Adrian Magson: Tracers

‘I hope you’re right. Seeing the same car twice is probably a thrill a minute in those parts; murder must be way up with UFOs and fish on bicycles.’

‘It’s been taken care of,’ Jennings said eventually. ‘There will be no comeback.’ He indicated the door. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’

Outside on the pavement, Harry flipped open the slim folder on Professor Samuel Silverman, late of Haifa, and wondered what Jennings wasn’t telling him. He also wondered who had been listening in on their conversation behind the door, and whether it had anything to do with Matuq’s early death.

Jennings watched the former MI5 officer cross the pavement to a muddy Saab parked in a residents-only bay, and felt a prickle of disquiet. Tate was an odd character. He had come on the recommendation of someone trusted, although with the proviso that he’d been round the block a few times and had a reputation for doing things his own way. There was also a whisper about something in his background which would have made interesting reading had his contact in the security services been able to gain access. But that part of his record was sealed. All his contact had been able to tell him was that Tate had left the service in mysterious circumstances, yet without a noticeable black mark, which was intriguing in itself. Since then, he had worked in private security here and overseas, occasionally hooking up with a former MI5 IT and communications expert named Ferris. Ferris also had a sealed record and had left the security service at the same time as Tate.

Tate was a rebel, in other words, used to doing things his own way. Jennings didn’t mind that. For the right jobs, rebels had their uses.

He turned as the door at the rear of the office opened, and a man entered. Dressed in a dark, ill-fitting suit, the newcomer was wiry and intense, with the compact build of a jockey. He looked oddly out of place in the confines of the office, like a caged animal, with eyes of cold grey set in a tanned and weather-beaten face. His mouth curled at one corner as if permanently snarling at the world, and his hair was cropped harshly at the sides and lank on top.

The newcomer went by the name of Dog. It had been his call sign years ago in the back runs of Belfast and Londonderry, when personal names could mean the difference between life or sudden death. Jennings was one of the few people who knew the man’s real name of Gary Pellew, but he’d always thought there was something in his manner and appearance that suited the pseudonym much better.

‘He sounds like trouble,’ Dog murmured. ‘He questions things.’

‘Stay on him,’ said Jennings, ignoring the comment. ‘And keep me informed. I’ll let you know what action to take.’

Dog turned and left without a word, and Jennings knew that his instructions would be followed to the letter. Unlike Tate, Dog didn’t have the same level of skills at tracing runners. But what he did have were certain rare attributes that would never get him any kind of desk job. It was these skills which gave Jennings cause to shiver whenever he was in the man’s presence, although he took great care not to show it.

He was always quietly relieved that Dog was on his side, but never more so than when the man had left the building.

Still, he couldn’t quite dispel an evidently shared feeling of unease about Tate, although he wasn’t about to tell Dog that he agreed with him. What particularly surprised him was the ease with which Tate had managed to track down Matuq. A week or ten days might have been the norm, given the Libyan’s head start. But Tate had hardly given him time to breathe before he was on him like a rash. Maybe he had underestimated the man’s capabilities.

He shook off his concerns and opened the middle desk drawer. Inside was a slip of paper bearing a name and telephone number. The number led to a contact deep inside the Ministry of Information in Libya’s capital city, Tripoli.

It was time to confirm the successful completion of another assignment.

Raymond Param’s house stood in leafy seclusion at the end of a short cul-de-sac in London’s Highgate. With a double garage, large garden, eyelash gables and a majestic sweep of roof, it was impressive and solid in the evening sunlight, a fanfare to design, prosperity and the rewards of capitalist enterprise.

It also had a brooding aura hovering over it like a dense cloud, as if the owner’s sudden change of status had infected the area, draining whatever light there may have been out of the atmosphere.

‘Nice gaff,’ said Rik Ferris, studying the facade. He scrubbed at his head of spiky hair which refused to be tamed. A bit, Harry decided, like his unusual taste in T-shirts, although he’d toned them down a bit lately. The current one was dark blue with a vivid splash of orange across the chest. The blue matched the Audi TT they were sitting in. Rik had agreed to meet him outside the house for a briefing on Param’s background. ‘I thought you said Jennings wanted him left alone.’

‘So he did. But I haven’t yet sorted out how to start on the latest job he gave me. A runner named Silverman — I’ll tell you about it later. In the meantime, we might as well do something positive.’ Harry took out the briefing paper on Param and scanned the main points. Raymond Param, investment manager for Boulding Bartram, an investment partnership in London. Aged forty-three, Anglo-Indian, his mother British, he went to the London School of Economics, did some time in the States, then joined Bouldings. Married, no children. Solid performer, reliable, steady, then one day, gone. No notes, no goodbyes, no shoes on the beach. He checked a six-by-four photo which accompanied the briefing notes. It showed a sleek individual in a conservative pinstripe, with receding black hair and an easy smile.

‘Why are they hot to find him?’

‘His employers found a bunch of dummy offshore accounts after he’d skipped. All empty. They think he set them up so he could dump small amounts of money over several months, then cleared them out once he was ready to go.’

‘Small? Is it worth all the trouble, trying to get him back?’

‘The small amounts added up to about three million.’

‘Ouch. Painful. Sounds like their systems slipped up.’

‘Just a bit. No warning, out of character, never done this before, highest integrity, honest as the day is long, blah-di-blah. Now rich and on the lam.’ He passed Rik copies of the briefing documents. ‘We need to check out anything you can find on him; clubs, friends, recent trips, financials — the usual.’

‘No problem.’ Rik folded the sheets and put them in the glove box. Like Harry, he was a former employee of MI5. He had an extensive knowledge of government systems and a widespread hacking community he could use to blur the lines of any illicit searches he needed to conduct. It had been his misuse of IT resources that had led to his own downfall, and his posting to the same remote station where he and Harry had first met.

‘Where do we start the physical stuff?’

‘Right here. The wife’s staying with her sister, so we’ve got full run of the house to do the audit, including, with luck, his computer and financial records.’ The audit was the term Harry used for trawling through a runner’s background, checking every file, document, scrap of paper, phone and email records, financial detail, and even searching their clothing and cars, all in the hope of finding a clue to the runner’s whereabouts. Mostly, it worked. Like it had with Matuq, turning up a colour postcard of a cottage in Blakeney, Norfolk. It hadn’t been the one he’d been staying in, but enough to point Harry in the right direction. The rest had been down to Rik checking phone calls and emails made by the Libyan from his office and home. Harry looked at him. ‘First, though, I’d like to check the wife actually is with the sister and hasn’t snuck off to Las Vegas to join hubby Raymond on the blackjack tables.’