Victoria Embankment Gardens held its customary gathering of desperate smokers, leisurely tourists and a growing flow of early homeward-bound commuters. Harry was early, having hit the underground on the run just as a train was arriving.
He did a tour of the area, checking the access paths before entering the garden. There was no sign of Ballatyne or his posse of outriders, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t waiting nearby. Georgio’s restaurant apart, he wondered if the rumours surrounding the Vauxhall Cross collective weren’t true; that like some rare breeds of wild cat, they rarely revisited the same place twice.
He approached the bench where he and Ballatyne had sat last time. It was vacant and he took a seat at one end and stretched his legs. Maybe a few minutes alone would be good for his thought processes. If he could just get rid of the minor prickling feeling on the back of his neck, he might almost manage to relax.
‘Hello, Harry.’
The prickling feeling intensified. He recognized the voice. It was the young woman who had called to set up the meeting. But that wasn’t why his internal alarm bells were ringing. The recognition came from further back, when it had been face to face and unencumbered by the distortion of a phone line.
As she sat down beside him, he turned and looked her in the eye.
It was Clare Jardine.
FORTY-SEVEN
Harry stared at her, wondering what had brought this cold, calculating killer back into his world at this particular moment in time. Whatever, he doubted it would be good news.
‘Got a moment?’ she said chattily. ‘We need to talk.’
He wanted to refuse, to walk away and not look back. But he couldn’t. He had to know what she was doing here. The last time he’d seen her, she had been sitting on the Embankment alongside her former boss, Sir Anthony Bellingham, Deputy Director (Operations) of MI6, moments before she killed him by slicing into his femoral artery.
‘Why not?’ There would be no Ballatyne, then. No wonder her voice had sounded vaguely familiar; he’d heard it often enough in the flesh. It must have been Clare who had warned Jean about the Bosnians, too. The realization that she knew that much about his private life was deeply unsettling.
‘Sorry, Harry. Secret squirrel habits never die, do they?’ She patted his knee. ‘Still, this is nice.’ She was dressed in a smart leather jacket and slacks, and looked fit and capable. . and to Harry, quite lethal. Her hair was cropped short and her face had lost the drawn look he remembered from his last sighting of her on the way back from Red Station. But then, he reminded himself, she had still been getting over being shot at. That kind of experience has an effect on people.
‘What do you want?’
‘You’re going after Paulton.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘Where did you hear that?’ There was no point denying it; she probably had an inside track on security matters and knew roughly what was going on, even if not the fine details. Professional links made in the service were not always easily broken, no matter what the circumstances. And Clare’s circumstances were that if she were spotted by the security establishment, she would go away for a long time. They didn’t like their senior people being murdered within sight of the building, no matter how badly they might have deserved it.
‘I’ve got friends. They don’t condone what I did, but they understand.’
She hadn’t taken her hand from his knee, he noticed, and it was now covered by a folded newspaper. He got a memory flash of her sitting alongside Bellingham not very far from this spot, and felt a sudden tightness in his belly.
‘You slotted a senior figure in SIS,’ he reminded her. ‘That kind of thing catches up with you sooner or later.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. Be honest, Harry, didn’t you want to do the same? He tried to have you topped, for God’s sake.’ Her voice was low but there was a sharp brittleness he didn’t recall from their last meeting, and a faint tic beneath one eye.
She was right, though. He’d thought about it many times since, and wondered what he’d have done if Clare hadn’t got there first. Paulton had already disappeared by the time they returned from Red Station in Georgia, getting out just ahead of the invading Russians. Turning in Bellingham to the authorities and relying on them to take appropriate action wouldn’t have been enough; the man had the connections if not to evade punishment altogether, certainly to avoid its more damaging extremes. In the end, he would have disappeared into a quiet retirement, countering the token establishment slap on the wrist by claiming that he had done it all for Queen and country.
‘How do you know about Jean? And my address?’ he added. The mystery caller Mrs Fletcher had seen. It had to have been her.
‘Same friends, how else? The intel community is the biggest gossip mill in the world, you know that. Bunch of floppy lips, most of them.’ She shrugged. ‘There are no secrets in our profession, Harry. I even know what you’re up to. The Protectory is for real, isn’t it? Who’d have thought. . a branch of the Samaritans for deserters and conchies.’
‘How did you know to warn Jean?’
‘I’d tried making contact at your place, but the resident dragon down the hall put me off, so I decided to think laterally and asked around.’
‘It’s hardly public knowledge.’
‘Oh, come on. . you know what I mean. Like I said, nothing’s totally secret, is it?’
‘You trawled Six’s files.’ It was the only way she could have known. . unless she had friends in Five, too.
She gave him a teasing smile but didn’t deny it. ‘It’s what they trained us to do, isn’t it — use whatever assets we have? She looks nice; just your type. Bit too elegant for my tastes, though.’
‘I’ll be sure to tell her.’ She was trying to annoy him. ‘How did you spot the two watchers?’
‘The two wannabes in the red van?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘God, they were too obvious. So obvious, in fact, that I scouted around and saw the others. They looked the real deal. Tough job you’ve got on, Harry. Is it your way of laying ghosts?’ Suddenly the humour was gone and she was searching his face for something, trying to read his expression. ‘Is that it?’
‘I’m doing what I can, Clare. It doesn’t explain why you’re here, though.’
‘Simple. I’ve got ghosts, too. And Paulton was part of setting up Red Station. Maybe I don’t forgive as easily as you, or maybe I’m just a bad-tempered, hormonal bitch. Call it what you like. I’m hoping you won’t get in my way, that’s all.’ She shuffled a little closer to him on the bench seat and smiled, a hint of perfume overlaying the metallic smell from the river. She tightened her hand on his thigh. It was a strange gesture of intimacy given their last meeting, which hadn’t been particularly warm, and the fact that she had no interest in men. Indeed, her reason for being banished from MI6 in the first place had been due to falling victim in a honey trap, where the intended target — a woman — had reversed the roles with career-damaging consequences for Clare.
Then she moved the newspaper to one side and looked down. Harry couldn’t help it; he did the same.
She was holding a powder compact, silvered and elegant and entirely ordinary. In fact it was very ordinary, an accessory nobody would look at twice, wouldn’t even give a passing thought to. Except that this one had an extra, sinister facility beyond the cosmetic: it housed a three-inch razor-sharp curved blade now protruding from the edge, retractable at the push of a button. And the blade was resting against Harry’s inner thigh.
FORTY-EIGHT
‘You haven’t lost your taste for cold steel, I see.’ Harry tried to remain calm. He’d seen what Clare could do with this thing. If he tried anything she’d cut him before he could move an inch and be gone before he could raise the alarm.
‘Sorry, Harry. Try to call out or pull away and you know what I’ll do. You’ll bleed out before they can get you
