The Man Between: The gripping new spy thriller you need to read in 2018
The Man Between: The gripping new spy thriller you need to read in 2018
Charles Cumming
‘Recommended. I read it one breathless sitting’ Ian RankinHe risked it all to become a spy. Now he must pay the price.A gripping new standalone spy thriller from the winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller of the Year and ‘the master of the modern spy thriller’ (Mail on Sunday).One simple task for British Intelligence takes him into a world of danger.Successful novelist Kit Carradine has grown restless. So when British Intelligence invites him to enter the secret world of espionage, he willingly takes a leap into the unknown.But the glamour of being a spy is soon tainted by fear and betrayal, as Carradine finds himself in Morocco on the trail of Lara Bartok – a mysterious fugitive with links to international terrorism.Bartok is a leading figure in Resurrection, a violent revolutionary movement whose brutal attacks on prominent right-wing politicians have spread hatred and violence throughout the West.As the coils of a ruthless plot tighten around him, Carradine finds himself drawn to Lara. Caught between competing intelligence services who want her dead, he soon faces an awful choice: to abandon Lara to her fate or to risk everything trying to save her.‘An instant classic of the genre’ Mick Herron‘The Man Between is up there with the best – full of thrills, wit and fine writing’ Peter Robinson
Copyright (#uea6a51c1-37b5-5a99-bd0e-480ac96f8ada)
HarperCollinsPublishers
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Charles Cumming 2018
Cover jacket design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photographs © Tim Robinson/Arcangel Images
Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Source ISBN: 9780008200312
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2018 ISBN: 9780008200336
Version: 2018-09-21
Dedication (#uea6a51c1-37b5-5a99-bd0e-480ac96f8ada)
For Luke Janklow and Will Francis
Epigraph (#uea6a51c1-37b5-5a99-bd0e-480ac96f8ada)
‘There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.’
Graham Greene, The Comedians
Contents
Cover (#u287faa0e-9661-548e-a7a7-36b4d0af8342)
Title Page (#u3def449d-e082-5e83-81b5-a8840fed8aa0)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Moscow
London: Eighteen Months Later
Chapter 1 (#u7c920aea-e397-5139-a328-0d2ac0775d36)
Chapter 2 (#uf9d2493c-dee6-5315-8eeb-77d76eac3d34)
Chapter 3 (#ufa7889c5-53d8-5739-978d-7ed82ce4029a)
Chapter 4 (#ufdead4f0-2081-5a75-9eef-d586d5512bbe)
Chapter 5 (#uf414cd8f-ac92-5abe-a543-9bc458e7956a)
Chapter 6 (#u8c02c906-bd09-5390-b648-ddfafb2f992f)
Chapter 7 (#u368fbe45-3aa8-5ba7-838e-e4a86d65a99c)
Chapter 8 (#ued6899c7-02db-5e92-802d-d7bda4fc7ebb)
Chapter 9 (#u0ba07aa4-1a9f-54fa-8faa-cce857988337)
Chapter 10 (#ud31bf5f9-4ae7-558a-9378-7375be6f05d9)
Chapter 11 (#ubbf23007-b041-56b9-86cf-cf60d16378a1)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
By Charles Cumming
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
‘Would you prefer to talk or to write everything down?’
‘Talk,’ she said.
Somerville crossed the room and activated the voice recorder. The American had brought it from the Embassy. There was a small microphone attached to a stand, a glass of tap water and a plate of biscuits on the table.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
‘Ready.’
Somerville leaned over the microphone. His voice was clear, his language concise.
‘Statement by LASZLO. Chapel Street, SW1. August nineteenth. Officer presiding: L4. Begins now.’ He checked his watch. ‘Seventeen hundred hours.’
Lara Bartok adjusted the collar of her shirt. She caught Somerville’s eye. He nodded at her, indicating that she should start. She brought the microphone slightly closer to her and took a sip of water. The American realised that he was standing in her eyeline. He moved to a chair on the far side of the room. Bartok did not continue until he was still and completely silent.
‘In the beginning, there were seven,’ she said.
SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE EYES ONLY / STRAP 1
STATEMENT BY LARA BARTOK (‘LASZLO’)
CASE OFFICERS: J.W.S./S.T.H. – CHAPEL STREET
REF: RESURRECTION/SIMAKOV/CARRADINE
FILE: RE2768X
PART 1 of 5
‘In the beginning there were seven. Ivan [Simakov], of course, who is still rightly regarded as the intellectual and moral architect of Resurrection;
and
, both American citizens whom Simakov had met in Zuccotti Park at the height of Occupy Wall Street.
, formerly of the Service;
, the cyber expert who had been active in Anonymous for several years and was instrumental in planning and orchestrating many of Resurrection’s most effective operations in the United States. Ivan had a way of contacting such people on the dark web, of gaining their trust over time, of drawing them out into the open. I used to say that he was like a child on a beach, pouring salt onto the sand so that the creatures of the deep would rise to the surface. He enjoyed this image very much. It is no secret that Ivan Simakov liked to think of himself as a man with extraordinary capabilities.
Also present that day were Thomas Frattura, former assistant to Republican Senator Catherine McKendrick, who had been a prominent figure in Disrupt J20; and me, Lara Bartok, originally from Gyula, in eastern Hungary, about whom you know almost everything.
These seven individuals met only once, in a suite at the Redbury Hotel on East 29th Street in Manhattan. Of course, no cellphones, laptops or Wi-Fi enabled devices of any kind were permitted to be brought to the hotel. Each of the guests who entered the suite was searched by Ivan and myself and asked to remove watches and other items of jewellery, all of which we then took – along with personal belongings including bags and shoes – to a room on a separate floor of the hotel for the duration of the meeting. Ivan, who was meeting
and
for the first time, introduced himself as a Russian citizen, born in Moscow and educated in Paris, who was hoping to effect political change in his own country by inspiring ‘an international resistance movement directed against the advocates and enablers of autocratic and quasi-fascist regimes around the world’.
Frattura asked him to explain in more detail what he meant by this. I remember that Ivan paused. He always had a good sense of theatre. He crossed the suite and opened the curtains. It was a wet morning, there had been heavy rain all night. Through the glass it looked as though the thick fog of the New York skyline was going to seep into the room. What he said next was the best of him. In fact his response to Frattura would form the basis of all the early statements released on behalf of Resurrection outlining our movement’s basic goals and rationale.
‘Those who know that they have done wrong,’ he said. ‘Those who have lied in order to achieve their political goals. Those who consciously spread fear and hate. Those who knowingly benefit from greed and corruption. Any person who has helped to bring about the current political crisis in the United States by spreading propaganda and misinformation. Those who aid and abet the criminal regime in Moscow. Those who lied and manipulated in order to see England (sic) break from the European Union. Those who support and actively benefit from the collapse of secular Islamic states; who crush dissent and free speech and willingly erode basic human rights. Any person seeking to spread the virus of male white supremacy or deliberately to stoke anti-Semitism or to suppress women’s rights in any form. All of these people – we will begin in the United States and countries such as Russia, the Netherlands, Turkey and the United Kingdom – are legitimate targets for acts of retribution. Bankers. Journalists. Businessmen. Bloggers. Lobbyists. Politicians. Broadcasters. They are to be chosen by us – by you – on a case-by-case basis and their crimes exposed to the widest possible audience.’
The beauty of Ivan’s idea was that it was individually targeted. This is what made it different to Antifa, to Black Lives Matter, to Occupy, to all those other groups who were only ever interested in public protest, in rioting, in civil disorder for its own sake. Those groups changed nothing in terms of people’s behaviour but instead gave various parties a chance merely to pose, to demonstrate their own virtue. There is a great difference between people of action and people of words, no? One thing you can say about Ivan Simakov, without a shadow of doubt, is that he was a man of action.
At no point did anybody suggest that the targets for Resurrection were too broadly defined. We were all what you would call in English ‘fellow travellers’. We were all – with the exception of Mr Frattura – in our twenties or early thirties. We were angry. Very angry. We wanted to do something. We wanted to fight back. We had grown up with the illegal wars in Iraq and Syria. We had lived through the financial crisis and seen not one man nor woman imprisoned for their crimes. All of us had been touched by the manifest corruption and greed of the first two decades of the new century. We felt powerless. We felt that the world as we knew it was being taken away from us. We lived and breathed this conviction and yearned to do something about it. Ivan was a brilliant man, possessed of fanatical zeal, as well as what I always recognised as considerable vanity. But nobody could ever accuse him of lacking passion and the yearning for change.
A policy of non-violence was immediately and enthusiastically endorsed by the group. At that stage nobody thought of themselves as the sort of people who would be involved in assassinations, in bombings, in terrorist behaviour of any kind. Everybody knew that deaths – accidental or otherwise – of innocent civilians would quickly strip the movement of popular support and allow the very people who were being targeted for retribution to accuse Resurrection of ‘fascism’, of murder, of association with nihilistic, left-wing paramilitary groups. This, of course, is exactly what happened.
Ivan spoke about his ideas for evading capture, eluding law enforcement and intelligence services, men such as yourselves. ‘This is the only meeting of its kind between us that will ever take place,’ he said. There were silent nods of understanding. People already respected him. They had experienced at first-hand the force of his personality. Once you had met Ivan Simakov, you never forgot him. ‘We will never again communicate or speak face-to-face. Nothing may come from what we discuss today. I have a plan for our first attacks, all of which may be prevented from taking place or fail to have the desired effect on international opinion. I cannot tell you about these plans, just as I would not expect you to divulge details of your own operations as you create them. The Resurrection movement could burn out. The Resurrection movement could have a seismic effect on public attitudes to the liars and enablers of the alt-Right. Who knows? Personally, I am not interested in fame. I have no interest in notoriety or my place in the history books. I have no wish to spend the rest of my life under surveillance or in prison, to live as the guest of a foreign embassy in London, or to save my own skin by making a deal with the devils in Moscow. I wish to be invisible, as you should all wish to be invisible.’
So much has happened since then. I have been through many lives and many cities because of my relationship with Ivan Simakov. At that moment I was proud to be at his side. He was in the prime of life. I was honoured to be his girlfriend and to be associated with Resurrection. Now, of course, the movement has moved deeper and deeper into violence, further and further away from the goals and ideals expressed on that first day in New York.
They were so different, but when I think of Ivan, I cannot help thinking of Kit. On the boat he told me that I was like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, the faithless woman at the side of a revolutionary zealot. Kit was romantic like that, always living at the edge of what was real, as if life was a book he had written, a movie he had seen, and all of us were characters in the story. He was kinder than Ivan, in many ways also braver. I confess to you that I miss him in a way that I did not expect to. I wish you would tell me what happened to him. In his company, I felt safe. It had been a very long time since any man had made me feel that way.
MOSCOW (#uea6a51c1-37b5-5a99-bd0e-480ac96f8ada)
The apartment was on a quiet street in the Tverskoy district of Moscow, about two kilometres from the Kremlin, a five-minute walk from Lubyanka Square. From the third floor, Curtis could hear the ripple of snow tyres on the wet winter streets. He told Simakov that for the first few days in the city he had thought that all the cars had punctures.
‘Sounds like they’re driving on bubble wrap,’ he said. ‘I keep wanting to tell them to put air in their tyres.’
‘But you don’t speak Russian,’ Simakov replied.
‘No,’ said Curtis. ‘I guess I don’t.’
He was twenty-nine years old, born and raised in San Diego, the only son of a software salesman who had died when Curtis was fourteen. His mother had been working as a nurse at Scripps Mercy for the past fifteen years. He had graduated from Cal Tech, taken a job at Google, quit at twenty-seven with more than four hundred thousand dollars in the bank thanks to a smart investment in a start-up. Simakov had used Curtis in the Euclidis kidnapping. Moscow was to be his second job.
If he was honest, the plan sounded vague. With Euclidis, every detail had been worked out in advance. Where the target was staying, what time his cab was booked to take him over to Berkeley, how to shut off the CCTV outside the hotel, where to switch the cars. The Moscow job was different. Maybe it was because Curtis didn’t know the city; maybe it was because he didn’t speak Russian. He felt out of the loop. Ivan was always leaving the apartment and going off to meet people; he said there were other Resurrection activists taking care of the details. All Curtis had been told was that Ambassador Jeffers always sat in the same spot at Café Pushkin, at the same time, on the same night of the week. Curtis was to position himself a few tables away, with the woman from St Petersburg role-playing his girlfriend, keep an eye on Jeffers and make an assessment of the security around him. Simakov would be in the van outside, watching the phones, waiting for Curtis to give the signal that Jeffers was leaving. Two other Resurrection volunteers would be working the sidewalk in the event that anybody tried to step in and help. One of them would have the Glock, the other a Ruger.
‘What if there’s more security than we’re expecting?’ he asked. ‘What if they have plain clothes in the restaurant I don’t know about?’
Curtis did not want to seem distrustful or unsure, but he knew Ivan well enough to speak up when he had doubts.
‘What are you so worried about?’ Simakov replied. He was slim and athletic with shoulder-length black hair tied back in a ponytail. ‘Things go wrong, you walk away. All you have to do is eat your borscht, talk to the girl, let me know what time Ambassador Fuck pays his cheque.’
‘I know. I just don’t like all the uncertainty.’
‘What uncertainty?’ Simakov took one of the Rugers off the table and packed it into the bag. Curtis couldn’t tell if he was angry or just trying to concentrate on the thousand plans and ideas running through his mind. It was always hard to judge Simakov’s mood. He was so controlled, so sharp, lacking in any kind of hesitation or self-doubt. ‘I told you, Zack. This is my city. These are my people. Besides, it’s my ass on the line if things go wrong. Whatever happens, you two lovebirds can stay inside, drink some vodka, try the stroganoff. The Pushkin is famous for it.’
Curtis knew that there was nothing more to be said about Jeffers. He tried to change the subject by talking about the weather in Moscow, how as a Californian he couldn’t get used to going from hot to cold to hot all the time when he was out in the city. He didn’t want Ivan thinking he didn’t have the stomach for the fight.
‘What’s that?’
‘I said it’s weird the way a lot of the old buildings have three sets of doors.’ Curtis kept talking as he followed Simakov into the kitchen. ‘What’s that about? To keep out the cold?’
‘Trap the heat,’ Simakov replied. He was carrying the Glock.
Curtis couldn’t think of anything else to say. He was in awe of Simakov. He didn’t know how to challenge him or to tell him how proud he was to be serving alongside him in the front ranks of Resurrection. Ivan gave off an aura of otherworldly calm and expertise which was almost impossible to penetrate. Curtis knew that he had styled himself as a mere foot soldier, one of tens of thousands of people around the world with the desire to confront bigotry and injustice. But to Curtis, Simakov was the Leader. There was nothing conventional or routine about him. He was extraordinary.
‘I just want to say that I’m glad you got me out here,’ he said.
‘That’s OK, Zack. You were the right man for the job.’
Simakov opened one of the cupboards in the kitchen. He was looking for something.
‘I need some oil, clean this thing,’ he said, indicating the gun.
‘I could go out and get you some,’ Curtis suggested.
‘Don’t you worry about it.’ He slapped him on the back, tugging him forwards, like a bear hug from a big brother. ‘Anyway, haven’t you forgotten? You don’t speak Russian.’
The bomb detonated six minutes later, at twenty-three minutes past four in the afternoon. The explosion, which also took the life of a young mother and her baby daughter in a corner apartment on the fourth floor of the building, was initially believed to have been caused by a faulty gas cylinder. When it was discovered that Zack Curtis and Ivan Simakov had been killed in the incident, a division of Alpha Group, Russia’s counter-terrorism task force, was dispatched to the scene. Russian television reported that Simakov had been killed by an improvised explosive device which detonated accidentally only hours before a planned Resurrection strike against the American ambassador to the Russian Federation, Walter P. Jeffers, former chairman of the Jeffers Company and a prominent donor to the Republican party.
News of Simakov’s death spread quickly. Some believed that the founder of Resurrection had died while in the process of building a home-made bomb; others were convinced that Russian intelligence had been watching Simakov and that he had been assassinated on the orders of the Kremlin. To deter Resurrection opponents and sympathisers alike, Simakov’s remains were interred in an unmarked grave in Kuntsevo Cemetery on the outskirts of Moscow. Curtis was buried two weeks later in San Diego. More than three thousand Resurrection supporters lined the route taken by the funeral cortège.
LONDON (#uea6a51c1-37b5-5a99-bd0e-480ac96f8ada)
1 (#ulink_3b5ec1c7-ef82-529e-a6f5-7e4ba03cce4f)
Like a lot of things that later become very complicated, the situation began very simply.
A few days short of his thirty-sixth birthday, Christopher ‘Kit’ Carradine – known professionally as C.K. Carradine – was walking along Bayswater Road en route to a cinema in Notting Hill, smoking a cigarette and thinking about nothing much in particular, when he was stopped by a tall, bearded man wearing a dark blue suit and carrying a worn leather briefcase.
‘Excuse me?’ he said. ‘Are you C.K. Carradine?’
Carradine had been writing thrillers professionally for almost five years. In that time he had published three novels and been recognised by members of the public precisely twice: the first time while buying a pot of Marmite in a branch of Tesco Metro in Marylebone; the second while queuing for a drink after a gig at the Brixton Academy.
‘I am,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry to stop you,’ said the man. He was at least fifteen years older than Carradine with thinning hair and slightly beady eyes which had the effect of making him seem strung out and flustered. ‘I’m a huge fan. I absolutely love your books.’
‘That’s really great to hear.’ Carradine had become a writer almost by accident. Being recognised on the street was surely one of the perks of the job, but he was so surprised by the compliment that he couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Your research, your characters, your descriptions. All first class.’
‘Thank you.’
‘The tradecraft. The technology. Rings absolutely true.’
‘I really appreciate you saying that.’
‘I should know. I work in that world.’ Carradine was suddenly in a different conversation altogether. His father had worked for British Intelligence in the 1960s. Though he had told Carradine very little about his life as a spy, his career had fired his son’s interest in the secret world. ‘You must have too, judging by your inside knowledge. You seem to understand espionage extraordinarily well.’
The opportunist in Carradine, the writer hungry for contacts and inspiration, took a half-step forward.
‘No. I roamed around in my twenties. Met a few spies along the way, but never got the tap on the shoulder.’
The bearded man stared with his beady eyes. ‘I see. Well, that surprises me.’ He had a polished English accent, un-ashamedly upper-class. ‘So you haven’t always been a writer?’
‘No.’
Given that he was such a fan, Carradine was intrigued that the man hadn’t known this. His biography was all over the books: Born in Bristol, C.K. Carradine was educated at the University of Manchester. After working as a teacher in Istanbul, he joined the BBC as a graduate trainee. His first novel, Equal and Opposite, became an international bestseller. C.K. Carradine lives in London. Perhaps people didn’t bother reading the jacket blurbs.
‘And do you live around here?’
‘I do.’ Four years earlier, he had sold the film rights to his first novel to a Hollywood studio. The film had been made, the film had bombed, but the money he had earned had allowed him to get a mortgage on a small flat in Lancaster Gate. Carradine didn’t anticipate being able to pay off the mortgage until sometime around his eighty-fifth birthday, but at least it was home. ‘And you?’ he said. ‘Are you private sector? HMG?’
The bearded man stepped to one side as a pedestrian walked past. A brief moment of eye contact suggested that he was not in a position to answer Carradine’s question with any degree of candour. Instead he said: ‘I’m working in London at present’ and allowed the noise from a passing bus to take the enquiry away down the street.
‘Robert,’ he said, raising his voice slightly as a second bus applied air brakes on the opposite side of the road. ‘You go by “Kit” in the real world, is that correct?’
‘That’s right,’ Carradine replied, shaking his hand.
‘Tell you what. Take my card.’
Somewhat unexpectedly, the man lifted up his briefcase, balanced it precariously on a raised knee, rolled his thumb over the three-digit combination locks and opened it. As he reached inside, lowering his head and searching for a card, Carradine caught sight of a pair of swimming goggles. By force of habit he took notes with his eyes: flecks of grey hair in the beard; bitten fingernails; the suit jacket slightly frayed at the neck. It was hard to get a sense of Robert’s personality; he was like a foreigner’s idea of an eccentric Englishman.
‘Here you are,’ he said, withdrawing his hand with the flourish of an amateur magician. The card, like the man, was slightly creased and worn, but the authenticity of the die-stamped government logo unmistakable:
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE
ROBERT MANTIS
OPERATIONAL CONTROL CENTRE SPECIALIST
A mobile phone number and email address were printed in the bottom left-hand corner. Carradine knew better than to ask how an ‘Operational Control Centre Specialist’ passed his time; it was obviously a cover job. As, surely, was the surname: ‘Mantis’ sounded like a pseudonym.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’d offer you one of my own but I’m afraid writers don’t carry business cards.’
‘They should,’ said Mantis quickly, slamming the briefcase shut. Carradine caught a sudden glimpse of impatience in his character.
‘You’re right,’ he said. He made a private vow to go to Ryman’s and have five hundred cards printed up. ‘So how did you come across my books?’
The question appeared to catch Mantis off guard.
‘Oh, those.’ He set the briefcase down on the pavement. ‘I can’t remember. My wife, possibly? She may have recommended you. Are you married?’
‘No.’ Carradine had lived with two women in his life – one a little older, one a little younger – but the relationships hadn’t worked out. He wondered why Mantis was enquiring about his personal life but added ‘I haven’t met the right person yet’ because it seemed necessary to elaborate on his answer.
‘Oh, you will,’ said Mantis wistfully. ‘You will.’
They had reached a natural break in the conversation. Carradine looked along the street in the direction of Notting Hill Gate, trying to suggest with his body language that he was running late for an important meeting. Mantis, sensing this, picked up the briefcase.
‘Well, it was very nice to meet the famous author,’ he gushed. ‘I really am a huge fan.’ Something in the way he said this caused Carradine suddenly to doubt that Mantis was telling the truth. ‘Do stay in touch,’ he added. ‘You have my details.’
Carradine touched the pocket where he had placed the business card. ‘Why don’t I phone you?’ he suggested. ‘That way you’ll have my number.’
Mantis snuffed the idea out as quickly and as efficiently as he had snapped shut his briefcase.
‘Perhaps not,’ he said. ‘Do you use WhatsApp?’
‘I do.’
Of course. End-to-end encryption. No prying eyes at the Service establishing a link between an active intelligence officer and a spy novelist hungry for ideas.
‘Then let’s do it that way.’ A family of jabbering Spanish tourists bustled past pulling a huge number of wheeled suitcases. ‘I’d love to carry on our conversation. Perhaps we can have a pint one of these days?’
‘I’d like that,’ Carradine replied.
Mantis was already several feet away when he turned around.
‘You must tell me how you do it,’ he called out.
‘Do what?’
‘Make it all up. Out of thin air. You must tell me the secret.’
Writers have a lot of time on their hands. Time to brood. Time to ponder. Time to waste. In the years since he had given up his job at the BBC, Carradine had become a master of procrastination. Faced with a blank page at nine o’clock in the morning, he could find half a dozen ways of deferring the moment at which he had to start work. A quick game of FIFA on the Xbox; a run in the park; a couple of sets of darts on Sky Sports 3. These were the standard – and, as far as Carradine was concerned, entirely legitimate – tactics he employed in order to avoid his desk. There wasn’t an Emmy award-winning box set or classic movie on Netflix that he hadn’t watched when he should have been trying to reach his target of a thousand words per day.
‘It’s a miracle you get any work done,’ his father had said when Carradine unwisely confessed to the techniques he had mastered for circumventing deadlines. ‘Are you bored or something? Sounds as though you’re going out of your tree.’
He wasn’t bored, exactly. He had tried to explain to his father that the feeling was more akin to restlessness, to curiosity, a sense that he had unfinished business with the world.
‘I’m stalled,’ he said. ‘I’ve been very lucky with the books so far, but it turns out being a writer is a strange business. We’re outliers. Solitude is forced on us. If I was a book, I’d be stuck at the halfway stage.’
‘It’s perfectly normal,’ his father had replied. ‘You’re still young. There are bits of you that have not yet been written. What you need is an adventure, something to get you out of the office.’
He was right. Although Carradine managed to work quickly and effectively when he put his mind to it, he had come to realise that each day of his professional life was almost exactly the same as the last. He was often nostalgic for Istanbul and the slightly chaotic life of his twenties, for the possibility that something surprising could happen at any given moment. He missed his old colleagues at the BBC: the camaraderie, the feuds, the gossip. Although writing had been good to him, he had not expected it to become his full-time career at such a comparatively early stage in his life. In his twenties Carradine had worked in a vast, monolithic corporation with thousands of employees, frequently travelling overseas to make programmes and documentaries. In his thirties, he had lived and worked mostly alone, existing for the most part within a five-hundred-metre radius of his flat in Lancaster Gate. He had yet fully to adjust to the change or to accept that the rest of his professional life would likely be spent in the company of a keyboard, a mouse and a Dell Inspiron 3000. To the outside world, the life of a writer was romantic and liberating; to Carradine it sometimes resembled a gilded cage.
All of which made the encounter with Mantis that much more intriguing. Their conversation had been a welcome distraction from the established rhythms and responsibilities of his day-to-day life. At frequent moments over the next twenty-four hours, Carradine found himself thinking about their chat on Bayswater Road. Had it been pre-arranged? Did the ‘Foreign and Commonwealth Office’ – surely a euphemism for the Service – know that C.K. Carradine lived and worked in the area? Had Mantis been sent to feel him out about something? Had the plot of one of his books come too close to a real-world operation? Or was he acting in a private capacity, looking for a writer who might tell a sensitive story using the screen of fiction? An aficionado of conspiracy thrillers, Carradine didn’t want to believe that their meeting had been merely a chance encounter. He wondered why Mantis had declared himself an avid fan of his books without being able to say where or how he had come across them. And surely he was aware of his father’s career in the Service?
He wanted to know the truth about the man from the FCO. To that end he took out Mantis’s business card, tapped the number into his phone and sent a message on WhatsApp.
Very good to meet you. Glad you’ve enjoyed the books. This is my number. Let’s have that pint.
Carradine saw that Mantis had come online. The message he had sent quickly acquired two blue ticks. Mantis was ‘typing’.
Likewise, delighted to run into you. Lunch Wednesday?
Carradine replied immediately.
Sounds good. My neck of the woods or yours?
Two blue ticks.
Mine.
2 (#ulink_4589853e-341f-5e5c-b4cc-ae15dc5ecc5d)
‘Mine’ turned out to be a small, one-bedroom flat in Marylebone. Carradine had expected to be invited to lunch at Wheelers or White’s; that was how he had written similar scenes in his books. Spook meeting spook at the Traveller’s Club, talking sotto voce about ‘the threat from Russia’ over Chablis and fishcakes. Instead Mantis sent him an address on Lisson Grove. He was very precise about the timing and character of the meeting.
Please don’t be late. It goes without saying that this is a private matter, not for wider circulation.
Carradine was about halfway through writing his latest book, still four months from deadline, so on the day of the meeting he took the morning off. He went for a dawn run in Hyde Park, had a shower back at his flat and ate breakfast at the Italian Gardens Café. He was excited by the prospect of seeing Mantis for the second time and wondered what the meeting would hold. The possibility of some sort of involvement with the Service? A scoop that he could fictionalise in a book? Perhaps the whole thing would turn out to be a waste of time. By ten o’clock Carradine was walking east along Sussex Gardens, planning to catch a train from Edgware Road to Angel. With a couple of hours to spare before he was due to meet Mantis, he wanted to rummage around in his favourite record store on Essex Road looking for a rare vinyl for a friend’s birthday.
He was halfway to the station when it began to rain. Carradine had no umbrella and quickened his pace towards Edgware Road. What happened in the next few minutes was an anomaly, a moment that might, in different circumstances, have been designed by Mantis as a test of Carradine’s temperament under pressure. Certainly, in the context of what followed over the next two weeks, it was a chance encounter so extraordinary that Carradine came to wonder whether it had been staged solely for his benefit. Had he written such a scene in one of his novels, it would have been dismissed as a freak coincidence.
