Terminal Black

by Adrian Magson

  ‘I realize that,’ Irina said, and felt a shiver go through her as she realized what Kraush was doing. He was expecting her to make a decision; that whatever happened from here on with Alex, it would be her responsibility. Out of desperation, she said, ‘But we can’t risk him talking. They always do.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘People like him. The broken ones. Head cases.’

  ‘You know this as a fact, do you?’ He appeared to be only half listening, his attention on the rations. But she knew better.

  ‘I do. My Uncle Yaroslav was wounded in Afghanistan. Bullet to the head from some stinking tribesman five hundred metres away. A lucky shot, they said, although not for my uncle. All he could talk about when they medevac’d him home and released him from hospital was the war. Didn’t matter that he shouldn’t – he couldn’t remember the rules, only the war. We would find him in the local bar telling anyone who would listen about the things they used to do.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Our troops.’

  ‘Like what?’ Kraush’s eyes were now drilling into hers. It was unsettling enough to make her mouth go dry. But at least she had his full attention.

  ‘They’d take a captured Mujahideen five-hundred metres up in a gunship over his village, and when the villagers came out to see what was happening, they’d toss him out … with a grenade inside his kameez. Minimum resources, maximum psychological damage, Uncle Yaroslav used to say.’

  Kraush looked at her as if studying an unusual kind of insect. ‘Now I can see why they suggested you should be on this programme. However, we cannot go terminating the man because he looked at the prisoner. Who would be next? Me? You?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I hope not.’ He placed a hand on her shoulder, making her flinch. ‘We’re under stress at the moment, in danger of seeing shadows where there are none. Keep an eye on him for now and we’ll talk about it another time. For now I have to get Ferris to open up, otherwise we will both be on a return trip to headquarters – a prospect neither of us wants.’

  TWELVE

  After leaving Jean, Harry went back to his flat and collected his dead phone. If he was going operational again he had to get this one kicked into life or buy a replacement.

  There was a phone boutique just down the street. A young man behind the counter was fiddling with two phones at the same time, like Rick Wakeman on keyboards. He looked up. ‘Can I help?’

  Harry explained the problem, and the man began tapping buttons. Less than a minute later he handed it back. ‘There you are. It’s all good.’ The phone immediately began pinging repeatedly and the assistant smiled. ‘Been out of action for a bit, has it?’

  ‘A week, maybe two. Why?’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve got some catching up to do.’

  ‘What’s the charge?’ Harry said.

  ‘No need. Just remember me next time you want to buy a new one.’

  Harry thought about it. ‘In that case I’ll take a back-up now.’ There was nothing worse than being in the field with no way of making contact with anyone.

  ‘Sure. Pay-as-you-go?’

  Three minutes later Harry left carrying a spare mobile loaded and ready to go. He stopped in the doorway of an abandoned shop and used it to dial Rik’s number. No answer. He cut the call and checked his old phone directory, then dialled again.

  ‘Maloney.’ The voice was the same growl he recalled from a long time ago, and he gave a sigh of relief. Bill Maloney had been with him on the bust that had led to Harry’s posting to Red Station. He had no idea if Bill was still with the agency, but it had been worth a try.

  ‘Ben Cramer,’ he said without preamble, because he didn’t know where Maloney was or who he might be with.

  ‘Fuck me sideways, Harry,’ Maloney breathed. ‘You trying to get me into trouble? What do you want?’

  ‘I love you, too,’ Harry replied, surprised at the less than genial reception. ‘How are you?

  ‘I was fine until now. And I’m still in the job, if that’s what you’re asking. Why are you asking about Cramer?’

  ‘I’ve had a visit from him.’

  ‘Count yourself privileged. So?’

  ‘Rik Ferris. He wants my help to bring him in.’

  ‘Wait one.’ There was a pause, then the sound of Maloney’s breathing and the rustle of cloth, and a door closing. ‘Sorry, pal. You took me by surprise. I work in a fucking cubicle, would you believe, surrounded by other cubicles. We sell double-glazing and life insurance on the side. Did you say Ferris – the tech bod you worked with?’

