Contents
About the Author
Also by Geoffrey Archer
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Geoffrey Archer’s gripping thrillers are inspired by a deep knowledge of international intrigue gathered during more than 25 years of reporting for ITN’s News at Ten. The Lucifer Network is the second novel featuring M16 agent Sam Packer, who first appeared in Fire Hawk. It follows his other international bestsellers: Java Spider, Scorpion Trail, Eagle Trap, Shadow Hunter and Sky Dancer.
This book is dedicated to the RN Submarine Service
whose pivotal role in great dramas cannot always be
revealed.
The Service celebrated its centenary in 2001.
Since the first edition of this book was published, bio-terrorism has become a frightening reality in the aftermath of September 11th 2001.
While preparing the factual backdrop against which this work of fiction is set, many people were generous with their time in setting me straight. There isn’t space to list them all and some of them spoke to me in confidence, but I would like to thank Dr Wolfgang Preiser of the Department of Virology at Middlesex Hospital, who spent many patient hours explaining to me how viruses can be spread – any errors in this book are very much mine and not his.
Glyn Ford MEP, Searchlight magazine and the EU Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna gave me valuable insights into the extreme right-wing in Europe. Officers from Scotland Yard’s Racial and Violent Crimes Task Force were most helpful too.
The Royal Navy Submarine Service was also extremely generous with its time. I am particularly grateful to Commander Jeff Tall, Curator of the RN Submarine Museum at Gosport and to Lt.-Commander Mike Walliker, First Lieutenant of HMS Turbulent, whose captain and crew looked after me so warmly and so informatively when I was their guest on a submerged passage to the Mediterranean.
Finally I should acknowledge the colourful insight into the murky world of arms smuggling in Africa which was given to me by someone who will remain nameless. Subsequent to our conversations, he was tried for the murder of his lover by poisoning and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Sky Dancer
Shadow Hunter
Eagle Trap
Scorpion Trail
Java Spider
Fire Hawk
The Burma Legacy
Dark Angel
THE ENGLISHMAN SWITCHED off the engine of the hired car. The emptiness of the parking area in front of the game lodge was broken by a handful of four-wheel-drives. Beyond and above the lattice of trees ringing this small country club a few miles outside Kitwe, the African sky was purple with the start of a still night. Cicadas tickled themselves in the trees. Under the bonnet of his rented Toyota something clinked as it cooled.
The last time he’d been in Africa the job had been dirty and it was dirty again. The same muck as before. ‘Clearing up’ London had called it. ‘You were in at the start, old son. Only proper you should be there at the end.’
By rights it was a job for an in-house man, someone under diplomatic cover, but they’d sent him because he was deniable. And because the matter was personal – if the man he’d come to see were to talk and was believed, it would be his head on the block as much as the Service’s, his career at an end.
The car window was open, the night air still warm but with a freshness not there during the day. Sam Packer wanted a drink. Something large and volatile. But he knew to restrain himself this evening. At the table Jackman would order the house red, because that’s what he always drank here. Brain glue, he called the stuff that came in a deceptively plain bottle from the Cape. A year ago Sam’s headache had been memorable. This time he would limit himself to a single glass. There was a deal to be struck. A man to be got the better of. A man who was unprincipled and full of guile.
In his late thirties, Sam Packer had a strong, square face with a chiselled chin whose determination was concealed by a close-trimmed beard. He disliked facial hair but had grown it two years ago out of a need to change his appearance. He had thick, dark hair and eyes that seemed distant, yet recorded all they saw. He was a man women tended to take an interest in.
He watched a Range Rover pull up and four men get out. White men with the look of engineers – here for the copper mines, he guessed. With wives who tinkered with oil paints and did voluntary work at the local school. The group made its way in to the restaurant, bantering gently.
He knew that decades ago whites fell in love with this sultry continent, never wanting to leave it, but his own experience had been recent and the parts of it he’d seen had smelled of death. It was a place where he didn’t want to be, particularly for a mission like this.
Headlamps swept round the car park, as a vehicle turned in from the Kitwe road. Packer slumped in the seat. Was this Jackman already, doing the same as him, coming twenty minutes early to check the place out? He felt crazily jumpy tonight. Too much was hanging on the outcome of this meeting. The halogen beams bounced round the potholed parking area and died close to him. He raised his eye-line above the door sill, enough to see out. It wasn’t Jackman climbing out of the vehicle parked a few feet from his, but a young and beautiful Zambian couple. As they walked with the grace of gazelles towards the lodge, they entwined fondly. He felt a twinge of envy. He pushed open the car door and stood up.
Tall and straight-backed, he wore freshly pressed tan slacks and a blue cotton shirt. He stretched to shake out the stiffness from his shoulders – there’d been little sleep on last night’s flight from London. The air smelled of some alien vegetation. Dust dry. It’d be December before the rains came, according to the hotel porter who’d carried his bags earlier that day. As he closed the car door and locked it, he listened to the rhythm of the tree crickets.
Pools of darkness surrounded the car park. He peered into them one by one, looking for shadows that moved. A year ago Jackman had told him the price for a contract killing in Zambia was fifty pounds. Sam touched the pocket of his trousers to check the wallet was there, then crunched over the gravel to the lodge, running a finger under the sweaty collar of his shirt to free it from his neck. Lights set high in the dark-leafed trees at one side of the building illuminated well-watered lawns and a few hardwood easy chairs and tables. But it was the mosquito hour and the guests were indoors. Instinctively Sam smacked a hand against a cheek, imagining some winged malaria-carrier braving the repellent he’d daubed on earlier.
