A Deadly Trade: A gripping espionage thriller

‘Funny, they showed quite an interest this morning.’

She let out a surprised breath and her body tensed beneath me. I smiled. ‘Your sidekick has quite a crush on you, did you know? The other guys hanging around were regular police officers. Judging by their sour expressions, they don’t care for the security services pulling rank.’ As soon as the words exited my mouth, I realised I’d said too much. For reasons unknown I’d wanted to impress her, to let her see that I was worthy. Vanity, Reuben had often reminded me, was a capital offence. ‘How is the boy?’ I said, changing tack.

She fixed me with hard eyes. ‘Safe from you.’

In spite of every effort to curb a reaction, a pulse above my left eyelid quivered. Like a shark scenting blood in the water, she spotted my weakness.

‘Why didn’t you kill him?’

I had no answer. If I wasn’t careful she would lead me to a place I’d no desire to visit. It was her turn to smile.

‘Your failure reveals worrying inconsistency. It’s as if you give a damn.’

I swallowed hard. She wasn’t finished. ‘I wonder what the hell that’s all about,’ she said, her turn to goad. ‘Care to share?’ I did my best to retain a blank expression. Her lips curved into a superior smile. She was onto me. I stepped back. ‘You’re free to go,’ I said. She didn’t move an inch. I had the impression of her staring right into my soul. I wanted to break her hold on me. Her gaze dropped, eyes fixed on a point beyond my shoulder. I turned minutely. Next, her hand thudded into my chest and she was gone.

I bent down to see if she’d taken the briefcase. It wasn’t there. She’d performed a classic disappearing trick. Like I said, she was smart.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Conscious she’d call for reinforcements, I took a fast, circuitous route. Whether she believed me or not was incidental. We both knew what we were dealing with. We both knew what we wanted. Whether or not she would play on my team, I’d no idea.

A creature of shadows, I liked the dark: my milieu. But that night I wasn’t paying enough attention. The memory of the MI5 girl’s laugh, her penetrating stare, a blizzard of green, had sidetracked me. Quite suddenly, I found myself in a shabby lane, a cut-through between two rows of houses within spitting distance of Earls Court, reminding me of the many hutong you find in the Forbidden City in China – without the bikes and rickshaws. Lights from neighbouring streets cast a sickly glare through the gloom. I could hardly see but I could imagine the shattered walls that flanked the alley, the corrugated iron and outbuildings in varying states of disrepair. Weeds grew in knots between the cobbled stones beneath my feet. I didn’t hear another, no telltale breath, no loud footfall, but I recognised that I had company. Too late, I turned.

The guy exploded into action, raining blows, several cracking my jaw and head. I darted, lunged, parried. Bone connected. Blood spattered. Mostly mine. My adversary was bigger than me in every respect, a wall of muscle, a human Pit Bull. Grabbing me by one ear, he yanked me close with one hand, by the throat with the other. He had a bad case of halitosis; his breath reeked of garlic and Guinness.

‘Where is it, you fucker?’

‘Where’s what?’

‘The fucking hard drive.’

We were eyeball to eyeball. Blood streamed from my head. Shot through with pain, I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t notice his strong Belfast accent.

‘You’ve got the wrong guy,’ I moaned through bloodied teeth.

Predictably he released his hold on my throat so he could mess me up some more. I arched, thrust my body back, felt my ear tear, but I was free. Enraged, he came in again at close range, fists, head and feet. Whoever he was, this clown meant business.

Under this level of fire thought vanished like the mist swirling around us. Fortunately I had good instincts and my instinct was to draw him back through a terrain of empty cans, litter and used needles towards a derelict building. He sensed my game and changed tempo. The pressure increased. I mostly absorbed the pain, landing the odd blow without doing him any serious damage. Acting the vanquished, I drew him close. Close enough to…

The length of wire flashed quicksilver against the dark and twisted round his neck with the speed of a cobra strike. In two steps I was behind him, hauling back, putting my full weight into hanging on, the struggling man twisting and turning and grunting, shoes sliding in the dirt. His fingers scrabbled to loosen the wire before it became embedded. I hauled some more. A fine spray of blood released and cascaded into the night. He fell back heavily, knocking the air out of my lungs as I collapsed beneath him. ‘Think like him and never stop thinking like him until he is dead’ Reuben had taught me. Men can do extraordinary things even when dying. I didn’t doubt that if I let go my assailant would produce a knife and make one last attempt to kill me. I clung on with grim determination until the spray became a pumping torrent of plasma and his heels drummed on the rough surface. My arms and shoulders juddering with strain, I gave one final wrench and it was over. A noise, like water gurgling down a plughole, rasped, rattled and hissed into the night.

