The hidden man

28

‘I’ll tell you one thing. Seb wants to fuck my sister-in-law.’

‘Come again?’ said Taploe.

‘They had lunch a week ago. I saw the appointment in his diary.’

‘Yes, we noticed that. Did you say anything?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Not to him. To her.’

‘No. She’d only lie about it, say it was for a story or something.’

Taploe took a Kleenex out of a small Cellophane packet, blew his nose into it and said, ‘Has she been unfaithful to Ben before?’

Mark paused, wondering if the question was relevant to their investigation or simply an invasion of his family’s privacy.

‘Why don’t you ask her?’ he said eventually. ‘I imagine so, yes. It’s not something I like to think about. Besides, they may only have had lunch. There is that possibility.’

Taploe scrunched the Kleenex into a tight ball and dropped it on the floor beside the accelerator. They were sitting in a Security Service Astra in the basement car park of a Hammersmith hotel. It was an excessive precaution: Taploe might just as well have met Mark in the broad daylight of a London park, but he felt it useful to create an atmosphere of suspense.

‘Is Ben faithful to her?’ he asked.

‘What, brother? Screw around behind Alice’s back? Christ no. She’d cut his dickoff. Ben hasn’t looked at another woman since 1993. He once copped off with a girl on a stag weekend — long time before they were married — and Alice didn’t let him forget it for years. Constant nagging, guilt trips, endless fucking about. You would have thought he’d got the girl pregnant, the way she carried on.’

Taploe sniffed.

‘Sorry,’ Mark said, sensing that he wanted to get back to business. ‘You were saying about the stuff I got from Kennington.’

‘Yes, we’re still examining it.’ Taploe was hoping to conceal the fact that it had proved largely useless.

‘And the disks?’

‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’

‘Just old crap?’

‘Just exactly that.’

A bottle-green Audi swung out in front of the Astra, blinding them briefly with the sweep of its headlights. Mark was concerned that the driver might see his face and he shielded it as Taploe opened the window and tapped his thumb on the steering wheel.

‘Let’s talk for a moment about the computers.’ Mark seized on this.

‘That’s what I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Surely you have a way of hacking into our network from the outside? You can read anything that comes out of there.’

‘Used to,’ Taploe replied. It was a moment of uncharacteristic candour. ‘We lost that level of surveillance three weeks ago. A manpower issue. And your firewall was changed last month.’

‘Terrific.’

He omitted to add that the entire Kukushkin operation was gradually, inevitably, being pushed to one side. Lack of concrete evidence. Death of a joe. The Wise Men had lost their faith in Taploe and were moving on to pastures new.

‘But it shouldn’t make any difference,’ he said. ‘That’s why you’re so important to us. With you on the inside we can get at everything we need.’

‘How?’ Mark asked. ‘Everything sensitive is password protected. I was trying to get into Mack’s email system…’

‘… There is an alternative,’ Taploe interrupted.

‘An alternative?’

‘Does Libra have technical back-up? A team of troubleshooters who come in if your network goes down?’

‘Sure they do. The people we bought the computers from.’

‘And where do you keep the file server?’

‘In the basement,’ Mark said.

It was as if the idea had only in that instant fused in Taploe’s mind, regardless of the fact that Quinn had conceived the plan two days earlier. He said, ‘Then let’s kill two birds with one stone.’

‘I’m not following.’

‘Next week- we’ll set a date — at a specified time, ideally when Macklin and Roth are out of the building, my people will stage-manage a computer attack at your offices in Soho. In other words, put a virus into the network from the outside. All the computers go down. Secretaries start to panic, people lose their work. Now, in the absence of Roth and Macklin, you’re the man in charge, is that correct?’

‘Correct.’

‘So it would be you who would call in the technicians?’

‘Not necessarily. Sam would do it, the office manager. But she’s just gone on maternity leave.’

It felt like Taploe’s first stroke of luck in weeks.

‘Good. Then you’re the one who makes the call. As soon as the network goes down, inform the staff that help is on its way. Only you’ve telephoned us. Your normal technicians never need to know. Instead, we send A-Branch plumbers who fix the system, copy every hard drive in the building and get access to the basement safe, all inside three or four hours.’

‘You can do that?’

‘We can do that,’ Taploe said. ‘Closer to the time, we’ll go through it all in more detail. For now, you should be getting back to work.’