Timebomb (Paul Richter)

by James Barrington

  ‘For us, too,’ Westwood agreed.

  ‘The US passport, the spelling of one word in the encrypted data and the size of the paper itself all suggest an American connection, and we’re assuming that this Kleber, Stevens, or whatever he’s really called, was part of an undercover operation being run on our side of the pond. And don’t the words “undercover” and “CIA” just seem to fit together naturally?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Westwood agreed, ‘usually with the words “incompetent” and “turned to rat-shit” tucked in there somewhere as well. So that’s why you’ve called me?’

  ‘Yes. Naturally, my boss is steaming slightly about this, because, if the Company was running some kind of covert op, you should have advised us about it. The other possibility is that he was actually working somewhere on the continent and fled here because he was worried about being unmasked by the group he’d targeted.’

  ‘It all sounds a bit vague, Paul.’

  ‘Well, the body’s real enough, and there have been a handful of unusual terrorist-related incidents in Europe over the last two or three weeks. I actually interviewed this man Stevens, and he claimed he was responsible for tipping off the authorities in two of them, and there’s evidence to support that. He also claimed to have done the same in a couple of earlier terrorist incidents. Anyway, I reckon this falls more or less within your terms of reference, so can you have a scout around tomorrow and see what you can find out?’

  ‘I’ll check, yes, but this really doesn’t sound like Company business. I mean, if we had mounted some kind of undercover operation in Europe we would, at the very least, have given your SIS and the French and German security forces a heads-up on it. Apart from anything else, we’d have preferred to use official resources rather than a network of probably part-time, perhaps amateur, support agents. This sounds to me more like a freelance operation, maybe with just a measure of official support.

  ‘Now,’ Westwood said, ‘if that’s the case, this man Gregory Stevens won’t be a current Company agent and maybe not even a past employee. He could be an ex almost anything: DEA, FBI, ATF or any of the other three-digit agencies that seem to infest the Land of the Free. Or even a cop, I suppose. Anyway, give me his passport number, and I’ll check it out.’

  Richter read out the number he’d been given by Mason.

  ‘OK,’ Westwood said, after he’d read the number back as a check, ‘and can you send us his dabs as well, for a positive ID?’

  ‘I wish I could, but the guys who killed this man took the trouble to remove his fingerprints permanently, using pliers. I’ve got post-mortem mug-shots of the victim, and I’ll be getting X-rays of his dental work, but that’s about all we have to go on.’

  ‘Nasty,’ Westwood remarked. ‘OK, I’ll call you, but unless you’re giving this a real high priority, it’ll probably be tomorrow before you hear from me.’

  ‘Thanks, John. You’ve got my numbers.’

  Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  In fact, John Westwood decided not to wait till the next day. There was, he rationalized, a positive advantage in going to Langley that evening to run the search routines on the massive CIA computer system, known to Agency insiders as ‘The Walnut’. With few other staff in the building on a Sunday, the response speed should be a lot faster than usual, so hopefully he could find an answer to Richter’s question fairly quickly. Besides, his diary the next day was already pretty full.

  Westwood drove to Langley from his home in Haywood, Virginia, and entered his office at just after seven thirty that evening. He powered up his desktop PC and logged on to the system. As head of the Foreign Intelligence (Espionage) Staff, a position he had held for a little over four years, he was allowed virtually unrestricted access to all sections of the CIA’s database.

  Running a search for the name ‘Gregory Stevens’ in the register of current employees, he found it appeared three times but, on checking the employment details for each of these men, he found that none of them fitted Richter’s criteria. Two of them were approaching retirement age, and the third was a young man currently recovering at home after a recent operation to remove his diseased appendix.

  Next, Westwood expanded his search to include all agents who had retired or resigned from the Agency, and that produced a single match for ‘Gregory Stevens’. The man in question had been employed in the Clandestine Services section, which would certainly mean he possessed the right background. But it seemed he had retired on grounds of ill-health and had died about a year later. So that, too, was literally a dead end.

  Westwood nodded thoughtfully. It looked as if Richter’s ‘Stevens’ was nothing to do with the Agency, but then he decided to try one other route. The CIA had links to numerous other databases, including that of the Department of State. He opened an online enquiry form, typed in the passport number Richter had given him and waited for the result. What appeared next was unexpected. A message inside a red dialogue box popped up in the middle of the screen to inform him that all details of this passport holder were ‘reserved’.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Westwood murmured, knowing exactly what that meant. To avoid personal details of CIA agents and certain other US government officials being disclosed, access to passport details and other identifying data held on official websites was severely restricted, even to other branches of government.

  Richter had told him the passport had been read electronically, and the name ‘Gregory Stevens’ displayed, and this quite probably meant that the former Clandestine Services’ agent of that name wasn’t anything like as dead as the CIA personnel database claimed. Or, rather, he probably really was dead now but he’d been working undercover ever since his supposed retirement on grounds of ill-health.

  Westwood went back to the ‘deceased’ agent’s personal records and checked the section on identifying marks. There were no tattoos or convenient birthmarks that might confirm the man’s identity with certainty, but there were a couple of other things that would at least help with identification.

