The Man Between

Still in a state of apprehension, Carradine took a detour on the way home, purchased a roll of masking tape and found an Internet café in Paddington. He wanted to be certain that Mantis was a bona fide Service employee, not a Walter Mitty figure taking advantage of him either for his own amusement or for some darker purpose which had not yet been made clear.

The café was half-full. Carradine stood over a vacant computer, tore off a small strip of the masking tape and placed it over the lens at the top of the screen. The computer was already loaded with a VPN. In his most recent novel, Carradine had written a chapter in which the principal character was required to comb the Dark Net in order to create a false identity. He had spoken to a hacker a few weeks before and still remembered most of what she had told him during their cloak-and-dagger meeting at a coffee shop in Balham. The trick – apart from disabling the camera – was to use the VPN both to create a false IP address and to encrypt his Internet usage. That way, his activities would be concealed from any prying eyes in Cheltenham and Carradine could investigate the mysterious Mr Mantis without fear of being identified.

As he expected, none of the ‘Robert Mantis’ listings on Facebook could plausibly have been the man he had met in Lisson Grove. There was no Twitter account associated with the name, nor anything on Instagram. Carradine ran Mantis through LinkedIn and Whitepages but found only an out-of-work chef in Tampa and a ‘lifestyle’ photographer in Little Rock. Remembering a tip he had been given by the hacker, he looked on Nominet to see if any variant of ‘robertmantis’ was listed as a website domain. It was not. Whoever he had met that afternoon was using a pseudonym which had been cleaned up for the obvious purpose of protecting his true identity. Mantis was not listed as a director at Companies House nor as a shared freeholder on any UK properties. A credit check on Experian also drew a blank.

Satisfied that he was a genuine Service employee, Carradine put the computer to sleep, removed the strip of masking tape from the lens and walked home.

6

The following morning, Carradine was woken early by the sound of the doorbell ringing. He stumbled out of bed, pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and struck his foot on the skirting board as he picked up the intercom.

‘Delivery for Mr Carradine.’

He knew immediately what it was. He reached down, grabbed his toe and told the delivery man to leave it in his postbox.

‘Needs to be signed for.’

The accent was Jamaican. Carradine buzzed the man into the building. He waited by the door, rubbing his foot. A moth flew up towards the ceiling. Carradine clapped it dead between his hands. He could hear the lift outside grinding towards the landing as he wiped the smashed body on his shorts.

The delivery man was a middle-aged, dreadlocked Rasta wearing a high-vis waistcoat. A Post Office satchel was slung over his shoulder. It was possible that he was a convincingly disguised errand boy for the Service, but Carradine assumed that Mantis had simply sent the items by Special Delivery. He signed an illegible version of his name on an electronic pad using a small plastic tool that slipped on the glass, thanked him and took the package inside.

On any other morning, Carradine might have gone back to bed for another hour’s sleep. But the contents of the package were too intriguing. He walked into the kitchen, set a percolator of coffee on the stove and sliced the envelope open with a knife.

There was a paperback book inside. Mantis had sent a French translation of one of Carradine’s novels, published four years earlier. He opened the book to the title page. It was unsigned. The rest of the text had not been marked up nor were any pages turned down or altered in any way. The book was in pristine condition.

He waited for the coffee to boil, staring out of the window at the treetops of Hyde Park. If the novel was to be used as a book cipher, then Mantis possessed an identical copy which would allow him to send coded messages to Yassine without risking detection. He was using a French, rather than an English version of the book because Yassine was most likely a French-speaking Arab. For Carradine to give him a copy of the novel at their meeting was an ingenious and entirely plausible piece of tradecraft. They would be hiding in plain sight.

He took out the second item, the sealed package for ‘Maria’. The envelope was sturdy and bound with tape at both ends. Carradine weighed it in his hands. He could make out the outline of what he assumed was a passport. He bent the package slightly and thought that he could feel a document of some kind moving beneath the seal. Carradine had an obligation to open the envelope, because it was surely crazy to board an international flight carrying a package about which he knew so little. But he could not do so. It was against the spirit of the deal he had struck with the Service and would constitute a clear breach of trust. It was even possible that the package was a decoy and that the Service had sent it solely as a test of his integrity.

