Moving off again, I eventually turned back onto Goswell Road and into the estate.
I went towards the chute where the big wheelie bins stood, where they threw the rubbish down onto the ground floor, and picked up a little plastic key fob hidden behind a pair of large metal doors.
Aglass- and steel-framed security door led into the stairwell. I rested the fob against the pad alongside it and it clicked open.
I didn't go into an apartment. I could never have afforded one here. My fob came from the Pizza Express about five minutes away. It was sheer luck: I'd found a set of keys in the toilet about five years ago. The dickhead had stuck his address on it. The keys didn't interest me – they'd have had them changed anyway. What did was the fact I could now enter and exit a secure area.
I led Lynn down into the basement, where the residents had little lock-ups for bikes and all that kind of shit.
I ducked under a tent that had been hung between the cages to dry and went and stood in the far corner, in front of a sign listing fire hazards.
I checked the flat screw heads. All of them should have had their recess at forty-five degrees. It was a simple tell-tale and one that any professional would have noticed. But that was exactly what I wanted them to see, to give them a false sense of security when they opened up the cache.
The screws were still in position. I twisted them open with a 5p piece. The next tell-tale was on top of the loose brick behind the board. I pulled it out gently, checking the top right-hand corner to reveal a disc-shaped piece of mortar that rested on top. I watched it fall into the small holding area as I removed the brick from the wall. No mortar disc? I would have walked away.
A clingfilm-wrapped bundle sat snugly in the holding area. It contained a passport, driver's licence and credit card in the name of Marc Richardson, and 6,000 US dollars in small denomination bills.
I checked that everything was exactly the way I'd left it: the end of the plastic cover cutting through the second S of the word passport.
I undid the package, removed its contents, replaced them with Nick Stone's passport, driving licence and credit cards, and wrapped it up again and slid it back in the hole.
'I'm shedding a skin.'
I slipped my new identity inside my Red Cross raincoat. 'I always knew there'd be a time when someone like you wouldn't want me around any more. This is my safety blanket.'
He didn't say a word – just took off his hat and ran his fingers absently across the scabs on his pate. I was beginning to sense a vulnerability in him that I hadn't expected. Fear I could have understood – but what I now saw in his eyes was sadness, and I couldn't think why. He was retired, he had a pension, a family, a big country seat. He should have been dancing a jig from dawn till dusk.
He put his hat back on and did up the flaps. 'No weapon?'
'No need. Next stop City Airport or the Eurostar.'
I headed out of the basement. 'I've got my new life. Now we'd better fix you one, so we can get out of here.'
45
I did have a weapon tucked away, but it was in another safety blanket, for use if I had to stay in the UK.
Everybody finds their own way to build an alternative ID, and, more especially, hide it. The second one was in northwest London, behind a bakery. It used to be in a safe-deposit box, but the police now had the power to open them up at will.
I wasn't worried about real people finding the caches. They'd probably just take the cash and sell the weapon and passport. It was the Firm that concerned me.
They would always be on the hunt for safety blankets. They knew any deniable operator worth his salt would have one. If mine was compromised, they'd have my new ID, my credit card details; they could let me run from the UK, allowing me to think I had evaporated, then just wait and see where I pitched up with my new passport and card, and do whatever they felt like doing.
I thought about Marc Richardson, who I'd bumped into in Zurich a couple of years earlier and set out to clone. He was a bit younger than me, but we looked vaguely similar.
I'd found him working in a bar in Muhlegasse, a notorious gay cruising ground. It's the best kind of place for what I had in mind, whatever country you're in. Marc had been living and working in Zurich for a couple of years. He had a steady job, and shared an apartment with his Swiss partner in the city. Most important of all, he had no intention of going back to England. I learnt all this as I got to know him over a couple of weeks; I'd pop into his bar when I knew it was his shift, and we'd chat. I met other gay men there, but they didn't have what Marc had. He was the one for me.
When I got back to the UK, I signed up to an online genealogical site and set about scouring the registers between 1960 and 1965 for his date of birth and his father's and mother's names. He hadn't liked to talk to me about his past, and I could never get anything more out of him than where he was born; trying to dig any deeper would have aroused suspicion. Besides, his partner was getting all territorial. It only took an hour to find him.
Marc Richardson the Second was soon the proud owner of a brand-new ten-year passport, complete with biometric chip. The Identity and Passport Service didn't provide it, of course. Brendan Coogan did.
Coogan was either a stickler for detail or just liked a laugh, because he even handed me the booklet that came with real passports. I nearly fell onto Coogan's kitchen floor laughing when I read it. I'm glad I didn't. His house made NHS wards seem almost sterile.
It told me that the IPS took Marc's security and privacy very seriously. The new British biometric passport met international standards, and they were confident that it was one of the most secure available. It featured many
