Deception

THIRTY-EIGHT

‘I wish I’d been there.’ Rik Ferris looked disgruntled at having missed out on some fun. Harry had called at his flat to bring him up to date on events and to see how he was progressing with his trawl for information on Vanessa Tan.

‘Good job you weren’t,’ said Harry. ‘You’d have slowed us down.’ He smiled to show he was joking and took a pair of pistols out of a leather briefcase he’d brought with him. They were German H amp;K VP70 semi-automatics.

Rik’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘Jesus — what’s this?’

‘The difference between life and death.’ Harry handed him a magazine. ‘Nine millimetre, eighteen-round mags, courtesy of a now defunct south London gang. If Zubac and Ganic come after us, we’re going to need them.’

‘How did you get hold of them?’ Rik picked up one of the guns and checked the mechanism. Both weapons had the patina of past use, but were clean and ready to go.

‘Ballatyne pulled some strings. They’re not logged to anyone, but if we have to lose them, make sure they stay lost.’

‘You think they’ll come, even after what they did in Brixton?’

Harry nodded. ‘Especially after what they did in Brixton. They don’t take failure very well, nor does Deakin. With McCreath banged up and out of reach, they’ll be concentrating even more on going after a prime target like Tan. . that’s if they haven’t already found her. But to do that, they’ll want me out of the way.’

Rik looked at him. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Because it’s what I would do.’

Rik put the gun down on the table with the magazine aligned alongside it. ‘Apart from watching our backs, where do we go from here?’

‘We keep looking for Tan. She’s the key to this. If we find her, we’ll eventually find Deakin and the others.’

‘And Paulton.’

‘And Paulton.’ It always came back to Paulton. Maybe his former boss had become an obsession, just as Ballatyne had suggested. But trying to ignore his part in the picture wasn’t going to help; he was a constant, hovering in the background like a ghost, an itch Harry couldn’t scratch. He rubbed his face and forced himself to rationalize. After the events of the morning and the dramatic flight through the police station, he was feeling numbed, as if he’d come down off a chemical high. The truth was, though, he’d been concentrating so much on the other runners, he’d given little more thought to finding Tan. And she was worrying him. For a high-profile young female army officer, Tan had disappeared completely. Too completely. With no back-story he could use to figure out where she might have gone, and no family history or recent employment details other than the sparse MOD material, it was like staring into a dense fog.

‘I haven’t found anything yet,’ Rik admitted, as if reading his mind. ‘I even checked all the social network sites like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and others, but there’s been nothing. I’ve got a couple of friends working on the name, too — and one is using the photo to link in to FR systems at airports. It’s slow going, though.’

Harry nodded. It was a long shot. Facial recognition systems were still not readily available in all international airports, and the chances of Vanessa Tan doing them a favour by appearing on one at the right moment were slim. But it was another avenue to explore. He sat down and stared at the ceiling, trying to work through the problem. There was something right there, back at the beginning, which was bugging him. ‘Why would someone on the run,’ he said aloud, ‘set up a system for managing a property left to deteriorate, and pay phone rental on a machine which is never used? What would be the point? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Keeping a bolthole, just in case?’ said Rik.

And what about the bank details? There had to be a link somewhere, Harry reasoned. ‘Anyone arranging regular payments through a bank has to leave some kind of trail. Christ, they certainly know how to chase me quickly enough when something goes wrong.’

Rik shook his head. ‘I checked and double-checked. Nothing doing. Somehow the system got wiped, but left instructions and funds enough to keep paying.’ He glanced at Harry and added, ‘Of course, there’s always the possibility that it was done deliberately. But why would they?’

There was only one reason Harry could think of. It was a major one and went right to the heart of international espionage practice: that of penetrating a foreign bureaucracy or military infrastructure and working on the inside. It would mean the current Vanessa Tan was a sleeper, a spy gathering information, data and the confidence of some of the most important military officers in the world. Yet, if that had been her sole role, whoever was running her could not have guaranteed the Cambridge graduate ever making it into the army, let alone gaining access to any of the information they wanted. Getting run over by a Cambridge bus would have been just as high on the cards.

Unless she had been just one of a handful of sleepers, her controllers playing the odds that at least one of them would succeed and find their way inside. If so, it spoke of people playing very long odds indeed. And that narrowed down the field considerably. Harry put that thought to one side. There was nothing he could do about it right now. Instead he had to concentrate on finding Tan. If she was a sleeper, the switch must have been made after leaving Cambridge and applying for the army. If so, that cut down the timeframe. But it still didn’t tell him who was running her.

