‘He’s been running an Italian restaurant out of Covent Garden and — how can I put this? — assisting Mr Macklin with his business affairs.’
‘Assisting in what way?’
Taploe moved towards the window and pinched a clump of curtain fabric in his hand.
‘He’s one of the nominee directors of Pentagon, for a start. For the moment, however, what we’re most interested in is his rapid turnover of female staff.’
‘Rapid turnover of female staff,’ Mark repeated.
‘That’s right.’ Quinn now tookover. ‘Waitresses, bar staff, cloakroom attendants, the pretty girls on reception who smile at you when you walkin then don’t speakany English. Birds from Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, the Balkans. They find jobs at the restaurant, then disappear when they’re offered more lucrative ways of making a living.’
‘You mean prostitution.’
‘I do mean prostitution, yes. We know that Kukushkin has control of a network of apartments all over London that are being used by call girls with connections to organized crime. We’ve had d’Erlanger under surveillance for some time, although at present his role seems to be limited.’
‘Limited to what?’
‘He simply acts as a middle man. The gangs organize to bring girls to the UK from locations right across central and eastern Europe, promising them jobs as au pairs, waitresses, dancers. D’Erlanger is one of several businessmen in London who offer them work so that they can remain in the country, then they run up debts, get their passports taken away by the gangs and discover that the only way to breakeven is spending fourteen hours a day sucking cocks in South Kensington. Maybe you’ve noticed this with staff at Libra — barmaids or girls in admin who were given workby Macklin and then farmed out to Vladimir Tamarov.’
‘Tamarov?’ Mark said. ‘The lawyer?’
‘For lawyer, read gangster.’ Quinn spoke the word with relish. ‘Tamarov is number two in the Kukushkin organization and certainly their main player on the UK mainland. We thinkhe’s the one who controls the girls. There are three known Tamarov-controlled escort agencies on the Internet, all of them based in London.’
‘And you’ve been following him?’
‘Him and others, yes.’ Taploe came forward, encouraged Mark to sit down and then looked across at Quinn. ‘This is part of the reason why I’ve brought you here today. Tamarov has a bodyguard, a middle-aged Latvian thug by the name of Juris Duchev. In the past Macklin tended to meet him as a first point of contact in London or Moscow. Increasingly, however, he’s been seeing Tamarov in person. Both Tamarov and Duchev are in London for the next three weeks. How would you feel about getting close to them, forging some kind of relationship?’
Mark laughed.
‘You want me to make friends with the Russian mob?’
Taploe opted for flattery.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘So far you’ve shown a real facility for winning people over. It’s one of the reasons Paul and I are so grateful to have you on board.’ Tellingly, Quinn looked at the floor. ‘You obviously have your father’s gift for intelligence work. The personal connections you could make would be worth months of surveillance.’
Mark frowned. ‘What makes you think they’d trust me?’
‘Just that,’ Taploe said, as if the simple fact of Mark’s good nature provided him with the answer. ‘And we have fresh sigint which suggests that Macklin is now looking to bring someone in.’
‘You’ve heard him say that? That he wants me?’
‘Not in so many words. But it’s clear that the relationship between Libra and Kukushkin has become so complex, so far-reaching, that Macklin needs a partner. Someone other than d’Erlanger. Someone like yourself, in fact.’
And so Mark found himself lured, flattered, finessed into a new area of intelligence work in which he had not anticipated being involved. From informer to plant, the ghost in the machine. It felt at first like a promotion, and appealed as much to his vanity as to any sense of duty towards his family. Yet Mark must have looked unsettled at the prospect because Taploe said, ‘There’d be no danger. You’d be under our watchful eye all the way.’
‘But why do you even need me to do it?’ He was beginning to wonder if he had the nerve, the where withal to pull it off. ‘Why don’t you just arrest all three of them? It sounds like you’ve got more than enough evidence.’
‘For legal reasons, mostly.’ Quinn stretched and a white, hair-scattered bulge of stomach appeared briefly beneath his shirt. ‘What the Yanks like to call attorney-client privilege. We had no right to do what we did at the Libra offices. Any information gathered from the premises under those conditions couldn’t be presented in a court of law.’ He scratched a patch of fatty, dry skin on his arm. ‘We’d have to go through due process, obtain a writ, even get formal permission from the Law Society to go through Macklin’s files again.’
Mark frowned.
‘So what was the point of it?’
‘Evidence gathering. Building a picture.’ Taploe arranged his hair. ‘We need hard evidence against Kukushkin and Tamarov, not just against Macklin and the Belgian. And we’re still trying to find out whether Roth had prior knowledge. Perhaps Paul didn’t make it clear, but Roth’s name is all over the documents. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that he’s been using Macklin to cover his own tracks. Roth could be double dipping Kukushkin, he could be a secret co-signatory on the Pentagon account, a director with the power to change the banking mandate. It’s just too early to tell. The one thing we’re trying to avoid is scaring off the Russians. I don’t want simply to arrest a Thomas Macklin when six others just like him could grow overnight in his place. That’s part of the reason I’ve never tried to recruit him. He might agree, but then tip off Tamarov or Duchev, even Kukushkin or Roth. And then what do we have? Probably Macklin in a body bag within forty-eight hours and an entire network of organized crime evaporated overnight. You know Sebastian, Mark. An operator as clever and capable as that would surely know what was going on in his own backyard.’
‘I suppose.’ Mark shrugged his shoulders. He felt like a child being sent out to play in the road.
‘The trickis to let them do the talking,’ Taploe said, priming him for the task a head. ‘Nurture any awkward silences. That forces people to open up. Agree with what Tamarov says, match his opinions with your own. If he feels that he can trust you then anything is possible.’
‘I’d also need you to find out whatever you can about a bloke called Timothy Lander,’ Quinn said.
‘Lander?’
‘He’s a banker, we think, based in the Caymans. Not, as far as we can tell, associated directly with Pentagon, but it’s a tight community out there and there’s a possibility a connection will be made. Your father made a series of telephone calls to his office in Grand Cayman in the weeks leading up to his death. There’s no record that they’ve met, but the coincidence seems strange.’
‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Mark admitted.
‘Well, I’ve asked our SIS station out there to look into it.’ Taploe suddenly looked pleased with himself. ‘The UK police are also interested in some work your father was doing for Divisar on behalf of a Swiss bank. Not Geneva based, but an investment house in Lausanne. Macklin or the Russians may have interests registered there which your father stumbled upon.’
‘Yes.’
‘So it’s a big task we’re facing,’ he said. ‘Much as we appreciate what you’ve achieved so far, there’s still a great deal of work to be done.’
34
A brilliant mid-winter afternoon, clean white light pouring into the Great Court of the British Museum. Ben felt bathed in limestone. He walked a circuit of the Reading Room and was revived. Let Alice have lunch with whoever she likes. At least she has nothing to hide. At least there are no secrets between us.
Long, chrome-legged tables with plastic tops were set out in rows perpendicular to the north-western edge of the Great Court. After half an hour Ben bought himself a cup of tea and sat down beside a young American student with bug eyes and a sprout of goatee beard. He was talking to a Japanese girl.
‘You wanna know what really amazes me about the Kennedy assassination?’ he was saying. ‘It’s that the guy
