started up. Two engines revving, the truck and the Mercedes. The light shining in his eyes wobbled and went out. Then with a crash of gears the two vehicles accelerated away.

  Silence again. And darkness. Just the eucalyptus smell. Overpowering. Like a stench. Sam clicked his headlamps back on, banged open the door and ran forward.

  ‘Harry . . .’ he breathed, crouching over him. Jackman lay in a thickening pool of blood. No response. The striped cotton had two small holes in the middle of the chest, but Jackman’s life was leaking from the craters in his back.

  The ashen face twitched suddenly. ‘Simon . . .’ More of a breath than a voice.

  Packer leaned forward.

  ‘Yes. Help’s coming.’

  ‘Merc . . .’ Jackman croaked.

  ‘The car?’ Why worry about a motor at a time like this?

  ‘No,’ Jackman hissed, suddenly finding the strength to pull Sam closer. ‘Mercury. Red mercury . . .’ Sam felt a chill shoot through him. ‘S’what I didn’t tell you. That deal . . .’

  ‘The stuff you shipped to the Islamics was red mercury?’

  ‘Julie . . .’ The hand that had been hooked into Sam’s shirt fell away. ‘Ask Julie ’bout it. She knows . . .’

  Then the breath left him. Quite suddenly. Like a tap being turned. Sam felt for a pulse in the neck, but there was nothing. Not a flicker.

  ‘God . . .’

  Try mouth to mouth? Get the life back into him? Then blood oozed from the lips and it sank in that Harry Jackman was utterly dead.

  Stunned, Sam sat back on his haunches.

  Red mercury. The one-time holy grail for terrorists bent on making nuclear bombs. Except the bloody stuff didn’t exist.

  ‘Harry . . .’ He patted the man’s face. Pointless. Harry Jackman would be going home, but in a box.

  Red mercury. Fucking nonsense.

  ‘Damn you, Harry.’ A night of riddles from the man, right up to the end.

  He looked up, shooting glances up and down the road. Engines approaching from each direction. A car from the Kitwe road stopped first. As its headlamps picked out the bloodied corpse, a woman screamed at her husband to drive on. Then the vehicle from out of town pulled up behind Sam’s car. From the engine rattle he knew it was the Land Rover – Jackman’s ‘protection’ that had conveniently given up on them half a mile back.

  Before he could turn his head, Sam felt hard metal press into the bone behind his ear.

  ‘Mistah Foster! You under ahrrest!’

  2

  London

  Three days later, 09.45 hrs

  THE METALLIC BLUE car that emerged from the underground garage of SIS headquarters was driven by a dark-haired woman in her late thirties called Denise Corby. She wore a slate-grey jacket and skirt. Beside her sat a fair-haired man, who was her immediate superior. As the security gates slid shut behind the Vectra, it turned right and blended with the traffic heading north over Vauxhall Bridge. The morning was dull, the sky overcast.

  ‘I spoke to Julie Jackman last night,’ the woman announced in a mellow, matter-of-fact voice that was almost low enough to be a man’s. ‘She can see us at noon.’

  ‘Good.’ Her boss, Duncan Waddell, spoke with a Belfast accent. A small figure, he sat rigidly upright to maximise his height. ‘You know, when the FCO consular department rang the ex-wife on Wednesday, she expressed no surprise whatsoever at the manner of Jackman’s demise. Says something, don’t you think?’

  ‘Says she didn’t care any more. I should hope not. It was twenty-six years ago that he dumped her and the child.’ Denise Corby was a big-boned woman who’d probably looked middle-aged since childhood.

  ‘Where exactly does the daughter work?’ Waddell queried.

  ‘In the virology department of the St Michael’s Hospital Group. It’s one of the top labs in the country, so I’m told.’

  ‘How did she sound?’

  ‘Oh, shaken up still. Naturally. And anxious about why we wanted to talk to her.’

  ‘What reason did you give?’

  ‘Bland as hell. Told her there were a couple of legal ends to tie up.’

  ‘If she’s anything like her father, you’ll need to watch her. Devious to a fault, that man was. The world’s a better place without him.’

  Waddell’s close-cropped hair gave him an austere, unforgiving appearance. He wore a light grey suit and his manner suggested an acute awareness of his own importance. He rested his elbow on the open window and glanced to his right where a shaft of sunlight had caught the roof of the Tate Gallery just visible beyond the bridge parapet. There was a Jackson Pollock exhibition on. Not his cup of tea.

  ‘What d’you know about Sam Packer?’ he asked.

  ‘Not a lot.’ Denise Corby pursed her lips. ‘Except . . . didn’t he have a spot of trouble with Ukrainian mobsters a couple of years back?’

  ‘He did. He’s still on a hit list.’

