The man Richter was looking at was of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean appearance: black hair cut fairly short and neatly styled, light brown complexion and with dark brown eyes. His features were regular and unmemorable, his suit was clearly good quality and expensive and what Richter could see of his figure suggested he was fairly fit, which possibly hinted at membership of a gym somewhere. What he looked like more than anything else was a successful businessman.
What he also looked like was puzzled and annoyed.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘And what do you want?’
‘As I said, Michael,’ Richter replied, ‘just a chat, really. I think you know the answers to a few questions that have been bothering me for a while.’
‘I don’t have to talk to you. Are you a police officer?’
‘Now why would you ask that? Have you done something wrong?’
Michael glanced to one side, apparently looking for someone, then returned his gaze to Richter, a slight smile on his face, but he didn’t reply.
Moments later, two heavily-built men also wearing suits but of a noticeably poorer quality than Michael’s appeared beside the booth.
‘Time for you to go,’ Michael said, and barely glanced up at the taller of the two men. ‘Get him outside,’ he instructed. ‘Take him down one of the alleyways and break both his legs.’
Richter didn’t even look at the two men.
‘I don’t think so,’ another voice said quietly, the American accent unmistakable.
TJ Masters had apparently materialised beside the taller of Michael’s two bodyguards. Like a bookend, Rich Moore matched his position beside the other man, the two Americans having shadowed Richter ever since he’d climbed out of the pool car in Covent Garden. They were both aiming Glock pistols at the bodyguards, stubby suppressors fitted to the ends of the barrels, the weapons out of sight of any of the other patrons of the pub because of the way the two men were standing.
‘This is just the sort of thing I mean,’ Richter said, in the same conversational tone. ‘You need to take a bit more care. Be more aware of what’s going on, and just try thinking things through a bit more. Maybe you should take these two guys for a short walk, TJ,’ he added to Masters, ‘but try not to make too much of a mess when you dump them. I can do without the extra paperwork.’
Masters nodded, gestured with the barrel of his pistol and the procession of four men walked slowly out of the pub, the two Americans with their weapons hidden under their jackets but ready for immediate use.
Michael watched as they left the building, then reluctantly looked back across the table at Richter.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘I don’t know you, and I think you’ve confused me with somebody else.’
Richter shook his head.
‘I don’t think so, Michael,’ he said. ‘I suppose it all really comes down to attention to detail. You probably thought your relationship with Martin Wilmot finished when you or one of your hired thugs stuck a knife in his stomach and ripped out his guts in Epping Forest, but you’d be wrong about that. Wilmot obviously had his faults otherwise you’d never have got your claws into him, but I think he knew his time was running out. So, before you got around to slicing and dicing him he wrote a letter. Not to anyone in particular because he probably hoped he’d eventually be able to destroy it. But as we know, that didn’t happen so it ended up on my desk.
‘He wrote down pretty much everything he could remember about his relationship with you, all about TRAIT and the files he supplied, none of which he should have done, obviously. The problem we had was that he hadn’t got much information that you might call substantive, and he obviously couldn’t supply any proof of what he was saying either. But one thing he did tell us that absolutely panned out was your mobile number. The number you told him to call you on whenever he had any urgent information to pass on, but only at certain times of the day. Like about this time of the day, for example, which is why I’m sitting here right now. It’s not good tradecraft to maintain the same channel of communication between two separate operations and I’m really surprised you didn’t know that. If you’d just bought yourself a new SIM card and told all your contacts what your new number was, I’d never have found you.’
Richter paused for a moment, as if another thought had just struck him.
‘But maybe you couldn’t just change the SIM card,’ he suggested. ‘After all, if you did that, how would your team of three Syrian hitmen be able to contact you and confirm that Professor Charles Vernon had ceased to exist down in Cambrils? We recovered the mobiles from what was left of them, and oddly enough your mobile number—’ he pointed at the smartphone lying on the table in front of Michael ‘—was in the call record of one of the phones and listed in the contacts section of all three of them. Bit of a giveaway, that, don’t you think?’
Michael shook his head.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he repeated, ‘and I don’t know you, so I’m leaving.’
Like most booths in most pubs, the table was fixed and so were the seats, so to stand up Michael had to lean forward slightly over the table so that he could manoeuvre his way out. Which was exactly what Richter had been expecting.