I slid out from beneath him and dragged him by his feet into the remains of an empty building partially boarded up and smelling of piss. Rifling through his clothing revealed a wallet with five hundred pounds in sterling, no credit cards, no identification. He also carried a gun. Difficult to tell what it was in the stuttering light, but it felt like a Colt. I briefly wondered why he hadn’t used it, and pocketed both.

To conceal the bloodstains on my coat, I took it off, turned it inside out and put it back on. Retrieving the wire, I wiped it on the dead man’s trousers, returned it to my pocket, and made my way back to Reuben’s.

This time I used a conventional form of entry: I rang Reuben’s doorbell. He let me in, invited me through to the sitting room.

‘You look like hell.’

I shrugged off my coat. ‘This needs to be disappeared.’

He took it from me without a word and told me to take a seat. ‘I will get something for the cuts and bruises.’

A fire blazed in the grate, throwing shadows on the walls. I realised how cold I was and stood and warmed myself. Reuben was halfway down a bottle of red wine. There were three glasses, one empty, one his, one used.

Reuben returned with a medical kit and expertly cleaned me up. It stung.

‘Who did this?’ he said.

Had it not been for my assailant’s mean and precise line of questioning, I might have thought I was the victim of a stranger attack. If you walk in those sorts of places you’re likely to meet trouble. As it was, had to be someone with more than a passing interest in Wilding although I didn’t believe it was anyone in an official capacity. Not their style. As for the accent, well, who knew? Plenty of out of work thugs from that part of the world. I wondered whom he worked for.

‘A guy with no name built like a banned breed of canine.’ I was spent and dejected. My head and ear throbbed. I flinched as Reuben traced my face with his thick fingers for fractures.

‘You’re fine,’ he said.

I grunted thanks. I felt anything but fine and gladly accepted his offer of a drink, a Grand Vin and premier cru of a fine vintage from Bordeaux. He asked nothing more of me. He knew that I’d speak when ready. We sat in awkward silence for some minutes until I chose to deliver edited highlights. I did not tell him about my audience with a Russian crime lord and his theory that the motive for Wilding’s murder was revenge. I did not tell him about my personal run-in with the British intelligence officer. I wanted to keep her to myself. Instead, I told Reuben that Wes wanted the hard drive returned in three days. Seemed like Wes was not the only person who wanted to get his hands on it, any number of parties after the same thing. Made my job a hundred times more difficult.

‘To give it to whom?’

‘I don’t know but I intend to find out.’

Reuben did not react.

‘Who in hell wants to inflict biological ethnic genocide?’ I snapped.

‘You lack the evidence to support your claim,’ Reuben softly reminded me.

‘You’re now saying I’m wrong?’ After all you told me? My mind reeled back to my conversation with Wes. Drugs that kill certain types of people. What else if it wasn’t this? And McCallen hadn’t exactly blown out my allegations about nerve agents. I wildly wondered whether the Israelis harboured a desire to annihilate their Arab neighbours by twisting the genetic key, and vice-versa. I asked Reuben.

He smiled broadly and shook his head. ‘Israelis and Arabs share similar genetic characteristics. They are both of Semitic origin. In simple engineering terms, it would be a tremendous feat to divide one human genome from another. Any pathogen developed in a test-tube would result in mutually-assured destruction.’

I gaped at him. He leant forward, rested a paw of a hand on my knee. ‘Do not worry, Joshua, you come from a mongrel race. It would be extremely difficult to wipe out you and yours.’

Then whom in God’s name were we talking about? Orientals? I looked him in the eye. For reasons I could not describe I found Reuben’s fervour neither convincing nor reassuring. Difficult was not the same as impossible. The white man in the Korean showcase had been chosen for a reason. My mind unravelled. I’d narrowly escaped moving from the steal-to-order market into something more deadly and dangerous, maybe even state sponsored terrorism. And what of the Russian connection? By now, MI5 would have disseminated the contents of my briefcase, trawled through my false identification papers and studied the photographs on the camera. I wondered whether they’d yet identified Yakovlevich’s mystery contact.