  ‘And wasn’t it linked to a certain piece of in-house scandal that we don’t talk about?’

  ‘It certainly was. An adulterous relationship with another field officer. She also worked eastern Europe.’

  Suddenly Denise Corby stamped on the brakes. An elderly woman in green and brown had drifted onto a zebra crossing. ‘Sorry. Didn’t see her.’

  ‘Won’t live long if she makes a habit of that,’ Waddell commented, bracing hi
mself against the dashboard.

  ‘She sort of blended into the background.’

  ‘Probably works for us,’ Waddell quipped.

  Corby let a smile flicker as they waited for the ancient pedestrian to get safely across.

  ‘A long-running affair, was it?’ she asked.

  ‘Sam’s? Yes. Went on for years. The husband hadn’t a clue until the very end.’

  ‘And he was one of ours too, I seem to remember.’

  ‘Indeed. The whole thing was highly incestuous. And I have to say the quality of the deception applied by all the parties involved did great credit to their tradecraft.’

  Corby smiled politely. ‘Pity about the quality of the judgement.’

  ‘Aye. That’s the bit we don’t like to think about. Anyway, apart from that little hiccup, Sam’s been a good field man for us, which is all you need to know. Ex naval intelligence, he did fine work in Eastern Europe in the early nineties, then switched to the Middle East beat three years ago. His cover job was in trade fairs.’

  ‘So how come he was working in Africa?’

  ‘Well, his legend got well and truly blown in Baghdad. Then, when the Odessa mafiya wrote a contract on him, we had to lose him somewhere.’

  ‘And where better than the dark continent.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Denise Corby drove expertly, heading up through Chelsea until they hit the Cromwell Road. The morning rush hour was over, but traffic flowed thickly in both directions.

  ‘You’ll have to direct me when we get closer,’ she warned. ‘Hounslow is not a part of the metropolis I make a point of frequenting.’

  A couple of miles later Waddell told her to turn left off the A4. ‘Flightpath-blighted housing and dreary industrial estates,’ he growled distastefully. ‘But there’s a nice little firm here that provides Sam with cover. The characters who run it are ex-SAS sergeants. Dave and Ron – Davron International Trading they call themselves.’

  ‘How sweet. Tell me, how did you prise Sam from the clutches of the Zambian police?’

  ‘Loud diplomatic noises and a few well-placed bank-notes. The High Commission in Lusaka has a slush fund that saves an awful lot of paperwork.’

  ‘And the investigation into the shooting?’

  ‘Not getting very far.’ He made it sound both to be expected and perfectly satisfactory. ‘They’ve failed to identify the army unit that carried out the killing, and judging by their past record on such robberies they never will.’

  Ten minutes later the car turned into a trading estate full of buildings trimmed with brightly coloured corrugated plastic.

  ‘Block C6. Bottom of the row, then left,’ Waddell directed.

  The unit they stopped outside had three Audis in the car park, all with personalised plates.

  Sam Packer had arrived at the Davron International offices ten minutes earlier, dressed in the light grey suit, pale blue shirt and striped tie that he’d travelled in on the night flight from Lusaka. He’d dumped his bag in a corner of the dusty, little-used, first-floor office that was his operating base and logged onto the Internet to check the main newspaper archives both in London and southern Africa for reports on Jackman’s murder. Specifically he wanted to see if connections had been made with red mercury. There were none. Before leaving Lusaka the station officer at the High Commission had shown him short articles in the local Post and Times. Both papers had dismissed the murder as robbery with violence – the police line – but Sam was certain they were wrong. Jackman had been targeted. Targeted for the simplest reason of all. Someone had wanted him dead.

  Compared with the torture chamber he’d experienced in Baghdad two years earlier, the police cell he’d been confined to in Kitwe had been luxurious. In Iraq, he’d thought his end had come. This time he’d felt certain of release within hours. After recovering from the shock of seeing a man die in front of him he’d picked his way back through their conversation, searching for clues to his killer.

  He was well aware that the world would, generally speaking, be quite content with Harry Jackman’s passing. From what he could gather, Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service was over the moon. But for him the murder had been a disappointment as well as a shock. He’d begun to believe that he could silence the man through negotiation. Believed too that in the process he would glean valuable intelligence about Islamic terrorism.

  Sam had not met Denise Corby before. Her appointment to Counter-Proliferation was recent. When she walked into his first floor office, towering above their diminutive boss, the skin-stripping stare of her dark brown eyes warned him that she was a career-hungry perfectionist, intolerant of human weakness, a woman it would be unwise to cross. He was big on first impressions.

  ‘Welcome back, Sam.’ Waddell made the introductions and they shook hands. ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine.’ Admitting to being shaken up by seeing people’s innards being blown out wasn’t the done thing for employees of the firm.