He set it to one side, drank the coffee and switched on the news. Overnight in New Delhi two vehicles had been hijacked by Islamist gunmen affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba and driven into crowds at a religious ceremony, killing an estimated 75 people. In Germany, an AFD politician had been gunned down on his doorstep by a Resurrection activist. Such headlines had become commonplace, as humdrum and predictable as tropical storms and mass shootings in the United States. Carradine waited for news of the Redmond kidnapping. It was the third item on the BBC. No trace had been found of the van in which Redmond had been driven away, no statement released by Resurrection claiming responsibility for the abduction.

Settling in front of his computer with a bowl of cereal, Carradine watched amateur footage of the crowds screaming in panic as they fled the carnage in New Delhi. He read an email written by the slain AFD politician, leaked to the press only days earlier, in which he had referred to Arabs as a ‘culturally alien people’ welcomed into Germany by ‘elitist pigs’. He learned that one in eight voters had given AFD their support in recent elections and that the group was now the second largest opposition party in the Bundestag. Small wonder Resurrection was so active in Germany. There had been similar assassinations of nationalist politicians in France, Poland and Hungary. It was only a matter of time before the violence crossed the Channel and a senior British politician was targeted.

Carradine took a shower and WhatsApped Mantis, acknowledging delivery of the package with a succinct ‘Thanks for the book’. Within thirty seconds Mantis had replied: ‘No problem’ adding – to Carradine’s consternation – two smiling emojis and a thumbs up for good measure. He put the package in a drawer and attempted to do some work. Every ten or fifteen minutes he would open the drawer and check that the package was still there, as if sprites or cat burglars might have carried it off while his back was turned. Later in the afternoon, when his once-a-fortnight cleaner, Mrs Ritter, was in the flat, he removed the package altogether and set it on his desk until she had left the building.

Though he had yet to complete any specific tasks on behalf of the Service, Carradine already felt as though he had been cut off from his old life; that he was inhabiting a parallel existence separate from the world he had known before meeting Mantis and witnessing the abduction of Lisa Redmond. He wanted to talk to his father about what had happened, to tell him about Morocco and to gauge his advice, but he was forbidden by the Secrets Act. He could say nothing to anyone about what Mantis had asked him to do. He tried to work, but it now seemed ridiculous to be writing about fictional spies in fictional settings when he himself had been employed by the Service as a bona fide support agent. Instead he spent the next two days re-reading Frederick Forsyth’s memoirs and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, trawling for insights into the life of a writer spy. He watched The Bureau and took a DVD of The Man Who Knew Too Much to his father’s flat the night before he was due to fly to Casablanca. They ordered curry from Deliveroo and sat in semi-darkness munching chicken dhansak and tarka daal, washed down with a 1989 Château Beychevelle he had been given by an old friend as a birthday present.

‘Doris Day,’ his father muttered as she sang ‘Que Sera Sera’ to her soon-to-be-kidnapped son. ‘Was she the one Hitchcock threw the birds at?’

‘No,’ Carradine replied. ‘That was Tippi Hedren.’

‘Ah.’

He tore off a strip of peshawari naan and passed it to his father saying: ‘Did you know she was Melanie Griffith’s mother?’

‘Who? Doris Day?’

‘No. Tippi Hedren.’

After a brief pause, his father said: ‘Who’s Melanie Griffith?’

It was after midnight by the time the film finished. Carradine did the washing-up and ordered an Uber.

‘So you’re off to Casablanca?’ His father was standing in the hall, leaning on the walking stick which he had carried with him since his stroke. ‘Research on the new book?’

‘Research, yes,’ Carradine replied. He detested the lie.

‘Never been myself. They say it’s not like the film.’

‘Yeah. I heard that.’

His father jutted out his chin and pulled off a passable impression of Humphrey Bogart.

‘You played it for her. You play it for me. Play it.’

Carradine hugged him. He tried to imagine what life in the Service must have been like in the 1960s. He pictured smoke-filled rooms, tables piled high with dusty files, men in double-breasted suits plotting in secure speech rooms.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I love you, too. Take care of yourself out there. Call me when you land.’

‘I will.’

Carradine opened the front door and stepped outside.

‘Kit?’

He turned to face his father. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m proud of you.’