  He checked his watch, working out the current time in Britain, then shrugged, reached for the phone and dialled one of Richter’s various London numbers.

  Just over half an hour after Westwood climbed back into his car to return home to Haywood, the duty computer system manager at Langley returned to his desk after taking a meal break. As he switched the computer screen back on, the first thing he noticed was a flashing dialogue box containing a message that he’d never seen before. It wasn’t indicating a system fault, just an urgent instruction to locate a particular senior CIA officer and pass him a brief and very specific short message.

  The manager attempted a couple of calls, but as soon as he realized where the officer was, and the local time there, he decided not to call him but to pass on the message using an encrypted email, for his eyes only.

  Fifteen minutes later, he had sent the email and returned to his normal duties. Thirty seconds after the message had been sent, it arrived in an in-box at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square in London, where it would remain until the addressee opened it.

  The message read simply: ‘Tripwire one: Stevens.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Monday

  Maidstone, Kent

  Richter braked the Jaguar to a halt outside the police station, grabbed the file sitting on the seat beside him and marched inside the building, where DI Mason was waiting for him.

  ‘Early start for you, isn’t it?’ the officer demanded, as they shook hands.

  ‘Yes,’ Richter admitted, ‘and I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. I took a call at just after three thirty, and that’s the reason I’m down here now instead of napping at my desk.’

  ‘You said you had some information? And wanted another look at the body?’

  Richter nodded. ‘That call was from my contact in Langley He reckons that “Helmut Kleber” might be a former CIA agent named “Gregory Stevens”, based on the name in the passport he used at Calais. I just need
to see the body one more time to check a couple of things that might confirm this identification.’

  ‘OK,’ Mason agreed. ‘We’ll take my car.’

  Fifteen minutes later they were standing side-by-side in the mortuary, gazing down at the mutilated naked body. After the post-mortem, the torso looked slightly less like raw meat than it had before. The jagged incision running from the breastbone almost down to the pubis was now held roughly closed by large stitches made with strong and coarse thread, while above the breastbone the V-shaped cut made by the pathologist looked neat by comparison.

  ‘The Ghoul, the local pathologist, now thinks the wound was probably made by something like a Stanley knife, and his attackers had to make multiple cuts just to get through the skin and subcutaneous fat. Obviously the victim would have been struggling violently, hence the jagged edge of the knife wound.’

  ‘That’s a hard way to go,’ Richter muttered.

  ‘You’re not wrong. Now, you had something?’

  ‘Yes.’ Richter opened the file folder he was carrying and extracted a single sheet of paper, with a couple of scribbled paragraphs at the top and a very rough diagram of a human body below them.

  Mason looked at the page with interest. ‘Is that some kind of arcane coding system that’s impossible to decipher?’

  ‘No,’ Richter replied, ‘it’s my personal scribble, and it’s just what my writing looks like when I’m woken up in the middle of the night and asked to take notes. Now, according to my source at Langley, about ten years ago Gregory Stevens had a minor operation to remove an infected cyst from his left forearm, so there should be a small scar there.’

  Mason leant forward and peered at the corpse’s arm. ‘There’s something here,’ he said. ‘An old scar about two inches long. Is that about right?’

  ‘Yes, that looks like it,’ Richter agreed. ‘The second is a bullet wound – just a graze, really – on the inside of his right calf.’

  Again, the DI looked at the corpse. ‘Yes. Just here, there’s a ragged scar running across the muscle, maybe three inches long and about half an inch wide. It looks like the kind of wound a bullet would make.’

  ‘OK,’ Richter said, stepping back from the corpse and closing the folder. ‘Obviously those checks aren’t conclusive, but they’re certainly indicative. To be certain we’ll need to send off his dental chart to Langley, but I’m now reasonably certain this man was indeed Gregory Stevens, and that raises a whole bunch of new questions.’

  ‘What questions, exactly? We’ve got a tentative identification, so that’s a step forward, surely.’

  ‘Yes, and no. The most interesting aspect of this situation is that, as far as my contact at the CIA has been able to find out, this man was retired from the Agency some eight years ago on grounds of ill-health.’

  ‘So? He might have since recovered from whatever illness he had.’

  ‘He might,’ Richter admitted, ‘but the Agency records don’t agree. They show that he died within a year.’

  ‘What? He died twice?’ Mason stared down at the body.

  ‘Only James Bond lived twice.’ Richter smiled. ‘No, it’s a lot simpler than that. Occasionally, when the Agency wants somebody to go deep undercover, they “kill” them, so that any checks come up against a literal dead end, and anyone investigating will know there’s no point in chasing a dead man. But they still always provide their undercover agents with genuine passports, to facilitate border crossings and so on, and often they have a kind of emergency pack if they get really stuck – something that will guarantee assistance from any friendly government or agency.’

  ‘So this guy was a CIA agent?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Richter said. ‘I suppose the best description of him would be a contract agent. That means he would be employed as a totally deniable asset by an agency – and not necessarily the CIA – to undertake a specific task.’

