Tracers (6 page)

While Rik was Googling, Harry went out for sandwiches, coffee and cake to spur on their thinking. After being cooped up in Param’s place, the car and now here, he was glad to get out into the open, and took his time. He had a feeling there would be a lot more of being cooped up to come.

On his return, he handed Rik his brain food and prowled the room deep in thought. The furnishings were minimal and mixed, evidence of impulse buying by Rik following his recent move from home, where he’d lived with his mother. There was an L-shaped sofa, a glass-topped table with four matching chairs, a space-age steel-and-glass coffee table, a flat-screen television and music centre, but little else. The floor was woodblock and polished to a high gleam. Discreet wall lights completed the modernistic, almost clinical effect.

‘God bless IKEA,’ Harry commented.

‘It’s a place to chill, not a character statement,’ retorted Rik, who had clearly been waiting for some form of comment. ‘Anyway, I’ve had no complaints.’ He smirked and fluttered his eyebrows.

Harry walked over to the window. His own place in Islington was like a second-hand shop in comparison, the furniture gathered at various times without much thought given to style or fashion, the result of a life on the move with little time spent at home. Anything matching was by chance, whereas he guessed Rik had chosen his furnishings with an instinctive leaning towards how they might look to a third party.

He peered down three floors to a twin row of shops. The area was busy, cars jostling with delivery vans to find space at the kerb, while pedestrians crossed wherever and whenever the spirit took them, instinctive survivors of a busy thoroughfare. The aftermath of an earlier fruit and vegetable market lay in the gutter like battle scars, blood-red segments of pulp and skin mixed with traces of paper bags and splinters of wooden boxes.

‘How is it,’ said Rik, sprawling on the sofa, waiting for the machine to do something, ‘that Silverman’s “people” didn’t supply any financials? No bank statements, no credit card slips, no receipts, no work stuff, like letters, academic notes, agendas or jottings. There’s usually too much crap, not too little. This bloke has nothing.’ He balanced the disposable mug on the arm of the sofa and ripped the ends off paper tubes of sugar, stirring in the contents and glumly considering the lack of data they had to work with. Rik’s IT-trained mind preferred to see something tangible to fasten on to, not a dribble of detail that led nowhere. ‘Makes you wonder how hard they looked.’

Harry was only half listening. He was studying a nondescript saloon at the kerb a hundred yards up the street. It was parked behind a battered delivery van and contained a solitary figure – a man – but he couldn’t see any other detail. A tired shopper, maybe. Or a patient husband, killing time while his wife did the weekly market run. It could be either, but after years of undercover work, he had built up a security man’s instinctive suspicion of lone figures in parked cars.

‘Unless he destroyed everything before walking away,’ he said vaguely. Some runners did that. Binned or burned everything. It was as much a psychological severing of all ties with their past life as it was an attempt to conceal any clues pointing to their new one.

‘He couldn’t destroy bank or tax records,’ Rik countered. ‘Not possible.’

Harry waited for a sign of movement. He’d noticed the car earlier, when he’d gone for coffee. Something about it had snagged at the edge of his attention without quite gelling. Yet there was nothing he could put his finger on. Maybe it was an aura he’d become attuned to over the years, a marker only those with the right instincts might pick up on. Yet why should it concern him? He didn’t even live here. He put his coffee down. Sometimes you had to follow your instincts. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

He ran downstairs, slowing to a stroll as he hit the street. He stopped at a fruit stall that was still packing up and bought some grapes, then continued along the street, eyeing the windows and pausing occasionally to peer at a display. As he drew level with the delivery van, he turned and faced the nearest shop window and chewed some grapes, studying a rack of audio equipment on special offer. He bent as if taking in the specifications. The angle gave him an ideal background against which he could see the driver in the saloon behind the van.

It was a man. Medium build, jowly, with dark hair and heavy eyebrows over a pasty face. He was staring down the street, eyes fixed on a point somewhere in front of him.