The lodge was reed-thatched, as were the two small accommodation chalets that stood slightly apart from it. A private venture, Jackman had told him, a more restful haven than the hotels in town for visiting relatives of European mining specialists. And the restaurant served good steaks in reasonable privacy. The lodge was of timber, darkly varnished. On its walls, paintings of elephants, baboons and exotic birds glowed under their picture lights.
‘I’m meeting Harry Jackman here,’ Sam announced to the shirt-sleeved European who greeted him inside.
‘May I ask your name sir?’
‘Foster. Simon Foster.’
Today’s name. And last year’s. The one Jackman had known him by when they’d done the deal that was now causing the firm such pain. Twelve months had passed, almost to the day, a year that had proved, if proof were ever needed, that even the best of intentions could go sour.
‘When he comes I’ll tell him you’re in the bar, sir.’
‘Thank you.’
The restaurant was small, not more than a dozen tables, several set against wide windows overlooking a small lake. Beyond it, the western horizon glimmered deep violet, its colours mirrored in the water. The four men he’d seen emerging from the Range Rover were already seated, studying menus and gulping beers.
The almost empty bar was separated from the dining room by a Chinese lacquered screen and lit by flickering oil lamps. Packer glanced around pretending to be looking for a friend. Two couples sat at tables, white haired and with the even-tanned complexions of the well-heeled. He returned their smiles, then made for a cane armchair in the shadows at the far end. The barman followed him to his seat.
‘Mosi please,’ he asked, remembering the name of the local beer. The African retreated to prepare a tray.
Packer felt intensely uneasy. His tactics were bad. He aimed to wrong-foot the wily old gun-runner, yet their meeting was at a time and place Jackman himself had set. His home ground. There’d been no other way, of course. The Service wanted a solution fast and Jackman held all the cards. Short of silencing him with a bullet, there had to be a negotiation. A gentle probing to see what he wanted. So it had been the phone call from an untraceable number at the headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. ‘We’re upset, Harry. Just don’t get it. Why are you doing this? We need to talk.’ And now this dinner date where, if the man was truly bent on discrediting his own country’s Intelligence Service, he might well have invited the press along to join them.
There was movement beyond the Chinese screen. Sam half covered his face. Instinct. Pure self-preservation. But it was only more dinner guests arriving.
Jackman could well arrive with a snapper, he realised. Some hack who’d flown out – maybe even on the same plane as Sam – to get the proof their story needed. Proof that the British government, through its intelligence arm, had involved itself in a coup in the small independent African state of Bodanga a year ago. A coup which had failed, leaving thousands dead, including the European staff of a refugee camp whose raped and machine-gunned bodies had been shown on a billion TV screens across the globe.
And it was Sam who’d paid Jackman to provide the guns for that coup. Paid him with a briefcase full of British taxpayers’ sweat, handed over twelve months ago. The cash had bought a lot of guns. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of thousands of bullets.
After the débâcle he’d asked himself if it would have felt less dirty had the coup succeeded. A quick clean kill, a tyrant overthrown, victims in the dozens, not thousands. No violation of those sweet girls from Surrey and County Clare. Probably. The politicians would have crowed, assured of a place in history when the cabinet papers came out in thirty years. Consciences clear, instead of being burdened by guilt – and now by panic.
Two more elderly white couples entered the bar, greeting one of those already there. There was air kissing and many gentle embraces.
‘My dears, it’s been an age . . .’ The flat accents of Europeans bred south of the equator.
No Jackman yet. No cameramen, thank God. Just these people. What were they? Tobacco farmers? Traders who killed with cancer instead of lead and never gave it a moment’s thought?
The Service had been baffled by what Jackman was threatening. Why would a man who’d been the only real beneficiary of that deal to arm the coup plotters try to blow the lid off it? Why had he told a prominent British newspaper editor of MI6’s complicity in the botched coup? And why that editor, Frank Hampson, a man whose links to the Intelligence Service had been common knowledge for years, a choice of mouthpiece that had led to the story being quickly blocked. Bad luck on Jackman’s part, or deliberate? Telling a brown-noser because he wanted his intentions known by SIS? But what did he want, this man enriched by decades of illicit dealings?
Packer finished his beer. The chilled amber liquid had been pleasant, though watery. He rejected the barman’s offer of another. He wanted the clearest of heads this evening.
The file on Jackman was thin – a few A4 sheets sketching suspected involvement in international intrigues and criminality, but little hard proof. The sort of bundle a graduate trainee would compile during induction at Vauxhall Cross. For more than twenty years Jackman had worked the rich vein of Africa’s corruption, first gold and precious stones, then tapping the richer lode of arms. The Angolan war had bought him homes in Zambia, South Africa and Spain. Congo and the ANC had helped him accrue property back in England under nominee names. There’d been money laundering and sanctions busting. Wisps of evidence. Not enough to convict, but possibly enough to frighten. It was Sam’s only card, but hardly an ace.
The skin crawled on the back of his neck, telling him he was being watched. He turned his head slowly but couldn’t see from where. A few minutes later the maître d’ appeared in the bar.
‘Mr Jackman asks if you will kindly join him in the restaurant, sir.’
‘Does he? Right.’
