Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘Getting shallow,’ Nat shouted over his shoulder. ‘There’s rocks here.’

  Seven metres of water beneath the keel, the gauge told him. Nothing to worry about.

  ‘We’ll drop anchor there.’ He pointed to a circle of pale blue on their starboard bow and gave a touch on the tiller. ‘I’ll tell you when.’

  He eased the throttle into neutral and at five and a half metres’ depth shouted for the hook to be dropped. The chain rattled like a machine-gun.

  ‘Easy,’ he yelled, pushing the gear in reverse so the chain wouldn’t pile up on the bottom.

  Neutral again. He hurried forward to check the anchor line was securely tied.

  ‘Had me worried for a moment,’ Nat muttered. ‘Thought you were going to put us on the beach.’

  They made their way back to the cockpit then peeled off the weatherproof tops and leggings that had protected them from spray in the stronger winds of the open sea. In the cove around them a light breeze ruffled the surface of the water but caused no swell.

  Nat went below. He passed up another beer first, then plates of bread, cheese and salad. Sam set them out on the small, varnished table which he’d unfolded in the centre of the cockpit.

  ‘Very civilised,’ Nat said, joining him.

  The boat was anchored in an amphitheatre of rock and vegetation. Seagull cries echoed from the cliffs to their left. Small waves slapped gently against the hull. To their right a long, thin ruff of foam rustled against the stones of the beach.

  Sam felt nagged by doubts again. The fear of being out of touch. There was a gnawing in his guts that wasn’t just hunger, a sense that something was wrong. He began to think he should ring in.

  ‘Think I might inflate the dinghy after lunch and row to the beach,’ he mumbled, his mouth full of cheese. ‘Interested in a run ashore?’

  Gibbon looked up and caught sight of a tiny figure walking along a cliff path.

  ‘No thanks. I get a bit of vertigo. Perfectly happy sitting here with a beer enjoying the view.’

  Sam heard the faint strains of music coming from the large motor cruiser sharing their anchorage. Its fat hull rocked gently in a swell created by the wake of some distant ship which had passed the island long before. A lone figure stood on the quarterdeck, holding what looked like a radio. The sound of the Greenwich pips floated across the water. He glanced at his watch. Two o’clock. Of course. There’d be a news bulletin.

  He dived below, needing to be certain that the anthrax attack the middle-aged Iraqi had warned about had not already happened.

  The radio was built into a panel next to the log above the chart table.

  ‘Just want to hear the headlines,’ he shouted up to the cockpit.

  ‘Personally, I’d rather not know,’ mused Nat.

  The set was kept tuned to Radio Four. The newsreader’s voice boomed out. Sam lowered the volume to a more comfortable level.

  ‘As the American presidential election campaign gathers pace, a new allegation has been made about sexual harassment . . .’

  ‘Why do they think we care?’ Nat moaned through the hatchway.

  ‘In the House of Commons this afternoon a row is expected to break . . .’

  Sam began to relax again. Nothing had happened. If the anthrax had been used it would be the lead story.

  ‘A British woman has been murdered in Cyprus.’

  A chill went through him. He leaned towards the loudspeaker.

  ‘Her partially clothed body was found on a beach, said a police spokesman in Nicosia. The circumstances of the death are unclear, but it’s believed the woman had been visiting Cyprus on business and was staying at a Limassol hotel. She has been named by the Cyprus authorities as Mrs Christine Taylor . . .’

  Sam couldn’t move. He felt as if his heart had stopped.

  ‘A Foreign Office spokesperson told the BBC that Mrs Taylor’s husband has been traced and informed of the tragedy. The couple had no children.’

  His jaw dropped in horror and disbelief. Taylor. Chrissie’s cover name.

  His head filled with white noise, the newsreader’s voice fading to a burble.

  The man on the radio had just said Chrissie was dead . . . It couldn’t be . . . it mustn’t be . . . Taylor. A common enough name. And Christine – common too . . . He sank down onto the navigator’s seat.

  Chrissie was dead? He mouthed the word, trying to make it have meaning. But he couldn’t connect with it. All he knew was that he was here, bobbing about on his fucking boat and of no damned use to her, when a few days ago she had saved his life.