He had reached the south-west corner of the busy intersection between Sussex Gardens and Edgware Road. He was waiting to cross at the lights. A teenage girl beside him was nattering away to a friend about boyfriend trouble. ‘So I says to him, I’m like, no way is that happening, yeah? I’m like, he needs to get his shit together because I’m like just not going through with that bullshit again.’ A stooped old man standing to Carradine’s left was holding an umbrella in his right hand. Water was dripping from the umbrella onto the shoulders of Carradine’s jacket; he could feel droplets of rain on the back of his neck. In the next instant he became aware of shouting on the opposite corner of the street, about twenty metres from where he was standing. A well-built man wearing a motorcycle helmet was raining punches through the passenger door of a black BMW. The driver – a blonde woman in her forties – was being dragged from the vehicle by a second man wearing an identical helmet and torn blue jeans. The woman was screaming and swearing. Carradine thought that he recognised her as a public figure but could not put a name to the face. Her assailant, who was at least six feet tall, was dragging her by the hair shouting, ‘Move, you fucking bitch’, and wielding what looked like a hammer.
Carradine had the sense of a moment suspended in time. There seemed to be at least twenty people standing within a few feet of the car. None of them moved. The rest of the traffic at the intersection had come to a standstill. A large white Transit van was parked in front of the BMW. The first man opened a side panel in the van and helped his accomplice to drag the woman inside. Carradine was aware of somebody shouting ‘Stop them! Somebody fucking stop them!’ and of the teenage girl beside him muttering ‘Fucking hell, what the fuck is this, this is bad’ as the door of the van slammed shut. The middle-aged man who had been seated on the driver’s side of the BMW now stumbled out of the car, his hair matted with blood, his face bruised and bleeding, hands raised in the air, imploring his attackers to release the woman. Instead, the man in the torn jeans walked back towards him and swung a single, merciless punch that knocked him out cold. Somebody screamed as he slumped to the ground.
Carradine stepped off the pavement. He had been taking boxing lessons for the past eighteen months: he was tall and fit and wanted to help. He was not sure precisely what he intended to do but recognised that he had to act. Then, as he moved forwards, he saw a pedestrian, standing much closer to the van, approach one of the two assailants. Carradine heard him cry: ‘Stop! Enough!’
‘Hey!’ Carradine added his own voice to the confrontation. ‘Let her go!’
Things then happened very quickly. Carradine felt a hand on his arm, holding him back. He turned to see the girl looking at him, shaking her head, imploring him not to get involved. Carradine would have ignored her had it not been for what came next. A third man suddenly emerged from the Transit van. He was wearing a black balaclava and carrying what looked like a short metal pole. He was much larger than the others, slower in his movements, but went towards the pedestrian and swung the pole first into his knees and then across his shoulders. The pedestrian screamed out in pain and fell onto the street.
At that moment Carradine’s courage deserted him. The man in the balaclava entered the van via the side door and slammed it shut. His two helmeted accomplices also climbed inside and drove quickly away. By the time Carradine could hear a police siren in the distance, the van was already out of sight, accelerating north along Edgware Road.
There was a momentary silence. Several onlookers moved towards the middle-aged man who had been knocked out. He was soon surrounded by the very people who, moments earlier, might have defended him against attack and prevented the abduction of his companion. Through the mêlée, Carradine could see a woman kneeling on the damp street, raising the victim’s head onto a balled-up jacket. For every bystander who was talking on their phone – presumably having called the police – there was another filming the scene, most of them as emotionally detached as a group of tourists photographing a sunset. With the traffic still not moving, Carradine walked across the intersection and tried to reach the BMW. His route was blocked. Car horns were sounding in the distance as a police vehicle appeared at the eastern end of Sussex Gardens. Two uniformed officers jogged towards the fallen men. Carradine realised that he could do nothing other than gawp and stare; it was pointless to hang around, just another passer-by rubbernecking the incident. He was beginning to feel the first quiet thuds of shame that he had failed to act when he heard the word ‘Resurrection’ muttered in the crowd. A woman standing next to him said: ‘Did you see who it was? That journalist from the Express, wasn’t it? Whatserface?’ and Carradine found that he could provide the answer.
‘Lisa Redmond.’
‘That’s right. Poor cow.’
Carradine walked away. It was clear that activists associated with Resurrection had staged the kidnapping. Redmond was a hate figure for the Left, frequently identified as a potential target for the group. So many right-wing journalists and broadcasters had been attacked around the world that it was a miracle she had not been confronted before. Carradine felt wretched that he had not done more. He had witnessed street brawls in the past but never the nerveless brutality displayed by the men who had taken Redmond. He was not due to meet Mantis for another hour and a half. He thought about cancelling the meeting and going home. Carradine told himself that it would have been rash to try to take on three armed men on his own, but wished that he had acted more decisively; his instinct for survival had been stronger than his desire to help.
He wandered down Edgware Road in a daze, eventually going into a café and checking the BBC for a report on what had happened. Sure enough it was confirmed that the ‘right-wing columnist’ Lisa Redmond had been kidnapped by activists associated with Resurrection and her husband beaten up in the act of trying to protect her. Carradine opened Twitter. ‘Fucking bitch had it coming’ was the first of several tweets he saw in defence of the attack, most of which carried the now-familiar hashtags #Resurrection #Alt-RightScum #RememberSimakov #ZackCurtisLives and #FuckOtis. The latter was a reference to the first – and most notorious – Resurrection kidnapping, in San Francisco, of Otis Euclidis, a senior editor at Breitbart News who had been seized from outside his hotel shortly before he had been due to make a speech at Berkeley University. The kidnapping of Redmond was merely the latest in a spate of copycat attacks that had taken place in Atlanta, Sydney, Budapest and beyond. Many of the victims had been held for several weeks and then killed. Some of the recovered bodies had been mutilated. Others, including Euclidis, had never been found.
3 (#ulink_83f28352-899b-5393-841a-1360e1735bb0)
Carradine’s apprehensiveness in the build-up to the meeting with Mantis had been completely erased by what had happened on Sussex Gardens. Arriving at the address on Lisson Grove, he felt numb and dazed. Mantis buzzed him inside without speaking on the intercom. Carradine walked up six flights of stairs to the third floor, slightly out of breath and sweating from the climb. The landing carpet was stained. There was a faux Dutch oil painting on the wall.
‘Kit. Good to see you. Do come in.’ Mantis was standing back from the door, as though wary of being spotted by neighbours. ‘Thank you so much for coming.’
Carradine was led into a sparsely furnished sitting room. He laid his jacket on the back of a brand-new cream leather sofa wrapped in clear plastic. Sunlight was streaming through the windows. The sight of the plastic made him feel constricted and hot.
‘Are you moving in?’ he asked. The flat smelled of old milk and toilet cleaner. There was no indication that Mantis had prepared any food.
‘It’s not my place,’ he replied, closing a connecting door into the hall.
‘Ah.’
So what was it? A safe house? If so, why had Mantis arranged to meet on Service territory? Carradine had assumed they were just going to have a friendly lunch. He looked around. Two mobile phones were charging on the floor by the window. There was a vase of plastic flowers on a table in the centre of the room. Two self-assembly stools were positioned in front of a breakfast bar linking the sitting room to a small kitchen. Carradine could see a jar of instant coffee, a box of teabags and a kettle near the sink. The kitchen was otherwise spotlessly clean.
‘Did you hear about Lisa Redmond?’ Mantis asked.
Carradine hesitated.
‘No,’ he said, feigning surprise. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Grabbed by Resurrection.’ Mantis opened a double-glazed window on to a small parking area at the rear of the building. Cool air poured into the room. ‘Thrown in the back of a Transit van and driven off – in broad bloody daylight.’
‘Christ,’ said Carradine.
He was not a natural liar. In fact, he could not remember the last time he had deliberately concealed the truth in such a way. It occurred to him that it was a bad idea to do so in front of a man who was professionally trained in the darker arts of obfuscation and deceit. Mantis gestured outside in the direction of Edgware Road.
‘A mile away,’ he said. ‘Less! Three men kicked the living shit out of her poor husband, who’s apparently some kind of hotshot TV producer. One of them had a pop at a have-a-go-hero who tried to save the day. It’s all over the news.’
‘What do you think will happen to her?’ Carradine asked, though he knew the answer to his own question.
‘Curtains,’ said Mantis. ‘Another Aldo Moro job.’
Moro, the Italian Prime Minister kidnapped by the Red Brigades in 1978, had been murdered in captivity, his body discovered in the back of a Renault two months later. Carradine wondered why Mantis had made such an obscure historical connection but conceded his point with a nod.
‘I’m surprised she didn’t have any security,’ he said. ‘People kept saying she was a target. In America, employees in the White House, staff at Fox News, prominent Republican officials, they’ve all been carrying guns for months.’
‘Quite right too,’ said Mantis with an impatience that reminded Carradine of the way his temper had flared on Bayswater Road. ‘People have a right to defend themselves. You never know who’s going to come out of the woodwork and take a pop at you.’
Carradine looked at the sofa. Mantis understood that he wanted to sit down and invited him to do so ‘on the plastic cover’. He asked Carradine to switch off his mobile phone. He was not particularly surprised by the request and did as he had been asked.
‘Now if you wouldn’t mind passing it to me.’
Carradine handed over the phone. He was delighted to see Mantis place it inside a cocktail shaker that he had removed from one of the cupboards in the kitchen. He had used an identical piece of tradecraft in his most recent novel, stealing the idea from an article about Edward Snowden.
‘A Faraday cage,’ he said, smiling.
‘If you say so.’ Mantis opened the door of the fridge and put the cocktail shaker inside it. The fridge was completely empty. ‘And if you could just sign this.’ He crossed the room and passed Carradine a pen and a piece of paper. ‘We insist on the Official Secrets Act.’
Carradine’s heart skipped. Without pausing to read the document in any detail, he rested the piece of paper on the table and signed his name at the bottom. It occurred to him that his father must have done exactly the same thing some fifty years earlier.
‘Thank you. You might want to take a look at this.’
Mantis was holding what appeared to be a driving licence. Carradine took it and turned it over. Mantis’s photograph and personal details, as well as a Foreign Office logo and a sample of his signature, were laminated against a pale grey background.
‘This wouldn’t be enough to get you into Vauxhall Cross,’ he said. It was necessary to demonstrate to Mantis that he did not fully trust him. ‘Do you have any other forms of ID?’
As though he had been expecting Carradine’s question, Mantis dipped into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a moulded plastic security pass.
‘Access all areas,’ he said. Carradine had wanted to inspect the pass, if only to experience the buzz of holding a genuine piece of Service kit, but Mantis immediately put it back in his pocket.
‘Always worried about losing it on the number nineteen bus,’ he said.
‘I’m not surprised,’ Carradine replied.
He asked for a glass of water. Mantis produced a chipped William and Kate mug and turned on the cold tap in the kitchen. It spluttered and coughed, spraying water onto his hand. He swore quietly under his breath – ‘fucking thing’ – filled the mug and passed it to Carradine.
‘Who owns this place?’
‘One of ours,’ he replied.
Carradine had met spies before but never in these circumstances and never in such a furtive atmosphere. He leaned back against the thick plastic cover and took a sip from the mug. The water was lukewarm and tasted of battery fluid. He did not want to swallow it but did so. Mantis sat in the only other available seat, a white wooden chair positioned in front of the window.
‘Did you tell anybody that you were coming here today?’ he asked. ‘A girlfriend?’
‘I’m single,’ Carradine replied. He was surprised that Mantis had already forgotten this.
‘Oh, that’s right. You said.’ He crossed his legs. ‘What about your father?’
Carradine wondered how much Mantis knew about William Carradine. A rising star in the Service, forced out by Kim Philby, who had given his name – as well as the identities of dozens of other members of staff – to Moscow. Surely somebody at Vauxhall Cross had told him?
‘He doesn’t know.’
‘And your mother?’ Mantis quickly checked himself. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Of course …’
Carradine’s mother had died of breast cancer when he was a teenager. His father had never remarried. He had recently suffered a stroke that had left him paralysed on one side of his body. Carradine made a point of visiting him regularly at his flat in Swiss Cottage. He was his only surviving blood family and they were very close.
‘I haven’t told anybody,’ he said.
‘Good. So nobody has been made aware of our chat in the street?’
‘Nobody.’
Carradine looked more closely at his interlocutor. He was wearing pale blue chinos and a white Ralph Lauren polo shirt. Carradine was reminded of a line judge at Wimbledon. Mantis’s hair had been cut and his beard trimmed; as a consequence, he no longer looked quite so tired and dishevelled. Nevertheless, there was something second-rate about him. He could not help but give the impression of being very slightly out of his depth. Carradine suspected that he was not the sort of officer handed ‘hot’ postings in Amman or Baghdad. No, Robert Mantis was surely lower down the food chain, tied to a desk in London, obliged to take orders from Service upstarts half his age.
‘Let me get straight to the point.’ The man from the FCO made deliberate and sustained eye contact. ‘My colleagues and I have been talking about you. For some time.’
‘I had a feeling our meeting the other day wasn’t an accident.’
‘It wasn’t.’
Carradine looked around the room. The flat was exactly the sort of place in which a man might be quietly bumped off. No record of the meeting ever happening. CCTV footage from the lobby conveniently erased. Hair samples hoovered up and fingerprints wiped away by a Service support team. The body then placed inside a thick plastic sheet – perhaps the one covering the sofa – and taken outside to the car park. Should he say this in an effort to break the ice? Probably not. Carradine sensed that Mantis wouldn’t find it funny.
‘Don’t look so worried.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You look concerned.’
‘I’m fine.’ Carradine was surprised that Mantis had failed to read his mood. ‘In fact, it did seem a bit odd to me that a serving intelligence officer would talk so openly about working for the Service.’
‘Good.’
‘What do you mean “good”?’
‘I mean that you obviously have sound instincts.’ Carradine felt the plastic rippling beneath him. It was like sitting on a waterbed. ‘You obviously have an aptitude for this sort of thing. It’s what we wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Go on.’
‘You have a Facebook page.’
‘I do.’
‘The other day you were asking for tips about Marrakech. Advertising a talk you’re doing at a literary festival in Morocco.’
Despite the fact that C.K. Carradine’s Facebook page was publicly available, he experienced the numbing realisation that the Service had most probably strip-mined every conversation, email and text message he had sent in the previous six months. He was grateful that he hadn’t run the name ‘Robert Mantis’ through Google.
‘That’s right,’ he said.
‘Get much of a response?’
‘Uh, some restaurant tips. A lot of people recommended the Majorelle Gardens. Why?’
‘How long are you going for?’
‘About three days. I’m doing a panel discussion with another author. We’re being put up in a riad.’
‘Would you be prepared to spend slightly longer in Morocco if we asked?’
It took Carradine a moment to absorb what Mantis had said. Other writers – Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Frederick Forsyth – had worked as support agents for the Service at various points in their careers. Was he being offered the chance to do what his father had done?
‘There’s no reason why I can’t stay there a bit longer,’ he said, trying to make his expression appear as relaxed as possible while his heart began to pound like a jungle drum. ‘Why?’
Mantis laid it out.
‘You may have noticed that we’re somewhat stretched at the moment. Cyber attacks. Islamist terror. Resurrection. The list goes on …’
‘Sure.’ Carradine felt his throat go dry. He wanted to take a sip of water but was worried that Mantis would see his hand shaking.
‘Increasingly, things fall through the gaps. Agents don’t have the support they need. Messages struggle to get through. Information can’t travel in the way that we want it to travel.’
Carradine was nodding. He knew that it was better at this stage to listen rather than to ask questions. At the same time he could feel his vanity jumping up and down with excitement; the flattery implicit in Mantis’s offer, coupled with the chance to honour his father’s career, perhaps even to surpass his achievements, was hitting a sweet spot inside him that he hadn’t known existed.
‘We had a station in Rabat. It was wound up. Folded in with the Americans. Manpower issues, budgetary restrictions. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that all of this is strictly between you and me.’
‘Of course.’
‘I have a desk responsibility for the region. I need to be able to put somebody in front of one or two of our agents out there, just to reassure them that they’re a priority for London. Even though that may not be entirely the case.’
Mantis flashed Carradine a knowing look. Carradine was obliged to return it in kind, nodding as though he was on intimate terms with the complexities of agent-running.
‘I’m afraid it would require you to go to Casablanca as well as Marrakech. Ever been?’
Carradine had heard that modern Casablanca was far removed from the romantic image of the city conjured by Hollywood: a crowded, choking industrial conurbation entirely devoid of charm and interest.
‘Never. But I’ve always wanted to check it out.’
He set the mug of water to one side. In the distance Carradine could hear the sound of sirens, the familiar background soundtrack to life in twenty-first-century London. He wondered if Redmond had already been found and could scarcely believe that within hours of witnessing her kidnapping, he was being offered a chance to work as a support agent for the Service. It was as though Mantis was handing him an opportunity to prove the courage that had so recently been found wanting.
‘Can you be more precise about what exactly you need me to do?’
Mantis seemed pleased that Carradine had asked the question.
‘Writers on research trips provide perfect cover for clandestine work,’ he explained. ‘The inquisitive novelist always has a watertight excuse for poking his nose around. Any unusual or suspicious activity can be justified as part of the artistic process. You know the sort of thing. Atmosphere, authenticity, detail.’
‘I know the sort of thing,’ said Carradine.
‘All you have to do is pack a couple of your paperbacks, make sure your website and Wikipedia page are up to date. In the highly unlikely event that you encounter somebody who doubts your bona fides, just point them to the Internet and hand over a signed copy of Equal and Opposite. Easy.’
‘Sounds like you’ve got it all worked out.’
‘We do!’ Mantis beamed with his beady eyes. Carradine must have looked concerned because he added: ‘Don’t be alarmed. Your responsibilities will be comparatively minimal and require very little exertion on your part.’
‘I’m not alarmed.’
‘There’s no need – indeed no time – for detailed preparation or training. You’ll simply be required to make your way to Casablanca on Monday with various items which will be provided to you by the Service.’
‘What sort of items?’
‘Oh, just some money. Three thousand euros to be paid to a locally based agent. Also a book, most likely a novel or biography of some sort, to be passed on as a cipher.’
‘Who to?’
‘Yassine. A contact of mine from Rabat. Feeling slightly neglected, needs to have his tummy tickled but I’m too busy to fly down. We usually meet up in a restaurant, Blaine’s, which is popular with businessmen and – well – young women of low social responsibility.’ Mantis grinned at the euphemism. ‘Yassine will recognise you, greet you with the phrase, “I remember you from the wedding in London.” You reply: “The wedding was in Scotland.” And your meeting can proceed.’
Carradine was surprised that Mantis was moving at such a pace.
‘You really do have everything worked out,’ he said.
‘I can assure you this is all very normal and straightforward, as long as you can remember what to do.’
‘I can remember …’
‘As for the money, you are to leave that at the reception desk of a five-star hotel under the name “Abdullah Aziz”. A very important contact. He is owed money.’
‘Abdullah Aziz,’ Carradine was trying to remember his answer to Yassine’s question about the wedding. He wondered why Mantis was flooding him with so much information so quickly and wished that he was free to write things down.
‘Sounds easy enough,’ he said. ‘Which five-star hotel?’
‘I’ll let you know in due course.’
Carradine was seated with his palms face down on the sofa’s plastic cover. He became aware that they were soaked in sweat.
‘And what about Marrakech? What am I doing there?’
Mantis was suddenly at a loss for words. Having rushed through Carradine’s responsibilities in Casablanca, he became hesitant to the point of anxiety. Twice he appeared to be on the brink of replying to Carradine’s question only to stop himself, biting the nail on the index finger of his left hand. Eventually he stood up and looked out onto the car park.
‘Marrakech,’ he revealed at last. ‘Well, that’s where things will become slightly more … nuanced.’ The man from the FCO turned and looked into the room, slowly rubbing his hands together as he moved towards the sofa. ‘It’s why we’ve picked you, Kit. We’re going to need you to use your initiative.’
4 (#ulink_17b46b96-c8e2-5fe3-9dc2-bfdf04113d1d)
Mantis explained that there was a woman.
A ‘remarkable young woman, cunning and unpredictable’. She didn’t have a name – at least one that was still ‘operationally useful or relevant’ – and hadn’t been seen for ‘the best part of two years’. She was on the books at the Service but they hadn’t heard ‘hide nor hair of her for far too long’. Mantis explained that he was worried. He knew that she was in trouble and that she needed help. The Service was ‘90 per cent certain’ that the woman was living in north-west Africa under an assumed name and ‘100 per cent certain’ that she wanted to come back to the UK. She had been sighted in Marrakech in the winter and again in the Atlas Mountains only three weeks earlier. ‘Other officers and support agents’ had been looking for her in a variety of locations – Mexico, Cuba, Argentina – but all the evidence pointed to Morocco. All Carradine had to do was keep an eye out for her. The woman knew the country well and it had been easy for her to ‘disappear’ in a place with such a large number of western tourists.
‘That’s it?’ Carradine asked. The job sounded farcical.
‘That’s it,’ Mantis replied.
‘You want me just to wander around Marrakech on the off-chance I run into her?’
‘No, no.’ An apologetic smile. ‘She’s a big reader. Fan of books and literature. There’s a strong possibility that she might show her face at your festival. We just want you to keep your eyes peeled.’
Carradine struggled to think of something constructive to say.
‘If she’s in trouble, why doesn’t she come in? What’s to stop her making contact with you? Why doesn’t she go to her nearest embassy?’
‘I’m afraid it’s a good deal more complicated than that.’
Carradine sensed that he was being lied to. The Service was asking him to look for a woman who was doing everything she could to avoid being found.
‘Is she Spanish?’ he asked.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Mexico. Argentina. Cuba. They’re all Spanish-speaking countries. Tangier is a one-hour flight from Madrid, a short hop on the boat from Tarifa.’
Mantis smiled. ‘I can see that you’re going to be good at this.’
Carradine ignored the compliment.
‘What does she look like?’ he asked.
‘I have a number of photographs that I can show you, but I’m afraid you’ll have to commit them to memory. I can give you a small passport-sized photograph to keep in your wallet as an aide-memoire, but you won’t be able to keep anything digital on your phone or laptop. We can’t risk these images falling into the wrong hands. If your phone was lost or stolen, for example, or you were asked to account for how you knew the woman …’
The task was sounding increasingly strange.
‘Who would be asking those kinds of questions?’
Mantis indicated with an airy wave of the hand that Carradine should not be concerned.
‘If you carry on behaving exactly as you have always behaved whenever you’ve been on a research trip to a foreign city, it’s very unlikely that you would ever be arrested, far less asked anything by anybody about the nature of your work for us. We take every precaution to ensure that our agents – by that I mean you, Kit – have no discernible relationship with British intelligence. Nevertheless, it goes without saying that you must never, under any circumstances, reveal anything under questioning about the arrangement we have made here today.’
‘Of course. Without saying.’
‘You and I will continue to communicate with one another en clair on WhatsApp using the number I provided to you. I will be your only point of contact with the Service. You will never come to Vauxhall, you will rarely meet any of my colleagues. As far as Morocco is concerned, you won’t tell anybody about our arrangement or – heaven forbid – start showing off about it on the phone or by email. Did you put my name into a search engine at all?’
Carradine assumed that Mantis already knew the answer to his own question, but replied truthfully.
‘No. I assumed it would be flagged up.’
‘You were right.’ He looked relieved. ‘By the same token, you mustn’t Google the names of anybody you come into contact with as a result of your work for us, nor carry with you anything that might be at all incriminating. We don’t do exploding pens and invisible ink. Does that sound like something you might be able to manage?’
Carradine felt that he had no choice other than to say: ‘Sure, no problem.’ He was perfectly capable of keeping a secret. He understood the mechanics of deceit. He was keen to do a patriotic job for his country, not least because his own professional life was so low on excitement. The only thing that concerned him was the possibility of being arrested and thrown into a Moroccan jail. But to say that to Mantis, to indicate that he was worried about saving his own skin, might have seemed spineless.
‘Mind if I use the loo?’ he asked.
‘Be my guest.’
Carradine crossed the hall and went into the bathroom. There were no towels on the rail or mats on the floor, no toothbrush or razor in the plastic mug on the basin. A stained shower curtain hung loose over the bath on white plastic hooks, many of which were bent out of shape. He locked the door and ran the tap, staring at his reflection in the mirror. It occurred to him that he was still recovering from the shock of the Redmond kidnapping and had not been thinking clearly about what Mantis was asking him to do. The job certainly promised intrigue and drama. It was a chance to perform a useful service for his country. Carradine would learn from the experience and obtain priceless first-hand research for his books. There was every possibility that he might be asked to work for the Service for a considerable period of time. In short, the situation was profoundly seductive to him.
‘Everything OK?’ Mantis asked as he came back into the living room.
‘Everything’s great.’
‘Come and have a look at these.’
He was holding an iPad. Carradine sat next to him on the sofa and looked at the screen. Mantis began flicking through a series of photographs, presumably of the woman Carradine would be asked to look for in Marrakech.
It was strange. In the same way that he had recognised Lisa Redmond as she was dragged from the car, without at first being able to put a name to her face, Carradine was sure that he had seen pictures of the woman before. She wasn’t a journalist or celebrity. She wasn’t a likely target for Resurrection. But she was some kind of public figure. Perhaps an actress he had seen on stage in London or somebody associated with a news story or political scandal. He could not work it out. It might equally have been the case that Carradine had met her at a party or that the woman had some connection to the film or publishing worlds. She was certainly not a stranger to him.
‘You look as though you recognise her.’
Carradine decided against telling Mantis that he had seen the woman’s face before. His explanation would have sounded confused.
‘No. I’m just trying to take a photograph with my eyes. Commit her face to memory.’
‘It’s a beautiful face.’
Carradine was taken aback by the wistfulness of the remark. ‘It is,’ he said as they shuttled back through the album. The woman had long, dark hair, light brown eyes and slightly crooked teeth. He assumed that most of the photographs had been culled from social media; they had a casual, snapped quality and appeared to cover a period of several years. In two of the pictures the woman was seated at a table in a restaurant, surrounded by people of her own age; in another, she was wearing a powder-blue bikini on a sunny beach, her arm encircling the waist of a handsome, bearded man holding a surfboard. Carradine assumed that he was a boyfriend, past or present.
‘He looks Spanish,’ he said, pointing at the man. ‘Was this taken in Spain?’
‘Portugal. Atlantic coast.’ Mantis reached across Carradine and quickly flicked the photo stream to the next image. ‘You were right. She has a Spanish mother. Speaks the language fluently.’
‘And her father? Where was he from?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’
There was a fixed, unapologetic look on Mantis’s face.
‘And you can’t tell me her name either?’
‘I’m afraid not. It’s better that you know nothing about her, Kit. If you were to start asking the wrong questions, if you were tempted to Google her, for example, it’s not easy to say what might happen to you.’
‘That sounds like a threat.’
‘It wasn’t meant to.’
Mantis directed Carradine’s attention back to the screen. He had a good memory for faces and was confident that he would be able to recognise the woman if he came across her in Morocco.
‘How tall is she?’ he asked.
‘Couple of inches shorter than you.’
‘Hairstyle?’
‘She might have changed it. Might have dyed it. Might have shaved it all off. Anything is possible.’
‘Accent?’
‘Think Ingrid Bergman speaking English.’
Carradine smiled. He could hear the voice in his head.
‘Any other, uh …’ He reached for the euphemism. ‘Distinguishing characteristics?’
Mantis stood up, taking the iPad with him.
‘Of course! I almost forgot.’ He extended his left arm so that it was almost touching Carradine’s forehead. ‘The woman has a tattoo,’ he said, tapping the wrist. ‘Three tiny black swallows just about here.’
Carradine stared at the frayed cuffs of Mantis’s shirt. Veins bulged on his forearm beneath a scattering of black hairs.
‘If it’s a tattoo,’ he said, ‘and she’s trying not to get recognised, don’t you think she might have had it removed?’
