trader – getting fat off it – is beneath contempt. I hope you nail him.’
‘If we find something.’
‘But I doubt you’ll nail him.’ She said it defiantly, as if to provoke.
The reply, inevitable: ‘I can assure you that if we find evidence of illegality we’ll throw the book. It’s just that we haven’t looked at him closely for too long.’
Time for an argument, a brief cat scrap? Maybe it was too hot even inside Starbucks, maybe she hadn’t slept and was too tired because Lucy from next door – a clerk in a solicitors’ firm specialising in immigration-tribunal appeals – was shagging noisily half the night, maybe she didn’t believe that Penny Laing, HMRC, Alpha team, was worth the hassle.
Megs Behan walked out into a rather pleasant summer morning and felt as if she had a stone in her sandal and a pain in her gut. The image in her mind was of the man walking past the police cordon and the crash barrier, and not seeming to notice the line of her people outside the fair at the ExCeL Centre or herself. Not even in the traffic, dodging it, could she wipe out the image of Harvey Gillot.
On her phone, Penny Laing spoke to her team leader, Dermot. ‘Yes, she was quite interesting. Really rather sad. They’re out on the margins, people like her. It’s her obsession. Don’t think there is anything in her life except hanging around outside hotels, conference halls, bawling abuse and being ignored. But not entirely wasted, and I’ll follow the Paris line. I’ll see you back at the office.’
It wasn’t illegal for a UK citizen to trade in arms and broker weapons deals. It was illegal if they were not declared and cleared under the Trade in Goods (Control) Order 2003 (S-I-2003/2765), and an end-user certificate had to have been rubber-stamped. It was the area of Alpha team and they were expensive, supported by Bravo team in an adjacent office. Without hits, arrests and publicity to match, they were pretty bloody surplus to requirements. She would have liked it to be promising, but it hadn’t.
She went to catch a tube… Seemed an interesting guy, Harvey Gillot, a worthwhile target, if his security ever slipped.
He didn’t take notes in meetings: Harvey Gillot had a good memory. He did not, like so many, clutter up the hard drive of a laptop or use memory sticks to store his version of what had been said.
From the aircraft steps he walked the few paces to the bus on the tarmac.
Enough had been indiscreet. In the world of Harvey Gillot, mostly, there was spanking clean legitimacy… but – but – every few months, or perhaps every couple of years, a deal fell into his lap that was just too good to lose for the sake of an end-user certificate. Those, rare enough, were the occasions when a trail of paper, electronic messages or mobile calls could put a man in the most unwelcome places: HMP Belmarsh, HMP Wandsworth, HMP Long Lartin. Her Majesty’s Prisons were unpleasant and avoidable.
He boarded the bus.
He knew enough who had ignored the survival rules. He couldn’t understand why more hadn’t followed the diktats of Solly Lieberman. When the old man had gone and he’d cleared the office, searched the locked drawers of Solly’s desk and opened his personal safe, it was quite extraordinary how sparse the paper trail was. Enough had been left that concerned whitewash deals – those in which he bought kit, night-vision or radio-communications boxes that had come out of the old Warsaw Pact warehouses and sold them to the Ministry of Defence – and uniforms, boots, magnification optics and ammunition. But of the choice stuff there had been no trace. Brilliant man, Solly. Gillot had learned the lesson.
On this trip, he reckoned himself to have been off the radar. He had gone through Immigration at Charles de Gaulle on the passport he used for Israeli visits, and out the next morning on the one he used for Arab countries. He had laid off using the mobile and had kept no record on his phone or laptop of the purpose of his visit to Paris and the overnight stay. No reference existed in his baggage of his journey to the airport at Tbilisi, with a charter of schoolchildren, on the DC-9 aircraft of the Georgian national airline.
When he came off the bus, he allowed the kids to spurt ahead. Two men waited for him. Could have been just about any place, any airport, anywhere. Not good suits, shirts that should have gone in the wash the previous evening, shoes that needed a little care with polish and a brush, haircuts that were fierce, shades and armpit bulges. They didn’t have to hold up a sign: ‘Esteemed guest, Harvey Gillot – we are honoured.’ He nodded recognition.
