The Spanish Game (25 page)

42

She told Ben as soon as she walked in the door. He was slumped on the sofa reading
Archangel
. They no longer kissed when they saw one another; merely an eye contact, a sort of shrug.

‘Listen, I talked to Michelle Peterson.’

Nothing.

‘My friend from university. You remember? The one who works for Customs and Excise.’

Ben turned a page.

‘A man calling himself Leonid Sudoplatov arrived in London on December the first last year. That’s eight days before your father was killed. He left from Heathrow on the morning of the twelfth. And he was Russian. Sixty-three years old.’

Now Ben rose from the sofa with the sluggishness of genuine surprise. The novel dropped to the floor. He might have said that it was impossible, that McCreery and Mark had disproved Bone’s theory. He might have told Alice to mind her own business and suggested with a lookthat things had moved on. But Kostov was alive, and his existence made perfect sense.

‘Did you tell Mark about this?’ Embarrassed by his behaviour in the club, Ben was wary of upsetting his brother, of making further mistakes.

‘He’s not answering his phone,’ Alice said.

‘I always knew that fucker was lying to me.’

‘Who? Mark?’

‘No. Not Mark. McCreery. Jock McCreery. I always knew he was hiding something.’

To Ben’s surprise, Alice came over and kissed him on the forehead. They both sat down.

‘McCreery said the letter was disinformation,’ she said.

‘I know. I know. And I sat in the pub and I listened to him smooth things over and I bought what he was saying, but in the back of my mind I always had this element of doubt. And then, when…’

‘… when what?’

‘Nothing.’ Ben had to checkhimself. He was about to mention Mark’s work for MI5. ‘McCreery is definitely covering for SIS,’ he said. ‘There’s something going on.’

‘Maybe somebody else is using Sudoplatov’s identity,’ Alice suggested, running her hand through his hair. ‘Is that a possibility?’

‘It’s a possibility.’ Ben wondered why she was being so affectionate towards him, so helpful and understanding.

‘You don’t think that’s what’s happened?’

‘Well, Kostov had his own false identities. Sudoplatov would have belonged to him. Unless somebody was trying to frame a dead man for murder, why would they bother using his passport?’

Alice nodded and looked at the floor. Was she hoping for a reconciliation, for an end to all the silences and the ill feeling? Ben wondered if talking to Michelle had been her way of making things up between them. He wondered if she was tired of his moods and anxiety. He wondered if she had spent the entire afternoon fucking Sebastian Roth.

‘How’s your piece going?’ he asked. ‘The one about the restaurant?’

Without a flicker, Alice said, ‘It got spiked.’

‘Spiked?’

‘Yeah. Seb just pulled out all of a sudden and Features said it was a bad idea. Anyway, I hadn’t heard from him in ages.’

There was a beat of distrust between them, nothing more. Then Alice said, ‘It was probably a good thing, anyway. I’d looked into Seb’s file atwork. He’s not a particularly pleasant man.’

‘How’s that?’ Ben was jealous of Roth and any criticism of him - particularly coming from Alice - was music to his ears.

‘When Libra was first starting out,’ she said, ‘Seb employed dealers to go into rival clubs and sell pills and trips to customers. Did you know about that? Does Mark know about that?’ Ben frowned and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Then he would tip off the police and get the club closed down. And when journalists have questioned him about this, he’s disguised what happened as a moral crusade, denied that he had any part in it.’

‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘You notice that about corrupt people. Always the ones pointing the finger. Always someone else to blame.’

‘That’s right.’ Alice nodded and appeared to warm to her theme. ‘Roth’s so tight, so money conscious, that he won’t even have people pouring themselves a glass of water in the toilets at Libra. You go in there with an empty bottle of Evian, security have instructions to confiscate. You’ve got tobuy water at the bar, just like everything else. No matter that there are dealers authorized by Libra on the sly selling pills to dehydrated punters who are already forty quid out of pocket just for coming in. The only thing Seb really cares about is the Libra share price. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable writing a piece about someone like that.’

‘Exactly,’ Ben said. ‘And you thinka guy like Roth, a man with his contacts, his leverage, doesn’t know a thousand journalists who could have written a puff piece about a restaurant opening? It was all a game. He was trying to get you into bed.’

Alice managed to make her embarrassment resemble modesty.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

‘I’m serious. I’ve talked to Mark about it. The concept of adultery, of stealing someone’s wife, it’s meaningless to him. He sees it as
competition
.’

Alice tooka cigarette out of her bag and was pleased that her hand did not shake as she lit it.

‘Well, I don’t know…’

‘It’s funny.’ Ben looked relieved. ‘I thought you fancied him. I thought you two had a bit of a crush.’

The sentence died away in his mouth, a moment of frankness that he had not intended.