Mantis moved his hand onto Carradine’s shoulder. Carradine hoped that he wouldn’t leave it there for long.
‘You don’t miss a trick, do you?’ he said. ‘We’ve obviously picked the right man, Kit. You’re a natural.’
5 (#ulink_c70687e7-fe18-5ef8-8146-a3be6178d2b0)
Mantis said nothing more about the tattoo. Carradine was told that if he spotted the woman, he was to approach her discreetly, ensure that their conversation was neither overheard nor overseen, and then to explain that he had been sent by British intelligence. He was also to pass her a sealed package. This would be delivered by the Service before he left for Morocco.
‘I’m assuming I can’t open this package when I receive it?’
‘That is correct.’
‘Can I ask what will be inside it?’
‘A passport, a credit card and a message to the agent. That is all.’
‘That’s all? Nothing else?’
‘Nothing else.’
‘So why seal it?’
‘I’m not sure I understand your question.’
Carradine was trying to tread the fine line between protecting himself against risk and not appearing to be apprehensive.
‘It’s just that if my bags are searched and they find the package, if they ask me to open it, how do I explain why I’m carrying somebody else’s passport?’
‘Simple,’ Mantis replied. ‘You say that it’s for a friend who left it in London. The same friend whose photo you’re carrying in your wallet.’
‘So how did she get to Morocco without a passport?’
Mantis took a deep breath, as if to suggest that Carradine was starting to ask too many questions. ‘She has two. One Spanish, the other British. OK?’
‘What’s my friend’s name?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I need to know her name. If it’s on the passport, if I’m carrying her picture around, they’ll expect me to know who she is.’
‘Ah.’ Mantis seemed pleased that Carradine had thought of this. ‘The surname on the passport is “Rodriguez”. Christian name “Maria”. Easy enough to remember.’
‘And mundane enough not to draw attention to itself.’
‘It does have that added dimension, yes.’
They remained at the Lisson Grove flat for another half-hour, going over further practical details of Carradine’s trip, including protocols for contacting Vauxhall Cross in the event of an emergency. Mantis insisted that they meet at the flat when Carradine returned from Marrakech, at which point he would be debriefed and given payment, in cash, for any expenses he had run up in Morocco.
‘Feel free to stay somewhere decent in Casablanca,’ he said. ‘We’ll cover your costs, the extra flight as well. Just keep accurate receipts for the bean counters. They’re notoriously stingy when it comes to shelling out for taxis and train tickets.’
As Carradine was leaving, Mantis handed him two envelopes, each containing €1,500. There was no limit to the amount of foreign currency he was permitted to bring into Morocco and Mantis did not think that €3,000 would be considered suspicious. He told Carradine that the sealed package containing the passport and credit card would be delivered to his flat in Lancaster Gate the following day, as well as the novel which was to be used as a book cipher. Mantis reiterated the importance of leaving the sealed package intact, unless Carradine was instructed to open it by law enforcement officials in the UK or Morocco. He did not give an explanation for this request and Carradine did not ask for one. Carradine assumed that the package would contain sensitive documents.
‘Good luck,’ Mantis said, shaking his hand as he left. ‘And thanks for helping out.’
‘No problem.’
Carradine walked out onto Lisson Grove in a state of confusion. He was bewildered by the speed with which Mantis had acted and strung out by the painstaking assimilation of so much information. It seemed bizarre that he should have been asked to undertake work on behalf of the secret state – particularly after such a cursory meeting – and wondered if the entire episode was part of an elaborate set-up. Clearly the content of his novels, the depictions of tradecraft, his observations about the burdens of secrecy and so forth, had convinced the Service that C.K. Carradine was possessed of the ideal temperament to work as a support agent. But how had they known that he would agree so readily to their offer? While working for the BBC in his twenties, Carradine had spoken to three veteran foreign correspondents – two British, one Canadian – each of whom had been tapped up by their respective intelligence services overseas. They had turned down the opportunity on the basis that it would interfere with the objectivity of their work, undermine the relationships they had built up with local sources and potentially bring them into conflict with their host governments. Carradine wished that he had shown a little more of their steadfastness when presented with the dangled carrot of clandestine work. Instead, perhaps because of what had happened to his father, he had demonstrated a rather old-fashioned desire to serve Queen and country, a facet of his character which suddenly seemed antiquated, even naive. He was committed to doing what Mantis had asked him to do, but felt that he had not given himself adequate protection in the event that things went wrong.
Still in a state of apprehension, Carradine took a detour on the way home, purchased a roll of masking tape and found an Internet café in Paddington. He wanted to be certain that Mantis was a bona fide Service employee, not a Walter Mitty figure taking advantage of him either for his own amusement or for some darker purpose which had not yet been made clear.
The café was half-full. Carradine stood over a vacant computer, tore off a small strip of the masking tape and placed it over the lens at the top of the screen. The computer was already loaded with a VPN. In his most recent novel, Carradine had written a chapter in which the principal character was required to comb the Dark Net in order to create a false identity. He had spoken to a hacker a few weeks before and still remembered most of what she had told him during their cloak-and-dagger meeting at a coffee shop in Balham. The trick – apart from disabling the camera – was to use the VPN both to create a false IP address and to encrypt his Internet usage. That way, his activities would be concealed from any prying eyes in Cheltenham and Carradine could investigate the mysterious Mr Mantis without fear of being identified.
As he expected, none of the ‘Robert Mantis’ listings on Facebook could plausibly have been the man he had met in Lisson Grove. There was no Twitter account associated with the name, nor anything on Instagram. Carradine ran Mantis through LinkedIn and Whitepages but found only an out-of-work chef in Tampa and a ‘lifestyle’ photographer in Little Rock. Remembering a tip he had been given by the hacker, he looked on Nominet to see if any variant of ‘robertmantis’ was listed as a website domain. It was not. Whoever he had met that afternoon was using a pseudonym which had been cleaned up for the obvious purpose of protecting his true identity. Mantis was not listed as a director at Companies House nor as a shared freeholder on any UK properties. A credit check on Experian also drew a blank.
Satisfied that he was a genuine Service employee, Carradine put the computer to sleep, removed the strip of masking tape from the lens and walked home.
6 (#ulink_341d4b5b-3938-553f-80e3-19d27e8d6a16)
The following morning, Carradine was woken early by the sound of the doorbell ringing. He stumbled out of bed, pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and struck his foot on the skirting board as he picked up the intercom.
‘Delivery for Mr Carradine.’
He knew immediately what it was. He reached down, grabbed his toe and told the delivery man to leave it in his postbox.
‘Needs to be signed for.’
The accent was Jamaican. Carradine buzzed the man into the building. He waited by the door, rubbing his foot. A moth flew up towards the ceiling. Carradine clapped it dead between his hands. He could hear the lift outside grinding towards the landing as he wiped the smashed body on his shorts.
The delivery man was a middle-aged, dreadlocked Rasta wearing a high-vis waistcoat. A Post Office satchel was slung over his shoulder. It was possible that he was a convincingly disguised errand boy for the Service, but Carradine assumed that Mantis had simply sent the items by Special Delivery. He signed an illegible version of his name on an electronic pad using a small plastic tool that slipped on the glass, thanked him and took the package inside.
On any other morning, Carradine might have gone back to bed for another hour’s sleep. But the contents of the package were too intriguing. He walked into the kitchen, set a percolator of coffee on the stove and sliced the envelope open with a knife.
There was a paperback book inside. Mantis had sent a French translation of one of Carradine’s novels, published four years earlier. He opened the book to the title page. It was unsigned. The rest of the text had not been marked up nor were any pages turned down or altered in any way. The book was in pristine condition.
He waited for the coffee to boil, staring out of the window at the treetops of Hyde Park. If the novel was to be used as a book cipher, then Mantis possessed an identical copy which would allow him to send coded messages to Yassine without risking detection. He was using a French, rather than an English version of the book because Yassine was most likely a French-speaking Arab. For Carradine to give him a copy of the novel at their meeting was an ingenious and entirely plausible piece of tradecraft. They would be hiding in plain sight.
He took out the second item, the sealed package for ‘Maria’. The envelope was sturdy and bound with tape at both ends. Carradine weighed it in his hands. He could make out the outline of what he assumed was a passport. He bent the package slightly and thought that he could feel a document of some kind moving beneath the seal. Carradine had an obligation to open the envelope, because it was surely crazy to board an international flight carrying a package about which he knew so little. But he could not do so. It was against the spirit of the deal he had struck with the Service and would constitute a clear breach of trust. It was even possible that the package was a decoy and that the Service had sent it solely as a test of his integrity.
He set it to one side, drank the coffee and switched on the news. Overnight in New Delhi two vehicles had been hijacked by Islamist gunmen affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba and driven into crowds at a religious ceremony, killing an estimated 75 people. In Germany, an AFD politician had been gunned down on his doorstep by a Resurrection activist. Such headlines had become commonplace, as humdrum and predictable as tropical storms and mass shootings in the United States. Carradine waited for news of the Redmond kidnapping. It was the third item on the BBC. No trace had been found of the van in which Redmond had been driven away, no statement released by Resurrection claiming responsibility for the abduction.
Settling in front of his computer with a bowl of cereal, Carradine watched amateur footage of the crowds screaming in panic as they fled the carnage in New Delhi. He read an email written by the slain AFD politician, leaked to the press only days earlier, in which he had referred to Arabs as a ‘culturally alien people’ welcomed into Germany by ‘elitist pigs’. He learned that one in eight voters had given AFD their support in recent elections and that the group was now the second largest opposition party in the Bundestag. Small wonder Resurrection was so active in Germany. There had been similar assassinations of nationalist politicians in France, Poland and Hungary. It was only a matter of time before the violence crossed the Channel and a senior British politician was targeted.
Carradine took a shower and WhatsApped Mantis, acknowledging delivery of the package with a succinct ‘Thanks for the book’. Within thirty seconds Mantis had replied: ‘No problem’ adding – to Carradine’s consternation – two smiling emojis and a thumbs up for good measure. He put the package in a drawer and attempted to do some work. Every ten or fifteen minutes he would open the drawer and check that the package was still there, as if sprites or cat burglars might have carried it off while his back was turned. Later in the afternoon, when his once-a-fortnight cleaner, Mrs Ritter, was in the flat, he removed the package altogether and set it on his desk until she had left the building.
Though he had yet to complete any specific tasks on behalf of the Service, Carradine already felt as though he had been cut off from his old life; that he was inhabiting a parallel existence separate from the world he had known before meeting Mantis and witnessing the abduction of Lisa Redmond. He wanted to talk to his father about what had happened, to tell him about Morocco and to gauge his advice, but he was forbidden by the Secrets Act. He could say nothing to anyone about what Mantis had asked him to do. He tried to work, but it now seemed ridiculous to be writing about fictional spies in fictional settings when he himself had been employed by the Service as a bona fide support agent. Instead he spent the next two days re-reading Frederick Forsyth’s memoirs and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, trawling for insights into the life of a writer spy. He watched The Bureau and took a DVD of The Man Who Knew Too Much to his father’s flat the night before he was due to fly to Casablanca. They ordered curry from Deliveroo and sat in semi-darkness munching chicken dhansak and tarka daal, washed down with a 1989 Château Beychevelle he had been given by an old friend as a birthday present.
‘Doris Day,’ his father muttered as she sang ‘Que Sera Sera’ to her soon-to-be-kidnapped son. ‘Was she the one Hitchcock threw the birds at?’
‘No,’ Carradine replied. ‘That was Tippi Hedren.’
‘Ah.’
He tore off a strip of peshawari naan and passed it to his father saying: ‘Did you know she was Melanie Griffith’s mother?’
‘Who? Doris Day?’
‘No. Tippi Hedren.’
After a brief pause, his father said: ‘Who’s Melanie Griffith?’
It was after midnight by the time the film finished. Carradine did the washing-up and ordered an Uber.
‘So you’re off to Casablanca?’ His father was standing in the hall, leaning on the walking stick which he had carried with him since his stroke. ‘Research on the new book?’
‘Research, yes,’ Carradine replied. He detested the lie.
‘Never been myself. They say it’s not like the film.’
‘Yeah. I heard that.’
His father jutted out his chin and pulled off a passable impression of Humphrey Bogart.
‘You played it for her. You play it for me. Play it.’
Carradine hugged him. He tried to imagine what life in the Service must have been like in the 1960s. He pictured smoke-filled rooms, tables piled high with dusty files, men in double-breasted suits plotting in secure speech rooms.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘I love you, too. Take care of yourself out there. Call me when you land.’
‘I will.’
Carradine opened the front door and stepped outside.
‘Kit?’
He turned to face his father. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m proud of you.’
7 (#ulink_c18e6989-6800-521d-be01-0c2193e439ca)
Carradine had been on the Gatwick Express for only a few minutes when he saw the photograph. He was seated alone at a table in a near-deserted carriage finishing off a cappuccino and a fruit salad from M&S. A passenger had left a copy of the Guardian on a seat across the aisle. Carradine had picked up the paper and begun to read about developments in the Redmond kidnapping. The Transit van, which had been stolen from a North London car park, had been found abandoned and burned out at the edge of a wood not far from Henley-on-Thames. CCTV showed a bearded man wearing a woollen hat filling the van up with diesel in Cricklewood a few hours before Redmond was seized. Resurrection sympathisers had now claimed responsibility for the kidnapping but no images of Redmond in captivity had been released. ‘Experts’ quoted in the article drew comparisons with the kidnapping of Otis Euclidis, pointing out that Resurrection had waited ten days before publishing footage of an apparently healthy and well-rested Euclidis sitting on a bed in an undisclosed location reading a book. The same experts claimed that the police were at a loss to know where Redmond was being held. At the bottom of the story there was a small box directing readers to a longer piece on the history of the Resurrection movement. Carradine had turned to the back of the paper, intending to read it.
Beneath the headline on the article was a layout of four pictures arranged in a square, each of them about the same size as the passport photograph of ‘Maria’ that Mantis had given to Carradine in Lisson Grove. The photograph in the top left-hand corner showed Redmond taking part in a reality television show several years earlier. Beside it was a picture of Euclidis in characteristic Instagram pose, wearing a white, gold-encrusted baseball cap, a gold crucifix medallion and outsized designer sunglasses. The photograph in the bottom left-hand corner showed Nihat Demirel, a pro-government talk-show host in Turkey who had been kneecapped by Resurrection outside his summer house in Izmir in May. It was the fourth picture that rocked Carradine.
He had seen the photograph before. It showed Ivan Simakov, the deceased leader of Resurrection, standing beside the woman who was reported to have been his girlfriend when the movement was conceived: Lara Bartok. Carradine stared at her. She had long, dark hair and slightly crooked front teeth. It was ‘Maria’.
He reached into his wallet. He placed the photograph of Maria alongside the picture of Bartok. There was no question that they were the same woman. He was about to pull up her Wikipedia page on his iPhone when he remembered that the search would flag. A young woman had taken a seat at the far end of the carriage. Carradine considered asking to borrow her phone to make the search but decided against it, instead reading the article for more detail on Bartok’s background. A Hungarian-born lawyer, she had met Simakov in New York and become attached to Occupy Wall Street. Described as ‘a latter-day Ulrike Meinhof’, Bartok was wanted in the United States on charges of armed assault, kidnapping and incitement to violence. She had reportedly become disillusioned with Resurrection and vanished from the couple’s apartment in Brooklyn. Several months later, Simakov was killed in Moscow.
Carradine put the newspaper to one side. The train had come to a halt at a section of track littered with cans and bottles. He stared outside, trying to work out what Mantis was up to. He assumed that the Service had recruited Bartok as an agent, persuading her to inform against Resurrection. But how had they managed to lose track of her? And why was Mantis using an untried and untested support agent to try to find her? In the Lisson Grove flat he had refused even to reveal Bartok’s name, telling Carradine that ‘several officers and support agents’ were searching for her in places as far afield as Mexico, Cuba and Argentina. If that was the case, it was plausible that she was no longer a source for British intelligence, but instead a fugitive from justice. Carradine had learned enough from his father about the workings of the Service to know that they were not a law enforcement agency. There had to be another reason behind Mantis’s search. Carradine recalled the wistfulness with which he had spoken about her beauty, his irritation with the photograph of her surfer boyfriend. As the train began to move away, he wondered if Mantis was romantically involved with her. That might explain the furtiveness with which he had spoken about ‘Maria’.
Gatwick airport was rammed. Carradine checked the suitcase containing the book and the sealed package into the hold and cleared security without any complications. He was carrying €1,000 of Mantis’s money in his wallet and the other €2,000 inside an envelope in his carry-on bag. The departure gate for the flight with Royal Air Maroc was a twenty-minute walk from security along increasingly deserted corridors leading further and further away from the heart of the terminal. A flight attendant wearing a headscarf and heavy mascara clicked a counter for every passenger that came on board. Carradine was one of the last to take his seat. He glanced at the counter as he passed her. There were fewer than fifty passengers on the plane.
As the flight took off, Carradine had the vivid sensation that he was leaving the old part of his life behind and entering a new phase which would in every way be more challenging and satisfying than the life he had known before. His thoughts again turned to Bartok. Was Mantis using him to try to get a personal message to her? If so, how could he guarantee that Carradine would find her at the festival? Was she a fan of his books? Did the Service think that she was going to show herself at his event? Perhaps she wanted to meet Katherine Paget, the novelist with whom he was due to appear on stage.
The sealed package was somewhere beneath Carradine’s feet in the chill of the baggage hold; he knew that it would contain the answers to his many questions and felt his professional obligation to Mantis dissipating with every passing mile. He did not consider himself to be particularly cynical or suspicious, but neither would he enjoy the feeling of being duped. He needed to know what was inside the envelope. If that meant breaking his promise to the Service, so be it.
About an hour into the flight, Carradine was handed a small tray with a plastic knife and fork and told that alcohol was not served by the airline. Craving a beer, he ate a tiny, vacuum-packed trout fillet with a bread roll and something the flight attendant claimed was chicken casserole. Leaving most of it unfinished, he decided to go for a stroll. As he passed his fellow passengers bent over their in-flight meals, Carradine could hear a man with a deep, resonant voice speaking in Spanish near the toilets at the rear of the plane. He assumed that the man was talking to a friend, but when he reached the galley he saw that he was alone. His back was turned and he was looking out of the window. He was wearing shorts and a black T-shirt. Religious tattoos completely covered his arms and the backs of his hands. There were tufts of black body hair protruding from the neck of his T-shirt. He was holding a mobile phone perpendicular to his mouth and appeared to be dictating notes. Carradine spoke very little Spanish and could not understand what he was saying. The man sensed that Carradine was behind him and turned around.
‘Sorry. You want the bathroom, man?’
The accent was Hispanic, the face about forty-five. He was well-built but not overtly muscular, with long, greasy hair gathered in a topknot. Though not fully bearded, at least three days of dense stubble ran in a continuous black shadow from beneath his eyes to the hollow of his collarbone. He was one of the hairiest people Carradine had ever seen.
‘No thanks. I’m just going for a walk.’
The man lowered the phone. He was smiling with forced sincerity, like a technique he had been taught at a seminar on befriending strangers. Carradine had the bizarre and disorienting sensation that the man knew who he was and had been waiting for him.
‘Out on the wing?’
‘What?’
‘You said you were going for a walk.’
Carradine rolled with the joke. ‘Oh. That’s right. Yes. So if you wouldn’t mind stepping aside I’ll just open the door and head out.’
An eruption of laughter, a roar so loud it might have been audible in the cockpit. An elderly Arabic woman emerged from one of the bathrooms and flinched.
‘Hey! I like you!’ said the man. He leaned a hand against the doorframe and shook out a crick in his neck. ‘Where you from?’
Carradine explained that he was from London. ‘And you?’
‘Me? I’m from everywhere, man.’ He looked like a mid-level drug dealer attached to a Colombian cartel: dishevelled, poorly educated, very possibly violent. ‘Born in Andalucía. Raised in Madrid. Now I live in London. Heading out to Morocco for some R & R.’
They shook hands. The Spaniard’s grip suggested prodigious physical force.
‘Ramón,’ he said. ‘Great to meet you, man.’
‘Kit. You too.’
‘So what you doing in Casablanca?’
Carradine went with the story he had agreed with Mantis.
‘I’m a novelist. Doing some research on my next book.’
The Spaniard again exploded with enthusiasm. ‘A writer! Holy shit, man! You write books?’ Carradine thought back to his first encounter with Mantis. There was something similarly inauthentic about Ramón. ‘You get any of them published?’
‘A few, yeah.’
‘Wow! So cool!’
A flight attendant came into the galley, obliging Carradine to step to one side. She was slim and attractive. Ramón stared at her as she bent down to retrieve a bottle of water from one of the catering boxes. He gazed open-mouthed at the outline of her uniform, all of the liveliness and energy in his face momentarily extinguished. He looked up, pursed his lips and shot Carradine a locker-room leer.
‘Nice, huh?’
Carradine changed the subject.
‘What do you do for R & R in Casablanca?’
It turned out to be the wrong question.
‘Oh man! The chicks in Morocco. You don’t know?!’ The flight attendant stood up, stared at Ramón with undisguised contempt and made her way back down the aisle. ‘Last time I was there, I meet this girl in a bar on the Corniche. She takes me to this apartment, we open a bottle of whisky and then – bang! Oh Kit, man! One of the great nights of my life. This chick, she was …’
Ramón’s recollection tailed off as a young child, accompanied by his father, was led to the bathroom. Carradine seized his chance to get away.
‘Well, it was interesting to meet you,’ he said.
‘You heading off?’
Ramón sounded distraught, almost as if he had been tasked with befriending Carradine and been judged to have failed.
‘Yeah. I’ve got stuff to read. Work to do. Just wanted to stretch my legs.’
‘Oh. OK. Sure. Great to meet you. You’re a cool cat, Kit. I like you. Good luck with those books!’
Carradine returned to his seat, oddly unsettled by the encounter. He remained there for the rest of the flight. He thought that he had seen the last of the Spaniard but, having landed and cleared passport control in Casablanca, found himself standing next to him in the baggage hall. As they waited for their respective suitcases, some of the last remaining passengers to be doing so, Ramón continued to grill Carradine on his life and career, to the point at which he began to wonder if he was testing his cover.
‘So, what? You’re writing a kind of spy story set in Morocco? Like a Jason Bourne thing?’
Carradine had always thought that his novels occupied a literary space equidistant between the kiss-kiss-bang-bang of Ludlum and the slow-burn chess games of le Carré. For reasons of intellectual vanity, he would ordinarily have tried to distance himself from Ramón’s description, but he was keen to stop talking about his work. As a consequence, he readily conceded that his ‘Moroccan thriller’ was going to be ‘full of guns and explosions and beautiful women’.
‘Like The Man Who Knew Too Much?’
Carradine thought of his father the night before munching naan bread and drinking claret. He didn’t think the comparison was accurate, but couldn’t be bothered to enter into a debate about it.
‘Exactly,’ he replied.
Ramón had spotted his bag moving along the carousel. He stepped forward, picked it up, slung the bag across his shoulder and turned around.
‘You wanna share a cab into town, man?’
Had this been his plan all along? To get alongside Carradine and to accompany him into Casablanca? Or was he merely an over-familiar tourist trying to do a fellow passenger a favour? Out of the corner of his eye Carradine saw his suitcase jerking along the carousel.
‘My bag will probably be a while longer,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry. The food on the flight was terrible. I’m going to grab something to eat in the terminal. You go ahead. Have a great trip.’
Ramón looked at the carousel. Three suitcases remained, two of which had passed them several times. Betraying an apparent suspicion, he shook Carradine’s hand, reiterated how ‘truly fantastic’ it had been to meet him and walked towards the customs area. Relieved to be shot of him, Carradine sent a WhatsApp to Mantis telling him that he had arrived, checked that the novel and the sealed package were still inside his case and walked out into the broiling Moroccan afternoon.
He had expected the chaos and clamour of a typical African airport, but all was relatively quiet as he emerged from the terminal. A hot desert wind was blowing in from the east, bending the tops of the palm trees and sending swirls of leaves and dust across the deserted concourse. Men in jeans and Polo shirts were perched on concrete blocks smoking in the shade of the terminal building. When they saw Carradine, they popped up and moved forwards, crowding him like paparazzi, repeating the phrase ‘Taxi mister, taxi’ as he tried to move between them. Carradine could see Ramón less than fifty metres away at the top of the rank standing next to a pranged beige Mercedes. He was negotiating a price with the driver. The Spaniard looked up, waving Carradine forward shouting: ‘Get in, man! Join me!’ Carradine was already uncomfortably hot. He was irritated by the drivers trying to force him towards their cars and intrigued enough by Ramón to want to know why he had taken such an interest in him. Was he working for the Service? Had Mantis sent him with instructions to keep an eye on the new kid on the block? Carradine raised a hand in acknowledgement as Ramón continued to gesture him forward. Should he stay or should he go? His curiosity began to tip the balance. Where was the harm in sharing a ride into town? He might even learn something. He duly rolled his suitcase towards the Mercedes and greeted Ramón for the third time.
‘Chaos back there,’ he said. ‘Thanks for helping me out.’
‘No problem.’ The driver popped the boot. ‘Where you headed, man? I drop you off.’
Carradine was staying at a Sofitel in the centre of town. It transpired that Ramón was staying in a hotel less than five hundred metres away.
‘No way! I’m at the Sheraton! Literally like no distance from where you are.’ A part of Carradine died inside. ‘We can meet up later, go for a drink. You know any good places?’
‘Somebody recommended Blaine’s to me.’
The words were out of his mouth before Carradine had time to realise what he had said. He was due to meet Yassine at Blaine’s the following evening. What if Ramón showed up during their dinner?
‘Blaine’s? I know it! Full of chicks, man. You’re gonna love it.’
He could feel his carefully arranged schedule being quickly and efficiently unpicked by the Spaniard’s suffocating camaraderie. He didn’t want to be put into a position where he had to work his cover, lying to Ramón about phantom meetings with phantom friends just to avoid seeing him. Why the hell hadn’t he taken a separate taxi?
‘Sofitel,’ Ramón told the driver, speaking in accentless French. ‘Près du port. Et après le Sheraton, s’il vous plaît.’
Somewhere between the aircraft and the Mercedes the Spaniard had developed a case of volcanic body odour. The car was quickly filled with the smell of his stale sweat. It was hot in the back seat, with no air conditioning, and Carradine sat with both windows down, listening to the driver muttering to himself in Arabic as they settled into a queue of traffic. Ramón offered Carradine a cigarette, which he gladly accepted, taking the smoke deep into his lungs as he gazed out onto lines of parked cars and half-finished breezeblock apartments, wondering how long it would take to get into town.
‘I never asked,’ he said. ‘What do you do for a living?’
Ramón appeared to hesitate before turning around to answer. His eyes were cold and pitiless. Carradine was reminded of the sudden change in his expression when the flight attendant had walked into the galley. It was like looking at an actor who had momentarily dropped out of character.
‘Me?’ he said. ‘I’m just a businessman. Came out here to do a friend a favour.’
‘I thought you said you were here for the rest and rec-reation?’
‘That too.’ Ramón touched his mouth in a way that made Carradine suspect him of lying. ‘R & R everywhere I go. That’s how I like to roll.’
‘What’s the favour?’ he asked.
The Spaniard cut him a look, turned to face the oncoming traffic and said: ‘I don’t like to talk too much about work.’
Another five minutes passed before they spoke again. The taxi had finally emerged from the traffic jam and reached what appeared to be the main highway into Casablanca. Ramón had been talking to the driver in rapid, aggressive French, only some of which Carradine was able to understand. He began to think that the two men were already acquainted and wondered again if Ramón had deliberately waited for him to come out of the airport.
‘You’ve met before?’ he asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘Your driver? You’ve used him before?’
The Spaniard flinched, as if to suggest that Carradine was asking too many questions.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Oh, nothing. It just sounded like this wasn’t the first time you’d met.’
At that moment the driver – who had not yet looked at Carradine nor acknowledged him in any way – turned off the highway onto a dirt track leading into a forest.
