Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Read online

  ‘It was added to a consignment due out of Northolt in late morning,’ said Clive, feeling relieved that he’d reached an episode in the narrative for which he couldn’t be held culpable. ‘Routed via Paris, arrived in Casablanca about nine p.m. It was in Zender’s warehouse on the Boulevard Moulay Slimane by midnight.’

  ‘It cleared customs in three hours?’

  ‘They get more from expediting shipments for Zender than they ever see in their wage packets,’ said de la Mere.

  ‘Then Zender transferred the IPD400 straight on to his client?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clive. ‘I mean, arms brokers never hold on to things longer than they have to. I’d say he was in possession of the IPD400 for twenty-four hours at most.’

  ‘And who did he sell it on to?’ de la Mere asked.

  ‘He wouldn’t reveal that.’ Clive glanced at the faces beside him and realised he was expected to say more. ‘Confidentiality agreements, a duty of trust to his clients, that sort of thing. . . Not that a man like Zender needs any excuse to keep something secret.’

  ‘Your thoughts on who his client might be?’ asked Sir Iain Strang.

  Clive looked over at de la Mere. Neither of them spoke.

  ‘This is why I get such a thrill out of the intelligence business,’ said the MI6 chief. ‘Supercharged professionals at my beck and call, intellects fizzing, theories clamouring to be heard. Who’s down as the end user on the export licence?’

  ‘Some tribal leader with a nominal role in the Mauritanian government,’ said de la Mere, ‘name of Makhlani.’

  ‘You can bulk buy them from any self-respecting stationers south of Tangiers for fuck’s sake. I thought Mauritania was on the proscribed list?’

  ‘Depends who’s lobbying. I’m having him checked now, but I think we can assume that Makhlani isn’t the proud owner of a brand new IPD400.’

  ‘What leverage do we have over Claude Zender?’

  ‘Rather less than he has over us,’ said Nigel.

  Strang gave an irritated snort. ‘Well, thank you, underlings, for placing the cock-up naked before me in all its throbbing majesty. Now we have to retrieve the IPD400 from Zender’s anonymous client while simultaneously pretending nothing’s happened. Nigel, you run this one. Clive, confine yourself to the Grosvenor end of it. Clear?’

  Clive nodded and glanced over at de la Mere. The sector chief, who was waiting to meet his eye, favoured him with a patronising nod.

  ‘Regarding your report,’ Strang went on. ‘I see that you call it The Theft of the IPD400, whereas the truth is that Grosvenor sold it. From such a flaccid start, it’s hard to see your list of action points yielding anything other than a bout of anxious foreplay followed by an apologetic withdrawal. But the gist of it is, you’re going to leave everything to Ms Kocharian. What chance does she have of bringing Zender to the table?’

  ‘Surprisingly good,’ said Nigel de la Mere. ‘The special offers she makes to favoured clients are said to be irresistible to any man with blood in his veins.’

  ‘So this over-promoted callgirl gives Claude Zender a tit job and we get the IPD400 back?’

  When neither of them replied, the MI6 chief gripped the edge of the conference table and squeezed so hard it looked as if he might shortly come away with two fistfuls of polished oak. His hands, Clive noticed, were those of a butcher, big-boned and thickly covered with pink flesh. Strang released the table and ran both hands over his sleek black hair.

  ‘Clive, handle Ms Kocharian. Explain that I want her to suck Zender dry. Nigel, draw up a list of candidates for ownership of the IPD400. Take note that the operation to lift it was expensive and sophisticated – we’re not looking for a trio of holy warriors in a Cairo bedsit. You may as well get New York on to dick-in-a-suit, though I predict he’ll turn out not to exist. Then see what access we have to Zender’s financial arrangements.’

  ‘Zender’s USP is that he’s a big fat dead end. It’ll be hard to get past his minders.’

  ‘Good thing we’re spies, eh?’ said Strang. ‘The more people who find out that we’ve lost the IPD400, the less likely we are to get it back. Nigel, you have the list of those who know it’s missing – put the fear of hell into everyone on it, and make sure it doesn’t get any longer. No horsetrading with other intelligence agencies, especially not our American cousins. I expect us to find it before the lubricious Ms Kocharian – when we do, tell no one. I want the IPD400 under my control until I’ve decided what to do with it.’ He paused to make a note on the pad at his side. ‘All that said, we need to tell James Palatine.’

