The posthumous letter written by Martin Wilmot had contained a comprehensive statement of everything that the scientist had been able to find out from his conversations with ‘Michael’ as well as deductions he had made about things that hadn’t been said. But because Wilmot had been drip fed only enough information to allow him to obtain whatever data Michael wanted, the hard facts he had been able to glean were comparatively few.
Richter had gone through Wilmot’s letter a couple of times and had noted down every piece of information that he felt might be useful. And now one of these in particular did actually seem to be working out. He had also spent well over an hour on a scrambled telephone call to the MI5 duty officer at Millbank who hadn’t seemed any too pleased to be embarking upon what he clearly felt to be some kind of a wild goose chase – albeit a highly classified wild goose chase – on behalf of an intelligence officer he had never heard of who worked for an intelligence organisation that he had also never heard of.
Simply establishing his bona fides had taken Richter the better part of ten minutes, five of them hanging on the phone while the man at Millbank presumably took advice from someone a little higher up the food chain or perhaps even rang someone at Legoland on the other side of the river at Vauxhall Cross. After all, Richter’s section, the Foreign Operations Executive, ostensibly worked on behalf of the Secret Intelligence Service, so it would have been reasonable to assume that somebody there would have at least heard of the FOE.
In the event, there appeared to be no useful information, or at least not the information that Richter had been looking for, at Millbank, so it had all been a complete waste of his time.
That wasn’t entirely surprising. Every foreign embassy and consulate in every city in the world routinely employed illegals, either professional intelligence officers who had been appointed in an entirely innocuous and meaningless capacity, typically something like a cultural attaché, or citizens of their own country who were acting as students or businessmen or whatever with no apparent official links to their homeland. These illegals were normally employed in active espionage or other activities to the detriment of the host country, and their identities were always a closely guarded secret, sometimes not even being disclosed to the most senior embassy or consulate staff.
Richter was then sitting in a corner of the public bar of a hostelry in Dean Street, a glass of lemonade sitting on the table in front of him. Like most professionals in his somewhat murky trade, Richter never drank alcohol, because it was far too easy for such beverages to be spiked or poisoned, and in his case it was simple enough to avoid the temptations of the demon drink because he had never tasted anything alcoholic that he actually liked. He was staring at the screen of his Blackview smartphone, a wired earpiece in his right ear and listening while James Baker, back in the dungeons at Hammersmith, worked some kind of arcane magic to explain what he was seeing on the screen.
It wasn’t, in fact, desperately impressive, just a mapping application that showed the network of fairly narrow streets and alleyways that characterised that part of London, Soho. There were numerous apps available for smartphones that would produce a very similar display to the one Richter was looking at, but his app differed from those in two important ways: first, it was not available to the general public for any price because of one feature it incorporated and, second, overlaid on the map was a very faint grid upon which a tiny blue symbol was pulsing slowly. And it was that symbol which was holding Richter’s full attention at that moment.
He had spent just over half an hour with Baker that morning, after catching about four hours of fitful sleep in one of the ground floor ready rooms of the building at Hammersmith, telling him what he needed to do and how he planned to do it. James Baker, the resident IT wizard for the section, had listened, nodded agreement and had then very efficiently produced the information – the location, or rather the locations – that Richter had needed.
Half an hour later, Richter had been on his way towards central London, travelling as a passenger in one of the pool cars. He’d climbed out of the vehicle on the edge of Covent Garden and then made his way slowly north towards Soho. There had been, at least at that stage, no hurry because they had no idea where the contact was. All Baker had been able to do was identify the area in which he had previously been located, which had come as something of a surprise, not because of where it was, but because it was such a small geographic area: basically, just Soho and Covent Garden.
Most intelligence professionals made a point of never being predictable, of never following the same route twice, even altering their method of transport, timing and route when travelling to work. Richter himself used a mix of public transport – the Tube, buses and taxis – plus his feet when he travelled to Hammersmith each day, and on two or three days each week he used his motorcycle, taking a slightly different route every time and always watching his mirrors. But for some reason the contact he was going to meet tended to always pop up in the same bit of London. Maybe he just felt comfortable there, or he lived nearby. Either way, it was sloppy and very unprofessional, and the man had also made another bad mistake that Baker was taking advantage of right then.
