The Marylebone Drop Read online

  Bachelor yawned, his broken night catching up with him. Through the pub window he could see it trying to snow; the air had a pent-up solid grey weight to it, like a vault. If he had to spend the night in the car, currently Plan A by default, there was a strong likelihood he’d freeze to death, and while he’d heard there were worse ways to go, he didn’t want to run a consumer test. Perhaps he should rethink approaching Solomon . . . Pity was tough to bear, but grief would be worse, even if he weren’t around to witness it. But if so, he’d have to either come up with a story as to why he’d got nowhere tracing Peter Kahlmann or, in fact, try tracing Peter Kahlmann. It occurred to him that of the two options, the latter required less effort. He checked his watch. Still shy of noon, which gave him a little wiggle room. Okay, he thought. Let’s try tracing Peter Kahlmann. If he’d got nowhere by three, he’d apply himself to more urgent matters.

  And he did, as it happened, have an idea where to start.

  A coffee shop just off Piccadilly Circus: a posh one where they gave you a chocolate with your coffee, but placed it too close to your cup, so it half-melted before reaching the table.

  Hannah Weiss didn’t mind. There was something decadent about melting chocolate; the way it coated your tongue. Just so long as you didn’t get it on your fingers or clothes.

  Richard Pynne said, “So it’ll go through like you asked. Make your transfer application. You don’t have to mention the stalking thing. It’ll be expedited end of next week at the latest.”

  “That’s great, Richard. Thank you.”

  She’d enjoyed working at BIS, but it was time for a change. If Richard hadn’t come through, “the stalking thing,” as he’d put it, would probably have done the trick, but it was as well she hadn’t had to go down that route. Julia, her line manager, would be horrified at the accusation; though of all the people who’d inevitably become involved, Julia would be easiest to convince of her own guilt. There was a certain kind of PC mindset which was never far away from eating itself. But more problematic would be being noticed for the wrong thing. Like all large organisations, the Civil Service hoisted flags about how its staff should report wrongdoing, but if you actually did so, your card was marked for life. It was hard not to feel aggrieved about that, even if the reported wrongdoing was fabricated.

  Pynne said, “I actually had a pastry earlier. Not sure I want a chocolate now.”

  Because he was expecting her to, she said, “Well, if you don’t . . .”

  He grinned and turned his saucer round so the chocolate was nearest her. Using finger and thumb, she popped it into her mouth whole. Richard watched the process, his grin flickering.

  “You’re okay with us meeting here?”

  “Sure. I’ll have to be back in the office in twenty minutes though.”

  “That’s okay. I just wanted to pass on the good news.”

  They were of an age, or at least, he wasn’t so much older that it looked unusual, the pair of them meeting for coffee. Nobody observing would have to make up a story to fit; they were just pals, that was all. He’d suggested, of course—back when they were building this legend—that he be an ex-boyfriend; still close, maybe on/off. And she’d given it genuine thought, but only for the half-second it took to reject it. The alacrity with which he’d agreed that it wasn’t, after all, a great idea had amused her, but she’d taken care to keep that hidden. On paper he was her handler, and it was all round best if he thought that was the case in the real world too.

  She supposed, if she were more important to the Park, they’d have given her someone with more experience; a father figure, someone like the man who’d recruited her in the first place. Pynne, though, was learning the game as much as she was; they were each other’s starter partners, or that was the idea. A fun-and-games op; blowing smoke in a friendly Agency’s eyes, just to show they could, though European Rules had changed in the years since Hannah’s recruitment, and if nobody was expecting hostilities to break out, a certain amount of tetchiness was on the cards. So maybe her value to the Park was on an upward trajectory, but even so, she wouldn’t be assigned a new handler now. It didn’t really matter. The fact was, Hannah Weiss had been playing this game for a lot longer than Richard Pynne. And the handler the BND had matched her with had a lot more field savvy; but then, he knew Hannah was a triple, working for the BND, while the Park thought she was a double, working for the Park.