  Waddell staked a territorial claim on Sam’s black leather recliner. He pointed to a couple of stacking chairs by the far wall, wiggling a finger to indicate they should grab them.

  ‘We’ve read your report, Sam,’ he began stiffly, ‘and the Lusaka station’s still doing follow-ups of course, but the whole thing’s pretty opaque. We’ve no idea why Jackman was shot, but so far we favour the robbery theory.’ He leaned back in the chair, rocking it on its springs. ‘And to be perfectly frank, we don’t give a shit,’ he added predictably. ‘He’s much less trouble to us dead.’

  ‘Unless those letters about Bodanga that he talked about start turning up in newspaper offices,’ Sam reminded him.

  ‘We’re working on that,’ Waddell told him. ‘Shouldn’t be hard to discredit him, particularly since he’s not around to defend himself. Anyway that was probably a bluff, Sam. The man was mostly piss and wind.’

  ‘Whatever. He’d have been a lot more useful to us if still alive.’

  ‘This red mercury crap, you mean?’

  ‘Sure. We’d have found out what the hell it was about, rather than having to guess.’

  ‘Red mercury simply doesn’t exist, Sam,’ Denise Corby told him firmly.

  ‘I’m well aware that’s the perceived wisdom,’ Sam responded. ‘It’s just that for some reason Harry Jackman seemed to think otherwise . . .’

  ‘Playing games,’ Waddell muttered. ‘A false hare for us to waste time on.’

  ‘He was in shock,’ Sam protested. ‘You don’t make up things like that when you know you’re about to die.’

  ‘Remind him, Denise,’ said Waddell dismissively. ‘Tell Sam about the red mercury scam.’

  ‘It began with glasnost at the end of the eighties.’

  ‘That much I remember,’ Sam nodded.

  ‘Word came out of Russia about this amazing new chemical compound which could make neutron bombs more lethal, or worse still, dramatically reduce the size of an H bomb. The media had visions of terrorists armed with thermonuclear footballs – particularly after certain perfectly reputable scientists, British and American, came back from a visit to Russia fully convinced of red mercury’s existence. They wrote it up in the scientific press.’

  ‘But you’re saying the Russians made it all up? The stuff didn’t exist?’

  ‘Or if it did, it certainly didn’t have the capability they claimed for it. But that didn’t matter, because in 1992 a Russian entrepreneur persuaded the Kremlin that overseas interest in red mercury was so strong they could all make a fortune from it. Export licences were granted – up to ten tonnes a year at a price of $350,000 a kilo. If you do the maths, that gives an earnings potential of over three billion dollars.’

  ‘But if the product didn’t exist,’ Sam queried, ‘how could they make any money?’

  ‘From gullibility. Some customers were ready to pay up front without even seeing the stuff, let alone testing it. Foreign banks gave huge credits to the Russian exporters on the promise of whacking interest payments
. The cash of course was used to finance a whole raft of other highly profitable business activities nothing to do with red mercury, most of them criminal. The banks didn’t care. Their paperwork said the loans were for a legitimate export business, and they got their money back with a hefty profit.’

  ‘And the people trying to buy the stuff?’

  ‘Lots of long faces,’ she answered. ‘Iraq tried for it. South Africa and Israel. Even Nigeria.’

  ‘Jackman told me about some business partner of his in Jo’burg having his head severed,’ Sam reminded them. ‘There was a South African connection, you said?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Waddell pushing the chair further back and resting his feet on Sam’s desk. His brown shoes were immaculately clean. ‘A series of odd and rather grisly murders in the early 1990s supposedly linked with attempts to buy or manufacture red mercury. All sorts of villains were suggested, including Mossad.’

  ‘But the man Jackman talked of – that was more recent.’

  ‘Three months ago – at the beginning of June. A dodgy trader, rather like Harry himself. Name of Van Damm. At first the South African media did speculate it was another red mercury killing, but the police found a simpler motive. The victim spent his spare time and ill-gotten gains on young, black rent boys.’

  ‘I see.’

  Sam’s mind clicked back to Tuesday night. All the double talk, the teasing hints that might or might not have been important.

  ‘Jackman was playing games with you, Sam,’ Waddell declared dismissively.

  ‘With his dying breath?’

  ‘Delirium perhaps,’ suggested Corby in a burst of generosity. ‘Or maybe you misheard him.’

  ‘He was lucid,’ Sam answered flatly. ‘Red mercury. That’s what he said. That and “Julie knows about it”. Quite deliberate and clear. Said he’d shipped a load of it somewhere and was worried it had ended up with Islamic fundamentalists. And now he was regretting it. Conscience troubling him.’

  ‘Conscience!’ Waddell exploded. ‘Since when did that bugger have a conscience?’