‘I’m told we should talk,’ said Garfinkle.
‘I’m on Piccadilly, if that helps.’
‘You know the Haymarket Hotel on Suffolk Place?’
‘No, but I can get there.’
‘Go to the concierge and tell him W. G. Grace sent you.’
Boxer walked up Piccadilly to the Circus and down Haymarket to Suffolk Place. He spoke to the concierge, who called a porter and mumbled in his ear. He followed the porter through the hotel to a small private room in which there was coffee and cakes. He poured himself some coffee and some minutes later a man fitting Tanya Birch’s description of Garfinkle came into the room. They shook hands. Garfinkle’s was large, padded and soft, more like an animal’s paw that could produce claws if the occasion demanded. He poured himself some coffee and before taking a sip picked up a cake and put it whole into his mouth. He ate ruminatively with crumbs tumbling down his suit from his mouth. He sipped coffee again and repeated the process. Only then did he sit down, brushing flakes and crumbs from his suit.
‘No breakfast,’ he said, to explain his greed. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Boxer?’
‘Conrad Jensen disappeared on the twelfth of January and his daughter has asked me to find him,’ said Boxer, who’d decided to come clean; no clever stuff with this kind of operator. ‘You went to see him on New Year’s Day in a rented house in the Cotswolds. I was wondering if you could help me.’
‘In what way?’
‘I understand Con was a contractor to the US military and that among other things he was involved in black site interrogations, the Arab Spring and Edward Snowden. I was wondering if any of these activities could have made him feel the need to disappear,’ said Boxer. ‘You are someone who works in his world. I understand you solve personnel problems in the
CIA
. You saw him just over two weeks ago. I would be interested in any insight you could give me.’
‘You’re a kidnap consultant.’
‘That’s right. I also run a foundation called
LOST
for finding missing persons. Normally they are cold cases that the police have given up on, but Con’s daughter was sent to me by his lawyer, Mark Rowlands, and she persuaded me to help her.’
‘So you’re sure he hasn’t been kidnapped?’
‘The daughter has not had any such communication,’ said Boxer. ‘And if he had been kidnapped I would not be able to run the negotiation. That would have to be done by the Met’s kidnap unit.’
‘Why did the lawyer send Conrad’s daughter to you when, forgive me for saying so, there must be far more effective investigators in London?’
‘Possibly because I have a wide-ranging network of people I can draw on,’ said Boxer. ‘I would not be sitting here if I didn’t.’
‘I’d have thought Conrad would have some buddies he could rely on who would be far better connected than you and much more likely to be able to track him down. I mean, he knows some experts in their fields: espionage, terrorism,
IT
, interrogation, security, firearms, you name it, Conrad’s done it,’ said Garfinkle. ‘You thought about that, Mr Boxer?’
Now he understood what Deacon meant about Walden Garfinkle.
‘I have,’ said Boxer. ‘The lawyer researched his possibilities and came up with me. Siobhan came to see me in some distress at being walked out on. She didn’t want the police involved, which told me something …’
‘What exactly?’
‘That we were talking about an individual who is operating below the radar part of the time and doesn’t want the authorities looking there because the people who pay him wouldn’t want the police looking there either.’
‘You mean us,’ said Garfinkle, tapping his chest, ‘when you say “the people who pay him”?’
‘Only you would know if you have an exclusive arrangement.’
‘So you think Conrad’s lawyer chose you because you’re not averse to operating outside the law of the land?’
‘I think he chose me because I have a reputation for getting things done,’ said Boxer. ‘And I don’t have any agenda other than finding him.’
Garfinkle looked at him with the eyes of a man used to assessing complicated people: hooded diamonds of light looking out from under the exuberant growth of his eyebrows, which were tweaked upwards at the ends. Boxer had the feeling that his assessment was crucial as to whether he would get answers or leave empty-handed.
‘A conscience is a difficult thing in our business,’ said Garfinkle. ‘We need agents with conscience because to have them without would be like trying to shepherd a pack of psychopaths. Most of my problems with agents occur as a result of conscience. They reach a moral boundary too far.
