The floor below that was a tiny maze of quiet corridors lined with closed and locked doors. Rudi had scoped it out, by degrees, in his first couple of weeks here. There were no obvious surveillance devices in the corridors, and none of the less obvious ones, and an open saunter around the fifth floor one evening had prompted no reaction from any of the other occupants of the Chambers. Which was not in and of itself any proof, of course.
Rudi walked calmly around the fifth floor, examining the locked doors. There was dust on some of them, in spite of Mrs Gabriel’s best efforts, but two of them were clean and shiny, their big brass escutcheons scratched by generations of badly-aimed keys. He unlocked one with a biro and the hook broken off a coat hanger and turned the handle slowly. Nothing obvious on the frame. No wires. No contact spots, shiny or matt. He pushed the door open, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him, all in one movement.
Light came in through the windows from the lamps five floors below, picking out a room lined floor to ceiling with filing cabinets. There was a desk and a chair. A kickstool sat in a corner, for those hard-to-reach top drawers. Tiny illuminated numbers glowed on the front of all the cabinets, where combination lock keypads guarded the secrets within. No point bothering. Rudi opened the door, backed out into the corridor, locked the door again, moved on to the next one.
Inside, another desk and chair, and on the desk a computer monitor running a screensaver of two kittens playing with the cardboard insert of a roll of kitchen paper. Rudi stood with his back to the door for quite a long time, watching the kittens playing.
It occurred to him that what seemed, on the surface, to be many weeks of sitting around doing nothing had actually been a complex conversation between himself and Mr Self. And through Mr Self with the people who actually owned and ran Smithson’s Chambers. He wondered how long this computer monitor had been sitting here, running its cute screensaver, waiting for him to break into the room. As a piece of entrapment, it was so transparently obvious that there seemed no harm at all in going over to the desk, sitting down, and waving the kittens away.
The computer’s menu was sparse to the point of comedy. Just the operating system and three spreadsheet files. The first sheet was a list of names and long numbers. Banks and account access codes. The second sheet was filled with random-looking five-figure groups, obviously encrypted. The third sheet was a mixture of encrypted groups and sets of figures in clear-text. A list of payments?
Rudi looked at the screen. Smithson’s Chambers was a black bank, a deniable source of funds for covert operations. Want to infiltrate a trade union and need some cash to set up the op? Smithson’s Chambers was your one-stop shop. Need to finesse the demise (political, religious or physical) of a troublesome imam? Smithson’s Chambers would dole out the money you’d need.
None of this was actually world-shaking. Intelligence – the real world of intelligence, not the stuff politicians were told about – ran on black money, reptile funds, cash that sloshed back and forth across continents in constant motion in case anyone happened upon it. The truly intriguing aspect of all of this was that he had been allowed to discover this fact, and discover it without being bundled off to his room. Here he was, sitting here quite comfortably, with the bank codes to access fourteen and a half million Swiss francs – as always Europe’s most copper-bottomed currency – literally beneath his fingertips. It was not, he found himself admitting sadly, the actions of a national intelligence service.
On the other hand, he thought, it might, just might, be the actions of a national intelligence service faced with a situation so bizarre and outré that only a bizarre and outré response would suffice.
He sat there looking at the pages of numbers for a long time. Much longer than he should have done, strictly speaking. It was such an obvious offer that it was almost comical, but it opened up an abyss of possibility. He wasn’t caught in an agony of indecision, so much as trying to think through the ramifications.
Finally he dug around in his pockets until he found a leaflet which had been thrust into his hand by a Hare Krishna in Leicester Square the previous day. He sat for another moment or two, Biro in one hand and leaflet in the other, then he started to copy out the list of bank codes.
THE NEXT COUPLE of days passed rather pleasantly. Rudi thought he detected a certain relaxation in the Chambers. Mr Self was less in evidence. Mrs Gabriel even smiled at him on several occasions. He sensed that they knew what he had done, and that they knew that he knew that they knew. Quite which direction the game had now taken, he couldn’t tell, but it was as if he had entered into a form of unspoken contract with these people and the people who controlled them, and it pleased them.
He continued with his walks, the folded Krishna leaflet tucked inside his sock. Not wasting time but trying to gain momentum.
One brisk spring midmorning he left the Chambers, not a thought in his head, and walked down the Strand and up into Covent Garden.
The area was, as ever, crowded with tourists and workers on their lunch break. Rudi wandered among them, hands in pockets, casually scoping the place out, rather enjoying the hustle and bustle of being out among ordinary people.
Crossing the Piazza, just outside the Royal Opera House, he found himself behind two young women, office workers from their clothes, walking side by side deep in conversation. One of the women was carrying a leather shoulder bag, unwisely left unzipped, and from the opening protruded what looked very much like the top half of a purse.
Rudi lengthened his stride slightly, and as he passed the woman he watched his right hand reach out and take the purse from her bag. He thought of Mr Bauer and Mrs Gabriel and Mr Self and their invisible masters and he peeled away from the two young women as naturally as anything and wandered unhurriedly off at a tangent.
He was at Cambridge Circus before he decided to snatch a look at the purse in his hand, and the moment he did so he realised his mistake. The purse was covered with thousands of tiny stiff plastic hairs, like the hard component of velcro, and the moment Rudi had it in his hand the little hairs had tasted his DNA, decided they didn’t recognise him, and the purse had armed itself.
As security measures went, it was from the cheap end, something you’d pick up on a market stall. It was meant to deter only the opportunist thief – you could circumvent it easily enough just by wearing gloves. But Rudi hadn’t thought to wear gloves, and if he tried to look in the purse now it would detonate a dye capsule and he’d be left wandering around Central London with a fluorescent green face. Without breaking stride he palmed the purse into a rubbish bin and moved on.
There was no way to stop now. He was in the most surveilled city in the most surveilled nation in Europe, and undoubtedly his theft of the purse had been recorded somewhere.
He did have some small advantage, though. He knew the truth about surveillance. Ever since the dawn of GWOT the nations of the West – apart from the United States, where civil libertarians tended to carry rifles and use them on closed-circuit cameras as an expression of their freedoms – had put their faith in creating a paranoid state, one where every move of every citizen was recorded and logged and filmed and fuck you, if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to worry about.
Whether this had had any great influence in the course of GWOT was a moot point, but there was one thing not generally appreciated about the paranoid state. It was incredibly labour-intensive.