  It wasn’t real to him. He needed to check if it were true, and check fast. Stupidly he’d not brought his mobile with him. He imagined them at Vauxhall Cross, headless chickens closing stable doors, preparing denials, getting an investigation under way.

  An investigation he should be involved in.

  ‘Shit!’

  He knew there was a call box on Sark, but to inflate the dinghy and climb the cliff path would take an hour. He could be three quarters of the way to Guernsey by then, where the island had not only phones, but an airport.

  ‘Nat,’ he called up into the cockpit. ‘Get the anchor up. Change of plan.’

  ‘Eh?’ Gibbon sounded startled. ‘Oh, all right . . . What, now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sam climbed up the companionway. Gibbon saw the grim, shell-shocked expression on his face and scuttled forward to the bows without a word.

  Don’t ask, Sam said to himself trembling. Just don’t bloody ask.

  16

  Thursday, 3 October, late afternoon

  Cyprus

  IT WAS REFUSING to sink in. Chrissie’s murder was fact, yet in Sam’s mind it wasn’t registering. As he pushed through bemused crowds of Russian holidaymakers in the baggage hall at Larnaca airport he half expected to begin to feel the impact of her death more strongly now he’d arrived on the island where it had happened. But the cotton wool that seemed to be filling his head didn’t budge.

  Two flights from the former Soviet Union had landed just ahead of the service from London. In the five years since he’d last been to the island, Cyprus had become a playground for Russia’s new rich, a safe haven for their cash. Some of those around him were middle-aged package tourists in dowdy greys and browns, but many were younger, dressed in designer suits and carrying hand-tooled briefcases with gold-plated locks which he imagined to be stuffed with banknotes.

  Dressed in jeans, cotton sports shirt and a navy-blue fleece, Sam headed for the green lane, his only luggage a holdall which he swung up onto his shoulder. The customs officials gave him less than half a glance, then the opaque glass doors slid back exposing a sea of tour agents wearing bright jackets and fixed smiles. His hazel eyes scanned the faces. Some illogical part of him expected Chrissie to be waiting, her face split by that grin of hers, announcing there’d been some crazy mix-up and she wasn’t dead after all. He turned away from the faces and looked for the rental desks where a car was booked under the name of Terry Malone.

  When he’d returned to London late yesterday afternoon, Duncan Waddell had been waiting for him above the launderette at Isleworth. He’d quickly briefed him on what they knew, which was little. Chrissie had filed just one report from Cyprus, on the Monday evening, saying she’d successfully picked up Khalil’s trail. She’d given them the name of a lawyer he’d visited and said Khalil, clearly under duress, was being accompanied wherever he went by the two men who’d met him at Amman airport on Saturday night. SIS had checked out the lawyer in question and found he was one of many in Cyprus who made a fat living representing offshore companies.

  Then in the early hours of Wednesday morning the British High Commission in Nicosia had called with the dreadful news that her body had been found in a car park near the beach in Limassol, cause of death not established, but clearly not natural.

  ‘The Cyprus police checked out what she’d been doing and began to suspect that Christine worked for us,’ Waddell had lam
ented. ‘Unusually sharp of them. We’ve denied it of course, and will continue to do so. The Cypriots are very touchy about us working covertly on their territory. As you know, our station man at the High Commission was on leave – it’s why we sent her there in the first place. We’ve sent Quentin Mowbray in from Amman to hold the reins. He’s in Nicosia now, keeping a watchful eye on the High Commission’s liaison with the Cypriot police. But he’s under normal diplomatic cover, so his hands are pretty much tied. That’s why we want you out there in Cyprus. By the way, Martin Kessler is particularly keen it’s you who goes.’

  Waddell had looked flummoxed when he’d said the last sentence. Sam had shared his surprise.

  ‘Thinks your recent experience in Iraq might give you some vital insight into Chrissie’s death,’ he’d added in explanation.