‘When they took on the job as young men and women, they were happy in their blissful ignorance to swear by Almighty God that they would do anything for the president and our great country of the United States of America. But as time goes on, these agents get older and they become men and women of experience. They develop relationships and some of them produce children. Whatever happens, gradually their conscience comes into play with their work. They are no longer just thinking about themselves and how they appear to their employers. They are conscious of how they might appear to others. It’s not always easy to lie in bed next to someone when you’ve just killed a man or interrogated someone and be the same loving individual you were, especially when you cannot tell anyone what you have done.
‘Sometimes agents cope by using delusional strategies. These have the short-term benefit of getting them through their day but the long-term prognosis for a delusional is not good. They become unstable. They don’t know who they are any more. They lose sight of themselves. They behave strangely. They become unpredictable. They are oppressed by feelings of guilt that they don’t understand.’
‘Is this a state that Conrad Jensen had reached … in your opinion?’
‘The interesting thing is that he is not a young man. I would expect this kind of behaviour from an agent in his late thirties or early forties, but Conrad has already gone seventy.’
‘Did he start late?’
‘That’s an interesting point. The first time we made use of him was in Cuba in 1989. We wanted information on how Cuba was going to cope with withdrawal of Russian economic support. How unstable it might become. And Conrad had just started a relationship with a woman who worked on the sugar board. We approached him and asked if he could help, and he was a natural. He was in his mid forties then. So yes, a late starter.’
‘Do you know what he did before that?’ asked Boxer. ‘I mean, he was a man with a yacht, which means he’d made some money somewhere.’
‘Of course we checked him out and made sure that he hadn’t made his money from trafficking drugs or anything like that, and he was clean. He had a history of running businesses in the US, Europe and the Middle East and selling them on. He ran a number of IT companies developing database management software, which was big at the time. He spoke a lot of languages, including Arabic and Russian, which impressed us and made us wary too. We checked out his relationships to make sure there were no communist sympathies and again he was in the clear.
‘He was very friendly with a couple in Damascus, a Syrian businessman who ran flour mills all over west Africa and the Middle East and was married to a Russian woman, which we assume is how he learnt those two languages. He made a lot of connections through the Syrian and was trading chemicals out of Libya and oil products out of Tunisia, and he even spent a few years trading sheanut out of Ghana and Benin. But that still doesn’t mean I know precisely what he was doing before he was engaged. We didn’t have a complete life history. That’s what we’re looking at now. All I know is that when he was employed he was not a communist and he was a businessman with no criminal record in any country prepared to tell us. When the War on Terror started back in 2001 he was in the perfect position to help us, which was when he set up his company, Jensen Security, and became an official
CIA
contractor.’
‘Have you always employed him directly or have you ever used his services through another contractor?’
‘That’s a strange question, Mr Boxer.’
‘I’m talking particularly about a company called Pavis Risk Management, run by a guy called Martin Fox.’
‘I’ll look into it. I don’t associate the name with Conrad, but you have to understand I am not his operations officer.’
‘You were talking about conscience in relation to Conrad. Was that what you went to talk to him about on New Year’s Day?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I spoke to his partner, Tanya Birch, who told me that he seemed thoughtful after your visit. He sat in a room on his own for quite some time in a contemplative state,’ said Boxer. ‘I learnt from my friend Simon Deacon that Con had worked in a black site outside Rabat conducting interrogations in 2005. If anything was going to stimulate your conscience I’d have thought it would be something like that, but nothing happened for, what, another nine years? Was there something else that tipped him over the edge?’
‘I understand from his operations officer that he wanted greater US involvement in Syria. When things really began to go off the rails in late 2011, he started getting angry because of US inaction. He could see that if something wasn’t done, the whole country, whose people define themselves by their religion, was going to break up and splinter into factions, which would give the Islamic extremists their opportunity.
But,
’ said Walden, holding up a fat, hairy finger,
‘he also understood our position after the horror of Iraq and Afghanistan. He knew there was little appetite for it from either the government or the American public. He could also see the alarming possibility that it could develop into something confrontational with Russia. So he wasn’t happy about it, but he accepted the US position.’
‘And Snowden?’
‘Look, I think he admired Snowden for having the guts to come out about something he felt was deeply wrong, but you have to understand that Conrad had been instrumental in putting together software teams to write the programs that would ultimately give the US government these internet surveillance powers. Conrad made a lot of money developing IT systems for the US government. He was part of the problem that had made Snowden angry enough to blow the lid on it.’
‘That doesn’t mean he couldn’t develop a conscience about it,’ said Boxer.