  ‘What task do you mean?’

  ‘That,’ Richter said, ‘is now the big question. I told you about the two anti-terrorist operations in Europe and how somebody tipped off the bad guys just before the police kicked down the doors. When I interviewed this man a couple of days ago, he claimed he was at the other end of the phone each time. But if he was, that raises a couple of obvious questions. If the CIA or some other agency was running an operation to infiltrate terrorist groups in Europe, why didn’t they liaise with us – with MI5 or the SIS – before doing so? We could have easily provided back-up and support, as well as current intelligence. And, just as important, why would they be using a contract agent instead of a regular agent? That very fact implies that the task was something more than just infiltration.’

  Richter paused and looked down again at the corpse.

  Anyway, I think we now know who this man was. What we need to do next is find out just what the hell he was doing over here. I’ll talk to my man in Langley and let him know we’ve made a tentative identification. Once you’ve got his dental chart, I’ll send it across the pond to get definitive confirmation of his identity.’

  ‘No problem. It’s already being organized.’

  As they left the mortuary Mason’s mobile rang, and he stopped just outside the building to answer it. A few seconds later he snapped the phone shut and turned to Richter.

  ‘We’ve found the Peugeot,’ he said. ‘It’s sitting in a public car park on the outskirts of Sittingbourne.’

  Romford, Essex

  In addition to Morschel and Hagen, there were sixteen men, all bulky and fit-looking, standing in the limited area of open space between the two lines of vans occupying the warehouse. Each was holding a couple of sheets of paper that Morschel had printed from his laptop computer earlier that morning. Facing this group, next to Hagen, was a large white-board on which a list of times and actions had been clearly written, and beside that was an expanded map of central London.

  ‘We’ve rehearsed this often enough,’ Morschel said, as a kind of introduction, ‘so by now you should all know precisely what you’re supposed to be doing. This board here, and the timetable you’re each holding, should serve merely as reminders of what we’ve planned, nothing more. But I’ll go through everything one last time, in case we notice any last-minute problems.

  ‘I’ve given each of you two sheets of paper, the first of which is the timetable, and I’ll get to that in a moment. The second one is just as important, as it lists all your first names and your mobile numbers. Remember, our mobiles are our lifelines. Once you’ve completed a specified action, you must tell me. More importantly, if anything goes wrong, I need to know immediately. If I don’t know, I can’t help you. So check right now that your name appears on that page, and that the mobile number listed beside it is correct.’

  Morschel looked round, but all the men just nodded.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s obvious, but you must make sure that your mobile is switched on and fully charged before you leave here. There are power points all over this building, and plenty of socket adaptors in the office at the rear.

  ‘Now, the timetable. We’ve worked backwards from the big one, and I’ve allowed forty minutes between each of our operations. That will give the Metropolitan Police just enough time to respond, and to concentrate their resources in exactly the wrong place each time.’

  Several of the men smiled grimly at his words.

  ‘The first detonation is timed for precisely eleven o’clock, here at Greenford.’ Morschel picked up a ruler and pointed to a red mark on the map, then he cross-referred to the timetable on the board. Then he moved his makeshift pointer to three other locations in turn, all situated north of the Thames, at each one running through the exact sequence of actions necessary for the operation.

  ‘The final attack will occur at one thirty this afternoon,’ he finished. ‘You already know your escape routes, and you’ve all reconnoitred your targets so you know exactly where to position the vehicles. Now, are there any questions?’

  Again, nobody responded.


  ‘Right,’ Morschel continued. ‘Hagen and I will go and get ready for our own part in this. The rest of you can relax until you need to get suited up ready to leave. To ensure you’re in position on time, each team should be leaving here about ninety minutes before its allotted time for action. Better to be waiting somewhere close to your target than trying to hack your way through traffic and then running late.’

  Morschel looked around the group one last time. ‘Finally, don’t forget about weapons safety. I’m not interested in how many civilians get shot, because they’re expendable, but we can’t afford any accidents with our own team. So those of you carrying MP5s should remember that until you actually get out of the vehicle you keep the bolt open and your finger off the trigger. Right, good luck, all of you. We’ll meet up back in Germany next week.’

  American Embassy, Grosvenor Square, London

  Carlin F. Johnson was in a foul mood, but that wasn’t unusual. He’d spent most of his long and highly successful career with the CIA in a bad temper. Currently, his mood was caused by two factors, neither of which he had the slightest control over. This, for him, was an additional annoyance.

  First, he hated the British weather: the almost perpetual drizzle that had characterized this alleged summer in London. Every morning, it seemed, he had looked out of the Embassy window at grey skies leaden with rain clouds. That was irritation enough.

  His second gripe was more immediate. When he’d first conceived VIPER, he’d realized that Gregory Stevens would need to go deep undercover, and that he simply wouldn’t be able to establish any kind of a regular communications schedule. Reports from him had been very erratic ever since the operation started, and even more so over the last month, with the result that Johnson literally had no idea what stage Stevens had reached, where he now was, or even if he was still alive.