7

Carradine had been on the Gatwick Express for only a few minutes when he saw the photograph. He was seated alone at a table in a near-deserted carriage finishing off a cappuccino and a fruit salad from M&S. A passenger had left a copy of the Guardian on a seat across the aisle. Carradine had picked up the paper and begun to read about developments in the Redmond kidnapping. The Transit van, which had been stolen from a North London car park, had been found abandoned and burned out at the edge of a wood not far from Henley-on-Thames. CCTV showed a bearded man wearing a woollen hat filling the van up with diesel in Cricklewood a few hours before Redmond was seized. Resurrection sympathisers had now claimed responsibility for the kidnapping but no images of Redmond in captivity had been released. ‘Experts’ quoted in the article drew comparisons with the kidnapping of Otis Euclidis, pointing out that Resurrection had waited ten days before publishing footage of an apparently healthy and well-rested Euclidis sitting on a bed in an undisclosed location reading a book. The same experts claimed that the police were at a loss to know where Redmond was being held. At the bottom of the story there was a small box directing readers to a longer piece on the history of the Resurrection movement. Carradine had turned to the back of the paper, intending to read it.

Beneath the headline on the article was a layout of four pictures arranged in a square, each of them about the same size as the passport photograph of ‘Maria’ that Mantis had given to Carradine in Lisson Grove. The photograph in the top left-hand corner showed Redmond taking part in a reality television show several years earlier. Beside it was a picture of Euclidis in characteristic Instagram pose, wearing a white, gold-encrusted baseball cap, a gold crucifix medallion and outsized designer sunglasses. The photograph in the bottom left-hand corner showed Nihat Demirel, a pro-government talk-show host in Turkey who had been kneecapped by Resurrection outside his summer house in Izmir in May. It was the fourth picture that rocked Carradine.

He had seen the photograph before. It showed Ivan Simakov, the deceased leader of Resurrection, standing beside the woman who was reported to have been his girlfriend when the movement was conceived: Lara Bartok. Carradine stared at her. She had long, dark hair and slightly crooked front teeth. It was ‘Maria’.

He reached into his wallet. He placed the photograph of Maria alongside the picture of Bartok. There was no question that they were the same woman. He was about to pull up her Wikipedia page on his iPhone when he remembered that the search would flag. A young woman had taken a seat at the far end of the carriage. Carradine considered asking to borrow her phone to make the search but decided against it, instead reading the article for more detail on Bartok’s background. A Hungarian-born lawyer, she had met Simakov in New York and become attached to Occupy Wall Street. Described as ‘a latter-day Ulrike Meinhof’, Bartok was wanted in the United States on charges of armed assault, kidnapping and incitement to violence. She had reportedly become disillusioned with Resurrection and vanished from the couple’s apartment in Brooklyn. Several months later, Simakov was killed in Moscow.

Carradine put the newspaper to one side. The train had come to a halt at a section of track littered with cans and bottles. He stared outside, trying to work out what Mantis was up to. He assumed that the Service had recruited Bartok as an agent, persuading her to inform against Resurrection. But how had they managed to lose track of her? And why was Mantis using an untried and untested support agent to try to find her? In the Lisson Grove flat he had refused even to reveal Bartok’s name, telling Carradine that ‘several officers and support agents’ were searching for her in places as far afield as Mexico, Cuba and Argentina. If that was the case, it was plausible that she was no longer a source for British intelligence, but instead a fugitive from justice. Carradine had learned enough from his father about the workings of the Service to know that they were not a law enforcement agency. There had to be another reason behind Mantis’s search. Carradine recalled the wistfulness with which he had spoken about her beauty, his irritation with the photograph of her surfer boyfriend. As the train began to move away, he wondered if Mantis was romantically involved with her. That might explain the furtiveness with which he had spoken about ‘Maria’.

Gatwick airport was rammed. Carradine checked the suitcase containing the book and the sealed package into the hold and cleared security without any complications. He was carrying €1,000 of Mantis’s money in his wallet and the other €2,000 inside an envelope in his carry-on bag. The departure gate for the flight with Royal Air Maroc was a twenty-minute walk from security along increasingly deserted corridors leading further and further away from the heart of the terminal. A flight attendant wearing a headscarf and heavy mascara clicked a counter for every passenger that came on board. Carradine was one of the last to take his seat. He glanced at the counter as he passed her. There were fewer than fifty passengers on the plane.

