Charles Cumming - The hidden man

Stephen Taploe was at a dead end. For the best part of six months he had assumed that the investigation into Libra’s activities would make his name within the Service. Secret dreams of promotion had raised him out of bed every morning; they had walked with him to the station and comforted him on the tube. He longed for the unfiltered approbation of his colleagues, their admiring smiles and whispered congratulations. But he could sense his entire career stalling on the fruitless search for conspiracy between Libra and Kukushkin. Six months of surveillance had produced — what? A thousand hours of phone taps and eavesdropped conversations revealing little more than Libra’s predictable determination to make a success of the Moscow operation. GCHQ had fax and email intercepts — letters to real-estate agents, tax lawyers, employment agencies — which were consistently mundane, simply the logistical pile-up of documents and contracts that would rain down on any company setting up a business in post-Soviet Russia. As well as occasional police reports from Moscow on the activities of known Kukushkin personnel, they had Watchers tracking Libra’s meetings in London — the last of them between Macklin and Tamarov filed by Michael Denby two days before, complete with a ninety-five pound attachment for ‘expenses’ accrued at a lap-dancing club in Finchley — none of which had revealed anything that could be termed abnormal or suspicious. Taploe had always held with the basic, optimistic belief that massive surveillance would, in the end, bear fruit. But what had Paul Quinn uncovered? The odd attempt by Macklin to exploit a loophole in British tax law and three Russians working on the bar at the club’s London site without adequate employment papers. Meagre tricks played by companies the world over, little ways of wriggling around the law. Taploe and Quinn needed something concrete, something with which to penetrate the cell structure of Russian organized crime in the United Kingdom. That was the purpose of pursuing the Libra connection, as a staging post into a much larger problem. And yet, increasingly, Taploe felt that he had missed his chance.

From his desk- tidy and well organized, it betrayed none of the accumulating chaos of the operation — he retrieved the initial police report into Christopher Keen’s murder. No clues, no leads, no theories. Another dead end. Just blind panic at Thames House that an agent had been murdered and threats to shut the entire operation down. Taploe, in his defence, had pointed out that Keen had not been tortured for information; nor was it a signature mob killing, the motorcycle assassin favoured by Viktor Kukushkin in Moscow. No, in a desperate bid to preserve control of the operation he had argued that Keen’s death was a fluke, a random accident in a season of bad luck. There was no need to over-react, no need to take his team off the case. Just give it time and they would unravel the mystery. Just give it time and they would bring Kukushkin down.

His pleas had at least bought some time. Taploe, in effect, was now on final warning; without results in a matter of weeks, he would be back on Real IRA. He was convinced that a link existed between the shooting and Keen’s work for Divisar, but it was impossible to prove it. Investigations had shown that in the weeks before he died, Keen had been assisting a private bank in Lausanne with clients in the St Petersburg underworld. Perhaps there was a link there. But how to establish that? Where to start?

There was a knock at the door of his office, three floors up at the north-western corner of Thames House.

‘Tea, boss,’ Ian Boyle said, setting a mug down on the desk. His tie hung at half-mast and the collar on his shirt was frayed.

‘Just leave it there.’

‘You all right, boss? Look a bit knackered.’

Taploe ignored the question and conveyed with a twitch of his moustache that he felt it impertinent.

‘Get the file on Mark Keen, will you?’

‘Sure,’ Ian replied, and retreated towards the door.

There was now a siege mentality about the operation, an imminent sense that a plug was about to be pulled. Something close to panic had begun to spread through the team, fanned by Taploe’s failure to redirect the investigation. It was like Ireland all over again: the boss looking downtrodden and frustrated, his ambition coming up against a wall of compromise and bad luck.

Ian returned with the file five minutes later, set it down and left without speaking. Taploe exhaled heavily as the door clunked shut and immediately began flicking through the material: photographs, email printouts, credit-card receipts, phone logs, surveillance reports. In all probability, a file on an innocent man, just as Mark’s father had insisted.

The idea, planted admittedly by Quinn, had been in his mind for three or four days. A last chance. The one person close to the centre with access to unambiguous information who could reveal the truth about Macklin and Roth.

He picked up the phone and dialled Mark’s office direct. A secretary answered at Libra Soho, first ring, with a voice like an advertising jingle. In a single breath she said: ‘Good morning Libra International how may I help you?’

‘Mark Keen, please.’

It felt like the final throw of the dice. To establish a source on the inside. Not the father, who could only ever have been peripheral, but the son.

‘Who shall I say is calling?’

‘My name is Bob Randall.’

‘Just putting you through now.’

There was a two-second delay, then, ‘Hello. Mark Keen.’

He recognized the voice like an old friend, the street consonants, the slackened vowels.

‘Mr Keen. Hello. My name is Bob Randall. I work for BT. Advanced telecommunications.’

‘Someone forget to pay our bill?’

Taploe felt that he should laugh, and did so.

‘On the contrary, Mr Keen, on the contrary. Not at all. Actually I have a business proposition for you. A little venture that I think Libra might be interested in. I understand you’re the company’s executive director. How are you set for lunch next week?’

Sebastian Roth lived alone, in the palace of a self-made man. His Pimlico house, valued at?2.4 million, was actually two properties knocked together, with staircases at opposite ends of the building, like reflections of one another. He had bought both houses as ruined shells, and their conversion, including the construction of a 40 ft swimming pool in the basement, had taken eighteen months, a period in which Roth had lived in a suite at the Lanesborough Hotel whenever he was not travelling abroad.

He had no wish to share his life with a woman, and yet he longed for the diversionary pleasure of an affair, something to distract him from the relentless tide and pressure of work. Since adolescence, Roth had designed his life as a series of obstacles to be overcome: win that award; make that first million; buy that rival’s company. The moral or social implications of his behaviour rarely troubled him. He simply did not calculate into any decision the possible repercussions for those around him. His was an almost sociopathic indifference. He would do as he pleased, and deny himself nothing. A man in such a position, anointed with the twin blessings of private wealth and perpetual cunning, can begin to feel untouchable, as if no harm can befall him. If Roth was vain, he did not recognize it; if he was cruel or mendacious, he did not care. The arc of his life was aimed solely at the pursuit of his own pleasure.

As he was shaking her hand at the funeral, he had resolved to sleep with Alice Keen. It was as simple as that. This was just a challenge, something to lighten his days, the thrill of which would be derived as much in the planning as in the final seduction itself. The long, pale drawing room on the first floor of Roth’s house was scattered with deep suede sofas and expensive works of art. In the corner nestled a Bang & Olufsen hi-fi, in the wall a widescreen digital TV. Yet he no longer derived pleasure from them. Studying a prospectus for investments in St Petersburg, looking at spreadsheets for the Moscow operation, he cast his work to one side and busied himself with the first components of a plan. He would lure Alice with the promise of contacts and scoops, gradually allowing their relationship to assume a more personal character as her career thrived. At the funeral, he had witnessed the sheer opportunism in her eyes, a throttling ambition concealed by the trick of beauty. She was too good for Ben, Roth decided, and gave no further thought to their marriage. His only concern was that it would all prove too easy. His only dread was that his boredom might last.