bequeathed by his father. A genetic facility for the double life; an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances concealing his true purpose from the world.
A week after the first meeting in Queensway, Mark had set to work. His first destination was the club’s main site in Kennington, where Roth kept unlocked offices containing papers, financial records and computer data that MI5 had never seen.
It was mid-morning, the time of day Mark most enjoyed visiting the club, when he could be alone in the vast, cavernous rooms with only a few cleaners for company. The floors were still sticky with drink and sweat from the weekend and Mark’s shoes squelched as he made his way across the lower level to a private staircase at the western end of the building. Through a security door, then up to level two, past the main bar and into a suite of dingy offices that reeked of stale air and sweat. He looked into all three rooms to check that he was alone, then fired up the closed-circuit televisions at the end of the corridor to warn him of any approaching employees. Having made photocopies of up to fifty documents in Roth’s filing cabinet, Mark turned his attention to his desk. The central drawer was locked, but he knew that he kept a key in a CD case behind the door. Sure enough, there it was, and he began searching through the debris of flyers, demo tapes and foreign currencies littering the interior. The contents were like historical artefacts, decade-old junk and trash from Libra’s earliest days. This was pure nostalgia, a glimpse into their vanished past, a time before the suit and tie and the Ibiza spin-off, when all that mattered was Time Out’s good opinion and three hundred punters on the door.
Then, right at the back, beneath a rave flyer from 1992, Mark found two floppy disks. They were unmarked and covered in fluff and dust, but he copied them on to his laptop with the certain conviction that he had uncovered something valuable. Weren’t disks, after all, the holy grails of espionage? Then, having replaced the key behind the door, he left the office. The entire visit had lasted just over two hours. He had moved through the building as if it were just another ordinary day, his role changed without visible effect from servant to spy.
Two days later, with Macklin in the Czech Republic and Roth skiing in Courcheval, Mark worked late at Soho headquarters and spent five hours going through the contents of their offices. He had doubts about this which he had kept to himself: namely, that any incriminating evidence would almost certainly have been secured in the basement safe, access to which was restricted solely to Macklin and Roth. Nevertheless, he followed the procedure mapped out by Randall. Again, filing cabinets and deskdrawers, and a thorough search of both rooms for compartments or concealed spaces.
Look behind pictures, Randall had told him, below carpets and underneath chairs. There may be documents hidden there, sequences of numbers or letters which we can make sense of in the context of other intelligence. Search for evidence of private financial accounts, correspondence from unusual sources, particularly the Cayman Islands, Jersey and Isle of Man, Turks and Caicos and other offshore territories. Make copies of bank statements, insurance records, anything and everything not immediately recognizable as Libra’s characteristic business. It’s possible Kukushkin are using Libra as a front for buying assets vital in regard to the facilitation of money laundering. Check Macklin’s records in particular. In the first instance, the legal end of transactions of this kind would almost certainly originate with him.
Finally, at 1 a.m., Mark switched on the computers in both offices and trawled them for information. It quickly became apparent that this was a hopeless task, too vast for one man alone at night with no idea of what he was looking for. Thousands of emails and documents relating to every aspect of Libra’s business: it would take a team of a dozen experts hundreds of hours to analyse them. Instead, acting on a separate request from Randall, Mark made hard copies of Roth’s and Macklin’s appointments diaries and placed them in a sports hold all now three-quarters full with documents.
It was almost 2.30 by the time he left the building, punching in a four-digit code to activate the security alarm. Shouldering the hold all he walked north and flagged down a taxi in Soho Square. Giving the address of his flat in Kentish Town, Mark zipped open the bag and glanced through Roth’s appointments: dinner with EMI in ten days’ time; two meetings scheduled for the end of the week with American representatives of a major Los Angeles record label; a haircut the day before that. Nothing unusual, in other words. Nothing encoded or obscure. Just another fortnight in the life of Sebastian Roth.
But then he saw it, two days back, an appointment that had been scheduled just hours before Roth was due to leave for the Alps. In his neat, looping script was written: Lunch 1 p.m. — Alice K.
28
‘I’ll tell you one thing. Seb wants to fuck my sister-in-law.’
‘Come again?’ said Taploe.
‘They had lunch a week ago. I saw the appointment in his diary.’
‘Yes, we noticed that. Did you say anything?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Not to him. To her.’
‘No. She’d only lie about it, say it was for a story or something.’
Taploe took a Kleenex out of a small Cellophane packet, blew his nose into it and said, ‘Has she been unfaithful to Ben before?’
Mark paused, wondering if the question was relevant to their investigation or simply an invasion of his family’s privacy.
‘Why don’t you ask her?’ he said eventually. ‘I imagine so, yes. It’s not something I like to think about. Besides, they may only have had lunch. There is that possibility.’
Taploe scrunched the Kleenex into a tight ball and dropped it on the floor beside the accelerator. They were sitting in a Security Service Astra in the basement car park of a Hammersmith hotel. It was an excessive precaution: Taploe might just as well have met Mark in the broad daylight of a London park, but he felt it useful to create an atmosphere of suspense.
‘Is Ben faithful to her?’ he asked.
‘What, brother? Screw around behind Alice’s back? Christ no. She’d cut his dickoff. Ben hasn’t looked at another woman since 1993. He once copped off with a girl on a stag weekend — long time before they were married — and Alice didn’t let him forget it for years. Constant nagging, guilt trips, endless fucking about. You would have thought he’d got the girl pregnant, the way she carried on.’
Taploe sniffed.
‘Sorry,’ Mark said, sensing that he wanted to get back to business. ‘You were saying about the stuff I got from Kennington.’
‘Yes, we’re still examining it.’ Taploe was hoping to conceal the fact that it had proved largely useless.
‘And the disks?’
‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’
‘Just old crap?’
‘Just exactly that.’
A bottle-green Audi swung out in front of the Astra, blinding them briefly with the sweep of its headlights. Mark was concerned that the driver might see his face and he shielded it as Taploe opened the window and tapped his thumb on the steering wheel.
‘Let’s talk for a moment about the computers.’ Mark seized on this.
‘That’s what I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Surely you have a way of hacking into our network from the outside? You can read anything that comes out of there.’
‘Used to,’ Taploe replied. It was a moment of uncharacteristic candour. ‘We lost that level of surveillance three weeks ago. A manpower issue. And your firewall was changed last month.’
‘Terrific.’
He omitted to add that the entire Kukushkin operation was gradually, inevitably, being pushed to one side. Lack of concrete evidence. Death of a joe. The Wise Men had lost their faith in Taploe and were moving on to pastures new.
‘But it shouldn’t make any difference,’ he said. ‘That’s why you’re so important to us. With you on the inside we can get at everything we need.’