Reuben broke into my thoughts. ‘I have not been idle in your absence. It’s all right I was discreet,’ he added in response to my obvious consternation. ‘I have an old contact who passed on some timely information.’ I retained a mask of inscrutability. That very morning Reuben had tried to persuade me that he no longer had connections. ‘The London station chief received a visit this afternoon from MI5’s Inger McCallen.’

Inger McCallen. I silently drank in her name, rolling it round my mouth like a fine wine. Suggestive of a Scottish origin, it explained the pale colouring, the copper-coloured hair, and flinty manner. It intrigued me. I mused whether Scandinavia played a part in her background. In my reverie, I clean forgot that her name was in all probability fictional. Reuben was still talking. ‘Apparently, Dr Wilding was killed by a bubble of air injected into the jugular vein.’ The suspected method used to kill Robert Maxwell before he was chucked overboard from his yacht, I remembered. I also remembered that in my foolish enthusiasm to impress McCallen I’d offered this as a possibility. In Wilding’s case, the combination of pills and alcohol would have masked the prick of the needle entering her skin. She would have put up no defence. As a method, it was brilliantly conceived, her assassin clearly taking advantage of available conditions on the ground – a masterstroke.

‘According to my source, the British are unusually upset by Wilding’s death.’

I gave a snort of frustration. ‘I’m not surprised.’

‘To be expected, indeed,’ Reuben said. ‘With the lingering stink over the Kelly affair, the security services are bound to be at the centre of a swirl of new allegations. They will not welcome renewed attention.’

I didn’t react. With every appearance of calm, as if Wilding were nothing more than a humble computer programmer setting up a new project, I said, ‘What if Wilding had her own agenda? What if she was working in an offensive capacity?’ Why else would the information be at her home?

He spread his hands and gave a wide shrug. I frowned. Reuben was doing the equivalent of feeding me titbits and then running away. ‘Whatever it was, this is well outside my experience,’ I said. ‘More than likely a foreign security service is responsible for her death.’

‘Then why were you employed?’

He had me there. Wes dealt exclusively with international organised crime. Silence invaded the room like a conquering army. I stayed still, tuned out. Finally Reuben broke the deadlock.

‘The British have an asset within a newly emergent fundamentalist Muslim splinter group based in the Midlands.’

‘Terrorists?’ I said, with a snatch of alarm.

‘Yes.’

I remembered Yakovlevich’s take on young Muslim radicals. I eyed Reuben with suspicion. ‘How do you know and how is this relevant?’

He let out a tired sigh as though I was particularly stupid. ‘Muslim groups are always relevant. The uneducated masses still declare death to Israel and death to the West.’

I suddenly didn’t buy Reuben’s alleged ignorance. ‘Reuben,’ I added sternly. ‘You are forcing connections and speaking in riddles,’ I said, exasperated. ‘Frankly, this is political dynamite and I don’t do politics.’ Nor religion nor fundamentalism, I could have said.

Reuben flashed a smile and hunched his shoulders. ‘I may be out of the game, Joshua, but there are certain things that a man like me can divine.’ I looked deeply into his eyes. He met my gaze with a considered expression. ‘McCallen is meeting the asset tomorrow here in London.’ He gave me the details.

‘Divination is one thing,’ I said deliberately. ‘If you’re so out of the game, how come you know about the meeting?’

Reuben slow-blinked, issued a wily smile. ‘Remember that everyone is there to be used.’

Dissatisfied, I stood to leave. Reuben got up, too, and followed me out into the hall and to the front door. Before he opened it he rested a hand on my arm. Despite the lightness of touch, I could feel the power of the man radiating through his fingertips. He quoted a motto of which he was particularly fond: By way of deception, thou shalt do war.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I bought some electric hair clippers from an open all hours’ chemist and booked into one of many cheap budget hotels near Paddington. Not the most comfortable establishments but they had their advantages. Within close proximity of train stations they offered the best chance of escape, and they employed the type of temporary staff inclined to be less discriminating. The night porter barely lifted his eyes let alone paid attention to my battered appearance as I asked for a room for the night.