Sam stood up without hurrying. He stepped past the Chinese screen, pausing in the entrance lobby to glance through the glass into the car park. A drab green Land Rover stood ostentatiously beneath one of the floodlights, its occupants dressed in army fatigues. Fear rippled through him, but he rebuked himself for it. This was friendly territory he was on, not some madhouse like Iraq.
Harry Jackman didn’t rise from the table as Sam approached, instead he eyed him with an almost playful look. His bald head was red from the African sun. His eyebrows were smudges on a fleshy face, angled upwards into the middle of his brow, giving him the deceptive look of a clown. He wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt with a thin stripe. Small gold spectacles perched firmly on the bridge of his nose.
‘I trust you’ve come alone,’ he murmured as Packer sat, his accent vaguely north of Birmingham.
‘You mean you’re not sure?’
Jackman stifled a smirk. Of course he was sure.
‘You on the other hand have brought some friends along,’ Sam remarked, inclining his head towards the door.
‘You noticed. I’m glad. You were meant to.’
‘You pay them to look after you? Or they do it for love?’
Jackman chuckled. ‘What do you think . . .’ Behind the small, polished lenses his eyes lacked self-confidence. The look of a man used to peering over his shoulder. The armed men in the car park would be regular escorts, Sam surmised.
‘Drink?’ Jackman offered.
‘That’d be nice.’
‘I’ve ordered some Cape Red . . .’
‘Fine.’
‘Brain glue I call it.’
‘I know. And a glass of water please.’
Jackman had only to raise his hand from the table for the waiter to be at his elbow.
‘Some water for my guest, Emanuel.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Sam, glancing up. ‘Mind if we change tables? There’s a terrible draught here.’
The waiter looked to Jackman for guidance. The stony consternation on the gun-runner’s face was enough to harden Sam’s suspicion of a microphone beneath the mahogany.
Jackman chuckled again. ‘Why not,’ he beamed. ‘Anywhere you like. You choose.’
The maitre d’ was summoned to reseat them. When they were alone again, Jackman glowered at him. ‘Happy now?’
‘Stiff neck. From the flight,’ Sam explained.
Jackman settled back like a Buddha, nodding knowingly.
‘Please yourself. They look after me pretty well here.’ He said it with the smugness of a man for whom being served by others was important. ‘I can remember them building this place,’ he added, reminding Sam how long he’d been around in these parts. ‘The bloke whose idea it was had done well from emeralds and wanted to put down roots. He’d gone native for a while, stupid bugger.
Had an African lady-friend he was talking of marrying. Didn’t happen, as it turned out. Went for a Norwegian instead. The wife of one of his first clients when he opened the lodge to tourists. Classic long legs, although the blonde hair was from a bottle. Only discovered that when she dropped her drawers.’ He chortled, his laugh rattling unhealthily in his chest.
‘He still runs it?’
‘No. Sold out five years ago. Moved back to Europe with his Scandi woman. Switzerland, I think.’
The waiter was back with the wine, a jug of water and two menus.
‘Steaks are always good,’ Jackman advised.
Sam chose a T-bone. A CD of Miriam Makeba played in the background. They were a reasonable distance from the next table and wouldn’t be overheard here.
‘Good flight out?’ They were fencing. Waiting to see who would be first to raise the issue they’d come here to discuss.
‘A 747 to Lusaka then a hop up to the Copperbelt on a turbo-prop.’
‘I trust HMG sends its representatives first class.’
‘Limousines at each end and a personal porter.’
‘I mean, I wouldn’t want to think that the man I’m being asked to deal with only merits being stuffed in the back of a jumbo with the families and the blacks.’ He said it with venom, as if such status issues really mattered to him.
Packer’s patience gave way. ‘Fuck the flight, Harry.’ He forced his mouth into a smile for the benefit of anyone watching. ‘What are you up to?’
Jackman drew back.
‘Testing the water.’
‘Meaning?’
‘That I’ve had enough of this continent, Simon. I want to go home. And I want to be sure I’m treated right when I get there.’
‘You’ve a funny way of going about it.’
‘Think so?’ The eyebrows shot up again, the eyes beneath them twinkling. ‘You’re here, aren’t you? The string-pullers have sent their boy.’
Sam bristled. ‘Those string-pullers, Harry, you’ve upset them. Writing outrageous letters to the papers isn’t wise.’
‘One paper.’
‘Whatever. Wasn’t wise at all. You ought to be careful.’
‘Me need to be careful? I think you’ll find the boot’s on the other foot, chum.’
The waiter returned to reset the cutlery for what they’d ordered. He was joined by a waitress with a basket of bread, a slender woman with braided hair, clad in a low-cut African dress. Her skin had the burnished glow of roasted coffee and her teeth dazzled as she smiled. She leaned forward and her breasts quivered with a life of their own. Then she withdrew and a third server came with soup.
When they’d all gone Harry Jackman passed a hand over his shiny dome.
‘Fancied that one, did you?’
‘She was very beautiful.’
‘A lot of them are. And a lot of ex-pats develop a taste, of course.’
‘Not you? How many years have you been here?’
‘Twenty-five, give or take. But no. They’re different, you see, African women. The smell. The shape of their mouths and their arses. To me it’d be like shagging a sheep. Not that I’ve anything against sheep. Or Africans. They’ve got their place in nature’s blueprint and we’ve got ours.’
‘Apartheid.’
‘Exactly. The idea was right. It’s the way the Afrikaners handled it that was wrong.’
‘And because apartheid’s dead you want to go home?’
‘Not that simple. Although you know as well as I do what’s happening here. This is no place any more for a white man wanting an easy life. Blighty, old boy. That’s where my roots are.’
