A Spy's Life (30 page)

He felt drowsy and began to slip towards sleep, knowing that he would never find himself at the bottom of the stairway again.

Harland arrived at Harriet’s house, too weary to care much about who might be watching his movements. Near the end of the train journey from Oxford it had occurred to him that Tomas’s presence in one of the pictures had prevented him from seeing them for their true worth. Far from being a kind of curse, they endowed their keeper with a certain power.

He installed himself in Harriet’s office at the top of the house and fed the disc into her computer. He looked at the picture of the mountainside first, isolating and enlarging the portion that contained Tomas. There was no doubt about it. Tomas was standing there with an oddly vacant expression, one foot lifting to the right, in the process of turning away. As far as Harland could tell, he was not armed.

He began to trawl the rest of the image for clues and information. He had been right about the date. It appeared over a patch of white rock that made it easy to miss. The events recorded had taken place at 2.15 p.m. on 15.7.95. That was probably all he needed to elicit the satellite pictures from Professor Reeve. He noted down the date and time, momentarily wondering whether the type of rock in the foreground was limestone. That might be a clue to the place. He moved over to the other side of the picture, framed the dark area at the bottom left-hand corner and instructed the computer to fill the screen with it. His first impression was of a detail in one of those mediaeval studies of the Day of Judgement – the souls of the damned cast into hell. There were five or six bodies lying there in the shadows. All of them appeared to be men. A glint of machinery caught his eye also, a crescent of metal, possibly the blade of a piece of earth-moving equipment.

Time and place were obviously important to Griswald’s investigation and he realised that the mountains at the top of the screen might establish an approximate position. He flipped back to the whole image. There was a V-shaped nick in the furthest range which consisted of one fairly prominent peak. That might be identified if the direction of the camera was known. Yes, because a clue to this lay in the time that the image was made – a little over two hours past midday. That time seemed to tally with the amount of light in the picture and the shortness of the shadows. More crucial, however, was his observation that the shadows ran away from the lens, which meant that whoever had been filming the scene had his back directly to the sun.

Harland closed his eyes to assemble his little knowledge of using the sun as an aid to orientation. At midday a shadow cast by a vertical object would give a reading for north since the sun was in the south. As the afternoon wore on the shadows would swing to the right and, using the principle of the sundial, it would be possible to gauge the time and also to get a bearing between zero and ninety degrees. The further the sun went west, the more the shadows would veer to the east and a bearing of ninety degrees. He remembered that the season had to be taken into account in such a calculation but since the picture was dated to just over three weeks after the summer solstice of 21 June, he assumed that variation would not be great.

He was unsure of his geometry and decided to make a copy of the picture on Harriet’s printer. Then he began to trace a series of lines fanning out from a point in the middle of the bottom of the frame. It was all very hit and miss, but after borrowing a protractor from his nephew’s geometry case he estimated that the shadows were pointed at a bearing of between 20 and 25 degrees. That put the V-shaped incision in the range at a bearing of 15 degrees and the large peak at a few degrees east of due north – say 355 degrees. If he could get the profile of the mountain range identified, he’d be able to mark out a rough area where the massacre had taken place. And that process might be refined by estimating the distance between the camera and the mountain range – not, perhaps, a problem for a surveyor – and the safe assumption that this spot was probably close to a road or track because of the inconvenience involved in moving a bulldozer over a lot of rough terrain.

He called up the other picture and squared off sections that he wanted to examine more closely. The screen filled with the still life of the table – a German-language newspaper dated 29 May 1998, the tray of drinks which included a bottle of Pernod, Martini, whisky of an identifiable brand and various mixers. Harland focused on the papers in front of the drinks tray. They were in German and appeared to be some kind of report. The type was too small to read from the screen, but he picked up a couple of signatures at the bottom of one sheet and with greater magnification these could be deciphered.