‘
Fancied
him?’ Alice made a face of appalled disgust, like a child swallowing medicine. ‘He’s revolting. How could you think that?’

A great wave of relief, of confidence-boosting pleasure, swept through Ben’s body. He smiled.

‘Just a hunch,’ he said. ‘Just a paranoia.’

Again Alice ran her hand through his hair. They kissed now, the sweet forgiveness, and Ben felt the skin on her back, reaching for the soft exquisite warmth of her stomach. For the first time in days he was at peace.

‘We should do something about Michelle,’ he said, galvanized and relieved. Alice looked taken aback as he rose from the sofa and lit a cigarette.

‘We should,’ she said instinctively. ‘She told me Sudoplatov was using a new passport, issued in the last couple of years. If he was in the KGB, he’d still have contacts in the Russian government, in the mafia, people who could get him passports, lines of credit, information.’

Ben inhaled deeply.

‘Then we should try to get in touch with Bone,’ he said, aware that he was slipping backinto a role for which his temperament was ill suited. ‘Would you know how to do that?’

‘Sure,’ Alice said.

‘I haven’t got a contact address for him, and I gave fucking McCreery my only copy of the letter. I don’t remember the number of the PO Box. There’s probably no way of finding him.’

‘Of course there is.’ Alice stood and tookhis hand in hers. ‘We’ll find him on the Internet. Let me get a glass of wine and we’ll go upstairs.’

Ben was technologically backward; he barely knew how to switch on Alice’s computer. In her study - a small, windowless cupboard on the same floor as their bedroom - he stood behind her as she opened Internet Explorer.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked. He had his hand on the back of her neckand was stroking her hair. The prospect of tracking down Bone seemed secondary to the knowledge that they would very soon be in bed together.

‘We just find Google and type in the name of the town. What was it? Where did the letter come from?’

‘What’s Google?’

‘Forget it. Where did the letter come from?’

‘Cornish. New Hampshire,’ Ben said. ‘Somewhere in New England.’

The connection was fast. Within three seconds a screen had appeared, saying:
New Hampshire Online. NH City Guides
.

‘Now we find the phone number. Then we call the local post office and say that it’s an emergency.’

‘Is that what you do at work? Lie and make stuff up?’

Alice didn’t reply. Ben could feel the light heave of her shoulders, the gradual uncurling of her spine as she breathed.

‘Welcome to New Hampshire,’ she said, reading aloud from the screen in a cod American accent. ‘What do you want to know about? Local restaurants? Ski conditions?
Where do you wanna go today?
’

Another screen appeared, a long list of cities and towns. Alice scrolled through them and clicked ‘Cornish’.

‘So we just lookhere,’ she said, another page loading. ‘Legal services. Libraries. Fire Departments…’

‘Post Offices!’ Ben exclaimed, pointing at the bottom of the screen.

Alice smiled, muttered ‘Bloody artists’ and clicked the icon. There was a single Post Office listed for Cornish. She wrote down the telephone number on the back of a gas bill and shut off the connection.

‘Do you want me to call them?’

‘Yeah, you do it,’ Ben said. ‘You lie better than me. You’re a journalist.’

Alice seemed to take this as a compliment. There was a phone beside the computer and she dialled the number.

‘They’re five hours behind,’ she murmured as the number connected. ‘It’s about two in the afternoon. Hello?’

A woman at the Post Office had picked up. She said, ‘Post Office, good afternoon. How may I help you?’

Alice curled a loop of hair behind her ear and touched Ben’s arm. He pressed his ear close to the phone in order to hear what was being said.

‘I’m trying to get in touch with one of your customers. He has a PO Box registered at this address. A Mr Robert Bone. My name is Alice Keen. I’m calling from London.’

The woman tookan unusually long time to respond. Ben heard her cough and say, ‘Could you repeat that name for me please?’

‘Yes, it’s a Mr Robert Bone. He sent a letter to my husbandhere in London, but there was no return address.’ Alice made her accent sound polished, more upperclass. ‘We need to get in touch with him as a matter of urgency.’

Another pause. Then, ‘May I askif you’re a family member?’

At first, neither of them understood the significance of the question.

Alice said, ‘I’m sorry?’

‘It’s just that we’ve had a lot of enquiries recently about Mr Bone from the United Kingdom.’

‘No, no, I’m not a family member. Neither of us is.’ Ben was frowning. He tookthe telephone from Alice’s hand and said ‘Hello?’

More silence. He wondered if the woman had left her deskto lookfor more information. Then Ben heard movement on the line, a different voice, a man.

‘Hello, miss?’

‘No, this is Benjamin Keen. You were just talking to my wife…’

‘Yes sir. That’s right. To your wife. I understand that she was looking for Bob?’