Reuben’s intelligence was non-specific in certain aspects, precise and detailed in others. Caught in a slimy net of events beyond my understanding, it made me suspicious. With this firmly planted in my head I fell asleep quickly and came to a couple of hours later, restless, awake and wired.

Logically, Wilding’s murder looked politically motivated, a foreign security service responsible for her death. And yet, as Reuben had pointed out, someone had been willing to employ a guy like me. In the same vein, my unknown assailant didn’t strike me as an ‘in-house’ professional. Whoever he was, I intended to find out – maybe Wes could offer an opinion – but first I’d keep my date with McCallen, the thought of crossing paths with her again strangely exhilarating.

In the past, my rare encounters with mostly foreign women had been restricted to the one-off, passionate and no holds barred variety, commonly termed the one-night stand. In the heat of the moment, terrific; hollow in the aftermath. I didn’t believe a woman like McCallen would ever look twice at a man like me and yet I briefly wondered what it would be like to sleep with her, how she would feel and taste. Wasn’t a simple case of sexual attraction, it was more elemental. Before the Wilding job I would have said that we were flip sides of the same coin. We both moved in murky worlds. We both had secret lives. We both hewed the rich seam of frail and foolish humanity. Long-term relationships were out. Neither of us could make promises, nor offer commitment. Alike in so many aspects and yet, I had to admit, light-years away in others. With this swilling around inside my head, I lay back down, resting in the shadows, then finally turned over and fell into a fractured sleep.

Low in spirit, smudged by fatigue, I rose at six in the morning. An hour later and, thanks to my new electric hair clippers, I had a brand new image. Along with the bruises and swelling around my left eye and torn ear, my freshly shaved head added several years to my appearance. Tag on a pair of outdated spectacles and scruffy jacket and I could pass for a recently released guest of Her Majesty.

Before leaving the hotel room, I wiped away fingerprints, paying particular attention to door handles, lavatory seats, anything that bore my personal insignia, then headed back to the streets and found a newsagents, part of a large chain, and rifled through the day’s newspapers. The identikit picture of me was particularly poor. Had McCallen protected me? I quickly dismissed the idea as wishful thinking.

Her meeting was scheduled for nine forty-five in a precise corner of Kensington Palace Gardens. (Reuben had all but given me the co-ordinates.) Arriving half an hour early, I walked up the road and entered the park through a wide set of gates that always reminded me of the elegant entrance to Pittville park in the Cotswold capital of Cheltenham, my home town.

Out of nowhere two black-clad police officers, carrying Heckler and Koch MP5’s, walked along the street towards me. Heart thudding in my chest, I curbed my natural instinct, which was to turn and leg it. Still they came, their gaze seemingly unfocused, the weapons held close to their barrel chests. At any moment I knew these guys could spring into action and empty a couple of magazines into me. The closer they walked, the more I sweated. My hearing went, my tongue stuck like bubblegum to the roof of my mouth. All I could see were the men and the guns, nothing else. Forcing my legs to move, I nodded good morning. They both nodded back, strolled past, oblivious of my real identity. I turned into the park and let out a painfully contained breath.

In spite of the Arctic weather, joggers ran, halting to perform the occasional squat thrust. Tourists milled about, snapping photographs. Footpaths were slippery and coated in frost. I meandered left, eyes raking my surroundings, and eventually walked past a bench that offered privacy without secrecy. If McCallen’s asset was as high-grade as Reuben led me to believe she would want him secure and in a place where nobody could slot him and get away with it.

Falling in with a bunch of Australians admiring the late Princess Diana’s old home, I waited when, eventually, a slightly built man in his mid-twenties rocked up. Hands thrust deep into a padded jacket, woollen Beanie hat close over his ears; he wore a desert scarf in a black and white chequered design, rebel republic style. A soft dark beard offset his pinch-faced features. Watchful and wary, he had standout eyes that made him look as if he wore eyeliner. He could easily pass for an Afghan, I thought.

He sat down with a bump, hunkered down into the seat in an effort to reduce his visibility, and clapped his hands together against the cold. His boots stamped the frosted ground. Swarthy complexion, tinged with blue, he looked frozen. With my freshly shaven head, I totally got where he was coming from. Slipping out the mobile phone for the Wilding job, I hastily took his picture and jammed the phone back into my pocket.

