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‘You don’t miss a trick, do you?’ he said. ‘We’ve obviously picked the right man, Kit. You’re a natural.’
5 (#ulink_c70687e7-fe18-5ef8-8146-a3be6178d2b0)
Mantis said nothing more about the tattoo. Carradine was told that if he spotted the woman, he was to approach her discreetly, ensure that their conversation was neither overheard nor overseen, and then to explain that he had been sent by British intelligence. He was also to pass her a sealed package. This would be delivered by the Service before he left for Morocco.
‘I’m assuming I can’t open this package when I receive it?’
‘That is correct.’
‘Can I ask what will be inside it?’
‘A passport, a credit card and a message to the agent. That is all.’
‘That’s all? Nothing else?’
‘Nothing else.’
‘So why seal it?’
‘I’m not sure I understand your question.’
Carradine was trying to tread the fine line between protecting himself against risk and not appearing to be apprehensive.
‘It’s just that if my bags are searched and they find the package, if they ask me to open it, how do I explain why I’m carrying somebody else’s passport?’
‘Simple,’ Mantis replied. ‘You say that it’s for a friend who left it in London. The same friend whose photo you’re carrying in your wallet.’
‘So how did she get to Morocco without a passport?’
Mantis took a deep breath, as if to suggest that Carradine was starting to ask too many questions. ‘She has two. One Spanish, the other British. OK?’
‘What’s my friend’s name?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I need to know her name. If it’s on the passport, if I’m carrying her picture around, they’ll expect me to know who she is.’
‘Ah.’ Mantis seemed pleased that Carradine had thought of this. ‘The surname on the passport is “Rodriguez”. Christian name “Maria”. Easy enough to remember.’
‘And mundane enough not to draw attention to itself.’
‘It does have that added dimension, yes.’
They remained at the Lisson Grove flat for another half-hour, going over further practical details of Carradine’s trip, including protocols for contacting Vauxhall Cross in the event of an emergency. Mantis insisted that they meet at the flat when Carradine returned from Marrakech, at which point he would be debriefed and given payment, in cash, for any expenses he had run up in Morocco.
‘Feel free to stay somewhere decent in Casablanca,’ he said. ‘We’ll cover your costs, the extra flight as well. Just keep accurate receipts for the bean counters. They’re notoriously stingy when it comes to shelling out for taxis and train tickets.’
As Carradine was leaving, Mantis handed him two envelopes, each containing €1,500. There was no limit to the amount of foreign currency he was permitted to bring into Morocco and Mantis did not think that €3,000 would be considered suspicious. He told Carradine that the sealed package containing the passport and credit card would be delivered to his flat in Lancaster Gate the following day, as well as the novel which was to be used as a book cipher. Mantis reiterated the importance of leaving the sealed package intact, unless Carradine was instructed to open it by law enforcement officials in the UK or Morocco. He did not give an explanation for this request and Carradine did not ask for one. Carradine assumed that the package would contain sensitive documents.
‘Good luck,’ Mantis said, shaking his hand as he left. ‘And thanks for helping out.’
‘No problem.’
Carradine walked out onto Lisson Grove in a state of confusion. He was bewildered by the speed with which Mantis had acted and strung out by the painstaking assimilation of so much information. It seemed bizarre that he should have been asked to undertake work on behalf of the secret state – particularly after such a cursory meeting – and wondered if the entire episode was part of an elaborate set-up. Clearly the content of his novels, the depictions of tradecraft, his observations about the burdens of secrecy and so forth, had convinced the Service that C.K. Carradine was possessed of the ideal temperament to work as a support agent. But how had they known that he would agree so readily to their offer? While working for the BBC in his twenties, Carradine had spoken to three veteran foreign correspondents – two British, one Canadian – each of whom had been tapped up by their respective intelligence services overseas. They had turned down the opportunity on the basis that it would interfere with the objectivity of their work, undermine the relationships they had built up with local sources and potentially bring them into conflict with their host governments. Carradine wished that he had shown a little more of their steadfastness when presented with the dangled carrot of clandestine work. Instead, perhaps because of what had happened to his father, he had demonstrated a rather old-fashioned desire to serve Queen and country, a facet of his character which suddenly seemed antiquated, even naive. He was committed to doing what Mantis had asked him to do, but felt that he had not given himself adequate protection in the event that things went wrong.
