Driven (12 page)

S
traker was given use of an office two doors down from Backhouse’s within the Ptarmigan factory. He started writing on a whiteboard the sabotage-related entities he had discovered so far in his investigation. An electronic device. Jamming. An apartment in Monte-Carlo. Michael Lyons. A Warwickshire cottage. A Peugeot hatchback. Trifecta. He also wrote: FIA. Heavy fines. Motive?

Straker sat there and just stared at his board.

He tried to think out from – and beyond – each of the entities in front of him, his eyes darting between them.

After a few minutes, he was sure he
had
noticed something. It was subliminal at first.

But something was odd.

Inconsistent.

Yes, he thought. There’s something there that isn’t quite right.

He dwelt on a contrast – the significant contrast in affluence between Lyons’s cottage and that apartment in Monaco. How much would a week’s rental for a flat like that during the Grand Prix set one back? he wondered. He didn’t know precisely, but he would bank on it being a tidy sum. Could Lyons really have afforded that, considering the modesty of the thatched cottage and two-door hatchback? Hardly. What was Lyons’s
status
, then, while he had been in Monte-Carlo? Was he there privately, or on business? Because of the expense, it had to be business, didn’t it? If so, was he there for Trifecta, or had Lyons been moonlighting – for somebody else?

If it
had
been his employer, would the company itself be behind his illicit radio jamming? Was that likely? Straker realized he needed to know more about Trifecta.

He rang Karen in London: ‘Could you look into a company called Trifecta Systems for me? I need you to identify all their activities, key
clients, directors, who their investors or shareholders are, and any news cuttings you can come up with – your usual magic!’

Leaving Karen to get on with that, Straker returned to staring at his whiteboard. Nothing came to him. For quite a while. Until, after his
n
th cup of coffee, he noticed something else. There was something missing. Something he knew, but which wasn’t on his board. He realized he had no idea of its relevance, but had a feeling that he wanted to know more about the person Lyons had met for breakfast that morning in Leamington. Why was he suspicious of that meeting? he asked himself.

What was the significance of it? It was a meeting with someone wearing a Benbecular lapel pin. There was no significance at all, if those pins were widely available merchandize items. Except Benbecular was hardly a “designer” brand. Someone wearing one was, therefore, demonstrating a heavily esoteric interest in motor racing. And the meeting was intriguing, again because of a possible inconsistency. Lyons’s office, which struck Straker as large and well-appointed, must have its own meeting rooms and hospitality facilities, surely? –
and
it was only a couple of miles away. Instead of meeting at Trifecta, then, Lyons had chosen neutral ground to meet this motor racing aficionado.

Why?

True, it was hardly clandestine – in a public restaurant, and in broad daylight – but Straker’s interest was piqued. He wanted to find out more.

How?

After yet another cup of coffee Straker came up with a wheeze. Picking out his phone, he searched the web for two things. First, he wanted a barber’s shop in the town; he found several, and picked one: Giorgio’s. Then he searched for the number of the Regent Hotel and dialled it using the embedded link on the website’s Contact Us page.

His call was answered promptly.

Straker asked to be put through to the dining room. A Black
Country-sounding voice soon answered and introduced herself as Jill.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I have a strange request, and really hope you can help me?’

Jill gave a nervous chuckle. ‘Okay?’

‘It’s Giorgio’s – the barbers – here, we’re just around the corner from the hotel,’ said Straker. ‘We had a client in this morning who rang back asking whether he had left his glasses behind.’

‘Oh.’

‘At the time, we said no. But, would you believe it? – we’ve found them.’

‘Err, okay?’ said the girl, sounding a little unsure what this had to do with her.

‘I’m ringing because we don’t know how to reach him. He did mention he had just had breakfast with you, though.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you, by any chance, have his name?’

‘How would we know that?’ she asked.

‘He happened to say that he was breakfasting with another of our clients, a Mr Lyons.’

There was a pause from the other end and Straker heard the encouraging sound of a page being flipped over. ‘Yes, you’re in luck – here it is. Mr Lyons … and … a Mr Jeremy Barnett,’ she read out.

‘Excellent. I suppose it’s too much to hope that Mr Barnett left a contact number when he booked?’

‘I’m afraid you’re right – he didn’t.’

Straker thanked Jill profusely and rang off. Next, via his iPhone, he looked up another telephone number on another website; he found one for the main switchboard for the company in question. He was going to take a punt.

