Anyway, Central London turned out to be surprisingly small, once you got to know it. All the important stuff was within walking distance, so long as you enjoyed walking. From the eastern edge of the City to the western end of Oxford Street was an hour and a half’s easy walk, and you could make it from Euston all the way over Waterloo Bridge to the great glass and steel blocks of the South Bank in less than that. It was hardly a stretch. And as everyone fell into a routine, Mrs Gabriel even made up sandwiches and gave him a small cardboard carton of fruit juice to take with him on his wanderings. This routine, this boredom, was of course exactly what he wanted. And equally, the inhabitants of Smithson’s Chambers knew this and indulged him. And he exploited them. And they let him. And so on. He was honestly curious about how long they could keep playing this peculiar little game. He suspected it could be quite a long time. The strongest impression he had formed so far about whoever was holding him was that, as well as having an unusual way of doing things, they were people of quite considerable patience.
On the other hand, he couldn’t stay here for ever. Apart from anything else, despite all the exercise he was getting, Mrs Gabriel’s food was putting weight on him.
As if sensing this new strain of restlessness, Mr Self began to make more frequent appearances at the Chambers. Rudi noticed him more and more about the place, talking Mr Bauer through interminable legal documents in his office, chatting lasciviously – he was a man of some lasciviousness – to Mrs Gabriel – who giggled like a teenager and thumped him on the shoulder – and all the time making sure he knew where Rudi was. Rudi found this new behaviour quite interesting, but kept up with his daily walks all the same. For the first time in weeks, he started keeping an eye out for a tail again.
One day in the first week of March, Mr Self happened to pass through the living room, where Rudi was sitting on the window seat reading a tattered biography of Brad Pitt.
“Oh,” Mr Self said as if the thought had just occurred to him, “ought to have told you. Having a party day after tomorrow.”
“Oh?” said Rudi.
“Big legal wigs,” said Mr Self. “Judges. High Court bods. Couple of MPs too, I think.”
“Sounds like fun,” Rudi said, imagining a room full of English Parliamentarians and legal types solemnly ploughing their way through a three-course meal prepared by Mrs Gabriel. He assumed bread pudding would feature somewhere, or the mysterious substance known as ‘Spotted Dick.’ Comfort food for men of Empire.
“Wouldn’t mind staying out of the way, would you?” asked Mr Self in that English way which was really an order.
“If you give me some money I could go to the theatre,” Rudi suggested. “
Fiddler On The Roof
at the Savoy.”
Mr Self thought about it. “Not a bad idea. I’ll see if I can get you tickets.”
Rudi shook his head. “It’s okay. I was only joking.”
Mr Self tipped his head to one side and regarded Rudi as if examining the hitherto unsuspected parameters of
joking
. “Alternatively,” he said finally, “you might want to turn in early. It’s going to be dreadfully boring. Very dry.”
“Perhaps I could cook for you,” Rudi said.
Mr Self considered this for roughly a femtosecond before shuddering. “And upset our Mrs Gabriel? Oh no, no thank you.” He laughed, but there was no humour at all in his body language. “No, I think we’d best leave the
catering
to her, old son.”
Rudi shrugged. “As you wish.” He went back to his book – Brad and Angelina were adopting another child – but Mr Self didn’t move. Rudi looked up. Mr Self was watching him. “Was there something else?”
Mr Self kept watching him. Rudi could almost hear him composing a report.
“Subject offered to cook dinner.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “No.” And he left.
Rudi laid down his book and looked out of the window at barristers and solicitors and clerks and tourists and local workers going past below. He thought he and Mr Self understood each other very well by now, and expressed that understanding with an atmosphere of polite mutual distrust. Still, a
party
was interesting. And whoever was behind Smithson’s Chambers would know that it was interesting. He wondered if it was a test.
