Kitabı oku: «The Man Between», sayfa 2
He wanted to know the truth about the man from the FCO. To that end he took out Mantis’s business card, tapped the number into his phone and sent a message on WhatsApp.
Very good to meet you. Glad you’ve enjoyed the books. This is my number. Let’s have that pint.
Carradine saw that Mantis had come online. The message he had sent quickly acquired two blue ticks. Mantis was ‘typing’.
Likewise, delighted to run into you. Lunch Wednesday?
Carradine replied immediately.
Sounds good. My neck of the woods or yours?
Two blue ticks.
Mine.
2
‘Mine’ turned out to be a small, one-bedroom flat in Marylebone. Carradine had expected to be invited to lunch at Wheelers or White’s; that was how he had written similar scenes in his books. Spook meeting spook at the Traveller’s Club, talking sotto voce about ‘the threat from Russia’ over Chablis and fishcakes. Instead Mantis sent him an address on Lisson Grove. He was very precise about the timing and character of the meeting.
Please don’t be late. It goes without saying that this is a private matter, not for wider circulation.
Carradine was about halfway through writing his latest book, still four months from deadline, so on the day of the meeting he took the morning off. He went for a dawn run in Hyde Park, had a shower back at his flat and ate breakfast at the Italian Gardens Café. He was excited by the prospect of seeing Mantis for the second time and wondered what the meeting would hold. The possibility of some sort of involvement with the Service? A scoop that he could fictionalise in a book? Perhaps the whole thing would turn out to be a waste of time. By ten o’clock Carradine was walking east along Sussex Gardens, planning to catch a train from Edgware Road to Angel. With a couple of hours to spare before he was due to meet Mantis, he wanted to rummage around in his favourite record store on Essex Road looking for a rare vinyl for a friend’s birthday.
He was halfway to the station when it began to rain. Carradine had no umbrella and quickened his pace towards Edgware Road. What happened in the next few minutes was an anomaly, a moment that might, in different circumstances, have been designed by Mantis as a test of Carradine’s temperament under pressure. Certainly, in the context of what followed over the next two weeks, it was a chance encounter so extraordinary that Carradine came to wonder whether it had been staged solely for his benefit. Had he written such a scene in one of his novels, it would have been dismissed as a freak coincidence.
He had reached the south-west corner of the busy intersection between Sussex Gardens and Edgware Road. He was waiting to cross at the lights. A teenage girl beside him was nattering away to a friend about boyfriend trouble. ‘So I says to him, I’m like, no way is that happening, yeah? I’m like, he needs to get his shit together because I’m like just not going through with that bullshit again.’ A stooped old man standing to Carradine’s left was holding an umbrella in his right hand. Water was dripping from the umbrella onto the shoulders of Carradine’s jacket; he could feel droplets of rain on the back of his neck. In the next instant he became aware of shouting on the opposite corner of the street, about twenty metres from where he was standing. A well-built man wearing a motorcycle helmet was raining punches through the passenger door of a black BMW. The driver – a blonde woman in her forties – was being dragged from the vehicle by a second man wearing an identical helmet and torn blue jeans. The woman was screaming and swearing. Carradine thought that he recognised her as a public figure but could not put a name to the face. Her assailant, who was at least six feet tall, was dragging her by the hair shouting, ‘Move, you fucking bitch’, and wielding what looked like a hammer.
Carradine had the sense of a moment suspended in time. There seemed to be at least twenty people standing within a few feet of the car. None of them moved. The rest of the traffic at the intersection had come to a standstill. A large white Transit van was parked in front of the BMW. The first man opened a side panel in the van and helped his accomplice to drag the woman inside. Carradine was aware of somebody shouting ‘Stop them! Somebody fucking stop them!’ and of the teenage girl beside him muttering ‘Fucking hell, what the fuck is this, this is bad’ as the door of the van slammed shut. The middle-aged man who had been seated on the driver’s side of the BMW now stumbled out of the car, his hair matted with blood, his face bruised and bleeding, hands raised in the air, imploring his attackers to release the woman. Instead, the man in the torn jeans walked back towards him and swung a single, merciless punch that knocked him out cold. Somebody screamed as he slumped to the ground.
Carradine stepped off the pavement. He had been taking boxing lessons for the past eighteen months: he was tall and fit and wanted to help. He was not sure precisely what he intended to do but recognised that he had to act. Then, as he moved forwards, he saw a pedestrian, standing much closer to the van, approach one of the two assailants. Carradine heard him cry: ‘Stop! Enough!’
‘Hey!’ Carradine added his own voice to the confrontation. ‘Let her go!’