  ‘You think it’s safe to trust him with this?’ said de la Mere.

  ‘He built the fucking thing, maybe he knows some way to track it down. Maybe it talks to him in his sleep. Remind me what he calls us.’

  ‘The Playpen,’ said Nigel.

  ‘Cheeky cunt. It’s a risk but we’ll have to take it – because our only other angles of attack are Clive’s floozy, a phoney accountant and your big fat dead end.’

  The Lamb and Flag was an unreconstructed hellhole on the ground floor of a seventies office block. James Palatine followed the girl into a dank interior that might once have been decked out in cream and raspberry, but was now almost uniformly beige. A bored-looking woman of about forty sat at the bar smoking; her only customer was an old man in a tatty yellow shirt with an empty beer glass on the table in front of him.

  ‘Brandy?’ James asked the girl.

  ‘Coke. Thanks.’

  Early twenties. A well-brought-up girl from a well-off family.

  James went up to the bar. The bored-looking woman waited until there could be no possible doubt that James wanted to buy a drink before laying down her cigarette and lumbering over. He ordered a scotch for himself, took the drinks to their table and waited while the girl produced a rubber band and tied back her hair, gathering the dyed section into a large, frizzy orb and smoothing the rest tight over her scalp. There was an air of determination in her brisk movements and stern expression – a girl who knew her mind and wasn’t going to be argued with – but it was all a bit too brittle and calculated.

  ‘I thought you were going to kill those boys.’

  ‘You saw the knives? I couldn’t take any chances, with you there.’

  ‘Oh, so it was all just to save me?’ Her light blue eyes glittered with indignation. ‘It seemed like you enjoyed it.’

  Was it so obvious, even to this girl who knew nothing about him? The man – he wasn’t a boy – whose shoulder he’d dislocated, that was justified, certainly. He wasn’t so sure about the other one.

  ‘I suppose I should say thank you,’ the girl said.

  ‘My pleasure, apparently. Next time I’ll give them a nasty pinch, see how they like that.’

  Perhaps she heard the self-recrimination in his voice. Her features relaxed and she permitted the corners of her wide, shapely mouth to lift in a conciliatory smile. They talked on, but after five minutes of listening to her guarded answers, all he’d found out was that her name was Sarah and she was a student at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies.

  ‘All right Sarah, I give in. Why are you following me?’

  ‘I’m not,’ she said, much too quickly. ‘If anything, you’re following me, so I don’t—’

  ‘You are. Tell me why, or I’ll follow you and find out for myself. Among my various accomplishments, following people is second only to breaking their arms.’

  The threat seemed to disconcert her. An internal debate was taking place and she wouldn’t meet his eye. He bought her another Coke and they sat in silence for a while.

  ‘I was hoping to bump into you,’ she said finally. ‘Only not like this.’

  ‘You didn’t set yourself up to be mugged? Then what?’

  ‘I was supposed to find out everything I could about you, then see if we could meet up – as if by accident.’

  ‘Supposed to in what sense?’

  ‘I was. . . I guess it doesn’t matter if I t
ell you straight out.’ She paused to re-tie her hair. ‘I’m in the Islamic Society at SOAS – I converted to Islam a year ago.’ She tossed her head, as if accustomed to this announcement being the prelude to an argument.

  ‘You don’t cover your head, though,’ said James.

  ‘I did for a while but I found men stared at me more so I stopped. Allah, praise Him, expects men to behave modestly, too.’ She gave James a look that suggested she’d already found him wanting in this regard.

  ‘Anyway,’ said James, ‘you joined this society.’

  ‘Yes. There’s a man who comes to our meetings – he runs a charity that looks after Muslim victims of Western tyranny. It’s such important work – I did some leafleting for him.’

  ‘You have to follow people around before thrusting leaflets at them?’

  ‘Ha ha. He said they were trying to get in touch with you, but you never replied to their emails.’

  James couldn’t remember any such approaches, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been any. His Imperial College email was a vast and largely uncharted territory. ‘What’s this man’s name?’

