The hidden man

46

Torriano Avenue curves steeply uphill, left to right, but Ian Boyle had a good view of the street from his position in the Southern Electric van. He saw Mark emerge from the house at 20.25 wearing a black coat and carrying a mobile phone. It was like catching sight of an old friend in the distance: the easy, sloping walk, the way Mark’s head bobbed from side to side as if swayed by thought or music. On a typical London evening in late winter, indistinct of colour and temperature, locals drifted into the corner shop at the foot of the hill and emerged with flimsy green plastic bags filled with cans and milk and videos. A very faint mist was visible in the glow of the streetlights as Ian dialled Taploe’s number.

‘Yes?’

‘Boss. He’s leaving now. Getting into the car.’

‘Good. Contact me again if anything changes. I’m just sitting here waiting at my desk.’

Ian started the engine as Mark started his. Sounds inaudible to one another, just two vehicles leaving the street. He let Mark reach the top of the avenue before pulling out and followed the black Saab as it slipped into a stream of cars heading south along Brecknock Road.

Ian had been listening to Jazz FM while he waited and he turned up the volume on a Billie Holiday cover of ‘Summertime’, humming the tune in the shunting traffic. The job was so routine he drove almost on autopilot, keeping the van a hundred metres back from the target, separated by three, sometimes four other cars. He knew Mark to be a decent driver, quick and liable to switch lanes smoothly in the quest for space. One time, ages ago now, back when Taploe had his suspicions, he had been tailing Mark from Heathrow and lost him at the Hogarth roundabout, just disappeared into the Chiswick streets never to be seen again. Ian thought the same thing was about to happen when he saw the Saab make an unexpected turn off York Way, the two-lane north-south artery feeding traffic into King’s Cross. He was sitting high up in the van and had a decent view of Mark’s car as it steered left towards Islington.

‘Where you going, mate?’ he muttered to himself, and had to accelerate through a changing amber to stay on Mark’s tail.

They were on Market Road now, not the route Ian would have taken to the West End but maybe Blindside knew a short-cut, a trick. After all, there were roadworks in King’s Cross until April 2047, so maybe he was doing them both a favour. Still they kept heading east, crossing Caledonian Road, then directly into the heart of Islington.

‘What’s he up to?’ Ian said again, shutting off the radio to concentrate. That was when Taploe put the call through to his mobile.

‘Boss?’

‘Ian?’

‘What’s going on? I’m tailing Blindside to the hotel but it’s arse about face. He’s on his way east, taking me into Highbury.’

‘There’s some confusion,’ Taploe said.

Ian was speaking hands-free, a microphone clipped to the sun-visor above the wheel.

‘What kind of confusion?’

Taploe took a while to respond.

‘Katy has just handed me some intel. We think Tamarov may have changed the meeting. We think he may be en route to Heathrow.’

‘ Heathrow? ’

‘It’s not confirmed yet. Where’s Blindside?’

‘Like I said. Going east. I’m on…’ Ian had to look for a street sign. ‘St Paul’s Road. Nowhere near Covent Garden, in other words. Maybe he’s got errands to run.’

Again Taploe waited before responding. It sounded as if the boss was holding four conversations simultaneously.

‘That’s not the case,’ Taploe said eventually. ‘We had a tap on a call Tamarov made half an hour ago. He told Blindside he was with the Latvian in Hackney, at the new restaurant. Asked him to get there prior to the meeting at St Martin’s Lane. Then someone else phoned the hotel and changed their reservation to ten o’clock.’

‘So what’s the problem?’ Ian asked. ‘Why Heathrow?’

‘The problem is, we traced the first call to Paddington Station. Got it to within sixty feet.’

‘And where is he now?’

‘Still trying to establish that. A conversation took place immediately after Tamarov had spoken to Blindside. In Russian, the phone moving west.’

‘He was talking to our friend?’

‘To our friend.’ Taploe cleared his throat, a noise that sounded like nerves. ‘He’s not in Hackney. We think Duchev may be on his way to Helsinki. Michael lost him at five. Again it’s not confirmed. I’m trying to obtain a translation of the conversation. Of the transcript. These things take time.’

Up ahead, Ian saw Mark’s Saab, black as a silhouette, swing fast into the right-hand lane of Ball’s Pond Road, as if preparing to make a turn south. A pretty girl was jay-walking through the traffic and he thought he saw her smile in Mark’s direction. In his rear-view mirror two motorcycles, fifty feet back, were crawling single-file in the narrow gap between cars.