Roots, thought Sam as he spooned tomato soup into his mouth. As twisted as the rest of Jackman’s law-dodging life. The file in London had shown a blank when it came to the man’s parentage. The first note of the young Harry’s existence had been at one week old when found in the doorway of a pub.
‘So let me get this straight, Harry.’ Sam edged his voice with sarcasm. ‘You want to settle back in the UK. And you want to be sure officialdom is nice to you when you get there. So what’s the first thing you do? You offer a story to the papers that’ll blow a hole in the government’s claims to have an ethical foreign policy. You’re off your trolley.’
‘I need to be sure, Simon.’
‘Of what, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Of being allowed to live the rest of my life in peace. I’m pushing fifty. Fifteen years older than you?’ He overestimated by a handful of years. ‘I can afford to retire. To do a bit of this and a bit of that, just for the fun of it. Not for the money. I’ve got enough.’
‘I’m sure you have.’ Thousands of dead Africans had seen to that. ‘But you’re still confusing me, Harry. How does writing a letter to a newspaper claiming the British government was involved in a bungled African coup get you safe passage home?’
Jackman’s eyes became deadly serious.
‘Come on. Don’t play the virgin with me. A warning shot, that’s all it was. I knew damn well that good-ole-boy Hampson wouldn’t go into print about Bodanga without the say-so of C or whatever you call him these days.’
‘Meaning?’
Jackman hissed with exasperation. ‘That I just wanted to show you what I could do if I was so minded.’
‘Oh. Is that what it was about?’ Sam mocked, trying to get Jackman on the back foot. ‘You’ve miscalculated, old son. The people you’re dealing with don’t take kindly to threats.’
‘Don’t be daft. They need my co-operation as much as I need theirs. The world’s a dangerous place. You scratch my back . . .’
Sam gave up on his soup which tasted unpleasantly of the can it came from, and pushed the plate away.
‘So, spell it out to me, Harry. What exactly is it you want?’
‘Immunity from any sort of prosecution.’
Sam lifted his eyebrows.
‘Come on,’ Jackman insisted. ‘It’s a small return for the services I’ve done for my country.’
It was true there’d been other small jobs for SIS before last year’s arms deal. Smuggling people across borders and providing untraceable funds to political groups that the government of the day was embarrassed to be associated with.
‘What sort of prosecutions did you have in mind?’ Sam inquired sceptically.
Jackman’s gaze became a tunnel with no light at its end. He wiped his mouth with a napkin.
‘Can’t imagine,’ he murmured with a contrived mysteriousness. ‘But there’s people out there who’ll dream something up. You boyos have found me useful over the years, but I don’t kid myself you’re my friends.’
‘So. Let me get this right,’ Sam persisted, spreading his fingers across the edge of the table. ‘You want HMG to promise that you’ll never be prosecuted, whatever crimes you’ve committed. Is that it?’
Jackman swallowed. ‘Yes, essentially.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Odd word crime, don’t you think? The definition of it seems to depend on who’s carried it out.’
Sam folded his arms. Time for some home truths. ‘They’ll never buy it, Harry. Not a blanket immunity. You’ll need to be specific. Have to spell it out in black and white.’
The gun-runner’s shoulders sagged as if the wind had been knocked from him. He shook his head. ‘No can do.’
The soup plates were cleared away and the steaks set before them.
‘Best beef in southern Africa . . .’ said Jackman listlessly. The words sounded like a mantra he’d grown rather tired of.
‘You’ll miss it,’ Sam goaded. ‘We’re all getting brain disease from the stuff back home.’
The gun-runner fired a glance towards the door. Sam recognised the look and empathised with it. Fear of enemies closing in.
‘Expecting someone?’
Jackman grimaced. ‘Look. I do want to go home, Simon. Back to England. Don’t make it hard for me.’
‘What makes you think you’ll be safer there?’
‘I’ll blend in easier . . . Surrounded by people my own colour.’
‘You’re out of touch. Times have changed.’
‘Not out in Suffolk they haven’t.’
Sam remembered the file again. An ex-wife and a daughter living in Ipswich.
Jackman’s eyebrows arched in despair. ‘I’ve got to get home, Simon. Too many enemies here. That’s why I’m prepared to play rough to be left in peace.’
Packer watched him begin picking at his food. He was puzzled. There was something fundamentally odd about Jackman’s fear of legal retribution. Before coming out here his controller had told him there was nothing pending. No warrants waiting to be served. No misdemeanours under investigation. So long as he kept his mouth shut the ex-pat could return home and merge with the background as much as he wanted. But Jackman clearly thought otherwise, a paranoia that was perfectly understandable after so many years of bending rules to suit his own pocket. But Packer sensed there was something specific Jackman was concerned about. Some deed in his recent past which he expected to backfire.
If so, his mission was changing. No longer merely a matter of agreeing terms for Jackman’s silence, but a need to discover what the bugger had been up to. Success would require more subtlety than he’d used so far. He decided to sidetrack. To soften up the ground.
‘Why Africa, Harry? What got you started here? Twenty-five years ago, you said.’
Jackman’s eyes melted with self-satisfaction. His mouth puckered, like a bully’s given an unexpected excuse to brag. ‘You really want to know?’ Sam nodded. Jackman took a gulp of wine. ‘Dust. That’s what got me started.’
‘Dust?’
