Let's call them Pinky and Perky, thought Matt: Pinky for the guy with the tie, Perky for the younger guy with the scruffy hair. He knew enough about Five and the way it operated to know that he wasn't going to be given their names. Never mind. It wasn't as if he was ever going to add them to his Christmas card fist.
I'm back. I'd better start getting used to it.
'These two men are going to ask you a few questions,' said Alison, her tone cold and businesslike. 'I'll be down the corridor. You'll see me again when they've finished.'
Matt looked for somewhere to sit down but they seemed to have forgotten to provide him with a chair. Forgotten? No. If there wasn't a chair, that was because they wanted it like that. They didn't want him relaxed.
They want to see whether I can still handle pressure.
'Your name is Matt Browning,' said Pinky, looking down at the notes on his desk. 'Thirty-five years old, two years out of the Regiment, served with distinction for ten years. Saw action in the Gulf, Ulster, Bosnia and a couple of other places that seem to have been mysteriously deleted from the files because the British Army wasn't officially supposed to be involved. Chechnya, Indonesia.' He paused, shifting to another sheet of paper. 'A tough soldier, exceptionally steady under fire, fantastic endurance, but takes things personally. Short-tempered. Sometimes prone to excessive violence, even by SAS standards.'
Matt looked at the man closely, but could read nothing in his expression. 'I know my record, thanks,' he said curtly. 'I've no apologies. Sometimes violence is the only language people understand.'
'Not officer material,' said Perky, looking down at the notes on his desk. 'Good sense of leadership, popular with the men and decisive in combat, but not easy to control. He doesn't always see the bigger picture, nor always understand about putting the interest of the campaign above the interests of his own men. Doesn't always listen to advice from his superiors. Doesn't learn from his mistakes.' He paused, looking up at Matt. 'Would you say that was a fair assessment?'
Matt shrugged. 'I'm out of the Regiment,' he replied. 'I assess myself these days.'
'We're going to read out a fist of words,' said Pinky. 'I want you to give us your first reaction to each one. OK?'
'Fine,' said Matt, shifting his weight from one leg to another. 'Shrink school. I know the drill.' He glanced down towards the small stack of flash-cards that Perky was pulling from his briefcase. At about the time he had left the Regiment a bunch of moronic management consultants had been hired to start testing the men's aptitudes and ambitions. It was all rubbish, according to most of the men, and Matt agreed with them — their main ambition was not to get killed, and you didn't need some consultant examining you to tell you that.
This stuff is fine for regional sales managers at Vodafone. Fighting men don't need it.
'Money,' said Perky.
'Control.'
'Hope,' said Pinky.
'Children.'
'Blood,' said Perky.
'Food.'
'Anger,' said Pinky.
'Fools.'
'Desire,' said Perky.
'Safety.'
'Greed,' said Pinky.
'Stupid,' said Matt.
Both men looked down at their notes, and made a series of marks on the papers spread out in front of them. Then Perky picked up his mobile and called up a pre-recorded number. 'You can come back in now,' he said. 'We're finished.'
Matt relaxed. 'Did I pass?'
'We're here to ask questions,' snapped Perky, 'not answer them.'
Matt briefly imagined meeting the man in a dark alley, thinking about the marks his fist would leave on his jaw.
'Our assessment is that you're psychologically impaired,' Perky continued. 'Maybe that's why you never got the promotions you wanted in the Regiment.'
Matt shrugged. 'Impaired?' he said sharply. 'I've noticed that you two couldn't find your way out of a dark room without someone coming to rescue you. I'd call that thinking pretty straight.'
'As we were saying,' Pinky leant forward on the desk, 'lacks respect for authority. No direction in life. No moral compass. Lacks socialisation.'
'Right,' said Matt, grinning. 'I thought moral flexibility was what Five was looking for these days.'
Behind him he heard Alison at the door, and he turned to watch her as she walked back into the room. She glanced towards the two men, nodded, then looked towards Matt. 'We're about to explain a mission to you,' she said. 'You might be interested, you might not be. Either way, I want you to understand that everything we are about to tell you is confidential. If you walk away, forget everything we say. Understood?'
Matt nodded. 'Agreed,' he said. 'I might be out of the services, but I'm still a loyal citizen.'
Alison returned one of her old smiles, the type Matt had seen in Spain but hadn't seen here in London: a smile that spoke of warmth and interest, not simply manipulation and control. 'OK,' she said softly. 'Great.'
Pinky took a Toshiba notebook computer from his case and set it out on the desk. 'You probably already know that the greatest security threat we face, indeed all the developed nations face, is al-Qaeda,' he began. 'We are fighting them in lots of different ways, shutting down training centres, rounding up sympathisers, stopping the flow of weapons. But one of the ways we are fighting them is financial.'
'Al-Qaeda has a lot of money,' said Perky, picking up the flow of the conversation where his colleague had left it. 'Its roots are in Saudi Arabia, and that's a rich place. But it has a lot of support right across that region. There are contributions coming from everywhere — Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, Malaysia. That's what makes them so deadly. Fanatics we can handle. Fanatics with cash are a different story. Overall, we estimate the organisation has at least five billion dollars at its disposal. They hide their money, and they are good at it. So it could be a lot more.'
Matt could feel his heart sinking. They hadn't told him what the deal was yet. But they had started talking about al-Qaeda. Whatever it was, it was going to be dangerous.
'Before September the eleventh, al-Qaeda kept its money hidden in offshore centres around the world.' Pinky glanced towards Alison as he spoke. 'The usual places — Gibraltar, the Isle of Man, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, Switzerland. Mainly Switzerland. It's got the best banks in the world, and the Arabs like Zurich and Geneva. The place is swarming with them.'
'But after September the eleventh it started getting too hot,' Perky continued. 'The Americans started clamping down hard, particularly on the Swiss. They told them they didn't mind the usual drugs dealers, Russian mafiosi, and tax dodgers who use their banks. They could all stay secret. But they wanted to know about the al-Qaeda accounts, and they wanted to shut them down. The Swiss didn't have any choice. Either they played along, or Credit Suisse and UBS and the rest of them were going to get kicked out of Wall Street. They couldn't afford that, so they had no choice. They had to start shutting al-Qaeda accounts down and seizing the money.'
Matt leant forward. 'And the Americans decided to share all of this information with you because they love MI5 so much?'
'No, they needed our help as well,' said Alison. 'A lot of al-Qaeda money was passing through the City of London as well. It's a big money-laundering market, everyone knows that. We froze out what we could, but it's in Zurich that most of its money is stored.'
Pinky looked towards Matt, a frown creasing his brow. 'Al-Qaeda saw what was happening in Switzerland. They could see the heat being turned up, and they could see their accounts being frozen. The Swiss authorities tracked and seized about one billion dollars. Ever since then, al-Qaeda have been slowly moving it out.'