McCallen arrived a few minutes later. The latecomer’s way of asserting authority, of stating who’s in charge and calls the shots, McCallen was very much displaying her credentials. Giving her time to settle, to re-establish a rapport with her contact, I turned my back and wandered over towards a water fountain. Bending down, I helped myself to a drink. The bitter cold set my teeth on edge. At this level McCallen was directly in my eye line. I fixed my gaze on her full-lipped mouth.

Looking straight ahead, she engaged the youth with the standard openers of conversations recited all over the world. She called him Saj. Saj replied that he was well and that his family were just fine. Next she asked after a guy called Mustafa.

‘Zealous as ever.’ A faint smile played on the young man’s thin features.

‘And the group’s more recent activities?’

‘Lying low after the attack plan attracted too much heat and was aborted.’

‘And they had no idea you were responsible for the tip-off?’

‘None.’ Saj seemed like a polite and quiet individual. With McCallen at his side, he had lost some of the nervousness he displayed earlier.

Then she moved on to the heavy stuff.

‘You’ve heard of Dr Mary Wilding?’

Perplexed, he said, ‘The dead scientist.’

‘We believe she was the victim of blackmail.’

At this we both frowned. Me, because it was something Wes should have told me; Saj, because he was unable to fathom any possible connection to himself. He said as much to McCallen. ‘What sort of blackmail?’

‘She had access to pathogens with a variety of uses.’ My interest spiked. I wondered what form of blackmail would persuade Wilding to risk her job, her reputation, her life and indeed, as it now turned out, the lives of others. Against every instinct, I was reminded of the dying Koreans, the blood and ordure. Saj nodded, gravely assimilating the information. ‘Are you aware of anyone making overtures to Mustafa?’ McCallen pressed him.

‘Something like this would not be brought to my attention. Above my pay grade.’

‘With this particular type of material on the market we fear Mustafa will be approached.’

‘Who by?’

‘Our only lead is a British assassin. Around six feet, maybe a shade under, strong, with a slim to medium build. He’s dark haired, blue-eyed, striking with flat high cheekbones. We think he may attempt to trade.’

I tuned out after assassin. She was wrong. She didn’t believe me. And she wasn’t going to get anywhere if she concentrated her attention in a wasted direction. The idiocy of it made me flare with anger.

‘Anyone like that cross your radar?’ she concluded.

‘Never.’

McCallen flexed her shoulders, dissatisfied. She wasn’t alone. The tip of her nose glowed red from the cold. Her eyes scanned the human landscape. I turned away so that I missed her contact’s follow-up question. When I turned back McCallen was speaking once more.

‘The hit was professional and accomplished. The killer escaped with vital information concerning a certain bio-weapon.’ Too true, I thought, wondering about the exact nature of this type of material. ‘Do you think you could persuade Mustafa to test the market, to put out the word?’ she said.

‘Use him as bait to draw the killer out of the shadows?’

‘And lead us to those who have the information. Would Mustafa deal with a white guy?’

‘You mean would he bargain with an infidel?’ Saj flashed a rare grin, the question rhetorical. ‘The world has changed. For Mustafa, this is all the more reason to ramp up the violence. We do business with whoever will aid our cause.’

‘If you could persuade…’ She changed position so that I could no longer read her lips. Fuck.

Her contact blew out a breath, sending a plume of warm air into the chill atmosphere. ‘Can you be more specific about what exactly we’re touting for?’

She bent towards him then drew away. Irritatingly, she still had her back to me. Suddenly, her contact twisted round, facing her, his eyes bright like polished mahogany. I couldn’t hear but his bearing shrieked outrage. ‘The British government sanctioned this?’

She leant towards him for a second time. Frustrated beyond belief, my eyes locked onto the young man’s thin lips.

‘It should have been destroyed.’

She reached out, rested a hand lightly on his shoulder, squeezed it, said something else then got up and strode away.

I followed at a distance. She walked quickly, soft shoes pumping, frequently changing direction. I felt out of sorts, possibly because I hadn’t eaten for hours, probably because I was a marked man and I could be arrested at any moment, mostly because McCallen had shone a fiery light on a dirty corner. I thought about Reuben and how McCallen’s revelation chimed with what I’d witnessed in his basement. I thought about Wes and the pack of lies he’d told me. I thought about my own presumption of Wilding’s greed and guilt.