Jackman grinned. ‘I was a chemist by training when I came out. First job was managing a lab at a copper mine. Boring as hell. I had two Kaffirs who did all the real work. Then one day a black came to me who’d been given the job of cleaning the whole place up. Copper production sites get littered with all sorts of junk. This Af had found some drums of powder and didn’t know whether it was safe to dump them. Didn’t know what was in ’em, you see.’ Jackman’s eyes twinkled at the memory of it. ‘So what did I do? I did a little test in the lab after my two assistants had gone home. Found out the powder was condensates from the smelter chimneys. Packed with cobalt and nickel. Worth a fortune to somebody with the hardware for extracting it. So, I told the Af the drums weren’t worth anything but because they contained toxic minerals, they couldn’t be taken for dumping. Then I got in touch with a feller I knew in South Africa . . .’
‘And the rest is history,’ Sam interrupted. ‘A life of crime was under way.’
‘Crime? Come on, my friend! Out here that’s not crime, it’s business.’
‘But a business which has now turned sour, you’re saying.’
Jackman sighed. ‘It’s become harder. A lot harder. Too many people wanting a cut.’
For a while they ate without speaking. The beef was as good as Jackman had promised. Sam noticed an increase in frequency of the glances towards the door.
‘Somebody after you, Harry?’ There’d be plenty of candidates.
Jackman feigned a look of wounded innocence.
‘Who is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
Sam clicked his tongue. ‘Come on, old son. If we’re to get anywhere, you’ve got to be straighter with me than that.’
‘No, I mean it.’ Behind the oval lenses Jackman’s eyes were like gob-stoppers. ‘I really don’t know, Simon.’
‘Explain.’
Jackman hesitated again. ‘Things . . . things have been going on.’
‘Such as?’
‘People dying.’
‘It happens.’
‘Unnaturally, I mean.’
‘Friends of yours?’
‘Yeah.’ Jackman’s expression became pained, as if he were really putting himself out. He glanced down at his hands and began picking at his cuticles with a thumbnail. ‘Look. There is something in particular – you know, that I want immunity from.’ Sam smiled inwardly. Progress. ‘The death I’m talking about was to do with that.’ He looked up again, his eyes wanting sympathy. ‘It’s a deal I wish I’d never got involved with, to be honest. And it’s something you boys really ought to know about.’
‘Perhaps we do already. Tell me.’
‘I’d like to. And I will. But only after I have it in writing that I’m being granted immunity.’ He bunched his fists and rested them on the table.
Packer let out a long sigh. For a moment he’d thought a breakthrough was in sight. ‘You know what you have to do, Harry. In black and white up front, so they know what’s involved.’
The sweaty red brow crinkled with concern. ‘You’re asking me to put my head on the block. I can’t do that.’ He glanced towards the door again then leaned forward. ‘Look . . . That bloke who died was a partner of mine in Jo’burg. Involved in the deal I’m talking about.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Jackman leaned even closer, his voice less than a whisper. ‘They’d sawn his effing head off, Simon.’ The fear in the eyes looked convincing. Jackman thought he was next. ‘For God’s sake let’s settle things with HMG, so I can tell you about it.’
‘If they can be settled . . .’
‘Oh they will be, Simon,’ Jackman bristled, winding back, angry at being played with. ‘You see, there’s other letters ready to be sent. To the media and to people I’m close to. A whole bunch. All sealed up. Envelopes addressed. Left with someone I trust in case something happens to me.’ He thumped a fist on the table. ‘And next time they won’t go to one of your bloody lapdogs.’
They finished their food in silence, heads down like weary bulls. When he’d done, Jackman puffed out his cheeks.
‘You know, I’m beginning to think they’ve sent the wrong man.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I need to talk with someone who’ll take me seriously.’
‘Oh I’m taking you very seriously Harry. Be in no doubt about that. But you haven’t understood what’s possible and what isn’t as far as HMG is concerned.’
Jackman seemed not to hear. He hovered like an angler pondering how much bait to lay down before the fish could be hooked.
‘This deal I’m talking about . . .’ He was whispering again. ‘I’ll tell you this much. It involved the shipment of something pretty nasty. And I think it was heading for the Islamics.’
The mention of the ‘I’ word triggered alarm bells for Sam. It was less than three weeks since the car bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
‘What do you mean think?’
‘Because I don’t know for sure.’
‘What sort of nasty stuff? Weapons? Biological? Nuclear?’
Jackman shook his head. He’d achieved his aim. Didn’t need to say more. The man was like a streetwalker, flashing her interesting bits then hiding them again.
‘You say you want to move back to England,’ Sam growled. ‘Why not Venezuela or Monaco? Someplace where they won’t give a shit what you’ve done in the past.’
‘Personal reasons.’
‘You’re not telling me you want to get back with your wife?’ Sam prodded.
‘Which one? I’ve had three. And no, I’m not planning anything like that. Just take it that I want to return to my own country.’
Sam told himself to cool it. Letting the man rile him wasn’t going to help. ‘Tell me about your ex-wife and daughter. The ones in Ipswich.’
‘Your file’s out of date. It’s Woodbridge. I bought them a place by the river a couple of years back. The estate where they’d been living was going downhill. Anyway, what about them?’
‘You’ve kept in touch?’
‘Stayed friends with all my exes. And Julie – my daughter – she’s just great. You married? Kids?’
‘No.’