Straker rang it. A few seconds later he was talking to an elderly lady who answered the phone: ‘Hello, Benbecular Engines?’

‘I need to write to Mr Jeremy Barnett,’ he explained, ‘and am anxious to get his title and address right, please.’

There was silence on the other end.

Oh shit, thought Straker. She doesn’t even recognize the name. Jeremy Barnett doesn’t mean anything to these people.

Suddenly he heard a sneeze.

‘Sorry about that, love,’ she said, still sounding distracted. ‘Caught by a sneeze. Who was it you wanted, again?’

‘Mr Barnett.’

‘Jeremy?’

‘Yes, that’s him.’

Straker smiled and added: ‘I’ve got him down as Engine Management Systems, is that right?’

‘No, dear. He’s in our Technology Development Division. His title is Management Engineer.’

‘Many thanks,’ he said. ‘My letter to him will be in the post today,’ and rang off.

Straker’s wheeze had worked.

He walked across his temporary office and wrote: “Jeremy Barnett – Benbecular” on his whiteboard.

Straker stood back and studied this new piece of information in the context of the others. For uncounted minutes, his eyes flicked from one name to the next, deliberately, as if trying to spot the anagram from among the jumbled letters of a cryptic crossword.

S
traker, after thirty minutes, realized he had drawn a blank.

But that conclusion wasn’t completely useless. It did help confirm something for him: there
was
no apparent connectivity.

Straker’s mind wandered back to his previous assignment for Quartech. What had been the breakthrough with that? he reflected. Links, he answered: the way things were linked together, sometimes without apparent reason.

With that, Straker had two thoughts at once.

What about Charlotte Grant?

Now that his investigation involved more names, could he test her connection with any of them? He suddenly thought of her phone, and the names he had seen on it in Monte-Carlo.

Turning it on, Straker looked into her directory. Spookily enough, Jeremy Barnett and Michael Lyons
were
there.

Both of them.

In the absence of any firmer leads, he wanted to examine everything her phone contained – including the call, text, and email logs. Maybe that data
could
now help him join up some of these dots. But there was a lot of it.

Extracting it all would clearly take some time.

Calling Backhouse’s secretary, he arranged for Charlotte’s phone to be couriered down to Cavendish Square in London. Then, ringing Karen in his office, he explained what was coming and what he needed the Quartech technicians to do when it arrived.

‘Okay, Matt. I was about to ring you anyway. I’ve got some stuff for you on Trifecta. Do you want me to email it through?’

F
ive minutes later Straker was standing over the printer in Backhouse’s office. ‘Okay, Andy,’ he said, as he lifted the sheets off the machine. ‘What can you tell me about this list of Trifecta directors?’ and read them out.

Backhouse replied: ‘A former president of the FIA, a former chief executive of the BRDC and a former World Champion.’

‘Not a group you’d expect to play fast and loose with the rules, then?’ suggested Straker.

‘Wouldn’t have thought so, would you?’

‘How do they square with Lyons’s clandestine jamming, then?’

Backhouse shook his head.

‘So Lyons
must
have been doing this as a sideline – a bit of moonlighting – mustn’t he?’

Backhouse shrugged in part-support of the logic.

There was a moment of silence between them. Straker leafed through some of the other pages. ‘There’s a list of Trifecta investors here – and, hang on, that’s interesting: There’s been some recent corporate activity. Back in March, someone acquired fifty-one per cent of the company. Someone called Avel Obrenovich?’

Backhouse’s face changed in an instant. ‘I don’t believe it?’

‘What?’

‘That’s extraordinary.’

‘Why?’

‘He only happens to be Massarella’s principal sponsor.’

S
traker buzzed with this new intelligence, his mind swirling. What did it mean? Frustratingly, he was called away from his meditations before he could plan his next step.

Minutes after twelve noon, having had a pretty clear overnight run, the convoy of Ptarmigan lorries arrived back at the Shenington factory from Monte-Carlo. Backhouse led Straker down to the loading bay to see them arrive. Pulling in through the large hangar-like doors, their air brakes were applied and the engines cut. With only hours before the lorries would be away again, this time for Belgium, the team went to work immediately, unloading and processing all their kit and equipment. Most of the attention – including Backhouse’s and Straker’s – was paid to the lorry carrying the wreckage of Helli Cunzer’s car. Fork-lift trucks, hand-pushed trolleys, and about twenty men converged round the tailgate as the segments, fragments and remains of the car were extracted and placed on the painted concrete floor of the bay.