‘What’s going on?’ Carradine looked back at the main road. Paranoia had settled on him like the slowly clinging sweat under his shirt. ‘Where are we going?’
‘No idea.’ Ramón sounded disconcertingly relaxed. ‘Probably has to visit his mother or something.’
The Mercedes bumped along the track, heading further and further into the woods.
‘Seriously,’ said Carradine. ‘Where are we going?’
The driver pulled the Mercedes to the side of the track, switched off the engine and stepped out. The heat of the afternoon sun was overwhelming. Carradine opened the door to give himself an option to run if the situation should turn against him. There was a small wooden hut about ten metres from the road, occupied by a woman whose face he could not see. The driver approached the hut, held out a piece of paper and passed it to her. Ramón put a tattooed arm across the seat.
‘You look tense, man. Relax.’
‘I’m fine,’ Carradine told him.
He was anything but fine. The stench of sweat was overwhelming. He was convinced that he had walked into a trap. He looked in the opposite direction, deeper into the woods. He could see only trees and the forest floor. He used the wing mirror on the driver’s side to check if there was anybody on the road behind them, but saw no sign of anyone. Through the woods beyond the hut he could make out a small clearing dotted with plastic toys and a children’s slide. The driver was coming back to the car.
‘Que faisiez-vous?’ Ramón asked him.
‘Parking,’ the driver replied. Carradine smiled and shook his head. His lack of experience had got the better of him. He looked back at the hut. The veiled woman was marking the piece of paper with an ink stamp. She slammed it onto a metal spike.
‘Crazy!’ Ramón produced a delighted grin. ‘In Casablanca they pay their parking tickets in the middle of the fucking woods. Never saw this before, man.’
‘Me neither,’ Carradine replied.
It was another forty-five minutes to the hotel. Carradine sat in the heat of the back seat, smoking another of Ramón’s cigarettes. On the edge of the city the Mercedes became jammed in three-lane traffic that inched along wide colonial boulevards packed with cars and motorbikes. Ramón grew increasingly agitated, berating the driver for taking the wrong route in order to extract more money for the journey. The swings in his mood, from back-slapping bonhomie to cold, aggressive impatience, were as unexpected as they were unsettling. Carradine followed the progress of the journey on his iPhone, trying to orientate himself in the new city, the street names – Boulevard de La Mecque, Avenue Tetouan, Rue des Racines – evoking all the antiquity and mystique of French colonial Africa. Mopeds buzzed past his door as the Mercedes edged from block to block. Men hawking drinks and newspapers approached the car and were shooed away by the driver, who switched on the windscreen wipers to deter them. Several times Carradine saw cars and scooters running red lights or deliberately going the wrong way around roundabouts in order to beat the jam. Stalled in the rivers of traffic he thought of home and cursed the heat, calling his father to tell him that he had arrived. He was busy playing backgammon with a friend and had no time to talk, their brief exchange leaving Carradine with a sense of isolation that he found perversely enjoyable. It was exhilarating to be alone in a strange city, a place about which he knew so little, at the start of a mission for which he had received no training and no detailed preparation. He knew that his father had been posted to Egypt by the Service in the early years of his marriage and thought of the life he must have led as a young spy, running agents in Cairo, taking his mother on romantic trips to Sinai, Luxor and Aswan. Ramón offered him yet another cigarette and he took it, observing that the smog outside was likely to do more damage to his lungs. Ramón went to the trouble of translating the joke for the benefit of the driver who turned in his seat and smiled, acknowledging Carradine for the first time.
‘Vrai!’ he said. ‘C’est vrai!’
That was when Ramón showed him his phone.
‘Jesus Christ, man. You see this?’
Carradine pitched the cigarette out of the window and leaned forward. The headline on the screen was in Spanish. He could see the words REDMOND and MUERTA.
‘What happened?’
‘They killed the Redmond bitch,’ Ramón replied. ‘Resurrection fucking killed her.’
8 (#ulink_5599d6b1-2958-5fa1-b31a-29e29279a90b)
They kept her in the van for the first thirty-six hours. She screamed when they took off the gag, so they put it on again and left her to rage. They offered her water and food, but she refused it. She soiled herself. When she had spent all of her energy, Redmond wept.
Towards the end of the second day they took her from the van, still blindfolded, and tied her to a chair in the basement of the farmhouse. They played the recording into the room. A loop of Redmond’s words, repeated over and over again. A torture of her own making. The bearded man called it ‘The Two Minutes of Hate’, after Orwell, but the recording lasted for more than twelve hours.
The immigrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean are the same insects already swarming over Europe. They choke our schools and hospitals. They dirty our towns and cities. They murder our daughters at rock concerts. They mow down our sons on the streets.
It went on and on into the night. Whenever Redmond looked as though she was falling asleep, they turned up the volume. She was prevented from sleeping by the words she had written. ‘Sentenced by your own sentences,’ said the man who had knocked down her husband.
The only answer is to lock up every young Muslim man or woman whose name appears on a terrorist watchlist. How else to protect British citizens from slaughter? If we cannot take the sensible precaution, outlined by the government of the United States, of preventing potential terrorists from entering the United Kingdom from countries that are known sponsors of Islamist terror, then this is the only option remaining to us.
On the morning of the third day they removed Redmond’s gag and again offered her food and water. This time she accepted. The bearded man asked her, on camera, if she wished to defend her words and actions. She said that she stood by everything she had written. She insisted that, given the chance, she would write and broadcast everything again. She had no regrets for exercising her right to free speech and for articulating views held by millions of people in the West who were too cowed by political correctness to speak their minds.
The bearded man was standing behind her as she spoke. He lifted her hair clear of her shoulders, held it in a fist above her head, and sliced her throat with a knife. Redmond’s body was dumped at a stretch of waste ground on the outskirts of Coventry. A photograph of her corpse was sent to the editor of the British newspaper who had commissioned her column.
Somerville switched off the recorder.
‘What are your feelings about what happened to Lisa Redmond?’ he said.
Bartok shrugged.
‘I do not know enough about it.’ She stood up and stretched her back, twisting one way, then the other. ‘I know that Kit was upset. He talked about it a lot. I think it haunted him.’
‘What about you?’ the American asked. His tone was supercilious. ‘Were you upset by it? Were you haunted, Lara?’
Bartok picked up one of the biscuits. She turned it over in her fingers. She liked Somerville. She trusted him. She did not like or trust the American.
‘As I have said. I did not know Redmond’s writing. I did not have the opportunity to listen to her radio broadcasts wherever I was hiding in the world. She sounded like somebody who we might have gone after.’
The American seized on this, closing the space between them.
‘We?’
‘Resurrection.’ Bartok looked at Somerville as if to suggest that the American was starting to annoy her. ‘In the old days. Before the violence and the killing. She was the sort of figure Ivan would have looked at. Redmond, and those like her, men like Otis Euclidis, they gave encouragement to the bigots, to the ignorant. Ivan wanted to teach them a lesson. We all did.’ She bit into the biscuit. It was dry. She could only swallow by taking a sip of water to wash it down. ‘When I see what has happened to Resurrection, I feel nothing but sadness. It began as something remarkable. It began as a phenomenon. Ivan had a conception of a new kind of revolutionary movement, one which harnessed the power of the Internet and social media, one which was fuelled by international outrage among young and old alike. He wanted to take that revolutionary movement out onto the streets, to fight back against those who had corrupted our societies. He knew that Resurrection would catch fire with people, inspire groups and individuals, oblige the masses to mount operations of their own – however small, however apparently insignificant – so that bit by bit and step by step, democracy and fairness would be restored. But all of the hope and the beauty of those ideas, the purity of the early attacks, has been lost.’
Somerville reached for the recorder. They needed to get the whole story out of Bartok. There was no point letting her talk during the breaks if nobody was keeping a record.
‘Would you like to go back to those early months?’ he asked.
‘Of course, whatever you want,’ she said.
‘Please. Tell us how it all got started.’
SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE EYES ONLY / STRAP 1
STATEMENT BY LARA BARTOK (‘LASZLO’)
CASE OFFICERS: J.W.S./S.T.H – CHAPEL STREET
REF: RESURRECTION/SIMAKOV/CARRADINE
FILE: RE2768X
PART 2 of 5
‘Euclidis was our first target. That was the first and most brilliant idea of Ivan’s, to capture this snake, this poison in the bloodstream of public life, and to show the world that decent people were prepared to stand up to hate, to put an end to divisive words, to expose Euclidis for the narcissist that he was. For all his expensive clothes and his clever talk, we showed the world that he was just a self-interested clown. He blogged to make money. He spread lies to get rich. To get laid. He was not interested in changing the system, in making the world a better place. He and his friends – the alt-right, the white supremacists, the anti-Semites, the Holocaust deniers – they had no alternative ideology. They had no ideas. They just wanted to draw attention to themselves. They wanted to make decent citizens feel uncomfortable and frightened. That was their reason for living. They were bullies, high on hate.
How did Euclidis draw so many admirers? By making stupid people feel better about their stupidity. By allowing bigots to think they were justified in making anti-Semitic statements, saying that it was OK to hate women, to be aggrieved about people of colour, about immigrants. The sad truth is that there were enough trolls buying his books, reading his articles, attending his talks to make him a rich man. They gave him the fame he craved. Euclidis was a junkie for attention. And if they didn’t give it to him in public, they gave it to him on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook. We had to take him down.
So Ivan, with my help, and with the assistance of Zack Curtis and
, seized him at Berkeley. Grabbed him as he stepped out of his hotel. It was so easy. We were in America so we were able to obtain guns. The hotel had no security, we possessed the element of surprise. We put a hood on him, we put him in cuffs, we threw his phone out of the window. He did not like that, he did not like being separated from his precious phone! We switched vehicles and drove into the mountains. Euclidis of course was a physical coward. He cried like a four-year-old boy. It was pitiful.
We filmed him in secret, as the world now knows. We were able to show on camera that Otis Euclidis was a charlatan, a fraud. He confessed that he had done it all to make money. He had never meant anything he had said or written to be taken seriously. His followers were ‘clowns’ and ‘losers’. When he had said in interviews that black lives ‘did not matter’, he had been ‘joking’. When he had written that feminism was ‘the worst invention since gunpowder’, he had only been ‘fooling around’. He showed himself to be a fraud who believed in nothing but fame. When we screened the film, when we put it out on the Internet for the world to see, and we saw the reaction, well, it was a beautiful moment.
Almost immediately there were copycat attacks. Dozens of politicians and right-wing figures around the world came under threat. My favourite was done by the refugee in Amsterdam. The kitchen porter. A Muslim from Iraq who had been washing dishes in a restaurant so that he could feed his wife and baby daughter. He was no older than twenty-five or twenty-six. Samir. I’ve forgotten his surname. [JWS: Samir Rabou] He learned that Piet Boutmy, the leader of the Dutch far-right party – again, I don’t remember the name of this party [JWS: Partij voor de Vrijheid] – was eating in the restaurant. A waiter, a Syrian, I believe, came into the kitchen and told him Boutmy was there. Samir knew about the kidnapping of Euclidis, he told the police who later interviewed him that he had followed Resurrection from its very first statements and that he greatly admired Ivan Simakov. He took off his washing gloves, kept his apron, walked out of the kitchen and went directly into the restaurant. The security guard protecting Boutmy thought he was a waiter. The table was covered in many dishes, including – perfectly! – a soup prepared with beetroots which was still very hot. Also bottles of water, glasses of red wine, cutlery, a vase of flowers. Shouting ‘Resurrection!’ Samir lifted the whole table on top of this racist animal, soaking him to the bone, also the colleague from the same party who was dining with him. I heard that he faced no charges and soon found another job at a rival restaurant. It was beautiful.
Everything that Ivan and myself had hoped for came to pass. Ivan was worried that the Resurrection movement would burn out. It didn’t. He wrote that he wanted Resurrection to have ‘a seismic effect on public attitudes to the liars and enablers of the Right’. This is exactly what happened. The summer homes of criminal bankers were burned to the ground. Cars belonging to producers at Fox News were vandalised and damaged. Those who had attended white supremacist rallies were identified by their peers and targeted for retribution. They paid the price for their hate with the loss of their careers, their friends. All it took was one or two examples for everyone to follow suit.
But, of course, Resurrection changed. What started as a non-violent movement, symbolic acts targeted against deserving victims, quickly became violent. I was naive to believe that this would not happen, but what distressed me was Ivan’s willingness to change his position, not only towards non-violence, but also concerning his own role as a figurehead. He wanted the limelight. He craved adulation. I had not identified these characteristics in him when we first met. His vanity, his stubbornness, his readiness to lose sight of what Resurrection was about and instead to place himself at the heart of what became a hijacked, paramilitary organisation. It became impossible to live with him. I could no longer do useful work. I lost my respect for Ivan Simakov and I left him. That is when they began to hunt me down.
9 (#ulink_b4366311-98e3-56d7-b80f-edcf8e7f3551)
Carradine reached his room and switched on the television.
Every major news network was carrying the story. The police believed the murder had been carried out by the same members of Resurrection who had kidnapped Redmond five days earlier. Tributes were being paid by friends and colleagues, inevitable expressions of outrage articulated by politicians, fellow journalists and friends.
Carradine muted the television. He sat on the bed and felt a hollowness inside him close to a feeling of personal responsibility in the death of an innocent woman. Had he done more to help, had he found the courage to cross the street and to confront Redmond’s kidnappers, she might still be alive. He thought of the girl who had been standing beside him, chatting away to her friend. So I says to him, I’m like, no way is that happening, yeah? I’m like he needs to get his shit together because I’m like just not going through with that bullshit again. Where was she now? How would she react to news of this kind? Would she share Carradine’s remorse or experience nothing but a momentary, fleeting anxiety that Resurrection had again resorted to murder? Would she even be aware that Redmond had been killed?
He went to the window and looked down at the vast city. Low whitewashed buildings stretched in a broad semi-circle to the Atlantic coast. At the sea’s edge the vast Hassan II Mosque dominated the skyline; to the north-west, the cranes and wharves of the port were blocks of shadow partly obscured by a high-rise hotel. Carradine had detested Redmond. He had abhorred her character and public style. She had weaved deliberate ignorance into casual prejudice with the sole purpose of inciting outrage, hysteria and fear. She had craved the spotlight of notoriety. In the wake of an Islamist suicide bombing on the streets of London, she had called for ‘internment’ for male Muslims under the age of forty. Handed a column in a tabloid newspaper with which to disseminate her toxic views, she had advocated the use of naval warships to prevent refugees – many of them fleeing the horrors of Syria and Yemen – from crossing the Mediterranean. When her rhetoric became too vile even for the leather-skinned editors of the Fourth Estate, Redmond merely had to look across the Pond to find any number of right-wing media outlets in the United States eager to beam her prejudices into the homes of the ignorant and the dispossessed. Indeed, Redmond had been only days from moving to the United States to work for Fox News when she had been seized by Resurrection. Carradine knew that if he opened Twitter, or switched to Fox itself, he would be swamped in partisan bile and hate. For every person shocked by Redmond’s murder there would be another openly celebrating; for every person applauding Resurrection for taking the fight to the goons and trolls of the alt-Right, there would be another – like Carradine himself – who knew that violence only made the situation far worse.
He turned from the window and began to unpack. The sealed envelope was at the top of his suitcase. He took it out and placed it on the bed. To try to clear his head he did fifty press-ups, took a shower and changed into a fresh set of clothes. Whatever was in the package, he knew that he could now be incriminating himself by passing documents to a suspected member of a terrorist organisation. The Redmond murder had changed the game. He had been transformed – without prior agreement – into a foot soldier in the global struggle against Resurrection. To hell with the Service; Carradine needed to do what he had to do. He picked up the package and felt it in his hands. He could make out the edges of the passport, the outline of the document.
He hesitated momentarily – then cut at the Sellotape using the knife on a bottle opener from the minibar. He reached inside the package.
It was a British passport, just as Mantis had said it would be. Carradine opened it to the back. A photograph of Bartok, identical to the one he was carrying in his wallet, looked out at him from the identity page. Bartok was identified as ‘Maria Consuela Rodriguez’, a British citizen, born 8 June 1983. A Santander credit card fell out of the passport and dropped onto the floor. The name MS M RODRIGUEZ was stamped across the bottom. The back of the card was unsigned.
Carradine reached into the package and pulled out a smaller rectangular envelope. The envelope was sealed. No name or address had been written on it, only the word ‘LASZLO’ in block capitals. This time he did not bother using the knife. He tore the envelope open with his hands.
Inside was a single piece of white A4 paper, folded twice. The letter was typed.
IF THIS MESSAGE FINDS YOU IT IS A MIRACLE. TRUST THE PERSON WHO GIVES IT TO YOU.
YOU ARE NOT SAFE. THEY HAVE WORKED OUT WHERE YOU ARE. IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THEY FIND YOU.
I CANNOT HELP YOU EXCEPT BY GIVING YOU THESE GIFTS. USE THEM WISELY. THE NUMBER IS 0812.
I AM THE MAN WHO TOOK YOU TO THE SEA.
10 (#ulink_a06fe823-3c86-5989-87c1-05b2bc48cc82)
Carradine read the message several times trying to decipher what was behind Mantis’s language. He assumed that 0812 was the Pin number for the credit card though he doubted that Bartok, should he ever find her, would risk using it more than once; to do so would be to pinpoint her location to anyone tracking the account. ‘The man who took you to the sea’ sounded romantic, but Carradine was wary of leaping to that conclusion without stronger evidence. Yet the tone of the letter was unquestionably personal. Mantis seemed to be distancing himself from the Service in order to send the warning. Who were ‘THEY’? The Service? The Agency? The Russians? Almost every law enforcement and intelligence service in the world was hunting Resurrection activists; all of them would have liked to get their hands on Lara Bartok. The only section that seemed unequivocal to him was the opening paragraph, which reinforced the idea that Mantis had employed Carradine in good faith and had been honest about the difficulty of finding ‘LASZLO’.
There was a safe in his room. Carradine asked for some Sellotape to be sent up from reception. He sealed the letter, the credit card and the passport back inside the package and put it in the safe. Just as he was finishing he heard his phone ping. Mantis had finally replied.
Glad you’ve arrived safely. Meeting is at the Four Seasons later this evening. Let me know how it goes.
Carradine understood that he was to go to the Four Seasons and to leave the money for ‘Abdullah Aziz’ at the reception desk. It was a simple enough task, yet he was apprehensive. He took the €2,000 from his satchel, adding a thousand more from his wallet, and wrote Aziz’s name on the envelope.
He looked at the map of Casablanca. The Four Seasons was on the eastern side of the city, close to a cluster of bars and restaurants on the Corniche. It was too far to walk but Carradine set out on foot, intending to catch a taxi en route. He took nothing with him except his wallet, his phone and the envelope containing the money. He was wearing a dark blue linen jacket and walked with both the wallet and the envelope buttoned into the inside pockets. It was still very hot but he did not want to have to take the jacket off and run the risk of it being snatched by an opportunistic thief.
He quickly found himself in a maze of narrow, dilapidated streets in the old medina to the west of the port. This was Morocco as he had imagined it: low brick houses painted in blocks of pale greens, blues and yellows with shuttered windows and crumbling plasterwork. He took out his phone and began to take photographs in the fading evening light, the writer in him aware that the details of what he saw – the wooden carts laden with fresh fruits and spices; the old women fanning themselves in shaded doorways; the raggedy children kicking a football in the street – might one day be useful to him. At the same time he was working his cover. On the small chance that he was being followed, C.K. Carradine had carte blanche to snoop around, to be seen taking photographs and scribbling notes, to loiter in the lobbies of five-star hotels or to meet a contact in a fashionable restaurant. If asked to explain why he was carrying €3,000 in cash, he could say that he did not fully trust the safe in his hotel and preferred to carry his personal belongings with him. His legend was foolproof. This was, after all, why Mantis had hired him.
Carradine was lining up a photograph of a rusting truck laden with watermelons when he saw a WhatsApp message from Mantis drop down onto the screen.
Change of plan. Meeting at Sheraton, not 4 Seasons. Sorry for inconvenience.
He wondered if he was the victim of an elaborate practical joke. Ramón was staying at the Sheraton. Was the Spaniard Mantis’s contact? Carradine hoped that the location was a bizarre coincidence, a consequence of the meagre number of top-class hotels in Casablanca, but could not shake off a sixth sense that Ramón and Mantis were somehow involved with one another. Perhaps Mantis had arranged for them to catch the same flight so that Ramón could keep an eye on him? It was impossible to know.
Carradine looked along the street. He was standing at the edge of a busy market square, a smell of mint and burning charcoal on the air. The narrow switchback streets of the old city had spun him around; he had no idea if he was facing north, south, east or west. He used his phone to pinpoint his position and began to walk in the general direction of the Sheraton, eventually finding an exit from the souk through the old walls of the Medina. Twenty minutes later Carradine was standing on the steps of the hotel. It was just before eight o’clock. A bored, uniformed guard indicated that he should pass through a metal detector. Carradine did so. Despite the fact that an alarm sounded as he walked through, the guard – who was wearing gloves and holding a plastic security wand – waved him on.
The lobby of the hotel was a vast marble atrium dominated by palm trees and wide marble columns. A mezzanine balcony overlooked the ground floor. A cleaning woman was polishing a vase near a window on the street side of the hotel. Carradine was aware that Ramón might be nursing a pre-prandial mojito or cup of coffee in one of the nooks and crannies of the lobby. He did not want to be spotted by the Spaniard and then engaged in conversation. He did not trust him and was sure that Ramón’s ebullient good cheer was a front disguising a volatile, possibly even violent personality. It occurred to him that he was now involved in precisely the sort of scenario he had written about many times in his fiction. The spy – amateur or otherwise – was always at risk of running into a friend or acquaintance in the field. Carradine quickly prepared a cover story, on the off-chance that he was identified, and walked towards the reception desk.
Had he dramatised the scene in one of his novels, he would have made more of the sense of trepidation his protagonist felt as he set about completing his first mission on behalf of the Service. In reality, Carradine found the task almost embarrassingly easy. He approached the youngest – and therefore potentially the least experienced – of three female members of staff, smiled at her warmly, explained that he wanted to leave a package for one of the hotel guests and handed her the envelope. The receptionist recognised ‘Abdullah Aziz’ as the name of a guest, placed the envelope in a pigeonhole beneath the desk and did not ask Carradine for his name. At no point did he spot Ramón, nor any individual who might conceivably have been the waiting Aziz. It was all very straightforward.
Within ten minutes Carradine was back on the tenth floor of his hotel, basking in the cool of the air-conditioning, sending a message to Mantis informing him that ‘the meeting had been a success’. A short time later Mantis responded, telling Carradine that ‘everybody was happy with the way things went’. Despite completing the task successfully, Carradine experienced an unexpected stab of disappointment and irritation that he had not been tested more thoroughly. Perhaps it was the nagging sense that all was not quite as it seemed. He did not fully trust Mantis. He was profoundly suspicious of Ramón. Having read the note inside the package, he was concerned that there was a plot to kidnap Lara Bartok, perhaps even to kill her. If that was the case, was he being used as an unwitting pawn?
He took a second shower, went down to the bar, ordered a vodka martini and tried to convince himself that his doubts were just the flights of fancy of a novelist with an overactive imagination. A man sitting two stools away was wearing an aftershave so overpowering that it began to affect the taste of the martini. Carradine ordered a second, carrying it to a table a safe distance from the bar. As he walked across the lounge, a vodka martini in one hand, a packet of cigarettes in the other, he realised that he was casting himself as the central character in a spy story no different to the ones he had written in the pages of his books or seen a hundred times at the movies.
He sat down and tried to work out the link between Mantis, Ramón and Bartok. Carradine acknowledged that he was a need-to-know support agent, not a fully-fledged spy cognisant of all the intelligence about ‘LASZLO’. In this respect, Mantis was not obliged to tell him everything he knew. By the same token, the Service was under no obligation to inform Carradine that Ramón had been sent to keep an eye on him. Besides, there was every reason to believe that Ramón was just an overly friendly passenger Carradine just happened to have bumped into on the plane. He had been shown no evidence to suggest that Ramón was ‘Abdullah Aziz’, nor was it credible that Mantis would have wanted him to pay Ramón for his services. The only thing that Carradine knew for certain was that Bartok was on the run. Mantis wanted to protect her, for reasons that were not yet clear, but had not been in a position to leave London in order to do so. As a result, he had hired Carradine to assist in the search for her.
Carradine stared at the pitted olive at the bottom of the glass. None of it made sense. The vodka had blunted, not sharpened his wits. He had been active as a support agent for less than twenty-four hours and already felt lost in the wilderness of mirrors.
He settled the bill and walked outside. There was a taxi idling in front of the hotel. Carradine climbed in and asked to be taken to the Corniche. He offered a cigarette to the driver who placed it, unlit, in a recess behind the gearstick. Sated by alcohol, Carradine sat in the back seat texting his father, trying to forget about his responsibilities to the Service and to set aside his doubts about Mantis and Ramón. He enjoyed the sepia light of the Moroccan evening and the movement of the taxi as it weaved from street to street. He wanted to convince himself that there was no deeper meaning to the information he had gleaned from the letter, no dark conspiracy playing out on the streets of Casablanca. But it was impossible. He knew, in the way that you know that a friendship is doomed or a love affair coming to an end, that something was not quite right. He was sure that he was being manipulated. He was certain that he had been sent to Morocco for a purpose that had not yet been made clear to him. The chances of finding Bartok were so remote that the words of warning contained in Mantis’s letter – ‘IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THEY FIND YOU’ – seemed to Carradine as vague and yet as terrifying as lines from a work of fiction. So why had he been handed such a task?
The taxi stopped at a set of lights. An elderly beggar came to the window, pressing his face against the glass. The driver swore in Arabic as the beggar knocked on the window, imploring Carradine to give him money. He dug around in his trouser pocket for some loose change and was about to roll down the window and pass the money to the beggar when the taxi accelerated down the street.
Carradine turned to see that the man had fallen over.
‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘Problème! Arrêtez!’
The driver ignored him, made a right-hand turn and headed north towards the sea. Through the back window, Carradine could see the beggar being helped to his feet.
‘He fell,’ he said in French, thinking of Redmond and his failure to act.
‘They all fall,’ the driver replied. Ils tombent tous.
‘Pull over!’
Again Carradine’s request was ignored. ‘I want to go back,’ he said, lamenting the fact that his French was not good enough to make himself properly understood. ‘Take me back to the old man.’
‘Non,’ the driver replied. He wanted his fare, he wanted to take the tourist to the Corniche. ‘You don’t go back, mister,’ he said, now speaking in English. ‘You can never go back.’
11 (#ulink_f4091ebf-709f-58af-ac44-38a05b95e6fc)
By the time Carradine had persuaded the driver to stop, it was too late. They had driven too far from the fallen man. As an expression of his annoyance, Carradine paid him off without a tip and covered the remaining mile on foot.
He found a restaurant on the Corniche where he continued to drink. On top of the two martinis, he bought a bottle of local white wine followed by successive vodka tonics at a bar across the street. Falling in with a group of businessmen from Dijon who knew a place nearby, Carradine found himself at a table in a packed nightclub on the oceanfront drinking Cuba libres until five in the morning. He eventually stumbled back to his hotel at dawn, his mind cleared of worry, his doubts put to rest.