‘I was twenty-one when I met Maeve. Shacked up with her because it was the thing to do in 1970.A nurse. Irish, but with the morals of a Dane. Birth pills in her handbag instead of a rosary. But careless with it. She got pregnant. I agreed to marry her, stupid kid that I was. She was wrong for me. Too placid. And, you know, when it came to the business, the sex stuff – it was something she felt she had to do because everyone else was. Not because she got any pleasure out of it. You know the sort.’
Happily for Sam he didn’t.
‘So I left her after a couple of years,’ Jackman continued, ‘and came out here. Went back from time to time. Not very often.’ He paused. ‘Little Julie never knew who I was when she was tiny.’
‘Do they know what you do for a living?’
Jackman squirmed slightly. ‘No. It isn’t always wise being truthful in relationships, don’t you find?’
Sam ignored his question. ‘So you started off selling black market chemicals. How did you get into guns?’
‘Somebody asked me if I could get them some. One of Mandela’s boys.’
‘And . . .?’
‘And I discovered how easy it was. AK47s could be prised from the Zambian army like peas from a pod. This country’s packed with people wanting to earn a dishonest penny.’
‘And it never concerned you what the guns might be used for?’
Jackman raised a cynical eyebrow. ‘Don’t come the naïve kid with me, Simon. I was filling a hole in the market. If it hadn’t been me, it’d have been someone else.’
The old excuse. They all used it.
‘And this other deal. The one you’ll only tell us about if you get immunity – was that filling a hole too?’
Jackman fixed him with a steady eye. He selected a toothpick from the holder in the middle of the table and removed some beef fibres from between two molars.
‘It was supplying somebody with something that was damned hard to get,’ he said enigmatically. ‘Something they wanted very bad.’ Then he leaned forward. ‘I’ll tell you something else. The shipping arrangements were real high security. Never done anything quite like it before. The warehouse I fixed up – it was like Ali Baba, Simon. Like bloody Ali Baba.’
An odd image, thought Sam. ‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that you and I have to do a deal, Simon.’ The eyes were playing with him again. ‘So I can tell you about it.’
Sam felt his patience going. He had a sudden urge to deprive Jackman of sleep and food for a few days.
‘For God’s sake, let’s do a deal, man,’ Jackman pleaded melodramatically. ‘For the sake of the civilised world, if not for you and me.’
Packer narrowed his eyes. What sort of line was he being spun? Fact, fiction – did Jackman even know the difference?
‘Look,’ he snapped. ‘The bottom line is this. You simply cannot expect the British government to give you immunity from prosecution without knowing what crimes you’re talking about. Suppose some African nation were to charge you with genocide. There’s no way HMG would protect you from that.’
Jackman pulled himself up straight. He twisted his head to one side and studied Sam out of the corner of his eye as if seeing whether a different perspective would show him the way forward.
‘Have another drink,’ he suggested unoriginally. ‘Something a little stronger? They’ve got good single malts here.’
Sam would willingly have seen off most of a bottle.
‘No.’
Jackman clasped his hands. ‘Okay. Let’s get back to basics. HMG needs my silence. I need a laissez-passer from HMG. There’s two people who can sort this out. You and me.’
‘I’ve been trying my best, Harry.’
Jackman nodded. For a delirious moment Sam thought he was about to concede something meaningful.
‘We can reach a compromise, you know,’ Jackman assured him. ‘I mean it is why you’ve come here, Simon. To do a deal.’
‘It’s your move, Harry. It really is.’
Jackman pushed the spectacles up his nose and stroked his chin. The cockiness had gone from his eyes, replaced by an expression Sam couldn’t quite define.
‘Well . . . if you won’t have a night-cap here, what about one back at my place,’ Jackman suggested. ‘The house rattles a bit. My last girlfriend left me a couple of months ago. Went back to the Cape.’
Loneliness. That’s what his eyes were showing, Sam realised. Jackman was lonely. Giving up on Africa because Africa had given up on him. He’d found a chink in the man’s armour. Big enough to stick a screwdriver in for now. Soon it’d be a chisel, then a whole DIY workbench.
‘All right. I’ll have a quick one with you,’ Sam conceded.
Jackman called for the bill and paid it. They made small talk about the upcoming Springboks’ tour and England’s chances for the coming season. Then they walked out to the car park. Seeing Jackman appear, the army officer in the Land Rover shook his soldiers awake.
‘You’ll follow me in your car?’ Jackman checked.
‘Be right behind you.’
Sam kept half an eye on Jackman as they each moved to their own vehicle. He heard the Land Rover engine rattle into life, then as he unlocked the door of the Toyota the Zambian officer crossed to Jackman’s Mercedes to talk to him. The two men’s palms touched. Payoff time.
The Mercedes was first onto the road back to Kitwe, followed by the army patrol, a nearly full moon turning the palm trees by the gate into ghostly sentries. Out on the road the three vehicles settled into a steady run towards the outskirts of town. Sam’s spirits had lifted. He felt absurdly confident all of a sudden. A few more hours and Jackman would be eating from the palm of his hand.
Five minutes into the journey, the Land Rover’s brake lights flickered and the vehicle lurched over to the side of the road. Sam overtook, expecting it to fall in behind like a tail gunner, but when he looked in the mirror the lights had been doused. His antennae twitched.
When the tail lights of Jackman’s Mercedes also disappeared he began to feel distinctly uneasy, but then they reappeared as he rounded a bend. He accelerated to close the gap. Suddenly, further ahead, there were other lights in the road. A red lamp being swung. A road block. Army or police. The Merc’s brake lights blazed and Sam also touched the pedal, telling himself there was no need for alarm. Random traffic checks were normal on Zambian roads. Part of the government’s anti-crime programme. The fact that the men involved used them to extort ‘fines’ from guiltless car drivers was just an inconvenient fact of life. He fingered his wallet for a suitable note.
