Assassin

'I'm sorry, Bill, but I just don't buy it. The last I heard, Carver was doing high-end security work. He tells nervous billionaires and politicians how to keep themselves safe. He even does dummy attacks, just to test their protection. The pay's good. There's no danger. He doesn't feel like shit thinking about what he's done. Why would he want to go back to wet jobs?'

'Maybe he's strapped for cash. Plenty of people are these days. I don't really know why he's done it. I'm just looking at a pile of evidence that says he has.'

'Well, how did we get dragged into this anyway?'

'A private call from Dubai,' said Selsey, pleased that he could now stick to something that had a grain of truth. 'The authorities there already know that Dey's killer is British. They think it would be good for the continued friendship between our two peoples if we helped identify him.'

'Forget it. We're not going to do their bloody plod-work for them. If they arrest a suspect and he happens to be British, it's a straightforward Foreign Office matter, nothing to do with us.'

'Unless he actually is Carver,' mused Selsey, delighted that Grantham had given him an opening. 'We wouldn't necessarily want him falling into anyone else's hands, would we? Not with what he knows.'

'No, we bloody wouldn't…' Grantham muttered. He had made deals with Carver, deals that would be very embarrassing indeed were they ever to be made public. It wouldn't be good for a senior MI6 officer to be exposed as a close associate of a paid killer. He shook his head. 'I still can't work out what's really happening here. I mean, what if someone's framing Carver, using him as camouflage to hide what they're up to?'

'Seems a bit elaborate,' said Selsey, trying to sound a lot more relaxed about the speed of Grantham's thought processes than he actually felt.

'Maybe, but even so, I'm not entirely sure about this.'

'Still, there's no harm in looking a bit deeper, eh? We might as well find out what's going on, just to keep our own back well covered.'

'That's always worth doing,' Grantham agreed. 'All right, Bill, dig around. Tell me what you find. And don't tell anyone else.'

'Of course not,' said Selsey. 'You can count on me.'

15

Harrison James put the phone down on a furious senior senator from Florida, having just informed him of the cancellation of a planned presidential trip to Miami. Officially the President had been going to visit the National Hurricane Center and lunch with local business leaders; unofficially he was repaying the senator for his endorsement early in the primary season. James had given the senator a vague explanation of the President's change of plans, saying that he'd be making an overseas trip with significant national security implications that made his destination confidential for the time being.

When the pork-barrelling old bastard asked, 'Are we talking Afghanistan, here, Hal?' he'd replied, 'Well, I can't comment on that, Javier. But I'll tell you this, the President has dynamic, far-reaching plans for the projection of US power around the world. If you can help make those plans a reality, he will not forget your sacrifice.'

Christ, the shit you had to talk just to smooth old men's egos, James thought, putting down the phone. Seconds later, the red light was flashing again.

'It's the British ambassador,' James's personal assistant informed him. 'He wants to talk about the Prime Minister's role in the President's visit.'

'I'll bet he does,' muttered James, then forced a smile into his voice as he said, 'Sir Michael, good to hear from you. What can I do?'

'Morning, Hal, it's just this whole Bristol business. The PM's delighted the President is coming to see us, naturally. Can't wait. And, of course, bearing in mind Britain's historic role in the abolition of slavery, he's absolutely supportive of any effort to stamp out this vile business today. He's just concerned that our presence is acknowledged, as it were.'

'You mean he doesn't want to be totally upstaged in his own back yard.'

'Absolutely, Hal, I knew you'd understand. And if you need a royal or two to greet the President off the plane, or host a spot of lunch, you only have to ask.'

'That's great, Sir Michael,' said James, wondering how the Brits managed to sound so damn condescending, even when they were kissing your ass.

No sooner had he got rid of the ambassador than the light went on again.

'It's Bobby DiLivio in the speechwriters' office,' came his assistant's voice. 'He wants to know if you can spare him five minutes to look over the opening paragraph of the President's speech.' The men who make tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars a year from organized crime do not possess the intelligence agencies – with electronic infrastructure capable of spying on virtually any communication, anywhere – available to the world's richest nations. They can, however, pay for the very best private-sector specialists in every form of surveillance and investigation. They also have the advantage that they do not even have to pretend to be bound by the law. They are thus free to bribe, blackmail, coerce and otherwise extort information. They routinely use assassination to further their aims. And they can, like any other spy network, insert their people as sleeper agents into legitimate occupations.

Bobby Kula, for example, was a highly regarded computer wizard who played an invaluable role developing and maintaining the operational software that enabled the Department of State to do its job. He was an Albanian-American, a fact of which he was proud, having arrived in the US with his parents when he was just four years old. He was equally proud of his doctorate from 'Course 6', otherwise known as the Electronic and Computer Science department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His security-clearance procedure had shown no record of any criminal activity; no predisposition to aberrant behaviour of any kind; no reason at all to suspect that he posed any risk to the security of his adopted country. It would have taken a detailed understanding of Albania's clan-based culture to understand that Bobby Kula was distantly related on his mother's side to a senior member of a gang run by the Visar clan, which had become one of the biggest international players in the trafficking of drugs, weapons and, above all, people. The importance of this family tie had been drummed into him from his earliest boyhood: both the advantages that it offered and the duties it involved.

It was pure chance that Kula overheard two State officials talking about the President's proposed war on slavery while sitting in a men's room cubicle, invisible to the officials standing at the urinals. His response was anything but random. He understood at once how the new policy could impact on the family business and conducted a private trawl through the department's computers, easily bypassing the security systems that he himself had helped develop and install, to find out more about it.

Having come up with a date and a place for the President's announcement, Kula called a friend at the Albanian embassy in DC and asked him and his family over for a barbecue he and his wife Cindy were having that Sunday afternoon. The invitation would have aroused no suspicion, even if Kula were being watched, which he was not: Albania is an ally of the US and it is perfectly normal for diplomats of all nations to make social contacts in the cities where they are posted. It is, in fact, their job. That this particular diplomat was also connected to the Visar clan was a detail of which the American security agencies were unaware. But even if they had been, there are few agents able to speak Gjuha shqipe, the language of Albania, particularly not in the colloquial north-western Geg dialect in which Bobby Kula and his contact were chatting over the franks, slaw and Coors Lights. The contact used the same dialect when passing the news on to the palatial villa in the hills of Nueva Andalucia, looking over the Spanish resort of Puerto Banus, where Arjan Visar was spending the weekend.