  ‘That’s him. I haven’t seen him in a while and Cramer says he’s gone rogue. He wants him found before the Basement get sent out to bring him back.’

  ‘Good luck with that. Although if it’s true he’s jumped the fence I doubt they’ll bother. They’re preaching the cut-it-off-before-it-spreads approach these days. And it won’t be an in-house job like the Basement.’

  ‘Contractors?’

  ‘Positive. For that kind of op they won’t want any mud to stick.’

  Harry sighed. Things hadn’t changed. Send out non-attributable or black ops personnel and the official line if things went bad was to deny all knowledge. Clean hands at any cost.

  ‘Good to know,’ he said. ‘What about Cramer? Anything I need to know?’

  ‘He’s ex-army, lost a leg in Afghan working with Six on some poxy-arsed contact mission and got side-lined even though it was their planning foul-up. Word is, to cover themselves he was assigned a post hopping between the two agencies. No pun intended. He’s now a fixer, I hear it said, arranging jobs between the cracks.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Not really. Met him a couple of times, but never worked with him. Seems nice enough. Did he play nice?’

  ‘You mean did he use threats?’

  ‘Like that.’

  ‘Obliquely, yes. But more towards Rik.’

  ‘Ah. Like find Ferris or the heavies will nobble him. We know how that’ll end.’

  ‘Yes.’ Harry felt a sinking feeling. He was no further forward. If Cramer was a blunt tool of Five and Six, he’d do whatever they ordered him to do, no question.

  ‘It’s unusual, though,’ Maloney said quietly. ‘Getting a rag-and-bone man like you involved.’

  ‘Cheers, Bill. Appreciate the image.’

  Maloney chuckled. ‘Only kidding. You know what I mean. If they hear someone’s gone over the fence, the last thing they do is let their mates in on it. Too much chance of it going wrong and the target getting a friendly tip-off, like Burgess and MacLean. I’m not saying you would or wouldn’t, but they must know your history with him.’

  ‘So why would they disregard it this time?’

  ‘Dunno. Could be because we’re all fighting bush fires at the moment. The moment we crap on one threat another one pops up. There’s a shortage of personnel and the budget’s never big enough.’

  ‘Is that what you’re on? Anti-terror?’

  ‘We all are, one way or another. But I’m guessing this business is different.’

  ‘Like what?’

  There was a long pause. Maloney was processing the question, thought Harry. Trying to figure out how much he could safely say. Finally he said, ‘I’m being kept out of the loop as far as your name’s concerned. But I did hear the Russia desk has put Ferris on the bulletin board for action. But that’s all I know. You need to watch your tail.’

  In other words, he was probably being followed as part of their suspicions about Rik. It wasn’t news but the idea gave him a ticklish feeling on the back of his neck. They’d be checking whether he, too, was suspect, tainted by association and saving manpower until they had reasonable cause. He wondered what Cramer would do if he also dropped out of sight without warning. Probably have kittens and call out the heavies.

  ‘Thanks, Bill. I’ll do that.’

  ‘No worries. Stay loose.’

  Harry cut the call and dropped the new phone into an
inside pocket, then continued to the last address for Rik’s mother. He didn’t bother looking over his shoulder; if Cramer’s people were doing their job they would have already covered all the addresses associated with Rik and himself. The time to check his tail was when he wasn’t going somewhere that obvious.

  It made him think about Rik’s chances if he didn’t manage to get to him first. When he’d first met him, the young IT geek had been unversed in all but the most basic level of security training, with limited trade craft and a vague notion of which way to point a gun. It wasn’t that he’d been unwilling to learn; computers were his thing, and his idea of a hot zone was an overheated computer room in the bowels of Thames House.

  Thrown together in Red Station, the two of them had been chalk and cheese. To them and the other inmates it was a punishment posting until the day they would be forgiven and welcomed back into the fold and re-assigned, all sins forgiven.