Things then happened very quickly. Carradine felt a hand on his arm, holding him back. He turned to see the girl looking at him, shaking her head, imploring him not to get involved. Carradine would have ignored her had it not been for what came next. A third man suddenly emerged from the Transit van. He was wearing a black balaclava and carrying what looked like a short metal pole. He was much larger than the others, slower in his movements, but went towards the pedestrian and swung the pole first into his knees and then across his shoulders. The pedestrian screamed out in pain and fell onto the street.
At that moment Carradine’s courage deserted him. The man in the balaclava entered the van via the side door and slammed it shut. His two helmeted accomplices also climbed inside and drove quickly away. By the time Carradine could hear a police siren in the distance, the van was already out of sight, accelerating north along Edgware Road.
There was a momentary silence. Several onlookers moved towards the middle-aged man who had been knocked out. He was soon surrounded by the very people who, moments earlier, might have defended him against attack and prevented the abduction of his companion. Through the mêlée, Carradine could see a woman kneeling on the damp street, raising the victim’s head onto a balled-up jacket. For every bystander who was talking on their phone – presumably having called the police – there was another filming the scene, most of them as emotionally detached as a group of tourists photographing a sunset. With the traffic still not moving, Carradine walked across the intersection and tried to reach the BMW. His route was blocked. Car horns were sounding in the distance as a police vehicle appeared at the eastern end of Sussex Gardens. Two uniformed officers jogged towards the fallen men. Carradine realised that he could do nothing other than gawp and stare; it was pointless to hang around, just another passer-by rubbernecking the incident. He was beginning to feel the first quiet thuds of shame that he had failed to act when he heard the word ‘Resurrection’ muttered in the crowd. A woman standing next to him said: ‘Did you see who it was? That journalist from the Express, wasn’t it? Whatserface?’ and Carradine found that he could provide the answer.
‘Lisa Redmond.’
‘That’s right. Poor cow.’
Carradine walked away. It was clear that activists associated with Resurrection had staged the kidnapping. Redmond was a hate figure for the Left, frequently identified as a potential target for the group. So many right-wing journalists and broadcasters had been attacked around the world that it was a miracle she had not been confronted before. Carradine felt wretched that he had not done more. He had witnessed street brawls in the past but never the nerveless brutality displayed by the men who had taken Redmond. He was not due to meet Mantis for another hour and a half. He thought about cancelling the meeting and going home. Carradine told himself that it would have been rash to try to take on three armed men on his own, but wished that he had acted more decisively; his instinct for survival had been stronger than his desire to help.
He wandered down Edgware Road in a daze, eventually going into a café and checking the BBC for a report on what had happened. Sure enough it was confirmed that the ‘right-wing columnist’ Lisa Redmond had been kidnapped by activists associated with Resurrection and her husband beaten up in the act of trying to protect her. Carradine opened Twitter. ‘Fucking bitch had it coming’ was the first of several tweets he saw in defence of the attack, most of which carried the now-familiar hashtags #Resurrection #Alt-RightScum #RememberSimakov #ZackCurtisLives and #FuckOtis. The latter was a reference to the first – and most notorious – Resurrection kidnapping, in San Francisco, of Otis Euclidis, a senior editor at Breitbart News who had been seized from outside his hotel shortly before he had been due to make a speech at Berkeley University. The kidnapping of Redmond was merely the latest in a spate of copycat attacks that had taken place in Atlanta, Sydney, Budapest and beyond. Many of the victims had been held for several weeks and then killed. Some of the recovered bodies had been mutilated. Others, including Euclidis, had never been found.
3
Carradine’s apprehensiveness in the build-up to the meeting with Mantis had been completely erased by what had happened on Sussex Gardens. Arriving at the address on Lisson Grove, he felt numb and dazed. Mantis buzzed him inside without speaking on the intercom. Carradine walked up six flights of stairs to the third floor, slightly out of breath and sweating from the climb. The landing carpet was stained. There was a faux Dutch oil painting on the wall.
‘Kit. Good to see you. Do come in.’ Mantis was standing back from the door, as though wary of being spotted by neighbours. ‘Thank you so much for coming.’
Carradine was led into a sparsely furnished sitting room. He laid his jacket on the back of a brand-new cream leather sofa wrapped in clear plastic. Sunlight was streaming through the windows. The sight of the plastic made him feel constricted and hot.
‘Are you moving in?’ he asked. The flat smelled of old milk and toilet cleaner. There was no indication that Mantis had prepared any food.