‘We’ll be laying all the bits out on the floor in here,’ Backhouse explained, ‘and we’ll subject every remnant to scrutiny and testing to try and determine the cause of the crash.’

Straker soon went back to his temporary office.

He was called by Backhouse ten minutes later. ‘I’ve got Remy’s helmet,’ he said. ‘Do you want to come and see us research the jamming device?’

They met up again as Backhouse was carrying the helmet into the electronics lab. He placed it on one of the work benches. Backhouse peered in through the visor and then ran his finger into the folds in the foam lining where the device had been put back.

His expression changed dramatically as he moved his fingers round the inside of the lining. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘What?’ asked Straker.

‘It’s not there.’

‘It’s not there?’

‘No.’

Carefully turning the helmet over, Backhouse unpopped some of the fastenings, pulled the foam inner out of the casing and laid it on the white workbench. Gently easing the foam panels apart, he opened up the groove where the jammer had been. ‘It’s definitely not here,’ he repeated and looked up into the other’s face. ‘It’s gone.’

Straker looked deeply concerned. ‘I want the area around it on the lorry dismantled and checked.
Immediately
.’

S
traker called Quartano an hour later from his temporary office.

‘What do you mean it’s gone?’ asked the tycoon. ‘You sure it hasn’t just fallen out? Somewhere in the truck, or fallen out into its carrying case?’

‘No, sir. I’m afraid not. We’ve stripped the compartment down completely.’

‘Someone’s taken it out for safe keeping?’

‘No, sir. We’ve asked everyone if they’ve been near the helmet – not why, of course – and we’ve even made contact with absent members of staff who are away on a break for a few days.’

‘Matt,’ said Quartano with unexpected gravity. ‘Are you sure? Are you
absolutely
sure?’

‘As much as I can be.’

‘Christ, you know what this means, of course,’ said Quartano solemnly.

‘It’s been removed – to cover the saboteur’s tracks. But worse, it means that even if Charlotte put it there, she clearly wasn’t the person who took it out. Someone else did. And it must’ve been one of the team. It means we’ve got a serious problem. Our saboteurs
do
still have a collaborator … right here … on the inside.’

S
traker returned home to Fulham early that evening, craving the comfort of familiar surroundings. But opening the door of his – their – empty flat, the hollowness hit him hard. Worse, among the backlog of post strewn across the mat, he saw an envelope franked with the name of his wife’s solicitors. A pulse hissed through his ears. The grim reality of what that letter meant was all too obvious.

Dropping his bags inside the door, Straker placed the letter on the hall table, unable to bring himself to open it.

After running a bath, and pouring a hefty tumbler of whisky, he finally summoned himself.

Having read it, he sighed. And breathed deeply. He and Jo were, mercifully, not at war. They would clearly reach an agreement and looked like they would settle as fast as the process allowed. He had a flat. She had a flat. There were no children. But it was the
fact
of it that finally got to him. Six years, altogether, many of which had been happy and close.

Straker found himself swallowing hard.

His rendition and enhanced interrogation by the Americans, and resultant struggles to reconcile those ethics with everything he had believed in for twenty years, really did for them – well him, at any rate.

He hoped, now, that he was over the worst of his turbulent reaction to those experiences. The flashbacks had been becoming much less frequent. His recovery had been happening gradually, but – tragically – not fast enough to reassure his wife that his psyche was on the mend.

Straker spent his one day of leave moping around the flat. His curtains remained closed for the entire time. He sat slumped in a chair. His only distractions were a bottle of whisky and the track which
best captured his mood – Miles Davis’s ‘Blue in Green’ – which he played semi-hypnotically in a continuous loop on his B&O CD player. He didn’t remember eating. He never felt hungry. Waking from another fitful sleep in the middle of the following night, he set out on a punishing run through the deserted streets of west London, trying to purge himself.

He was glad to be going away again.

Just before leaving their flat, breathing deeply, he signed the letter, slid it back into its envelope and posted it in a postbox at the end of his street.

T
his time it was Belgium.

He flew to Liège, timing his arrival to coincide with Remy Sabatino’s flight in by private jet from Malta, she having asked for an update on his dealing with the sabotage threat. By the time they met up, Straker had just about forced himself to regain some equanimity.

They climbed aboard their chartered helicopter and flew in the Bell Jet Ranger up into the mountains of the Ardennes. Several silent minutes into the flight, Sabatino spoke to him over the intercom. ‘You okay?’ she asked provocatively.