  Waddell had hurried the rest of his brief, explaining that Chrissie had been working under the cover of a debt-collecting agency. The High Commission had told the Cyprus authorities she was investigating an Iraqi named Salah Khalil, travelling on a Jordanian passport, who’d used fake credit cards in London to run up huge debts at hotels. Although still suspicious that it was MI6 who’d been running her, the Cyprus police were co-operating in playing down the affair, telling the press they believed she’d got into bad company in the bar of her hotel one night.

  ‘You know the stuff,’ Waddell had said, ‘married woman away from home, fancies a fling, gets a little carried away on cheap brandy and cola. If they can persuade the press to swallow that tosh we’ll be only too delighted. What we’re assuming is she found out something significant about Khalil’s activities in Cyprus but got too close to the flame. We need you to tell us what that something was, Sam. And fast.’

  He’d handed over a small photograph of Khalil taken in London. Cyprus police were trying to find him, he’d said, but the man had checked out of his hotel on Tuesday evening with his two companions. The Cypriot lawyer he’d visited was pleading client confidentiality and refusing to answer questions, but the Cyprus Central Bank which had registration details of all offshore companies was being pressured to come up with a business name and account number.

  ‘Then we can get at the big CHIPS computers to try and trace the money which Khalil was presumably shifting,’ Waddell had added.

  ‘CHIPS?’

  ‘Clearing Houses International Payments System. A lot of the banks use it for big money transfers. GCHQ monitors the satellites they use for shifting cash electronically.’

  ‘And where do we think that money was going?’

  ‘Into some other account more directly under the control of Saddam Hussein. Where else?’

  Sam steered his rented red Toyota out of the airport and onto the road north. To his left stretched a bleak salt lake, its surface a yellow-grey crust that stank of decay. A flock of waders picked at the edges of it. To his right lay the suburbs of Larnaca, a straggle of three-bed houses with solar water heaters on their roofs and satellite dishes in the gardens.

  As he turned west onto the road for Limassol, he thought about Martin Kessler. Had it sunk in with him yet?

  The Deputy Head of Global Risks at SIS had been a constancy in his life for the past five years, entrenched at the other end of the rope in his tug-of-war over Chrissie. Yet he’d never met the man face to face, his point of contact with the Firm being Duncan Waddell. Almost all of what he knew about Kessler had come from Chrissie – late forties, a memory for detail on a par with a Cray computer, boarding school from the age of seven, emotionally stunted, a man who might have been actively homosexual if he’d allowed himself any choice in the matter. That she should bind herself emotionally to such a man in preference to him still stuck in his throat. A decision that would now remain a mystery for ever.

  Kessler. He’d particularly wanted Sam to be sent to Cyprus because his recent experience in Iraq might give him some vital insight, Waddell had said. To rub his nose in it more likely, Sam had decided. To make damned sure he became as intimate with her in death as he had been with her in life.

  He knew there was a voyeuristically manipulative side to Kessler – Chrissie had told him. The man took satisfaction in spoiling other people’s pleasure when he wasn’t getting any. Sam had experienced something of it for himself. In the moments after Chrissie had cut him loose in the centre of Barnes Common and he’d spotted Kessler watching his moment of eclipse, there’d been a look of triumph on his face. The eyes behind the round, smeary spectacles had been gloating.

  He was out of Larnaca town now, the road cutting through a dry, sandy landscape, its verges punctuated by dusty fig trees and straggly mimosa long past the flowering season. In the far distance a range of hills was taking on the purple-pink hues of dusk.

  Sam’s eyes kept flicking to the left, looking out for the bar where he was to meet Quentin Mowbray. Soon he spotted the yellow painted sign that said OK Corral and slowed right down before swinging the car onto the square of compressed rubble serving as a parking lot. A terrace at the front of the squat, log-cabin-style building was sheltered from the lowering sun by lengths of rush matting and set with chairs and tables, at one of which sat Mowbray.

  The only customer for now, he raised a hand in greeting but didn’t stand up. Sam parked the car and locked it, a habit bred from living in a metropolis. Mowbray wore a pale, short-sleeved shirt and grey trousers.

  ‘Hello, Quentin.’

  Sam sat down opposite him.