As the two vehicles approached the checkpoint in tandem, Sam braked harder. Suddenly a man in fatigues sprinted forward, shouting at him to stop short of the other car and to switch off his lights. An icy chill came over him – the soldier wore a black cloth hood with holes for eyes and mouth. This was no ordinary road block.
Jackman’s car had stopped twenty yards in front of his. A spotlamp on the roof of an army truck lit up its pale cream paint. Sam’s window was half open. The soldier who’d stopped him rested his rifle barrel on the top of the glass. A strong body odour wafted in, leavened by eucalyptus from the roadside trees.
His unease growing by the second, Sam watched Jackman being dragged from his car, a gun at his chest. The old expat still seemed unconcerned, extracting a wad of banknotes from a hip pocket. Sam told himself they’d be okay. A robbery on a larger scale than usual perhaps, but if they stayed cool and let the men have what they wanted . . .
Then a shot rang out, echoing through the trees like the sound of splitting timber. Jackman buckled and fell.
‘Shit . . .’ Sam grabbed at the door handle to open it, but felt the cold of the gun press against his temple.
A second shot had Sam thinking his own brains had been blasted. But it was Jackman again. Spread-eagled on the tarmac, a vivid red bubbled from his chest. Then the spotlight turned on Sam, blinding him.
His throat tightened. He couldn’t speak or breathe. Any moment now they’d do the same to him. There’d been times before when he’d faced death, and he knew there was no way to manage it. No way to control that cringing feel as you waited for the hit.
Two more shots, each sending shocks through his body, but not touching him. He heard air hiss from a tyre. There was a shout of impatience and the lorry started up. Two engines revving, the truck and the Mercedes. The light shining in his eyes wobbled and went out. Then with a crash of gears the two vehicles accelerated away.
Silence again. And darkness. Just the eucalyptus smell. Overpowering. Like a stench. Sam clicked his headlamps back on, banged open the door and ran forward.
‘Harry . . .’ he breathed, crouching over him. Jackman lay in a thickening pool of blood. No response. The striped cotton had two small holes in the middle of the chest, but Jackman’s life was leaking from the craters in his back.
The ashen face twitched suddenly. ‘Simon . . .’ More of a breath than a voice.
Packer leaned forward.
‘Yes. Help’s coming.’
‘Merc . . .’ Jackman croaked.
‘The car?’ Why worry about a motor at a time like this?
‘No,’ Jackman hissed, suddenly finding the strength to pull Sam closer. ‘Mercury. Red mercury . . .’ Sam felt a chill shoot through him. ‘S’what I didn’t tell you. That deal . . .’
‘The stuff you shipped to the Islamics was red mercury?’
‘Julie . . .’ The hand that had been hooked into Sam’s shirt fell away. ‘Ask Julie ’bout it. She knows . . .’
Then the breath left him. Quite suddenly. Like a tap being turned. Sam felt for a pulse in the neck, but there was nothing. Not a flicker.
‘God . . .’
Try mouth to mouth? Get the life back into him? Then blood oozed from the lips and it sank in that Harry Jackman was utterly dead.
Stunned, Sam sat back on his haunches.
Red mercury. The one-time holy grail for terrorists bent on making nuclear bombs. Except the bloody stuff didn’t exist.
‘Harry . . .’ He patted the man’s face. Pointless. Harry Jackman would be going home, but in a box.
Red mercury. Fucking nonsense.
‘Damn you, Harry.’ A night of riddles from the man, right up to the end.
He looked up, shooting glances up and down the road. Engines approaching from each direction. A car from the Kitwe road stopped first. As its headlamps picked out the bloodied corpse, a woman screamed at her husband to drive on. Then the vehicle from out of town pulled up behind Sam’s car. From the engine rattle he knew it was the Land Rover – Jackman’s ‘protection’ that had conveniently given up on them half a mile back.
Before he could turn his head, Sam felt hard metal press into the bone behind his ear.
‘Mistah Foster! You under ahrrest!’
THE METALLIC BLUE car that emerged from the underground garage of SIS headquarters was driven by a dark-haired woman in her late thirties called Denise Corby. She wore a slate-grey jacket and skirt. Beside her sat a fair-haired man, who was her immediate superior. As the security gates slid shut behind the Vectra, it turned right and blended with the traffic heading north over Vauxhall Bridge. The morning was dull, the sky overcast.
‘I spoke to Julie Jackman last night,’ the woman announced in a mellow, matter-of-fact voice that was almost low enough to be a man’s. ‘She can see us at noon.’
‘Good.’ Her boss, Duncan Waddell, spoke with a Belfast accent. A small figure, he sat rigidly upright to maximise his height. ‘You know, when the FCO consular department rang the ex-wife on Wednesday, she expressed no surprise whatsoever at the manner of Jackman’s demise. Says something, don’t you think?’
‘Says she didn’t care any more. I should hope not. It was twenty-six years ago that he dumped her and the child.’ Denise Corby was a big-boned woman who’d probably looked middle-aged since childhood.
‘Where exactly does the daughter work?’ Waddell queried.
‘In the virology department of the St Michael’s Hospital Group. It’s one of the top labs in the country, so I’m told.’
‘How did she sound?’