Taploe, his voice now pinched with stress, said: ‘I think we should get Blindside out of there. Tell him the meeting is off.’

‘You sure about that, boss?’

A beat.

‘I’m sure about that.’

Taploe didn’t sound it. He was relying on technology, a satellite hunch, on little more than a feeling that something was wrong. Up ahead, Mark indicated on the green light and Ian followed him.

‘Can you see the Saab?’ Taploe asked. He sounded demoralized and Ian felt for him: if Duchev had done a runner twenty-four hours after the boss had tried to pitch him, there’d be hell to pay.

‘He’s making a right-hander,’ he said. Then a white Fiat Punto stalled in front of Ian’s van and the lights were changing back. One of the motorcyclists passed Ian’s window, frog-walking his machine. Ian leaned on the horn. There was a second passenger, leatherclad in black, riding pillion on the back of the bike. They buzzed past the Punto and ran the red light.

‘Fuck,’ Ian said and hit the horn again. Both the bike and the Saab were no longer visible around the corner. He wondered where the second motorcycle had gone. It was the training, the intuition. One of the motorcycles was missing.

‘What’s going on?’ Taploe’s voice rose on the question. ‘Get to him, Ian. He’s not answering his mobile. Get Blindside back to Kentish Town.’

‘I’m trying, boss,’ he said. ‘I’m trying. Somebody stalled in front of the van.’

Ian noticed exhaust fumes emerging from the tailpipe of the Punto and looked up to see the back of a green Range Rover edging slowly around the corner. Good, he thought, there’s traffic on the other side, something to hold Mark up. Then he saw the missing bike, two feet back in the passenger side mirror, long female hair dropping below the helmet. Speaking to Taploe in his office, he said, ‘I think everything’s OK, boss. I think everything’s OK.’

Mark had been listening to demo tapes all the way from Torriano Avenue: new tracks from Danny Tenaglia, and a set by a French DJ he’d never heard of who was looking for a gig in London. He had turned the music up high as a reaction against the microphones installed in his car. The volume allowed him to maintain his privacy. Mark was shutting out the spooks.

Without thinking, he had thrown his mobile phone into the back of the Saab, an awkward arm-twist and stretch behind his seat. As a consequence he spent most of the journey wondering if the constant stream of voice calls and text messages was important Libra business or yet more attempts by his brother to get in touch. Mark was aware, too, that Randall might be trying to make contact, but he was committed to acting alone tonight, without interference or advice from his controller. He felt that things had worked best in the past when he had been left to his own devices; when you introduced a third party, it seemed, the business of spying became altogether more complicated.

On Ball’s Pond Road he opened an A to Z and realized that he would have to make an immediate right-hand turn at the next junction to avoid the one-way system on the approach to the restaurant. Flicking out an indicator, Mark pulled the Saab quickly into an adjacent lane, catching the eye of a pretty young girl who was weaving on foot across the traffic. She smiled at him and he grinned back, making the turn at speed. Somebody behind him blasted their horn: the noise was loud and relentless and it smothered the first and second rings of another call on his phone. Steering with his right hand, Mark stretched into the back seat and began padding around for the mobile, hitting papers, freebie T-shirts, a map, cans and bottles. He could not find the phone without looking.

‘Where are you?’ he muttered, his bicep starting to ache. Then the traffic came to a halt and he was able to twist right round in his seat. The phone was buried in his coat and Mark wrenched it out of the folds, seeing ‘Rand’ on the read-out in black.

‘Hello?’

A motorbike pulled up parallel to the driver’s door, its engine a soothing pulse. The first shot, fired by the passenger riding pillion, obliterated the window of the Saab and passed three inches behind Mark’s neck.

Taploe said, ‘Mark?’

The sound he could hear from the room in Thames House was at first indistinguishable from squelch or static. Then he heard traffic noise, and the blast of a distant horn.

The shooter could see clearly now, watching Mark turn dazed in his seat, looking up at the bike and reaching for the handle of the door. His hair and his clothes were covered in glass, shards like roughened diamonds that bit deep into his skin. The second shot killed Mark outright, a sound Taploe heard as a sustained scream because a woman had stepped out of a nearby shop and was approaching the Saab from the pavement. The bike moved off immediately, up to forty miles per hour inside five seconds and gone before Ian could see it. Alerted by the first shot, he had come around the corner on foot, and it was just as if the world had ceased to move on a switch.