As the flight took off, Carradine had the vivid sensation that he was leaving the old part of his life behind and entering a new phase which would in every way be more challenging and satisfying than the life he had known before. His thoughts again turned to Bartok. Was Mantis using him to try to get a personal message to her? If so, how could he guarantee that Carradine would find her at the festival? Was she a fan of his books? Did the Service think that she was going to show herself at his event? Perhaps she wanted to meet Katherine Paget, the novelist with whom he was due to appear on stage.

The sealed package was somewhere beneath Carradine’s feet in the chill of the baggage hold; he knew that it would contain the answers to his many questions and felt his professional obligation to Mantis dissipating with every passing mile. He did not consider himself to be particularly cynical or suspicious, but neither would he enjoy the feeling of being duped. He needed to know what was inside the envelope. If that meant breaking his promise to the Service, so be it.

About an hour into the flight, Carradine was handed a small tray with a plastic knife and fork and told that alcohol was not served by the airline. Craving a beer, he ate a tiny, vacuum-packed trout fillet with a bread roll and something the flight attendant claimed was chicken casserole. Leaving most of it unfinished, he decided to go for a stroll. As he passed his fellow passengers bent over their in-flight meals, Carradine could hear a man with a deep, resonant voice speaking in Spanish near the toilets at the rear of the plane. He assumed that the man was talking to a friend, but when he reached the galley he saw that he was alone. His back was turned and he was looking out of the window. He was wearing shorts and a black T-shirt. Religious tattoos completely covered his arms and the backs of his hands. There were tufts of black body hair protruding from the neck of his T-shirt. He was holding a mobile phone perpendicular to his mouth and appeared to be dictating notes. Carradine spoke very little Spanish and could not understand what he was saying. The man sensed that Carradine was behind him and turned around.

‘Sorry. You want the bathroom, man?’

The accent was Hispanic, the face about forty-five. He was well-built but not overtly muscular, with long, greasy hair gathered in a topknot. Though not fully bearded, at least three days of dense stubble ran in a continuous black shadow from beneath his eyes to the hollow of his collarbone. He was one of the hairiest people Carradine had ever seen.

‘No thanks. I’m just going for a walk.’

The man lowered the phone. He was smiling with forced sincerity, like a technique he had been taught at a seminar on befriending strangers. Carradine had the bizarre and disorienting sensation that the man knew who he was and had been waiting for him.

‘Out on the wing?’

‘What?’

‘You said you were going for a walk.’

Carradine rolled with the joke. ‘Oh. That’s right. Yes. So if you wouldn’t mind stepping aside I’ll just open the door and head out.’

An eruption of laughter, a roar so loud it might have been audible in the cockpit. An elderly Arabic woman emerged from one of the bathrooms and flinched.

‘Hey! I like you!’ said the man. He leaned a hand against the doorframe and shook out a crick in his neck. ‘Where you from?’

Carradine explained that he was from London. ‘And you?’

‘Me? I’m from everywhere, man.’ He looked like a mid-level drug dealer attached to a Colombian cartel: dishevelled, poorly educated, very possibly violent. ‘Born in Andalucía. Raised in Madrid. Now I live in London. Heading out to Morocco for some R & R.’

They shook hands. The Spaniard’s grip suggested prodigious physical force.

‘Ramón,’ he said. ‘Great to meet you, man.’

‘Kit. You too.’

‘So what you doing in Casablanca?’

Carradine went with the story he had agreed with Mantis.

‘I’m a novelist. Doing some research on my next book.’

The Spaniard again exploded with enthusiasm. ‘A writer! Holy shit, man! You write books?’ Carradine thought back to his first encounter with Mantis. There was something similarly inauthentic about Ramón. ‘You get any of them published?’

‘A few, yeah.’

‘Wow! So cool!’

A flight attendant came into the galley, obliging Carradine to step to one side. She was slim and attractive. Ramón stared at her as she bent down to retrieve a bottle of water from one of the catering boxes. He gazed open-mouthed at the outline of her uniform, all of the liveliness and energy in his face momentarily extinguished. He looked up, pursed his lips and shot Carradine a locker-room leer.

‘Nice, huh?’

Carradine changed the subject.

‘What do you do for R & R in Casablanca?’