  What none of them had known was that there was to be no re-assignment nor a welcome home. They were tainted by the dust-cloud of failure and under a no-contact rule, a tighter version of radio silence, monitored and enforced by watchers who knew their every move.

  Once Harry had learned what was really going on, he’d begun the fight back. Not for him the dull prison-like existence or the sour taste of acquiescence. He’d wanted to go home and find out who was behind this desolate confinement. Fortunately, Rik had been a quick learner. With an elimination squad on their heels to obliterate all trace of them, and half the Russian army about to roll over their tiny outpost, there had been no time for classroom lectures, slide shows of escape-and-evasion tactics or battlefield scenarios with grizzled instructors. There was just Harry, a former soldier voted in as leader to get them out of the mess they were facing and giving them the kind of instruction which said fight or die.

  Now, of course, in the brave new world of the intelligence and security services health-and-safety manuals, before anyone so much as picked up a gun there would be suitability evaluations, psychological profiles and enough paperwork to sink a small freighter.

  They had come through it, however, with a little help from a couple of the other drop-outs, equally damaged and bruised but still standing who’d chosen fight-and-flight. It had been a close-run thing, and there had been a few bodies left in their wake. They hadn’t been welcomed back with open arms and a photo-op outside the shiny black door of No 10, but at least they were still alive and not cooped up in a Russian prison being fed Pentothal or whatever Moscow Centre was currently using to get hard truth out of reluctant captives.

  One of their number, an MI6 operative named Clare Jardine who, according to Stuart Mace, the outpost’s station chief, ‘didn’t do fluffy’, had gutted Sir Anthony Bellingham, her former boss, on the Embankment with a nasty little knife in retaliation for sending her to Red Station in the first place. But since Bellingham, along with MI5 rogue officer George Paulton, had broken more rules than anyone had cared to list or have broadcast to the wider world, the search for her had been scaled back after a while for fear that a hungry media would eventually stumble over the details. In the end, after a couple of scuffles alongside Harry and Rik, Jardine had quietly slipped away to who-knew-where, to everyone’s relief, including Harry’s. The memory of having once had her favoured razor-sharp little blade hovering over his inner thigh and his femoral artery was still enough the make his blood freeze.

  Now he had to catch up with the skinny, badly dressed and coiffed IT drop-out, who could be anywhere in the world. Cramer had been right, albeit probably by accident: Harry had indeed trained Rik, starting by getting them out of Georgia, then by hooking up and pairing Rik’s talents with his own in a fledgling security business. With the Red Station fiasco forgotten by the intelligence establishment, but not allowed back inside even if they’d wanted it, they were forced to use their talents in a growing market for security specialists, all the while hunting for and finding George Paulton, one of the two architects of their downfall.

  However, even good partnerships can begin to drift. Or maybe it was because they’d tracked down Paulton, although they’d had nothing to do with his eventual demise on a late-evening Eurostar to Paris. That had been due to a sliced femoral artery, for which there was only one suspect in Harry’s book. But Clare had disappeared into the vast night of Europe and wasn’t likely to be coming back to face that particular piece of music.

  He and Rik had eventually been drawn apart to separate graft. The world was changing fast and becoming less free, less predictable and far more dangerous. And while there was plenty of freelance work on offer, much of it went to a man of Rik’s talents, while Harry found offers of placement in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot-spots, where military experience counted for a lot.

  Harry left the underground at Southwark and walked to where Rik’s mother had lived. He doubted there would be anything to find, but overlooking the blindingly obvious would be a mistake. A neighbour, maybe, a curtain-twitcher who might just know something he could use.

  THIRTEEN

  Bright netting showed behind the glass door panel, and the letterbox was shiny with polish. A few seconds after knocking the door opened to reveal a tiny black lady with thick spectacles staring up at him.

  ‘You from the council?’ she asked in a sing-song voice. ‘If you are I gotta bone to pick, y’know? It’s about the drains – I wrote in two weeks ago and heard not a thing. Nothing. It’s pretty rank, let me tell you.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m not,’ said Harry and told her his name. ‘I’m looking for information about the lady who used to live here – a Mrs Ferris.’