He woke up at midday and ordered room service, necking two ibuprofen with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice followed by three black coffees courtesy of the Nespresso machine in his room. There was a spa on the third floor of the hotel. Carradine booked a hammam
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Charles Cumming
‘Recommended. I read it one breathless sitting’ Ian RankinHe risked it all to become a spy. Now he must pay the price.A gripping new standalone spy thriller from the winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller of the Year and ‘the master of the modern spy thriller’ (Mail on Sunday).One simple task for British Intelligence takes him into a world of danger.Successful novelist Kit Carradine has grown restless. So when British Intelligence invites him to enter the secret world of espionage, he willingly takes a leap into the unknown.But the glamour of being a spy is soon tainted by fear and betrayal, as Carradine finds himself in Morocco on the trail of Lara Bartok – a mysterious fugitive with links to international terrorism.Bartok is a leading figure in Resurrection, a violent revolutionary movement whose brutal attacks on prominent right-wing politicians have spread hatred and violence throughout the West.As the coils of a ruthless plot tighten around him, Carradine finds himself drawn to Lara. Caught between competing intelligence services who want her dead, he soon faces an awful choice: to abandon Lara to her fate or to risk everything trying to save her.‘An instant classic of the genre’ Mick Herron‘The Man Between is up there with the best – full of thrills, wit and fine writing’ Peter Robinson
Copyright (#uea6a51c1-37b5-5a99-bd0e-480ac96f8ada)
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Charles Cumming 2018
Cover jacket design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photographs © Tim Robinson/Arcangel Images
Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Source ISBN: 9780008200312
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2018 ISBN: 9780008200336
Version: 2018-09-21
Dedication (#uea6a51c1-37b5-5a99-bd0e-480ac96f8ada)
For Luke Janklow and Will Francis
Epigraph (#uea6a51c1-37b5-5a99-bd0e-480ac96f8ada)
‘There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.’
Graham Greene, The Comedians
Contents
Cover (#u287faa0e-9661-548e-a7a7-36b4d0af8342)
Title Page (#u3def449d-e082-5e83-81b5-a8840fed8aa0)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Moscow
London: Eighteen Months Later
Chapter 1 (#u7c920aea-e397-5139-a328-0d2ac0775d36)
Chapter 2 (#uf9d2493c-dee6-5315-8eeb-77d76eac3d34)
Chapter 3 (#ufa7889c5-53d8-5739-978d-7ed82ce4029a)
Chapter 4 (#ufdead4f0-2081-5a75-9eef-d586d5512bbe)
Chapter 5 (#uf414cd8f-ac92-5abe-a543-9bc458e7956a)
Chapter 6 (#u8c02c906-bd09-5390-b648-ddfafb2f992f)
Chapter 7 (#u368fbe45-3aa8-5ba7-838e-e4a86d65a99c)
Chapter 8 (#ued6899c7-02db-5e92-802d-d7bda4fc7ebb)
Chapter 9 (#u0ba07aa4-1a9f-54fa-8faa-cce857988337)
Chapter 10 (#ud31bf5f9-4ae7-558a-9378-7375be6f05d9)
Chapter 11 (#ubbf23007-b041-56b9-86cf-cf60d16378a1)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
By Charles Cumming
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
‘Would you prefer to talk or to write everything down?’
‘Talk,’ she said.
Somerville crossed the room and activated the voice recorder. The American had brought it from the Embassy. There was a small microphone attached to a stand, a glass of tap water and a plate of biscuits on the table.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
‘Ready.’
Somerville leaned over the microphone. His voice was clear, his language concise.
‘Statement by LASZLO. Chapel Street, SW1. August nineteenth. Officer presiding: L4. Begins now.’ He checked his watch. ‘Seventeen hundred hours.’
Lara Bartok adjusted the collar of her shirt. She caught Somerville’s eye. He nodded at her, indicating that she should start. She brought the microphone slightly closer to her and took a sip of water. The American realised that he was standing in her eyeline. He moved to a chair on the far side of the room. Bartok did not continue until he was still and completely silent.
‘In the beginning, there were seven,’ she said.
SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE EYES ONLY / STRAP 1
STATEMENT BY LARA BARTOK (‘LASZLO’)
CASE OFFICERS: J.W.S./S.T.H. – CHAPEL STREET
REF: RESURRECTION/SIMAKOV/CARRADINE
FILE: RE2768X
PART 1 of 5
‘In the beginning there were seven. Ivan [Simakov], of course, who is still rightly regarded as the intellectual and moral architect of Resurrection;
and
, both American citizens whom Simakov had met in Zuccotti Park at the height of Occupy Wall Street.
, formerly of the Service;
, the cyber expert who had been active in Anonymous for several years and was instrumental in planning and orchestrating many of Resurrection’s most effective operations in the United States. Ivan had a way of contacting such people on the dark web, of gaining their trust over time, of drawing them out into the open. I used to say that he was like a child on a beach, pouring salt onto the sand so that the creatures of the deep would rise to the surface. He enjoyed this image very much. It is no secret that Ivan Simakov liked to think of himself as a man with extraordinary capabilities.
Also present that day were Thomas Frattura, former assistant to Republican Senator Catherine McKendrick, who had been a prominent figure in Disrupt J20; and me, Lara Bartok, originally from Gyula, in eastern Hungary, about whom you know almost everything.
These seven individuals met only once, in a suite at the Redbury Hotel on East 29th Street in Manhattan. Of course, no cellphones, laptops or Wi-Fi enabled devices of any kind were permitted to be brought to the hotel. Each of the guests who entered the suite was searched by Ivan and myself and asked to remove watches and other items of jewellery, all of which we then took – along with personal belongings including bags and shoes – to a room on a separate floor of the hotel for the duration of the meeting. Ivan, who was meeting
and
for the first time, introduced himself as a Russian citizen, born in Moscow and educated in Paris, who was hoping to effect political change in his own country by inspiring ‘an international resistance movement directed against the advocates and enablers of autocratic and quasi-fascist regimes around the world’.
Frattura asked him to explain in more detail what he meant by this. I remember that Ivan paused. He always had a good sense of theatre. He crossed the suite and opened the curtains. It was a wet morning, there had been heavy rain all night. Through the glass it looked as though the thick fog of the New York skyline was going to seep into the room. What he said next was the best of him. In fact his response to Frattura would form the basis of all the early statements released on behalf of Resurrection outlining our movement’s basic goals and rationale.
‘Those who know that they have done wrong,’ he said. ‘Those who have lied in order to achieve their political goals. Those who consciously spread fear and hate. Those who knowingly benefit from greed and corruption. Any person who has helped to bring about the current political crisis in the United States by spreading propaganda and misinformation. Those who aid and abet the criminal regime in Moscow. Those who lied and manipulated in order to see England (sic) break from the European Union. Those who support and actively benefit from the collapse of secular Islamic states; who crush dissent and free speech and willingly erode basic human rights. Any person seeking to spread the virus of male white supremacy or deliberately to stoke anti-Semitism or to suppress women’s rights in any form. All of these people – we will begin in the United States and countries such as Russia, the Netherlands, Turkey and the United Kingdom – are legitimate targets for acts of retribution. Bankers. Journalists. Businessmen. Bloggers. Lobbyists. Politicians. Broadcasters. They are to be chosen by us – by you – on a case-by-case basis and their crimes exposed to the widest possible audience.’
The beauty of Ivan’s idea was that it was individually targeted. This is what made it different to Antifa, to Black Lives Matter, to Occupy, to all those other groups who were only ever interested in public protest, in rioting, in civil disorder for its own sake. Those groups changed nothing in terms of people’s behaviour but instead gave various parties a chance merely to pose, to demonstrate their own virtue. There is a great difference between people of action and people of words, no? One thing you can say about Ivan Simakov, without a shadow of doubt, is that he was a man of action.
At no point did anybody suggest that the targets for Resurrection were too broadly defined. We were all what you would call in English ‘fellow travellers’. We were all – with the exception of Mr Frattura – in our twenties or early thirties. We were angry. Very angry. We wanted to do something. We wanted to fight back. We had grown up with the illegal wars in Iraq and Syria. We had lived through the financial crisis and seen not one man nor woman imprisoned for their crimes. All of us had been touched by the manifest corruption and greed of the first two decades of the new century. We felt powerless. We felt that the world as we knew it was being taken away from us. We lived and breathed this conviction and yearned to do something about it. Ivan was a brilliant man, possessed of fanatical zeal, as well as what I always recognised as considerable vanity. But nobody could ever accuse him of lacking passion and the yearning for change.
A policy of non-violence was immediately and enthusiastically endorsed by the group. At that stage nobody thought of themselves as the sort of people who would be involved in assassinations, in bombings, in terrorist behaviour of any kind. Everybody knew that deaths – accidental or otherwise – of innocent civilians would quickly strip the movement of popular support and allow the very people who were being targeted for retribution to accuse Resurrection of ‘fascism’, of murder, of association with nihilistic, left-wing paramilitary groups. This, of course, is exactly what happened.
Ivan spoke about his ideas for evading capture, eluding law enforcement and intelligence services, men such as yourselves. ‘This is the only meeting of its kind between us that will ever take place,’ he said. There were silent nods of understanding. People already respected him. They had experienced at first-hand the force of his personality. Once you had met Ivan Simakov, you never forgot him. ‘We will never again communicate or speak face-to-face. Nothing may come from what we discuss today. I have a plan for our first attacks, all of which may be prevented from taking place or fail to have the desired effect on international opinion. I cannot tell you about these plans, just as I would not expect you to divulge details of your own operations as you create them. The Resurrection movement could burn out. The Resurrection movement could have a seismic effect on public attitudes to the liars and enablers of the alt-Right. Who knows? Personally, I am not interested in fame. I have no interest in notoriety or my place in the history books. I have no wish to spend the rest of my life under surveillance or in prison, to live as the guest of a foreign embassy in London, or to save my own skin by making a deal with the devils in Moscow. I wish to be invisible, as you should all wish to be invisible.’
So much has happened since then. I have been through many lives and many cities because of my relationship with Ivan Simakov. At that moment I was proud to be at his side. He was in the prime of life. I was honoured to be his girlfriend and to be associated with Resurrection. Now, of course, the movement has moved deeper and deeper into violence, further and further away from the goals and ideals expressed on that first day in New York.
They were so different, but when I think of Ivan, I cannot help thinking of Kit. On the boat he told me that I was like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, the faithless woman at the side of a revolutionary zealot. Kit was romantic like that, always living at the edge of what was real, as if life was a book he had written, a movie he had seen, and all of us were characters in the story. He was kinder than Ivan, in many ways also braver. I confess to you that I miss him in a way that I did not expect to. I wish you would tell me what happened to him. In his company, I felt safe. It had been a very long time since any man had made me feel that way.
MOSCOW (#uea6a51c1-37b5-5a99-bd0e-480ac96f8ada)
The apartment was on a quiet street in the Tverskoy district of Moscow, about two kilometres from the Kremlin, a five-minute walk from Lubyanka Square. From the third floor, Curtis could hear the ripple of snow tyres on the wet winter streets. He told Simakov that for the first few days in the city he had thought that all the cars had punctures.
‘Sounds like they’re driving on bubble wrap,’ he said. ‘I keep wanting to tell them to put air in their tyres.’
‘But you don’t speak Russian,’ Simakov replied.
‘No,’ said Curtis. ‘I guess I don’t.’
He was twenty-nine years old, born and raised in San Diego, the only son of a software salesman who had died when Curtis was fourteen. His mother had been working as a nurse at Scripps Mercy for the past fifteen years. He had graduated from Cal Tech, taken a job at Google, quit at twenty-seven with more than four hundred thousand dollars in the bank thanks to a smart investment in a start-up. Simakov had used Curtis in the Euclidis kidnapping. Moscow was to be his second job.
If he was honest, the plan sounded vague. With Euclidis, every detail had been worked out in advance. Where the target was staying, what time his cab was booked to take him over to Berkeley, how to shut off the CCTV outside the hotel, where to switch the cars. The Moscow job was different. Maybe it was because Curtis didn’t know the city; maybe it was because he didn’t speak Russian. He felt out of the loop. Ivan was always leaving the apartment and going off to meet people; he said there were other Resurrection activists taking care of the details. All Curtis had been told was that Ambassador Jeffers always sat in the same spot at Café Pushkin, at the same time, on the same night of the week. Curtis was to position himself a few tables away, with the woman from St Petersburg role-playing his girlfriend, keep an eye on Jeffers and make an assessment of the security around him. Simakov would be in the van outside, watching the phones, waiting for Curtis to give the signal that Jeffers was leaving. Two other Resurrection volunteers would be working the sidewalk in the event that anybody tried to step in and help. One of them would have the Glock, the other a Ruger.
‘What if there’s more security than we’re expecting?’ he asked. ‘What if they have plain clothes in the restaurant I don’t know about?’
Curtis did not want to seem distrustful or unsure, but he knew Ivan well enough to speak up when he had doubts.
‘What are you so worried about?’ Simakov replied. He was slim and athletic with shoulder-length black hair tied back in a ponytail. ‘Things go wrong, you walk away. All you have to do is eat your borscht, talk to the girl, let me know what time Ambassador Fuck pays his cheque.’
‘I know. I just don’t like all the uncertainty.’
‘What uncertainty?’ Simakov took one of the Rugers off the table and packed it into the bag. Curtis couldn’t tell if he was angry or just trying to concentrate on the thousand plans and ideas running through his mind. It was always hard to judge Simakov’s mood. He was so controlled, so sharp, lacking in any kind of hesitation or self-doubt. ‘I told you, Zack. This is my city. These are my people. Besides, it’s my ass on the line if things go wrong. Whatever happens, you two lovebirds can stay inside, drink some vodka, try the stroganoff. The Pushkin is famous for it.’
Curtis knew that there was nothing more to be said about Jeffers. He tried to change the subject by talking about the weather in Moscow, how as a Californian he couldn’t get used to going from hot to cold to hot all the time when he was out in the city. He didn’t want Ivan thinking he didn’t have the stomach for the fight.
‘What’s that?’
‘I said it’s weird the way a lot of the old buildings have three sets of doors.’ Curtis kept talking as he followed Simakov into the kitchen. ‘What’s that about? To keep out the cold?’
‘Trap the heat,’ Simakov replied. He was carrying the Glock.
Curtis couldn’t think of anything else to say. He was in awe of Simakov. He didn’t know how to challenge him or to tell him how proud he was to be serving alongside him in the front ranks of Resurrection. Ivan gave off an aura of otherworldly calm and expertise which was almost impossible to penetrate. Curtis knew that he had styled himself as a mere foot soldier, one of tens of thousands of people around the world with the desire to confront bigotry and injustice. But to Curtis, Simakov was the Leader. There was nothing conventional or routine about him. He was extraordinary.
‘I just want to say that I’m glad you got me out here,’ he said.
‘That’s OK, Zack. You were the right man for the job.’
Simakov opened one of the cupboards in the kitchen. He was looking for something.
‘I need some oil, clean this thing,’ he said, indicating the gun.
‘I could go out and get you some,’ Curtis suggested.
‘Don’t you worry about it.’ He slapped him on the back, tugging him forwards, like a bear hug from a big brother. ‘Anyway, haven’t you forgotten? You don’t speak Russian.’
The bomb detonated six minutes later, at twenty-three minutes past four in the afternoon. The explosion, which also took the life of a young mother and her baby daughter in a corner apartment on the fourth floor of the building, was initially believed to have been caused by a faulty gas cylinder. When it was discovered that Zack Curtis and Ivan Simakov had been killed in the incident, a division of Alpha Group, Russia’s counter-terrorism task force, was dispatched to the scene. Russian television reported that Simakov had been killed by an improvised explosive device which detonated accidentally only hours before a planned Resurrection strike against the American ambassador to the Russian Federation, Walter P. Jeffers, former chairman of the Jeffers Company and a prominent donor to the Republican party.
News of Simakov’s death spread quickly. Some believed that the founder of Resurrection had died while in the process of building a home-made bomb; others were convinced that Russian intelligence had been watching Simakov and that he had been assassinated on the orders of the Kremlin. To deter Resurrection opponents and sympathisers alike, Simakov’s remains were interred in an unmarked grave in Kuntsevo Cemetery on the outskirts of Moscow. Curtis was buried two weeks later in San Diego. More than three thousand Resurrection supporters lined the route taken by the funeral cortège.
LONDON (#uea6a51c1-37b5-5a99-bd0e-480ac96f8ada)
1 (#ulink_3b5ec1c7-ef82-529e-a6f5-7e4ba03cce4f)
Like a lot of things that later become very complicated, the situation began very simply.
A few days short of his thirty-sixth birthday, Christopher ‘Kit’ Carradine – known professionally as C.K. Carradine – was walking along Bayswater Road en route to a cinema in Notting Hill, smoking a cigarette and thinking about nothing much in particular, when he was stopped by a tall, bearded man wearing a dark blue suit and carrying a worn leather briefcase.
‘Excuse me?’ he said. ‘Are you C.K. Carradine?’
Carradine had been writing thrillers professionally for almost five years. In that time he had published three novels and been recognised by members of the public precisely twice: the first time while buying a pot of Marmite in a branch of Tesco Metro in Marylebone; the second while queuing for a drink after a gig at the Brixton Academy.
‘I am,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry to stop you,’ said the man. He was at least fifteen years older than Carradine with thinning hair and slightly beady eyes which had the effect of making him seem strung out and flustered. ‘I’m a huge fan. I absolutely love your books.’
‘That’s really great to hear.’ Carradine had become a writer almost by accident. Being recognised on the street was surely one of the perks of the job, but he was so surprised by the compliment that he couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Your research, your characters, your descriptions. All first class.’
‘Thank you.’
‘The tradecraft. The technology. Rings absolutely true.’
‘I really appreciate you saying that.’
‘I should know. I work in that world.’ Carradine was suddenly in a different conversation altogether. His father had worked for British Intelligence in the 1960s. Though he had told Carradine very little about his life as a spy, his career had fired his son’s interest in the secret world. ‘You must have too, judging by your inside knowledge. You seem to understand espionage extraordinarily well.’
The opportunist in Carradine, the writer hungry for contacts and inspiration, took a half-step forward.
‘No. I roamed around in my twenties. Met a few spies along the way, but never got the tap on the shoulder.’
The bearded man stared with his beady eyes. ‘I see. Well, that surprises me.’ He had a polished English accent, un-ashamedly upper-class. ‘So you haven’t always been a writer?’
‘No.’
Given that he was such a fan, Carradine was intrigued that the man hadn’t known this. His biography was all over the books: Born in Bristol, C.K. Carradine was educated at the University of Manchester. After working as a teacher in Istanbul, he joined the BBC as a graduate trainee. His first novel, Equal and Opposite, became an international bestseller. C.K. Carradine lives in London. Perhaps people didn’t bother reading the jacket blurbs.
‘And do you live around here?’
‘I do.’ Four years earlier, he had sold the film rights to his first novel to a Hollywood studio. The film had been made, the film had bombed, but the money he had earned had allowed him to get a mortgage on a small flat in Lancaster Gate. Carradine didn’t anticipate being able to pay off the mortgage until sometime around his eighty-fifth birthday, but at least it was home. ‘And you?’ he said. ‘Are you private sector? HMG?’
The bearded man stepped to one side as a pedestrian walked past. A brief moment of eye contact suggested that he was not in a position to answer Carradine’s question with any degree of candour. Instead he said: ‘I’m working in London at present’ and allowed the noise from a passing bus to take the enquiry away down the street.
‘Robert,’ he said, raising his voice slightly as a second bus applied air brakes on the opposite side of the road. ‘You go by “Kit” in the real world, is that correct?’
‘That’s right,’ Carradine replied, shaking his hand.
‘Tell you what. Take my card.’
Somewhat unexpectedly, the man lifted up his briefcase, balanced it precariously on a raised knee, rolled his thumb over the three-digit combination locks and opened it. As he reached inside, lowering his head and searching for a card, Carradine caught sight of a pair of swimming goggles. By force of habit he took notes with his eyes: flecks of grey hair in the beard; bitten fingernails; the suit jacket slightly frayed at the neck. It was hard to get a sense of Robert’s personality; he was like a foreigner’s idea of an eccentric Englishman.
‘Here you are,’ he said, withdrawing his hand with the flourish of an amateur magician. The card, like the man, was slightly creased and worn, but the authenticity of the die-stamped government logo unmistakable:
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE
ROBERT MANTIS
OPERATIONAL CONTROL CENTRE SPECIALIST
A mobile phone number and email address were printed in the bottom left-hand corner. Carradine knew better than to ask how an ‘Operational Control Centre Specialist’ passed his time; it was obviously a cover job. As, surely, was the surname: ‘Mantis’ sounded like a pseudonym.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’d offer you one of my own but I’m afraid writers don’t carry business cards.’
‘They should,’ said Mantis quickly, slamming the briefcase shut. Carradine caught a sudden glimpse of impatience in his character.
‘You’re right,’ he said. He made a private vow to go to Ryman’s and have five hundred cards printed up. ‘So how did you come across my books?’
The question appeared to catch Mantis off guard.
‘Oh, those.’ He set the briefcase down on the pavement. ‘I can’t remember. My wife, possibly? She may have recommended you. Are you married?’
‘No.’ Carradine had lived with two women in his life – one a little older, one a little younger – but the relationships hadn’t worked out. He wondered why Mantis was enquiring about his personal life but added ‘I haven’t met the right person yet’ because it seemed necessary to elaborate on his answer.
‘Oh, you will,’ said Mantis wistfully. ‘You will.’
They had reached a natural break in the conversation. Carradine looked along the street in the direction of Notting Hill Gate, trying to suggest with his body language that he was running late for an important meeting. Mantis, sensing this, picked up the briefcase.
‘Well, it was very nice to meet the famous author,’ he gushed. ‘I really am a huge fan.’ Something in the way he said this caused Carradine suddenly to doubt that Mantis was telling the truth. ‘Do stay in touch,’ he added. ‘You have my details.’
Carradine touched the pocket where he had placed the business card. ‘Why don’t I phone you?’ he suggested. ‘That way you’ll have my number.’
Mantis snuffed the idea out as quickly and as efficiently as he had snapped shut his briefcase.
‘Perhaps not,’ he said. ‘Do you use WhatsApp?’
‘I do.’
Of course. End-to-end encryption. No prying eyes at the Service establishing a link between an active intelligence officer and a spy novelist hungry for ideas.
‘Then let’s do it that way.’ A family of jabbering Spanish tourists bustled past pulling a huge number of wheeled suitcases. ‘I’d love to carry on our conversation. Perhaps we can have a pint one of these days?’
‘I’d like that,’ Carradine replied.
Mantis was already several feet away when he turned around.
‘You must tell me how you do it,’ he called out.
‘Do what?’
‘Make it all up. Out of thin air. You must tell me the secret.’
Writers have a lot of time on their hands. Time to brood. Time to ponder. Time to waste. In the years since he had given up his job at the BBC, Carradine had become a master of procrastination. Faced with a blank page at nine o’clock in the morning, he could find half a dozen ways of deferring the moment at which he had to start work. A quick game of FIFA on the Xbox; a run in the park; a couple of sets of darts on Sky Sports 3. These were the standard – and, as far as Carradine was concerned, entirely legitimate – tactics he employed in order to avoid his desk. There wasn’t an Emmy award-winning box set or classic movie on Netflix that he hadn’t watched when he should have been trying to reach his target of a thousand words per day.
‘It’s a miracle you get any work done,’ his father had said when Carradine unwisely confessed to the techniques he had mastered for circumventing deadlines. ‘Are you bored or something? Sounds as though you’re going out of your tree.’
He wasn’t bored, exactly. He had tried to explain to his father that the feeling was more akin to restlessness, to curiosity, a sense that he had unfinished business with the world.
‘I’m stalled,’ he said. ‘I’ve been very lucky with the books so far, but it turns out being a writer is a strange business. We’re outliers. Solitude is forced on us. If I was a book, I’d be stuck at the halfway stage.’
‘It’s perfectly normal,’ his father had replied. ‘You’re still young. There are bits of you that have not yet been written. What you need is an adventure, something to get you out of the office.’
He was right. Although Carradine managed to work quickly and effectively when he put his mind to it, he had come to realise that each day of his professional life was almost exactly the same as the last. He was often nostalgic for Istanbul and the slightly chaotic life of his twenties, for the possibility that something surprising could happen at any given moment. He missed his old colleagues at the BBC: the camaraderie, the feuds, the gossip. Although writing had been good to him, he had not expected it to become his full-time career at such a comparatively early stage in his life. In his twenties Carradine had worked in a vast, monolithic corporation with thousands of employees, frequently travelling overseas to make programmes and documentaries. In his thirties, he had lived and worked mostly alone, existing for the most part within a five-hundred-metre radius of his flat in Lancaster Gate. He had yet fully to adjust to the change or to accept that the rest of his professional life would likely be spent in the company of a keyboard, a mouse and a Dell Inspiron 3000. To the outside world, the life of a writer was romantic and liberating; to Carradine it sometimes resembled a gilded cage.
All of which made the encounter with Mantis that much more intriguing. Their conversation had been a welcome distraction from the established rhythms and responsibilities of his day-to-day life. At frequent moments over the next twenty-four hours, Carradine found himself thinking about their chat on Bayswater Road. Had it been pre-arranged? Did the ‘Foreign and Commonwealth Office’ – surely a euphemism for the Service – know that C.K. Carradine lived and worked in the area? Had Mantis been sent to feel him out about something? Had the plot of one of his books come too close to a real-world operation? Or was he acting in a private capacity, looking for a writer who might tell a sensitive story using the screen of fiction? An aficionado of conspiracy thrillers, Carradine didn’t want to believe that their meeting had been merely a chance encounter. He wondered why Mantis had declared himself an avid fan of his books without being able to say where or how he had come across them. And surely he was aware of his father’s career in the Service?
He wanted to know the truth about the man from the FCO. To that end he took out Mantis’s business card, tapped the number into his phone and sent a message on WhatsApp.
Very good to meet you. Glad you’ve enjoyed the books. This is my number. Let’s have that pint.
Carradine saw that Mantis had come online. The message he had sent quickly acquired two blue ticks. Mantis was ‘typing’.
Likewise, delighted to run into you. Lunch Wednesday?
Carradine replied immediately.
Sounds good. My neck of the woods or yours?
Two blue ticks.
Mine.
2 (#ulink_4589853e-341f-5e5c-b4cc-ae15dc5ecc5d)
‘Mine’ turned out to be a small, one-bedroom flat in Marylebone. Carradine had expected to be invited to lunch at Wheelers or White’s; that was how he had written similar scenes in his books. Spook meeting spook at the Traveller’s Club, talking sotto voce about ‘the threat from Russia’ over Chablis and fishcakes. Instead Mantis sent him an address on Lisson Grove. He was very precise about the timing and character of the meeting.
Please don’t be late. It goes without saying that this is a private matter, not for wider circulation.
Carradine was about halfway through writing his latest book, still four months from deadline, so on the day of the meeting he took the morning off. He went for a dawn run in Hyde Park, had a shower back at his flat and ate breakfast at the Italian Gardens Café. He was excited by the prospect of seeing Mantis for the second time and wondered what the meeting would hold. The possibility of some sort of involvement with the Service? A scoop that he could fictionalise in a book? Perhaps the whole thing would turn out to be a waste of time. By ten o’clock Carradine was walking east along Sussex Gardens, planning to catch a train from Edgware Road to Angel. With a couple of hours to spare before he was due to meet Mantis, he wanted to rummage around in his favourite record store on Essex Road looking for a rare vinyl for a friend’s birthday.
He was halfway to the station when it began to rain. Carradine had no umbrella and quickened his pace towards Edgware Road. What happened in the next few minutes was an anomaly, a moment that might, in different circumstances, have been designed by Mantis as a test of Carradine’s temperament under pressure. Certainly, in the context of what followed over the next two weeks, it was a chance encounter so extraordinary that Carradine came to wonder whether it had been staged solely for his benefit. Had he written such a scene in one of his novels, it would have been dismissed as a freak coincidence.
He had reached the south-west corner of the busy intersection between Sussex Gardens and Edgware Road. He was waiting to cross at the lights. A teenage girl beside him was nattering away to a friend about boyfriend trouble. ‘So I says to him, I’m like, no way is that happening, yeah? I’m like, he needs to get his shit together because I’m like just not going through with that bullshit again.’ A stooped old man standing to Carradine’s left was holding an umbrella in his right hand. Water was dripping from the umbrella onto the shoulders of Carradine’s jacket; he could feel droplets of rain on the back of his neck. In the next instant he became aware of shouting on the opposite corner of the street, about twenty metres from where he was standing. A well-built man wearing a motorcycle helmet was raining punches through the passenger door of a black BMW. The driver – a blonde woman in her forties – was being dragged from the vehicle by a second man wearing an identical helmet and torn blue jeans. The woman was screaming and swearing. Carradine thought that he recognised her as a public figure but could not put a name to the face. Her assailant, who was at least six feet tall, was dragging her by the hair shouting, ‘Move, you fucking bitch’, and wielding what looked like a hammer.