And why would she drop out at such a crucial moment and position in her career? Had someone blown her cover? If so, Ballatyne would have been the first to know. Unless she’d simply lost her nerve and taken flight. She was thirty years old, still young, and the intense pressure of working in that kind of environment, storing away information while staying below the radar of constant security reviews, would have been enormous.

That raised another question: how did the people running her get the information out of her head? They couldn’t exactly download it like a stored computer file. Unless she took huge risks and put everything down in writing and passed it on by secure electronic means. He mentioned it to Rik, who looked doubtful.

‘It’s possible, but risky. Transmissions of any data going out from anywhere in Afghanistan would stand a high chance of being picked up, and an encrypted satellite phone would only be any good as long as nobody found it. Would she be allowed to carry one in her position?’

Harry had to agree. But if she didn’t pass the information online, it had to be by personal contact. That was also highly risky, but providing she was careful, she could have done it by booking into a hotel somewhere and having pre-arranged meetings with her controller in the next room.

He decided to call Ballatyne. The MI6 man came on within seconds.

‘Were there ever any doubts about Lieutenant Tan in the weeks leading up to her disappearance?’ Harry asked him.

Ballatyne hesitated, then said, ‘Not as far as I know.’ He sounded puzzled. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Her disappearance doesn’t fit. The whole set-up is odd.’

‘Odd?’

‘There’s no trace of her before or after she signed up. That’s not normal. Everyone leaves something, no matter how small.’

‘Are you suggesting she’s a sleeper?’ Ballatyne had caught on fast.

‘It’s possible. But if she is, why leave such a prime position if she didn’t have to? It’s a waste of an asset.’

There was another pause before Ballatyne said, ‘All I can say is, she had a spotless record, with exemplary conduct. But then,’ he continued, ‘if she was a sleeper, her controllers would have made sure of her legend, wouldn’t they?’

The legend — the cover story for operatives working undercover. It had to be good enough to stand up to rigorous examination, with enough strands of truth to sound convincing, yet not so many that a reasonable check would reveal unexplained holes. If Tan was a spy, her legend must have been exceptional, given the position she had achieved. Either she was genuinely clean and original or she was the cleverest insert anyone had ever put in place.

‘Whether original or a plant,’ Ballatyne pointed out, ‘we still have a problem: a person of importance has gone missing. What we don’t know is how much she has taken with her or how much she may have already passed on.’

He was right. If a foreign power had managed to strike gold by placing an asset in Tan’s position, they wouldn’t sit back for long without taking delivery of every nugget they could get their hands on. And neither would the Protectory.

‘There’s another point bugging me.’

‘Only one?’

‘How does the Protectory get a line on the deserters, and how do they identify who’s a talent and who isn’t?’

‘That’s been worrying us, too. So far I don’t like the answers we’re getting. I’ll keep you informed. Anything else?’

‘Yes. The American McCreath referred to as “Turp”. I’m guessing he’s a deserter like Deakin. There can’t be too many One-oh-One Airborne men out there on the run. Do you know who we can ask?’

‘You need to speak to the Army Deserter Information Point at Fort Knox. A Major Kenwin Dundas. He’s been cleared to help you.’ He gave Harry the relevant telephone and fax numbers to call. Harry was impressed. It showed Ballatyne had been listening carefully to McCreath and had already prepared the way for him to make contact.

‘There’s just one thing,’ Ballatyne continued. ‘If Tan is a sleeper, I think we can be fairly sure it isn’t the Guoanbu running her.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘We’ve had an interesting circular bulletin from German Counterintelligence. A “person of interest” named Wien Lu Chi has been staying at a luxury hotel in Bremen for a few days. The reason he was noticed was that a member of the German parliament was staying there with a young woman who is not his wife, and they were keeping a close watch to keep the press away. Wien Lu Chi happened to pop up on the radar. He’s a known middleman for the Chinese and a few select Middle Eastern clients, usually dealing in arms and weapons technology. Nobody knows why he was in the country, but it’s a safe bet he was up to no good. If the Chinese are running Tan, they wouldn’t need him to be involved — they’d deal direct.’

‘I take it there’s been no sighting of her in the area?’

‘No. They’ve interviewed the staff and bugged his room, but nothing has shown up yet.’ He paused, and Harry picked up on it.

‘There’s a but in there.’

‘There is. Wien Lu Chi received two visitors in the hotel before the Germans could get a bug in place. One American, one British. They left no names but the watchers got a look at the hotel’s CCTV system.’ Ballatyne’s voice contained a smile. ‘One of the men was Thomas Deakin.’