It was a look Harry had seen too many times to be mistaken: the driver was watching someone. He turned and followed the line of the man’s focus, but there was too much clutter to be able to pick out any one object. Or person.

He continued his stroll, pausing to catch the car’s reflection in another window, but without drawing any firm conclusion. A local cop, then. A drugs squad officer on a dealer’s tail, perhaps. Or more mundane than that: a market inspector.

He crossed the street and returned to the flat by a roundabout route, wondering if paranoia got worse as you got older.

‘Everyone’s life overlaps in some way, right?’ Rik was still teasing at the lack of paperwork in Silverman’s file, as if Harry hadn’t left. ‘There’s always home stuff in their desks and work stuff at home. Until now.’ He blinked, just noticing a change in the atmosphere. ‘You’ve been out.’

‘Just checking something.’ Harry picked up his coffee. It had gone cold. He exchanged it for the briefing sheet Jennings had given them. He stared again at the description of Silverman, although it produced nothing he hadn’t read several times already.

The description fitted thousands of men; like many of those walking past in the street outside. He put it down and picked up the fragment of charred paper. It appeared to have been torn from a spiral notebook, with a line of jagged holes along one edge. The writing was at an angle across the paper, as if it had been scribbled in a hurry. The letters were faded, probably by the heat, but he could clearly make out ‘J.A. London’, followed by a number.

He handed it to Rik, saying, ‘“J. A. London”. A place or a person?’

Rik shrugged. ‘Take your choice. And what’s the six-digit number?’ He fed it into a search engine in a variety of permutations, but came up blank.

‘Mobile phone?’

‘Maybe. Without the first half, though, we’ll never track it down.’ Rik could access some useful databases, but there were limits to the information he could get from them without adequate pointers to help focus his search.

‘It might explain the flight to Heathrow. He decided to come over to somewhere or someone he felt close to.’ Harry fingered the number LH4736 T2 written on the briefing paper. ‘A Lufthansa flight number arriving at Terminal Two. It’s all we’ve got.’

‘Great.’ Rik fed that into his laptop, but shook his head. ‘Can’t access their passenger lists. They’re blocked. Do you know anyone in Immigration?’

Harry nodded. As it happened, he did. As vague as the lead was, it was their best bet. It must have seemed significant to the Israelis, otherwise why provide it? He took out his phone, checked the directory and dialled a number. When it was answered he spoke quickly, giving Silverman’s details and the flight number. He ended the call and nodded. ‘She’ll check it out. Might take a while.’

Rik gave a sly smile. ‘She? Did you say “she”? Christ, things are looking up. I thought your only contacts were hairy-arsed coppers with a drink problem.’ He picked up an
A–Z
of London and flicked through the index. After a few minutes, he sighed and tossed it to one side. ‘There are several places in London that fit the “J. A.”: James Avenue and Jersey Avenue to name two. We need a house number, otherwise we’re chasing smoke.’

Harry nodded. ‘Long shot. Leave it.’

Rik opened the folder and tapped the briefing paper where it mentioned Haifa University. There were no other details, such as contact numbers, faculty, or departmental names. ‘Didn’t you say Silverman was a doctor of theology?’

‘According to Jennings. Before he went AWOL.’

Harry chewed on that for a while. Jennings might have picked up the information at an original client briefing, but for some reason hadn’t bothered including it in his notes, such as they were. Still, even if they didn’t have the department, how big could the place be? The Professor must have had friends there at one time; someone might remember him and give them some background information.

‘I need a phone number,’ said Harry.

‘I’m on it.’ Rik turned to his laptop and began punching keys.

TWELVE

H
arry dialled the number and waited. It rang twelve times before being answered by a gruff male voice. He asked if they had a Professor Samuel Silverman on the staff. There was a sharp reply in what he took to be Hebrew, before the phone clicked and a woman’s voice came on with an American accent. He repeated the question.

‘Who are you?’ She sounded instantly suspicious. ‘It’s a holiday today. Why do you want to know?’

