The telephone call that morning on his mobile had been short, entirely uninformative to a third person listening in, but completely comprehensible to the two participants.
‘This is Todd. Can I speak to Sandra, please?’ The male caller had spoken English entirely fluently but with a faint and unidentifiable accent.
Professor Martin Wilmot had been expecting a call, but not quite so quickly. He found himself clutching his mobile phone a little more tightly than he had before as he answered.
‘You’ve got the wrong number,’ he’d said, the response that he had learned by rote half a decade previously.
‘Isn’t that 369356?’
‘No,’ Wilmot had replied. ‘This is 369326.’
‘Sorry,’ the caller had replied, and then immediately disconnected.
Wilmot’s mobile phone number did genuinely end with the six digits 369326, and misdialling by touching the two rather than the five on a smartphone’s virtual keyboard was an easy mistake to make, so the call sounded genuinely innocuous and an eavesdropper would have dismissed it as harmless. But, in reality, every word spoken had been quite deliberate and conveyed a very specific meaning as part of a remarkably simple code. Wilmot had known nothing of the covert world and the code that had been agreed with the man who was acting as his handler was about as basic as it was possible to get.
The name ‘Todd’ meant that the caller wanted to see Wilmot today, the first three letters of ‘Todd’ and ‘today’ being identical. If the meeting was being arranged for the next day – tomorrow – the caller would have used the name ‘Tommy’ instead. The name ‘Sandra’ referred to the address of one particular bar in Dean Street in Soho, and Wilmot had memorised a list of half a dozen addresses in London and the codewords that indicated them. And the final three digits of the telephone number the caller had apparently been trying to ring – 356 – simply specified the time of the meeting: nothing more complex than 3:56 pm.
Martin Wilmot, fifty-seven years old, just over six feet tall, thin to the point of looking cadaverous, bespectacled, and with a lined and furrowed face that made it appear that he was bearing all the cares in the world on his shoulders – an impression that in his case was substantially correct – was an extremely unwilling participant in the arrangement.
Wilmot had a secret that he would have died rather than reveal, and some five years earlier he had encountered a man who called himself ‘Michael’ and who appeared to share the same taste for forbidden fruit. In reality, Michael’s agenda was entirely different, and he had used Wilmot’s unnatural craving simply to ensnare the man and to ensure that he would do exactly what he was told. Wilmot had become Michael’s creature, held in check by the professional-quality DVD recordings Michael had arranged to be made of the events of one particular evening that had been memorable for several reasons.
Michael had laid out his terms: Wilmot was to provide information to him as and when requested, information that was specific to the kind of work the scientist was engaged in and which he would have access to as a normal part of his job. He had been providing highly classified and very specific information to Michael ever since. Along the way, he thought he had identified the man’s actual nationality, which hadn’t come with even a crumb of comfort. Because of occasional remarks Michael had made, he believed the man who held his life almost literally in his hands was from the Middle East, possibly Iranian or Iraqi, but most probably Syrian. Whether his guess was right or not, the escalating conflict in Syria had made liberal use of a variety of chemical weapons, and every time Wilmot saw a news broadcast or read a newspaper article about the conflict he cringed inside as he recognised some of his own handiwork – the classified information he had been providing to Michael about such devices – as being the agency of much of the death and misery in that war-torn country.
In fact, Wilmot had correctly identified the part of the world that Michael came from, but his tormentor was not Syrian. If he had realised exactly who Michael was working for, and had possessed some other pieces of information that were not generally known but were nevertheless in the public domain if you happened to know where to look for them, he would have come to a very different conclusion about one aspect of the matter he was involved in.