The Lucifer Network

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘Bastards!’ he hissed. He hated terrorists.

  All the main right-wing groups were infiltrated, Steph had told him. They could hardly fart without Special Branch knowing. So it was probably a loner. Hard to catch. He listened through the rest of the news, but there was no mention of a spy scandal.

  He looked again at the Scottish ferry tickets, then pulled a road atlas from the pocket in the door and located Bute in the Firth of Clyde. The Wemyss Bay ferry terminal was on the Ayrshire coast about an hour west of Glasgow. Driving to Scotland would take the rest of the day, he realised. It’d make more sense to fly. He began to calculate how soon he could get there. Then his phone rang.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Simon Foster?’

  He tensed. He’d only used that name in his dealings with Harry Jackman. The voice was a woman’s which he didn’t recognise.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Julie. Julie Jackman.’ Her voice was strangely hoarse. Nervous, he guessed.

  ‘Oh. Hello.’

  ‘You’re surprised to be hearing from me?’

  ‘I am rather. Where did you get this number from?’

  ‘You’ll never believe this, but it was totally by accident. When you lent me your phone yesterday, I was pressing buttons trying to turn it off when the number of the phone came up on the display. And it just so happens I have a very good memory for numbers.’

  Sam didn’t believe in accidents like that. He’d slipped up. A security lapse.

  ‘Okay,’ he said suspiciously. ‘So, what can I do for you?’

  ‘It’s what I can do for you, really. There’s been a letter. I thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘A letter? From your father?’ He felt an adrenalin rush.

  ‘Yes. It arrived here in Woodbridge this morning. And it talks about red mercury.’

  ‘Does it now . . .’ He struggled to contain his excitement. ‘Have you contacted Denise Corby?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you should.’

  ‘Look. That woman got right up my nose yesterday. She came on like the Gestapo. I don’t mind showing the letter to you – and please drop the pretence that you two don’t work together.’

  ‘Never met her before yesterday,’ he replied with total honesty.

  ‘Whatever . . . I won’t have Denise Corby anywhere near me again.’

  Sam knew the headquarters woman would blow a fuse if he acted on his own. And if he took up Julie’s invitation, the investigation into his father’s past would have to go on hold. But he was intensely keen to read that letter. And – it would mean getting another eyeful of Julie Jackman again, which he wouldn’t object to at all.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Woodbridge.’

  ‘Could you bring the letter to London?’

  ‘No. I promised to take Liam to the beach this afternoon.’

  ‘This letter could be very important, Julie.’

  ‘Liam’s important too.’

  He glanced at the dashboard clock. Twelve-fifteen. ‘Very well. I could be with you by four.’

  ‘Make it after six, could you? I won’t be back until then.’

  He recoiled. The nation’s intelligence machinery was being put on hold so a seven-year-old could build a sand castle.

  ‘All right,’ he agreed reluctantly. ‘Six o’clock it is.’

  ‘You on your own, right?’

  ‘Me on my own. Oh, one more question. Did the letter talk about anything else?’

  Like a bungled coup in Bodanga.

  ‘No-o . . .’ she answered hesitantly. ‘Not really. Just red mercury.’

  He felt relieved. ‘See you at six, then.’

  Sam clicked the phone back into its holder. The call had unsettled him. Even if he accepted her unlikely explanation about how she knew his number, there was something else.

  Despite his insistence on anonymity yesterday, the damned girl knew his cover name.

  6

  IT WAS FIVE minutes before six when he pulled up outside the converted sail loft by the river in Woodbridge. Shafts of sunlight broke through buttresses of cloud, giving a mellow tone to the building’s dark red bricks and grey slate roof. Two S-Reg Range Rovers and an open-top BMW stood like trophies on the pea-shingle drive. The weekenders were in residence.

  He tapped on the brass knocker for the ground floor flat at the left-hand end of the building. When Maeve Jackman opened the door, he felt awkward suddenly, like a spotty-faced youth on a first date.

  ‘Didn’t expect to see you again so soon,’ she said in wary greeting. ‘She’s not back yet, but you can come in.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Jackman.’

