She was breathing hard as she reached the top of the flight and turned into what she imagined would be the living room, were the place occupied and not completely empty of furniture. She dropped the bag, which hit the floor with a thud, sending up a small cloud of dust.
`You're three minutes late,' the man said sharply. He was of medium height, and slim-built, with a complexion much browner than hers, and a thin black moustache. It came to her that after all their meetings, she was taking in these details for the first time.
He was poorly dressed, she noticed, in a crumpled suit and a shirt frayed clean through at the collar.
He nodded towards the hold-all. 'What's this?' he asked, with an edge of suspicion in his voice.
A cold chill ran through her. Don't make him suspicious, Adam had said. We don't want him panicking. She twisted her mouth into what she hoped was a rueful grin. 'Nothing. I was supposed to be going off for a break this morning, down to Devon with a few girlfriends. I was almost gone last night when this signal came in. I had a look at it and decided I had to pass it on. I'll have to catch the rest up on the train.'
'What's so urgent about it?'
The grin turned to a frown. 'You know better than to ask me that. I give you the information in a sealed envelope, you leave, I follow. We discuss nothing. That's the drill.'
He held out his hand. 'Okay, okay,' he said, in a guttural accent, 'so keep your hair on.
Give it to me, and let me go, if it's so urgent.'
She nodded and bent over the hold-all. Unzipping a side pocket she drew out a brown A4 envelope, sealed and folded across the centre. 'Here. Take my word for it, it's urgent. Do what you have to do with it as fast as you can.'
The man took it from her, and shoved it roughly into a pocket of his jacket. 'Very well. I'm going. Remember, give me the usual ten minutes' start before you go to catch your train.
Till the next time.'
`Yes,' she muttered, as he disappeared down the staircase towards the drab street outside.
As she heard the creaking door close behind him, she breathed a huge sigh of relief. She realised she was shaking, and reached automatically into the deep pocket of her woollen jacket. Finding her Turkish cigarettes, she lit one and drew on it deeply, then, throwing the spent match into the nearest corner of the room, she exhaled, and sat down carefully on her tight-packed hold-all.
Only a few seconds later, she heard a sound. It came from directly above her head. 'Ugh,' she said aloud. 'Rats. Hardly surprising in a place like this.'
But then, the ceiling creaked once more, louder this time She jumped bolt upright and backed against the wall, looking upwards. On none of her previous visits had she ever noticed the trapdoor to the attic. Now it caught her gaze and held it, as, slowly, as if someone's fingers were struggling for purchase, it began to move.
Finally the hatch was free. Where it had been, in the fat corner of the ceiling, there was a black hole into nothing. But the doorway was empty for only a moment. First, she saw the ridged soles of a pair of heavy brogue shoes. Then short, stocky legs, encased in what seemed to be black, overall-style trousers appeared through the trap. They descended slowly, as if they were being lowered out of some awful dark cloud, until suddenly, with a rush, the rest of Adam Arrow dropped into the room.
Oh! Adam, you shit!' It was almost a scream. 'What a scare you gave me!' She rushed towards him and hugged him. 'You might have told me you'd be hiding up there. If I'd known I had a guardian angel on the premises I wouldn't have been so bloody scared. I thought I wasn't seeing you again for weeks' She hugged him again, tighter, and pressed her left cheek against his. Did you always mean to do this, or was it a change of plan?'
His arms were around her. The left clamped across her shoulders, returning her embrace.
His right hand slipped round, and grabbed her jaw. He tugged, once, very hard. The crack filled the room, and in the same instant, she went limp in his grasp.
`No, Shana,' he said, in a voice as hard as the flinty expression in his eyes. He let the body go, watching as it crumpled to the floor. 'This was always the way it was going to be.'
SEVENTY-ONE
‘You look a bit tense, Adam. You all right?'
Lieutenant John Swift was one of those people who never beat about the bush.
‘Eh? What? Course I'm all right.'
Swift nodded. 'That's good. You looked like shit for a second, that's all.'
`Just shut the fook up, Swifty.' He glanced up at his wall clock.
It was just before midday. Now, what d'you want?'
Swift sat down squarely in the chair facing his desk. He was a big husky man, eight inches taller than Arrow. Like his colleague, he had come to MOD Security from the Special Forces, but in his case from the Special Boat Services, for which he had been selected after seven years in nuclear submarines.
‘Got something for you,' he said, slapping a yellow folder with a red Top Secret classification down on the desk.
`What's this?'
It's that report you asked for, on the Aerofoil consortium.' `By heck, that was quick.
Someone must have owed you a favour.'
`They did, but after this it's paid in full. That's the warts-and-all document you wanted. It's in there, all the detail, but for Christ's sake, Adam, be careful with it. You can't let any of what's in it go beyond this office, or neither of us will sleep easy!
Arrow's eyebrows twitched upwards. 'Must be hot stuff Swifty. Summarise it for me.'
Okay then.' He took a breath. 'The Aerofoil consortium has three main players. It was put together purely to develop and market a new air-to-ground missile called Reaper. The members are Fusil, a French company who build the rocket itself, Bartoli of Belgium, who specialise in the payload, and SL, that's short for Societe Lugano, a Swiss company, who provide the guidance system. The initiative behind Aerofoil came from SL. The company knew that it would have no chance of selling to any NATO member on its own, so it head-hunted partners from within the European Union. They designed and built their missile inside two years. The MOD order is their first biggieSo what's so special about the missile?' asked Arrow.
`That's just it. If you've read our guys' assessment, you'll know that there's nothing special about it. Yet Davey gave Aerofoil the order, against what everyone said was a superior British product. You remember the flak that caused.'
The soldier nodded.
`Well, it seems that this was too much for MI6. That organisation is still its own master in some respects, and its DG decided to make some enquiries off his own bat. What he found out made his hair curl.
The investigation had a quiet look at Davey's bank accounts and investment portfolio but there was nothing there to indicate that he'd taken a back-hander. It had a look at the French and Belgian companies and found them squeaky clean. But when it tried to look at SL, it came up against a series of blanks.
The people who fronted their technical input to the operation were unknowns, without any track record in the defence industry. The ownership of the company was obscure too, linked into a Swiss investment trust.
'Then someone had a bright idea. They had an expert look at SL's guidance technology and compare it to other systems in use around the world. And very quickly, they came up with an interesting analysis. The Reaper guidance system is similar in every important respect, and identical in some, to that used in its missiles by one major military power, and one alone.'
And what's that?' asked Arrow impatiently.
`Russia.'
Eh? We bought Russian technology from these people? 'Ow the hell did we do that?'
Another terrific question, Adam, and another that MI6 asked too. They dug as hard as they could into Societe Lugano, and eventually they came up with a name for its owner, one Martin Hugo, an immigrant to Switzerland at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. They even came up with a photograph. The DG was out of control by this time, so he sent my pal over to Moscow with the picture, to show it to an old rival of his in the KGB. The Russian clocked it straight away. Martin Hugo's real name is Vassily Kelnikov, and he was a KGB General involved in Intelligence gathering. He was part of the coup against Gorbachev, but he vanished just before it went pear-shaped, taking a fortune in gold with him, plus, they suspected but couldn't tell for certain, a number of military secrets. The KGB have tried to find him ever since, but they didn't know where to look.