She sipped her coffee and winced. ‘You made the right decision,’ she said, but Milraud’s smile was perfunctory. He was clearly impatient for the debrief to begin.
‘So how did it go?’ asked Liz, sitting down at last.
Milraud shrugged. ‘Much as expected.’
‘Was he concerned about security? I mean, since your Paris meeting was aborted because of the surveillance.’
Milraud sat up. ‘Yes. He was worried that I might have been followed and he checked me out for a microphone. I assured him he need not worry; that I was once an intelligence officer and I know about these things.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘I explained that I had gone to Paris and Berlin under different passports and I was at least twelve hours ahead of anyone hunting me.’ He grimaced; they both knew Milraud had thought this himself.
‘Do you think he suspects you?’
‘In his position I certainly would – I never trust my customers, so why should they trust me? But when he pressed me about being spotted in Paris, I told him I had as much right to worry about him as he had about me. That shut him up.’
‘So after that, what did you discuss? He called the meeting, didn’t he? What did he want to say to you?’
‘He wanted to add to his order. That was for firearms, as you know.’
‘What else does he want?’
‘It’s a bit surprising. He wants grenades – two dozen of them.’
‘Really?’ Liz was astonished. The whole business seemed surprising, as it was generally assumed that the jihadi groups fighting in the Arab Spring countries had no difficulty acquiring weapons from their supporters, but this requirement was even more unexpected.
‘That’s right. And then the oddest thing of all – he wants more ammunition for the weapons he’d ordered. Not more weapons; just more ammunition. Twenty thousand rounds.’
‘Twenty thousand?’ Liz could not contain her astonishment. It sounded as if Zara was equipping an infantry battalion. And why so much ammunition for only twenty weapons?
‘I agree it doesn’t make sense, unless he already has a lot of weapons at his disposal. But I didn’t have that impression from our first meeting. It’s quite peculiar.’
Milraud looked uneasy; Liz sensed there was something on his mind. She waited, but he said no more. Eventually she asked, ‘Let’s come back again to this black man you met in Berlin. What did he want?’
‘I was asked to meet him. I was told he wanted to see who was involved in the deal. I was told he has not done this type of business before.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Almost nothing. He just asked about my business – how long I’d been supplying, what parts of the world I supplied, that sort of thing.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Very little, but it seemed to satisfy him. Then he rushed off. He was very jumpy.’
He still looked uncomfortable. Then he shrugged and returned to the subject of the meeting with Zara. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t sure how you wanted me to play it today. So I told him that I would check if I could get the goods he wanted in time and get back to him. He pressed me, so I had to promise to let him know tomorrow.’
‘How are you to do that?’
‘By email.’
She knew from Seurat that the French were in control of the email traffic.
Milraud asked, ‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Can you supply the extra things he wants in time?’
‘Yes. I only have to email my supplier.’
‘Where is he?’
‘In Bulgaria.’
Liz didn’t hesitate. ‘Do it then and tell him you can fulfil the supplementary order. But also tell him you need to know precisely where and how it should be delivered. Press him for details.’
She looked at Milraud intently. He might have been surprised by Zara’s request, but she was certain he was holding something back. It didn’t make sense that he knew nothing about Jackson. Milraud was acting as if Jackson was Zara’s contact and he had nothing to do with him, but she was sure that wasn’t the case. Maybe if young Thibault over in Paris could hack into their back email exchanges the full truth would emerge – and a lot sooner than if she waited for Milraud to come clean.
Chapter 30
It was almost eight when Liz left the hotel. Milraud would be spending the night there in the other pair of interconnecting rooms, under the watchful eye of Dicky Soames and his colleagues, before returning to Paris with them as close escorts. There was no way Liz was going to be responsible for losing the man whom Martin Seurat had spent so many years hunting.
In the dark, Thames House looked like a lit-up half-filled egg box: unoccupied offices were dark, but enough officers worked late hours to dot the heavy masonry façade with the lights of their midnight oil. In her office Liz found a handwritten slip from Peggy: Halliday rang. Said call him any time. He has news.
When she reached Halliday there was the background noise of a raucous party going on. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he shouted. Gradually the noise subsided, until she could hear only traffic whizzing past in the background, tyres wet from rain. Halliday must have stepped outside from whatever club he was visiting. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said.
‘It’s Liz Carlyle; I got a message to ring you. But I don’t want to interrupt the party.’
‘I’m working, believe it or not. I’m drinking vodka and tonic without the vodka, and waiting for the barman to offer to sell me three grams of coke. I thought I’d better take your call outside. I’ve got some news for you. Not good, I’m afraid.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘We raided Slim’s with Immigration – that’s the club owned by Lester Jackson. We arrested half a dozen girls working upstairs – they were “hostesses” but they were doing more than serving drinks. All from somewhere in Eastern Europe most likely but they didn’t have a set of papers between them.
‘Normally that would have been enough to close the place down, and maybe let me squeeze our high-flying friend Mr Jackson a bit. But he wasn’t there and he didn’t seem to care, and I now know why. He had a leading brief go to the lock-up by breakfast time, and bob’s your uncle, it turned out all the girls had proper papers and valid passports – the solicitor claimed he’d been holding them on the girls’ behalf.’
‘What sort of passports?’
‘Bulgarian – every one. And now that it’s in the EU that means they can work here, come and go as they please. Not that I believe for a minute their papers were kosher. None of those girls speaks Bulgarian.’
‘How do you know? Do you speak it?’
Halliday laughed. ‘No. But one of the cleaners at the police station is from Sofia. She said the girls couldn’t understand a word she said.’
‘But you had to let them go anyway?’
‘Yes. No choice. They’re all living in Manchester, so it’s not up to me. I would have tried to work the prostitution angle, but Manchester SB couldn’t be bothered. These days it’s hard to convict unless you show the girls involved are either under duress or illegal immigrants. None of the girls would make a complaint so we couldn’t do either.’
‘Too bad,’ said Liz, though she wasn’t very surprised. Jackson seemed unlikely to jeopardise his club by laying himself open to a single police raid.
Halliday paused and Liz heard the sound of a bus passing. As it died down Halliday went on, ‘That isn’t good news, but there’s worse to come. I had a source in the club – an older woman who functioned as a kind of “mother” to the working girls. Name of Katya.’