Mark Burnell - Chameleon

‘Don’t you believe in knocking?’

‘I don’t believe in anything. Not any more.’

‘You’re too old to play the teenage rebel, Stephanie.’

‘But too young to retire?’

She didn’t think anything had changed; the shelves crammed with leather-bound books along opposite walls, the Chesterfield sofa, the parquet floor and the Persian carpet, the antique Italian globe in the corner. She remembered how disappointed she’d been to learn that it wasn’t a tasteless drinks trolley.

‘What happened to your hand?’ asked Alexander.

‘I cut myself flossing.’

He let it pass and moved away from the window. Curiously, on home ground, he seemed more cautious.

‘You’ve made the right decision, you know.’

‘It had to happen some time.’

He slid an envelope across his desk. She picked it up and felt keys inside. There was an address on the front. Alexander said, ‘This is where you’ll stay. It’s a furnished rental. We start on Monday morning at nine. That gives you the weekend to get settled.’

Stephanie smiled without a trace of humour or warmth. ‘That’s going to take more than a weekend. That’s going to take years.’

The two-bedroom flat was on the top floor of a five-storey Victorian red-brick building on Bulstrode Street, just off Marylebone High Street. The communal entrance hall was dust and junk mail. The staircase grew narrower and darker with each floor. The locks on the front door had been changed. Inside, the air was still and stale. Stephanie dumped her rucksack in the hall and opened windows in a futile attempt to encourage a cleansing breeze.

The floors were sea-grass, except in the kitchen and bathroom, which were tiled. The walls were all painted off-white and the windows had blinds, not curtains. She ran a tap in the bathroom; there was hot water. In the kitchen, the stainless steel fridge was cool but empty. She looked through the cupboards. Nothing except a jar of Marmite and half a bag of long-grain rice. The main bedroom had a low double bed, a mattress as hard as concrete, and a pristine white duvet.

In the sitting room, there was a TV in one corner, a black leather sofa, a table with a top that was a large disc of etched glass. There were paperbacks on the shelves, CDs in a rack, framed black-and-white prints of pouting models down one wall. Definitely a man’s flat, Stephanie decided, but a real man? There were some framed snapshots on the mantelpiece above the Victorian fireplace. She picked one up; a shot of a pretty girl with long, light brown hair. She was smiling. Stephanie turned it over, released the clip and opened the back. The cosy, family photo had been culled from a glossy brochure. She examined the paperbacks. Not a single crease along a single spine.

Stephanie recognized the signs; the clumsy, artificial human touches that only served to underline the place’s cold sterility. Pure Magenta House.

After the rank heat of a Monday morning rush hour on the Underground, the cool air conditioning of the subterranean conference room was welcome. The walls and carpet were the same dark grey as her T-shirt. There were sixteen screens set into the wall on her left, in a four-by-four arrangement. At the centre of the room, there was an oval cherry table with ten chairs around it, black leather over graphite frames.

‘Hey, Stephanie.’

Stephanie turned round. Rosie Chaudhuri was standing in the doorway. She was slimmer than four years ago and it made her look younger. She wore a tight dark red knee-length skirt and a black silk shirt. Her lustrous black hair was gathered into a thick ponytail.

‘Rosie.’

‘I’m sorry to see you again.’

‘Me too.’

They smiled at each other.

‘Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? A ticket out of here?’

‘Sounds good.’

‘You look well.’

‘So do you.’

When Alexander entered the room, Rosie left, taking the warmth with her. He sat at one end of the table, Stephanie sat at the other. There was no small talk. He pressed a button on a silver remote control and a single picture appeared over four screens; a black-and-white portrait of a dour-looking man with a long face, a craggy brow and thinning hair swept over the scalp from one ear to the other.

‘This is James Marshall. A former SIS employee who came to work for us and then retired early.’ Alexander shifted awkwardly. ‘Unfortunately, he developed a drink problem that … well, it got out of hand and affected his reliability.’

‘I can’t imagine how that could’ve happened working here.’

‘In the past, he’d proved to be an effective field operator. Which partly explains why, out of some misguided notion of loyalty, we continued to employ Marshall on an informal, part-time basis. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement; he got a little extra cash to supplement his disgraceful pension, we got someone we could rely upon for the odd job that was better handled by an outsider. Which was why, in April, I chose Marshall to run an errand for me in Paris. It seemed perfect since he chose to live in Paris after leaving us.’

Marshall’s face was replaced by some footage from a security camera. Run in slow motion, it showed a man moving through a customs hall before being beckoned by officials. The footage then froze to focus on him; tall, with sandy hair slanting across the forehead down towards the left eye. The next images were stills; head-and-shoulder shots from the front and side.

‘Hans Klepper, a Dutch career criminal based in Amsterdam, heroin his speciality, all of it through Indonesia, the routes secured by influential friends bribed in Jakarta. The video footage we’ve just seen was taken at Heathrow on December the sixteenth last year, as Klepper stepped off a flight from Baku. Acting on an SIS tip-off from Moscow, but originating in Novosibirsk, customs officials intercepted Klepper, who was travelling on a false Belgian passport. Being well aware of Klepper’s reputation, they expected to find him carrying heroin. Instead, they found Plutonium-239. Seventeen hundred and fifty grams of it with a purity of ninety-four per cent. Do you know why that’s significant?’

Stephanie shook her head.

‘Anything above ninety-three per cent purity is weapons-grade. What’s more, you only need about eight kilos of it to make a nuclear weapon. Klepper was carrying the Plutonium-239 in protective canisters inside two suitcases. He was also carrying quantities of Lithium-6, which enhances bomb yields, even though it’s not radioactive itself.’

‘What’s a heroin dealer doing with nuclear material?’

‘The obvious question.’

‘What was Klepper’s answer?’

‘He didn’t have one. He died.’

Stephanie raised an eyebrow. ‘There and then?’

‘Within an hour.’

‘How?’

‘Heart attack.’

She glanced at the stills. Klepper looked as though he was in his late thirties or early forties. ‘Heart attack?’

Alexander nodded. ‘Artificially induced. Klepper would’ve known that once his case was marked for examination he was in trouble. He’d have known that in the custody suite he’d be stripped and searched. The postmortem revealed a pin-prick on his left wrist. An examination of his clothes and effects revealed a Mont Blanc pen that had been adapted to act as a syringe, attached to a cartridge of chemically doctored Alfentanil. The pen acted as a delivery device, like those gadgets used by diabetics. As a weapon, it was not unlike the umbrella tip used on Georgy Markov, the Bulgarian dissident, here in London in September 1978.’

The slow-motion footage resumed. Klepper approached an examination bench, hauled both cases onto it and handed his passport to an official. Then he reached inside his jacket pocket and took out his Mont Blanc pen. The most mundane action imaginable. He appeared to adjust the pen, holding it with one hand, twisting with the other. He was looking the officials in the eye, giving silent answers to their silent questions. They never noticed the jab. Discreet but firm, he never flinched.