As he did so, Richter pulled out the cosh that he had concealed in his right-hand jacket pocket and swung it in a short vicious arc towards the left-hand side of Michael’s head. The blow connected with a solid thud and the effect was immediate. Michael simply collapsed onto the table, knocking his half empty glass onto the floor where it rolled around but didn’t shatter, the spilled liquid from the drink spreading across the table.
Richter glanced round, but nobody seemed to be paying him any particular attention, and very possibly the sight of someone collapsing in a pub was not sufficiently unusual for most people to notice. Although to be in that state of inebriation before lunch was perhaps not so common.
He stepped out of the booth and walked around to the seat opposite, pocketed Michael’s phone then dragged him out and wrapped his left arm over his shoulder so that he could grasp the unconscious man’s left wrist. Then he pulled him upright and walked him slowly and clumsily across the bar towards the main door, mouthing apologies and muttered explanations as he did so. What he hoped it looked like was a man helping his drunken friend out of the door and into the street outside where he could sober up. In fact, of course, Richter’s purpose was rather less altruistic.
As well as tracking Michael’s mobile phone, Baker had also been tracking Richter’s Blackview, and the call he had made before confronting Michael had been to Hammersmith, which meant that Baker had been able to both listen to and record the entire conversation Richter had had with Michael. And on a different line, Baker had been talking to Steve Carpenter, an elegant and lethally efficient black man who was both another of Simpson’s operatives and one of the men Richter had always found he could rely on. Carpenter had himself been shadowing the three men, but from a motor vehicle.
And that was why, less than thirty seconds after Richter had stepped out of the main door of the pub, still holding up the unconscious Michael, an anonymous white Ford Transit van stopped right outside the building. The side sliding door opened, Moore and Masters stepped out, grabbed Michael and hauled him into the back of the vehicle while Richter climbed into the passenger seat beside Carpenter. The two doors slammed almost simultaneously, Carpenter lifted his foot off the clutch pedal and the van shot away down the road.
‘Just one question, my man,’ Carpenter asked in his fake Jamaican accent. ‘Where to?’
Richter paused for a few seconds, considering. Then he smiled bleakly.
‘Epping Forest should do the trick,’ he said. ‘Bit of poetic justice, perhaps, returning to the scene of the crime. Or in this case the scene of a completely different crime, but who’s counting?’
He turned to look back into the rear of the vehicle where Masters had already snapped a pair of handcuffs around the unconscious Michael’s wrists.
‘Any problems with the bodyguards?’ Richter asked.
Moore shook his head.
‘They were both carrying,’ he said, ‘but we had the drop on them and they’d seen the suppressors so they knew we could finish them quietly enough so nobody would ever notice. Or almost nobody. And people in this fine capital city of yours don’t seem to take too much notice of what’s going on around them anyway. So we walked them off the main drag, found a convenient set of railings and used the other sets of handcuffs to hitch them up to it. We took their pistols and spare mags and about two minutes later your friend Steve Carpenter here pitched up in this white truck. Then we just waited for the go from Hammersmith. Job done, pretty much.’
It was more or less the middle of the day and the traffic was moving fairly freely, at least by London standards. Carpenter headed north until he could pick up the M25, then turned east towards the Dartford Crossing, but pulled off at Junction 26, drove under the motorway and then took to the country roads and headed up towards Epping Green, looking for a secluded spot where Richter could spend a little quality time with Michael.
A little under three hours after they had finally stopped, the four men got back into the Transit van and Carpenter began steering them back more or less the way they’d come.
Michael had ceased providing useful information to them at about the same time as he’d stopped breathing, and they’d taken some time to sanitise the scene before leaving, to muddy the waters. And what the Iranian had told Richter had served to confirm what they’d already deduced about what was going on, as well as putting a lot more flesh on the bones, including what he had known about the timescale. His name of course was not Michael, but they had discovered that he was the senior Iranian illegal in Britain. Or, to be ruthlessly accurate, he had been the senior Iranian illegal in Britain, a position that would now have to be filled by a new incumbent in due course.
Richter spent about twenty minutes on his mobile, bringing Simpson and the Intelligence Director up to speed, and Masters had been similarly employed briefing the senior spook at the American Embassy.
What they then had to do was decide how to respond.
If they could.
And if there was time.
‘And don’t forget the one thing we really can’t do about this,’ Richter emphasised to Simpson, ‘is tell the bloody Israelis. Or not yet, anyway.’