The Lucifer Network (24 page)

‘Now you're being daft.' Rosemary tugged at a tuft of her hair, twisting it round her finger. ‘I think I've lost the thread of all this somewhere,' she cautioned. The truth was she was beginning to suspect her friend might be having some sort of breakdown. ‘Go back a few pages and explain how this divinely complicated infatuation of yours came about?'

Julie told her about her father's death in Africa, the letters and the mysterious shipment he'd referred to as red mercury. Then she described how the
Chronicle
people had cajoled her into entrapping Simon Foster. She talked about the backlash from the laboratory after the newspaper piece came out and the grilling she'd been given by the police that morning.

‘You poor, poor thing,' said Rosemary when she'd finished. ‘If it had been me going through all that I'd have just burst into tears and found a hole in the ground to hide in.'

‘No you wouldn't. Anyway, you'd never have got yourself into such a mess in the first place.' Talking it through had left Julie more undecided than ever. She leaned forward and grabbed her friend's hands. ‘Oh Rosie . . . what should I do? Please tell me what I should do.'

Rosemary pulled her old friend into her arms and gave her a huge hug.

‘I don't know. But whatever you do, be careful.'

Sam was met on the air jetty at Heathrow by a fidgety man called Bennett from SIS security who wore fawn trousers and a navy blue pullover. He led him
down a staircase onto the tarmac and into a waiting car.

‘We're taking you out the back way, just in case,' Bennett explained as he drove off. ‘The media have rumbled your flat already. Been staking it out since lunchtime. Nice neighbours you've got. At least three of them phoned the papers.'

‘They'd sell their own mothers if the price was right,' Sam grumbled.

‘Anybody give you trouble in Scotland?'

‘Not exactly. Although there's one bloke in Rothesay who knows more than he should.'

‘Give me a name and address and I'll have him taken out for you.'

Sam smiled grimly at the joke. He settled back in the passenger seat as they sped through the security barrier and onto the loop road that led to the exit tunnel. His controller had called him shortly before he boarded the flight from Glasgow. They were to meet later in the afternoon.

Bennett glanced at him as he drove onto the motorway. ‘That clean chin helps,' he commented. ‘Might be wise to lighten the hair though, and start wearing spectacles. We can arrange all that this afternoon.'

Sam cringed at the thought of another identity change. ‘I'd rather leave it a day or two. I'll be going abroad as soon as I've fixed a flight.'

During his wait for the shuttle from Glasgow he'd reflected on his conversation with Jo Macdonald, and been left dissatisfied. He'd begun to question whether a young prostitute could really have known whether the information his father passed on was sensitive or not and decided he needed to hear it from the horse's mouth. The ‘horse' being Günther Hoffmann.

He'd made a phone call from Glasgow airport to an
old friend in the German equivalent of MI6, the BND. Fifteen minutes later he'd been called back with confirmation that Hoffmann was currently at his Karl-Marx Hof apartment in Vienna and, judging by recent form, was unlikely to be going anywhere.

But before heading for the Austrian capital, there were two pressing issues to sort out. The first was to find out where he stood with his employers, and the second was to procure a change of clothes. The latter could prove difficult. If the media were outside his apartment, returning there to get them would be impossible.

‘So where are you taking me?' he asked Bennett.

‘We've found you a room in Ealing for now. In what they call a private hotel.'

‘Sounds like a knocking shop.'

‘No such luck. It's full of refugees. Half of them Ukrainian.'

‘
Ukrainians!
' Sam jumped. ‘Have you read my file?'

‘Course I have. Don't worry. You'll be in good company. These people are dodging the mafiya too.'

‘I don't think much of your sense of humour.'

‘It's only for a few days – until the grownups decide what to do with you.'

‘What about my stuff?'

‘All done. One of my girls went to your place last night. There's a couple of suitcases waiting for you in Ealing.'

‘Efficient of you.'

