Gerald Seymour: The Dealer and the Dead

‘I have some, should be enough for me to be excused patronising shit. I did time in the Congo, the Kinshasa office, attached to the embassy. I haven’t just come from Luton airport and duty-free allowances.’

Megs slapped her own wrist and grinned: her little gesture of guilt. ‘So, Harvey Gillot. Funny thing, and just chance, but we had a girl from a sister group in Paris and she was out yesterday at Charles de Gaulle. Anyway, Harvey Gillot walked right past her, had come off a flight from Burgas and-’

‘Where’s that?’

She reverted back to the theatrical. ‘Where’s that? It’s a Black Sea port city in Bulgaria. Ukraine, for second-hand stuff, is about played out, and Bulgaria is the best source of last-generation weapons for the independent dealers. She identified the flight – before you ask – because he came through with a wedge of passengers who had that place’s tags on their bags, and it was the only flight down at that time. Satisfied? Harvey Gillot is alive and well and hasn’t retired to put his feet up. If he’s just been to Bulgaria, he’s buying.’

‘Big or little fish?’

‘What my kid brother would have called “specimen” size.’ Megs Behan had always enjoyed a captive audience – it seemed to her pretty pathetic that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Alpha team, were tapping her for intelligence again. Again. She savoured it, then pointedly finished her coffee. She was brought another mug and another biscuit. ‘How long have you got?’

‘However long it takes for your insights.’

‘He was born in 1963, in Guildford, Surrey. His dad was a post-office sorting supervisor and his mother worked as a contract office cleaner. They named him Herbert but he didn’t fancy that. He did grammar school but not university and was taken on in an office equipment and stationery business, then picked up by Solomon Lieberman – American, resident in UK, big-time and amoral. That was where he learned the trade. Lieberman died in 1990 and Harvey Gillot took on the business. Company records show that the deal was for a knock-down. He’s done business since then all over except – big except – Central Africa. I’d say his prime areas are the Middle East, with interest in South East Asia. Tends to handle surplus. It wouldn’t be conscience or altruism that’s kept him off Central Africa, just that it’s a crowded market and there are other dark corners where the going’s easier…’

She talked for half an hour. She might, she reflected, be underselling the commercial capabilities of Harvey Gillot. Couldn’t quite bring herself to describe a winning smile, manners and charm, little courtesies. To describe him as good at his job would have been similar, she reckoned, to talking up the communication skills of a grooming paedophile. She said he gave an impression of affluence: he drove a big car, his suits and shirts were good. How did she know so much? She gathered trifles of information from any quarter. It was what the spooks, the Branch, the government offices and HMRC’s Alpha team could have learned, but it would have been time-consuming and they’d have pleaded ‘lack of resources’. She wound up.

‘He has a wife and a teenage kid. He lives on the south coast, on Portland, but I’ve not been there. You see, he is – nothing gilded – a trader in death, misery or destruction. The arms trade is a filthy business and an arms trader – getting fat off it – is beneath contempt. I hope you nail him.’

‘If we find something.’

‘But I doubt you’ll nail him.’ She said it defiantly, as if to provoke.

The reply, inevitable: ‘I can assure you that if we find evidence of illegality we’ll throw the book. It’s just that we haven’t looked at him closely for too long.’

Time for an argument, a brief cat scrap? Maybe it was too hot even inside Starbucks, maybe she hadn’t slept and was too tired because Lucy from next door – a clerk in a solicitors’ firm specialising in immigration-tribunal appeals – was shagging noisily half the night, maybe she didn’t believe that Penny Laing, HMRC, Alpha team, was worth the hassle.

Megs Behan walked out into a rather pleasant summer morning and felt as if she had a stone in her sandal and a pain in her gut. The image in her mind was of the man walking past the police cordon and the crash barrier, and not seeming to notice the line of her people outside the fair at the ExCeL Centre or herself. Not even in the traffic, dodging it, could she wipe out the image of Harvey Gillot.

On her phone, Penny Laing spoke to her team leader, Dermot. ‘Yes, she was quite interesting. Really rather sad. They’re out on the margins, people like her. It’s her obsession. Don’t think there is anything in her life except hanging around outside hotels, conference halls, bawling abuse and being ignored. But not entirely wasted, and I’ll follow the Paris line. I’ll see you back at the office.’

It wasn’t illegal for a UK citizen to trade in arms and broker weapons deals. It was illegal if they were not declared and cleared under the Trade in Goods (Control) Order 2003 (S-I-2003/2765), and an end-user certificate had to have been rubber-stamped. It was the area of Alpha team and they were expensive, supported by Bravo team in an adjacent office. Without hits, arrests and publicity to match, they were pretty bloody surplus to requirements. She would have liked it to be promising, but it hadn’t.

She went to catch a tube… Seemed an interesting guy, Harvey Gillot, a worthwhile target, if his security ever slipped.

He didn’t take notes in meetings: Harvey Gillot had a good memory. He did not, like so many, clutter up the hard drive of a laptop or use memory sticks to store his version of what had been said.

From the aircraft steps he walked the few paces to the bus on the tarmac.

Enough had been indiscreet. In the world of Harvey Gillot, mostly, there was spanking clean legitimacy… but – but – every few months, or perhaps every couple of years, a deal fell into his lap that was just too good to lose for the sake of an end-user certificate. Those, rare enough, were the occasions when a trail of paper, electronic messages or mobile calls could put a man in the most unwelcome places: HMP Belmarsh, HMP Wandsworth, HMP Long Lartin. Her Majesty’s Prisons were unpleasant and avoidable.

He boarded the bus.

He knew enough who had ignored the survival rules. He couldn’t understand why more hadn’t followed the diktats of Solly Lieberman. When the old man had gone and he’d cleared the office, searched the locked drawers of Solly’s desk and opened his personal safe, it was quite extraordinary how sparse the paper trail was. Enough had been left that concerned whitewash deals – those in which he bought kit, night-vision or radio-communications boxes that had come out of the old Warsaw Pact warehouses and sold them to the Ministry of Defence – and uniforms, boots, magnification optics and ammunition. But of the choice stuff there had been no trace. Brilliant man, Solly. Gillot had learned the lesson.

On this trip, he reckoned himself to have been off the radar. He had gone through Immigration at Charles de Gaulle on the passport he used for Israeli visits, and out the next morning on the one he used for Arab countries. He had laid off using the mobile and had kept no record on his phone or laptop of the purpose of his visit to Paris and the overnight stay. No reference existed in his baggage of his journey to the airport at Tbilisi, with a charter of schoolchildren, on the DC-9 aircraft of the Georgian national airline.

When he came off the bus, he allowed the kids to spurt ahead. Two men waited for him. Could have been just about any place, any airport, anywhere. Not good suits, shirts that should have gone in the wash the previous evening, shoes that needed a little care with polish and a brush, haircuts that were fierce, shades and armpit bulges. They didn’t have to hold up a sign: ‘Esteemed guest, Harvey Gillot – we are honoured.’ He nodded recognition.