T
HE DAY OF
the party dawned wet and windy. Mrs Gabriel’s breakfast – fried eggs, fried bacon, grilled tomatoes and a rather horrible Cumberland sausage – was hurried and not even up to her own less than exacting standards. The little woman hurried about the Chambers with a vacuum cleaner and a tattered cardboard box full of cloths and cleaning solutions, making a valiant and rather noteworthy attempt to bring the cluttered and dusty rooms up to a standard which would not offend legal bigwigs and Ministers of Parliament, and everywhere she went she kept having to move Rudi out of the way because he was sitting or standing just where she needed to clean or dust or hoover next, and finally this enraged her so much that she spluttered that it would please her very much indeed if he would just
go out
and leave her in peace to get the place ready, please. To which Rudi protested that it was raining. Which broke Mrs Gabriel’s reserve entirely and caused her to say, in a very loud voice, “I don’t care if it’s cats and dogs pelting down outside, sir. I need to get this place ready!”
Unwillingly, grudgingly, Rudi put on his shoes and shrugged into his jacket, and, collecting an umbrella from the elephant’s foot stand by the door, went out into the wet windy world.
Which wouldn’t have fooled anyone, but that wasn’t the point. The point was simply to cause nuisance. So he unfurled the umbrella and put it up and set a brisk pace up to the archway and out onto Fleet Street, imagining a surveillance team being scrambled as he turned left and stepped out towards Trafalgar Square.
It was a dreadful day, but he felt lighter of heart than he had for some weeks. He had already been more than averagely fit, and his long rambles around London had tempered him, and he put on as much of a spurt of speed as the other umbrella-bearing pedestrians allowed as he reached Trafalgar Square and worked his way around the various street crossings to Admiralty Arch.
The vehicle gate of the arch was closed off, but the pedestrian ones remained open, fitted with scanners manned by drenched policemen. He slipped through, past the ivy-choked bulk of the Citadel, and into St James’s Park.
Once in the park, he slackened his pace, wandering seemingly aimlessly. He treated it like one of Fabio’s training exercises, scoping out likely locations for dead drops but not being quite as careful as he normally would. He imagined the surveillance team – and he knew they were there, they could not
not
be there, his departure from the Chambers had been too obviously stage-managed for them to ignore it – arriving flustered, catching up, seeing him looking for somewhere to stash – or collect – something. What could he be planning? What could be going on in his mind? What could he possibly be going to do later? He imagined Mr Self snorting at all this but being unable to ignore it,
just in case
. Rudi was so obviously, transparently,
taking the piss
, but how to be certain? Could it be a double-bluff...?
So he spent a leisurely hour in the park, then he picked up his pace again and walked down to Victoria, and from there onto the Embankment for a nice calm stroll back to the Temple and Smithson’s Chambers, where Mr Self was waiting with a barbed glance and a flustered and busy Mrs Gabriel was waiting with a
cold collation
– a couple of cold chicken drumsticks, some thickly-sliced ham, doorsteps of white bread, salted butter, and a pot of tea – and a request to please stay out of my way for the rest of the day, please, sir. Rudi smiled.
Been a bad boy. Sent to bed without my dinner.
On the way up to his room, carrying a tray laden with Mrs Gabriel’s efforts at supper, he saw Mr Self again, and the look that passed between them was so freighted with meaning and nuance that it could have won a Nobel Prize for Literature, or at least an Oscar. It was a look, finally, of acknowledgement, of recognition. They smiled at each other. Mr Self’s smile was ghastly. It made Rudi’s heart lift like a dirigible.
B
UT IN THE
end, the day had merely been mischief, a diversion from the creeping boredom that had been gathering around him. It had been fun, in an anarchic kind of way, but now it was over and he was contemplating his
cold collation
, he felt a bit low, almost post-coital. Annoying his hosts had been terribly gratifying at the time, but it hadn’t actually achieved anything.
He took up Brad Pitt again, and read while the antique streetlamps outside came on and the noises of Mrs Gabriel clattering about trying to clean up downstairs were gradually replaced by an expectant silence and a scent of roasting meat and boiling vegetables mushrooming up through the Chambers, and then, quite slowly, the increasing hubbub of a dinner party getting into gear in the rooms beneath his feet.
Rudi lay on his bed, reading by the light of the little green-tasselled bedside lamp, listening to the murmur of conversation on the floor below, judging the arrival of each course by lulls in the noise. It sounded as if quite a few bigwigs and MPs and assorted top hats had responded to Mr Bauer’s invitation.
