London N1
Jack Granthamwas having a hard time relaxing. On the surface, everything appeared to be going well. He was sitting in the living room of his Islington flat. He had a glass of Scotch on the table by his side. The TV was on in the background, and he was reading a hardback spy thriller, set in the early eighties, about a KGB sleeper who had penetrated British intelligence. Grantham wasn’t a big fan of spy novels. He spent too many hours dealing with the realities of secret intelligence to bother with the fiction. This, however, was the debut effort by Dame Agatha Bewley, the one-time Head of the Security Service, known as ‘SS’ to Whitehall insiders, and MI5 to the rest of the world. He’d always admired Dame Agatha, despite their regular inter-service disputes, and was now smiling to himself as he enjoyed the characteristically canny ways in which she’d managed to convey a sense of absolute authenticity, while leaving out any unduly revealing insights into how the job was actually done.
It was very nearly an enjoyable experience, spoiled only by the thought that niggled and itched at the back of his mind. The Malachi Zorn investigation was bothering him. By any logical analysis of the threats facing the United Kingdom, Grantham had been right to make it a low priority. Still, that throwaway remark about Zorn bringing down Lehman Brothers Bank as a rehearsal for a far bigger stunt wormed away at him, making it impossible to relax.
Grantham tried to distract himself by looking at the news. A TV production company, working on some kind of Candid Camera — style reality show, had caused a riot at a restaurant on the Greek island of Mykonos by staging a fake attack by a couple of gunmen. By pure chance — in no way connected with the TV people’s desire for global publicity — a passing tourist just happened to have been filming the scene using a high-definition video-camera.
Grantham glanced up at the sound of gunfire and watched as two men appeared, blew the head off a live pelican (the bird’s death, the newsreader solemnly intoned, had caused outrage and controversy around the world), and then appeared to kill a woman in cold blood. Grantham watched the panic that ensued, while the voice-over described how a British tourist had been injured in the melee and was now threatening to sue both the restaurant owner and the TV company. Grantham was just about to switch channels when something caught his eye.
He rewound the scene, then watched it again twice more. On the second time through, he froze the image at a particular point. Several hours earlier he had done exactly the same thing with the feed from Malachi Zorn’s Italian party and spotted Alix. Now here was another face with which Grantham was all-too familiar: her ex-boyfriend Samuel Carver. And however much trouble she brought into Grantham’s life, Carver brought infinitely more.
‘That’s all we need,’ Grantham muttered to himself. He ran through the scene a couple more times, just to make sure that his instinctive reaction to it had been correct. Yes, there was no doubt: Carver had tried to make his escape and been pursued by the gunmen. Grantham couldn’t believe Carver would ever have consented to clown around for the benefit of a TV camera. He was genuinely running for his life.
‘Well, so what?’ Grantham told himself. Carver was no more a concern of his than Malachi Zorn. And yet, like Zorn’s ‘rehearsal’, Carver’s image on that TV screen kept gnawing away at him.
He spent a moment or two wondering what, if anything, he should do, then called the office. A junior officer, assigned to night-duty, picked up the call.
‘This is Grantham,’ his boss informed him. ‘Get me passenger manifests for all flights in and out of Mykonos, Greece, in the past, oh… seventy-two hours. Ferry traffic, too, if you can get it. And CCTV footage. Then cross-ref it with our databases: names and faces. I want to see if anyone we’re interested in has paid a visit there recently.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And if you find anything, call me. I don’t care what time it is. Call anyway.’
Grantham put down the phone. He gazed at the frozen image on his TV screen, then turned off the set. He put the book down on the side-table next to the now-empty whisky glass. Then he hauled himself off up to bed.