Straker turned to face her. ‘Sure.’

‘You seem quiet?’

‘No, no,’ he said defensively, aware he was not being particularly convincing. ‘I was … thinking about the investigation.’

‘Right…’

Straker stepped straight back in before she could say anything else. ‘We’ve made some progress,’ he said.

‘With Helli’s car?’

Straker shook his head. ‘No, not yet – they’re still working on that. It’ll be a few more days before we’ll know any more there.’

‘What then?’

‘We’ve found some links with Michael Lyons – your radio jammer.’

Sabatino looked impressed. ‘Wow – with who?’

‘Trifecta Systems.’

‘
No!
’

‘We’re pretty sure Lyons works there.’

‘But they
supply
us, don’t they? Why would they be sabotaging us at the same time?’

Straker’s whole mood seemed to change with his subsequent smile.

Sabatino looked disapproving. ‘What’s so funny? How’s that funny?’

‘Don’t you see?’ he said searchingly. ‘That’s good news. It’s a lead – a clue. Precisely because it
doesn’t
make any sense.’

Sabatino looked blank.

‘It’s a clear invitation for us to look into this further,’ he explained. ‘If it did make sense, we wouldn’t bother with it – we wouldn’t give it a moment’s thought. We’d move straight on.’

Sabatino’s face registered a partial understanding of what Straker was getting at. ‘Who are the other links with, then?’

‘We’ve found a connection between Trifecta and Avel Obrenovich.’

‘
No!
How?’

‘Recently – very recently – Obrenovich became the majority shareholder in Trifecta.’

Sabatino looked impressed then somewhat concerned. ‘That’s
more
good detective work. Wow. Does that mean Massarella are behind this, then?’

‘We’ve got no proof of any direct interaction between any of these people,’ Straker went on. ‘Elsewhere, we do have a different connection – this time one between Michael Lyons and Benbecular – through a man who works for them called Jeremy Barnett.’

Sabatino shook her head to indicate no recognition.

‘At this stage, though, I can’t see any reason to believe that’s anything other than a routine relationship.’

Sabatino’s expression showed a mix of intrigue and anxiousness.

‘But,’ continued Straker calmly, ‘we do have
one
point of concern.’

Because of his tone, Sabatino looked at him intensely.

‘I know you didn’t approve of my putting the bug back in your helmet – after Qualifying in Monaco – to provide misinformation to the saboteurs?’

Sabatino nodded – and then shook her head, acknowledging that she now did.

‘Well, when your kit was returned to the factory, I asked Andy to have the device taken out and examined, hoping we might learn something from it. But when he went to look for it … the bug was gone.’

‘Fallen out?’

Straker shook his head. ‘No, we’re sure it was removed.’

‘
Removed?
’

‘We searched everything.’

Sabatino fell silent for a moment. ‘What does that
mean
?’ she asked. ‘Does it mean we
do
have a traitor – on the inside of the team?’

‘I’m afraid it appears that way,’ he said firmly.

Sabatino continued to look straight at Straker. Her dark brown eyes and tanned face suddenly looked less striking than they should have done. For all her brilliance as a driver, and her courage and toughness when racing wheel to wheel at breakneck speed, there was a glimmer of vulnerability. ‘What are you doing about it, then?’

Straker smiled inwardly at the change in her attitude – how she would have so readily dismissed this before as spy games, as she first did in Monaco. Having expected this question, and knowing he had to sound convincing to retain her trust, he said: ‘Several things,’ and explained them confidently, without losing eye contact.

‘And none of those will interfere with the workings of the team?’

‘Minimally.’

‘Who are you telling about this threat?’

Straker allowed himself to convey a little uncertainty at his point. ‘I wanted to talk to you about that. This is a sport and you’re the competitor. How would the guys around you react to the idea of a saboteur been in among them?’

Sabatino slowly rocked her head from side to side, as if weighing up the consequences.

‘It’s your call,’ he went on, ‘but making a big song and dance about it could just make people suspicious of each other – and so easily damage team spirit?’

Sabatino, far from looking vulnerable, now looked like she was ready to affect events rather than be prey to them. ‘Given the other measures you’ve described, I’m happier not to advertize the existence of the insider. How many people know about this as of now?’

‘That the bug was removed?’

She nodded.

‘Only Backhouse, Quartano, you and me.’