Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

Webster had never been to Oliver’s office before; their two or three meetings had always been on neutral ground, where an illusion of distance might be maintained. He was not someone to be seen with, if it could be helped, and perhaps he understood this, because Oliver spent his days in a single room on a light industrial estate in an anonymous part of north London, four hundred yards from the prison—which may or may not have occupied his mind as he walked to work each morning.

Uniquely among that strange band of people who did occasional jobs for him, Webster knew nothing about Dean Oliver: where he lived, who he lived with, what he held dear; how he came to do the difficult and esoteric work that made him useful. Still less about his trade secrets, which was probably just as well. After every meeting Webster came away with the feeling that he had said rather too much, which left him at the same time unsettled and reassured.

Even Oliver’s face gave little away. It was tanned all year round to a suspicious evenness, and otherwise smooth and so featureless that it was hard to retain a strong impression of him without the original present. His cheeks were tight and always clean-shaven, his lips a little too full. That was all that was notable; all, in fact, that one could see. The rest of his face was covered by a swipe of thin brown hair across his forehead and a pair of metal-framed glasses whose tinted brown lenses were just dark enough to obscure his eyes. Sitting with him, it was impossible to know whether he was making some piercing survey of you or simply staring vacantly past your ear.

It was his voice that bore all the distinction: it was rich, in a quiet way, full of sympathy and invitation and gentle variations that irresistibly drew you in. A good thing, then, and no surprise, that he did all his work on the phone.

Oliver asked Webster whether he’d like coffee—“I wouldn’t, it’s not good”—and excused himself while he finished an e-mail. There were five phones in his office: two landlines and three mobiles, neatly laid out on a sixties wooden desk beside a laptop. Webster watched him type and found himself asking the same, unaired questions that always occurred to him when they met. Something about Oliver forbade inquiry: an aura of privateness, of a persona deliberately constructed to give nothing away. But Webster feared the answers more than the reaction. It was difficult to believe that this very particular man who performed such a very particular purpose had ever been a child, or cried to his mother, or worn shorts, or gone on holiday.

What was only too evident, though, was that Dean loved his work. From this anonymous bolt-hole he carried out silent raids on any organization foolish enough to think that it could keep its information secure. Banks, hospitals, councils, ministries, universities, the companies that sell us phones, power and credit: his job was to get inside them, take what he needed, and retreat without leaving a trace. He needed little more than cunning, and to every target he was someone else. To the local branch of Barclays, he was from the fraud department in London; to the person in the cell phone company call center who sent out copies of bills, he was the owner of that phone and that account; to the local tax office he was a colleague in another office looking to clarify an inconsistency. His work was a sequence of tiny masquerades. But despite his apparent hollowness, Oliver’s great talent was not acting but eliciting; he didn’t inhabit a role so much as simply create a space that others felt obliged to fill.

And they did. In his first meeting with Webster he had volunteered—unusually, it turned out, because he rarely offered information—that he had never been “compromised,” in his word: never had a single call that had gone awry, never had a single mark suspect that they were being duped. Webster could believe it. For all his flatness there was something about Oliver that made you want to tell him things. Perhaps it was some hidden trickery; perhaps it was as simple as needing to banish a silence. Whatever it was, it hadn’t changed, and Webster found himself once again giving too much away.

He had meant to leave the details vague: his purpose for looking, what he was expecting to find. But in the end he told Oliver everything except the identity of his client: the looted sculpture, the death of Mehr, the utter conviction he now had that the two were linked and that the only way to find the connection was to go to the heart of it all, where the money was.

When Webster had finished his brief, Oliver nodded several times to show that they were now in harmony, part of a secret team.

“And what do you need, Ben?” His voice was warm, gently coaxing.

Webster took a last look at Oliver before committing. His calculation was this: Qazai was blackmailing him, and in order to make him stop he had to blackmail him back. That was the argument, and it was logical enough. But logic wasn’t what had brought him here.

Finding out who Shokhor phoned was one thing: he was a crook, without question, and in any case no one in Dubai or Cyprus cared much about privacy laws. But this was London, and the targets were UK citizens, and one of them was only recently dead. What was worse, it was conspicuous. Ten years before, few journalists or investigators had stopped to think about what they were doing; there had been safety in numbers and so little interest in the activity that the crimes had barely seemed crimes. Then there had been Dean Olivers everywhere, stealing secrets from celebrities, checking spouses’ finances, tracing fleeing debtors; but now, as the world finally objected to having its privacy ravaged, his kind was dying out, and it was difficult to see how even Oliver himself, such a subtle, devious operator, could avoid his fate. Hammer, early on, had outlawed any contact with him or his kind.

Looking at him now, Webster felt a certain sadness—part of the man’s spell, possibly—that one day soon such people might simply not exist, and that men like Qazai could relax a little more. Because occasionally, and certainly now, what Oliver did, however unsavory, felt not merely necessary, but right.

“I need you to look at Qazai. His calls. His credit cards. Don’t worry about the banks—they’ll be too complicated. But I want to know what he’s spending, where and when. So credit cards. Any hotels he’s stayed at, I want to see the bills. Any calls made from the room. Flights. He has a jet. He keeps it at Farnborough. I want to know exactly where it’s been for the last two years.”

Oliver made some notes, and Webster went on.

“Have a look at Mehr, too. His company. His private accounts—any you can find. Money in and out. And his telephone calls. Everything you can think of. You have free rein.”

“How long ago did he die?”

“Two months.”

Oliver wrote it all down, and Webster had a sudden vision of his notebook in a barrister’s hand being introduced as evidence. He would have a word about destroying it at the end of the case.

“And his lawyer.” He went on. “What the hell. His name’s Yves Senechal. It’s a French cell phone. Just his calls.” He paused. “How are you in France?”

“I have a good man in France.”

Webster wondered whether he really had good men stationed across the world or whether they were all, in fact, just Dean himself, seducing unwitting bank clerks wherever they happened to pick up their phone. He wouldn’t have been surprised.

“I think that’s it.”

“It’s a lot. I have quite a lot of other work at the moment, Ben.”

“I’ll pay you a hundred percent bonus if you find something useful.”

“How long have I got?”

“Two weeks.”

“Are you serious?”

Webster ignored him, and Oliver, adjusting his glasses, went through his notes, ticking each item as he went. When he was done he looked up.