  ‘Maeve. Do call me Maeve.’ She wore pale cotton slacks, a grey sweatshirt printed with the slogan GIVE THE NURSES THEIR DUE and spoke with a soft southern Irish accent. ‘They’re still at the beach, but shouldn’t be long. Would you like a cup of tea?’ She looked him up and down as if trying to decide his tastes. ‘Or there’s some of Liam’s pop. No beer, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Tea would be fine.’ The weird feeling of being nineteen again lingered – ‘Mum’ checking him over while the girl fixed her hair.

  The ground floor was an open-plan living area. There was a corner for toys, a tidy kitchen with a woodblock worktop and a wide, stainless steel hood over the stove.

  ‘You have a nice home,’ Sam commented.

  ‘Oh yes. Can’t complain. Swankier than the last place, although I miss the neighbours. There’s no one here to talk to most of the time.’

  ‘Harry bought this place for you?’

  ‘That’s right. My ex-husband was a bastard in some ways, Simon’ – That use of his cover name again sent a frisson through him – ‘but Harry looked after us in his own way. Julie and I can live here as long as we want, but when we’re dead it all goes to Liam. A good investment, Harry said. And I’m sure he was right. Money was the one aspect of human relationships that he understood.’

  ‘I can believe that.’

  Much of the far wall of the open-plan was glass. A sliding patio door opened onto a lawn which extended to the water’s edge. Sam crossed the hardwood floor to take in the view.

  ‘The grounds are communal,’ Maeve Jackman told him, standing beside him. ‘We pay a service charge, then somebody comes and cuts the grass. Did it myself at the last place.’

  The estuary glowed a golden olive green in the early evening light. Further downstream a fleet of dinghies was making slow progress upriver.

  ‘It is a lovely spot,’ Maeve Jackman chattered, ‘although I’m not really one for the boats. Don’t mind looking at them, just so long as I don’t have to step into one of the things.’

  She returned to the kitchen area, leaning against the work surface with her arms spread, as if defending her territory. Her expression, when Sam turned to face her, was wary again. Her body which had probably once been as trim as her daughter’s had lost its shape. As the kettle began to sing behind her, he noticed that the Mr Blobby wall clock above her head showed five minutes after six. Julie’s tardiness was beginning to jar.

  ‘Harry’s letter, Maeve,’ he asked briskly, ‘I don’t suppose you have it to hand?’

  ‘No I don’t,’ she answered firmly. ‘Julie has it somewhere safe. She wanted to show it to you herself. She won’t be long.’

  The kettle clicked. Maeve Jackman turned to make the tea and Sam settled on the flower-patterned sofa. The room was light and airy. The books on the shelves were few and mostly with bright covers, suggesting they were for the boy. A colour photo of Liam in a brown card frame, taken in a mass session at school, stood on top of the TV.

  ‘Good picture of the lad,’ Sam commented as the boy’s grandmother set a tea tray down on the coffee table, then sat in an armchair opposite him.

  ‘It’s nice, isn’t it? He’s a bit of a handful, but we do our best for him, despite there being no man around.’ She poured from a silver pot into bone china cups. ‘Fortunately he’s in
a home where there’s two women who are well used to that situation.’

  ‘Liam’s father . . .?’

  ‘Brendan. He was a useless so-and-so.’ Her brow wrinkled contemptuously. ‘Long gone. And changed his name a few times since, I shouldn’t wonder. Sugar?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘A bad lot, that man was. The worst sort of Irishman, and that’s saying something. Believe me. I come from the country myself so I know.’

  ‘He doesn’t send Julie any money for Liam?’

  ‘That’s a joke! He was gone the day after she told him she was going to have his baby. Not a word since.’

  ‘That must have shaken her up.’

  ‘It wasn’t a good time for her, Simon, that’s for sure.’ She watched him sip at the tea. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No. No woman’ll have me, I’m afraid.’

  She laughed politely. ‘That I don’t believe. But you’ll have your reasons, no doubt.’

  Sam looked at his watch. Ten past six.