Still in a state of apprehension, Carradine took a detour on the way home, purchased a roll of masking tape and found an Internet café in Paddington. He wanted to be certain that Mantis was a bona fide Service employee, not a Walter Mitty figure taking advantage of him either for his own amusement or for some darker purpose which had not yet been made clear.
The café was half-full. Carradine stood over a vacant computer, tore off a small strip of the masking tape and placed it over the lens at the top of the screen. The computer was already loaded with a VPN. In his most recent novel, Carradine had written a chapter in which the principal character was required to comb the Dark Net in order to create a false identity. He had spoken to a hacker a few weeks before and still remembered most of what she had told him during their cloak-and-dagger meeting at a coffee shop in Balham. The trick – apart from disabling the camera – was to use the VPN both to create a false IP address and to encrypt his Internet usage. That way, his activities would be concealed from any prying eyes in Cheltenham and Carradine could investigate the mysterious Mr Mantis without fear of being identified.
As he expected, none of the ‘Robert Mantis’ listings on Facebook could plausibly have been the man he had met in Lisson Grove. There was no Twitter account associated with the name, nor anything on Instagram. Carradine ran Mantis through LinkedIn and Whitepages but found only an out-of-work chef in Tampa and a ‘lifestyle’ photographer in Little Rock. Remembering a tip he had been given by the hacker, he looked on Nominet to see if any variant of ‘robertmantis’ was listed as a website domain. It was not. Whoever he had met that afternoon was using a pseudonym which had been cleaned up for the obvious purpose of protecting his true identity. Mantis was not listed as a director at Companies House nor as a shared freeholder on any UK properties. A credit check on Experian also drew a blank.
Satisfied that he was a genuine Service employee, Carradine put the computer to sleep, removed the strip of masking tape from the lens and walked home.
6 (#ulink_341d4b5b-3938-553f-80e3-19d27e8d6a16)
The following morning, Carradine was woken early by the sound of the doorbell ringing. He stumbled out of bed, pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and struck his foot on the skirting board as he picked up the intercom.
‘Delivery for Mr Carradine.’
He knew immediately what it was. He reached down, grabbed his toe and told the delivery man to leave it in his postbox.
‘Needs to be signed for.’
The accent was Jamaican. Carradine buzzed the man into the building. He waited by the door, rubbing his foot. A moth flew up towards the ceiling. Carradine clapped it dead between his hands. He could hear the lift outside grinding towards the landing as he wiped the smashed body on his shorts.
The delivery man was a middle-aged, dreadlocked Rasta wearing a high-vis waistcoat. A Post Office satchel was slung over his shoulder. It was possible that he was a convincingly disguised errand boy for the Service, but Carradine assumed that Mantis had simply sent the items by Special Delivery. He signed an illegible version of his name on an electronic pad using a small plastic tool that slipped on the glass, thanked him and took the package inside.
On any other morning, Carradine might have gone back to bed for another hour’s sleep. But the contents of the package were too intriguing. He walked into the kitchen, set a percolator of coffee on the stove and sliced the envelope open with a knife.
There was a paperback book inside. Mantis had sent a French translation of one of Carradine’s novels, published four years earlier. He opened the book to the title page. It was unsigned. The rest of the text had not been marked up nor were any pages turned down or altered in any way. The book was in pristine condition.
He waited for the coffee to boil, staring out of the window at the treetops of Hyde Park. If the novel was to be used as a book cipher, then Mantis possessed an identical copy which would allow him to send coded messages to Yassine without risking detection. He was using a French, rather than an English version of the book because Yassine was most likely a French-speaking Arab. For Carradine to give him a copy of the novel at their meeting was an ingenious and entirely plausible piece of tradecraft. They would be hiding in plain sight.
He took out the second item, the sealed package for ‘Maria’. The envelope was sturdy and bound with tape at both ends. Carradine weighed it in his hands. He could make out the outline of what he assumed was a passport. He bent the package slightly and thought that he could feel a document of some kind moving beneath the seal. Carradine had an obligation to open the envelope, because it was surely crazy to board an international flight carrying a package about which he knew so little. But he could not do so. It was against the spirit of the deal he had struck with the Service and would constitute a clear breach of trust. It was even possible that the package was a decoy and that the Service had sent it solely as a test of his integrity.