Carradine had the sense of a moment suspended in time. There seemed to be at least twenty people standing within a few feet of the car. None of them moved. The rest of the traffic at the intersection had come to a standstill. A large white Transit van was parked in front of the BMW. The first man opened a side panel in the van and helped his accomplice to drag the woman inside. Carradine was aware of somebody shouting ‘Stop them! Somebody fucking stop them!’ and of the teenage girl beside him muttering ‘Fucking hell, what the fuck is this, this is bad’ as the door of the van slammed shut. The middle-aged man who had been seated on the driver’s side of the BMW now stumbled out of the car, his hair matted with blood, his face bruised and bleeding, hands raised in the air, imploring his attackers to release the woman. Instead, the man in the torn jeans walked back towards him and swung a single, merciless punch that knocked him out cold. Somebody screamed as he slumped to the ground.
Carradine stepped off the pavement. He had been taking boxing lessons for the past eighteen months: he was tall and fit and wanted to help. He was not sure precisely what he intended to do but recognised that he had to act. Then, as he moved forwards, he saw a pedestrian, standing much closer to the van, approach one of the two assailants. Carradine heard him cry: ‘Stop! Enough!’
‘Hey!’ Carradine added his own voice to the confrontation. ‘Let her go!’
Things then happened very quickly. Carradine felt a hand on his arm, holding him back. He turned to see the girl looking at him, shaking her head, imploring him not to get involved. Carradine would have ignored her had it not been for what came next. A third man suddenly emerged from the Transit van. He was wearing a black balaclava and carrying what looked like a short metal pole. He was much larger than the others, slower in his movements, but went towards the pedestrian and swung the pole first into his knees and then across his shoulders. The pedestrian screamed out in pain and fell onto the street.
At that moment Carradine’s courage deserted him. The man in the balaclava entered the van via the side door and slammed it shut. His two helmeted accomplices also climbed inside and drove quickly away. By the time Carradine could hear a police siren in the distance, the van was already out of sight, accelerating north along Edgware Road.
There was a momentary silence. Several onlookers moved towards the middle-aged man who had been knocked out. He was soon surrounded by the very people who, moments earlier, might have defended him against attack and prevented the abduction of his companion. Through the mêlée, Carradine could see a woman kneeling on the damp street, raising the victim’s head onto a balled-up jacket. For every bystander who was talking on their phone – presumably having called the police – there was another filming the scene, most of them as emotionally detached as a group of tourists photographing a sunset. With the traffic still not moving, Carradine walked across the intersection and tried to reach the BMW. His route was blocked. Car horns were sounding in the distance as a police vehicle appeared at the eastern end of Sussex Gardens. Two uniformed officers jogged towards the fallen men. Carradine realised that he could do nothing other than gawp and stare; it was pointless to hang around, just another passer-by rubbernecking the incident. He was beginning to feel the first quiet thuds of shame that he had failed to act when he heard the word ‘Resurrection’ muttered in the crowd. A woman standing next to him said: ‘Did you see who it was? That journalist from the Express, wasn’t it? Whatserface?’ and Carradine found that he could provide the answer.
‘Lisa Redmond.’
‘That’s right. Poor cow.’
Carradine walked away. It was clear that activists associated with Resurrection had staged the kidnapping. Redmond was a hate figure for the Left, frequently identified as a potential target for the group. So many right-wing journalists and broadcasters had been attacked around the world that it was a miracle she had not been confronted before. Carradine felt wretched that he had not done more. He had witnessed street brawls in the past but never the nerveless brutality displayed by the men who had taken Redmond. He was not due to meet Mantis for another hour and a half. He thought about cancelling the meeting and going home. Carradine told himself that it would have been rash to try to take on three armed men on his own, but wished that he had acted more decisively; his instinct for survival had been stronger than his desire to help.
He wandered down Edgware Road in a daze, eventually going into a café and checking the BBC for a report on what had happened. Sure enough it was confirmed that the ‘right-wing columnist’ Lisa Redmond had been kidnapped by activists associated with Resurrection and her husband beaten up in the act of trying to protect her. Carradine opened Twitter. ‘Fucking bitch had it coming’ was the first of several tweets he saw in defence of the attack, most of which carried the now-familiar hashtags #Resurrection #Alt-RightScum #RememberSimakov #ZackCurtisLives and #FuckOtis. The latter was a reference to the first – and most notorious – Resurrection kidnapping, in San Francisco, of Otis Euclidis, a senior editor at Breitbart News who had been seized from outside his hotel shortly before he had been due to make a speech at Berkeley University. The kidnapping of Redmond was merely the latest in a spate of copycat attacks that had taken place in Atlanta, Sydney, Budapest and beyond. Many of the victims had been held for several weeks and then killed. Some of the recovered bodies had been mutilated. Others, including Euclidis, had never been found.
3 (#ulink_83f28352-899b-5393-841a-1360e1735bb0)
Carradine’s apprehensiveness in the build-up to the meeting with Mantis had been completely erased by what had happened on Sussex Gardens. Arriving at the address on Lisson Grove, he felt numb and dazed. Mantis buzzed him inside without speaking on the intercom. Carradine walked up six flights of stairs to the third floor, slightly out of breath and sweating from the climb. The landing carpet was stained. There was a faux Dutch oil painting on the wall.
‘Kit. Good to see you. Do come in.’ Mantis was standing back from the door, as though wary of being spotted by neighbours. ‘Thank you so much for coming.’
Carradine was led into a sparsely furnished sitting room. He laid his jacket on the back of a brand-new cream leather sofa wrapped in clear plastic. Sunlight was streaming through the windows. The sight of the plastic made him feel constricted and hot.
‘Are you moving in?’ he asked. The flat smelled of old milk and toilet cleaner. There was no indication that Mantis had prepared any food.
‘It’s not my place,’ he replied, closing a connecting door into the hall.
‘Ah.’
So what was it? A safe house? If so, why had Mantis arranged to meet on Service territory? Carradine had assumed they were just going to have a friendly lunch. He looked around. Two mobile phones were charging on the floor by the window. There was a vase of plastic flowers on a table in the centre of the room. Two self-assembly stools were positioned in front of a breakfast bar linking the sitting room to a small kitchen. Carradine could see a jar of instant coffee, a box of teabags and a kettle near the sink. The kitchen was otherwise spotlessly clean.
‘Did you hear about Lisa Redmond?’ Mantis asked.
Carradine hesitated.
‘No,’ he said, feigning surprise. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Grabbed by Resurrection.’ Mantis opened a double-glazed window on to a small parking area at the rear of the building. Cool air poured into the room. ‘Thrown in the back of a Transit van and driven off – in broad bloody daylight.’
‘Christ,’ said Carradine.
He was not a natural liar. In fact, he could not remember the last time he had deliberately concealed the truth in such a way. It occurred to him that it was a bad idea to do so in front of a man who was professionally trained in the darker arts of obfuscation and deceit. Mantis gestured outside in the direction of Edgware Road.
‘A mile away,’ he said. ‘Less! Three men kicked the living shit out of her poor husband, who’s apparently some kind of hotshot TV producer. One of them had a pop at a have-a-go-hero who tried to save the day. It’s all over the news.’
‘What do you think will happen to her?’ Carradine asked, though he knew the answer to his own question.
‘Curtains,’ said Mantis. ‘Another Aldo Moro job.’
Moro, the Italian Prime Minister kidnapped by the Red Brigades in 1978, had been murdered in captivity, his body discovered in the back of a Renault two months later. Carradine wondered why Mantis had made such an obscure historical connection but conceded his point with a nod.
‘I’m surprised she didn’t have any security,’ he said. ‘People kept saying she was a target. In America, employees in the White House, staff at Fox News, prominent Republican officials, they’ve all been carrying guns for months.’
‘Quite right too,’ said Mantis with an impatience that reminded Carradine of the way his temper had flared on Bayswater Road. ‘People have a right to defend themselves. You never know who’s going to come out of the woodwork and take a pop at you.’
Carradine looked at the sofa. Mantis understood that he wanted to sit down and invited him to do so ‘on the plastic cover’. He asked Carradine to switch off his mobile phone. He was not particularly surprised by the request and did as he had been asked.
‘Now if you wouldn’t mind passing it to me.’
Carradine handed over the phone. He was delighted to see Mantis place it inside a cocktail shaker that he had removed from one of the cupboards in the kitchen. He had used an identical piece of tradecraft in his most recent novel, stealing the idea from an article about Edward Snowden.
‘A Faraday cage,’ he said, smiling.
‘If you say so.’ Mantis opened the door of the fridge and put the cocktail shaker inside it. The fridge was completely empty. ‘And if you could just sign this.’ He crossed the room and passed Carradine a pen and a piece of paper. ‘We insist on the Official Secrets Act.’
Carradine’s heart skipped. Without pausing to read the document in any detail, he rested the piece of paper on the table and signed his name at the bottom. It occurred to him that his father must have done exactly the same thing some fifty years earlier.
‘Thank you. You might want to take a look at this.’
Mantis was holding what appeared to be a driving licence. Carradine took it and turned it over. Mantis’s photograph and personal details, as well as a Foreign Office logo and a sample of his signature, were laminated against a pale grey background.
‘This wouldn’t be enough to get you into Vauxhall Cross,’ he said. It was necessary to demonstrate to Mantis that he did not fully trust him. ‘Do you have any other forms of ID?’
As though he had been expecting Carradine’s question, Mantis dipped into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a moulded plastic security pass.
‘Access all areas,’ he said. Carradine had wanted to inspect the pass, if only to experience the buzz of holding a genuine piece of Service kit, but Mantis immediately put it back in his pocket.
‘Always worried about losing it on the number nineteen bus,’ he said.
‘I’m not surprised,’ Carradine replied.
He asked for a glass of water. Mantis produced a chipped William and Kate mug and turned on the cold tap in the kitchen. It spluttered and coughed, spraying water onto his hand. He swore quietly under his breath – ‘fucking thing’ – filled the mug and passed it to Carradine.
‘Who owns this place?’
‘One of ours,’ he replied.
Carradine had met spies before but never in these circumstances and never in such a furtive atmosphere. He leaned back against the thick plastic cover and took a sip from the mug. The water was lukewarm and tasted of battery fluid. He did not want to swallow it but did so. Mantis sat in the only other available seat, a white wooden chair positioned in front of the window.
‘Did you tell anybody that you were coming here today?’ he asked. ‘A girlfriend?’
‘I’m single,’ Carradine replied. He was surprised that Mantis had already forgotten this.
‘Oh, that’s right. You said.’ He crossed his legs. ‘What about your father?’
Carradine wondered how much Mantis knew about William Carradine. A rising star in the Service, forced out by Kim Philby, who had given his name – as well as the identities of dozens of other members of staff – to Moscow. Surely somebody at Vauxhall Cross had told him?
‘He doesn’t know.’
‘And your mother?’ Mantis quickly checked himself. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Of course …’
Carradine’s mother had died of breast cancer when he was a teenager. His father had never remarried. He had recently suffered a stroke that had left him paralysed on one side of his body. Carradine made a point of visiting him regularly at his flat in Swiss Cottage. He was his only surviving blood family and they were very close.
‘I haven’t told anybody,’ he said.
‘Good. So nobody has been made aware of our chat in the street?’
‘Nobody.’
Carradine looked more closely at his interlocutor. He was wearing pale blue chinos and a white Ralph Lauren polo shirt. Carradine was reminded of a line judge at Wimbledon. Mantis’s hair had been cut and his beard trimmed; as a consequence, he no longer looked quite so tired and dishevelled. Nevertheless, there was something second-rate about him. He could not help but give the impression of being very slightly out of his depth. Carradine suspected that he was not the sort of officer handed ‘hot’ postings in Amman or Baghdad. No, Robert Mantis was surely lower down the food chain, tied to a desk in London, obliged to take orders from Service upstarts half his age.
‘Let me get straight to the point.’ The man from the FCO made deliberate and sustained eye contact. ‘My colleagues and I have been talking about you. For some time.’
‘I had a feeling our meeting the other day wasn’t an accident.’
‘It wasn’t.’
Carradine looked around the room. The flat was exactly the sort of place in which a man might be quietly bumped off. No record of the meeting ever happening. CCTV footage from the lobby conveniently erased. Hair samples hoovered up and fingerprints wiped away by a Service support team. The body then placed inside a thick plastic sheet – perhaps the one covering the sofa – and taken outside to the car park. Should he say this in an effort to break the ice? Probably not. Carradine sensed that Mantis wouldn’t find it funny.
‘Don’t look so worried.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You look concerned.’
‘I’m fine.’ Carradine was surprised that Mantis had failed to read his mood. ‘In fact, it did seem a bit odd to me that a serving intelligence officer would talk so openly about working for the Service.’
‘Good.’
‘What do you mean “good”?’
‘I mean that you obviously have sound instincts.’ Carradine felt the plastic rippling beneath him. It was like sitting on a waterbed. ‘You obviously have an aptitude for this sort of thing. It’s what we wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Go on.’
‘You have a Facebook page.’
‘I do.’
‘The other day you were asking for tips about Marrakech. Advertising a talk you’re doing at a literary festival in Morocco.’
Despite the fact that C.K. Carradine’s Facebook page was publicly available, he experienced the numbing realisation that the Service had most probably strip-mined every conversation, email and text message he had sent in the previous six months. He was grateful that he hadn’t run the name ‘Robert Mantis’ through Google.
‘That’s right,’ he said.
‘Get much of a response?’
‘Uh, some restaurant tips. A lot of people recommended the Majorelle Gardens. Why?’
‘How long are you going for?’
‘About three days. I’m doing a panel discussion with another author. We’re being put up in a riad.’
‘Would you be prepared to spend slightly longer in Morocco if we asked?’
It took Carradine a moment to absorb what Mantis had said. Other writers – Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Frederick Forsyth – had worked as support agents for the Service at various points in their careers. Was he being offered the chance to do what his father had done?
‘There’s no reason why I can’t stay there a bit longer,’ he said, trying to make his expression appear as relaxed as possible while his heart began to pound like a jungle drum. ‘Why?’
Mantis laid it out.
‘You may have noticed that we’re somewhat stretched at the moment. Cyber attacks. Islamist terror. Resurrection. The list goes on …’
‘Sure.’ Carradine felt his throat go dry. He wanted to take a sip of water but was worried that Mantis would see his hand shaking.
‘Increasingly, things fall through the gaps. Agents don’t have the support they need. Messages struggle to get through. Information can’t travel in the way that we want it to travel.’
Carradine was nodding. He knew that it was better at this stage to listen rather than to ask questions. At the same time he could feel his vanity jumping up and down with excitement; the flattery implicit in Mantis’s offer, coupled with the chance to honour his father’s career, perhaps even to surpass his achievements, was hitting a sweet spot inside him that he hadn’t known existed.
‘We had a station in Rabat. It was wound up. Folded in with the Americans. Manpower issues, budgetary restrictions. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that all of this is strictly between you and me.’
‘Of course.’
‘I have a desk responsibility for the region. I need to be able to put somebody in front of one or two of our agents out there, just to reassure them that they’re a priority for London. Even though that may not be entirely the case.’
Mantis flashed Carradine a knowing look. Carradine was obliged to return it in kind, nodding as though he was on intimate terms with the complexities of agent-running.
‘I’m afraid it would require you to go to Casablanca as well as Marrakech. Ever been?’
Carradine had heard that modern Casablanca was far removed from the romantic image of the city conjured by Hollywood: a crowded, choking industrial conurbation entirely devoid of charm and interest.
‘Never. But I’ve always wanted to check it out.’
He set the mug of water to one side. In the distance Carradine could hear the sound of sirens, the familiar background soundtrack to life in twenty-first-century London. He wondered if Redmond had already been found and could scarcely believe that within hours of witnessing her kidnapping, he was being offered a chance to work as a support agent for the Service. It was as though Mantis was handing him an opportunity to prove the courage that had so recently been found wanting.
‘Can you be more precise about what exactly you need me to do?’
Mantis seemed pleased that Carradine had asked the question.
‘Writers on research trips provide perfect cover for clandestine work,’ he explained. ‘The inquisitive novelist always has a watertight excuse for poking his nose around. Any unusual or suspicious activity can be justified as part of the artistic process. You know the sort of thing. Atmosphere, authenticity, detail.’
‘I know the sort of thing,’ said Carradine.
‘All you have to do is pack a couple of your paperbacks, make sure your website and Wikipedia page are up to date. In the highly unlikely event that you encounter somebody who doubts your bona fides, just point them to the Internet and hand over a signed copy of Equal and Opposite. Easy.’
‘Sounds like you’ve got it all worked out.’
‘We do!’ Mantis beamed with his beady eyes. Carradine must have looked concerned because he added: ‘Don’t be alarmed. Your responsibilities will be comparatively minimal and require very little exertion on your part.’
‘I’m not alarmed.’
‘There’s no need – indeed no time – for detailed preparation or training. You’ll simply be required to make your way to Casablanca on Monday with various items which will be provided to you by the Service.’
‘What sort of items?’
‘Oh, just some money. Three thousand euros to be paid to a locally based agent. Also a book, most likely a novel or biography of some sort, to be passed on as a cipher.’
‘Who to?’
‘Yassine. A contact of mine from Rabat. Feeling slightly neglected, needs to have his tummy tickled but I’m too busy to fly down. We usually meet up in a restaurant, Blaine’s, which is popular with businessmen and – well – young women of low social responsibility.’ Mantis grinned at the euphemism. ‘Yassine will recognise you, greet you with the phrase, “I remember you from the wedding in London.” You reply: “The wedding was in Scotland.” And your meeting can proceed.’
Carradine was surprised that Mantis was moving at such a pace.
‘You really do have everything worked out,’ he said.
‘I can assure you this is all very normal and straightforward, as long as you can remember what to do.’
‘I can remember …’
‘As for the money, you are to leave that at the reception desk of a five-star hotel under the name “Abdullah Aziz”. A very important contact. He is owed money.’
‘Abdullah Aziz,’ Carradine was trying to remember his answer to Yassine’s question about the wedding. He wondered why Mantis was flooding him with so much information so quickly and wished that he was free to write things down.
‘Sounds easy enough,’ he said. ‘Which five-star hotel?’
‘I’ll let you know in due course.’
Carradine was seated with his palms face down on the sofa’s plastic cover. He became aware that they were soaked in sweat.
‘And what about Marrakech? What am I doing there?’
Mantis was suddenly at a loss for words. Having rushed through Carradine’s responsibilities in Casablanca, he became hesitant to the point of anxiety. Twice he appeared to be on the brink of replying to Carradine’s question only to stop himself, biting the nail on the index finger of his left hand. Eventually he stood up and looked out onto the car park.
‘Marrakech,’ he revealed at last. ‘Well, that’s where things will become slightly more … nuanced.’ The man from the FCO turned and looked into the room, slowly rubbing his hands together as he moved towards the sofa. ‘It’s why we’ve picked you, Kit. We’re going to need you to use your initiative.’
4 (#ulink_17b46b96-c8e2-5fe3-9dc2-bfdf04113d1d)
Mantis explained that there was a woman.
A ‘remarkable young woman, cunning and unpredictable’. She didn’t have a name – at least one that was still ‘operationally useful or relevant’ – and hadn’t been seen for ‘the best part of two years’. She was on the books at the Service but they hadn’t heard ‘hide nor hair of her for far too long’. Mantis explained that he was worried. He knew that she was in trouble and that she needed help. The Service was ‘90 per cent certain’ that the woman was living in north-west Africa under an assumed name and ‘100 per cent certain’ that she wanted to come back to the UK. She had been sighted in Marrakech in the winter and again in the Atlas Mountains only three weeks earlier. ‘Other officers and support agents’ had been looking for her in a variety of locations – Mexico, Cuba, Argentina – but all the evidence pointed to Morocco. All Carradine had to do was keep an eye out for her. The woman knew the country well and it had been easy for her to ‘disappear’ in a place with such a large number of western tourists.
‘That’s it?’ Carradine asked. The job sounded farcical.
‘That’s it,’ Mantis replied.
‘You want me just to wander around Marrakech on the off-chance I run into her?’
‘No, no.’ An apologetic smile. ‘She’s a big reader. Fan of books and literature. There’s a strong possibility that she might show her face at your festival. We just want you to keep your eyes peeled.’
Carradine struggled to think of something constructive to say.
‘If she’s in trouble, why doesn’t she come in? What’s to stop her making contact with you? Why doesn’t she go to her nearest embassy?’
‘I’m afraid it’s a good deal more complicated than that.’
Carradine sensed that he was being lied to. The Service was asking him to look for a woman who was doing everything she could to avoid being found.
‘Is she Spanish?’ he asked.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Mexico. Argentina. Cuba. They’re all Spanish-speaking countries. Tangier is a one-hour flight from Madrid, a short hop on the boat from Tarifa.’
Mantis smiled. ‘I can see that you’re going to be good at this.’
Carradine ignored the compliment.
‘What does she look like?’ he asked.
‘I have a number of photographs that I can show you, but I’m afraid you’ll have to commit them to memory. I can give you a small passport-sized photograph to keep in your wallet as an aide-memoire, but you won’t be able to keep anything digital on your phone or laptop. We can’t risk these images falling into the wrong hands. If your phone was lost or stolen, for example, or you were asked to account for how you knew the woman …’
The task was sounding increasingly strange.
‘Who would be asking those kinds of questions?’
Mantis indicated with an airy wave of the hand that Carradine should not be concerned.
‘If you carry on behaving exactly as you have always behaved whenever you’ve been on a research trip to a foreign city, it’s very unlikely that you would ever be arrested, far less asked anything by anybody about the nature of your work for us. We take every precaution to ensure that our agents – by that I mean you, Kit – have no discernible relationship with British intelligence. Nevertheless, it goes without saying that you must never, under any circumstances, reveal anything under questioning about the arrangement we have made here today.’
‘Of course. Without saying.’
‘You and I will continue to communicate with one another en clair on WhatsApp using the number I provided to you. I will be your only point of contact with the Service. You will never come to Vauxhall, you will rarely meet any of my colleagues. As far as Morocco is concerned, you won’t tell anybody about our arrangement or – heaven forbid – start showing off about it on the phone or by email. Did you put my name into a search engine at all?’
Carradine assumed that Mantis already knew the answer to his own question, but replied truthfully.
‘No. I assumed it would be flagged up.’
‘You were right.’ He looked relieved. ‘By the same token, you mustn’t Google the names of anybody you come into contact with as a result of your work for us, nor carry with you anything that might be at all incriminating. We don’t do exploding pens and invisible ink. Does that sound like something you might be able to manage?’
Carradine felt that he had no choice other than to say: ‘Sure, no problem.’ He was perfectly capable of keeping a secret. He understood the mechanics of deceit. He was keen to do a patriotic job for his country, not least because his own professional life was so low on excitement. The only thing that concerned him was the possibility of being arrested and thrown into a Moroccan jail. But to say that to Mantis, to indicate that he was worried about saving his own skin, might have seemed spineless.
‘Mind if I use the loo?’ he asked.
‘Be my guest.’
Carradine crossed the hall and went into the bathroom. There were no towels on the rail or mats on the floor, no toothbrush or razor in the plastic mug on the basin. A stained shower curtain hung loose over the bath on white plastic hooks, many of which were bent out of shape. He locked the door and ran the tap, staring at his reflection in the mirror. It occurred to him that he was still recovering from the shock of the Redmond kidnapping and had not been thinking clearly about what Mantis was asking him to do. The job certainly promised intrigue and drama. It was a chance to perform a useful service for his country. Carradine would learn from the experience and obtain priceless first-hand research for his books. There was every possibility that he might be asked to work for the Service for a considerable period of time. In short, the situation was profoundly seductive to him.
‘Everything OK?’ Mantis asked as he came back into the living room.
‘Everything’s great.’
‘Come and have a look at these.’
He was holding an iPad. Carradine sat next to him on the sofa and looked at the screen. Mantis began flicking through a series of photographs, presumably of the woman Carradine would be asked to look for in Marrakech.
It was strange. In the same way that he had recognised Lisa Redmond as she was dragged from the car, without at first being able to put a name to her face, Carradine was sure that he had seen pictures of the woman before. She wasn’t a journalist or celebrity. She wasn’t a likely target for Resurrection. But she was some kind of public figure. Perhaps an actress he had seen on stage in London or somebody associated with a news story or political scandal. He could not work it out. It might equally have been the case that Carradine had met her at a party or that the woman had some connection to the film or publishing worlds. She was certainly not a stranger to him.
‘You look as though you recognise her.’
Carradine decided against telling Mantis that he had seen the woman’s face before. His explanation would have sounded confused.
‘No. I’m just trying to take a photograph with my eyes. Commit her face to memory.’
‘It’s a beautiful face.’
Carradine was taken aback by the wistfulness of the remark. ‘It is,’ he said as they shuttled back through the album. The woman had long, dark hair, light brown eyes and slightly crooked teeth. He assumed that most of the photographs had been culled from social media; they had a casual, snapped quality and appeared to cover a period of several years. In two of the pictures the woman was seated at a table in a restaurant, surrounded by people of her own age; in another, she was wearing a powder-blue bikini on a sunny beach, her arm encircling the waist of a handsome, bearded man holding a surfboard. Carradine assumed that he was a boyfriend, past or present.
‘He looks Spanish,’ he said, pointing at the man. ‘Was this taken in Spain?’
‘Portugal. Atlantic coast.’ Mantis reached across Carradine and quickly flicked the photo stream to the next image. ‘You were right. She has a Spanish mother. Speaks the language fluently.’
‘And her father? Where was he from?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’
There was a fixed, unapologetic look on Mantis’s face.
‘And you can’t tell me her name either?’
‘I’m afraid not. It’s better that you know nothing about her, Kit. If you were to start asking the wrong questions, if you were tempted to Google her, for example, it’s not easy to say what might happen to you.’
‘That sounds like a threat.’
‘It wasn’t meant to.’
Mantis directed Carradine’s attention back to the screen. He had a good memory for faces and was confident that he would be able to recognise the woman if he came across her in Morocco.
‘How tall is she?’ he asked.
‘Couple of inches shorter than you.’
‘Hairstyle?’
‘She might have changed it. Might have dyed it. Might have shaved it all off. Anything is possible.’
‘Accent?’
‘Think Ingrid Bergman speaking English.’
Carradine smiled. He could hear the voice in his head.
‘Any other, uh …’ He reached for the euphemism. ‘Distinguishing characteristics?’
Mantis stood up, taking the iPad with him.
‘Of course! I almost forgot.’ He extended his left arm so that it was almost touching Carradine’s forehead. ‘The woman has a tattoo,’ he said, tapping the wrist. ‘Three tiny black swallows just about here.’
Carradine stared at the frayed cuffs of Mantis’s shirt. Veins bulged on his forearm beneath a scattering of black hairs.
‘If it’s a tattoo,’ he said, ‘and she’s trying not to get recognised, don’t you think she might have had it removed?’
Mantis moved his hand onto Carradine’s shoulder. Carradine hoped that he wouldn’t leave it there for long.
‘You don’t miss a trick, do you?’ he said. ‘We’ve obviously picked the right man, Kit. You’re a natural.’
5 (#ulink_c70687e7-fe18-5ef8-8146-a3be6178d2b0)
Mantis said nothing more about the tattoo. Carradine was told that if he spotted the woman, he was to approach her discreetly, ensure that their conversation was neither overheard nor overseen, and then to explain that he had been sent by British intelligence. He was also to pass her a sealed package. This would be delivered by the Service before he left for Morocco.
‘I’m assuming I can’t open this package when I receive it?’
