Darke Mission (32 page)

“What about Mr Wilson? He's my direct boss, the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury and he would need to know about my impending promotion,” stressed Joel, being the consummate professional that he was.

“You can't tell Craig as yet,” said Robson. His voice was not raised, but it was strong and deliberate. “Look, Joel, if you tell Craig then a sequence of dynamic events will unfold that we may eventually lose control of. First, if Craig knows you're leaving his office to be Deputy Head of Finance, then he will begin the search for your replacement. That will involve HR, maybe outside head hunters. They will ask questions and you may appear less than open if you do not tell all, which you cannot. Then your colleagues will ask about your rapid, nay meteoric promotion. That would involve more evasiveness on your part, of which you may not be skilled.” Robson looked directly at Joel and he nodded, he sure was not skilled at evasion. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury spent a few more minutes detailing the potential pitfalls of Joel telling anyone about his findings or his upcoming promotion.

“Are we in agreement?” Robson asked.

“I guess so, Sir,” said Joel, by now a little taken aback by the subterfuge surrounding the whole issue. Robson stood up to signal that the meeting was over. They shook hands.

As Joel was leaving Robson's office to return to his own, the Financial Secretary asked, “What time do you finish tonight, Joel?”

“Around 6pm, Sir, my usual time,” he replied. It was 4pm now.

“Look, it's been a complex day for you, lots to think about. Why don't you leave a little early, say 5 o'clock, go home have a bit more relax time,” Robson said cheerily.

“Thank you, Sir, I think I will,” replied Gordon and with that he went back to his office. Neil Robson stayed in his till just before 6pm. He felt that he had been convincing and sincere enough in his delivery and content that Gordon would not mention his forensic accounting or upcoming promotion to anyone. Still, as he pondered further their conversation ‘I guess so, Sir' did not really smack of full commitment and it was full commitment that Robson sorely needed at this point. MI5 officers are trained to leave as little as humanly possible to chance and he had not forgotten his training. Maybe he would just saunter down to Joel Gordon's desk.

“Becky, I'm going down to Joel Gordon's office. In a few minutes ring his extension and tell me his password for his work emails. Also, check with the switchboard to see if he made any external calls after 4.30pm today,” asked Robson of his candescent PA. In truth, Becky was a little less luminous today, dressed mainly in monochrome.

“Sure,” replied Becky. It was not unusual for senior Treasury and government officials to look at their junior colleagues' emails. Often the more senior officials worked longer hours or were abroad and may need access to information and projects at short notice or when the juniors were not there. The executive PAs, of which Becky was one, had a list of all the relevant passwords.

“Becky,” acknowledged Robson as he picked up Joel Gordon's phone.

“Mr Gordon did not make any phone calls after 4.30pm today, Sir. His password for his private emails is
Talisha1
.”

“Thanks,” said Robson and then he hung up. Well at least that's encouraging thought Robson. No panic phone calls to anyone after their meeting. Maybe the ambitious Jamrock yardie was fully committed after all. Robson keyed in Gordon's email password and began to scroll through the list of mails. They looked fine until one sent email, timed at 4.45pm, stood out. Neil Robson's demeanour altered significantly.
Puerile peasant
thought Robson as he looked at Joel Gordon's mail. It was to Craig Wilson. It read:

As Neil Robson leant back in Joel Gordon's chair, he closed his eyes and was silently lamenting that the young accountant's commitment to secrecy had barely lasted fifteen minutes. Maybe Vasily was going to earn Babikov that £1 million fee after all.

* * *

The next day Gil had decided to pick Cyrus up from school. Most days her ward didn't need or want to be picked up as he could easily walk from his Chelsea school to his Chelsea home. Today, however, the boys' tennis team from his school had a challenge match against the boys from the Harrodian, in Barnes near Richmond. They had been taken there by coach in mid-afternoon but Gil had already told Cyrus that she would collect him. She wanted to keep the boy as close as possible to her. Gil, too, hadn't heard from JJ in a couple of days and while that was to be expected given the nature of JJ's mission, Gil knew that she was solely responsible for Cyrus given his only living parent was in absentia. She also liked Cyrus's company; they were relaxed in each other's space and although the age difference was more than ten years they seemed to enjoy many similar things. Training in the gym wasn't one of them, however, but as last night was movie night, tonight was going to be gym night. Maybe a light session, thought Gil, since the boy would be tired after tennis though this would be somewhat balanced by the remarkable energy recovery capacity of the fourteen year old.