He set it to one side, drank the coffee and switched on the news. Overnight in New Delhi two vehicles had been hijacked by Islamist gunmen affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba and driven into crowds at a religious ceremony, killing an estimated 75 people. In Germany, an AFD politician had been gunned down on his doorstep by a Resurrection activist. Such headlines had become commonplace, as humdrum and predictable as tropical storms and mass shootings in the United States. Carradine waited for news of the Redmond kidnapping. It was the third item on the BBC. No trace had been found of the van in which Redmond had been driven away, no statement released by Resurrection claiming responsibility for the abduction.
Settling in front of his computer with a bowl of cereal, Carradine watched amateur footage of the crowds screaming in panic as they fled the carnage in New Delhi. He read an email written by the slain AFD politician, leaked to the press only days earlier, in which he had referred to Arabs as a ‘culturally alien people’ welcomed into Germany by ‘elitist pigs’. He learned that one in eight voters had given AFD their support in recent elections and that the group was now the second largest opposition party in the Bundestag. Small wonder Resurrection was so active in Germany. There had been similar assassinations of nationalist politicians in France, Poland and Hungary. It was only a matter of time before the violence crossed the Channel and a senior British politician was targeted.
Carradine took a shower and WhatsApped Mantis, acknowledging delivery of the package with a succinct ‘Thanks for the book’. Within thirty seconds Mantis had replied: ‘No problem’ adding – to Carradine’s consternation – two smiling emojis and a thumbs up for good measure. He put the package in a drawer and attempted to do some work. Every ten or fifteen minutes he would open the drawer and check that the package was still there, as if sprites or cat burglars might have carried it off while his back was turned. Later in the afternoon, when his once-a-fortnight cleaner, Mrs Ritter, was in the flat, he removed the package altogether and set it on his desk until she had left the building.
Though he had yet to complete any specific tasks on behalf of the Service, Carradine already felt as though he had been cut off from his old life; that he was inhabiting a parallel existence separate from the world he had known before meeting Mantis and witnessing the abduction of Lisa Redmond. He wanted to talk to his father about what had happened, to tell him about Morocco and to gauge his advice, but he was forbidden by the Secrets Act. He could say nothing to anyone about what Mantis had asked him to do. He tried to work, but it now seemed ridiculous to be writing about fictional spies in fictional settings when he himself had been employed by the Service as a bona fide support agent. Instead he spent the next two days re-reading Frederick Forsyth’s memoirs and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, trawling for insights into the life of a writer spy. He watched The Bureau and took a DVD of The Man Who Knew Too Much to his father’s flat the night before he was due to fly to Casablanca. They ordered curry from Deliveroo and sat in semi-darkness munching chicken dhansak and tarka daal, washed down with a 1989 Château Beychevelle he had been given by an old friend as a birthday present.
‘Doris Day,’ his father muttered as she sang ‘Que Sera Sera’ to her soon-to-be-kidnapped son. ‘Was she the one Hitchcock threw the birds at?’
‘No,’ Carradine replied. ‘That was Tippi Hedren.’
‘Ah.’
He tore off a strip of peshawari naan and passed it to his father saying: ‘Did you know she was Melanie Griffith’s mother?’
‘Who? Doris Day?’
‘No. Tippi Hedren.’
After a brief pause, his father said: ‘Who’s Melanie Griffith?’
It was after midnight by the time the film finished. Carradine did the washing-up and ordered an Uber.
‘So you’re off to Casablanca?’ His father was standing in the hall, leaning on the walking stick which he had carried with him since his stroke. ‘Research on the new book?’
‘Research, yes,’ Carradine replied. He detested the lie.
‘Never been myself. They say it’s not like the film.’
‘Yeah. I heard that.’
His father jutted out his chin and pulled off a passable impression of Humphrey Bogart.
‘You played it for her. You play it for me. Play it.’
Carradine hugged him. He tried to imagine what life in the Service must have been like in the 1960s. He pictured smoke-filled rooms, tables piled high with dusty files, men in double-breasted suits plotting in secure speech rooms.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘I love you, too. Take care of yourself out there. Call me when you land.’