‘It’s not my place,’ he replied, closing a connecting door into the hall.
‘Ah.’
So what was it? A safe house? If so, why had Mantis arranged to meet on Service territory? Carradine had assumed they were just going to have a friendly lunch. He looked around. Two mobile phones were charging on the floor by the window. There was a vase of plastic flowers on a table in the centre of the room. Two self-assembly stools were positioned in front of a breakfast bar linking the sitting room to a small kitchen. Carradine could see a jar of instant coffee, a box of teabags and a kettle near the sink. The kitchen was otherwise spotlessly clean.
‘Did you hear about Lisa Redmond?’ Mantis asked.
Carradine hesitated.
‘No,’ he said, feigning surprise. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Grabbed by Resurrection.’ Mantis opened a double-glazed window on to a small parking area at the rear of the building. Cool air poured into the room. ‘Thrown in the back of a Transit van and driven off – in broad bloody daylight.’
‘Christ,’ said Carradine.
He was not a natural liar. In fact, he could not remember the last time he had deliberately concealed the truth in such a way. It occurred to him that it was a bad idea to do so in front of a man who was professionally trained in the darker arts of obfuscation and deceit. Mantis gestured outside in the direction of Edgware Road.
‘A mile away,’ he said. ‘Less! Three men kicked the living shit out of her poor husband, who’s apparently some kind of hotshot TV producer. One of them had a pop at a have-a-go-hero who tried to save the day. It’s all over the news.’
‘What do you think will happen to her?’ Carradine asked, though he knew the answer to his own question.
‘Curtains,’ said Mantis. ‘Another Aldo Moro job.’
Moro, the Italian Prime Minister kidnapped by the Red Brigades in 1978, had been murdered in captivity, his body discovered in the back of a Renault two months later. Carradine wondered why Mantis had made such an obscure historical connection but conceded his point with a nod.
‘I’m surprised she didn’t have any security,’ he said. ‘People kept saying she was a target. In America, employees in the White House, staff at Fox News, prominent Republican officials, they’ve all been carrying guns for months.’
‘Quite right too,’ said Mantis with an impatience that reminded Carradine of the way his temper had flared on Bayswater Road. ‘People have a right to defend themselves. You never know who’s going to come out of the woodwork and take a pop at you.’
Carradine looked at the sofa. Mantis understood that he wanted to sit down and invited him to do so ‘on the plastic cover’. He asked Carradine to switch off his mobile phone. He was not particularly surprised by the request and did as he had been asked.
‘Now if you wouldn’t mind passing it to me.’
Carradine handed over the phone. He was delighted to see Mantis place it inside a cocktail shaker that he had removed from one of the cupboards in the kitchen. He had used an identical piece of tradecraft in his most recent novel, stealing the idea from an article about Edward Snowden.
‘A Faraday cage,’ he said, smiling.
‘If you say so.’ Mantis opened the door of the fridge and put the cocktail shaker inside it. The fridge was completely empty. ‘And if you could just sign this.’ He crossed the room and passed Carradine a pen and a piece of paper. ‘We insist on the Official Secrets Act.’
Carradine’s heart skipped. Without pausing to read the document in any detail, he rested the piece of paper on the table and signed his name at the bottom. It occurred to him that his father must have done exactly the same thing some fifty years earlier.
‘Thank you. You might want to take a look at this.’
Mantis was holding what appeared to be a driving licence. Carradine took it and turned it over. Mantis’s photograph and personal details, as well as a Foreign Office logo and a sample of his signature, were laminated against a pale grey background.
‘This wouldn’t be enough to get you into Vauxhall Cross,’ he said. It was necessary to demonstrate to Mantis that he did not fully trust him. ‘Do you have any other forms of ID?’
As though he had been expecting Carradine’s question, Mantis dipped into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a moulded plastic security pass.
‘Access all areas,’ he said. Carradine had wanted to inspect the pass, if only to experience the buzz of holding a genuine piece of Service kit, but Mantis immediately put it back in his pocket.
‘Always worried about losing it on the number nineteen bus,’ he said.
‘I’m not surprised,’ Carradine replied.
He asked for a glass of water. Mantis produced a chipped William and Kate mug and turned on the cold tap in the kitchen. It spluttered and coughed, spraying water onto his hand. He swore quietly under his breath – ‘fucking thing’ – filled the mug and passed it to Carradine.
‘Who owns this place?’
‘One of ours,’ he replied.
Carradine had met spies before but never in these circumstances and never in such a furtive atmosphere. He leaned back against the thick plastic cover and took a sip from the mug. The water was lukewarm and tasted of battery fluid. He did not want to swallow it but did so. Mantis sat in the only other available seat, a white wooden chair positioned in front of the window.