Richter had headed slowly towards Soho, hoping that a definitive and accurate location would follow.
And it had. It had just taken rather longer than he had hoped or expected.
Most people who use mobile phones, which in the Western world means almost everybody over the age of five, will normally keep the device switched on at all times except when they are in bed. Some people even leave them switched on overnight but with the ringer muted so they have a fighting chance of getting a decent night’s sleep. That way, they will still be aware from the call record if somebody tried to ring them.
But there are other users of mobile phones who have a slightly different way of working. Often these people have two or more mobiles, or perhaps two SIM cards in a single handset if the hardware allows it, with individual ringtones selected. One phone or SIM card will be on most of the time, and the other only turned on when needed, when the user is expecting a call or a message of some kind. Not all, but many, of these users are involved in criminal activity of one kind or another, most frequently involving the supply of illegal pharmaceutical products: drug dealers, in short. These people may not be the sharpest tools in the shed, but they are not entirely stupid. If they are able to read – a skill which almost all of them possess to a greater or lesser degree – they will know that the location of every mobile phone can be tracked as long as it is switched on, and sometimes even if it switched off but the battery is still fitted.
For the forces of law and order, tracking the location of the cell phone of a suspected criminal provides a very convenient and easy way of establishing that particular person’s movements in any given period. It’s especially convenient and easy for the police because all the work is done by somebody else, some technician employed by the mobile phone provider. But if the phone is only switched on for a few minutes, the only thing that can be established is a single location at a specific time, and this is of much less use to an investigating police officer.
The phone that Richter was following had, according to the data that Baker had obtained through a series of parallel high priority requests sent a couple of days earlier to every mobile phone service provider in the United Kingdom, spent most of the previous day, and in fact most of the previous week and the previous six months, switched off. But the records also showed that the mobile was normally switched on for about twenty to thirty minutes in the late morning of almost every weekday, and almost invariably when this happened the phone was located somewhere in the Soho or Covent Garden areas of London. Sometimes the location was mobile, but usually only for a couple of minutes, and then it typically remained static for at least fifteen minutes.
The reasonable supposition was that the user of the device expected to be contacted by a colleague or a superior or some other person at that time, perhaps while he was sitting in a cafe or a restaurant somewhere, and that once whatever message had been received or the telephone conversation had finished, the phone was switched off again so that his movements could no longer be tracked.
‘Still static,’ Baker said into Richter’s ear.
‘Elapsed time?’
‘Three minutes fifty-two. You’re less than two minutes away.’
Richter was now walking quickly through the streets of Soho, not running because that would attract attention and he had no idea whether or not the target he was homing in on would have protection: one or more minders inside or outside wherever he was, men who would be looking out for anything unusual. Like a running man, for example.
‘Activity?’ Richter asked.
‘It switched on but not being used. According to the map, the target’s a pub on the next corner on your left.’
‘Visual,’ Richter said, his voice clipped. ‘Going off-line.’
He removed the earpiece and tucked it into his jacket pocket, pulling the mini jack plug out of the socket on the top of his Blackview and replacing the cover using his thumb.
Richter stopped for a few seconds outside the door of the pub, accessed the telephone function of the mobile and made sure that the correct number was displayed on the screen. Then he stepped inside, glanced around to get his bearings and, more importantly, to visually check the people standing and sitting around inside the bar, looking for his target.
Then he touched the screen to begin the call and held the phone to his ear.
On the far side of the bar were three booths and as Richter looked round he heard the unmistakable sound of a phone beginning to ring. In the centre booth he saw a man, who was sitting by himself, lower a glass containing a clear liquid to the table in front of him and pick up a mobile phone to answer it.
Richter began walking towards him, but in the crowded bar he was just one of several people moving around and the man in the booth did not appear to have even noticed him.
‘Hello?’ a man’s voice sounded in his ear as Richter saw the seated figure’s lips forming the word.
He pressed the button on the screen to end the call, dialled another number and then slipped the phone back into his pocket and sat down in the booth directly opposite the seated figure.
‘Hello, Michael,’ Richter said. ‘We need to talk.’