‘The friends?’
‘Three. He’s known them all for ten years or more. They’ve been to the house before.’
‘Do they have security?’
Popov shook his head. ‘One is a writer, one is an actor who’s going to be starring in a movie Mr Grechko’s production company is due to film in Canada, and his accountant is coming.’
‘We’ll be checking their vehicles?’
‘Of course. But as I said, they have all been here before, they’re trusted friends.’
‘Sounds good,’ said Shepherd. ‘I think I’ll probably pop off home this afternoon, then. If you need me, I’m at the other end of the phone.’
Popov grinned. ‘We’ll try to get by without you, Tony,’ he said. ‘It’ll be a struggle but hopefully we’ll manage. You enjoy your day off.’
Shepherd and Popov were at the entrance to the house when the designers arrived, a middle-aged blond woman with the chiselled looks of a former model, a plump Asian girl with a briefcase and a long plastic tube on a shoulder strap, and an effeminate man in tight Versace jeans who kept batting his eyelids at Popov.
As Popov ushered the team into the house, Shepherd gave the driver and his car the once-over. ‘Anywhere I can get a coffee, pal?’ asked the driver, a fifty-something man in a grey suit and a yellowish pallor that suggested liver problems.
Shepherd called Volkov over and asked him to take the driver to the kitchen and to stay with him. He was uneasy whenever outsiders were in the house, but the design team were harmless and the driver didn’t have the look of a professional assassin.
The meeting lasted just over an hour and a half and then they left, with the male member of the design team blowing Popov an exaggerated kiss through the car window before they disappeared through the gate.
Half an hour later, a black top-of-the-range Mercedes prowled through the gates and disgorged two fifty-something men in Savile Row suits. They adjusted their silk ties and expensive shirt cuffs and blinked in the sunlight like vampires emerging from their coffins before following Popov inside. The Mercedes headed back to the gate.
Shepherd waited until the gate had closed before walking over to the garage. He pressed his thumb against the sensor and tapped out his four-digit code. He walked inside and down the ramp to the car parking area. He waved up at a CCTV camera, knowing that Molchanov would be watching him in the control centre. He climbed into his X5 and drove out.
He parked in an underground car park in Park Lane and put on a black raincoat before walking outside. The sky was a leaden grey and it looked as if it wouldn’t take much for the heavens to open. He was ten minutes early but Harper was already sitting at a table at the café overlooking the Serpentine, smoking a cigarette, his face half hidden by the hood of his parka. ‘How’s it going, mate?’ he asked.
‘All good,’ said Shepherd. He gestured at the empty coffee cup in front of Harper. ‘Another?’
‘Yeah, go on,’ said Harper. Shepherd went over to the counter and returned with two cappuccinos. He sat down next to Harper and looked out over the water. Half a dozen swans were trying to persuade people to part with chunks of their cakes and sandwiches. ‘They’re keeping you busy?’ asked Harper, flicking ash on to the ground.
‘As always.’
‘I suppose if I asked what you’re working on you’d say that you could tell me but then you’d have to kill me?’
‘It’s not like that,’ said Shepherd. ‘Most of what I do is more like police work than spook stuff.’
‘But classified?’
‘Sure, but then pretty much everything I work on is.’
‘Terrorists?’
‘Mainly. But big-time crims, too.’
‘Drug dealers?’ asked Harper, with a sly smile.
‘Some,’ said Shepherd. ‘But most of the resources are now targeted at home-grown Muslim terrorists, for obvious reasons. Back in the old days it was old Cold War stuff, then the IRA, but when the Soviet Union imploded and the peace process kicked in, they had nothing to do for a while. That’s when they started looking at organised crime, but that went on to the backburner after 9/11.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s an ill wind, they say.’
Shepherd nodded. ‘From your standpoint, sure.’
‘You checked up on me, right?’ Shepherd didn’t say anything and Harper grinned mischievously. ‘What, do you think you can go rooting around the PNC for me and that I wouldn’t find out?’
‘It wasn’t me,’ said Shepherd.
‘Whoever it was they were clever enough not to leave their fingerprints,’ said Harper. ‘They went in under the log-in of a young PC who obviously thought he could leave his terminal unattended while he went for a coffee.’
‘You’ve got someone in the Met on your payroll?’ said Shepherd.
Harper faked indignation. ‘How dare you suggest that I would do anything as illegal as paying a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary for information!’
‘No offence,’ said Shepherd.
Harper grinned and took a long pull on his cigarette. ‘Well, come on, tell me what you found out about me.’
‘Not much, as it happens.’
Harper’s grin widened. ‘Told you,’ he said.
‘You’ve done a good job of staying below the radar. The consensus seems to be that you’re in Spain.’
‘Yeah, well, as long as they think that, I’m a happy bunny.’
‘How did you find me, Lex?’
‘It wasn’t difficult. For a start you weren’t hiding, plus I knew you back in Afghanistan, I knew your name and your date of birth and that you were married to Sue and that you had a kid, Liam.’ His face fell. ‘Shit, sorry.’
‘Sorry?’
‘About the wife. The car crash. I only just found out. Sorry.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘I know, but I’m sorry. I never met her, but you were always talking about her.’ He sipped his coffee and then wiped the foam from his upper lip with his sleeve. ‘Always nagging you to leave the Regiment, remember?’
Shepherd chuckled. ‘Yeah. She got what she wanted after I got shot. I left a few months later. Out of the frying pan into the fire, as it happens.’
‘Yeah?’
Shepherd nodded. ‘Yeah. They never had me walking a beat, they put me straight into an undercover unit and the work was every bit as dangerous as Afghanistan. High-level crims, drug dealers, hitmen, gangsters. She was soon nagging me to leave the cops.’
‘To join Five?’
Shepherd shook his head. ‘Nah, I moved to SOCA, but that was after she died.’
‘SOCA? Now that was a great idea, wasn’t it? The British FBI? They couldn’t find their arse with both hands.’
‘You’ve come up against them, have you?’
‘There’s half a dozen of them in Pattaya but they don’t know me. I’ve sat opposite two of them in a go-go bar and they’ve looked straight through me.’
‘How come?’
‘Because they’re tossers. Like your mate, what was his name, Razor? In and out of the massage parlours like bloody yo-yos. If ever they started to get busy about me I’ve more than enough to get them pulled back to the UK. SOCA was never going to work. You can’t shove cops, customs officers and taxmen into the same organisation and expect them to work together. They form their own little kingdoms and start plotting against each other.’
Shepherd raised his eyebrows. ‘You seem to know a lot about SOCA.’
‘I know a lot about a lot, mate. Knowledge is power. End of.’ He took a long pull on his cigarette. ‘Still, if they were any good they’d have been giving me a hard time, wouldn’t they, so thank heaven for small mercies. I just hope this new mob, the National Crime Agency, isn’t much better. Doubt it will be. It’s like renaming the Titanic just before the iceberg hits.’