‘Well, I suppose so.’ She made it sound as if the package was going to be the size of a small car.
‘Thanks. Now, can I speak to Kelly?’
There was mumbling in the background as she got up and took the telephone out of the living room. I wished Kelly had a mobile, but hers wasn’t tri-band so she’d left it in the States. The TV chatter died and there was scuffling before I could hear breathing. ‘Kelly?’
‘I know, you can’t make it. You’re working. Whatever.’
‘It’s not like that. I’m stuck. I’m trying to get back tonight but if not they’ll take you to Dr Hughes’s tomorrow and I’ll try to meet you there. I’m sorry, I’m trying to get out of it, I really am.’
She’d heard it all before. ‘Sure, whatever. Do you want to talk to Granny now?’
‘No. I just want to talk to you.’
‘What’s to talk about? Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow, then, eh?’
The phone went dead. I understood why, but it still pissed me off. I redialled and Carmen answered. I gave her the contact details and timings for Hughes, then hung up.
I drove out of the parking space and headed for a multi-storey, eyes skinned for the Volvo.
One carrier-bag full of washing kit and a black nylon bumbag from Superdrug later, I went into a corner shop-cum-post office and bought a pen and an A4 Jiffy-bag. In went my Nick Stone passport, wallet with Citibank credit cards, and all my other Nick Stone bits and pieces including the key to Carmen’s front door. I hated it when the Firm took away my real documents: it was like losing my personality, my life; I felt exposed, undefended. This way, at least I knew where they were, and if all went well and I got binned I’d be picking them up soon anyway. I couldn’t help a little smile as I addressed the bag to myself. Carmen had decided to call the bungalow the Sycamores, and got Jimmy to put up the sign – but you still had to write No. 68 or your mail never got there.
18
With ten minutes to spare, I buzzed up to the flat. Suzy let me in and I almost choked on Benson & Hedges. The windows were all double-glazed and had more locks than the Bank of England. I followed her into the bedroom and into a cloud of nicotine that even the French would have been proud of.
‘I know, Nick, I know. Sorry. But I was gagging. The gum’s shite.’
‘Well, get some patches or something, will you?’
‘I promise it’s the last one, ever.’
It was obvious that the Golf Club had already been and gone – so much for coming back at six. There was an open suitcase on the bed in Suzy’s room. It looked as if she was in the process of unpacking. She held up a Nokia moan-phone. ‘We’ve got one each, one spare, three batteries and a fill gun. The rest looks like the Packet Oscars.’
I dropped my carrier-bag on the bed and noticed the wardrobe door was open. The couple of shelves on the right were full of underwear and socks, a hairdryer and a washbag. In the suitcase were two MP5 SDs, the normal Heckler and Koch MP5 machine-gun but with a very bulky barrel, together with five or six boxes of ammunition and three magazines for each weapon. For us to respond with as the situation dictated to ensure the safety of the public and ourselves.
The SDs were suppressed and not ‘silenced’. There’s no way of totally silencing a weapon’s muzzle report. A suppressor just diminishes it with a series of rubber baffles and fine meshing inside the barrel, which dissipate the gases that propel the round. By the time the round leaves the muzzle there is just a dull thud and no flash, and the faint click of the working parts moving backwards before the return spring pushes them forward again to pick up another round and ram it into the chamber.
Both weapons were fitted with holographic sights, a small window mounted where the rear sight would normally be. When you turned it on, it was like looking at a heads-up display on a windscreen.
There were different packets for different jobs. Packet Oscar was a covert killing pack. As well as the SD, it contained the basic kit needed to make entry covertly into a building in order to kill, all rolled up in a black PVC MOE [Method of Entry] wallet.
These particular Packet Oscars had come with a few extras. I picked up one of the moan-phones as Suzy busied herself with the other two, connecting up the jack that led into the fill gun, a slim green alloy box about the size of a pound bar of chocolate.
Suzy depressed the black button and kept it down until the red light flickered, indicating that the encryption code was downloaded. The phone could now be put into secure mode at any time, and anyone listening in would just get mush. Just as importantly, it would cut out the phone’s footprint; digital phones are notoriously easy to track, but once these were fill-gunned and on secure mode we became invisible. Two, ten, even a hundred phones could be filled with the same encryption code, and everyone could dial up and talk to each other in clear speech knowing they were secure.
The money to update kit had miraculously appeared after 9/11. The phones were light years ahead of the old system of one-time pads to encrypt a message into a series of numbers, then key the numbers over the phone. It took far too long, and there was always the possibility of fucking up under pressure.
Some fill guns had a number of codes so they could be constantly changed throughout an operation, at specified times and dates. Normally there was a numbered dial on the gun, one to ten, so you might get the instruction, ‘On Thursday it will be number six.’ But on this fill gun there was just one fill. We would still try to fill the phones once every twenty-four hours anyway, to ensure the fill didn’t drop – that the encryption didn’t get corrupted. Each phone had a sticker on the back with the PIN security code to access it, just like any other Nokia, and all three were the same – an unimaginative 4321.
Suzy leant down next to me as I turned the phones on and plugged them into the charger to make sure the batteries were full. Beneath the aroma of hastily smoked B and H she smelt of freshly washed clothes and apple shampoo. ‘Get everything you needed, then?’ She sounded bouncy enough, but studiously avoided any eye- contact.
‘Yeah. Spent most of the time trying to find somewhere to park the car.’ I paused. ‘You all right?’
‘Of course I’m all right,’ she snapped. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
I’d annoyed her. I hadn’t meant to.
She started to fill the last phone, and the red light flickered before she looked up. ‘How well do you know the boss? I thought when we got briefed before Penang that you two might have a little history . . .’
‘Hardly know him – we’ve just got that fatal-attraction thing going on between us.’
She wasn’t having any of it. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘You called your CA yet?’
‘Nope. We got to sort our story first. Penang’s history now, isn’t it?’ She stood up, her face beaming, almost taunting, just inches from mine. ‘Switch on, will you?’ The B & H was just still on her breath. ‘Anyone would think you didn’t want to be here.’
We spent a few minutes working something out, then I went into the front room and hit my own cell keys while Suzy headed for the bedroom to do the same. I was greeted by a happy, middle-aged female voice.
‘Rosemary, how are you? It’s Nick.’
‘Really well, thank you. Good holiday?’
‘Fantastic.’
‘You forgot to send us a postcard, naughty boy.’
They were good people, James and Rosemary. Their job was both to confirm my cover story and be part of it. When I was a K, I used to visit them whenever I could, especially before an op, so that my cover got stronger as time passed. They knew nothing about the ops, and didn’t want to: we would just talk about what was going on at the social club, and how to keep greenfly off the roses.
All my documentation, all my credit cards, anything that needed an address, was registered to theirs. I subscribed to three or four weekly and monthly magazines to maintain a steady flow of mail and regular charges on my card. I was even on the electoral register. I hadn’t seen them for over a year, since moving and working for George, so I’d had a lot of catching up to do before the Penang job. It had been quite a surprise for all of us.
‘Sorry about the card, but you know what Spain’s like – and the weather was fantastic.’