‘Did you tell anybody that you were coming here today?’ he asked. ‘A girlfriend?’
‘I’m single,’ Carradine replied. He was surprised that Mantis had already forgotten this.
‘Oh, that’s right. You said.’ He crossed his legs. ‘What about your father?’
Carradine wondered how much Mantis knew about William Carradine. A rising star in the Service, forced out by Kim Philby, who had given his name – as well as the identities of dozens of other members of staff – to Moscow. Surely somebody at Vauxhall Cross had told him?
‘He doesn’t know.’
‘And your mother?’ Mantis quickly checked himself. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Of course …’
Carradine’s mother had died of breast cancer when he was a teenager. His father had never remarried. He had recently suffered a stroke that had left him paralysed on one side of his body. Carradine made a point of visiting him regularly at his flat in Swiss Cottage. He was his only surviving blood family and they were very close.
‘I haven’t told anybody,’ he said.
‘Good. So nobody has been made aware of our chat in the street?’
‘Nobody.’
Carradine looked more closely at his interlocutor. He was wearing pale blue chinos and a white Ralph Lauren polo shirt. Carradine was reminded of a line judge at Wimbledon. Mantis’s hair had been cut and his beard trimmed; as a consequence, he no longer looked quite so tired and dishevelled. Nevertheless, there was something second-rate about him. He could not help but give the impression of being very slightly out of his depth. Carradine suspected that he was not the sort of officer handed ‘hot’ postings in Amman or Baghdad. No, Robert Mantis was surely lower down the food chain, tied to a desk in London, obliged to take orders from Service upstarts half his age.
‘Let me get straight to the point.’ The man from the FCO made deliberate and sustained eye contact. ‘My colleagues and I have been talking about you. For some time.’
‘I had a feeling our meeting the other day wasn’t an accident.’
‘It wasn’t.’
Carradine looked around the room. The flat was exactly the sort of place in which a man might be quietly bumped off. No record of the meeting ever happening. CCTV footage from the lobby conveniently erased. Hair samples hoovered up and fingerprints wiped away by a Service support team. The body then placed inside a thick plastic sheet – perhaps the one covering the sofa – and taken outside to the car park. Should he say this in an effort to break the ice? Probably not. Carradine sensed that Mantis wouldn’t find it funny.
‘Don’t look so worried.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You look concerned.’
‘I’m fine.’ Carradine was surprised that Mantis had failed to read his mood. ‘In fact, it did seem a bit odd to me that a serving intelligence officer would talk so openly about working for the Service.’
‘Good.’
‘What do you mean “good”?’
‘I mean that you obviously have sound instincts.’ Carradine felt the plastic rippling beneath him. It was like sitting on a waterbed. ‘You obviously have an aptitude for this sort of thing. It’s what we wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Go on.’
‘You have a Facebook page.’
‘I do.’
‘The other day you were asking for tips about Marrakech. Advertising a talk you’re doing at a literary festival in Morocco.’
Despite the fact that C.K. Carradine’s Facebook page was publicly available, he experienced the numbing realisation that the Service had most probably strip-mined every conversation, email and text message he had sent in the previous six months. He was grateful that he hadn’t run the name ‘Robert Mantis’ through Google.
‘That’s right,’ he said.
‘Get much of a response?’
‘Uh, some restaurant tips. A lot of people recommended the Majorelle Gardens. Why?’
‘How long are you going for?’
‘About three days. I’m doing a panel discussion with another author. We’re being put up in a riad.’
‘Would you be prepared to spend slightly longer in Morocco if we asked?’
It took Carradine a moment to absorb what Mantis had said. Other writers – Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Frederick Forsyth – had worked as support agents for the Service at various points in their careers. Was he being offered the chance to do what his father had done?
‘There’s no reason why I can’t stay there a bit longer,’ he said, trying to make his expression appear as relaxed as possible while his heart began to pound like a jungle drum. ‘Why?’
Mantis laid it out.
‘You may have noticed that we’re somewhat stretched at the moment. Cyber attacks. Islamist terror. Resurrection. The list goes on …’
‘Sure.’ Carradine felt his throat go dry. He wanted to take a sip of water but was worried that Mantis would see his hand shaking.
‘Increasingly, things fall through the gaps. Agents don’t have the support they need. Messages struggle to get through. Information can’t travel in the way that we want it to travel.’
