stranger things had happened. If it were true, it explained why Ballatyne hadn’t wanted him talking to General Foster, and why Foster himself had looked totally blank on hearing her name. He hadn’t been included in the plan.
Then he had an idea and cursed himself for being slow off the mark. He’d missed an opportunity to get here much faster than this. What was it Mrs Crane had said about her?
If there was one thing he wouldn’t have called Vanessa Tan, it was plain. He found Mrs Crane’s telephone number and rang her.
‘Mr Tate?’ She sounded surprised to hear from him. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Mrs Crane, do you have a PC?’
‘Well, of course. We’re not in the Stone Age up here, you know. I was just using it, as a matter of fact. Why do you ask?’
‘I want you to look at a picture and tell me what you think.’ When she agreed and gave him her email address, he got Rik to send her the jpeg of Vanessa Tan from the memory stick.
Moments later, she said, ‘Right. Got it. Just let me open the attachment. I don’t suppose you’ve found her, have you? Oh. . goodness.’
‘What’s wrong?’
Mrs Crane sounded puzzled. ‘Who is this?’
It was all Harry needed. But he had to have confirmation without feeding her any hints.
‘Do you recognize her?’
‘No, I don’t. .’ She hesitated, then said, ‘You think it’s Vanessa, don’t you?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Sorry, Mr Tate, but I think you’ve been given the wrong information. Whoever this woman is, it’s definitely not Vanessa Tan. Not in a million years.’
After thanking Mrs Crane and hanging up, Harry sat down to consider the possibilities of what they had stumbled over. Suddenly several bits of the puzzle were falling into place. The unexplained disappearance of a very bright and promising young female army officer; the absence of any solid background details, friends or family; the lack of any clues to her whereabouts.
‘How the hell did they do this?’
Rik shrugged. ‘Easy enough, given time and access.’
‘Could you do it?’
‘Sure. Whoever set this up would’ve been on the inside, with a lot more facilities, but I could manage, given time and some privacy.’ He smiled knowingly. ‘I could get your name in there if I had to. Put you on the general staff, all braid and creased trousers.’
‘How?’ Harry felt sure he was going to regret asking, but he had to know. And Rik was the only one who would tell him.
‘I’d have to access certain servers and files which I won’t frighten you with by naming, then I’d go in and enter your name as having served, say, on the HQ staff in Desert Storm. I’d throw in a few photos of you sitting on a gun turret and smiling, or enjoying a brew-up with the lads in the desert, then link it all in with your regimental records. And if I was really clever, which I am, I’d make sure your name was included in movement records from the UK to Iraq and back; maybe even add a bit of gloss by showing you’d been evac’d out and treated in hospital for shrapnel wounds.’ He sat back and grinned. ‘Everyone loves a hero with some metal ballast. It’s not really that hard — just a matter of filling in blanks.’
‘But the photo.’
‘That’s where they fell short: they wouldn’t have had a recent shot of Tan, so they just took the first one they could get of an Anglo-Chinese woman of roughly the same age. Maybe they managed to get hold of any existing shots of her as a girl and wiped them. What they didn’t reckon on was that you’d show the file photo to someone who’d known her, or that that anyone would bother looking beyond the basic facts they’d put on the records.’
Harry swore. He’d been on one long wild goose chase. There never had been a Lieutenant Tan. The original had died in a fire after leaving Cambridge. And now he knew why: her place in the big wide world had been taken by a fiction — an invention — used to lay an elaborate bait for the Protectory. It wouldn’t have taken much; false entries in the army records, a glowing CV that painted a picture of a high-flyer with an elephantine memory, and the closest possible connections to the high command in Afghanistan. And just enough detail to make her seem real if anyone should run a cursory check.
‘There’s a clincher,’ added Rik. ‘I checked Tan’s original application to university — her real one. She never studied languages, and even if she’d been to Kabul, there’s a reason she wouldn’t have been pictured with locals: in contrast to the old cobblers you were fed, she couldn’t speak Pashto or Dari. She had some Cantonese from her father, and a bit of French, but that was it. And there was no record of a special memory to help her graduate, either. Whatever qualifications she got, she’d had to work hard for.’
They’d done it in a rush and got careless. Pasted together a past which didn’t exist for a woman who was dead, snatching bits of reality and painting on a fabricated history. A giant Photoshop representation of a make- believe life. It wasn’t going to stand up long to close scrutiny, but that would never have been the intention. It was all smoke and mirrors. Once they’d identified the dead woman in the house fire — which only MI6 would have had the time, clout and purpose to do — the house and phone must have been kept active to show anyone who cared to look that she still existed. Clever.
He stood up. Ballatyne; before this went any further, he had a lot of talking to do. Before leaving, however, he told Rik about his meeting with Clare off Whitehall.
Rik was sceptical. ‘She’s poison, you know that. Anyone could cut a man like she did Bellingham isn’t right in the head.’
‘I know. But she’s told me more than Ballatyne has, and right now I need all the help I can get. If her friends in Six come up with anything substantial, it could save a lot of time.’
‘He’s another one, Ballatyne. He’s strung us along — and for what?’ Rik scrubbed at his hair, making it even wilder than it looked normally. ‘Great game we’re in, isn’t it? Our friends turn out to be our enemies.’
Harry couldn’t argue with that. It was in the nature of the people who worked in the intelligence business: only tell people as much as they need to know, and even then, make sure very little is the full unvarnished truth.
‘I’m going to see him. Find out what’s going on.’
‘You want me there?’ Rik looked hopeful. ‘I could hold your jacket.’
‘No. I’d like to keep it civilized — but don’t go anywhere.’
Rik spread his arms, forgetting to wince at his wound. ‘Where will I go? This is my existence. I’m beginning to feel like a laboratory rat. Nothing ever happens.’
Harry grinned at him. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ he said, and left.
FIFTY-FOUR
‘There are reasons we did it this way, Harry. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you in on the fine detail, but my hands were tied.’
It was an hour later and Ballatyne had agreed with surprising ease to a meeting. They were back in the Italian restaurant off Wigmore Street, the minder on the door and a car outside. ‘It was decided to have the tightest possible list of people in the know, restricted to me and a maximum of four others, including the IT specialists who fed the Tan background data into the official records. Any wider than that and we would have been no closer to knowing who was leaking the names of deserters out to the Protectory. I don’t include you in that, of course.’
‘Big of you. So what’s the story?’
‘The government and MOD have been concerned for some time about the desertion figures. They’re rising all the time, especially with the casualty rates in Afghanistan. That by itself is containable, given some attention. But what nobody had reckoned on was deserters turning round and selling what they knew. It’s happened occasionally