‘No, that’s true,’ said Garfinkle.
‘But clearly what you’re saying is that none of these areas of difficulty were why you went to see him on New Year’s Day.’
‘My aim on New Year’s Day was to find out what was on his mind,’ said Garfinkle. ‘I’d been warned by his operations officer that something was troubling him. I’d met him a number of times over the years. I was especially active when we were operating the black sites, as this was clearly a step over a moral boundary that even the operations officers weren’t happy about. We’ve had lengthy discussions over the years covering all areas of potential anxiety. Conrad was never a concern to me. Perhaps it was his maturity. I’m only a few years younger than him. We saw eye to eye on a lot of things. But I take it seriously when someone like Conrad appears to be unhappy. He knows a lot about our operations and some of them would be classified by the media as unsavoury to say the least.’
‘You mean you’re worried that he might be about to blow something open in the media?’
‘When somebody does a disappearing act like this, we’re always worried.’
‘So how did you get on with him on New Year’s Day?’
‘We got on fine, as always. He just didn’t tell me anything. I’ve understood more from you telling me that Tanya said he was very contemplative after I left,’ said Garfinkle. ‘That makes me think that he might be about to embark on something risky.’
11.45, 16 January 2014
Wilton Place, London, SW1
T
hree is never an easy number around a table, especially when one of them was Ryder Forsyth. They’d had the awkward introduction, the commiseration and an initial chat, and Emma Railton, while revealing her frantic worry, had also shown herself to be intelligent, strong, focused and not given to sentimentality. She was a very attractive woman in her mid to late forties with blonde hair cut gamine style, minimal make-up around her grey eyes, a small red rosebud mouth and an hourglass figure that seemed both old-fashioned and yet incredibly sexy. Mercy was now trying to conduct the initial interview and neither of them was relaxed with the oppressive presence of Forsyth’s personality.
‘Ryder,’ said Emma, finally, ‘would you mind leaving us to have our talk by ourselves?’
‘I don’t think that would be advisable, ma’am.’
‘I know you have your instructions from Kinderman, but first of all don’t call me ma’am when I know you’re English. My name is Emma. Secondly, just leave us alone. We’re women, we know how to talk this out.’
Forsyth got up and left without a word.
‘Thank God,’ said Emma. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I think Ryder is tremendous, but you don’t know what it’s like. As soon as Kinderman is involved in anything, a colossal weight comes down on all the proceedings. Nobody can say a word without referring to some higher authority.’
‘Was that one of the reasons why you left your husband?’
‘I loved my husband …’
‘Past tense?’ said Mercy.
‘Yes. We did love each other, but huge demands were made on Ken’s time and our lives together. In the beginning he tried to leave the corporation but every time they made a big fuss. The vice-president … of the United States, I mean, would make personal phone calls to him, urging him to reconsider. The remuneration packages went through the roof. And Ken found it very difficult to resist. There were other things too and he accepted that I couldn’t carry on. I mean, there are some people who would kill to live in a four-bedroom apartment on the hundred and eighth floor of the Burj Khalifa with all the amenities of a luxury health spa, but it ain’t me.’
‘Was that it?’ asked Mercy. ‘You left him because you didn’t like the lifestyle?’
Emma cast about the room looking for inspiration and gave up.
‘No.’
‘Nothing goes out of this room, but I do have to know everything. All the detail. The smallest things matter.’
‘This wasn’t a small detail,’ said Emma. ‘I found it increasingly difficult to live with the decisions that Ken was making on behalf of the Kinderman Corporation. I didn’t like a lot of the things they were doing. I hated the subterfuge, the politics and the bare-faced lying that went on. Ken had worked all his life to be the
CEO
of a major American corporation, and at forty-nine years old he wasn’t going to walk away from the top job in his world because I was miserable about some of his business ethics. He made his choice. Now he’s got one of those trophy wives that come free when you buy a Lamborghini Veneno.’
They looked at each other, registered the seriousness of the revelation, and then laughed. On the back of that release of emotion tears suddenly came and Emma reached for the tissues.
‘Sorry, I can’t control it.’
‘Don’t worry. I know what it’s like. Always there, trembling just below the surface.’
‘You mean you’re a kidnap investigator with a daughter who’s been kidnapped?’