  ‘Don’t fret. She’ll not be long now because Liam’ll be desperate for his tea. And anyway, you mustn’t begrudge Julie her relaxation. Life hasn’t done her too many favours, you know.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right.’ He reined in his impatience. It was true that a few more minutes wouldn’t matter.

  Maeve Jackman leaned forward and lowered her voice, despite there just being the two of them there. ‘Between you and me, she’s never had a man that didn’t let her down. Doesn’t stand up to them, that’s the trouble. Tries too hard, you know what I mean? To my mind it’s all because of Harry running off when she was a baby, though she won’t admit it. Always makes out she didn’t care that much about her daddy, but whenever he made one of his little visits to us, she was all over him. If he’d told her he wanted to step on her, she’d have lain on the floor and let him do it.’

  Sam nodded. He could imagine her as a child, constantly seeking her father’s approval. ‘So Harry’s death must have . . .’

  ‘. . . upset her a lot more than she’s saying, yes. To be honest with you, she should have gone to the funeral. But she said she’d only go if I did, and there was no chance of that. Somebody had to stay and look after Liam. And anyway, I had no feeling for the man any more.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you did,’ Sam murmured.

  ‘You know, Julie really has had more than her fair share of life’s rough face, Simon. She got in with a bad lot at college. Drinking and clubs and all that. And then there was drugs. That’s when she started going with Brendan. He was a disc jockey. Good-looking feller, but he had no thought for anybody but himself. By the time the baby came and she dropped out of college she was pretty near bottom. She’d not been in touch with home for months. I didn’t even know she was pregnant. She just turned up one day, grey as a ghost, with this three-week-old scrap in her arms, and the two of them suffering withdrawal symptoms.’

  ‘Withdrawal symptoms?’ Sam raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Julie was addicted to heroin.’

  ‘Really? I’d never have guessed.’

  ‘She’s clean now, thank God. It took her a while. And Harry played his part, I’ll give him that. When he heard the state she was in with a newborn baby, he was back here on the first plane. Blamed himself for never being there when she needed him.’

  ‘So he stayed for a while?’

  ‘Oh no. Said his business didn’t allow it. But he phoned a lot. And he fixed a clinic for her – to get her off the drugs. Eventually he persuaded her back to college to complete her degree.’

  ‘While you looked after Liam.’

  ‘While I looked after Liam,’ she confirmed. ‘Had to give up my own job to do it.’ She looked embarrassed suddenly. ‘Och, you poor man. You came here to read some crazy letter and you get a life history rammed down your throat.’

  He was about to tell her it didn’t matter when he heard tyres on the gravel at the front.

  ‘That’ll be them now. They went in my Clio,’ she explained. ‘Julie doesn’t have a car of her own.’

  A few moments later Sam heard a key in the lock. He stood up. The boy stumbled in, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Fell asleep,’ Julie mouthed to her mother as she gathered her grandson into her arms.

  ‘What’ll it be, Liam?’ the older woman asked. ‘Fish fingers, I suppose.’

  The sleepy boy dumped his head on her shoulder, then stuck a thumb in his mouth.

  Julie turned to Sam. She still had her glasses on from the driving, but took them off and held them in her hand. There were tight lines of tension round her eyes. ‘I’m sorry if you’ve been waiting,’ she told him.

  ‘That’s all right.’ She looked sun-baked and wholesome and he could forgive her anything.

  ‘I’ll get you the letter.’

  Sam stared longingly at her lean limbs as she climbed the open staircase to the floor above. She wore blue shorts and a white sleeveless vest that clung to her breasts. Her shoulders were red from the sun. She reappeared a few seconds later with an envelope.

  ‘If you want to read it in peace, there’s a bench in the garden,’ she told him, sliding the patio door fully open. She was eyeing him with reserve, as if trying to form a judgement of him.

  ‘You said it arrived this morning?’ Sam asked as they crossed the lawn to where it sloped to the water.

  ‘That’s right. It shook me when I picked it off the mat and saw the writing.’

  ‘Why would it have come here instead of to Acton?’

  ‘He chopped and changed. Anything he wanted to be sure I got he sent to Woodbridge, for some reason. He knew I was here at the weekends.’