Cyrus jumped into the passenger side of his dad's Porsche and nonchalantly tossed all his tennis gear into the back bucket seats, designed for legless dwarves, but in the absence of wee folk, ideal for a tennis racket or two.

“Hi Gil,” he said cheerily. “Thanks for picking me up.”

“Hi Cyrus. By your happy expression I take it you played like the post-Lendl Andy Murray not the pre-Lendl version?”

“I won my match 7-6, 6-4. The team lost three matches to two, so I'm only partly happy. It was good fun, competitive but not overly aggressive,” he added, as Gil pulled away from the school gates.

“Are you shattered?” Gil asked.

“No, I'm fine,” replied Cyrus.

“Good,” she responded. “Tonight is gym night young man. I don't want your father coming back accusing me of turning you into a teletubby,” Gil said, laughing, as Cyrus was built like a rake.

“C'mon Gil! I've been playing tennis for nearly two hours, my shorts are falling off I'm so skinny. Give me a break.”

“Let's have one of those widely recognised British compromises then,” Gil retorted. “A soft warm up, no cardiovascular exercises but we train on the mat working on holds, how to get out of them and then evasive action dealing with knife attacks. No more than an hour tops.”

“OK,” said Cyrus, now reclining in his seat, eyes closed, earphones in, iPod music on. The twenty to thirty minutes it would take to drive from Barnes to Markham Square was enough for him to get a few tunes in and block out any further physical activities that Gil may be thinking of. As he was listening to his music he would also be going over in his mind's eye some of the moves involved in defence against common knife attacks. Oriental, ice pick, slash, he had dealt with them before but wanted to surprise Gil by remembering a good selection of the defensive countermoves she and dad had taught him previously. He didn't really mind the mat work either, at least you got to lie down and, as a bonus, you learned how to get out of choke holds, not that he'd ever need to, he mused. While Cyrus was listening to his tunes, Gil was keeping her eyes on the road. They were driving over Putney Bridge, soon to take a right into the New King's Road, which was a good example of a street name misnomer, as it looked more dilapidated than the King's Road itself.

One of the aspects of CIA, NSA and other intelligence services training, is that your neural network becomes differently wired to that of civilians. Normal good drivers keep two hands on the wheel, when not changing gear, look ahead to see what's happening and maybe, anticipate what might. Those who have done any type of circuit driving or race training tend to have more acute peripheral vision as well. Is that kid going to run into the road, is that cyclist going to ride onto the zebra crossing, is that mobile phone junkie going to notice that her dog is about to bolt across the street? That type of awareness. What even good civilian drivers don't really notice, unless lights are flashing or sirens wailing, is who is behind them. True, there is the frequent interior and exterior mirror glances, especially when changing lane or turning across traffic but, in truth, most drivers, on a twenty minute journey, could not tell you in any detail which cars were behind them for most of the trip. That is reasonable enough in the normal world. Who cares who's behind you? As long as they're not tail-gaiting or getting ready to cut you up, or travelling in a pre-arranged convoy, it doesn't really matter. It's different in the clandestine world. In that dark space, intelligence officers are taught to be aware of who or what's behind them. ‘Cover your six' means protect your back, your most vulnerable part to enemy attack.

Gil Haning was no longer an employed intelligence officer. When she was, she was a good one and certain parts of her training had stayed with her, like riding a bike stays with you all your life. It was with this training, somewhere deep in her subconscious, undercover, mind that she kept glancing at one particular car, three or four vehicles behind JJ's Porsche. Cyrus was merrily unaware. Eyes closed, legs jiggling, curly mop bobbing from side to side. He was contentedly lost in his music.

Gil's biological neurons were also bopping away but in her case it was because her internal network was on alert. At this point it was a lot closer to DEFCON 5 than DEFCON 1, but on alert it was. The car in question was a black Mercedes E-class with tinted windows. Gil remembered seeing it near the Harrodian. It had not really registered, there was always a good sprinkling of high quality cars in south west London. However, the Harrodian was at the tail end of a residential road, leading eventually to Hammersmith Bridge. This car had been parked in the road, maybe a hundred yards from the school's gates. It was on its own. The other cars in the vicinity were parked either in the Harrodian's car park or the individual driveways of the houses, near the school.