  ‘Hadn’t expected to see you again so soon,’ Mowbray mumbled uncomfortably. ‘Sorry it’s under such dreadful circs.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mowbray signalled to a white-shirted waiter who’d emerged from the café at the sound of Sam’s car.

  ‘What would you like?’

  ‘A Keo beer,’ said Sam.

  ‘Two,’ ordered Mowbray.

  The waiter took away his empty coffee cup.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Mowbray enquired, with concern. ‘All your Baghdad bruises . . .’

  ‘Better. The pain’s more mental now,’ Sam admitted. ‘Been here long?’ he asked, turning the conversation away from himself.

  ‘Twenty minutes. It’s a faster run from Nicosia than I expected.’ Mowbray took a sugar lump from the bowl on the table and toyed with it. ‘This is a really bad business, Sam. Must have been a terrible shock for you.’

  ‘Hasn’t sunk in. But I’m not out here because I was a friend of hers,’ he added defensively.

  ‘God no. I know that.’ Mowbray clasped his hands together, as if deciding from now on to restrict his words to business. ‘Look, I need to warn you to be very careful about how you operate here. The Cypriots are desperately sensitive. Murdered foreigners are bad news, both for tourism and for the offshore activities which keep this country afloat. When anything goes wrong which might reflect badly on them, their instinct is to conceal and ignore rather than to investigate.’

  ‘I understand all that.’ Sam didn’t need lectures. ‘Have you picked up anything more about Khalil’s movements here?’

  Mowbray deferred his answer as the waiter appeared with their beers. He paid for them immediately.

  ‘Khalil and his minders seem to have disappeared. Once we’d told the police Chrissie was looking for him because she was in the debt collection business, they naturally wanted to interview them about her death. But too late. They’d gone. And the other problem is that the Central Bank hasn’t released details of any offshore companies Khalil might have been involved with. The bank protects its foreign clients’ confidentiality pretty fiercely, insisting on clear evidence of financial wrongdoing before being ready to co-operate with the forces of law. London’s still working on that, telling them Khalil may have been using his businesses here to circumvent UN sanctions.’

  He paused, searching Sam’s face for some evidence of what state he was really in behind the mask.

  ‘Shall I tell you what’s known about Chrissie?’

  Sam swallowed. ‘Yes. I think you’d better.’


  ‘Well, as you know, she came over from Amman on Sunday evening. Checked into the Mondiale Hotel in Limassol. Five stars.’

  ‘Nothing but the best,’ Sam murmured. Chrissie had always enjoyed spending money, particularly other people’s.

  ‘She got lucky,’ Mowbray told him. ‘Initially anyway. Khalil and his escorts were staying in the Mondiale too.’

  ‘Ah. Handy.’

  ‘So, on Monday she tailed him to the office of a Limassol lawyer specialising in—’

  ‘Offshore businesses. Yes, I know. Waddell told me. What happened then?’

  Mowbray sighed. ‘Well, that’s the trouble. We don’t really know. She phoned the lawyer’s name through to London in the evening, then dined in the hotel restaurant alone. The head waiter confirmed that to the police and the meal for one was on her unpaid bill, which I settled. But what she did on Tuesday is something of a mystery. The police say she was seen in the hotel in the evening, drinking with a couple of high rollers. They suspect she went with them to some casino or other, but haven’t identified the men or the place.’

  ‘Could those high rollers have been the Iraqis?’

  ‘You tell me. All we know is her bed wasn’t slept in Tuesday night. Then, on Wednesday, at about five in the morning, she – her corpse – was found by a police patrol checking for stolen cars in a car park by the waterfront.’

  ‘Where?’ Sam croaked, wincing at the word ‘corpse’. ‘Where exactly was this?’

  Mowbray unfolded a map of Limassol and spread it on the table.

  ‘Here,’ he pointed. ‘Bang in the centre of the main promenade. The buildings overlooking it are mostly offices – empty during the night.’

  ‘Shit . . .’ breathed Sam. It was getting to him now. Mowbray’s matter-of-factness was bringing it home. ‘Where is she – her body?’