‘That is correct.’
‘Can I ask what will be inside it?’
‘A passport, a credit card and a message to the agent. That is all.’
‘That’s all? Nothing else?’
‘Nothing else.’
‘So why seal it?’
‘I’m not sure I understand your question.’
Carradine was trying to tread the fine line between protecting himself against risk and not appearing to be apprehensive.
‘It’s just that if my bags are searched and they find the package, if they ask me to open it, how do I explain why I’m carrying somebody else’s passport?’
‘Simple,’ Mantis replied. ‘You say that it’s for a friend who left it in London. The same friend whose photo you’re carrying in your wallet.’
‘So how did she get to Morocco without a passport?’
Mantis took a deep breath, as if to suggest that Carradine was starting to ask too many questions. ‘She has two. One Spanish, the other British. OK?’
‘What’s my friend’s name?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I need to know her name. If it’s on the passport, if I’m carrying her picture around, they’ll expect me to know who she is.’
‘Ah.’ Mantis seemed pleased that Carradine had thought of this. ‘The surname on the passport is “Rodriguez”. Christian name “Maria”. Easy enough to remember.’
‘And mundane enough not to draw attention to itself.’
‘It does have that added dimension, yes.’
They remained at the Lisson Grove flat for another half-hour, going over further practical details of Carradine’s trip, including protocols for contacting Vauxhall Cross in the event of an emergency. Mantis insisted that they meet at the flat when Carradine returned from Marrakech, at which point he would be debriefed and given payment, in cash, for any expenses he had run up in Morocco.
‘Feel free to stay somewhere decent in Casablanca,’ he said. ‘We’ll cover your costs, the extra flight as well. Just keep accurate receipts for the bean counters. They’re notoriously stingy when it comes to shelling out for taxis and train tickets.’
As Carradine was leaving, Mantis handed him two envelopes, each containing €1,500. There was no limit to the amount of foreign currency he was permitted to bring into Morocco and Mantis did not think that €3,000 would be considered suspicious. He told Carradine that the sealed package containing the passport and credit card would be delivered to his flat in Lancaster Gate the following day, as well as the novel which was to be used as a book cipher. Mantis reiterated the importance of leaving the sealed package intact, unless Carradine was instructed to open it by law enforcement officials in the UK or Morocco. He did not give an explanation for this request and Carradine did not ask for one. Carradine assumed that the package would contain sensitive documents.
‘Good luck,’ Mantis said, shaking his hand as he left. ‘And thanks for helping out.’
‘No problem.’
Carradine walked out onto Lisson Grove in a state of confusion. He was bewildered by the speed with which Mantis had acted and strung out by the painstaking assimilation of so much information. It seemed bizarre that he should have been asked to undertake work on behalf of the secret state – particularly after such a cursory meeting – and wondered if the entire episode was part of an elaborate set-up. Clearly the content of his novels, the depictions of tradecraft, his observations about the burdens of secrecy and so forth, had convinced the Service that C.K. Carradine was possessed of the ideal temperament to work as a support agent. But how had they known that he would agree so readily to their offer? While working for the BBC in his twenties, Carradine had spoken to three veteran foreign correspondents – two British, one Canadian – each of whom had been tapped up by their respective intelligence services overseas. They had turned down the opportunity on the basis that it would interfere with the objectivity of their work, undermine the relationships they had built up with local sources and potentially bring them into conflict with their host governments. Carradine wished that he had shown a little more of their steadfastness when presented with the dangled carrot of clandestine work. Instead, perhaps because of what had happened to his father, he had demonstrated a rather old-fashioned desire to serve Queen and country, a facet of his character which suddenly seemed antiquated, even naive. He was committed to doing what Mantis had asked him to do, but felt that he had not given himself adequate protection in the event that things went wrong.
Still in a state of apprehension, Carradine took a detour on the way home, purchased a roll of masking tape and found an Internet café in Paddington. He wanted to be certain that Mantis was a bona fide Service employee, not a Walter Mitty figure taking advantage of him either for his own amusement or for some darker purpose which had not yet been made clear.
The café was half-full. Carradine stood over a vacant computer, tore off a small strip of the masking tape and placed it over the lens at the top of the screen. The computer was already loaded with a VPN. In his most recent novel, Carradine had written a chapter in which the principal character was required to comb the Dark Net in order to create a false identity. He had spoken to a hacker a few weeks before and still remembered most of what she had told him during their cloak-and-dagger meeting at a coffee shop in Balham. The trick – apart from disabling the camera – was to use the VPN both to create a false IP address and to encrypt his Internet usage. That way, his activities would be concealed from any prying eyes in Cheltenham and Carradine could investigate the mysterious Mr Mantis without fear of being identified.
As he expected, none of the ‘Robert Mantis’ listings on Facebook could plausibly have been the man he had met in Lisson Grove. There was no Twitter account associated with the name, nor anything on Instagram. Carradine ran Mantis through LinkedIn and Whitepages but found only an out-of-work chef in Tampa and a ‘lifestyle’ photographer in Little Rock. Remembering a tip he had been given by the hacker, he looked on Nominet to see if any variant of ‘robertmantis’ was listed as a website domain. It was not. Whoever he had met that afternoon was using a pseudonym which had been cleaned up for the obvious purpose of protecting his true identity. Mantis was not listed as a director at Companies House nor as a shared freeholder on any UK properties. A credit check on Experian also drew a blank.
Satisfied that he was a genuine Service employee, Carradine put the computer to sleep, removed the strip of masking tape from the lens and walked home.
6 (#ulink_341d4b5b-3938-553f-80e3-19d27e8d6a16)
The following morning, Carradine was woken early by the sound of the doorbell ringing. He stumbled out of bed, pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and struck his foot on the skirting board as he picked up the intercom.
‘Delivery for Mr Carradine.’
He knew immediately what it was. He reached down, grabbed his toe and told the delivery man to leave it in his postbox.
‘Needs to be signed for.’
The accent was Jamaican. Carradine buzzed the man into the building. He waited by the door, rubbing his foot. A moth flew up towards the ceiling. Carradine clapped it dead between his hands. He could hear the lift outside grinding towards the landing as he wiped the smashed body on his shorts.
The delivery man was a middle-aged, dreadlocked Rasta wearing a high-vis waistcoat. A Post Office satchel was slung over his shoulder. It was possible that he was a convincingly disguised errand boy for the Service, but Carradine assumed that Mantis had simply sent the items by Special Delivery. He signed an illegible version of his name on an electronic pad using a small plastic tool that slipped on the glass, thanked him and took the package inside.
On any other morning, Carradine might have gone back to bed for another hour’s sleep. But the contents of the package were too intriguing. He walked into the kitchen, set a percolator of coffee on the stove and sliced the envelope open with a knife.
There was a paperback book inside. Mantis had sent a French translation of one of Carradine’s novels, published four years earlier. He opened the book to the title page. It was unsigned. The rest of the text had not been marked up nor were any pages turned down or altered in any way. The book was in pristine condition.
He waited for the coffee to boil, staring out of the window at the treetops of Hyde Park. If the novel was to be used as a book cipher, then Mantis possessed an identical copy which would allow him to send coded messages to Yassine without risking detection. He was using a French, rather than an English version of the book because Yassine was most likely a French-speaking Arab. For Carradine to give him a copy of the novel at their meeting was an ingenious and entirely plausible piece of tradecraft. They would be hiding in plain sight.
He took out the second item, the sealed package for ‘Maria’. The envelope was sturdy and bound with tape at both ends. Carradine weighed it in his hands. He could make out the outline of what he assumed was a passport. He bent the package slightly and thought that he could feel a document of some kind moving beneath the seal. Carradine had an obligation to open the envelope, because it was surely crazy to board an international flight carrying a package about which he knew so little. But he could not do so. It was against the spirit of the deal he had struck with the Service and would constitute a clear breach of trust. It was even possible that the package was a decoy and that the Service had sent it solely as a test of his integrity.
He set it to one side, drank the coffee and switched on the news. Overnight in New Delhi two vehicles had been hijacked by Islamist gunmen affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba and driven into crowds at a religious ceremony, killing an estimated 75 people. In Germany, an AFD politician had been gunned down on his doorstep by a Resurrection activist. Such headlines had become commonplace, as humdrum and predictable as tropical storms and mass shootings in the United States. Carradine waited for news of the Redmond kidnapping. It was the third item on the BBC. No trace had been found of the van in which Redmond had been driven away, no statement released by Resurrection claiming responsibility for the abduction.
Settling in front of his computer with a bowl of cereal, Carradine watched amateur footage of the crowds screaming in panic as they fled the carnage in New Delhi. He read an email written by the slain AFD politician, leaked to the press only days earlier, in which he had referred to Arabs as a ‘culturally alien people’ welcomed into Germany by ‘elitist pigs’. He learned that one in eight voters had given AFD their support in recent elections and that the group was now the second largest opposition party in the Bundestag. Small wonder Resurrection was so active in Germany. There had been similar assassinations of nationalist politicians in France, Poland and Hungary. It was only a matter of time before the violence crossed the Channel and a senior British politician was targeted.
Carradine took a shower and WhatsApped Mantis, acknowledging delivery of the package with a succinct ‘Thanks for the book’. Within thirty seconds Mantis had replied: ‘No problem’ adding – to Carradine’s consternation – two smiling emojis and a thumbs up for good measure. He put the package in a drawer and attempted to do some work. Every ten or fifteen minutes he would open the drawer and check that the package was still there, as if sprites or cat burglars might have carried it off while his back was turned. Later in the afternoon, when his once-a-fortnight cleaner, Mrs Ritter, was in the flat, he removed the package altogether and set it on his desk until she had left the building.
Though he had yet to complete any specific tasks on behalf of the Service, Carradine already felt as though he had been cut off from his old life; that he was inhabiting a parallel existence separate from the world he had known before meeting Mantis and witnessing the abduction of Lisa Redmond. He wanted to talk to his father about what had happened, to tell him about Morocco and to gauge his advice, but he was forbidden by the Secrets Act. He could say nothing to anyone about what Mantis had asked him to do. He tried to work, but it now seemed ridiculous to be writing about fictional spies in fictional settings when he himself had been employed by the Service as a bona fide support agent. Instead he spent the next two days re-reading Frederick Forsyth’s memoirs and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, trawling for insights into the life of a writer spy. He watched The Bureau and took a DVD of The Man Who Knew Too Much to his father’s flat the night before he was due to fly to Casablanca. They ordered curry from Deliveroo and sat in semi-darkness munching chicken dhansak and tarka daal, washed down with a 1989 Château Beychevelle he had been given by an old friend as a birthday present.
‘Doris Day,’ his father muttered as she sang ‘Que Sera Sera’ to her soon-to-be-kidnapped son. ‘Was she the one Hitchcock threw the birds at?’
‘No,’ Carradine replied. ‘That was Tippi Hedren.’
‘Ah.’
He tore off a strip of peshawari naan and passed it to his father saying: ‘Did you know she was Melanie Griffith’s mother?’
‘Who? Doris Day?’
‘No. Tippi Hedren.’
After a brief pause, his father said: ‘Who’s Melanie Griffith?’
It was after midnight by the time the film finished. Carradine did the washing-up and ordered an Uber.
‘So you’re off to Casablanca?’ His father was standing in the hall, leaning on the walking stick which he had carried with him since his stroke. ‘Research on the new book?’
‘Research, yes,’ Carradine replied. He detested the lie.
‘Never been myself. They say it’s not like the film.’
‘Yeah. I heard that.’
His father jutted out his chin and pulled off a passable impression of Humphrey Bogart.
‘You played it for her. You play it for me. Play it.’
Carradine hugged him. He tried to imagine what life in the Service must have been like in the 1960s. He pictured smoke-filled rooms, tables piled high with dusty files, men in double-breasted suits plotting in secure speech rooms.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘I love you, too. Take care of yourself out there. Call me when you land.’
‘I will.’
Carradine opened the front door and stepped outside.
‘Kit?’
He turned to face his father. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m proud of you.’
7 (#ulink_c18e6989-6800-521d-be01-0c2193e439ca)
Carradine had been on the Gatwick Express for only a few minutes when he saw the photograph. He was seated alone at a table in a near-deserted carriage finishing off a cappuccino and a fruit salad from M&S. A passenger had left a copy of the Guardian on a seat across the aisle. Carradine had picked up the paper and begun to read about developments in the Redmond kidnapping. The Transit van, which had been stolen from a North London car park, had been found abandoned and burned out at the edge of a wood not far from Henley-on-Thames. CCTV showed a bearded man wearing a woollen hat filling the van up with diesel in Cricklewood a few hours before Redmond was seized. Resurrection sympathisers had now claimed responsibility for the kidnapping but no images of Redmond in captivity had been released. ‘Experts’ quoted in the article drew comparisons with the kidnapping of Otis Euclidis, pointing out that Resurrection had waited ten days before publishing footage of an apparently healthy and well-rested Euclidis sitting on a bed in an undisclosed location reading a book. The same experts claimed that the police were at a loss to know where Redmond was being held. At the bottom of the story there was a small box directing readers to a longer piece on the history of the Resurrection movement. Carradine had turned to the back of the paper, intending to read it.
Beneath the headline on the article was a layout of four pictures arranged in a square, each of them about the same size as the passport photograph of ‘Maria’ that Mantis had given to Carradine in Lisson Grove. The photograph in the top left-hand corner showed Redmond taking part in a reality television show several years earlier. Beside it was a picture of Euclidis in characteristic Instagram pose, wearing a white, gold-encrusted baseball cap, a gold crucifix medallion and outsized designer sunglasses. The photograph in the bottom left-hand corner showed Nihat Demirel, a pro-government talk-show host in Turkey who had been kneecapped by Resurrection outside his summer house in Izmir in May. It was the fourth picture that rocked Carradine.
He had seen the photograph before. It showed Ivan Simakov, the deceased leader of Resurrection, standing beside the woman who was reported to have been his girlfriend when the movement was conceived: Lara Bartok. Carradine stared at her. She had long, dark hair and slightly crooked front teeth. It was ‘Maria’.
He reached into his wallet. He placed the photograph of Maria alongside the picture of Bartok. There was no question that they were the same woman. He was about to pull up her Wikipedia page on his iPhone when he remembered that the search would flag. A young woman had taken a seat at the far end of the carriage. Carradine considered asking to borrow her phone to make the search but decided against it, instead reading the article for more detail on Bartok’s background. A Hungarian-born lawyer, she had met Simakov in New York and become attached to Occupy Wall Street. Described as ‘a latter-day Ulrike Meinhof’, Bartok was wanted in the United States on charges of armed assault, kidnapping and incitement to violence. She had reportedly become disillusioned with Resurrection and vanished from the couple’s apartment in Brooklyn. Several months later, Simakov was killed in Moscow.
Carradine put the newspaper to one side. The train had come to a halt at a section of track littered with cans and bottles. He stared outside, trying to work out what Mantis was up to. He assumed that the Service had recruited Bartok as an agent, persuading her to inform against Resurrection. But how had they managed to lose track of her? And why was Mantis using an untried and untested support agent to try to find her? In the Lisson Grove flat he had refused even to reveal Bartok’s name, telling Carradine that ‘several officers and support agents’ were searching for her in places as far afield as Mexico, Cuba and Argentina. If that was the case, it was plausible that she was no longer a source for British intelligence, but instead a fugitive from justice. Carradine had learned enough from his father about the workings of the Service to know that they were not a law enforcement agency. There had to be another reason behind Mantis’s search. Carradine recalled the wistfulness with which he had spoken about her beauty, his irritation with the photograph of her surfer boyfriend. As the train began to move away, he wondered if Mantis was romantically involved with her. That might explain the furtiveness with which he had spoken about ‘Maria’.
Gatwick airport was rammed. Carradine checked the suitcase containing the book and the sealed package into the hold and cleared security without any complications. He was carrying €1,000 of Mantis’s money in his wallet and the other €2,000 inside an envelope in his carry-on bag. The departure gate for the flight with Royal Air Maroc was a twenty-minute walk from security along increasingly deserted corridors leading further and further away from the heart of the terminal. A flight attendant wearing a headscarf and heavy mascara clicked a counter for every passenger that came on board. Carradine was one of the last to take his seat. He glanced at the counter as he passed her. There were fewer than fifty passengers on the plane.
As the flight took off, Carradine had the vivid sensation that he was leaving the old part of his life behind and entering a new phase which would in every way be more challenging and satisfying than the life he had known before. His thoughts again turned to Bartok. Was Mantis using him to try to get a personal message to her? If so, how could he guarantee that Carradine would find her at the festival? Was she a fan of his books? Did the Service think that she was going to show herself at his event? Perhaps she wanted to meet Katherine Paget, the novelist with whom he was due to appear on stage.
The sealed package was somewhere beneath Carradine’s feet in the chill of the baggage hold; he knew that it would contain the answers to his many questions and felt his professional obligation to Mantis dissipating with every passing mile. He did not consider himself to be particularly cynical or suspicious, but neither would he enjoy the feeling of being duped. He needed to know what was inside the envelope. If that meant breaking his promise to the Service, so be it.
About an hour into the flight, Carradine was handed a small tray with a plastic knife and fork and told that alcohol was not served by the airline. Craving a beer, he ate a tiny, vacuum-packed trout fillet with a bread roll and something the flight attendant claimed was chicken casserole. Leaving most of it unfinished, he decided to go for a stroll. As he passed his fellow passengers bent over their in-flight meals, Carradine could hear a man with a deep, resonant voice speaking in Spanish near the toilets at the rear of the plane. He assumed that the man was talking to a friend, but when he reached the galley he saw that he was alone. His back was turned and he was looking out of the window. He was wearing shorts and a black T-shirt. Religious tattoos completely covered his arms and the backs of his hands. There were tufts of black body hair protruding from the neck of his T-shirt. He was holding a mobile phone perpendicular to his mouth and appeared to be dictating notes. Carradine spoke very little Spanish and could not understand what he was saying. The man sensed that Carradine was behind him and turned around.
‘Sorry. You want the bathroom, man?’
The accent was Hispanic, the face about forty-five. He was well-built but not overtly muscular, with long, greasy hair gathered in a topknot. Though not fully bearded, at least three days of dense stubble ran in a continuous black shadow from beneath his eyes to the hollow of his collarbone. He was one of the hairiest people Carradine had ever seen.
‘No thanks. I’m just going for a walk.’
The man lowered the phone. He was smiling with forced sincerity, like a technique he had been taught at a seminar on befriending strangers. Carradine had the bizarre and disorienting sensation that the man knew who he was and had been waiting for him.
‘Out on the wing?’
‘What?’
‘You said you were going for a walk.’
Carradine rolled with the joke. ‘Oh. That’s right. Yes. So if you wouldn’t mind stepping aside I’ll just open the door and head out.’
An eruption of laughter, a roar so loud it might have been audible in the cockpit. An elderly Arabic woman emerged from one of the bathrooms and flinched.
‘Hey! I like you!’ said the man. He leaned a hand against the doorframe and shook out a crick in his neck. ‘Where you from?’
Carradine explained that he was from London. ‘And you?’
‘Me? I’m from everywhere, man.’ He looked like a mid-level drug dealer attached to a Colombian cartel: dishevelled, poorly educated, very possibly violent. ‘Born in Andalucía. Raised in Madrid. Now I live in London. Heading out to Morocco for some R & R.’
They shook hands. The Spaniard’s grip suggested prodigious physical force.
‘Ramón,’ he said. ‘Great to meet you, man.’
‘Kit. You too.’
‘So what you doing in Casablanca?’
Carradine went with the story he had agreed with Mantis.
‘I’m a novelist. Doing some research on my next book.’
The Spaniard again exploded with enthusiasm. ‘A writer! Holy shit, man! You write books?’ Carradine thought back to his first encounter with Mantis. There was something similarly inauthentic about Ramón. ‘You get any of them published?’
‘A few, yeah.’
‘Wow! So cool!’
A flight attendant came into the galley, obliging Carradine to step to one side. She was slim and attractive. Ramón stared at her as she bent down to retrieve a bottle of water from one of the catering boxes. He gazed open-mouthed at the outline of her uniform, all of the liveliness and energy in his face momentarily extinguished. He looked up, pursed his lips and shot Carradine a locker-room leer.
‘Nice, huh?’
Carradine changed the subject.
‘What do you do for R & R in Casablanca?’
It turned out to be the wrong question.
‘Oh man! The chicks in Morocco. You don’t know?!’ The flight attendant stood up, stared at Ramón with undisguised contempt and made her way back down the aisle. ‘Last time I was there, I meet this girl in a bar on the Corniche. She takes me to this apartment, we open a bottle of whisky and then – bang! Oh Kit, man! One of the great nights of my life. This chick, she was …’
Ramón’s recollection tailed off as a young child, accompanied by his father, was led to the bathroom. Carradine seized his chance to get away.
‘Well, it was interesting to meet you,’ he said.
‘You heading off?’
Ramón sounded distraught, almost as if he had been tasked with befriending Carradine and been judged to have failed.
‘Yeah. I’ve got stuff to read. Work to do. Just wanted to stretch my legs.’
‘Oh. OK. Sure. Great to meet you. You’re a cool cat, Kit. I like you. Good luck with those books!’
Carradine returned to his seat, oddly unsettled by the encounter. He remained there for the rest of the flight. He thought that he had seen the last of the Spaniard but, having landed and cleared passport control in Casablanca, found himself standing next to him in the baggage hall. As they waited for their respective suitcases, some of the last remaining passengers to be doing so, Ramón continued to grill Carradine on his life and career, to the point at which he began to wonder if he was testing his cover.
‘So, what? You’re writing a kind of spy story set in Morocco? Like a Jason Bourne thing?’
Carradine had always thought that his novels occupied a literary space equidistant between the kiss-kiss-bang-bang of Ludlum and the slow-burn chess games of le Carré. For reasons of intellectual vanity, he would ordinarily have tried to distance himself from Ramón’s description, but he was keen to stop talking about his work. As a consequence, he readily conceded that his ‘Moroccan thriller’ was going to be ‘full of guns and explosions and beautiful women’.
‘Like The Man Who Knew Too Much?’
Carradine thought of his father the night before munching naan bread and drinking claret. He didn’t think the comparison was accurate, but couldn’t be bothered to enter into a debate about it.
‘Exactly,’ he replied.
Ramón had spotted his bag moving along the carousel. He stepped forward, picked it up, slung the bag across his shoulder and turned around.
‘You wanna share a cab into town, man?’
Had this been his plan all along? To get alongside Carradine and to accompany him into Casablanca? Or was he merely an over-familiar tourist trying to do a fellow passenger a favour? Out of the corner of his eye Carradine saw his suitcase jerking along the carousel.
‘My bag will probably be a while longer,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry. The food on the flight was terrible. I’m going to grab something to eat in the terminal. You go ahead. Have a great trip.’
Ramón looked at the carousel. Three suitcases remained, two of which had passed them several times. Betraying an apparent suspicion, he shook Carradine’s hand, reiterated how ‘truly fantastic’ it had been to meet him and walked towards the customs area. Relieved to be shot of him, Carradine sent a WhatsApp to Mantis telling him that he had arrived, checked that the novel and the sealed package were still inside his case and walked out into the broiling Moroccan afternoon.
He had expected the chaos and clamour of a typical African airport, but all was relatively quiet as he emerged from the terminal. A hot desert wind was blowing in from the east, bending the tops of the palm trees and sending swirls of leaves and dust across the deserted concourse. Men in jeans and Polo shirts were perched on concrete blocks smoking in the shade of the terminal building. When they saw Carradine, they popped up and moved forwards, crowding him like paparazzi, repeating the phrase ‘Taxi mister, taxi’ as he tried to move between them. Carradine could see Ramón less than fifty metres away at the top of the rank standing next to a pranged beige Mercedes. He was negotiating a price with the driver. The Spaniard looked up, waving Carradine forward shouting: ‘Get in, man! Join me!’ Carradine was already uncomfortably hot. He was irritated by the drivers trying to force him towards their cars and intrigued enough by Ramón to want to know why he had taken such an interest in him. Was he working for the Service? Had Mantis sent him with instructions to keep an eye on the new kid on the block? Carradine raised a hand in acknowledgement as Ramón continued to gesture him forward. Should he stay or should he go? His curiosity began to tip the balance. Where was the harm in sharing a ride into town? He might even learn something. He duly rolled his suitcase towards the Mercedes and greeted Ramón for the third time.
‘Chaos back there,’ he said. ‘Thanks for helping me out.’
‘No problem.’ The driver popped the boot. ‘Where you headed, man? I drop you off.’
Carradine was staying at a Sofitel in the centre of town. It transpired that Ramón was staying in a hotel less than five hundred metres away.
‘No way! I’m at the Sheraton! Literally like no distance from where you are.’ A part of Carradine died inside. ‘We can meet up later, go for a drink. You know any good places?’
‘Somebody recommended Blaine’s to me.’
The words were out of his mouth before Carradine had time to realise what he had said. He was due to meet Yassine at Blaine’s the following evening. What if Ramón showed up during their dinner?
‘Blaine’s? I know it! Full of chicks, man. You’re gonna love it.’
He could feel his carefully arranged schedule being quickly and efficiently unpicked by the Spaniard’s suffocating camaraderie. He didn’t want to be put into a position where he had to work his cover, lying to Ramón about phantom meetings with phantom friends just to avoid seeing him. Why the hell hadn’t he taken a separate taxi?
‘Sofitel,’ Ramón told the driver, speaking in accentless French. ‘Près du port. Et après le Sheraton, s’il vous plaît.’
Somewhere between the aircraft and the Mercedes the Spaniard had developed a case of volcanic body odour. The car was quickly filled with the smell of his stale sweat. It was hot in the back seat, with no air conditioning, and Carradine sat with both windows down, listening to the driver muttering to himself in Arabic as they settled into a queue of traffic. Ramón offered Carradine a cigarette, which he gladly accepted, taking the smoke deep into his lungs as he gazed out onto lines of parked cars and half-finished breezeblock apartments, wondering how long it would take to get into town.
‘I never asked,’ he said. ‘What do you do for a living?’
Ramón appeared to hesitate before turning around to answer. His eyes were cold and pitiless. Carradine was reminded of the sudden change in his expression when the flight attendant had walked into the galley. It was like looking at an actor who had momentarily dropped out of character.
‘Me?’ he said. ‘I’m just a businessman. Came out here to do a friend a favour.’
‘I thought you said you were here for the rest and rec-reation?’
‘That too.’ Ramón touched his mouth in a way that made Carradine suspect him of lying. ‘R & R everywhere I go. That’s how I like to roll.’
‘What’s the favour?’ he asked.
The Spaniard cut him a look, turned to face the oncoming traffic and said: ‘I don’t like to talk too much about work.’
Another five minutes passed before they spoke again. The taxi had finally emerged from the traffic jam and reached what appeared to be the main highway into Casablanca. Ramón had been talking to the driver in rapid, aggressive French, only some of which Carradine was able to understand. He began to think that the two men were already acquainted and wondered again if Ramón had deliberately waited for him to come out of the airport.
‘You’ve met before?’ he asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘Your driver? You’ve used him before?’
The Spaniard flinched, as if to suggest that Carradine was asking too many questions.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Oh, nothing. It just sounded like this wasn’t the first time you’d met.’
At that moment the driver – who had not yet looked at Carradine nor acknowledged him in any way – turned off the highway onto a dirt track leading into a forest.
‘What’s going on?’ Carradine looked back at the main road. Paranoia had settled on him like the slowly clinging sweat under his shirt. ‘Where are we going?’
‘No idea.’ Ramón sounded disconcertingly relaxed. ‘Probably has to visit his mother or something.’
The Mercedes bumped along the track, heading further and further into the woods.
‘Seriously,’ said Carradine. ‘Where are we going?’
The driver pulled the Mercedes to the side of the track, switched off the engine and stepped out. The heat of the afternoon sun was overwhelming. Carradine opened the door to give himself an option to run if the situation should turn against him. There was a small wooden hut about ten metres from the road, occupied by a woman whose face he could not see. The driver approached the hut, held out a piece of paper and passed it to her. Ramón put a tattooed arm across the seat.
