Vosse was going apoplectic in his ear.
‘You can’t get back round! Fucking hell, Cagney. I told you I was looking at routes. I told you not to do anything stupid. You’re going to lose him.’
Tomkins felt as though a small bird had flown in through the back window and been let loose inside the car. He could not seem to clear his head to make a decision of any kind. He wanted to ask Vosse to stop shouting at him, to stop telling him not to do anything stupid. Should he execute a U-turn? Should he drive all the way back up to Whitechapel Road and just hope that Pavkov was still parked in the lay-by? The whole thing was so shameful and embarrassing. Tomkins momentarily went into a blank white panic, a kind of system shut-down from which there was no escape. He could not function. He had been trained to deal with pressure, but his training had let him down. Why the hell had he turned off the road? I’m good at exams, he told himself, slipping into self-pity. I sailed through all the tests and interviews to get into MI5. The moment he had been put under any sort of operational pressure, he had cracked. Tomkins wished he could be out of the car and back at home, sitting on the edge of his bed or on a stool, lifting dumbbells in the mirror. That was his happiest, purest state. He always felt good about himself when he could see his body reflected back at him, the firmness of his abs, remembering the voices of the women who had complimented him on the way he kept himself in shape. But he wasn’t back at home. He was messing up a surveillance operation in a shitty Ford Mondeo with Robert Vosse raging in his ear.
‘What do you think I should do?’ he asked.
‘Wait,’ Vosse replied in a firm, optimistic tone of voice. Something in his manner had changed. Tomkins was given sudden renewed hope that the operation had not been entirely ruined. ‘Listen,’ Vosse added.
Tomkins heard a tertiary noise in his AirPods, the sound of movement inside the Fiat Punto picked up by the MI5 mikes. Pavkov was scrabbling around, the same banging and clattering and rustle of plastic as before.
‘Did you hear that?’ Vosse asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ Tomkins replied but, to his horror, heard the note change of the Serb switching on the engine. Pavkov was preparing to drive off. Tomkins finally came to his senses and executed a rapid U-turn, but as he reached the set of lights at the junction with Stepney Green, there was no sign of the Punto either to the left or the right. Pavkov had disappeared.
‘I can’t see him, sir.’
‘Fuck!’ said Vosse. ‘Fucking fuck. You’ve lost him.’
Where had he gone? How had Zoltan vanished into thin air?
It was like the bird had been set loose inside the car again. Tomkins had visions of the Iranians laughing at him as Pavkov pulled up at his secret destination, mocking the incompetence of MI5 and gloating over the imminent death of the hostage, Lachlan Kite.
Then – a miracle.
A voice on the microphone inside the Fiat. Not the Serb’s, not a passenger he had picked up. Another sort of third party altogether.
Directions for number 19 Spindrift Avenue, London E14 9US
It was the voice of the satnav. Pavkov, the stone-cold idiot, had typed in the address given to him by the Iranians. The Tom-Tom had dictated that address to the Punto microphones.
‘Bingo,’ said Vosse. ‘High noon on Spindrift Avenue. That’s where they’re holding BIRD. Get as close as you can, Cagney. I’ll meet you there ASAP.’
18
Cheryl Kite may have believed that you could tell a lot about a person by the way they treated staff in restaurants, but Michael Strawson had a rather more developed and exhaustive philosophy of human nature. He reckoned everything you needed to know about an individual’s character and temperament would be revealed by round-the-clock surveillance.
For this reason he had put the eighteen-year-old Lachlan Kite under light, Grade III observation for a forty-eight-hour period prior to his arrival at Killantringan. Rita Ayinde, one of the surveillance Falcons at BOX 88 in London, had telephoned Strawson from Maybole station with the second of her two reports into the target’s movements and behaviour. The first had given Strawson little to chew on. Rita told her boss that Kite had spent the better part of Wednesday inside Xavier Bonnard’s house, venturing out only for lunch with friends at the Stockpot restaurant and to watch Dangerous Liaisons at a cinema on Fulham Road. The following morning, having apparently stayed up most of the night playing computer games, Kite and Xavier had slept past midday, gone for a smoke and a walk in Hyde Park, then attended an eighteenth birthday party at Borscht & Tears, a Russian restaurant on Beauchamp Place. From there Kite’s friends had moved on to Mud Club on Charing Cross Road. Drugs were available on the premises but the surveillance officer on duty had not observed Kite in the act of buying or consuming narcotics. The target had gone home with a woman identified as Alison Hackford, a twenty-seven-year-old estate agent with Knight, Frank & Rutley, leaving her apartment on Lamb’s Conduit Street shortly before dawn and proceeding on foot to the Bonnard residence. It was not known why Kite had not taken a taxi or public transport. Strawson, who had lost a son to heroin, hated drugs and wondered if Kite might have been high; Rita suggested that he may simply have run out of money to pay for a bus fare.
‘Then he should have been smart enough to talk his way into a free ride,’ Strawson replied.
From day one, he had been sceptical about
