Adrian Magson - Deception

Master Sgt Gregory C. Turpowicz (‘Turp’) — b. 1968, Ft Worth, Texas — served 101st Airborne Div (Air Assault) Ft Campbell Kentucky — served Kosovo 2000 — Iraq and Afghanistan — wounded 2003 (Iraq) and 2008 (Afghanistan) — listed as deserter January 2010. Believed to be Canada or Europe.

It had to be Garcia, Major Dundas’s assistant at Fort Knox. Harry was wondering why she should have contacted him via an anonymous email account, when he scrolled down and saw another line of text.

This soldier has been de-classified as NFA (No Further Action).

There was no signature. Harry was convinced the message came from Garcia. He debated dialling Fort Knox again, but decided against it. If Garcia was operating as some kind of whistleblower, he didn’t see that compromising her would help. But it still didn’t explain why Dundas and the State Department were being so coy. And what did an NFA classification mean? Had Turpowicz come back in? Or was he dead?

His phone rang. The number was withheld.

‘Mr Tate?’ A woman’s voice, cool and efficient, Home Counties smooth. Faintly familiar.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m calling on behalf of Richard Ballatyne. He wonders if you could meet him in Victoria Embankment Gardens, same as last time. Thirty minutes from now. Can you confirm?’

‘Make it forty,’ Harry said automatically. He cut the connection and rang Ballatyne’s number. A man’s voice picked up.

‘He’s not here. Can I help?’

‘No, thanks.’ Harry couldn’t think why a personal meeting was necessary simply to exchange information about a police raid, but Ballatyne was clearly comfortable at keeping up their contact. If that led through the Bosnians eventually to Paulton, he’d be stupid to throw his dummy from the pram just because he didn’t like being tugged around. Even so, he felt uneasy and rang Rik and told him where he was going.

As he stepped outside the building, he met one of his neighbours. Mrs Fletcher lived on the ground floor and saw herself as the local neighbourhood watch. She was fencepost slim and seemed permanently dressed in an elegant long coat and scarf.

‘Mr Tate,’ she greeted him. ‘Did your visitor get hold of you?’

Harry was forced to stop. The manner in which she blocked his way indicated that it was more than just a passing question, and he wondered if she had ever worked for the Security Service. ‘What visitor was that, Mrs Fletcher?’

‘The young woman I saw coming down the stairs earlier today. I didn’t recognize her, and when I asked if I could help, she more or less brushed me off. I must say, you try to help people and they respond with rudeness.’ Her expression was accusatory, as if Harry was in the habit of consorting with riff-raff.

‘Can you describe her?’

‘Just a young woman. Reasonably well dressed, early thirties, I’d say. A business person, perhaps, maybe an estate agent?’ She fixed him with a stare. ‘You’re not thinking of moving, are you?’ She made it sound like jumping a sinking ship.

‘No, I’m not.’ It must have been one of Ballatyne’s people, he decided, and made a mental note to check. He went to move past Mrs Fletcher, but she touched his arm, a tentative smile hovering around her eyes.

‘A few of us in the block are having a coffee morning later this week. We were wondering if you would like to come. Maybe we could get to know a little more about you. Say Thursday?’

Harry wondered how to refuse without upsetting her. She was only being neighbourly, and telling her to mind her own business was a bit strong. She and her coffee table irregulars had undoubtedly discussed him at length already. Instead he said, ‘Sounds very nice. But Thursday is my day for gun practice.’

Victoria Embankment Gardens held its customary gathering of desperate smokers, leisurely tourists and a growing flow of early homeward-bound commuters. Harry was early, having hit the underground on the run just as a train was arriving.

He did a tour of the area, checking the access paths before entering the garden. There was no sign of Ballatyne or his posse of outriders, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t waiting nearby. Georgio’s restaurant apart, he wondered if the rumours surrounding the Vauxhall Cross collective weren’t true; that like some rare breeds of wild cat, they rarely revisited the same place twice.

He approached the bench where he and Ballatyne had sat last time. It was vacant and he took a seat at one end and stretched his legs. Maybe a few minutes alone would be good for his thought processes. If he could just get rid of the minor prickling feeling on the back of his neck, he might almost manage to relax.

‘Hello, Harry.’

The prickling feeling intensified. He recognized the voice. It was the young woman who had called to set up the meeting. But that wasn’t why his internal alarm bells were ringing. The recognition came from further back, when it had been face to face and unencumbered by the distortion of a phone line.

As she sat down beside him, he turned and looked her in the eye.

It was Clare Jardine.

Harry stared at her, wondering what had brought this cold, calculating killer back into his world at this particular moment in time. Whatever, he doubted it would be good news.

‘Got a moment?’ she said chattily. ‘We need to talk.’

He wanted to refuse, to walk away and not look back. But he couldn’t. He had to know what she was doing here. The last time he’d seen her, she had been sitting on the Embankment alongside her former boss, Sir Anthony Bellingham, Deputy Director (Operations) of MI6, moments before she killed him by slicing into his femoral artery.

‘Why not?’ There would be no Ballatyne, then. No wonder her voice had sounded vaguely familiar; he’d heard it often enough in the flesh. It must have been Clare who had warned Jean about the Bosnians, too. The realization that she knew that much about his private life was deeply unsettling.

‘Sorry, Harry. Secret squirrel habits never die, do they?’ She patted his knee. ‘Still, this is nice.’ She was dressed in a smart leather jacket and slacks, and looked fit and capable. . and to Harry, quite lethal. Her hair was cropped short and her face had lost the drawn look he remembered from his last sighting of her on the way back from Red Station. But then, he reminded himself, she had still been getting over being shot at. That kind of experience has an effect on people.

‘What do you want?’

‘You’re going after Paulton.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘Where did you hear that?’ There was no point denying it; she probably had an inside track on security matters and knew roughly what was going on, even if not the fine details. Professional links made in the service were not always easily broken, no matter what the circumstances. And Clare’s circumstances were that if she were spotted by the security establishment, she would go away for a long time. They didn’t like their senior people being murdered within sight of the building, no matter how badly they might have deserved it.

‘I’ve got friends. They don’t condone what I did, but they understand.’

She hadn’t taken her hand from his knee, he noticed, and it was now covered by a folded newspaper. He got a memory flash of her sitting alongside Bellingham not very far from this spot, and felt a sudden tightness in his belly.

‘You slotted a senior figure in SIS,’ he reminded her. ‘That kind of thing catches up with you sooner or later.’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. Be honest, Harry, didn’t you want to do the same? He tried to have you topped, for God’s sake.’ Her voice was low but there was a sharp brittleness he didn’t recall from their last meeting, and a faint tic beneath one eye.