‘I won’t be signing anything, now or later.’
Cullum scrambled to his feet. He was shorter than he’d looked. ‘There isn’t room for compromise, Tate,’ he muttered. ‘This isn’t some kind of lone warrior mission, you know. We need that form signed.’
Harry’s phone rang. He checked the screen. Ballatyne.
‘Harry.’ The MI6 man’s voice was flat. ‘We’ve got a problem. Are you alone?’
‘I’m with Cullum. We’ve just finished,’ he added heavily. Cullum looked annoyed. He must have guessed it was Ballatyne. He turned and walked out without a word, scooping up the travel brochure as he went.
‘Good. Lose him and get down to Victoria Embankment Gardens. Urgent.’
‘He’s gone. What’s up?’
‘Pike and his escorts never made it to Colchester.’
EIGHT
Harry took the underground to Embankment, changing trains twice on the way as a precaution. If Pike had been killed or taken, someone must have been watching him. It followed that Harry might now be on someone’s watch list. He emerged into bright sunshine. Behind and to his left across the river was the London Eye, revolving slowly under a blue-grey sky. In front of him was a paved pedestrian area leading up towards Charing Cross station. Victoria Embankment Gardens opened to his right, with the usual cluster of office workers on a smoke break, managing to look somehow miserable in their enjoyment.
He checked the immediate area but saw no sign of Ballatyne, so he turned right and walked into the gardens. Bordered on one side by tall buildings and on the other by the river and the rush of traffic along the Victoria Embankment, the gardens presented an oasis of sorts, overlooked by a number of large trees with lush foliage. The area was roughly triangular in shape, narrowing at one end, with wooden benches dotted at regular intervals around the central lawn, facing outwards. It was a good place for a meeting, Harry noted; busy enough for a person to merge with the office workers and tourists, central enough for anyone to be there with good reason, and with space for a discreet conversation without being overheard. He’d used places like it over the years, although not always so pleasant.
Ballatyne was sitting on one of the benches down the river side of the triangle, next to a young woman in a blouson jacket and jeans. He was nursing a disposable mug and reading a newspaper. His minder was standing a few yards away, chewing on an apple. The minder spotted Harry and gave a brief nod, then walked over and threw his apple into a waste bin. It seemed to be the signal for the young woman to get up and walk away, leaving the seat next to Ballatyne vacant.
Harry walked along the path and sat down.
‘Smooth,’ he said. ‘Do you all practise that on the terrace at Vauxhall Cross?’
‘Well, we have to spend the allocation on something,’ said Ballatyne, not bothering to check that anyone was near. The background noise of a train passing over Hungerford Bridge and the roar of traffic along the Embankment would ensure privacy. ‘Pike and his escorts were in an RTA on the A12 north of Brentwood. Pike and Wallace are dead and Collins is in intensive care, condition critical.’
Harry felt his gut drop at the news. ‘What happened?’
‘It was a hit. Witnesses said another car — a Mercedes estate — came off the intersection with the M25 and drew alongside. There were some bangs and Pike’s car swerved and flipped. The witness said they were travelling fast. The Merc was gone by the time anyone could take the number. Did you get anything from him?’
‘No. He wouldn’t talk. But I know he came into the country on Eurostar via Brussels. Someone else must have known it, too.’ He ran back over the past eighteen hours. Pike’s trail must have been picked up and followed at some stage. He thought back to the two men he’d seen in the car at the hospital. That had been a grey estate, too, but he couldn’t recall the make. The men had stood out only because of their look. It didn’t mean they were responsible for killing Pike, but it was a possibility. He told Ballatyne about them. No, he hadn’t noticed the registration.
Ballatyne nodded. ‘I’ll get the Plods to see if the local cameras picked them up. What time was this?’
Harry told him. ‘I’ll follow the Eurostar lead, backtrack his journey in. If he came in from Thailand, he could have flown in to Amsterdam, then by train on through Brussels to London.’ He had a sudden thought. ‘That photo of Paulton in Brussels; how recent was it?’
Ballatyne gave a ghost of a smile. ‘I can see your thinking. But whatever Pike was doing in Brussels, it wasn’t meeting Paulton. That photo was four months old, before Pike went on the trot. We do have a lead, though. A flag just came up on Pike’s Visa card. He used it twice to draw cash from a machine near The Hague. Approximately four hundred pounds in two lots.’
Harry thought about the money in Pike’s wallet. That would be about right, given ticket money to London and some kind of deposit on his room rental in Clapham. Yet laying such an obvious trail was inconsistent with a man deciding to bunk off to foreign parts and pick up a new life in exchange for selling sensitive military information.
‘He wasn’t running anywhere,’ he said finally, as the realization hit him. ‘He was coming home.’ He thought about the bayonet and its keen edge, and the expression in Pike’s eyes when he saw Harry standing in his way. It had been a reactive process: Harry was there to stop him, ergo he was the enemy and to be taken out. ‘Pike was damaged goods. He needed psychiatric help, not a return to combat.’
‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’
The young woman in the blouson returned and sat on a section of low wall a few yards away, while the minder in the suit wandered off to watch the traffic on the Embankment. The young woman turned and lifted a mobile phone to squint at the screen.
‘Tell her to knock it off,’ said Harry mildly. ‘You’ve got my picture on file.’
Ballatyne looked irritated and glared at the young woman until she got the message and moved away. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t part of their orders. Bloody mobile phones, given them all carte blanche to record everything they see.’ He sighed. ‘Many more downloads of worthless crap and the system will crash altogether.’ He leaned over and dumped his cup into a waste bin alongside the bench. ‘There’s a rum thing about Pike, though, Harry: he can’t have been all that damaged. We came across an offshore bank account in his brother’s name. Popped up out of nowhere. Four days ago he received a deposit of fifty grand from sources unknown via an account in Grand Cayman.’ He squinted at the sky. ‘The Pikes of this world don’t get money from offshore centres — certainly not that much — not unless it smells of drugs or terrorism. Or espionage.’
‘I didn’t know he had a brother.’ There had been no mention of close family in the notes. Pike was alone in the world, a free agent.
‘He doesn’t. He did once, but little Davy fell out of a tree when he was five. Died of a brain haemorrhage.’
Harry let it go. It sounded as if Ballatyne had Pike’s past activities all sewn up and the evidence to prove it. There was nothing more he could do except find out where the man had been. ‘Do you have the location of the cash machine Pike used in The Hague?’
‘I thought you might ask that.’ He took a brown A5 envelope from his pocket and passed it across. ‘It’s in there. A place with an unpronounceable name on the coast.’ It seemed a curiously furtive action and Harry wondered how often Ballatyne got out of his office.
‘We’re trying to track the route of the Mercedes that totalled Pike and the others, but I’m not holding out much hope. Some of the cameras have been turned off to save money. It’s probably been torched in a field somewhere by now.’ He paused, then said, ‘There’s another runner out there who’s causing a bit of a fuss at the moment. No need to concern you overly, but like Pike, she has potential value to the right people.’
Harry opened the envelope and slid out a sheet of paper and a five-by-seven photo of a young woman with black hair and a confident, steady gaze. She had even, white teeth and the kind of smooth, latte-coloured skin most women would kill for. There was Asian blood in there, Harry thought. Her mouth looked as though it might be about to break into a smile, and he wondered what had made such a high-flyer break for the hills.