‘I will.’
Carradine opened the front door and stepped outside.
‘Kit?’
He turned to face his father. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m proud of you.’
7 (#ulink_c18e6989-6800-521d-be01-0c2193e439ca)
Carradine had been on the Gatwick Express for only a few minutes when he saw the photograph. He was seated alone at a table in a near-deserted carriage finishing off a cappuccino and a fruit salad from M&S. A passenger had left a copy of the Guardian on a seat across the aisle. Carradine had picked up the paper and begun to read about developments in the Redmond kidnapping. The Transit van, which had been stolen from a North London car park, had been found abandoned and burned out at the edge of a wood not far from Henley-on-Thames. CCTV showed a bearded man wearing a woollen hat filling the van up with diesel in Cricklewood a few hours before Redmond was seized. Resurrection sympathisers had now claimed responsibility for the kidnapping but no images of Redmond in captivity had been released. ‘Experts’ quoted in the article drew comparisons with the kidnapping of Otis Euclidis, pointing out that Resurrection had waited ten days before publishing footage of an apparently healthy and well-rested Euclidis sitting on a bed in an undisclosed location reading a book. The same experts claimed that the police were at a loss to know where Redmond was being held. At the bottom of the story there was a small box directing readers to a longer piece on the history of the Resurrection movement. Carradine had turned to the back of the paper, intending to read it.
Beneath the headline on the article was a layout of four pictures arranged in a square, each of them about the same size as the passport photograph of ‘Maria’ that Mantis had given to Carradine in Lisson Grove. The photograph in the top left-hand corner showed Redmond taking part in a reality television show several years earlier. Beside it was a picture of Euclidis in characteristic Instagram pose, wearing a white, gold-encrusted baseball cap, a gold crucifix medallion and outsized designer sunglasses. The photograph in the bottom left-hand corner showed Nihat Demirel, a pro-government talk-show host in Turkey who had been kneecapped by Resurrection outside his summer house in Izmir in May. It was the fourth picture that rocked Carradine.
He had seen the photograph before. It showed Ivan Simakov, the deceased leader of Resurrection, standing beside the woman who was reported to have been his girlfriend when the movement was conceived: Lara Bartok. Carradine stared at her. She had long, dark hair and slightly crooked front teeth. It was ‘Maria’.
He reached into his wallet. He placed the photograph of Maria alongside the picture of Bartok. There was no question that they were the same woman. He was about to pull up her Wikipedia page on his iPhone when he remembered that the search would flag. A young woman had taken a seat at the far end of the carriage. Carradine considered asking to borrow her phone to make the search but decided against it, instead reading the article for more detail on Bartok’s background. A Hungarian-born lawyer, she had met Simakov in New York and become attached to Occupy Wall Street. Described as ‘a latter-day Ulrike Meinhof’, Bartok was wanted in the United States on charges of armed assault, kidnapping and incitement to violence. She had reportedly become disillusioned with Resurrection and vanished from the couple’s apartment in Brooklyn. Several months later, Simakov was killed in Moscow.
Carradine put the newspaper to one side. The train had come to a halt at a section of track littered with cans and bottles. He stared outside, trying to work out what Mantis was up to. He assumed that the Service had recruited Bartok as an agent, persuading her to inform against Resurrection. But how had they managed to lose track of her? And why was Mantis using an untried and untested support agent to try to find her? In the Lisson Grove flat he had refused even to reveal Bartok’s name, telling Carradine that ‘several officers and support agents’ were searching for her in places as far afield as Mexico, Cuba and Argentina. If that was the case, it was plausible that she was no longer a source for British intelligence, but instead a fugitive from justice. Carradine had learned enough from his father about the workings of the Service to know that they were not a law enforcement agency. There had to be another reason behind Mantis’s search. Carradine recalled the wistfulness with which he had spoken about her beauty, his irritation with the photograph of her surfer boyfriend. As the train began to move away, he wondered if Mantis was romantically involved with her. That might explain the furtiveness with which he had spoken about ‘Maria’.