‘That’s right. I don’t know if your colleague explained, but we’re calling from London and -‘

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sir, but we’ve had a shooting here. Almost three weeks ago now. Bob was killed out at his house. You didn’t hear about it? Did nobody thinkto let you know?’

43

From time to time, Stephen Taploe would lie to his agents, present a more optimistic view of an operation than was realistically the case. He did it to maintain their trust. He did it to keep them onside. Running a joe was a delicate art and he had been taught long ago that it was acceptable to manipulate the truth if an officer had one eye on the long-term gain.

So Taploe had lied to Mark about Timothy Lander. He hadn’t asked SIS to track him down because MI5 had done so themselves two weeks before, using phone records obtained from Divisar. In fact he had never wanted SIS to play any role in the Kukushkin investigation, for fear that he would lose control of the case, and out of a more personally motivated concern that they would discover that Christopher Keen had been an agent for MI5. Keen’s dealings with the Swiss bankhad also provided a convenient smokescreen which Taploe had used to lure Mark into co-operation; there was no evidence atall that Kukushkin or any other syndicate had funds lodged in Lausanne. Furthermore, in the cab Taploe had failed to disclose his intention to recruit Juris Duchev; Mark’s suggestion that he try to do so had been merely a coincidence. For seven weeks, Service analysts had been weighing up the risks of running the Latvian. On Sunday, Taploe had made his pitch.

The team had Duchev’s routine down pat. He was up at six every morning, usually switched on the television in the sitting room of his flat, cursed in his native tongue as he tooka shower, then rang his daughter in Jelgava to catch her before she went off to work. Between five past and ten past seven he would walkfifty metres to a greasy spoon down the road and find a seat in the window. It turned out that Duchev had a fondness for British breakfasts. Thelma, who had run the cafe for fifteen years, knew him on sight and knew his order: plenty of black pudding, a heap of baked beans, two sunny-side fried eggs, at least three porksausages, several rashers of bacon and a pair of pip-oozing fried tomatoes. Duchev ate it all up, wiping his plate clean day after day with margarine-smeared pieces of toast. ‘You better get to him quick, boss,’ Ian had joked. ‘We’re not careful, he’ll be dead from a heartattack before he’s any use to us.’

Taploe had waited in the cafe from six forty-five on Sunday morning, flicking through the dreck and betrayals of the
News of the World
. Duchev appeared half an hour later, washing his breakfast down with three cups of Thelma’sindifferent and scalding coffee. Ian had the van outside - just for observation - but it had proved surprisingly easy to strike up conversation and to take Duchev for a walk around Shepherd’s Bush and to let him know that he was being watched around the clockand that he would find himself doing time unless he gave Her Majesty’s Government his full co-operation. Taploe knew all about the land in Andalucia, you see - a last-minute bonus from Mark- and all about the Bosnian prostitute in ParkWest Place that Duchev was banging and beating up behind Tamarov’s back. Taploe didn’t let on about Macklin, of course, nor profess any knowledge of the Libra conspiracy. It was enough to imply that his days as a criminal underling were numbered. He was offered a generous cash sum in return for his co-operation - and advised to keep his mouth shut.

Forty-eight hours later, the timing of Taploe’s pitch would form the subject of intense discussions at both Thames House and Vauxhall Cross. Why, for instance, had Taploe risked alerting a senior figure in the Kukushkin organization to a law enforcement presence without a cast-iron guarantee that Duchev would turn? Why, furthermore, had he attempted to recruit the Latvian just as Mark was cementing his relationship with Tamarov on Monday night? Hauled before a grey-faced committee of his superiors, Taploe would later be asked to account for every minute of the weekend, beginning with the journey by cab he had taken with Mark and Ian on Saturday morning, and ending with the events of Monday night. Time and again he insisted that every precaution had been taken. Tamarov had confirmed the venue for the dinner as the St Martin’s Lane Hotel on no fewer than three separate occasions. The position of his reserved table had been established and steps taken to secure that specific area of the restaurant for sound. A separate table, occupied by Service personnel, had also been reserved for observation. Mark had agreed to travel to the meeting by car and to have his own vehicle wired on the understanding that he would offer the Russian a lift at the end of the evening and attempt to start a conversation about Macklin. Ian Boyle had been assigned to tail the vehicle from Mark’s flat in Torriano Avenue.

Little of this made any impression on the members of the panel, who sensed blood and seemed determined to bring Taploe down. Something of an i-dotting, t-crossing bureaucrat himself, it nevertheless occurred to Taploe that something reductive in human nature emerged within the context of institutions. Normally sympathetic, sound-minded colleagues appeared suddenly to revel in his misfortune.

It was as if his peers derived as much satisfaction from the suffering and collapse of one of their own as they would from the successful arrest and conviction of a hardened criminal. Either development, after all, could be termed progress, of one kind or another.