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.’‘Fuck.His wife’s beside herself.Says he’s never done this before.Had he told you about his problems?’‘He mentioned something about the tax police.’‘I hope he hasn’t done anything stupid.’‘I can’t see it.Not Alan.’ Christ.I hope no one has done it for him.‘Have you told the police?’‘The Tyumen police aren’t big on missing persons.’‘But you’ve told them.’‘I’ve notified them.’‘And you don’t know whether he took a flight?’‘No.We know nothing.He left his house at eight on Monday and that’s it.He booked the flights.Hasn’t phoned anyone.His phone’s off, needless to say.Car’s still at home.’‘Have you tried his Turkish phone?’‘I didn’t know he had a Turkish phone.’Webster sat down on the stairs.The different possibilities cycled through his mind.‘Look, Leonard.Maybe I can do something.I’ll have a look at his flights and see if anyone’s been using his phone.Get Irina to send me his credit card details, all his cards.Any phone numbers I might not have.I’ll have a look.’‘Thanks Ben.This isn’t like him.’‘Tell me if anything happens.’‘I will.’Webster hung up.He found the Turkish number for Knight and dialled it.It went straight to voicemail.Where was he? Perhaps he had bolted; gone to Turkey while things calmed down.Perhaps his home life wasn’t as solid as it seemed.Perhaps he was in debt.In the kitchen he picked up his glass and took a good swallow.None of these was convincing.‘What was that?’ Elsa was chopping an onion, her face half turned away from the fumes.‘Nothing.A case.’‘You look worried.’‘It’s nothing.Just a wayward source.’Webster did what he could to track down Knight.His travel-agent source found out that he had been booked on the 10.35 from Tyumen to Vladivostok; he never checked in, not to that flight or to any other that had left Tyumen that week – or any Russian airport, for that matter.With Mrs Knight’s permission Webster spoke to the phone company as Knight and reported his phone missing; no calls had been made since Monday morning when he had rung for a taxi to take him to the airport.His wife had seen him leave in the car, and the taxi controller told Webster that they had dropped him off at around eight in the morning.He had paid the driver in cash, but in the airport made one purchase on his credit card, for three hundred rubles, from a cafe.That was the last trace he had left.It would take about a week to discover whether he had taken any money from his offshore account, but somehow it seemed unlikely; he had withdrawn no money from the joint account he held with his wife.Alan Knight was definitely gone.If he had decided to make himself disappear he had done a very good job of it.He was clever enough for that.And the alternative, while it seemed so much more likely, simply didn’t make sense.Why abduct him? Why not have him die in a car crash or a hit and run? Why not arrest him on some absurd charge and ship him off to a distant prison? He was a Russian citizen.They could do what they liked to him.But what Webster really couldn’t accept was that whatever was happening to Alan had anything to do with a conversation they had had two months ago about not very much.It seemed so disproportionate.And if they were sending him messages, surely Alan’s disappearance would come with some sort of message attached; if this was meant to frighten off Ikertu, why leave it ambiguous?It was while he was dwelling on these questions, wondering whether he should wait for answers before finally conceding that this case was no longer worth the prize, that he received a call from his friend at the travel agency.The news was not about Knight but about Lock: he was booked on flights to Cayman through London, leaving Moscow on Wednesday and stopping in London for two nights on his way back.Surveillance consumed everything: time, money, attention.Webster never relished it.While he had an operation running it was impossible for him to concentrate on anything else, and the returns were often meagre: it never told you quite as much as you wanted.Today, for now, everything was running smoothly enough.The team had picked up Lock at Heathrow.He had flown in from Cayman with two bodyguards and what looked like a lawyer, probably a Bryson Joyce man, who had said goodbye after Customs and taken the train into town.One of Lock’s men had hired a car; there was some argument with the hire company, and Lock had become agitated by the delay, but eventually a silver Volvo saloon had arrived outside Arrivals and taken him and the remaining bodyguard into London.One of the first text messages Webster received from his team that morning read, in a familiar, flat tone, ‘Enquiries with the Hertz desk established that the gentleman was disappointed not to receive the Mercedes that he believed he had booked.’George Black, purveyor of first-rate surveillance and counter-surveillance, had listened to what Webster needed and arranged a team of six: four in a car and two on a motorbike.One woman in the car, one on the back of the bike – a good woman, George had told Webster many times, being an essential part of any successful operation.Black himself was in the car, managing the operation and sending text message after text message to Webster.He was a soldier, or had been, with a career that had straddled special forces and military intelligence.He said little about his past, but what he did say you knew was true, and he had followed many people trickier and nastier than Lock.He was direct, efficient, wholly committed to the job, and better than anyone else Webster had ever tried.But even he lost people now and then.Today that didn’t matter, not terribly.Later on Lock would be having dinner with Onder (the hardest part of the operation to set up – Webster had eventually had to blackmail Onder with visions of Lock’s imminent demise to persuade him to come to London) and through him they knew where he would be staying – Claridge’s, in Mayfair.There was no critical meeting that they had to catch, and that made the whole operation less nervy than it might have been.Webster’s brief to George was unusual: report how Lock behaves.Is he relaxed or busy? Is he smiling, rushing, hiding? Is he doing Malin’s business or his own?The text messages came every ten to fifteen minutes.‘Subject proceeding east on M4.’.‘Subject proceeding east on A4.’.‘Subject approaching Claridge’s along Upper Brook Street.’ Black never abbreviated.Webster tried to deal with his email but was getting little done.In the end he left his office and went for a walk.It was the middle of the morning, raining still, and the people of Chancery Lane, having picked up their breakfasts and not yet gone for lunch, were working.Webster could sense the industry around him, in new glass buildings and older concrete blocks, in the offices where the lawyers opined and the accountants added up.No one made anything here.No one sold anything either, except for sandwiches and ties and birthday cards.They calculated, they assessed risk, they checked, they analysed; they disputed, and resolved, and testified; they reported, and then they invoiced.They helped their clients to make money, to avoid losing it, to sidestep drudgery.They did what Webster did, in short.And Lock, he thought.We help others do.What was it to be Lock at the moment? Until the summer he must have felt so comfortable.Hammer was right: as Malin’s shield, if that’s what he was, he had had no real shielding to do until now.His path had been easy.He was used to the Russians, knew the companies and the tax treaties by heart, had his regiment of advisers out there to do his bidding
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Tematy
IndexChris A Jackson [Weapon of Fl Weapon of Vengeance (epub)
Chris Kennedy [The Theogony When the Gods Aren't Gods (epub
Chris Priestley [Tales of Ter Tales of Terror from the Tunnel
Chris A Jackson [Scimitar Sea Scimitar Sun (retail) (epub) id
Chris Vials Realism for the Masses; Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and U.S. Culture, 1935 1947 (2009)
Chris Wooding [Ketty Jay 02] The Fade (ORIGINAL) (epub)
Chris Wooding [Tale of the Ke The Black Lung Captain (epub) i
Chris Kuzneski [Payne and Jon The Secret Crown (2010) (epub)
Coulter Catherine Baron 01 Szalony baron
Ciezki piasek Anatolij Rybakow