‘You look tense, man. Relax.’
‘I’m fine,’ Carradine told him.
He was anything but fine. The stench of sweat was overwhelming. He was convinced that he had walked into a trap. He looked in the opposite direction, deeper into the woods. He could see only trees and the forest floor. He used the wing mirror on the driver’s side to check if there was anybody on the road behind them, but saw no sign of anyone. Through the woods beyond the hut he could make out a small clearing dotted with plastic toys and a children’s slide. The driver was coming back to the car.
‘Que faisiez-vous?’ Ramón asked him.
‘Parking,’ the driver replied. Carradine smiled and shook his head. His lack of experience had got the better of him. He looked back at the hut. The veiled woman was marking the piece of paper with an ink stamp. She slammed it onto a metal spike.
‘Crazy!’ Ramón produced a delighted grin. ‘In Casablanca they pay their parking tickets in the middle of the fucking woods. Never saw this before, man.’
‘Me neither,’ Carradine replied.
It was another forty-five minutes to the hotel. Carradine sat in the heat of the back seat, smoking another of Ramón’s cigarettes. On the edge of the city the Mercedes became jammed in three-lane traffic that inched along wide colonial boulevards packed with cars and motorbikes. Ramón grew increasingly agitated, berating the driver for taking the wrong route in order to extract more money for the journey. The swings in his mood, from back-slapping bonhomie to cold, aggressive impatience, were as unexpected as they were unsettling. Carradine followed the progress of the journey on his iPhone, trying to orientate himself in the new city, the street names – Boulevard de La Mecque, Avenue Tetouan, Rue des Racines – evoking all the antiquity and mystique of French colonial Africa. Mopeds buzzed past his door as the Mercedes edged from block to block. Men hawking drinks and newspapers approached the car and were shooed away by the driver, who switched on the windscreen wipers to deter them. Several times Carradine saw cars and scooters running red lights or deliberately going the wrong way around roundabouts in order to beat the jam. Stalled in the rivers of traffic he thought of home and cursed the heat, calling his father to tell him that he had arrived. He was busy playing backgammon with a friend and had no time to talk, their brief exchange leaving Carradine with a sense of isolation that he found perversely enjoyable. It was exhilarating to be alone in a strange city, a place about which he knew so little, at the start of a mission for which he had received no training and no detailed preparation. He knew that his father had been posted to Egypt by the Service in the early years of his marriage and thought of the life he must have led as a young spy, running agents in Cairo, taking his mother on romantic trips to Sinai, Luxor and Aswan. Ramón offered him yet another cigarette and he took it, observing that the smog outside was likely to do more damage to his lungs. Ramón went to the trouble of translating the joke for the benefit of the driver who turned in his seat and smiled, acknowledging Carradine for the first time.
‘Vrai!’ he said. ‘C’est vrai!’
That was when Ramón showed him his phone.
‘Jesus Christ, man. You see this?’
Carradine pitched the cigarette out of the window and leaned forward. The headline on the screen was in Spanish. He could see the words REDMOND and MUERTA.
‘What happened?’
‘They killed the Redmond bitch,’ Ramón replied. ‘Resurrection fucking killed her.’
8 (#ulink_5599d6b1-2958-5fa1-b31a-29e29279a90b)
They kept her in the van for the first thirty-six hours. She screamed when they took off the gag, so they put it on again and left her to rage. They offered her water and food, but she refused it. She soiled herself. When she had spent all of her energy, Redmond wept.
Towards the end of the second day they took her from the van, still blindfolded, and tied her to a chair in the basement of the farmhouse. They played the recording into the room. A loop of Redmond’s words, repeated over and over again. A torture of her own making. The bearded man called it ‘The Two Minutes of Hate’, after Orwell, but the recording lasted for more than twelve hours.
The immigrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean are the same insects already swarming over Europe. They choke our schools and hospitals. They dirty our towns and cities. They murder our daughters at rock concerts. They mow down our sons on the streets.
It went on and on into the night. Whenever Redmond looked as though she was falling asleep, they turned up the volume. She was prevented from sleeping by the words she had written. ‘Sentenced by your own sentences,’ said the man who had knocked down her husband.
The only answer is to lock up every young Muslim man or woman whose name appears on a terrorist watchlist. How else to protect British citizens from slaughter? If we cannot take the sensible precaution, outlined by the government of the United States, of preventing potential terrorists from entering the United Kingdom from countries that are known sponsors of Islamist terror, then this is the only option remaining to us.
On the morning of the third day they removed Redmond’s gag and again offered her food and water. This time she accepted. The bearded man asked her, on camera, if she wished to defend her words and actions. She said that she stood by everything she had written. She insisted that, given the chance, she would write and broadcast everything again. She had no regrets for exercising her right to free speech and for articulating views held by millions of people in the West who were too cowed by political correctness to speak their minds.
The bearded man was standing behind her as she spoke. He lifted her hair clear of her shoulders, held it in a fist above her head, and sliced her throat with a knife. Redmond’s body was dumped at a stretch of waste ground on the outskirts of Coventry. A photograph of her corpse was sent to the editor of the British newspaper who had commissioned her column.
Somerville switched off the recorder.
‘What are your feelings about what happened to Lisa Redmond?’ he said.
Bartok shrugged.
‘I do not know enough about it.’ She stood up and stretched her back, twisting one way, then the other. ‘I know that Kit was upset. He talked about it a lot. I think it haunted him.’
‘What about you?’ the American asked. His tone was supercilious. ‘Were you upset by it? Were you haunted, Lara?’
Bartok picked up one of the biscuits. She turned it over in her fingers. She liked Somerville. She trusted him. She did not like or trust the American.
‘As I have said. I did not know Redmond’s writing. I did not have the opportunity to listen to her radio broadcasts wherever I was hiding in the world. She sounded like somebody who we might have gone after.’
The American seized on this, closing the space between them.
‘We?’
‘Resurrection.’ Bartok looked at Somerville as if to suggest that the American was starting to annoy her. ‘In the old days. Before the violence and the killing. She was the sort of figure Ivan would have looked at. Redmond, and those like her, men like Otis Euclidis, they gave encouragement to the bigots, to the ignorant. Ivan wanted to teach them a lesson. We all did.’ She bit into the biscuit. It was dry. She could only swallow by taking a sip of water to wash it down. ‘When I see what has happened to Resurrection, I feel nothing but sadness. It began as something remarkable. It began as a phenomenon. Ivan had a conception of a new kind of revolutionary movement, one which harnessed the power of the Internet and social media, one which was fuelled by international outrage among young and old alike. He wanted to take that revolutionary movement out onto the streets, to fight back against those who had corrupted our societies. He knew that Resurrection would catch fire with people, inspire groups and individuals, oblige the masses to mount operations of their own – however small, however apparently insignificant – so that bit by bit and step by step, democracy and fairness would be restored. But all of the hope and the beauty of those ideas, the purity of the early attacks, has been lost.’
Somerville reached for the recorder. They needed to get the whole story out of Bartok. There was no point letting her talk during the breaks if nobody was keeping a record.
‘Would you like to go back to those early months?’ he asked.
‘Of course, whatever you want,’ she said.
‘Please. Tell us how it all got started.’
SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE EYES ONLY / STRAP 1
STATEMENT BY LARA BARTOK (‘LASZLO’)
CASE OFFICERS: J.W.S./S.T.H – CHAPEL STREET
REF: RESURRECTION/SIMAKOV/CARRADINE
FILE: RE2768X
PART 2 of 5
‘Euclidis was our first target. That was the first and most brilliant idea of Ivan’s, to capture this snake, this poison in the bloodstream of public life, and to show the world that decent people were prepared to stand up to hate, to put an end to divisive words, to expose Euclidis for the narcissist that he was. For all his expensive clothes and his clever talk, we showed the world that he was just a self-interested clown. He blogged to make money. He spread lies to get rich. To get laid. He was not interested in changing the system, in making the world a better place. He and his friends – the alt-right, the white supremacists, the anti-Semites, the Holocaust deniers – they had no alternative ideology. They had no ideas. They just wanted to draw attention to themselves. They wanted to make decent citizens feel uncomfortable and frightened. That was their reason for living. They were bullies, high on hate.
How did Euclidis draw so many admirers? By making stupid people feel better about their stupidity. By allowing bigots to think they were justified in making anti-Semitic statements, saying that it was OK to hate women, to be aggrieved about people of colour, about immigrants. The sad truth is that there were enough trolls buying his books, reading his articles, attending his talks to make him a rich man. They gave him the fame he craved. Euclidis was a junkie for attention. And if they didn’t give it to him in public, they gave it to him on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook. We had to take him down.
So Ivan, with my help, and with the assistance of Zack Curtis and
, seized him at Berkeley. Grabbed him as he stepped out of his hotel. It was so easy. We were in America so we were able to obtain guns. The hotel had no security, we possessed the element of surprise. We put a hood on him, we put him in cuffs, we threw his phone out of the window. He did not like that, he did not like being separated from his precious phone! We switched vehicles and drove into the mountains. Euclidis of course was a physical coward. He cried like a four-year-old boy. It was pitiful.
We filmed him in secret, as the world now knows. We were able to show on camera that Otis Euclidis was a charlatan, a fraud. He confessed that he had done it all to make money. He had never meant anything he had said or written to be taken seriously. His followers were ‘clowns’ and ‘losers’. When he had said in interviews that black lives ‘did not matter’, he had been ‘joking’. When he had written that feminism was ‘the worst invention since gunpowder’, he had only been ‘fooling around’. He showed himself to be a fraud who believed in nothing but fame. When we screened the film, when we put it out on the Internet for the world to see, and we saw the reaction, well, it was a beautiful moment.
Almost immediately there were copycat attacks. Dozens of politicians and right-wing figures around the world came under threat. My favourite was done by the refugee in Amsterdam. The kitchen porter. A Muslim from Iraq who had been washing dishes in a restaurant so that he could feed his wife and baby daughter. He was no older than twenty-five or twenty-six. Samir. I’ve forgotten his surname. [JWS: Samir Rabou] He learned that Piet Boutmy, the leader of the Dutch far-right party – again, I don’t remember the name of this party [JWS: Partij voor de Vrijheid] – was eating in the restaurant. A waiter, a Syrian, I believe, came into the kitchen and told him Boutmy was there. Samir knew about the kidnapping of Euclidis, he told the police who later interviewed him that he had followed Resurrection from its very first statements and that he greatly admired Ivan Simakov. He took off his washing gloves, kept his apron, walked out of the kitchen and went directly into the restaurant. The security guard protecting Boutmy thought he was a waiter. The table was covered in many dishes, including – perfectly! – a soup prepared with beetroots which was still very hot. Also bottles of water, glasses of red wine, cutlery, a vase of flowers. Shouting ‘Resurrection!’ Samir lifted the whole table on top of this racist animal, soaking him to the bone, also the colleague from the same party who was dining with him. I heard that he faced no charges and soon found another job at a rival restaurant. It was beautiful.
Everything that Ivan and myself had hoped for came to pass. Ivan was worried that the Resurrection movement would burn out. It didn’t. He wrote that he wanted Resurrection to have ‘a seismic effect on public attitudes to the liars and enablers of the Right’. This is exactly what happened. The summer homes of criminal bankers were burned to the ground. Cars belonging to producers at Fox News were vandalised and damaged. Those who had attended white supremacist rallies were identified by their peers and targeted for retribution. They paid the price for their hate with the loss of their careers, their friends. All it took was one or two examples for everyone to follow suit.
But, of course, Resurrection changed. What started as a non-violent movement, symbolic acts targeted against deserving victims, quickly became violent. I was naive to believe that this would not happen, but what distressed me was Ivan’s willingness to change his position, not only towards non-violence, but also concerning his own role as a figurehead. He wanted the limelight. He craved adulation. I had not identified these characteristics in him when we first met. His vanity, his stubbornness, his readiness to lose sight of what Resurrection was about and instead to place himself at the heart of what became a hijacked, paramilitary organisation. It became impossible to live with him. I could no longer do useful work. I lost my respect for Ivan Simakov and I left him. That is when they began to hunt me down.
9 (#ulink_b4366311-98e3-56d7-b80f-edcf8e7f3551)
Carradine reached his room and switched on the television.
Every major news network was carrying the story. The police believed the murder had been carried out by the same members of Resurrection who had kidnapped Redmond five days earlier. Tributes were being paid by friends and colleagues, inevitable expressions of outrage articulated by politicians, fellow journalists and friends.
Carradine muted the television. He sat on the bed and felt a hollowness inside him close to a feeling of personal responsibility in the death of an innocent woman. Had he done more to help, had he found the courage to cross the street and to confront Redmond’s kidnappers, she might still be alive. He thought of the girl who had been standing beside him, chatting away to her friend. So I says to him, I’m like, no way is that happening, yeah? I’m like he needs to get his shit together because I’m like just not going through with that bullshit again. Where was she now? How would she react to news of this kind? Would she share Carradine’s remorse or experience nothing but a momentary, fleeting anxiety that Resurrection had again resorted to murder? Would she even be aware that Redmond had been killed?
He went to the window and looked down at the vast city. Low whitewashed buildings stretched in a broad semi-circle to the Atlantic coast. At the sea’s edge the vast Hassan II Mosque dominated the skyline; to the north-west, the cranes and wharves of the port were blocks of shadow partly obscured by a high-rise hotel. Carradine had detested Redmond. He had abhorred her character and public style. She had weaved deliberate ignorance into casual prejudice with the sole purpose of inciting outrage, hysteria and fear. She had craved the spotlight of notoriety. In the wake of an Islamist suicide bombing on the streets of London, she had called for ‘internment’ for male Muslims under the age of forty. Handed a column in a tabloid newspaper with which to disseminate her toxic views, she had advocated the use of naval warships to prevent refugees – many of them fleeing the horrors of Syria and Yemen – from crossing the Mediterranean. When her rhetoric became too vile even for the leather-skinned editors of the Fourth Estate, Redmond merely had to look across the Pond to find any number of right-wing media outlets in the United States eager to beam her prejudices into the homes of the ignorant and the dispossessed. Indeed, Redmond had been only days from moving to the United States to work for Fox News when she had been seized by Resurrection. Carradine knew that if he opened Twitter, or switched to Fox itself, he would be swamped in partisan bile and hate. For every person shocked by Redmond’s murder there would be another openly celebrating; for every person applauding Resurrection for taking the fight to the goons and trolls of the alt-Right, there would be another – like Carradine himself – who knew that violence only made the situation far worse.
He turned from the window and began to unpack. The sealed envelope was at the top of his suitcase. He took it out and placed it on the bed. To try to clear his head he did fifty press-ups, took a shower and changed into a fresh set of clothes. Whatever was in the package, he knew that he could now be incriminating himself by passing documents to a suspected member of a terrorist organisation. The Redmond murder had changed the game. He had been transformed – without prior agreement – into a foot soldier in the global struggle against Resurrection. To hell with the Service; Carradine needed to do what he had to do. He picked up the package and felt it in his hands. He could make out the edges of the passport, the outline of the document.
He hesitated momentarily – then cut at the Sellotape using the knife on a bottle opener from the minibar. He reached inside the package.
It was a British passport, just as Mantis had said it would be. Carradine opened it to the back. A photograph of Bartok, identical to the one he was carrying in his wallet, looked out at him from the identity page. Bartok was identified as ‘Maria Consuela Rodriguez’, a British citizen, born 8 June 1983. A Santander credit card fell out of the passport and dropped onto the floor. The name MS M RODRIGUEZ was stamped across the bottom. The back of the card was unsigned.
Carradine reached into the package and pulled out a smaller rectangular envelope. The envelope was sealed. No name or address had been written on it, only the word ‘LASZLO’ in block capitals. This time he did not bother using the knife. He tore the envelope open with his hands.
Inside was a single piece of white A4 paper, folded twice. The letter was typed.
IF THIS MESSAGE FINDS YOU IT IS A MIRACLE. TRUST THE PERSON WHO GIVES IT TO YOU.
YOU ARE NOT SAFE. THEY HAVE WORKED OUT WHERE YOU ARE. IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THEY FIND YOU.
I CANNOT HELP YOU EXCEPT BY GIVING YOU THESE GIFTS. USE THEM WISELY. THE NUMBER IS 0812.
I AM THE MAN WHO TOOK YOU TO THE SEA.
10 (#ulink_a06fe823-3c86-5989-87c1-05b2bc48cc82)
Carradine read the message several times trying to decipher what was behind Mantis’s language. He assumed that 0812 was the Pin number for the credit card though he doubted that Bartok, should he ever find her, would risk using it more than once; to do so would be to pinpoint her location to anyone tracking the account. ‘The man who took you to the sea’ sounded romantic, but Carradine was wary of leaping to that conclusion without stronger evidence. Yet the tone of the letter was unquestionably personal. Mantis seemed to be distancing himself from the Service in order to send the warning. Who were ‘THEY’? The Service? The Agency? The Russians? Almost every law enforcement and intelligence service in the world was hunting Resurrection activists; all of them would have liked to get their hands on Lara Bartok. The only section that seemed unequivocal to him was the opening paragraph, which reinforced the idea that Mantis had employed Carradine in good faith and had been honest about the difficulty of finding ‘LASZLO’.
There was a safe in his room. Carradine asked for some Sellotape to be sent up from reception. He sealed the letter, the credit card and the passport back inside the package and put it in the safe. Just as he was finishing he heard his phone ping. Mantis had finally replied.
Glad you’ve arrived safely. Meeting is at the Four Seasons later this evening. Let me know how it goes.
Carradine understood that he was to go to the Four Seasons and to leave the money for ‘Abdullah Aziz’ at the reception desk. It was a simple enough task, yet he was apprehensive. He took the €2,000 from his satchel, adding a thousand more from his wallet, and wrote Aziz’s name on the envelope.
He looked at the map of Casablanca. The Four Seasons was on the eastern side of the city, close to a cluster of bars and restaurants on the Corniche. It was too far to walk but Carradine set out on foot, intending to catch a taxi en route. He took nothing with him except his wallet, his phone and the envelope containing the money. He was wearing a dark blue linen jacket and walked with both the wallet and the envelope buttoned into the inside pockets. It was still very hot but he did not want to have to take the jacket off and run the risk of it being snatched by an opportunistic thief.
He quickly found himself in a maze of narrow, dilapidated streets in the old medina to the west of the port. This was Morocco as he had imagined it: low brick houses painted in blocks of pale greens, blues and yellows with shuttered windows and crumbling plasterwork. He took out his phone and began to take photographs in the fading evening light, the writer in him aware that the details of what he saw – the wooden carts laden with fresh fruits and spices; the old women fanning themselves in shaded doorways; the raggedy children kicking a football in the street – might one day be useful to him. At the same time he was working his cover. On the small chance that he was being followed, C.K. Carradine had carte blanche to snoop around, to be seen taking photographs and scribbling notes, to loiter in the lobbies of five-star hotels or to meet a contact in a fashionable restaurant. If asked to explain why he was carrying €3,000 in cash, he could say that he did not fully trust the safe in his hotel and preferred to carry his personal belongings with him. His legend was foolproof. This was, after all, why Mantis had hired him.
Carradine was lining up a photograph of a rusting truck laden with watermelons when he saw a WhatsApp message from Mantis drop down onto the screen.
Change of plan. Meeting at Sheraton, not 4 Seasons. Sorry for inconvenience.
He wondered if he was the victim of an elaborate practical joke. Ramón was staying at the Sheraton. Was the Spaniard Mantis’s contact? Carradine hoped that the location was a bizarre coincidence, a consequence of the meagre number of top-class hotels in Casablanca, but could not shake off a sixth sense that Ramón and Mantis were somehow involved with one another. Perhaps Mantis had arranged for them to catch the same flight so that Ramón could keep an eye on him? It was impossible to know.
Carradine looked along the street. He was standing at the edge of a busy market square, a smell of mint and burning charcoal on the air. The narrow switchback streets of the old city had spun him around; he had no idea if he was facing north, south, east or west. He used his phone to pinpoint his position and began to walk in the general direction of the Sheraton, eventually finding an exit from the souk through the old walls of the Medina. Twenty minutes later Carradine was standing on the steps of the hotel. It was just before eight o’clock. A bored, uniformed guard indicated that he should pass through a metal detector. Carradine did so. Despite the fact that an alarm sounded as he walked through, the guard – who was wearing gloves and holding a plastic security wand – waved him on.
The lobby of the hotel was a vast marble atrium dominated by palm trees and wide marble columns. A mezzanine balcony overlooked the ground floor. A cleaning woman was polishing a vase near a window on the street side of the hotel. Carradine was aware that Ramón might be nursing a pre-prandial mojito or cup of coffee in one of the nooks and crannies of the lobby. He did not want to be spotted by the Spaniard and then engaged in conversation. He did not trust him and was sure that Ramón’s ebullient good cheer was a front disguising a volatile, possibly even violent personality. It occurred to him that he was now involved in precisely the sort of scenario he had written about many times in his fiction. The spy – amateur or otherwise – was always at risk of running into a friend or acquaintance in the field. Carradine quickly prepared a cover story, on the off-chance that he was identified, and walked towards the reception desk.
Had he dramatised the scene in one of his novels, he would have made more of the sense of trepidation his protagonist felt as he set about completing his first mission on behalf of the Service. In reality, Carradine found the task almost embarrassingly easy. He approached the youngest – and therefore potentially the least experienced – of three female members of staff, smiled at her warmly, explained that he wanted to leave a package for one of the hotel guests and handed her the envelope. The receptionist recognised ‘Abdullah Aziz’ as the name of a guest, placed the envelope in a pigeonhole beneath the desk and did not ask Carradine for his name. At no point did he spot Ramón, nor any individual who might conceivably have been the waiting Aziz. It was all very straightforward.
Within ten minutes Carradine was back on the tenth floor of his hotel, basking in the cool of the air-conditioning, sending a message to Mantis informing him that ‘the meeting had been a success’. A short time later Mantis responded, telling Carradine that ‘everybody was happy with the way things went’. Despite completing the task successfully, Carradine experienced an unexpected stab of disappointment and irritation that he had not been tested more thoroughly. Perhaps it was the nagging sense that all was not quite as it seemed. He did not fully trust Mantis. He was profoundly suspicious of Ramón. Having read the note inside the package, he was concerned that there was a plot to kidnap Lara Bartok, perhaps even to kill her. If that was the case, was he being used as an unwitting pawn?
He took a second shower, went down to the bar, ordered a vodka martini and tried to convince himself that his doubts were just the flights of fancy of a novelist with an overactive imagination. A man sitting two stools away was wearing an aftershave so overpowering that it began to affect the taste of the martini. Carradine ordered a second, carrying it to a table a safe distance from the bar. As he walked across the lounge, a vodka martini in one hand, a packet of cigarettes in the other, he realised that he was casting himself as the central character in a spy story no different to the ones he had written in the pages of his books or seen a hundred times at the movies.
He sat down and tried to work out the link between Mantis, Ramón and Bartok. Carradine acknowledged that he was a need-to-know support agent, not a fully-fledged spy cognisant of all the intelligence about ‘LASZLO’. In this respect, Mantis was not obliged to tell him everything he knew. By the same token, the Service was under no obligation to inform Carradine that Ramón had been sent to keep an eye on him. Besides, there was every reason to believe that Ramón was just an overly friendly passenger Carradine just happened to have bumped into on the plane. He had been shown no evidence to suggest that Ramón was ‘Abdullah Aziz’, nor was it credible that Mantis would have wanted him to pay Ramón for his services. The only thing that Carradine knew for certain was that Bartok was on the run. Mantis wanted to protect her, for reasons that were not yet clear, but had not been in a position to leave London in order to do so. As a result, he had hired Carradine to assist in the search for her.
Carradine stared at the pitted olive at the bottom of the glass. None of it made sense. The vodka had blunted, not sharpened his wits. He had been active as a support agent for less than twenty-four hours and already felt lost in the wilderness of mirrors.
He settled the bill and walked outside. There was a taxi idling in front of the hotel. Carradine climbed in and asked to be taken to the Corniche. He offered a cigarette to the driver who placed it, unlit, in a recess behind the gearstick. Sated by alcohol, Carradine sat in the back seat texting his father, trying to forget about his responsibilities to the Service and to set aside his doubts about Mantis and Ramón. He enjoyed the sepia light of the Moroccan evening and the movement of the taxi as it weaved from street to street. He wanted to convince himself that there was no deeper meaning to the information he had gleaned from the letter, no dark conspiracy playing out on the streets of Casablanca. But it was impossible. He knew, in the way that you know that a friendship is doomed or a love affair coming to an end, that something was not quite right. He was sure that he was being manipulated. He was certain that he had been sent to Morocco for a purpose that had not yet been made clear to him. The chances of finding Bartok were so remote that the words of warning contained in Mantis’s letter – ‘IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THEY FIND YOU’ – seemed to Carradine as vague and yet as terrifying as lines from a work of fiction. So why had he been handed such a task?
The taxi stopped at a set of lights. An elderly beggar came to the window, pressing his face against the glass. The driver swore in Arabic as the beggar knocked on the window, imploring Carradine to give him money. He dug around in his trouser pocket for some loose change and was about to roll down the window and pass the money to the beggar when the taxi accelerated down the street.
Carradine turned to see that the man had fallen over.
‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘Problème! Arrêtez!’
The driver ignored him, made a right-hand turn and headed north towards the sea. Through the back window, Carradine could see the beggar being helped to his feet.
‘He fell,’ he said in French, thinking of Redmond and his failure to act.
‘They all fall,’ the driver replied. Ils tombent tous.
‘Pull over!’
Again Carradine’s request was ignored. ‘I want to go back,’ he said, lamenting the fact that his French was not good enough to make himself properly understood. ‘Take me back to the old man.’
‘Non,’ the driver replied. He wanted his fare, he wanted to take the tourist to the Corniche. ‘You don’t go back, mister,’ he said, now speaking in English. ‘You can never go back.’
11 (#ulink_f4091ebf-709f-58af-ac44-38a05b95e6fc)
By the time Carradine had persuaded the driver to stop, it was too late. They had driven too far from the fallen man. As an expression of his annoyance, Carradine paid him off without a tip and covered the remaining mile on foot.
He found a restaurant on the Corniche where he continued to drink. On top of the two martinis, he bought a bottle of local white wine followed by successive vodka tonics at a bar across the street. Falling in with a group of businessmen from Dijon who knew a place nearby, Carradine found himself at a table in a packed nightclub on the oceanfront drinking Cuba libres until five in the morning. He eventually stumbled back to his hotel at dawn, his mind cleared of worry, his doubts put to rest.
He woke up at midday and ordered room service, necking two ibuprofen with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice followed by three black coffees courtesy of the Nespresso machine in his room. There was a spa on the third floor of the hotel. Carradine booked a hammam
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Charles Cumming
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: ‘Recommended. I read it one breathless sitting’ Ian RankinHe risked it all to become a spy. Now he must pay the price.A gripping new standalone spy thriller from the winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller of the Year and ‘the master of the modern spy thriller’ (Mail on Sunday).One simple task for British Intelligence takes him into a world of danger.Successful novelist Kit Carradine has grown restless. So when British Intelligence invites him to enter the secret world of espionage, he willingly takes a leap into the unknown.But the glamour of being a spy is soon tainted by fear and betrayal, as Carradine finds himself in Morocco on the trail of Lara Bartok – a mysterious fugitive with links to international terrorism.Bartok is a leading figure in Resurrection, a violent revolutionary movement whose brutal attacks on prominent right-wing politicians have spread hatred and violence throughout the West.As the coils of a ruthless plot tighten around him, Carradine finds himself drawn to Lara. Caught between competing intelligence services who want her dead, he soon faces an awful choice: to abandon Lara to her fate or to risk everything trying to save her.‘An instant classic of the genre’ Mick Herron‘The Man Between is up there with the best – full of thrills, wit and fine writing’ Peter Robinson