Tomkins hadn’t yet seen Zoltan in the flesh, but he already knew, just by the general tenor of his conversations with Cara and Vosse, that he was lazy and corrupt and unreliable. Look at the facts. He lived in a shitty one-bedroom flat in Bethnal Green. He drove an illegal third-hand Fiat Punto which would probably blow a tyre and cause an accident if it went any faster than fifty miles per hour on a dual carriageway. He had taken money from MOIS to facilitate the capture of a suspected British intelligence officer and doubtless enjoyed dishing out £250 fines to customers in his car park who turned up five minutes late to retrieve their vehicles. What was the fucking point of someone like Zoltan Pavkov being allowed to remain in this country? He was just the right age to be a Balkan war criminal, an associate of Mladic´ or Karadžić, a soldier party to mass slaughter in Bosnia who had somehow tricked Britain into giving him political asylum, then Right to Remain, then a passport entitling him to exactly the same lifestyle as Londoners whose ancestors had lived in Bethnal Green for three hundred years.
‘Chill out,’ he whispered, aware that he was allowing himself to become agitated. ‘Just chill.’
Tomkins took out his personal mobile and saw that he had received a couple of text messages, one from his mother, the other from a girl he had met on Tinder who didn’t know how to read the signals and kept bugging him to meet up, even though she was much fatter than her profile photos and there had been zero chemistry on their one and only date. He was about to start flicking through Tinder, a few left and right swipes just to kill some time and put him back in control, when something caught his eye at the entrance to Zoltan’s building.
A light had triggered. Somebody was coming out of the street door carrying a plastic bag and wearing what looked like a beanie. It was a man. He was short and stooped and – from a distance of sixty metres – seemed to match the description Tomkins had been given of Zoltan Pavkov.
‘Fuck,’ he whispered. His whole upper body tensed up. How had he missed this? No lights had come on in the flat. There hadn’t been a whisper through the AirPods. Then Vosse rang.
‘Hello?’ said Tomkins, aware that his voice sounded dry and nervous.
‘Situation,’ Vosse replied. No question mark in the numb inflection of the word, no ‘Hi’ or ‘How are you doing?’ Just ‘Situation’, as if Tomkins was a robot, a kind of MI5 version of Alexa, sitting in a car at one o’clock in the morning waiting to do the bidding of Robert fucking Vosse.
‘Excuse me, sir?’
‘I said situation, Cagney. What’s it looking like? Where is our man? Still asleep? Watching Belgrade Tonight on the telly? Taking a much-needed shower? Any sign of him in the last ten minutes or can I go to sleep?’
‘I think someone just came out, sir. I think it might be him, but I didn’t hear anything on the micro—’
Vosse’s response was explosive.
‘What?’ he said. ‘You think someone just came out or you know the target is mobile?’
Tomkins looked again. The man in the beanie had stopped on the far side of the street. He was taking something out of his left trouser pocket. If a vehicle came towards him and Pavkov happened to look in Tomkins’s direction, his face would light up in the front seat of the Ford like a Halloween pumpkin.
‘I’m sure it’s him,’ he said, trusting his instinct. ‘Woollen hat, like you said he was wearing in the car park. Same features, same height. It’s a match.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m telling you now. It only just happened when you rang.’
Tomkins worked out what was going on: either Zoltan was heading to a prearranged meeting or he had a burner phone inside the flat which he had used to contact the Iranians.
‘Looks like he’s going for his car,’ he told Vosse, catching the glint of a streetlight on a set of keys in Pavkov’s left hand. The target walked away from the Mondeo in the direction of his own vehicle, parked thirty or so metres further away down the street.
‘You need to follow him,’ said Vosse. ‘I’m blind here. All I’ve got is the microphone in the Fiat. The trace is dead.’
Tomkins was horrified. He lifted the tablet from the passenger seat and keyed through to the live feeds from Zoltan’s Fiat Punto. He could see what Vosse could likely see on his own screen in Acton: a descriptor for the dashboard microphone implanted that afternoon, but no signal from the GPS.
‘What happened to it?’
‘Fuck should I know? Happens too often. These people have one job – give me a trace that works – and they can’t do it.’
‘Battery must have failed.’
‘You think?’ said Vosse with too much sarcasm for Tomkins’s liking. ‘What’s his position?’
It was pitch-dark on the street and Zoltan had briefly vanished behind a line of parked cars. It occurred to Tomkins that carrying the keys might be a bluff for surveillance: the Iranians could be waiting for him in a second vehicle on an adjacent street. Should he follow on foot or remain in the Mondeo? Why the hell had Vosse left him on his own? Why wasn’t Cara here in a backup car instead of fast asleep in Hackney Marshes?
‘One zero zero metres down the street. Carrying a plastic bag. Interior lights in the Fiat just came on.’
Zoltan was getting into his car. Tomkins quickly checked the tablet to see if any messages had been sent or calls made from the Serb’s mobile but the read-out was predictably blank.
‘What’s in the bag?’ Vosse asked.
Tomkins tuned the AirPods to the mikes inside the
