Deception

FORTY-ONE

Six thirty next morning, and Harry found sleep elusive. It was too early to call Fort Knox, so he ran through Paulton’s details on the data stick. He came up for air at one point and phoned Rik to see how he was progressing with his search for Vanessa Tan.

‘Nothing yet,’ said Rik. ‘But it doesn’t mean there isn’t something out there.’ There was the sound of key taps in the background, then, ‘Point is, we’re not the only ones looking.’

Harry gripped the phone. ‘Explain.’

‘I put a couple of mates on to it. . told them it was a simple trace for an insurance job. More hands make light work, that sort of thing.’

‘And?’

‘They both came back with the same message. They’d bumped into other searches for the same name. Queries left on forums, the name Tan fed into search engines to see what came up — pretty much what I’ve been doing. There was even a back-door search made through an airline database, but it bombed out when the searcher tripped an alarm.’

The Protectory.

This had turned into a race. ‘What’s your best guess?’

‘If we haven’t found anything so far, it means she went off the grid as soon as she ran. In fact. .’ He paused. More taps on the keyboard.

‘What?’ Harry fought to remain patient. Rik often mused aloud as he typed, as if using his fingers to drive his thought processes. In Harry’s experience, it was best to let him mumble away, but this was getting urgent.

‘To have disappeared so completely, she’d have needed to stop leaving a trail way before that. But there’s nothing.’

‘How do you mean, nothing?’

‘You sure you want to hear this?’

‘Can you hear my hand coming down the line?’

‘It’s like she never existed.’

Harry was stumped. Not even the dead vanish so completely that they don’t leave some trace behind. Unless. .

‘Could someone have erased her back-trail, or whatever you call it?’

‘History. I don’t know. I’ve heard whispers about a programme that can do it, developed by webmasters working for the National Security Agency. They’d certainly have the budget and the means to carry it out, but it would be a hell of a task. If it’s true, though, it would be like a giant search engine which simply gobbles up any mention of the target name and wipes it off the records. There one second, gone the next. The main problem is, if they weren’t very careful, it would wipe out all other Tans, too. But I know that hasn’t happened.’

‘How?’

‘Easy. I fed the name into Google. If I told you how many hits it got, your head would explode. The main question is, even if they’ve managed to wipe out her individual history, why go to those extremes for one junior officer? What are they trying to hide?’

Another answer Harry didn’t have. But they couldn’t give up now, especially with the Protectory out there, too. ‘Keep looking.’

‘Sure. How deep do you want me to go?’ The question was casual, but the tone of voice wasn’t. Rik was getting impatient, both with not being able to turn up something useful and being cooped up nursing his shoulder. As Harry knew well, when that happened, he was in danger of letting his fingers do the walking into areas best left alone — the very thing that had got him assigned out of MI5 in the first place.

‘You know the answer to that,’ he said neutrally. Rik possessed skills that could save a lot of time and legwork. Preventing him using those skills for what could be a global search seemed a chronic waste of talent. But if he took care, what could be the harm? ‘Can you use a. . what is it called — a proxy?’

The smile was evident in Rik’s voice. ‘Oh, dude,’ he drawled, ‘you’re so beyond ancient it’s like. . prehistory. Fortunately, I know what you mean. I’ll get back to you.’

Harry switched off the phone and went back to studying the file on Paulton. It amounted to precious little, and nothing to get his teeth into. The official records had been pared down to the bare minimum, large chunks of text having no doubt been black-lined at source to conceal sensitive information. What was left contained no personal clues to the man behind the name — or names, in Paulton’s case — giving only a skeleton of facts from a life spent on the move, serving in various locations including Northern Ireland, the US, Afghanistan and Colombia — the last two on attachment with the Drug Enforcement Administration, waging war on the Cartels and other traffickers — and with many gaps in the narrative which Harry translated as working undercover, and therefore classified for all eternity. It seemed ironic to him that a man like Paulton, who had been running an illegal operation that broke all the rules of the Security Service, should now be protected by the official protocol he had so clearly despised.

But railing against it would do no good; he had to work with what he had. And that, he was forced to conclude after reading and re-reading the files, was next to nothing. Paulton had turned out to have been a master of security, even among his peers. A list of fellow MI5 officers was attached, all of whom had been interviewed. Their names were blanked out, but their comments confirmed what Harry already knew: that George Henry Paulton had lived and worked among them, yet had remained an unknown quantity, even within an organization that prided itself on its sense of family, of shared ideals and goals. Paulton had been the odd fish, with no leads, no handy family connections to be pressured, no habits which might betray him and reveal his location, no long-term friends. He had been a true everyman, colourless, self-effacing, leaving no trace and nothing in his wake.

Harry stared at the wall with a mild sense of frustration. There was only one thing for it: if he couldn’t get to Tan and ultimately to Paulton, he would have to wait for Paulton to come to him.

Seconds later, his phone rang.

‘Harry?’ It was Jean.

Her voice brought an instant feeling of disquiet. ‘Hi, you. What is it?’

‘Umm. . I don’t want to ask silly questions,’ she said carefully, ‘but. . are you having me followed?’