  ‘Hamed. He said your work contributes to the oppression of Muslims. He wants to try and persuade you to stop.’

  ‘So you told Hamed you’d arrange to bump into me?’ said James, trying to keep the incredulity out of his voice.

  ‘Yes.’ She looked relieved that her story was out. ‘He said it was the best way of getting to you – it’s not the sort of thing I usually do.’

  ‘Good, because to be honest, you’re not that good at it.’

  She looked down and tried to pout. She wasn’t very good at that, either. ‘So will you? I mean, come to one of our meetings and talk to Hamed?’

  ‘I’m not helping to oppress Muslims,’ said James, wondering if in fact, in some obscure way, he was. ‘What’s the charity called?’

  ‘Children of Islam.’

  ‘Is it a registered charity? They have a website and so on?’

  ‘No, Hamed says all the money they raise must go straight to the victims. He’s very passionate about it.’

  ‘I wonder who else he’s going to get you to pursue round London,’ James said – but then decided it would be unfair to tease her. However improbable this Hamed’s story, it was clear that Sarah believed it. There didn’t seem to be much harm in her, anyway – and for all the spikiness and ingratitude, he found that he rather liked her.

  ‘I’ll need your phone number, in case I end up in court opposite two nice young men with their arms in slings.’

  She found a scrap of paper and a pen in her courier bag and they swapped numbers. When he dialled hers, a phone rang in her bag.

  ‘Actually, it belongs to Hamed,’ she said. ‘Mine was nicked and he said I could use it until I get a new one.’

  ‘Charitable of him.’

  She stood up suddenly, as if exchanging phone numbers had been the sole purpose of her mission.

  ‘I have to meet someone.’

  ‘You don’t want to start converting me right away?’

  She heaved the courier bag onto her shoulder and shot out of the pub without replying. The old man in the yellow shirt raised his glass and nodded vigorously at James.

  ‘Go after her, mate, lovely gel like that.’

  The ten-year revenue growth chart for Grosvenor Systems – ‘the UK’s leading supplier of surveillance systems and solutions’, as it styled itself, although most of its revenues came from arms brokerage – had one striking feature: for the first seven years it depicted an incline so smooth and gentle as to be almost undetectable; then three years ago it had turned sharp left and followed a dramatic upward trajectory – to the point where, at the end of the previous financial year, turnover could be seen to have doubled since the month when the upturn began. Something momentous must have happened in the life of Grosvenor Systems to cause such a radical shift in its serene progress into the new millennium. Something had: Natalya Kocharian.

  Nat liked the revenue growth chart very much. She updated and circulated it regularly, and had recently overlain it with a second line showing a parallel rise in the company’s market value. On the day when the 2005/06 accounts were published, she appeared at work carrying a large black tote bag with the revenue chart printed on one side, the share price on the other: the lines that illustrated progress prior to her arrival were in grey; thereafter, shocking pink and studded with diamantés. The latest sets of numbers filled the first slide in every in-house presentation she ever did, and those of her colleagues who did not benefit from the Grosvenor Systems Performance Related Remuneration Scheme were mightily bored of it. For the rest, its appearance was the cue for an agreeable bout of mental arithmetic. While Nat told them about the new contracts she had won, the market sectors opening up before her, and the competitors sent skulking off to the world’s least profitable backwaters, her colleagues calculated their bonuses. And when they had finished, they fell to admiring the smattering of freckles across their sales director’s pink-flushed cheeks, or the way her upper lip would not quite close over her teeth. Or they tried to catch, without being caught, the captivating animation in her lovely green eyes.

  Nat had been summoned to a 6.30 p.m. meeting with the Grosvenor chairman, Sir Peter Beddoes, and her prowess as a sales director was not on the agenda. Beddoes was a tall, skinny old bird with watery eyes and a neck liberally adorned with turkey-wattles of scaly, purplish skin. She counted him as one of the quite large number of men who dangled from her little finger, but this time the pencil skirt and promising smile were met with a look of prudish gravitas.