  Maybe everyone would sit down and have a good laugh about all of this one day, but for the moment, it suited her real bosses that she be transferred to the office handling Brexit negotiations. It wasn’t the world’s biggest secret that Britain had been handling these discussions with the grace and aplomb of a rabbit hiding a magician in its hat, but, on the slim chance that somebody had a masterplan up their sleeve, the BND wouldn’t have minded a peek.

  “So . . . Everything else all right?”

  Hannah sipped her coffee, looked Richard Pynne directly in the eye, and said, “Yes. Yes, all fine.”

  He nodded, as if he’d just managed a successful debriefing. It was hard not to compare his treatment of her with that of Martin, who sometimes insisted on clandestine handovers in public places—the old ways are the best, Hannah; you have to learn how to do things the hard way; this is how we do a drop, Hannah; learn this now, it may someday save your life—and other times spirited her away for the evening; one of the brasher clubs round Covent Garden, where up-and-coming media types mingle with new-breed business whizzkids. Those evenings, they’d drink champagne cocktails, like a September/May romance in the making, and his interrogation of her life was a lot less timid than Richard Pynne’s. What about lovers, Hannah; fucking anybody useful? You don’t have to say if you don’t want to. I’ll find out anyway. But she didn’t mind telling him. When they were together, she didn’t have to hide who she was. And not hiding who she was included letting him know how much she enjoyed hiding who she was; how much she enjoyed playing these games in public. Because that’s what it was, so far; a fun-and-games op in one of the world’s big cities. How could she not be enjoying herself?

  “But don’t ever forget, Hannah, that if they catch you, they’ll put you in prison. That’s when the fun stops, are you receiving me?”

  Loud and clear, Martin. Loud and clear.

  Now she said to Richard Pynne, “I’ll put my application in this afternoon. The sooner the better, yes?”

  “Good girl.”

  She finished her coffee, and smiled sweetly. “Richard? Don’t get carried away. I’m not your good girl.”

  “Sorry. Sorry—”

  “Richard? You have to learn when I’m teasing.”

  “Sorry—”

  And she left him there, to settle their bill; not looking back from the cold pavement to his blurred face behind the plate glass window, like a woman who’s just told her Labrador to stay, and won’t test his mettle by flashing him kindness.

  At Regent’s Park the weather, to no one’s surprise, was much the same as elsewhere in London; the skies sea-grey, the air chill, and packed with the promise of snow.

  John Bachelor was having conversation with a guardian of the gate, who in this particular instance was seated at a desk in the lobby. “You’re not expected,” she was telling him, something he was already aware of.

  “I know,” he said. “That’s what ‘without appointment’ means. But I’m not meeting with anyone, I just need to do some research.”

  “You should still book in ahead.”

  He swallowed the responses which, in a better life, he’d have had the freedom to deliver, and managed a watery smile. “I know, I know. Mea culpa. But my plans for the day have gone skew-whiff, and this is the one chance I have at redeeming the hour.”

  His plans for the day had obviously involved shaving and putting a clean shirt on, the woman’s non-spoken reply spelled out. Because those things hadn’t happened either. But she ran his
name and ID card through her scanner anyway, and evidently didn’t come up with any kill-or-capture-on-sight instructions. “It says you’re in good standing,” she said, with a touch too much scepticism for Bachelor’s liking. “But I’d rather see your name on the roster.”

  All or nothing.

  “You want me to give Diana a ring?” He produced his mobile phone. “Sorry, I mean Ms. Taverner. I could call her and she can put you straight.”

  For a horrible second he thought she was about to call his bluff, but the moment passed; gave him a cheery wave, he liked to think, on its way through the door. She did something on her keyboard, and a printer buzzed. Retrieving its product, peeling a label from the sheet, she clipped it onto a lanyard. “That’s a two-hour pass,” she told him. “One second over, I send in the Dogs.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Have a nice visit.”

  Seriously, he thought, passing through the detectors and heading for the staircase; seriously: Checkpoint Charlie must have been more fun, back in the old days. Not that he’d actually been there. On the other hand he knew what it was, and wouldn’t mistake it for a Twitter handle.