‘Oh, shaken up still. Naturally. And anxious about why we wanted to talk to her.’
‘What reason did you give?’
‘Bland as hell. Told her there were a couple of legal ends to tie up.’
‘If she’s anything like her father, you’ll need to watch her. Devious to a fault, that man was. The world’s a better place without him.’
Waddell’s close-cropped hair gave him an austere, unforgiving appearance. He wore a light grey suit and his manner suggested an acute awareness of his own importance. He rested his elbow on the open window and glanced to his right where a shaft of sunlight had caught the roof of the Tate Gallery just visible beyond the bridge parapet. There was a Jackson Pollock exhibition on. Not his cup of tea.
‘What d’you know about Sam Packer?’ he asked.
‘Not a lot.’ Denise Corby pursed her lips. ‘Except . . . didn’t he have a spot of trouble with Ukrainian mobsters a couple of years back?’
‘He did. He’s still on a hit list.’
‘And wasn’t it linked to a certain piece of in-house scandal that we don’t talk about?’
‘It certainly was. An adulterous relationship with another field officer. She also worked eastern Europe.’
Suddenly Denise Corby stamped on the brakes. An elderly woman in green and brown had drifted onto a zebra crossing. ‘Sorry. Didn’t see her.’
‘Won’t live long if she makes a habit of that,’ Waddell commented, bracing himself against the dashboard.
‘She sort of blended into the background.’
‘Probably works for us,’ Waddell quipped.
Corby let a smile flicker as they waited for the ancient pedestrian to get safely across.
‘A long-running affair, was it?’ she asked.
‘Sam’s? Yes. Went on for years. The husband hadn’t a clue until the very end.’
‘And he was one of ours too, I seem to remember.’
‘Indeed. The whole thing was highly incestuous. And I have to say the quality of the deception applied by all the parties involved did great credit to their tradecraft.’
Corby smiled politely. ‘Pity about the quality of the judgement.’
‘Aye. That’s the bit we don’t like to think about. Anyway, apart from that little hiccup, Sam’s been a good field man for us, which is all you need to know. Ex naval intelligence, he did fine work in Eastern Europe in the early nineties, then switched to the Middle East beat three years ago. His cover job was in trade fairs.’
‘So how come he was working in Africa?’
‘Well, his legend got well and truly blown in Baghdad. Then, when the Odessa mafiya wrote a contract on him, we had to lose him somewhere.’
‘And where better than the dark continent.’
‘Precisely.’
Denise Corby drove expertly, heading up through Chelsea until they hit the Cromwell Road. The morning rush hour was over, but traffic flowed thickly in both directions.
‘You’ll have to direct me when we get closer,’ she warned. ‘Hounslow is not a part of the metropolis I make a point of frequenting.’
A couple of miles later Waddell told her to turn left off the A4. ‘Flightpath-blighted housing and dreary industrial estates,’ he growled distastefully. ‘But there’s a nice little firm here that provides Sam with cover. The characters who run it are ex-SAS sergeants. Dave and Ron – Davron International Trading they call themselves.’
‘How sweet. Tell me, how did you prise Sam from the clutches of the Zambian police?’
‘Loud diplomatic noises and a few well-placed bank-notes. The High Commission in Lusaka has a slush fund that saves an awful lot of paperwork.’
‘And the investigation into the shooting?’
‘Not getting very far.’ He made it sound both to be expected and perfectly satisfactory. ‘They’ve failed to identify the army unit that carried out the killing, and judging by their past record on such robberies they never will.’
Ten minutes later the car turned into a trading estate full of buildings trimmed with brightly coloured corrugated plastic.
‘Block C6. Bottom of the row, then left,’ Waddell directed.
The unit they stopped outside had three Audis in the car park, all with personalised plates.
Sam Packer had arrived at the Davron International offices ten minutes earlier, dressed in the light grey suit, pale blue shirt and striped tie that he’d travelled in on the night flight from Lusaka. He’d dumped his bag in a corner of the dusty, little-used, first-floor office that was his operating base and logged onto the Internet to check the main newspaper archives both in London and southern Africa for reports on Jackman’s murder. Specifically he wanted to see if connections had been made with red mercury. There were none. Before leaving Lusaka the station officer at the High Commission had shown him short articles in the local Post and Times. Both papers had dismissed the murder as robbery with violence – the police line – but Sam was certain they were wrong. Jackman had been targeted. Targeted for the simplest reason of all. Someone had wanted him dead.
Compared with the torture chamber he’d experienced in Baghdad two years earlier, the police cell he’d been confined to in Kitwe had been luxurious. In Iraq, he’d thought his end had come. This time he’d felt certain of release within hours. After recovering from the shock of seeing a man die in front of him he’d picked his way back through their conversation, searching for clues to his killer.
He was well aware that the world would, generally speaking, be quite content with Harry Jackman’s passing. From what he could gather, Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service was over the moon. But for him the murder had been a disappointment as well as a shock. He’d begun to believe that he could silence the man through negotiation. Believed too that in the process he would glean valuable intelligence about Islamic terrorism.
Sam had not met Denise Corby before. Her appointment to Counter-Proliferation was recent. When she walked into his first floor office, towering above their diminutive boss, the skin-stripping stare of her dark brown eyes warned him that she was a career-hungry perfectionist, intolerant of human weakness, a woman it would be unwise to cross. He was big on first impressions.
‘Welcome back, Sam.’ Waddell made the introductions and they shook hands. ‘You okay?’ he asked.