  Clive Silk, who sat on the Grosvenor Board under the title Head of Innovation, was also there: cautious, slippery Silk who had so far resisted Nat’s attempts to engage him in a little light banter of the kind she was accustomed to regard – with good reason – as irresistible. She thought he must be gay, despite the evidence of a wife and teenage daughter.

  The meeting was to discuss what Beddoes insisted on calling the ‘potentially disastrous disposal’ of the IPD400 prototype. Nat had already told him everything she knew about it in a succession of emails that she now wished she’d written with a little more care.

  ‘It was marked as AVAILABLE FOR IMMEDIATE SALE and I immediately sold it,’ Nat protested at the start of the meeting. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘You knew this was a highly sensitive item,’ Clive Silk told her. ‘It was negligent of you not to query the change of status.’

  ‘First it was secret, then it was for sale: it’s called the product development cycle,’ came Nat’s retort.

  At this, Sir Peter Beddoes compressed his lips, causing the lines around his mouth to arrange themselves in an arsehole-like way. Nat seldom saw these two men together outside of corporate jollies, and they presented a tricky challenge. She couldn’t play the power-struck little ingénue to Beddoes, while also plugging away at the husky siren act that she’d judged most likely to bring Clive Silk to heel. Her inclination was to flirt with Beddoes and leave Silk to sit and spin; but she’d always been suspicious of the Head of Innovation, who seemed to have more authority at Grosvenor than his job title warranted. And since it now appeared that her feisty defence was not going to have the deterrent effect she had hoped for, Nat sat in demure silence while the two men admonished her, Clive Silk delivering what sounded like a well-rehearsed script, while Beddoes knitted his brow in the manner of a schoolma’am with an untidy piece of homework. It was most unpleasant.

  ‘Lecture over, then,’ Beddoes said finally. ‘You know how much we value your work here, Natalya. If we didn’t – and I make no bones about it – we wouldn’t be having this meeting and you wouldn’t have a job. It’s not just the IPD400 – all our development projects are under the spotlight. We can protect ourselves only if we play by the rules, and I won’t have the future of Grosvenor Systems put in jeopardy because a member of senior management can’t see the bigger picture. Clive?’

  ‘Thanks
, Peter. Next step, Natalya, get on and sort this out,’ said Clive Silk. ‘Your man Zender is the priority – do whatever it takes to bring him to the table.’ He directed at her a look at once full of meaning and overlain with matronly disapproval.

  ‘It was you who introduced us, Clive, so—’

  ‘Why didn’t you pitch the IPD400 to anyone else, by the way?’

  ‘Zender’s offer was pre-emptive,’ said Nat, having prepared this answer in advance. ‘He always pulls out if he suspects there’s an auction going on.’

  ‘I wonder if you could have got more for it,’ said Silk. Nat’s jaw bulged with the effort of not responding to this slight. ‘But that’s irrelevant now. You have our authority to buy the IPD400 back for the thirteen million you sold it for, plus a five per cent sweetener for Zender and his client. Any higher and you’ll have to get back to me.’

  ‘You’re on good terms with Zender,’ said Beddoes, ‘that’s the critical point. Time to call in some favours, so to speak?’

  ‘He’s a client, he doesn’t owe me any favours.’

  ‘If we don’t get the IPD400 back, never mind your job here, you are potentially in serious trouble,’ said Clive Silk, looking pleased to be able to deliver the threat. ‘I’ve taken advice and it seems that as directors of Grosvenor Systems, we could face legal proceedings.’

  ‘I’m not on the board, Clive,’ said Nat. ‘But I can see it would be awful if you went to prison over this.’

  ‘That’s hardly likely,’ said Beddoes, his normally patrician voice disrupted by a querulous wobble. ‘The final point is that you are not to discuss the loss of the IPD400 with anyone—’

  ‘Other than Claude Zender, of course. And everyone else who already knows about it?’

  ‘I shouldn’t need to tell you this,’ said Clive Silk, ‘but I’ve come directly from a meeting with the Director-General of MI6. He’s taking personal responsibility for throwing a cordon of silence round the loss of the IPD400, and I’d strongly advise you not to be the one to break it.’

  Was that a hint of a squeak in Silk’s bland voice? The chaps are scared, Nat thought. She was greatly cheered.