Carradine was nodding. He knew that it was better at this stage to listen rather than to ask questions. At the same time he could feel his vanity jumping up and down with excitement; the flattery implicit in Mantis’s offer, coupled with the chance to honour his father’s career, perhaps even to surpass his achievements, was hitting a sweet spot inside him that he hadn’t known existed.
‘We had a station in Rabat. It was wound up. Folded in with the Americans. Manpower issues, budgetary restrictions. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that all of this is strictly between you and me.’
‘Of course.’
‘I have a desk responsibility for the region. I need to be able to put somebody in front of one or two of our agents out there, just to reassure them that they’re a priority for London. Even though that may not be entirely the case.’
Mantis flashed Carradine a knowing look. Carradine was obliged to return it in kind, nodding as though he was on intimate terms with the complexities of agent-running.
‘I’m afraid it would require you to go to Casablanca as well as Marrakech. Ever been?’
Carradine had heard that modern Casablanca was far removed from the romantic image of the city conjured by Hollywood: a crowded, choking industrial conurbation entirely devoid of charm and interest.
‘Never. But I’ve always wanted to check it out.’
He set the mug of water to one side. In the distance Carradine could hear the sound of sirens, the familiar background soundtrack to life in twenty-first-century London. He wondered if Redmond had already been found and could scarcely believe that within hours of witnessing her kidnapping, he was being offered a chance to work as a support agent for the Service. It was as though Mantis was handing him an opportunity to prove the courage that had so recently been found wanting.
‘Can you be more precise about what exactly you need me to do?’
Mantis seemed pleased that Carradine had asked the question.
‘Writers on research trips provide perfect cover for clandestine work,’ he explained. ‘The inquisitive novelist always has a watertight excuse for poking his nose around. Any unusual or suspicious activity can be justified as part of the artistic process. You know the sort of thing. Atmosphere, authenticity, detail.’
‘I know the sort of thing,’ said Carradine.
‘All you have to do is pack a couple of your paperbacks, make sure your website and Wikipedia page are up to date. In the highly unlikely event that you encounter somebody who doubts your bona fides, just point them to the Internet and hand over a signed copy of Equal and Opposite. Easy.’
‘Sounds like you’ve got it all worked out.’
‘We do!’ Mantis beamed with his beady eyes. Carradine must have looked concerned because he added: ‘Don’t be alarmed. Your responsibilities will be comparatively minimal and require very little exertion on your part.’
‘I’m not alarmed.’
‘There’s no need – indeed no time – for detailed preparation or training. You’ll simply be required to make your way to Casablanca on Monday with various items which will be provided to you by the Service.’
‘What sort of items?’
‘Oh, just some money. Three thousand euros to be paid to a locally based agent. Also a book, most likely a novel or biography of some sort, to be passed on as a cipher.’
‘Who to?’
‘Yassine. A contact of mine from Rabat. Feeling slightly neglected, needs to have his tummy tickled but I’m too busy to fly down. We usually meet up in a restaurant, Blaine’s, which is popular with businessmen and – well – young women of low social responsibility.’ Mantis grinned at the euphemism. ‘Yassine will recognise you, greet you with the phrase, “I remember you from the wedding in London.” You reply: “The wedding was in Scotland.” And your meeting can proceed.’
Carradine was surprised that Mantis was moving at such a pace.
‘You really do have everything worked out,’ he said.
‘I can assure you this is all very normal and straightforward, as long as you can remember what to do.’
‘I can remember …’
‘As for the money, you are to leave that at the reception desk of a five-star hotel under the name “Abdullah Aziz”. A very important contact. He is owed money.’
‘Abdullah Aziz,’ Carradine was trying to remember his answer to Yassine’s question about the wedding. He wondered why Mantis was flooding him with so much information so quickly and wished that he was free to write things down.
‘Sounds easy enough,’ he said. ‘Which five-star hotel?’
‘I’ll let you know in due course.’
Carradine was seated with his palms face down on the sofa’s plastic cover. He became aware that they were soaked in sweat.
‘And what about Marrakech? What am I doing there?’
Mantis was suddenly at a loss for words. Having rushed through Carradine’s responsibilities in Casablanca, he became hesitant to the point of anxiety. Twice he appeared to be on the brink of replying to Carradine’s question only to stop himself, biting the nail on the index finger of his left hand. Eventually he stood up and looked out onto the car park.
‘Marrakech,’ he revealed at last. ‘Well, that’s where things will become slightly more … nuanced.’ The man from the FCO turned and looked into the room, slowly rubbing his hands together as he moved towards the sofa. ‘It’s why we’ve picked you, Kit. We’re going to need you to use your initiative.’
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