Assassin

14

Bill Selsey was sitting at his desk at the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, at Vauxhall Cross, London. If he got up and walked to the windows looking out on to the river Thames he could see the Gothic towers and spires of the Houses of Parliament across the water, a few hundred yards downstream. He had given his entire working life to this agency, protecting the values that parliament embodied. Now he was about to betray it all. True, it wasn't as terrible a deception as those of some of the traitors who had gone before him. He wasn't working for enemies bent on his country's destruction: he was just doing favours for a gangster. But in a way, that pettiness only made it worse. He couldn't claim he was working for any great cause. He was simply selling out.

It had all begun with Sir Perceval Wake. Selsey had helped destroy Wake's Consortium and consign him to an enforced, ignominious retirement, deep in the Shropshire countryside. But the old man had always been a compulsive networker and the love of intrigue had never left him. He had enticed Selsey down to his modest farmhouse with the promise of new revelations about the Consortium's activities. Wake had thrown Selsey a few titbits of useful information, just so that he did not return to his superiors empty-handed. That task accomplished, it had proved simple – surprisingly so, to both men – to persuade Selsey to carry out a few straightforward orders for which he would be rewarded on a scale that far outstripped his modest government salary.

Money, of course, has always been a motive for treachery. As Selsey well knew, it provided the 'M' in 'MICE', the intelligence-business acronym that described the four motivations through which undercover spies could be recruited: the other three being 'ideology', 'coercion' and 'ego'. Neither ideology nor coercion applied to Selsey. But ego, he admitted to himself, yes, that might have had something to do with it.

For years, Selsey had been a loyal second-in-command to Jack Grantham, a younger but more brilliant, more driven man. Selsey had always told himself, and anyone else who asked, that he was happy to leave the heavy lifting to someone else. Let Grantham suffer the stresses of leadership and the poison of inter-departmental politics: Selsey was happy to do a good day's work, then head home to a quiet life in the south London suburbs. But much like a loyal spouse, too long taken for granted, Selsey had begun to harbour feelings of bitterness and an urge to upset the status quo. When he was offered the chance to go behind Grantham's back, to withhold secrets and to mislead him with false information, it was as enticing as a pretty young woman offering the promise of an affair.

And it was, after all, such a little thing that had been asked of him. At some point, as yet to be determined, a mechanism would be set in motion that would end in Samuel Carver's death. Selsey had no particular reason to feel any loyalty to Carver. Nor would he be responsible for any harm that Carver suffered. He would just be one cog in a much bigger machine, one step on a long road, and for this small favour he would receive a total of two hundred thousand pounds, tax-free, in a Cayman Islands account.

The first fifty thousand was already sitting there, enough to enable Selsey to think, I've earned more than you this year, old boy, whenever Grantham's casual arrogance became more than usually irritating. The second instalment would soon follow. For Selsey had just received his first instructions.

He was ordered to investigate the poisoning of an Indian people-trafficker called Tiger Dey. To help him in this task, he was advised to examine the passenger manifests of an Emirates Airlines flight from London to Dubai, and to check relevant CCTV footage at both Dubai and Heathrow airports. He was also given a contact in the Dubai police, who would provide him with access to the official investigation of Dey's murder – an investigation that had, unusually, begun while its subject was still, just, alive. Finally, he was supplied with the number of a recently opened account at a Zurich bank, and the name of a former prostitute who would be able to assist in his inquiries.

Taken together, he was assured, these leads would provide a great deal of information. All he had to do, for now at any rate, was to use this information to arouse Jack Grantham's interest, and persuade him that Samuel Carver had started killing again. From then on, events would take care of themselves.

Selsey had assigned a junior agent to do the donkey work. Provided with the passenger list he had quickly spotted the name 'James Conway Murray' and recognized it at once as one of Carver's known aliases. He had the relevant footage pulled from Heathrow Terminal Three's cameras. As always, the footage was infuriatingly indistinct, but there certainly was a man who answered to Carver's general description, carefully keeping his face away from any direct exposure to the cameras with a skill that only an experienced professional would possess.

Selsey asked for any records of further flights by Murray and was rewarded with a BA ticket to San Francisco, leaving three days after the Dubai job. There was no flight yet between Dubai and London – he would have to keep looking for that. Meanwhile Murray had gone to the States. That would be a lead worth following in due course.

He put in a call to Dubai, beginning the negotiations that would get him the police reports. The local detectives had already concluded that Dey's killer must have been the Englishman who had sat with him at the Karama Pearl Hotel. They had interviewed Dey's bodyguards without success: they would not squeal to the police, not even on their boss's killer. But Selsey's call made the Dubaians suspect that someone in London knew who the man was. So the deal was obvious: the reports in exchange for the name. Selsey told them he would think about it.

He also had to start the process of extracting information from the Swiss bank. With any luck the people there would be cooperative: the Swiss were far more open than they used to be. Otherwise he'd have to use more underhand methods. He also needed a way into that refuge where the prostitute was hiding. All that would require resources, and for that he needed Grantham's approval. It was time to approach his boss… and start lying in his face. Jack Grantham sat back in his chair and rubbed his forehead, trying to ease his tension and fatigue. He let out a long slow exhalation, then leaned forward and looked at Selsey standing on the far side of his desk.

'I'm sorry, Bill, but I just don't buy it. The last I heard, Carver was doing high-end security work. He tells nervous billionaires and politicians how to keep themselves safe. He even does dummy attacks, just to test their protection. The pay's good. There's no danger. He doesn't feel like shit thinking about what he's done. Why would he want to go back to wet jobs?'

'Maybe he's strapped for cash. Plenty of people are these days. I don't really know why he's done it. I'm just looking at a pile of evidence that says he has.'

'Well, how did we get dragged into this anyway?'

'A private call from Dubai,' said Selsey, pleased that he could now stick to something that had a grain of truth. 'The authorities there already know that Dey's killer is British. They think it would be good for the continued friendship between our two peoples if we helped identify him.'

'Forget it. We're not going to do their bloody plod-work for them. If they arrest a suspect and he happens to be British, it's a straightforward Foreign Office matter, nothing to do with us.'

'Unless he actually is Carver,' mused Selsey, delighted that Grantham had given him an opening. 'We wouldn't necessarily want him falling into anyone else's hands, would we? Not with what he knows.'

'No, we bloody wouldn't…' Grantham muttered. He had made deals with Carver, deals that would be very embarrassing indeed were they ever to be made public. It wouldn't be good for a senior MI6 officer to be exposed as a close associate of a paid killer. He shook his head. 'I still can't work out what's really happening here. I mean, what if someone's framing Carver, using him as camouflage to hide what they're up to?'

'Seems a bit elaborate,' said Selsey, trying to sound a lot more relaxed about the speed of Grantham's thought processes than he actually felt.

'Maybe, but even so, I'm not entirely sure about this.'

'Still, there's no harm in looking a bit deeper, eh? We might as well find out what's going on, just to keep our own back well covered.'

'That's always worth doing,' Grantham agreed. 'All right, Bill, dig around. Tell me what you find. And don't tell anyone else.'

'Of course not,' said Selsey. 'You can count on me.'