He knew enough of those who had fouled up the system because they demanded that material be stored in files, in safes, or on computer chips. They were in UK gaols, US, French and German gaols. They had in common that they had all scented the big deal that would make the big bucks, and had left tracks that any half-efficient bloodhound could canter after. One guy, nice man, had even shredded his files. Hadn’t done the history lesson taught by Solly Lieberman. The old East German secret police had shredded till the machines blew up, but the new Federal authority had put together a unit, hired a warehouse, brought sacks of paper to it and set to work with rolls of Sellotape. The same exercise had convicted a guy from the south-east who was on a dodgy deal of Heckler amp; Koch machine pistols manufactured under licence in Tehran. Harvey Gillot stored nothing.
He was led to a car, a Mercedes with privacy glass.
His meeting in Paris had been at the office of the Georgian embassy’s military attache. He had listed what he could ship from Bulgaria, what it would cost, and an arrival date. Ahead of him lay a long afternoon, evening and night of detailed discussions. Why did the Georgian government want weapons from Bulgaria through the back door? Simple enough. After the mauling Georgia had received from Russian tanks and artillery in the summer of ’08, the government would have wanted to rearm on their own terms, not on American or European Union terms, and Harvey Gillot was the man they had turned to and would pay handsomely for the privilege of independent action. Not that he cared anything for the politics of East and West. It was a hell of a good deal he’d brokered.
The car went fast. A blue lamp flashed on the roof and traffic swerved to give it space. He was among people who valued him, saw him almost as a saviour, the knight in shining armour, at the top of his game. Here, far from home and his country’s law-enforcement agencies, he could savour his importance. He couldn’t at home. On trains or in aircraft he would find himself beside men and women who insisted on spilling their life stories to him, but he never reciprocated. He maintained a wall of privacy around himself. Could hardly respond, ‘Dealer in death,’ when asked what his trade was. Would have been the same for an undertaker. He didn’t recognise loneliness, but was a man alone. Maybe a blessing, and maybe a carried cross, but isolation went with the work.
Harvey Gillot felt good here, almost closed his eyes and almost dozed.
The man came in a Land Cruiser that trailed a plume of dust behind it. Petar saw it from far back. The priest was almost a stranger to them at this moment; the police already were. He thought of the Land Cruiser and its passengers as an intrusion. Tomislav had threatened earlier to walk back to the village, collect half a dozen ditching spades and start the job himself. Others had growled support and sworn they would help to excavate their own from the ground. Andrija had supported Tomislav. Petar had not known what was best or what he wanted. The priest had said, diffidently, that they should wait. The Croat policeman had ordered that no digging should be done, and had said that the field where the hand protruded was now a potential crime scene. The Serb policeman was in the patrol car but Petar had believed he smirked while the argument went on. Tomislav had not gone to get the spades. The grave had not been touched.
The Land Cruiser braked, soil flying up from the wheels. A girl climbed out of the front passenger seat and a man from the back. The villagers did not surge forward or seek introductions, and the priest caught their mood.
The girl had a good voice. ‘I’m sorry you’ve all had to wait so many hours for expert help to reach you. I’m grateful for your patience. I’m Kristina, from the Department of Pathology and Forensic Science at the university hospital in Zagreb. Under government statutes it is required that all graves from the Homeland War, those with the possibility of genocide, a crime against humanity or a war crime, must be investigated with rigour and care. I was delayed because I went to the airport and was fortunate enough to meet one of the principal experts in his field today. He was due here in two days’ time, after giving a lecture in the hospital in Zagreb tomorrow to government and media, but this situation is more important and the lecture has been postponed. He has come directly from the airport following his flight from the west coast of America. He is Professor William Anders.’
Petar saw a big man, solid, muscular, without surplus weight. He had a strong chin with two days’ growth on it. Petar had never been on an aircraft. The furthest he had travelled from the village was to the refugee camp for displaced persons near Zagreb. There were big bulges under the man’s eyes and the lower rims of his dark glasses rested on them. He wore lace-up walking boots, a creased pair of jeans, a shirt and a cotton jacket. He looked as though he had slept rough. On his head, shading his face from the sun, now low, was a wide-brimmed leather hat.
