forty-four

“I’m sorry, Ruth. We’re taking you off the Hardman case.”

Richard Aston sounded matter-of-fact in his apology, but his hands clenched in front of him showed a visible sign of tension. Martyn Claas, sitting alongside him, looked completely calm, even pleased.

The three of them were alone in the Hardman briefing room, with Ruth facing the two senior Cruxys men. The building was still quiet save for the usual skeleton staff manning the operations desks, and only the vague hum of traffic outside signalled the activity of a normal day. She had been summoned up here the moment she had arrived, but hadn’t expected this.

She felt a genuine sense of shock on hearing the words, and wondered what had happened. “Why? What’s changed?”

“Lack of progress,” Claas muttered, “if you really need an explanation.” He waved away Aston’s attempt to cut him off and continued forcefully, “You haven’t even scratched the surface of this business, and that’s not good enough. You may not be aware, Ms. Gonzales, but every day spent on these cases is a dent in our bottom line. We need a swift conclusion, not a lengthy investigation that goes nowhere. There is not an unlimited budget at your disposal to take a leisurely view of a missing person or their private circumstances. Nor do we have the resources of the authorities. For that reason I am closing this down.”

“It’s been just three days and there’s fuck-all leisure about it,” she protested fiercely, and wanted to slap the smug smile off Claas’s face. “What are you going to do—leave Nancy Hardman hanging while her daughter’s being held captive God knows where?”

“I’m sure the police will be happy to take over. They are accustomed to dealing with cranks. What is your problem?”

“It’s immoral!” She stopped. “What do you mean, the police? You can’t.”

“We have to take a pragmatic view. For all we know the girl had been taken by her father—a domestic dispute. It happens all the time. We must hand this matter over to the proper agency to deal with it. It will ensure the best outcome all round.”

“That’s precisely what the kidnap note said not to do. You have no idea what will happen when the cops show up.” She looked at Aston for support, but he shook his head, his lips set in anger. She guessed he had been outvoted and the signal was telling her not to push back. But she was beyond caring. “Have you any idea of the dimensions of this case? Have you even considered what’s behind this kidnap?”

“The whys and wherefores are not my concern,” Claas replied and made to stand up with a glance at Aston. “I think this discussion has gone far enough. I do not intend trading words with an employee in this way.”

“Wait!” Ruth stood up too and walked round to the storyboard. It carried nothing of what she had discussed with Vaslik last night, nor of her suspicions about who might be behind Beth’s kidnap. But now maybe it should do, because if this Dutchman had his way, this was the last throw of the coin she had left. Good or bad, it had to count.

She stabbed the board with her finger, standing in a way that blocked Claas’s progress to the door. “See this? It’s all bullshit. It’s detail, but none of it counts because there’s something going on here that’s a million miles away from Nancy and Beth Hardman. That kid’s been taken for reasons we can’t even begin to know about—and there are people not far from here who know why.”

“People?” Claas looked at her with an expression of pity. “What on earth—I don’t have to listen to this hysteria. Please get out of my way.” He made to push past her but Ruth wasn’t moving. She was too angry.

“I haven’t finished yet. You really want to treat this like a domestic? See this?” She pointed at the copy of the kidnap note, which had been enlarged for emphasis. “The language: American. It’s also intelligently constructed, so not the work of some crank. This woman?” A stab at the photo of Clarisse taken from the CCTV footage at the gym. “She sounded American but we believe she’s Israeli and possibly a former member of the Israel Defense Forces. Tiggi Sgornik?” Another stab at the board, where Tiggi was smiling out at the room like a catwalk model. “Also probably Israeli, born of Polish immigrants, because the one thing she isn’t is a first-generation Pole.” Claas made to interrupt, going redder in the face, but she waded on, determined not to allow him to close her down without a fight. “The listening devices in the house? Installed by experts so that we were meant to find some, but not all. The visual surveillance on the house? Also expert. An approach by a team that included Clarisse was clearly a run-up to a kidnap attempt on Nancy Hardman, possibly because they saw lifting Beth wasn’t producing the result they wanted quickly enough.”

She saw George Paperas’ name had been added to the board and grabbed a red marker pen, slashing through the name with a vicious cross. “George was a UN aid expert who was helping me with background information that might have found Michael Hardman. He was followed from a meeting with me by two men, one identified as a CIA agent.”

“I don’t see the relevance—”

“You should. Two days later he was dead, murdered by a hit-and-run driver that a witness claimed appeared to be waiting for him.” She paused for breath, aware that somebody else had entered the room. But she wasn’t willing to stop now. “And this morning, there’s continued close surveillance on the Hardman house, only they’re not even bothering to hide anymore.” She tossed the pen onto the table, where it clattered across the surface and pinged loudly off a water carafe before landing on the floor.

Claas looked ready to burst. “What is your point?”