It turned out to be the wrong question.

‘Oh man! The chicks in Morocco. You don’t know?!’ The flight attendant stood up, stared at Ramón with undisguised contempt and made her way back down the aisle. ‘Last time I was there, I meet this girl in a bar on the Corniche. She takes me to this apartment, we open a bottle of whisky and then – bang! Oh Kit, man! One of the great nights of my life. This chick, she was …’

Ramón’s recollection tailed off as a young child, accompanied by his father, was led to the bathroom. Carradine seized his chance to get away.

‘Well, it was interesting to meet you,’ he said.

‘You heading off?’

Ramón sounded distraught, almost as if he had been tasked with befriending Carradine and been judged to have failed.

‘Yeah. I’ve got stuff to read. Work to do. Just wanted to stretch my legs.’

‘Oh. OK. Sure. Great to meet you. You’re a cool cat, Kit. I like you. Good luck with those books!’

Carradine returned to his seat, oddly unsettled by the encounter. He remained there for the rest of the flight. He thought that he had seen the last of the Spaniard but, having landed and cleared passport control in Casablanca, found himself standing next to him in the baggage hall. As they waited for their respective suitcases, some of the last remaining passengers to be doing so, Ramón continued to grill Carradine on his life and career, to the point at which he began to wonder if he was testing his cover.

‘So, what? You’re writing a kind of spy story set in Morocco? Like a Jason Bourne thing?’

Carradine had always thought that his novels occupied a literary space equidistant between the kiss-kiss-bang-bang of Ludlum and the slow-burn chess games of le Carré. For reasons of intellectual vanity, he would ordinarily have tried to distance himself from Ramón’s description, but he was keen to stop talking about his work. As a consequence, he readily conceded that his ‘Moroccan thriller’ was going to be ‘full of guns and explosions and beautiful women’.

‘Like The Man Who Knew Too Much?’

Carradine thought of his father the night before munching naan bread and drinking claret. He didn’t think the comparison was accurate, but couldn’t be bothered to enter into a debate about it.

‘Exactly,’ he replied.

Ramón had spotted his bag moving along the carousel. He stepped forward, picked it up, slung the bag across his shoulder and turned around.

‘You wanna share a cab into town, man?’

Had this been his plan all along? To get alongside Carradine and to accompany him into Casablanca? Or was he merely an over-familiar tourist trying to do a fellow passenger a favour? Out of the corner of his eye Carradine saw his suitcase jerking along the carousel.

‘My bag will probably be a while longer,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry. The food on the flight was terrible. I’m going to grab something to eat in the terminal. You go ahead. Have a great trip.’

Ramón looked at the carousel. Three suitcases remained, two of which had passed them several times. Betraying an apparent suspicion, he shook Carradine’s hand, reiterated how ‘truly fantastic’ it had been to meet him and walked towards the customs area. Relieved to be shot of him, Carradine sent a WhatsApp to Mantis telling him that he had arrived, checked that the novel and the sealed package were still inside his case and walked out into the broiling Moroccan afternoon.

He had expected the chaos and clamour of a typical African airport, but all was relatively quiet as he emerged from the terminal. A hot desert wind was blowing in from the east, bending the tops of the palm trees and sending swirls of leaves and dust across the deserted concourse. Men in jeans and Polo shirts were perched on concrete blocks smoking in the shade of the terminal building. When they saw Carradine, they popped up and moved forwards, crowding him like paparazzi, repeating the phrase ‘Taxi mister, taxi’ as he tried to move between them. Carradine could see Ramón less than fifty metres away at the top of the rank standing next to a pranged beige Mercedes. He was negotiating a price with the driver. The Spaniard looked up, waving Carradine forward shouting: ‘Get in, man! Join me!’ Carradine was already uncomfortably hot. He was irritated by the drivers trying to force him towards their cars and intrigued enough by Ramón to want to know why he had taken such an interest in him. Was he working for the Service? Had Mantis sent him with instructions to keep an eye on the new kid on the block? Carradine raised a hand in acknowledgement as Ramón continued to gesture him forward. Should he stay or should he go? His curiosity began to tip the balance. Where was the harm in sharing a ride into town? He might even learn something. He duly rolled his suitcase towards the Mercedes and greeted Ramón for the third time.