The Arcadia Private Hotel was in a side street off the Uxbridge Road. A dozen rooms, the rent for eleven of them paid by the local authority. Bennett showed him upstairs and handed him the key. The room was little wider than a corridor. There was a single divan with his cases on it and a cracked sink in the corner.

‘I'll be leaving you now, sir.' Bennett stood by the door with a silly smirk on his face.

‘S'pose you're after a tip.'

‘Never know your luck. Here.' He handed Sam a card. ‘Give me a ring when you want your hair done. My bloke who “does” is as gay as a glee club, but he's got a lovely touch.'

‘Thanks a million.'

When the security man had gone, Sam peeked out of the grubby window. The yard at the back was of cracked concrete surrounded by bricks blackened by decades of pollution. Two small children played on rickety tricycles while their mother watched listlessly. All three were black and very beautiful. Somali or Ethiopian, Sam guessed. Refugees from the sort of injustice he'd spent his life fighting. A fight which Julie Jackman had sabotaged with a single flick of an eyelash.

He moved back from the window and contemplated the plain, peeling walls of the stale-smelling bedroom. His mind flashed back to the cell in Baghdad two years ago, his fate then also determined by a woman.

He flipped open the suitcases and was impressed. Bennett's girl had chosen sensibly. He would need one of the bags for Vienna, so began hanging some of the clothes in the cheap wardrobe. When he'd done, he sat on the bed to gather his thoughts.

Vienna. A city of spies, where twelve months ago an elusive Russian called Vladimir Kovalenko had conned a gullible trader called Harry Jackman into shipping nuclear weapons to Arab terrorists, telling him the boxes contained a fool's gold known as red mercury. Vienna, where a few years earlier an old Stasi spymaster called Günther Hoffmann had set up his retirement home because he wanted to be away from the witch hunts in his newly united homeland, and to be close to his beloved opera. Two men who held answers to most of the questions hammering in his head.

Hoffmann would be the easier to find. He'd chosen a sedentary life after the winding up of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. Sam had last met him a few years after his move to Vienna, by which time he and his wife had been well settled in their small apartment. He'd claimed to have turned his back on his old world – an assertion that wasn't entirely true, Sam had discovered a short while later. In exchange for being spared further investigation by the German authorities, Hoffmann had agreed to spy for them on former KGB contacts setting up businesses in Vienna. Sam was crossing his fingers that Kovalenko might have been one of them.

He had little doubt that the ‘Johann' who'd blackmailed his father was none other than Hoffmann himself. A field officer in a foreign land was exactly the sort of job he'd have been doing twenty-seven years ago. And it would have been typically pretentious of him to have used a composer's Christian name for his legend. Also characteristic to have taken such a personal interest in the fate of his victims – the man had an odd compassionate streak.

It was as a direct consequence of the dismantling of the former East German spy network that Sam had met Hoffmann. Stasi documents uncovered by German counter-intelligence in 1991 had revealed the existence of ‘Papagena', a female informer who'd operated inside British Rhine Army headquarters during the last decade of the cold war, her controller being Günther Hoffmann. Sam had been sent to Berlin to sit in on the interrogation of him being conducted by the German Bf V counterintelligence service, but the man had refused to reveal Papagena's name or position, saying that to identify her would wreck her marriage and alienate her children. His concern for her well-being had seemed strangely decent in a man who'd exploited people so ruthlessly for
so many years. Only when Papagena developed a terminal illness in 1995 had Hoffmann agreed to name her.

Sam's sporadic contacts with the old spy had spanned the best part of five years. He'd even grown to like the man, a clever, cunning foe from a nobler era when spying had been fuelled by ideology rather than cash. Sam had pondered whether to telephone him to arrange a meeting, but had decided it wiser to turn up unannounced. The German had a knack of avoiding confrontations when he knew one was coming.

Sam extracted the telephone from his rucksack, intending to ring the airlines about flights to Vienna. When he switched it on, he saw the message icon flashing.

