Fortress

81

The garage had once been a KwikFit, but had changed hands several times and was now owned by a company called Expo. The main windows had been bricked up with breeze blocks and there was no sign of any business being done. It was on a back-street of lock-ups and small industrial units, none of which seemed to be much in use.

Rafiq touched the wipers and the Transit’s screen cleared of the grey, greasy rain that was bucketing down. Of all the short straws, this one beat the lot. It was moments like these when he had to have a quiet laugh about signing up for MI5. Recruitment had warned him to forget James Bond, that much of the work was mundane, but that didn’t begin to cover it. And he had turned down Goldman Sachs. His best mate, who had graduated from LSE with him, was now in Manhattan pulling in a hundred K a year. And here he was sitting in a surveillance Transit on a back-street in Hatfield. Hatfield! And now it was raining. Was twenty-three too early for a mid-life crisis?

The only people he could find were a couple of guys with industrial face masks re-spraying some car wheels in a lock-up down the street, one stripped to the waist with a Union Jack tattoo on his back. At first they had paid no attention to his polite enquiry about the former KwikFit, but he persisted.

‘Do you know any of them — the guys who’ve got that place?’

The man shook his head and turned away.

‘Only I’m trying to find my brother. I think he may be working round here.’

That got them going. The tattooed man took off his mask. ‘Too many of your fuckin’ brothers over here, mate. You know what you lot should do? Fuck off home, back where you came from.’

Rafiq nodded, as if he would indeed give it some thought. ‘So they looked like me, the guys who worked there?’

‘Yeah, like you couldn’t tell them apart.’

Rafiq gave them a big smile and thanked them.

He had found forty-five garages in or near Hatfield. First he eliminated the franchised dealers and service stations, which brought the figure down to twenty-two. Then he visited each one, armed with enough innocent enquiries to get him into the back offices and have a cursory look round. Of the last three, one was a burned-out shell, the second was occupied by very pale squatters and an alarming canine menagerie — and the third was this one.

On the face of it, it appeared that no one had been there in months. There was an overflowing wheelie-bin outside and the letterbox had junk mail oozing out of it. But to Rafiq’s trained eye, it was evident that the locks had recently been turned, and there was some tell-tale condensation on a small, high window. He slipped the probe of a Borescope inspection camera under the roller door, which revealed a black people-carrier with a current tax disc.

He retreated to the Transit, reciting the registration to himself to keep the letters and numbers in sequence, and called up Cindy in the hangar for a plate check. It was with a company based in Sheffield. Fifteen minutes later she was back on the phone. ‘Interesting. The address for Expo’s in Sheffield, but the company’s been dissolved and the property in Sheffield has been re-let. I got on to the agent for the landlord, who said it was some kind of medical-aid charity. He told me it was wound up very suddenly a few weeks ago. The woman he’d been dealing with, a Leanne Grove, vanished, owing them three months’ rent. He was about to get a bailiff onto it when out of the blue all the money was wired to him from an overseas account. I persuaded him to go through his records and he found it had come from a bank in St Croix.’

‘Where the fuck’s that?’

‘Virgin Islands.’

‘Not famous for their terror cells.’

‘Not famous for anything much, apart from beaches and tax avoidance. Interesting, though.’

‘Okay, keep digging.’

He called Woolf, who told him to stay put and keep watch for anyone coming or going. The rain began to come down harder. He was about ready to pack up and leave, when the roller door started to move and the black people-carrier pulled out. Three men — two his age, one older — who could all have been his ‘brothers’ were on board.

He gave them a minute to clear the street, then returned to the garage with a parcel he had prepared and labelled with the address. He hammered on the door good and hard, shouting that he had a package needing a signature. Then he held open the letterbox and listened. The only sound was a low, intermittent murmur, which could have been a radio. He tried the camera probe again, and saw some large white tubs and cardboard packaging.

His phone buzzed.

Cindy was almost hyperventilating. ‘Are you ready for this?’

‘Go on.’

‘The account the money came from for the rent, the one in the Virgin Islands, is held by a company called Excelsior, described as an international courier company, a subsidiary of another firm that’s an agency for offshore contractors — they supply infrastructure and personnel to the oil and gas industry. I got a contact at Vauxhall Cross to see if they could dig any further into their dealings. They couldn’t come up with any names of the board or employees or anything, but elsewhere in the account details there was a big fat debit: one million two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. It’s from a numbered account but it has a forwarding address in Houston.’

Rafiq was excited now too. ‘Oryxis?’

‘No! Better than that. Remember Brandeis’s slide of Zuabi’s house? All innocent-looking and suburban?’

‘No shit!’

‘Yes shit. That’s the forwarding address!’

‘Mother of fuck.’