Tracers

FORTY-NINE

Harry’s mobile rang fifteen minutes later. They were seated at a corner table of a deserted lounge in a four-star international hotel along the Bayswater Road. The Saab was out the back, tucked discreetly behind a laurel bush. A porter had departed to get them some coffee. Harry glanced at the screen, but the number was withheld.

‘Major?’ he replied.

‘I’m afraid not. Who is this?’ The voice was hard-edged, the accent neutral.

Harry hesitated. If it wasn’t Marshall, there was only one person it could be: his deputy, Richard Ballatyne. ‘My name’s Harry,’ he replied, and glanced at his watch. Anything over a minute was pushing their luck; if Marshall was leading them on, he could have an active unit abseiling down around their ears before they knew what had hit them.

But the caller had anticipated that. ‘Relax, Mr Tate,’ he said brusquely. ‘Nobody’s playing tricks here.’

Damn. They had his name. Harry was stunned. ‘We know about Ferris, too,’ the man told him. ‘Marshall recognized your face from that business in Red Station, Georgia, and we ran a search of known associates. Harry — if I may call you that? — I’ve got some bad news.’

‘Go on.’ Christ, he thought, what was worse than knowing you were no longer invisible and that the massed forces of the State could pick you up whenever they felt like it?

‘Andrew Marshall is dead.’

The words took a long moment to assimilate. Dead? But how? They’d only been speaking a short while ago. The waiter chose that moment to arrive, and Harry signalled at Rik to get rid of the man. Even just one side of this sort of conversation was hard to disguise. Rik caught on quickly, taking the tray before the waiter could begin to unload it and hustling him out of earshot with a hefty tip.

‘How did it happen?’ Harry finally managed to ask.

‘He was knifed in the back about a hundred yards from this office. He died instantly.’ The words came with the unemotional tones of a newsreader, but behind it Harry detected a restrained sense of anger.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, knowing how lame it sounded. ‘When did this happen?’

‘Within the last hour. The people who found him thought he’d had a heart attack and got him to a hospital. He’d been dropped off by his driver to walk the last couple of hundred yards to the office, something he liked to do. We’re running CCTV footage of the street right now. I don’t hold out much hope of seeing anything to help us, though. Someone said they saw a biker on the same stretch of pavement, but it’s not much to go on. Whoever did this was a pro.’

‘Dog.’ Harry uttered the word dully, thinking of the crackle of exhaust at South Acres.

To his surprise, Ballatyne agreed. ‘We think so. We’re circulating pictures of him to all agencies. We believe he also killed another of our men earlier today, near Victoria Station. A knife in the ear. Our man had tracked him to a hostel. He got too close.’

‘You actually had him located?’ Harry felt a surge of anger at the idea that they had traced the man and had let him get away. To do this.

Ballatyne didn’t try defending the decision and Harry guessed he was already feeling as bad as a man could do over missed opportunities. ‘We messed up. At the time we didn’t know for sure what Dog’s involvement was, only that he’d dropped out of a contract assignment in Iraq while under investigation. He was on a watch list and appeared on the radar a couple of days ago. We’ve now got him on a Code Seven.’

‘What the hell is that?’ He was no longer familiar with all the security warning levels or their meanings. The world was changing too fast.

‘Locate and neutralize.’

‘You mean kill.’ He guessed from the man’s reticence that it was a Special Order, which needed neither Cabinet nor MOD approval to carry out.

‘It means what it says.’

‘What do we do now?’ Harry asked. ‘Did Marshall speak to you?’

‘Yes. Where are you?’

‘It doesn’t matter where we are. You just need to get Dog off our backs. We’ll do the rest.’

‘It’s Dog we need to talk about.’ Then a woman’s voice intruded at the other end and Ballatyne broke off. When he came back, he apologized. ‘Sorry — there’s a lot happening here. I’ll call again in ten.’ Then he was gone.

‘What’s going on?’ Rik looked wary.

Harry gave them the news about Marshall. They both looked stunned. ‘He didn’t say anything else. . just that things were happening. He’ll call back.’ He wondered if Ballatyne was playing them along in order to find out where they were. But he decided it was unlikely; he was pretty sure they hadn’t been connected long enough for a firm trace to have been made. ‘Let’s give it time.’

Joanne had been looking increasingly nervous during the telephone conversation. She stood up and rubbed her stomach. ‘I need something from the car.’ She dropped her rucksack on the chair and pulled a face. ‘Girl stuff.’

Harry nodded and handed her the car keys, and he and Rik drank coffee and waited for Ballatyne to call back. The phone rang just as Joanne returned. Harry left it muted while Rik prowled the foyer.

‘Sorry,’ Ballatyne said. ‘Where were we?’

‘You mentioned Dog.’

‘Right. From what we’ve turned up in the last couple of hours, it looks like Dog may have been around on the same course that Miss Archer took before she went to Iraq. He was listed as still serving at the time, although he’d been out of the army for some months.’

‘Somebody fudged the paperwork?’

‘Either that or he was on a retained contract we knew nothing about. There are several departments running operations requiring specialist training sessions. But that’s the least of your problems. We believe he has help, but we don’t know what they look like. Two men, that’s all we know. There’s another matter we need to talk about, but that needs to be face to face.’

In the background, Joanne excused herself and walked towards the rear of the hotel, where the signs pointed to the washrooms.

Harry considered what Ballatyne had told him. If Ballatyne didn’t know what these other two men looked like, there was no chance that he, Rik or Joanne could even begin to know.

‘Can you give me a hint?’ Then his mind whirled off in another direction as he realized something: if Dog had been on the same course as Joanne, how was it she hadn’t recognized him from the photo she’d taken in Baghdad?

‘Miss Archer,’ Ballatyne continued with uncanny timing. ‘Is she still with you?’

‘What about her?’ Harry had a sinking feeling in his chest. This wasn’t going to be good news.

‘We’ve checked all the security logs in Baghdad over the period Gordon Humphries was killed. There’s no record of Humphries having logged an outgoing call to her, asking for a meeting on the day he died. The day of the bombing.’

‘So he forgot. It happens.’ Even as he spoke, Harry knew he was barking at the moon. Humphries would have been under enormous stress in Baghdad, and missing the odd piece of paperwork would not have been unreasonable. But everything his sister had told them about her brother indicated that Humphries had been far too professional to make that kind of slip.

‘He might have,’ Ballatyne agreed reasonably. ‘But there was one incoming call for him logged that morning.’

‘Do you know who from?’

‘Not yet. There was an insurgent attack on the base perimeter at the time, and the comms corporal responsible for the log had to drop everything. We’re waiting to confirm details.’

Harry stared across the lounge in the direction Joanne had disappeared, his mind in a whirl. Had Joanne called her handler?

He glanced at the chair where she had been sitting.

Her rucksack was gone.