It was there, and now it's here, three car lengths behind Gil and Cyrus, on Putney Bridge. Still not that unusual thought Gil. Lower Richmond Road, Putney Bridge, Fulham Road or King's Road, that would be a fairly normal route to get from the outskirts of Barnes, Roehampton or Richmond into central London. Let's see if the black Merc takes the Fulham Road route when we turn right into the New King's Road, thought Gil. It didn't. The traffic lights changed and Gil was on the New King's Road. The black Merc was now two cars adrift as one of the other cars behind Gil and Cyrus had gone in the direction of Fulham Road. Gil still had not raised her DEFCON status. She couldn't work it out precisely in her head, but there had to be forty to fifty right hand and left hand turns a given car could take between the beginning of the New King's Road and Markham Square. The odds were that the black Merc would turn before they reached home. It didn't.

As Gil drove into Markham Square she could see in her rear mirror that the black Merc drove by on the main King's Road. The vast majority of the time that would be that. Maybe the Merc's driver lived a few streets further on, maybe he was on his way to central London, maybe he was going to have tea with the bleedin' Queen. While the sum of all those maybes added up to the most likely probability, it still left one maybe outside of that set. Maybe the driver of the Merc is a professional and he drove past to avoid arousing attention.

“Are we there yet?” asked Cyrus in a mock kiddie's voice and wondering why Gil had not fully parked the car in the Square.

“We're here Cyrus,” Gil replied. “I was just dawdling a bit and thinking about the best parking spot. Don't want to kerb the wheels. Your dad would kill me!” she exclaimed. It made perfect sense too. While Markham Square was subject to resident parking permits, as was most of Chelsea, there always seemed to be more cars than houses. On top of that, certain parts of the Square had parking on both sides of the street so if two fat Chelsea tractors were directly opposite one another, then a third fat Chelsea tractor was going to struggle to navigate the Square without risking mirror bashing at best. Gil parked the car about two doors away from their house and tucked in the external mirrors.

“Cyrus, go into the house, stick the kettle on and let's have some green tea and a snack before we train in an hour or so. I just need to pop into Boots to get some woman's stuff,” said Gil, with no hint of alarm in her voice.

“Sure,” replied Cyrus, not wishing for any further detail. With that he extracted his tennis equipment from the back seats, closed his car door and skipped up the half a dozen or so stairs to his front door, all Chelsea blue and gleaming. Once inside, Cyrus dropped all of his kit just inside the front door. While he knew that Gil would return and yell ‘Cyrus you're not six anymore, pick up your stuff slobboid', he'd await his admonishment before tidying up. Anyway, he felt like a brew of green tea and a biscuit or six before the hard work of reposing on a mat began.

Gil locked the Porsche and walked casually down the east side of Markham Square. A right onto the King's Road would take her to Boots the chemist in under one minute. She didn't take the right, partly because she had told Cyrus a wee white lie. She didn't need stuff from the chemist, woman's or otherwise. Her neurons were still a-bobbing and she just wanted to take a look up and down the main road, while always maintaining eye contact with their front door. About five yards before the junction of Markham Square and the King's Road, Gil stopped in her tracks. Directly opposite or, for the pedantic, almost opposite, was Smith Street.

There it was. Partially obscured by a few parked motorbikes and one of those electric cars; the black Merc. Gil turned tail and walked at her normal pace back up the Square. You didn't need to be a maths genius to work out that the probability the Merc driver lived in Smith Street, or had decided on a swift impromptu shop near that section of the King's Road, was very low indeed. The Merc had followed them all the way from Barnes. Turned left onto Putney Bridge when it was 50:50 to take a right or left turn at that point. Same again for the King's Road versus Fulham Road. Then the forty to fifty left side and right side potential exits off the King's Road before Markham Square, all with more or less equal probability. Already Gil's computer brain had calculated that there was a less than 1% chance that such a car on the same journey as she and Cyrus would arrive at Markham Square within five car lengths of each other. Now multiply that by the probability that in the whole of posh London, the Merc driver would live in Smith Street. Not a snowball's chance in the fiery furnace of hell, she concluded. She or Cyrus or both were under surveillance. In fact, a further moment's thought led Gil to conclude that it was Cyrus who was the Merc's person of interest. Gil had driven from Chelsea to the Harrodian with no tail. The Merc was already parked near the Harrodian when she arrived. It was Cyrus they were watching. She did not know who or why but logic deemed that it must have something to do with JJ. Time to get in touch with Daddio, Gil thought. Who knows whether or not surveillance was the end of the story.