The Dark Chronicles (37 page)

As the Rover skidded through the streets, I remembered my last conversation with Sasha, just three days earlier. I had told him. I had bloody
told
him where to find me.

‘And he was definitely Italian?’ asked Osborne, interrupting my thoughts. He was staring through the passenger window, looking rather pale and drained, as I imagined I did, too.

I followed his gaze. It was raining heavily and storms had been forecast: England’s green and pleasant land was suddenly looking rather grey and sinister. The Cabinet had raised the alert level to Four: much higher and we’d have been taking helicopters to Welbeck Abbey – but that was strictly for when we were facing an imminent Third World War. Political assassination didn’t require a subterranean command centre, but it did require an immediate
meeting. I prayed it wouldn’t go on too long. I was in desperate need of a shower, something to eat and a long kip.

Osborne had asked me about the sniper’s nationality several times, perhaps because it was all we had to go on, or perhaps because Italy was a NATO ally and he was wondering about the diplomatic ramifications. I told him again that I was fairly certain of the nationality because he had spoken fluent Italian on the verge of death, at which point instinct tends to take over. But it was baffling me, too, albeit for very different reasons. Had he just been a hired thug, untraceable back to Moscow? I ran through the scene in my mind for the hundredth time: Farraday’s head jerking forward, the shot ringing out. There was no doubt that I had been the intended target – if he hadn’t suddenly stepped in front of me, the bullet would have gone straight through my chest. The fact that nobody had picked up either of my emergency numbers confirmed it: one of those lines was supposed to be manned around the clock, without fail. I had been cut off.

‘How did they know about the memorial?’ Osborne asked. ‘We didn’t announce it.’

He was like a schoolboy heading into an exam he hadn’t prepared for, and I was the swot he was desperately hoping might help him out.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps Fearing will have something.’ Giles Fearing was head of Five, and had also been invited to the meeting.

Osborne nibbled at a fingernail. I suspected he was torn between wanting any information he could get his hands on and hoping that he wouldn’t be shown up by our rival agency. Five were responsible for domestic threats, while the Service dealt with everything overseas. That could be another reason he wanted to be sure of the sniper’s nationality: it offered a chance for us to head up the investigation.

If so, he’d have to manoeuvre himself sharpish, because Five had a head-start. They’d been all over the cathedral when I’d returned
from Smithfield: a team had already begun examining the building from top to bottom. Farraday had been killed instantaneously – the bullet had entered just above his heart. His body had been taken to the nearest morgue, while most of the congregation had retreated to their offices to contact colleagues and plan a course of action. The corpse of the sniper had also been removed from the market.

After telling them most of what I knew, I had taken a cab to Lambeth, but Osborne had already been leaving for Whitehall when I’d arrived, so I had climbed in and was now debriefing him on the way. He was biting his nails for good reason. For two Chiefs to be murdered within two months looked worse than a lapse in security: it looked like a declaration of war. And, of course, Osborne was now worried that there might be someone training their sights on
him
– not for nothing were we travelling in one of the bullet-proofed models. I had even asked if we should travel separately, as the formalities had been overruled and I was now acting Deputy Chief and he Chief. I wished I’d kept that thought to myself, though, as it had made him even jumpier.