At some point between the main course and dessert, Rudi got up from the bed and went over to the door of his room. He opened the door quietly and stepped out onto the landing.
Smithson’s Chambers, like the other Chambers on King’s Bench Walk, occupied a building on six floors. The ground floor was where the main business of the Chambers was conducted – interviews with clients, administration and so on. The first, second and third floors were accommodation. Bedrooms, dining rooms, sitting rooms, the kitchen. The sixth floor was a chaotic space under the eaves of the roof, piled haphazardly with old furniture and dusty rolls of carpet and cardboard boxes of ancient ribbon-tied legal files.
The floor below that was a tiny maze of quiet corridors lined with closed and locked doors. Rudi had scoped it out, by degrees, in his first couple of weeks here. There were no obvious surveillance devices in the corridors, and none of the less obvious ones, and an open saunter around the fifth floor one evening had prompted no reaction from any of the other occupants of the Chambers. Which was not in and of itself any proof, of course.
Rudi walked calmly around the fifth floor, examining the locked doors. There was dust on some of them, in spite of Mrs Gabriel’s best efforts, but two of them were clean and shiny, their big brass escutcheons scratched by generations of badly-aimed keys. He unlocked one with a biro and the hook broken off a coat hanger and turned the handle slowly. Nothing obvious on the frame. No wires. No contact spots, shiny or matt. He pushed the door open, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him, all in one movement.
Light came in through the windows from the lamps five floors below, picking out a room lined floor to ceiling with filing cabinets. There was a desk and a chair. A kickstool sat in a corner, for those hard-to-reach top drawers. Tiny illuminated numbers glowed on the front of all the cabinets, where combination lock keypads guarded the secrets within. No point bothering. Rudi opened the door, backed out into the corridor, locked the door again, moved on to the next one.
Inside, another desk and chair, and on the desk a computer monitor running a screensaver of two kittens playing with the cardboard insert of a roll of kitchen paper. Rudi stood with his back to the door for quite a long time, watching the kittens playing.
It occurred to him that what seemed, on the surface, to be many weeks of sitting around doing nothing had actually been a complex conversation between himself and Mr Self. And through Mr Self with the people who actually owned and ran Smithson’s Chambers. He wondered how long this computer monitor had been sitting here, running its cute screensaver, waiting for him to break into the room. As a piece of entrapment, it was so transparently obvious that there seemed no harm at all in going over to the desk, sitting down, and waving the kittens away.
The computer’s menu was sparse to the point of comedy. Just the operating system and three spreadsheet files. The first sheet was a list of names and long numbers. Banks and account access codes. The second sheet was filled with random-looking five-figure groups, obviously encrypted. The third sheet was a mixture of encrypted groups and sets of figures in clear-text. A list of payments?
Rudi looked at the screen. Smithson’s Chambers was a black bank, a deniable source of funds for covert operations. Want to infiltrate a trade union and need some cash to set up the op? Smithson’s Chambers was your one-stop shop. Need to finesse the demise (political, religious or physical) of a troublesome imam? Smithson’s Chambers would dole out the money you’d need.
None of this was actually world-shaking. Intelligence – the
real
world of intelligence, not the stuff politicians were told about – ran on black money, reptile funds, cash that sloshed back and forth across continents in constant motion in case anyone happened upon it. The truly intriguing aspect of all of this was that he had been allowed to discover this fact, and discover it without being bundled off to his room. Here he was, sitting here quite comfortably, with the bank codes to access fourteen and a half million Swiss francs – as always Europe’s most copper-bottomed currency – literally beneath his fingertips. It was not, he found himself admitting sadly, the actions of a national intelligence service.
On the other hand, he thought, it might, just
might
, be the actions of a national intelligence service faced with a situation so bizarre and
outré
that only a bizarre and
outré
response would suffice.
He sat there looking at the pages of numbers for a long time. Much longer than he should have done, strictly speaking. It was such an obvious
offer
that it was almost comical, but it opened up an abyss of possibility. He wasn’t caught in an agony of indecision, so much as trying to think through the ramifications.