Gatwick airport was rammed. Carradine checked the suitcase containing the book and the sealed package into the hold and cleared security without any complications. He was carrying €1,000 of Mantis’s money in his wallet and the other €2,000 inside an envelope in his carry-on bag. The departure gate for the flight with Royal Air Maroc was a twenty-minute walk from security along increasingly deserted corridors leading further and further away from the heart of the terminal. A flight attendant wearing a headscarf and heavy mascara clicked a counter for every passenger that came on board. Carradine was one of the last to take his seat. He glanced at the counter as he passed her. There were fewer than fifty passengers on the plane.
As the flight took off, Carradine had the vivid sensation that he was leaving the old part of his life behind and entering a new phase which would in every way be more challenging and satisfying than the life he had known before. His thoughts again turned to Bartok. Was Mantis using him to try to get a personal message to her? If so, how could he guarantee that Carradine would find her at the festival? Was she a fan of his books? Did the Service think that she was going to show herself at his event? Perhaps she wanted to meet Katherine Paget, the novelist with whom he was due to appear on stage.
The sealed package was somewhere beneath Carradine’s feet in the chill of the baggage hold; he knew that it would contain the answers to his many questions and felt his professional obligation to Mantis dissipating with every passing mile. He did not consider himself to be particularly cynical or suspicious, but neither would he enjoy the feeling of being duped. He needed to know what was inside the envelope. If that meant breaking his promise to the Service, so be it.
About an hour into the flight, Carradine was handed a small tray with a plastic knife and fork and told that alcohol was not served by the airline. Craving a beer, he ate a tiny, vacuum-packed trout fillet with a bread roll and something the flight attendant claimed was chicken casserole. Leaving most of it unfinished, he decided to go for a stroll. As he passed his fellow passengers bent over their in-flight meals, Carradine could hear a man with a deep, resonant voice speaking in Spanish near the toilets at the rear of the plane. He assumed that the man was talking to a friend, but when he reached the galley he saw that he was alone. His back was turned and he was looking out of the window. He was wearing shorts and a black T-shirt. Religious tattoos completely covered his arms and the backs of his hands. There were tufts of black body hair protruding from the neck of his T-shirt. He was holding a mobile phone perpendicular to his mouth and appeared to be dictating notes. Carradine spoke very little Spanish and could not understand what he was saying. The man sensed that Carradine was behind him and turned around.
‘Sorry. You want the bathroom, man?’
The accent was Hispanic, the face about forty-five. He was well-built but not overtly muscular, with long, greasy hair gathered in a topknot. Though not fully bearded, at least three days of dense stubble ran in a continuous black shadow from beneath his eyes to the hollow of his collarbone. He was one of the hairiest people Carradine had ever seen.
‘No thanks. I’m just going for a walk.’
The man lowered the phone. He was smiling with forced sincerity, like a technique he had been taught at a seminar on befriending strangers. Carradine had the bizarre and disorienting sensation that the man knew who he was and had been waiting for him.
‘Out on the wing?’
‘What?’
‘You said you were going for a walk.’
Carradine rolled with the joke. ‘Oh. That’s right. Yes. So if you wouldn’t mind stepping aside I’ll just open the door and head out.’
An eruption of laughter, a roar so loud it might have been audible in the cockpit. An elderly Arabic woman emerged from one of the bathrooms and flinched.
‘Hey! I like you!’ said the man. He leaned a hand against the doorframe and shook out a crick in his neck. ‘Where you from?’
Carradine explained that he was from London. ‘And you?’
‘Me? I’m from everywhere, man.’ He looked like a mid-level drug dealer attached to a Colombian cartel: dishevelled, poorly educated, very possibly violent. ‘Born in Andalucía. Raised in Madrid. Now I live in London. Heading out to Morocco for some R & R.’
They shook hands. The Spaniard’s grip suggested prodigious physical force.
‘Ramón,’ he said. ‘Great to meet you, man.’
‘Kit. You too.’
‘So what you doing in Casablanca?’
Carradine went with the story he had agreed with Mantis.
‘I’m a novelist. Doing some research on my next book.’
The Spaniard again exploded with enthusiasm. ‘A writer! Holy shit, man! You write books?’ Carradine thought back to his first encounter with Mantis. There was something similarly inauthentic about Ramón. ‘You get any of them published?’
‘A few, yeah.’
‘Wow! So cool!’