I was also jumpy, but trying to keep my head. The sniper had been Italian, but the whole affair had Moscow’s fingerprints all over it. I had been so intent on avoiding the suspicions of my colleagues in the Service that I hadn’t noticed the threat looming from the other flank. But I still had no idea
why
they wanted me dead. This should have been the pinnacle of my success, with their long investment in me finally paying off: even Philby hadn’t made it this far. I thought back to my conversation with Sasha on Monday evening. He had told me that the Slavin provocation in Nigeria had been the work of the KGB, and that for the last two decades I had, in fact, been working for the GRU: military intelligence. I’d come away with the impression that the KGB hadn’t wanted to give up control of me. Could it be that they now wanted to take revenge for my having messed up their operation? It seemed far-fetched, but there had been no mistaking the trajectory of that bullet. And Slavin had been one of their agents; perhaps they blamed me for
his death. But why try to kill me in public, then, rather than simply ambush me at home? Perhaps the GRU had been behind it, after all, and someone had simply decided that I had served my purpose and had come too close to being exposed. I had taken Sasha at face value when he had told me that I was the hero of the hour, but perhaps he had just been stringing me along, keeping me sweet until a sniper could be found to deal with me. If the bullet had found its intended target, it would have made me a martyr in the eyes of the Service – and extinguished any questions about my loyalty once and for all. The Service would have closed the book on Paul Dark, and remained oblivious to the extent that I had compromised them. But as long as I was alive, I could be exposed, and if that happened I might crack under interrogation and make a list of everything I had handed over, rendering most of it worthless to Moscow in the process.

Or perhaps it was even worse than that. What if someone in the higher echelons of the GRU had decided, as a result of the events in Nigeria, that Sasha’s entire network should be closed down? Or not just closed down, but terminated? What if Sasha and his whole crew had all been killed – and I was the only one left standing?

On reflection, the motivations for doing me in seemed almost infinite. But one thing was for sure:
someone
wanted me dead, and they’d gone to a lot of trouble to try to make it happen. As the car came into Whitehall, I wondered when the next attempt would come.

*

The conference room was large and well appointed, with the usual Regency furniture and chandeliers, but the blacked-out windows and whey-faced stenographer in the corner deadened the grandeur somewhat. In the centre of the room, three men were seated around a large polished teak table. Fearing was fair-haired and stoutly built, with heavy jowls; Pelham-Jones, his deputy, was a few years younger and two stone lighter; and finally, there was the Home Secretary, Haggard.

Haggard lived up to his name: a giant skeleton of a man with dark circles under his eyes and a cigar perpetually glued to his thin lips. He was considered the Prime Minister’s closest ally – the two of them had risen through the party ranks together. His public image was of a straight-talking man of principle, and he was warier of spooks than everyone else in the Cabinet, with the possible exception of the PM.

As soon as Osborne and I had seated ourselves, Haggard stubbed out his cigar, scraped back his chair and walked over to one of the alcoves, from where he surveyed us like a hawk might a small cluster of overfed mice. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said, not bothering to make it sound even remotely sincere. ‘As you may know, John Farraday was a good friend of mine, and godfather to my eldest daughter. I also strongly recommended him for the position of Chief, and so view his murder not only as a national but as a personal tragedy.’ He stepped forward and looked at us all in turn, and his voice rose fractionally. ‘I also view it as a cock-up of monumental proportions. As you will remember, when the idea was mooted to hold this service in St Paul’s rather than the Foreign Office chapel, my immediate concern was security. And I was assured that the place would be under closer scrutiny than the Crown Jewels.’ He reached out and banged the table with the palm of his hand, making the glasses jump. ‘Well, it was hardly the Crown fucking Jewels, was it, gentlemen?’ he shouted, his face flushed.

He glared at us, daring anyone to reply. Fearing looked like he was considering it for a second, but then thought better of the idea. Haggard adjusted the knot in his tie and took a long, deep breath.

‘The PM is currently suffering from gastroenteritis,’ he said, his voice reverting to its usual chilly calm, ‘so he can’t be with us this morning. However, he has been fully apprised of the situation and has called a Cabinet meeting for his bedside at two o’clock, at which time I will report on the results of this meeting. He is already not best pleased with your lot as a result of the incident in Nigeria, and I need hardly remind you that John’s murder came while we were
mourning the death of the last man to occupy his position. So… can anyone tell me why I shouldn’t recommend that he sack the whole bloody lot of you?’ He picked his glass of water from the table and took a few gulps of it, his Adam’s apple bobbing wildly. ‘I want an explanation for this,’ he said, sitting down again, ‘and I want it now.’

Osborne glanced across at me and I debriefed for the third time, taking it from the moment of the shot until the sniper’s death in Smithfield.

