Adrian Magson - Red Station

‘Why not? Clean sheets makes for untroubled sleep, so my dear old mother used to say. Course, they wouldn’t agree back at HQ, but that’s why we’re all here, isn’t it?’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do. Where was I? Oh, yes: Clare Jardine. Nice girl, but don’t get on her bad side. She comes from Six, along with all sorts of vile habits. She doesn’t do fluffy.’

‘Six?’ Harry was surprised. ‘I thought this was strictly a Five set-up.’

‘It started out that way. Then Vauxhall Cross asked to join the party in case they needed to export one or two of their own clandestine miscreants.’

‘I’m surprised they have enough to warrant it.’

‘You kidding? With over five thousand employees between ’em, it’d be a bloody miracle not to have some lame ducks. You any idea how many Fivers and Sixers get quietly canned every year?’

‘No.’

‘About two dozen at the last estimate, although they’re mostly minor. Some end up behind bars, others get the order of the boot and a rap over the head with the Official Secrets Act.’ He broke off and took a sip of his drink. ‘Then there’s the ones they can’t afford to kick off the end of the plank. Which is where this place comes in.’

‘Go on.’

‘Take young Clare, for instance. Passed all the courses with flying colours, didn’t put a foot wrong in the assessments and practical tests and left everyone else on her intake streets behind. She was only in Six for a year before she got spotted and chucked in at the deep end. Too deep, as it happened.’

Harry stirred his coffee and tried to match the woman he’d met with the kind of officers MI6 trained and ran. He’d got to know a few but they’d mostly been men.

‘How do you mean?’

‘You know what a honey trap is?’ Mace’s voice was low.

‘I know the theory.’

‘Right. It needs two willing parties. Well, one willing, the other as gullible as buggery. The trapper and the trappee. Jardine got badly stung.’

‘She was the target?’ It made him wonder why — and what she knew of value.

‘Knew you’d think that.’ Mace shook his head. ‘Our Clare was the honey pot.’

‘Oh.’ Harry revised his opinion. She clearly had hidden depths.

‘Trouble was, she got too close, too friendly.’ Mace shrugged. ‘Big no-no, that. Scale ten on the rectum-quivering chart. She should have made her excuses and pulled out, as the old-time News of the World journos used to say. But she didn’t. She stayed and tried to work the situation… and got burned. Turned out the target was setting her up, not the other way round.’

‘So why is she here?’

‘Like I said, she’s good. And hard-nosed. Don’t let the fact that she’s a woman fool you. She got snitty with her controller when he hauled her in, and threatened to tell what she knew. Seems in between the door and the target’s boudoir, she stumbled on some sensitive information. Nobody’s saying what, but it was enough to get her tabbed and sent her out here to lose her memory.’

‘Is it working?’

‘It’s fading.’

‘And Fitzgerald?’

‘He’s just unlucky. Ex-para, one of Five’s heavies for a few years — the kind used to lift someone off the street when they needed it. Then his wife ran off with the milkman, turned his kids against him and he lost the plot. Smacked a colleague who said the wrong thing. They were going to pay him off but he asked for a hard posting instead. This was it. Should have known better, being ex-army. Never volunteer for nothing.’

Harry looked at him and said, ‘What about you?’

Mace’s face remained blank. ‘You don’t have clearance for that information, son.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘Anything else you want to know?

‘Yes. What you said about the Russians coming; is that what all the local military activity is about?’

Mace eyed him for a few moments, then grunted. ‘They didn’t let you in on much before sending you out here, did they? Christ, what a bunch.’ He finished his drink and pushed the glass away. ‘Right, quick briefing. Thirty miles south of here is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. It runs oil from the Caspian all the way through to the Med. It’s what some folk call strategic… turn off the pipeline and there’s no oil for the motoring masses in Europe to drive their four-by-fours. Amazingly, our lords and masters have only just woken up to the fact. To the north is a breakaway region called South Ossetia, which sits up against the border with Mother Russia. And this is where things get interesting: the Ossetians have decided they want to be Russian rather than Georgian, which isn’t going down too well with President Saakashvili and his mates. It’s a source of tension.’

‘I heard.’ Like much of what passed for news, it had gone in one ear and out the other. But Harry wasn’t entirely ignorant of what was going on in this part of the world.

‘Good. What you probably won’t have heard is that things have been hotting up in this region. The separatists are pushing the envelope ’til it bursts and the Georgians are getting pissed and rattling their sabres. Can’t say I blame them, really.’

‘How seriously?’

‘Enough for some ordnance to have been lobbed back and forth over the border. Homemade, a lot of it, but it still goes bang when someone gets too close. Serious enough — ’ he paused and scratched his face with a bitten fingernail — ‘to have attracted the attention of Moscow. And we all know how that could pan out.’

Harry tried to work out what might happen, but gave up. It was a tortuous trap of a puzzle with no predictable outcome. ‘What are the odds?’

Mace pulled a face. ‘Putin doesn’t take any pushing around. If he gets in the mood, he’ll do something. It doesn’t have to make sense to us, just his own people. Still,’ he smiled, revealing coffee-stained teeth, ‘that’s above our pay grade. All we can do is monitor the situation and hold on to our hats.’

‘And if it blows?’

‘If it goes tits up, just hope for a clear road to the airport and a full tank of petrol.’

Clare Jardine was waiting for him when he left Mace’s office. She was dressed in black cargo pants and walking boots, with a dark fleece top. Her hair was tied in a severe bun. She clearly wasn’t dressing to impress.

She tossed him a set of car keys. ‘I’m going out. Mace says I have to take you with me, God help me. I’ll let you drive; it’ll be your first taster of life out here.’ She indicated a kettle on a side table, with a couple of flasks standing next to it. ‘Make yourself some coffee; we’ll be operating in a Starbucks’-free zone.’

I love you, too, thought Harry, and picked up a flask while she paraded impatiently back and forth. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked, pouring in boiling water.

‘I’m meeting a contact at a truck stop twenty miles north of here. He says he’s got some figures on military truck movements which he thinks might be of interest.’ She rubbed her thumb and fingers together to indicate that money was involved.

Harry shook the flask and screwed on the top. He’d made it black and strong, to keep him awake. It seemed to be what everyone drank around here, with the possible exception of Mace. Maybe it explained Jardine’s spikiness; she certainly seemed wired up.

‘So why would exposing me be a good idea?’ he said.

Jardine stopped pacing and stared at him. Rik Ferris, working at a PC monitor, looked up with interest. ‘Why wouldn’t it?’ she replied coolly. ‘You saying you don’t want to come?’

‘I’m saying your contact might know you, but he won’t know me from a fence post. Seeing me will either scare him off or give him another face to identify if he gets compromised.’ He shrugged. ‘Just thought I’d mention it.’