‘Why don’t you ask her?’ he said eventually. ‘I imagine so, yes. It’s not something I like to think about. Besides, they may only have had lunch. There is that possibility.’
Taploe scrunched the Kleenex into a tight ball and dropped it on the floor beside the accelerator. They were sitting in a Security Service Astra in the basement car park of a Hammersmith hotel. It was an excessive precaution: Taploe might just as well have met Mark in the broad daylight of a London park, but he felt it useful to create an atmosphere of suspense.
‘Is Ben faithful to her?’ he asked.
‘What, brother? Screw around behind Alice’s back? Christ no. She’d cut his dickoff. Ben hasn’t looked at another woman since 1993. He once copped off with a girl on a stag weekend — long time before they were married — and Alice didn’t let him forget it for years. Constant nagging, guilt trips, endless fucking about. You would have thought he’d got the girl pregnant, the way she carried on.’
Taploe sniffed.
‘Sorry,’ Mark said, sensing that he wanted to get back to business. ‘You were saying about the stuff I got from Kennington.’
‘Yes, we’re still examining it.’ Taploe was hoping to conceal the fact that it had proved largely useless.
‘And the disks?’
‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’
‘Just old crap?’
‘Just exactly that.’
A bottle-green Audi swung out in front of the Astra, blinding them briefly with the sweep of its headlights. Mark was concerned that the driver might see his face and he shielded it as Taploe opened the window and tapped his thumb on the steering wheel.
‘Let’s talk for a moment about the computers.’ Mark seized on this.
‘That’s what I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Surely you have a way of hacking into our network from the outside? You can read anything that comes out of there.’
‘Used to,’ Taploe replied. It was a moment of uncharacteristic candour. ‘We lost that level of surveillance three weeks ago. A manpower issue. And your firewall was changed last month.’
‘Terrific.’
He omitted to add that the entire Kukushkin operation was gradually, inevitably, being pushed to one side. Lack of concrete evidence. Death of a joe. The Wise Men had lost their faith in Taploe and were moving on to pastures new.
‘But it shouldn’t make any difference,’ he said. ‘That’s why you’re so important to us. With you on the inside we can get at everything we need.’
‘How?’ Mark asked. ‘Everything sensitive is password protected. I was trying to get into Mack’s email system…’
‘… There is an alternative,’ Taploe interrupted.
‘An alternative?’
‘Does Libra have technical back-up? A team of troubleshooters who come in if your network goes down?’
‘Sure they do. The people we bought the computers from.’
‘And where do you keep the file server?’
‘In the basement,’ Mark said.
It was as if the idea had only in that instant fused in Taploe’s mind, regardless of the fact that Quinn had conceived the plan two days earlier. He said, ‘Then let’s kill two birds with one stone.’
‘I’m not following.’
‘Next week- we’ll set a date — at a specified time, ideally when Macklin and Roth are out of the building, my people will stage-manage a computer attack at your offices in Soho. In other words, put a virus into the network from the outside. All the computers go down. Secretaries start to panic, people lose their work. Now, in the absence of Roth and Macklin, you’re the man in charge, is that correct?’
‘Correct.’
‘So it would be you who would call in the technicians?’
‘Not necessarily. Sam would do it, the office manager. But she’s just gone on maternity leave.’
It felt like Taploe’s first stroke of luck in weeks.
‘Good. Then you’re the one who makes the call. As soon as the network goes down, inform the staff that help is on its way. Only you’ve telephoned us. Your normal technicians never need to know. Instead, we send A-Branch plumbers who fix the system, copy every hard drive in the building and get access to the basement safe, all inside three or four hours.’
‘You can do that?’
‘We can do that,’ Taploe said. ‘Closer to the time, we’ll go through it all in more detail. For now, you should be getting back to work.’
29
Jenny telephoned to say that she would be half an hour late for her appointment with Ben. It was 9.45 in the morning. Having finished his third cup of coffee of the day, he walked downstairs and retrieved the post from the metal box bolted to his front door. The number of messages of condolence he now received in relation to his father’s death had dwindled to perhaps one or two a week. And none today, it seemed. Just an electricity bill, addressed to Alice, and something from a French mail-order clothing store she liked to use from time to time. The obligatory bank statement, a takeaway flyer, and a postcard addressed to the house next door in Elgin Crescent that had obviously been delivered by mistake. Then, second from the bottom, Ben discovered an airmail envelope made out in his name containing what felt like a substantial letter. A return address had been written on the reverse side.
Robert Bone US Post Office/Box 650 Rt 12 °Cornish New Hampshire 03745 United States of America
Inside the envelope he found a typed, six-page letter written on fine, watermarked paper and folded twice with care. Only Ben’s name was handwritten, the barely legible scrawl of a hyperactive mind. He began to read:
Dear Benjamin
We met all too briefly at the service to commemorate the death of your father, Christopher, who was, as I hope I communicated to you at the time, a close and dear friend of mine. I promised as my wife and I departed that afternoon that I would write you and Mark with some of my recollections of Christopher, both the good times and the bad. However, I also believe that what I have to say may help to cast some light on the reason why your father was killed.
Ben read that last sentence twice and found himself speeding through what followed.
Your father was loyal to his friends, an erudite and sophisticated man, troublesome on occasion, at times maybe even a little impossible. The Keen temper was famous on both sides of the Atlantic! He loved Russia as his second home: its beauty, its fine tradition of literature, of poetry and music. Most of all, and this may sound odd of an Intelligence man, he loved the honesty of the people, what he described to me as ‘the lack of evasiveness in the Russian soul’. When Jock spoke at the funeral he touched on all of these things but I could sense from talking to Mark and to you even briefly on the driveway that there was a good deal missing, too many gaps left unfilled.
As you will no doubt be aware by now, Christopher worked for British Intelligence for almost twenty years. In 1977 — his first year with the SIS — he was posted to Berlin where he remained for the next four years. (Most of what I’m about to tell you is classified information, so I would ask that you bear that in mind when you consider who to speak to about it.) I first met Christopher in the winter of ’79, as one of the agency’s Station Chiefs. Liked him immediately, almost as a brother. The Foreign Office can specialize in disdain, but Christopher wasn’t arrogant in that sense. I gained the impression that he was unlike his other colleagues, just eager to do the best job he could. Anyway, that Christmas Brezhnev drank one too many egg nogs and decided to send troops into Afghanistan and for a while we all thought we might be on the brink of another global war. But the powers in Washington — I’m talking predominantly about hawks in the Reagan administration like Casey at the CIA- saw the invasion as an opportunity. Even if the Afghan resistance wasn’t ever going to be able to defeat the Soviets, they decided that at least the United States could prolong the agony and visit upon the Russians the equivalent of their own Vietnam.