‘A couple of years ago,’ said Mercy, ‘but she was older, more able to look after herself.’
‘Oh, Sophie can look after herself all right. She’s eight going on eighteen. She’s an extraordinary girl. I wish I’d had her confidence at that age. She’s almost more at home with the Kinderman board members than with her class at Francis Holland.’
‘So she wouldn’t have had dolls or teddies or anything like that?’
‘Not exactly. Her only toy is a rag-doll frog called Zach. It’s like an alter ego. Sometimes she has dialogues with Zach and other times she becomes Zach. It can be quite unnerving. I’d be driving with a friend sitting in the front and suddenly Zach would appear between us and look slyly from one to the other and say in a deep voice: “Hu-llo, la-a-adies.” As if he was some gigolo or pimp. My friend would have to check behind just to make sure it was Sophie holding up the frog. It was that freaky.’
‘Interesting,’ said Mercy. ‘You wonder where it comes from?’
‘She’s a very inventive little girl,’ said Emma. ‘We’d go on holiday and she’d take a girlfriend with her and they’d sit on rubber rings in the pool and play out these dialogues as if they were old women in a tea shop, or two old guys playing bowls, or the worst was a couple of teenagers sunbathing and going through their night on the town together, the boys they ended up with. Ken would tell me I had to do something about it. And I’d say in my best American: “Like what?” I mean, am I about to crush all creativity out of my child just because she’s a bit weird? She might be a budding screenwriter and I’d have hammered it out of her. Forget it.’
‘How did she get on with the chauffeur?’
‘Yes, the chauffeur. I got rid of the Kinderman driver around about day two. He was one of those ex-marines, shorn back and sides with a crew cut on top, eighteen stone of pure muscle. He could run through doors, but only because he’d never remember it was easier to open them. Cars would bounce off him, but only because he would go and play in the rush hour traffic. He’d shake your hand with one finger because he’d put you in hospital if he did it properly. No conversation. Pre-programmed for total efficiency. Impossible.
‘Now Pat Gould. He was
my
choice. A wonderful man. Irish. Loved a bit of banter and play-acting. Sophie adored him. They’d sit together up front, she never went in the back, and have these rip-roaring conversations with Pat pretending to be her music producer while Sophie was some idiotic child pop star. When he dropped her off at school she’d run through the gates as if she was being mobbed by paparazzi. After school one day I saw her waving at the window and looked out to find no one in the street. When I asked her what she was doing, she said, “Just waving at my adoring fans. You’ve got to, haven’t you, Mum?”’
They laughed again and the tears came straight after.
‘So you see,’ said Emma,’ she really is the light of my life. She makes me laugh like a drain.’
‘Is she physically resilient?’ asked Mercy. ‘Does she have any illnesses, take any medication?’
‘Since my separation from Ken she’s developed what I call anxiety asthma. She has one of those pumps if she gets into trouble. It’s never been an issue but I don’t know how she’ll react to the stress of being kidnapped. She appears to be self-reliant but she misses her father and relies a lot on me for emotional sustenance. She’ll always call me during the day to … to …’
The tears came once more. Mercy reached over and squeezed her shoulder. Emma held on to her hand. Mercy asked her to describe the clothes Sophie was wearing (school uniform), any jewellery (pearl studs in her ears), lucky charms (a fossil of a bug embedded in a piece of rock), bracelets (two strings, orange and green, around her wrist), a watch (not one that she wore), and the mobile phone number. Emma handed over some photographs. They talked about teeth, hair and skin. It made Emma feel calm.
‘I want to talk a bit more about your husband now,’ said Mercy. ‘I understand he was very generous to you in the divorce settlement and despite that he is still a very wealthy man. Has all that wealth been accumulated through his work for Kinderman?’
‘His father was a very successful businessman. They were good Republican boys and always competed against each other until the day his father died suddenly of a stroke nearly ten years ago,’ said Emma. ‘He’d always said that Ken had to make his way in the world and that he wasn’t going to inherit, that he didn’t believe in handing wealth down because it spoilt the next generation. But Ken was already very well set up by the time his father died, leaving him a New York property portfolio and stocks and shares worth around four hundred million dollars.’
Mercy couldn’t stop a reaction from her eyebrows.