“My point is, this kidnap was conceived and carried out to get the attention of a man we know absolutely nothing about; a man with a secret bank account, who keeps disappearing into countries where he can’t be contacted; who manages to support his family with no visible income. I don’t know about your home life, Mr. Claas, but that’s not a domestic where I come from. And if you leave Nancy Hardman and her daughter hanging like this, word will get out and our reputation will be in ruins within twenty-four hours.”

She walked out of the room, brushing past a vaguely familiar figure with short-cropped grey hair and steel spectacles. Another new board member, she recalled, although she couldn’t remember his name. She carried on down to the basement where she found James Ellworthy crouched over a monitor, humming to himself over a screen full of data. She dropped the smart card from Nancy’s photo frame on the desk in front of him. She wasn’t sure why she was bothering, but it was better than inactivity or kicking the furniture. And another confrontation with Claas would not end well for either of them.

“Hi,” he said, pushing his spectacles back on the bridge of his nose.

“Can you run this through whatever machinery you have and see if you can rescue a file? It shows up blank. It might be something that got caught up and loaded in error, but I’d like to check it out.”

He smiled and nodded as if thrown a challenge. “Sure thing, uh …”

“Ruth. Ruth Gonzales. Thank you.”

“Sure. Are you OK? You look pissed—and I don’t mean drunk.”

“Actually, I wish I was drunk. I’d feel a hell of a lot calmer than I do right now.” She pointed at the smart card. “As quick as you can, please?” She handed him a card with her phone number.

He nodded. “I’ll call you.”

She turned and went back up to the ground floor. She had to get out of this place. The atmosphere was suddenly cloying and she wanted to throw something—especially at Claas the Arse.

Aston was waiting for her. He looked faintly amused and said, “Got that out of your system?”

She said nothing at first, not trusting herself to be discreet enough to remain professional. Finally she asked, “Am I fired?”

“No. I confess he tried, but there are areas where I still hold some authority. Bob Zitterman backed me up, but I wouldn’t count on that lasting long. They’re much too close and Claas has powerful connections. He’s also a big-money man in the investment community. But your comment about the damage to our reputation was right on the button; it won’t be just Cruxys affected—any fall-out will include Greenville as well, and they wouldn’t like that.”

“So where does that leave me?”

“Until the police step in you’re still working this case.”

“Thank you. Zitterman’s the new American board member?”

“Yes. He arrived yesterday from Washington. He has friends, as they say, along the Beltway and he’s taken an active interest in the Hardman case—I suspect prompted by Claas.” His expression remained blank. “I’m not sure why, but they form a formidable front if they want this to go away. Never underestimate the powers of accountants, Ruth.”

“If that’s all it is.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Well, it’s obvious Claas wants this assignment stopped in its tracks. But why? I don’t buy his argument about bottom lines; I may be a simple employee but I know we have enough paying clients on the books who never make a claim to make this division profitable.”

He looked worried. “I know. There’s been a sudden change of atmosphere in our connections with Greenville, that’s all I can tell you. Almost as if somebody threw a switch. I don’t know where it stems from, but I’m trying to find out.”

Greenville was the American half of the Dutch-US parent company that now owned Cruxys, Ruth remembered. “You mean they’d be happy to see us lose our reputation and go to the wall?” The security and crisis management sector had already been hit by several scandals; walking away from a kidnapping and being seen to be lambasted by the police and press would surely finish Cruxys overnight. What would make Claas and Greenville take that lying down?

“I wouldn’t overestimate our financial value to them,” he cautioned her sombrely. “We’re probably little more than loose change on their balance sheet. But in PR terms, even a hint of bad news in the current climate means they’d let us go like a snake shedding skin.”

“Thanks for the warning. So what do I do now?”

“I spoke with Sir Philip Coleclough about Hardman after you left yesterday. He made a few phone calls, called in some favours. He got back to me with an answer just before you arrived this morning.”

Ruth waited.

“Michael Hardman is not, and never has been in the employ of Her Majesty’s armed forces, the Security Service or Secret Intelligence Service. Sir Philip ran the name and photo you supplied through all the agencies. They’ve never heard of him. In fact they came up blank.”

Blank. It was an odd word. At the level of checking to which Coleclough was rumoured to have access, there would surely have been something—even a parking fine. “Blank as in—?”

“There’s nothing. He’s a ghost.”

“How can he be? He has a bank account in Kensington.”

“It shouldn’t be possible, I agree. But that’s not all: the passport office has no record of him, either.”

“What?”

“All I can say is that Michael Hardman has now become a person of some interest.”

“And the dead European in Herat?”

“An import—a Chechen fighter in his mid-twenties. He has a tattoo on his back linking him with a hard-line Islamist group with its roots in Grozny. There’s been a steady flow of young men from the area into Afghanistan and now Syria, and he appears to be one of the latest casualties.”

“But he had a phone on him with Nancy Hardman’s number.”

Aston gave a cool smile. “There were reports of a fourth man, although he’s rather conveniently vanished. Think about it: what would you do if you wanted to disappear, believed dead? You have an item identifying you … and a dead body with no face.” He shrugged. “Classic misdirection.”