He went back to the whole frame and tried to see what else might lie there. Way off in the background were two men in dark suits, standing with their hands clasped in front of them in the manner of silent heavies the world over. The landscape was rolling rather than mountainous, and it was possible to make out pastures and clumps of pine trees. It could be anywhere, thought Harland. There was countryside like this all over the Balkans and Central Europe but, given the newspaper, he’d bet on Austria or Germany.

Finally he addressed Viktor Lipnik, enlarging him to fill the whole screen. The three-quarter view gave him much more sense of Lipnik than the profile in the first picture. He had a rather long face with a nose that was slightly hooked at the end, a feature enhanced by the angle of his rather thin nostrils. His hair was straight and dark – perhaps dyed? – and he had a light beard which was only visible above his lip. All things considered it was not an unpleasant face.

Harland stared at the whole picture. He was aware of something speaking to him. It wasn’t the sense of Eastern European style in the sheen of his suit, the angle of the shirt collar, the Windsor-knotted tie. Nor was it the suspicion that Viktor Lipnik had invested in cosmetic surgery, evidenced by a vertical scar in front of one of his ears. It was his Rolex watch – exactly the same chunky symbol of wealth that he’d been surprised to see on Tomas’s arm in the first picture. He knew that Tomas had not worn it on the occasions that they met.

He printed two fresh copies of the pictures and two sets of the details he had examined, and placed them in envelopes. As he dialled Frank Ollins’s mobile number, he let his eyes play over the photograph. As usual Ollins picked up immediately.

‘Did you find anything in that material?’ asked Harland.

‘Not yet.’ Ollins was unfazed by Harland’s lack of greeting. ‘The people who were looking at it haven’t come back to me.’

‘Which people were dealing with it? You see, some might regard this material as poison and its bearer as a national security risk.

‘Whoever you’re talking about isn’t going to get his hands on it. This is an FBI investigation into a very serious crime. We won’t swerve from the completion of this inquiry, I can promise you that.’ Harland was taken aback by this rather formal statement. Perhaps Ollins was speaking for the benefit of others.

‘Good,’ said Harland, thinking of that audience. ‘Of course, anyone interested in suppressing this evidence would need to know that it’s possible to place the information on the Web or to give it to newspapers. At this time of year they’re always short of news.’

‘So what did you find?’

‘Two pictures of a man named Lipnik, who was indicted as a war criminal before he was killed off in an elaborately staged assassination. The pictures prove that Lipnik is alive and that he took part in a massacre of some scale. This man was the subject of Griswald’s last inquiry and must be regarded as a suspect in the Falcon’s crash.’

‘What are you going to do with the pictures?’

‘Send them to the Secretary-General’s office.’

‘Not before you give them to me as per our agreement, right?’

This was entirely within Harland’s plan, but he wanted Ollins to know that he was doing him a favour.

‘Why don’t you tell me a bit more about the crash? What did you mean by the questions you asked me?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Ollins resolutely. ‘I can’t say more.’

‘Well, tell me whether you’ll be keeping the Secretary-General informed on developments.’

There was a pause.

‘Yes,’ said Ollins. ‘Look, to get back to our agreement. We said that whoever decoded the material first would send it to the other. That’s what you agreed. Are you welching?’

‘No, I’ll send it in an attachment this evening using the same procedure as before.’ Harland sounded reluctant but he knew that he was only too happy to pass the pictures to the FBI. The pictures represented power, but it was not the kind of power that needed to be hoarded.

They said goodbye, exchanging a sardonic New Year’s greeting.

The next call was to Jaidi’s office, which was still manned. He told the woman on the other end that he would be sending a two-page memorandum to the Secretary-General and that he would need a fax number or e-mail address that would ensure Jaidi read it the next morning. He stressed the need for utter secrecy and speed. She gave him a fax number in Davos, Switzerland where Jaidi had improbably holed up for a few days with his Swedish-born wife and child.

He slowly replaced the phone, already in the act of composition. But his thoughts were interrupted by Harriet telling him that there were just ten minutes to go before midnight. They were opening champagne.

Harland got downstairs to find Robin sprawled almost horizontal, his long legs stretched in front of him. He smiled comfortably at Harland.