‘I know,’ said Emma. ‘The sums are fantastic. His father died in 2005 and Ken divested himself of that property portfolio over the following two years and reinvested in gold. He then bought into the banks after the credit crunch and reinvested in property in London, Shanghai and Sydney and made that four hundred million worth eight hundred million in seven years. At the same time his Kinderman shares were doubling and tripling and he was being awarded more and more so that he was very close to becoming a double billionaire by the end of last year. I know because he told me recently that Forbes had got it all wrong. They were nearly eight hundred million bucks out. Whatever … it’s completely obscene.’
‘Has Ryder told you about the other kidnaps that took place yesterday?’
‘Yes. He mentioned that in each case there was a political connection,’ said Emma. ‘You must know that Ken was at Princeton with about half the political class of the
USA
. And the
VP
of the US was a big pal of his father’s and they’ve known each other for years.’
‘Did he also tell you that in each case the parents are billionaires?’
‘Ryder thinks that’s relevant only from the point of view of motivation for the kidnappers.’
‘How does he view this demand for expenses?’
‘He thinks it’s a joke. I mean he thinks it’s just something to show that all the kidnaps are connected and how clever the gang has been to pull them off. In the end he reckons it will come down to negotiation. He’s determined to bring Sophie back safely, but I can detect some pride in there. He wants to do it for less than anybody else. And I’ve told him not to put her at risk for anything as silly as money.’
‘Can I ask whether you’re in a relationship at the moment?’
‘Of course. Yes, I do have a boyfriend … seems ridiculous to call him that. He’s … er … somewhat older than me. We met in Dubai. He has business out there. Then when I split from Ken we re-met here in London.’
‘Can you give me his name?’ asked Mercy. ‘We’re going to have to check him out, as I’m sure you’ll understand.’
‘You’re going to check
him
out?’ said Emma, astonished. ‘He used to
work
for Kinderman. He’s already been fully vetted by the US military, Kinderman human resources and probably the
CIA
, but … by all means. His name is Conrad Jensen.’
Isabel was upstairs lying on the bed, exhausted. She’d put Alyshia off for lunch, said she was going to have to sleep, told her to come round in the late afternoon. She was wrapped in the duvet still fully clothed, no energy to get undressed. She held on to her belly, felt its swelling, imagined the small life doubling and redoubling inside her. She was so happy, even happier than she’d been when she’d had Alyshia because she’d already begun to feel the quality of Frank’s particular darkness by then. She’d seen him mixing not only with all the right people but also with undesirable types, the sort you looked at and they strangled something inside you, made your goodness feel laughable.
She thrust it out of her mind. Couldn’t understand why she was allowing such doom-laden thoughts to enter her consciousness on a day such as this. She drifted back in time to a party she’d been to with Charlie. It had been a formal affair until after the dinner, when there’d been some dancing. Charlie had cut in and soon they were dancing in an aura of empty space as everybody around them could see from their unswerving gaze into each other’s eyes that here were two people madly in love.
It was at this point that she started to find air in the bedroom difficult to come by. She thought it might have been the memory, which had induced excitement and slightly impaired her breathing, but the feeling of breathlessness intensified. She threw open the duvet in the hope that this would help her breathe, but it got worse. She rolled over and fumbled on the bedside table for her mobile phone, trying to suck air into lungs that didn’t seem capable of inflating. Her throat protested as her hand lashed out, dashing everything to the floor, and her brain told her that she’d left the phone in the kitchen. She coughed and was alarmed to see a spattering of blood on the white sheet. Where had that come from?
She staggered to her feet, the room reeling so that she clutched at invisible handrails trying to stay vertical. She tripped forward, swerving towards the door, whose jamb seemed to shift so that her shoulder careened into it and she ricocheted into the corridor and somehow managed to grab the wooden sphere on the top of the banister post. She hung on, trying to focus on the stairs, aware now that whatever the cause this was serious and she would have to get help.
The stairs seemed immensely steep and high as she pointed her foot towards the first step. Another cough; blood speckled her hand as her foot stretched out and connected with nothing while her supporting leg collapsed and she dived head first, hands grasping at air. Her vision filled with incomprehensible, disordered images: chest, carpet, feet, light, banister, wall. Her body made jarring contact on the shoulder, coccyx and knee, finishing with a sickening cranial thud against the wall, which relieved her of consciousness and left her face down on the granite tiles of the hallway to the front door.