  The seat was under a willow tree. She sat close beside him, as if not trusting him to be alone with the letter. Solemnly she handed the envelope to him and he extracted the contents.

  Harry Jackman’s handwriting had a slight backward slope. ‘There’s no date,’ Sam commented, inhaling the orange-blossom smell of her sun cream with the intensity of a solvent sniffer. She sat close enough for him to feel the warmth of her body.

  ‘No. There’s nothing to say when it was written.’ She hugged her arms to her chest and clamped a hand over her mouth, staring downriver to where the racing dinghies were being hauled from the water.

  Sam began to read.

  ‘If you ever get this letter it’ll be because I’m dead, my dearest. Don’t grieve for me long. We all got to go some time.’

  He glanced at Julie, wondering how it must have felt for her to read those words. In the next sentence Jackman explained he was leaving the letter with a trusted friend to be mailed if anything happened to him. Sam checked the envelope. The postmark was Kitwe.

  ‘Any idea who this friend was?’ he asked, turning to her again.

  ‘Not a clue.’ She pushed her hair back, revealing a perfectly shaped ear with a small mole behind the lobe. Her slender neck was white where the hair had covered it, but reddened by the sun where it plunged below the T-shirt collar. He was in love again.

  He regained his concentration and read on.

  ‘I’ve done lots in my life that I’m none too proud of, my sweet. Forgive me. But if I hadn’t done it someone else would have. If African tribes are going to kill, they’re going to kill. The press always blame the “merchants of death” for selling them guns, but it’s nonsense. If the Afs didn’t have guns it’d be pangas. Look at Rwanda. All those split heads.’

  Julie had her hand clamped over her mouth again, as if by doing so she could hold everything together. She felt perilously close to disintegrating. Pressure was being put on her from the grave which she was finding hard to handle. She knew the letter by heart. Knew the words of this one, and of the other which she’d received that morning, a more personal letter hidden for now under the floor mat in the boot of her mother’s car.

  Conscious of her tension, but unaware of the reasons for it, Sam read on.

  ‘But there is one trade I did that troubles me. It happened a year ago. On
e of the other fellows involved has been murdered. I’m scared I may be next. I wasn’t a big player, just a shipper for the cargo, but the deal was a bad one. I’m telling you my sweet, because someone needs to know about it. I intend to tell the British intelligence people, but only if they agree to leave me in peace when I come back to England. If you get this letter, you’d best show it to the police. They’ll pass it on to the appropriate place.

  Did you ever hear of red mercury? It was supposed to be a chemical the Russians invented for making miniature nuclear bombs. Some people say it doesn’t exist, but I think it does.’

  His pulse quickening, Sam turned the page over.

  ‘It started in the summer of 1997 when I was contacted by a Russian trader who operated out of Vienna. He wanted me to import something into Zambia under diplomatic seals. I had good contacts with Zambian officials, so I could arrange for there to be no police or customs. The Russian told me to find a secure warehouse in Kitwe to store the cargo for a few days before it was collected by a man I knew called Van Damm, who traded for a big chemicals company in Jo’burg. I asked him what the cargo was, explaining that I wouldn’t touch Class A drugs. Because of you, my darling. What you went through.’

  Sam glanced at her smooth skin, imagining her arms once scarred by needles. Julie guessed where he’d reached in the letter. She met his look.

  ‘It’s history,’ she said flatly.

  ‘I know,’ Sam answered. ‘Your mother told me.’

  Julie hissed. ‘She’s got a mouth like a runaway train, that woman . . .’

  ‘The Russian told me it was red mercury from a Siberian laboratory. People had been trying to get hold of the stuff for years, so I was pretty excited by the deal. And there was big money in it. The cargo was to be delivered to a Zambian embassy compound in Moscow in late July, then boxed up with the diplomatic seals and flown first to Vienna and on to Kitwe. I had everything arranged, the aircraft booked, the Zambians paid off, and I went to Vienna to finalise the plans and meet the Russian trader, Vladimir Kovalenko . . .’

  Sam sat bolt upright. Kovalenko’s name was uncomfortably familiar to him. The man was a major player.