‘What a pity you couldn’t bring him in alive,’ said Haggard once I’d finished. ‘A capsule, you say?’

I nodded. ‘He bit down on it within moments of my reaching him.’

‘I see.’ He took another cigar from his jacket and lit it, and a spiral of smoke wafted across the room to clog itself in the curtains. ‘At any rate, thank you: we all owe you a debt of gratitude for at least trying to apprehend the killer. Perhaps your colleagues from Five can now tell us how this was allowed to happen in the first place?’

Fearing bristled at the scarcely veiled accusation. ‘We took all the usual precautions and more,’ he said. ‘We had sixteen Redcaps stationed inside the cathedral—’

‘Who were a fat lot of use,’ said Haggard.

Fearing paused for a moment and decided not to pursue it: ‘And we conducted a thorough sweep of the building before the service began. There was no indication—’

‘“A thorough sweep”?’ Haggard jumped in again. ‘How on earth did the sniper get in, then? And what about the climbing ropes Paul’s just told us about – how did he manage to bring them in unnoticed?’

Fearing’s nostrils flared. As the head of Five, he was unused to being given a carpeting. But he deserved it: it had happened on his watch. ‘We’re looking into the first matter urgently, sir,’ he said. ‘But he may simply have walked in during the service.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Haggard quietly, ‘but did you just say that he might have
walked in?
’

‘Yes. He was disguised as a priest. We did consider the security situation extensively, but St Paul’s is a public place of worship. If we’d closed it off completely, we would have created an enormous problem with local parishioners, so some access was a condition of holding the service there, as it has been in the past.’ He glanced at Osborne to make it clear that he had raised these issues beforehand. ‘The Redcaps turned tourists away at the door explaining it was a private funeral service, but there was still some toing and froing. As for the climbing ropes, the scaffolding was taken down from around the dome last year but there were still a few bits and pieces on the galleries. We checked with the Dean beforehand that this was all in order, and he told us to leave it. But it appears that he had hidden his ropes among these—’

‘Pathetic!’ Haggard snapped. ‘I don’t want to hear any more of this tripe. You should, of course, have taken the Dean or whoever was responsible up there to check. And as for creating problems with parishioners…’ His shook his head. ‘Pathetic. Do we at least have any idea who was behind it? Paul said he was Italian – are we sure of that?’

‘I think we can be reasonably confident, minister,’ Osborne broke in. ‘He spoke the language fluently as he was dying, at which point instinct tends to come into play.’

He had a good memory, Osborne; I had to give him that. Probably why he’d made it so far.

‘But why on earth would the Italians want to kill John?’ asked Haggard.

Pelham-Jones took it. ‘The sniper may just have been a gun for hire, sir. We don’t have anything further on his identity yet, although we’ve shared a detailed description with Interpol to see if they can help. But we have had a claim of responsibility.’

Osborne and I both looked up. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘When was this?’

‘About two hours ago. A call to Holborn police station from a
group calling themselves the “Movement for International Solidarity”.’

‘Credible?’

Pelham-Jones nodded. ‘There is no way of concealing that something happened this morning – there were simply too many people involved, and it will get out whether we like it or not. But this was still a very quick response, and at the moment we’re inclined to think it was genuine.’

‘I wish you’d told us this before the meeting,’ said Osborne, and I felt his shoe kick against mine under the table. I glanced across at him but he was making notes intently on his pad. I squinted at the scrawl at the top of the page:
KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS OUTFIT?

‘We’ve been rather busy,’ Fearing said icily.

I picked up my pen and wrote
NO
on my pad. It rang a bell, vaguely, but I didn’t have any facts at my fingertips.

Osborne scribbled again.
EDMUND MIGHT.

He asked Haggard if I could briefly be excused to check whether or not we had anything on the group in our files. Haggard agreed, and I asked one of the private secretaries to show me to a telephone. It took a while to get hold of Innes, but once I had I quickly explained where we were. He perked up as soon as I told him the name of the group.