officer’s attention.
Foster slowed, eyeing the card and then Harry, his concentration broken. He stopped.
‘What is it?’ Up close, he was tanned and lean, exuding confidence and gravitas. He would have to, given his job, Harry thought, and realized he was only going to get one punt at this.
As he opened his mouth to reply, a minder in a suit tried to intervene, placing a hand on Harry’s chest and pushing without even bothering to look at his card. ‘That’s not possible. Step back. Apply through the press office in the approved manner.’
Harry looked down at the hand, then eased it away, applying just enough pressure on the tendons with his thumb to draw a gasp from the man. He dropped the hand and looked straight at General Foster, estimating that he had about five seconds before the minder got over his surprise and wounded pride and yelled for back-up. Another three and security guards would be jumping all over him. ‘General, I need to ask you about Lieutenant Tan. Have you any idea where she might have gone?’
Foster’s eyes were a dark shade of green, Harry noted, full of intelligence and, no doubt, the weightiness of his position in the war against the Taliban, coupled with his role as a military diplomat. But there was a disturbing blankness in there, too, echoed by the frown edging his brow, and Harry experienced a moment of startling revelation.
The general said, ‘Sorry — I think you need to speak to personnel on any issue like that.’ Then he was gone, surrounded by his acolytes, and Harry was left with two large security guards hustling him towards the exit.
As he stepped out into the sunlight over Whitehall, Harry realized he’d been wrong. His assumption about the senior officer being protected from any fallout and therefore off-limits to Harry was way off-target. The simple fact was, General Patrick Foster, Deputy Commander Afghanistan and Lieutenant Vanessa Tan’s immediate boss, hadn’t got the faintest idea of who Harry had been talking about.
FIFTY-TWO
‘Cutting it fine, Harry. I was beginning to have my doubts about you.’ Clare Jardine answered Harry’s call on the fifth ring. She sounded amused and even faintly smug, as if she’d been expecting his call all along. ‘I’m glad I was wrong.’
‘What do you want?’ He was only fifty yards from the MOD building, and curiosity had got the better of him.
‘Come on, don’t be like that.’ Her voice took on a more businesslike tone. ‘Look, sorry about the teasing. If we work together, Harry, we can both get what we want. I help you, you help me, friends forever.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Not over the phone. There are too many ears in this city for my liking. Choose somewhere public if it makes you feel safer.’ The amused tone was back, giving Harry cause to wonder at Clare’s mental state, her mood veering from one extreme to another in the blink of an eye.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Horse Guards Parade opposite the lake. Fifteen minutes.’ Horse Guards, where armed police were stationed in cubicles, watching the government’s back and the passing public. If Clare was thinking of trying any of her knife work there, she’d have to be suicidal.
Her laugh echoed down the line. ‘Horse Guards is good. But fifteen? From where you’re standing right now, Harry, it should take about four minutes, tops, a fit man like you. Don’t be late. . and don’t bring the Milky Bar Kid or I might have to give him a slap.’ Then she was gone, leaving him with a prickly feeling on the back of his neck.
He refused to turn round and look; he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.
Five minutes later, Clare joined him on the edge of the parade square, within sight of an armed police guard. She was dressed this time in pressed trousers and a smart jacket, every inch the office worker on a break, fitting easily into the background the way she would have been trained. She carried no bag, he noticed, but that didn’t mean she was harmless; he’d seen how quickly she could move and how she could produce her little compact knife faster than many sleight-of-hand artistes.
‘Mmm. . clever,’ she congratulated him, eyeing the guard. ‘You really don’t trust me, do you? And after everything we’ve been through. I’m almost hurt.’
‘No, you’re not. Tell me why I should trust you.’
‘OK. Fair point. Straight down to business, then.’ She set off at a dawdle along the pavement, keeping a body’s width apart from him, hands clasped in front of her. Amazingly, she looked almost demure, as if butter wouldn’t melt. ‘I know Paulton is working with the Protectory,’ she announced. ‘Don’t bother asking how, I just do. He’s a wheeler-dealer and he must have seen them as a prime source of money. Only he doesn’t have any secrets of his own to sell, does he? Who the hell cares about MI5 stuff that’s over a year out of date? And officers or agents he was running have long been pulled out. But he has contacts in all sorts of unlikely places. He must have been storing away names for years, hoping that one day he’d have a use for them. He might not have planned on this kind of use, but he’s resourceful; he knows how the Protectory works: they get their hands on a few prime military personnel who are desperate for a new life and safety away from guns and bullets and IEDs and whatever crap they call their home life, and sell whatever they’ve got in their heads.’ She paused for breath; she’d been talking fast, a professional pitch to sell the idea of chasing Paulton and not letting Harry go. And was that a hint of desperation in her voice?
‘That’s the Protectory. Where does Paulton fit in?’
‘Simple: he’s got something to bring to the table. He knows people who know people and he can get buyers for the kind of stuff on offer. The Protectory’s problem is they don’t have the reach or the contacts and never have. They’re strictly small-time; soldiers cut adrift, looking to flog off a few details here and there. Negotiating without a gun is not their strong point, and they’ve probably been ripped off plenty of times. Paulton’s argument is that he can get them in front of some real buyers. . and in the process take a nice cut for himself. It’s a neat fit.’
She was right. Paulton had been in the security and intelligence game a long time. It was a world away from the kind of spheres Deakin and his friends inhabited. The kind of information that had passed across Paulton’s desk over the years would have included names, positions and locations of people looking to get hold of whatever Britain and her allies were developing in tactical equipment. Names men like Deakin and Nicholls would never even have heard of.
But he still wasn’t sure how knowing this would get him to Paulton. Clare answered that in a way he hadn’t been expecting.
‘I don’t want to tell stories out of school, Harry, but you know Ballatyne’s playing you, don’t you?’
He stopped, forcing her to do the same. He knew this might be a ploy, Clare playing SIS-type mind games to drive a wedge between him and Ballatyne. Divide and rule, as old as the hills. Yet a part of him found it difficult to contradict her outright. ‘Go on.’
‘They’re only using you for one thing: to track these guys down so they can take them out. They don’t have the manpower to do it themselves, and don’t want to get their hands dirty if it all goes public and shit-shaped. So they’ve dressed it up, with Paulton now in the frame in the hope that you can kill two birds with one stone. They knock the Protectory out of the game, you get Paulton. . everyone’s happy.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I told you: I’ve got friends. They have connections. Word is that a dribble of information has been coming out of the Protectory for about three months now. Bits here, snippets there; nothing huge, but it’s enough to tell them what the group is doing. At first the government didn’t want to know; they looked on the Protectory as no more than rumour, a small group of ex-army misfits not worth bothering with. Then about a month ago the decision was taken to shut them down.’
‘Why?’
‘They were becoming the stuff of legend; celebrity renegades, would you believe? Robin Hood and his merry men in desert camos. You know what squaddies are like; coop them up in forward operating bases for weeks on end and they’ll talk up Jack the Ripper as a hero. Make it a group helping out deserters and they’re like the X-Men and the Magnificent Seven all rolled into one. It gives those with even a vague notion of jumping ship the idea that it might just work if they had somewhere safe to run. That’s not good for morale.’
‘Neither is killing deserters who refuse their help.’