‘Damn!' He kicked himself for not asking Bennett for a replacement SIM card. Julie Jackman or Tom Craigie had probably sold his number to every media outlet in the country by now. There'd be invitations from
Newsnight,
offers from the tabloids. Full of trepidation, he dialled into voicemail.

‘You have two new messages. First message: Mr Foster – Simon – it's probably mad of me to ring . . .'

The wind left his lungs. The voice was Julie Jackman's.

‘I just wanted to say I am terribly sorry about what happened.'

Sam's eyebrows shot up. ‘Sorry?' She soon would be if he had anything to do with it.

‘I just got in a total muddle over my father. And I let myself be bullied by the press. I realise I've put you in a terrible position. I'm really, really sorry. I shouldn't have done what I did.'

Sam listened hard, searching for some give-away in the voice. Something to back his suspicion that there was a press man at her elbow.

‘If you'd only let me see you again, I'd try to explain.'

‘Of course, sweetheart. Any bloody time you like.' The
submissive tone she'd injected into her voice incensed him.

‘But I don't imagine for one moment that you'd agree . . .'

‘Too bloody right.' The woman was out of her tiny mind.

‘But
just
in
case,
you
can
reach
me
through
e-mail.
I'm
avoiding
phones
at
the
moment.
' She rattled off a web address.
‘Well
um
. . .
goodbye.
And
again
please
accept
my
apologies.
'

He erased the message and disconnected the line. The second message could wait. He leaned back against the wall savouring what he would do to the woman if by some chance they met again. The dark side of his nature fancied murder, but the more reasonable part simply wanted to shake some sense into her. To make the silly bitch understand once and for all that he hadn't killed her father.

The phone trilled. He froze, imagining it was her again. He let it ring until the system diverted to voicemail. A couple of minutes later he dialled in.

‘You have two new messages. First message: Hi. I've been thinking of you all day. Give me a ring if you get the chance.'

Sam smiled. Good old Steph. A friend in need.

‘Second message: Ring me will you? I'm in your neighbourhood and we need to meet.'
Duncan Waddell, sounding like he had a ferret up his arse.

Sam rang straight back. His controller was parked round the corner from the Arcadia Hotel.

‘I'll be there in five,' he told him.

‘Make it four. The clock's ticking.'

Sam stood up, collected his thoughts for a moment, then left the room, locking the door behind him.

Waddell had found a parking meter on the main road a couple of hundred yards away. There was ten minutes
on the clock. Sam got into the car, which smelled overpoweringly of Waddell's deodorant.

‘We'll keep this short,' his controller snapped, not looking at him. ‘I can tell you there's been blood spat today. There are even people washing their mouths out after talking about you.'

‘Do me a favour . . .' Sam complained. The car rocked as a bus passed, its brakes squealing as it approached a stop.

‘The point is this, laddie. If it were simply Jackman's word against ours on Bodanga, the FCO would have walked it. But with your guilty-looking mug shot in the paper, the opposition's been given a huge shove up the ladder.'

Sam let his head fall back against the rest. ‘So? What's the verdict?'

‘Still making up their minds.'

‘About?'

‘Whether to stuff your corpse in an incinerator, or to invite you to find a new job on the other side of the world.' Waddell spat out the words, still staring straight ahead.

‘Thanks, Duncan.'

‘I can tell you that my vote was for the former,' the Ulsterman added without a trace of humour.

‘Of course.'

‘Heavens above, man! D'you ever stop to think how much easier your life would be if you followed your instincts instead of your gonads?'

‘For me sex
is
an instinct, Duncan.'

Waddell let out an explosion of air. ‘But one to be kept separate from your professional activities, for Christ's sake! Anyway, this isn't getting us anywhere.'

‘No. Look, perhaps we can hurry up with the execution. I've got a plane to catch.' Sam had already told
Waddell about Hoffmann and Vienna, when they'd spoken on the phone from Glasgow.

‘The truth is there
were
two options,' Waddell went on, calmer now. ‘One plan was for you to make yourself available to the press and proclaim your innocence. The other was for you to keep well out of the way until the media get bored with the story.'