‘I need to speak to him,’ he said finally, winging it. He had no idea if the university staff were aware that Silverman had gone walkabout, and didn’t want to set alarm bells ringing unnecessarily. ‘He was helping my nephew with some study advice.’

The woman made a grudging noise, and he heard the sound of paper rustling. In the background someone laughed and a computer beeped. ‘You say Samuel?’ said the woman after a lengthy wait. ‘Samuel Silverman?’

‘That’s right. Professor Samuel Silverman.’ He waited. If she wanted the department and the subject, he was sunk.

‘What’s he teaching? You don’t know?’ The woman must have extrasensory perception. He wondered what to say. What subject or speciality would an Israeli professor, apparently much valued by his government, teach? It wouldn’t be theology, in spite of what Jennings had said. Defence studies was more likely. Statistics, maybe. But they wouldn’t work – not now he’d mentioned a nephew. He had to risk a bluff. ‘You think my nephew tells me what he’s studying?’ he countered dramatically. ‘He tells me nothing, like he tells his parents. I have to force things out of him. It could be theology, though – he’s into all that stuff.’

Across the room, Rik shook his head in mock despair.

‘Sorry,’ said the woman. ‘Silvermans we have plenty of, but not a Samuel. And believe me, sir, we’ve had the same theology staff here since Golda Meir was in small pants.’

‘Oh.’

‘Sorry – nobody of that name on the staff here.’ In spite of her abruptness, she sounded sympathetic. ‘And no visiting lecturers, either – I checked the register, in case. We have people coming and going all the time, you see. You should maybe try another campus.’

He thanked her and rang off. ‘No Professor Samuel Silverman, nor ever was.’

Rik pulled a face. ‘Maybe he was caught playing naughties with a student and they’ve blanked him from the records.’

‘That would take some doing.’

‘Not if he was in tight with the government. Scandals they don’t need.’

‘OK, so given that he’s cut loose from his life in the Promised Land, what made him decide to come to Britain?’ He stood up and stretched, then stared at the ceiling as if it might contain the answer. He didn’t mind puzzles – relished them, in fact – but this wasn’t even a small one; it was a nothing made up of vague facts.

‘If he was grief-stricken,’ Rik ventured, ‘it might have been on impulse.’

‘Or he’s been here before without anyone knowing. It’s always easy going back to a place the second time round.’

‘Where would you go if it happened to you? If you had to disappear at a moment’s notice?’

Harry pursed his lips. Good point. Not being a family man himself, the question was academic. If he were forced, really forced, he could cut and run anywhere he chose at a moment’s notice. But trying to imagine himself into the lives of the people they were searching for was a habit that had often proved useful in whittling down the options.

‘I’d go anywhere I could find a hole, pull the lid over me and hide,’ he said eventually. ‘I suppose if I was coming from somewhere like Israel, I’d want a similar climate without the people. But nowhere I wouldn’t fit in and nowhere I’d be recognized.’

Rik yawned. ‘Fair enough. But wouldn’t you want somewhere familiar – somewhere where you knew you
could
hide?’

Harry saw what he was driving at. People on the run rarely chose a place they’d never been to in their lives before. A few did; those who could step off the edge with no backward glance and a sincere faith in their own abilities to survive in an alien location. But they were a rarity. Mostly, runners looked for a place with a similar culture or language, where the requirement to adapt was less of a struggle, or where they had local contacts to fall back on. There was no guarantee otherwise that they would find a suitable hole. It also followed that only the truly desperate, with none of the mental or financial resources required to successfully disappear, would put themselves unwittingly in the position where they stood out to the degree that people began asking questions.

Harry’s phone buzzed. He listened for a few moments, then asked the caller to hold. He turned to Rik. ‘There’s no record of a Samuel Silverman coming through any terminals on the twenty-seventh.’

‘You told her the right date?’ Even as he said it, he looked apologetic. Harry wouldn’t have made such a basic mistake. ‘Scratch that.’