  ‘Sure. I remember.’ She considered him for a moment, then pointed a slim finger down the street. ‘I used to share a room with me sister along the river, then I got the chance at this place. I felt bad, you know, taking over from the old lady, but it’s what we all do, right? We have to move on and trust in the Good Lord.’

  ‘She died, I believe?’

  The woman agreed that she had. ‘I attended her funeral, but from a respectful distance, you understand. Nobody deserves to go to their final resting place unobserved, as if they never mattered in this life. There were a few others, but an extra person takes up no room at all.’ She gave him a look. ‘You weren’t there, though – I’d have remembered. I got a good memory for faces.’

  ‘I was out of the country. Did you know Rik, her son?’

  ‘Not personally. Just to say hello, the way you do. The poor lamb was very upset, though. I felt for him.’ Her face creased in sorrow. ‘It’s always hard on those left behind, especially those who were close. Death is like a desertion over which we have no control, did you know that?’

  ‘I know what you mean. I take it there was nothing she left behind?’

  Her head cocked to one side. ‘Now why would you be asking such a question, Mr Harry Tate? Are you the po-lice?’ The word came drawn out with a hint of distrust, and her eyes drilled into his as if checking the back of his head for deep, dark thoughts. ‘You have the bearing, if I may say so.’

  Harry stared right back at her, suspecting she would pounce on any attempt at defence. ‘I’m not, actually. I never fancied the uniform or the hours. Rik’s a friend. He’s gone missing and I’m trying to track him down. I thought maybe there might be some indication here as to why he’s gone and where.’

  ‘Grief, I expect.’ She nodded with certainty, her voice softening. ‘That’s most likely the reason. We all react in different ways, y’know. Some cry, some shout, some sing. Some go inside themselves. Maybe the boy just wanted to get away somewhere quiet, to reflect. But to answer your question, no. There was nothing she left behind save memories in the air and echoes in the breeze. Sorry.’

  Harry quite liked the poetry in her words. He thanked her and headed back to the other side of the river, playing dodgems in the underground and emerging at Oxford Circus. He started walking at a steady pace along Oxford Street, not looking left or right, a man on a journey with no mea
sure of haste. His target destination was the area around Paddington station, but he wanted to travel in the open and, if possible, get there without company.

  He’d picked up a couple of possible ‘ticks’ after leaving the old lady. Nothing concrete at first, more a feeling on the back of his neck when he saw the same two faces more than once. One was a man, fair-haired, mid-thirties, wearing a suit and heavy spectacles. The other was a woman, fifty-ish, carrying a shopping bag and rolling slightly as if her feet were hurting.

  He didn’t try to lose them, but let them follow if that was their purpose. Shaking a possible tick wasn’t as simple as some made out, especially if you were only a train carriage apart and in a crush of people in close proximity. It made identifying any one follower almost impossible unless he or she made a mistake.

  By the time he entered the underground at Marble Arch, the man had dropped out of sight but the woman was still on his tail, chatting on a mobile phone. He did a tour of the underground passageways, stopping to check his Oyster card and drop a coin in a violin case on the way, but she was still there, stuck like glue.

  Just for the hell of it Harry drew the chase out to see what happened. His army days had left him with the ability to cover a lot of ground at a deceptively slow pace. He arrived at Paddington station, stopping once for a take-away coffee, and a glance in the mirror behind the counter showed a familiar figure loitering down the street.

  The station was an ants’ nest of commuters, travellers, sightseers and those with simply nowhere else pressing to be. Just how he liked it. He made a tour of the interior, checking the train departures board before buying a ticket to Didcot. When he was sure the woman was checking the ticket machine to see if his destination was showing, he headed for the exit behind a group of backpackers and out into the street.

  Just to be sure he took a circuitous route to where Rik lived, checking for followers on the way. Nobody obvious showed up, no one dodging back looking out of place or pretending to be studying a street map. But if they were any good they wouldn’t do that anyway.