‘So what’ve you been up to, Bobby? Haven’t really had a chance to ask since you vanished from my office yesterday.’

Harriet looked on edge, as though she guessed he’d discovered something important.

‘Oh, this and that,’ he said, as pleasantly as he could. Whatever Robin’s deficiencies of intellect, he was certainly a good host. He deserved politeness. The strokes of Big Ben came. They embraced, Harland enduring a longer than usual hug from his brother-in-law.

The phone went. It was Philip Smith-Canon breaking the news that Tomas had emerged from his coma. He had been awake for twenty-five minutes. He was very weak and there were problems with muscle spasm. They would be working on this in the next few days.

Harland hung up and told them.

‘Well, that’s some good news to start the year off with,’ said Robin.

‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Harriet.

18

VIGO’S MAP

After a while Harriet and Robin went upstairs. Harland returned to the little office to begin a memorandum for Jaidi. It was a laconic affair which, if anything, underplayed the sabotage theory, although he did mention that the FBI had made unspecified discoveries concerning the electronics systems of the plane. The rest concerned the pictures of Lipnik whom he assumed was the man that Jaidi referred to as the ‘quantum enemy’. He asked the Secretary-General to expand on his phrase for, as far as he knew, Lipnik had only one other identity – the one assumed after the staged assassination. He gave a hint or two about the evidence to be gleaned from a close examination of both pictures. He ended the note by saying that he was continuing his inquiries in Eastern Europe. He signed off in the hope that they would speak soon. He sent the e-mail with the photographs in an attachment, knowing that Jaidi would not concern himself with the identity of the young soldier in the background of the earlier picture.

As he was clearing up and preparing to go to bed, Harriet slipped into the office and perched, in an ancient woollen dressing-gown, on the desk beside him. Her face was scrubbed clean of make-up and glistened with moisturiser.

‘Okay,’ she said in a bad American accent, ‘quit stalling on me. What’ve you got?’

‘A lot,’ he said glumly, and withdrew one of the prints from the envelope and handed it to her. ‘That was taken in Bosnia. It’s the scene of a massacre. You can see Tomas in the background.’

Harriet let out a gasp. ‘God! How on earth did you get this?’

‘Griswald was carrying it on the plane. His interest was in the man in the foreground. That has to be Lipnik.’

‘So everything does connect. What are you going to do now?’

‘I’m going to go to Prague to try to trace Tomas’s mother. It’s essential that she’s found to help communicate with him. But she must also be able to explain how he came to be in Bosnia when he was just twenty years old.’

‘Who have you showed these pictures to?’

‘So far the FBI and Jaidi. Both within the last hour or so.’

‘I see.’ She paused. ‘Lipnik could reasonably assume that they were no longer in existence. After all, they took the mini-disc from you in the UN and wouldn’t have expected you to have copied it. But that doesn’t explain why Tomas was hunted down like that. It can’t have been because he was witness to that thing in Bosnia because they would have found him before. So why now? What’s the connection?

‘Maybe Tomas knew Lipnik was alive.’ Harland didn’t sound very convincing to himself. He went on to tell her about his afternoon with the man from GCHQ.

‘So the connection could be something to do with these codes.’

‘Maybe.’

‘So that means you’re still much in danger?’

‘I think not. But who knows? I haven’t got to the bottom of this thing.’

‘And you’re going to Prague.’

This came out like an accusation. She knew about the last time, not the details of course, but she saw him in hospital only a few days after The Bird and Macy had delivered him there. She sighed heavily and rubbed her hands together. There were tears of anger and frustration in her eyes. Harland started to say that he had to go.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t you think that you’ve run out of lives, Bobby? I mean, let’s face it, you came back from the police station the other night in a terrible state. I know what caused it. So do you. You had a flashback. And now you’re going back to Prague. What do you think will happen? Surely you can trace this woman and simply telephone her?’

‘It’s not that easy. I’ll need to look at some old files there.’

She pressed her hands together and interlocked her fingers. ‘You’re a bastard to cause me so much worry. I hope you know that.’