  He took the lift and headed for the library. He didn’t have an appointment, it was true, because an appointment would have appeared on someone’s calendar, and anything documented in the Park carried the potential for blowback of one sort or another. Bachelor’s standing might be “good,” as the guardian of the gate had reluctantly verified, but “good” simply meant he wasn’t currently on a kill-list. If he actually did bump into Di Taverner, she might have him dropped down a lift shaft just for the practice. So no, no actual appointment, but he had rung ahead and made contact with one of the locals; asked if they could have a quick chat, off the books. In the library. If the local was around, that was.

  He was.

  They still called it the library, but there weren’t books here any longer, only desks with cables for charging laptops. Bachelor settled in the corner furthest from the door, draped his coat on a chair, then went and fetched a cup of coffee from the dispenser, on his way back suffering a glimpse of a future that awaited him, one in which he haunted waiting rooms and libraries, anywhere he might sit in the warmth for ten minutes before being asked to move on. How had it come to this? What had happened to his life? He made a panicky noise out loud, a peculiar little eck-sound, which he immediately repeated consciously, turning it into a cough halfway through. But there was only one other person in the room, a middle-aged woman focused on her screen; she had earplugs in, and didn’t glance his way.

  At his table, he warmed his hands on the plastic cup. He didn’t have his laptop—he’d left it in his car; a disciplinary offence, come to think of it—so opened his notebook and pretended to study his own words of wisdom. He must have looked like an illustration of how he felt: an analogue man in a digital world. No wonder it was leaving him behind so quickly. But others managed. Look at Solomon. Bachelor thought again of that cosy flat, its busy bookshelves, the active chessboard indicating Solomon’s continuing engagement in struggle, even an artificial one, played out with himself. By any current reckoning, Solomon was of no account; part of the last century’s flotsam, unless it was jetsam; discarded by a now-unified state, washed up onto an island that had lately reasserted its insularity. But he still felt himself part of the game, enough to alert Bachelor that he’d thought he’d seen a drop. No, Bachelor corrected himself; Solly knew what he’d seen. He might have been wrong, but that was barely relevant. Solomon knew.

  The name Peter Kahlmann stared up at Bachelor from the notebook in front of him.

  So okay, it was true that he had designs on Solomon’s sofa; on having somewhere to sleep that wasn’t the back seat of his own car. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t pursue the trail in front of him to the best of his careworn abilities—he wasn’t, when you got down to it, acting under false pretences. He was, in fact, acting under genuine pretences, and if in some eyes that might seem worse, it was the best he could manage in the circumstances.

  “Bachelor?”

  He started, alarmed that he’d been found out.

  “It is you, right?”

  And he admitted that indeed it was.

  “Alec?” was how Bachelor had greeted him the first time they met. “Do I detect a touch of Scots?”

  “It’s Lech,” Alec said. “And no, I’m not one of the Scottish Wicinskis. But good catch.”

  So yes, Alec Wicinski, born Lech, to parents themselves UK citizens, but both offspring of Poles who’d settled here during the war; named by his mother for the hero of the hour, Lech Walęsa, which proved such a burden to the young Lech throughout a turbulent school career that he reinvented himself at University: Alec, good proper name, nothing off the wall about it. He’d since come to semi-regret the change, and now answered to both, depending on who was addressing him. That he had two names—two covers, both real—amused him. Made him feel more a spy than his Service card did.

  Which stated, when run through a scanner, that Alec Wicinski was an analyst, Ops division, which meant he worked on the hub, except for those rare occasions when he sat in the back of a van, watching other people kick doors down. Afterwards, he’d be who you went to to find out why the door hadn’t come off its hinges first kick, or where the stuff you’d expected to find behind it might be now. Where John Bachelor had encountered him had been at the funeral of an ancient asset, who’d been a friend of Alec’s grandfather, unless he’d been the grandfather of Alec’s friend. Bachelor was hazy on the details, having launched himself wholeheartedly into the inevitable wake, but he’d made a point of scratching Wicinski’s name on the wall of his memory cave. You never knew when a contact at the Park would come in handy.

  Alec sat, and shook his head when Bachelor suggested coffee. “You have a name that might interest me?”

  “It came through one of my people,” Bachelor told him. Having people lent him weight, he thought. “Might be something, might be nothing.”

  “Are we currently in a movie?”

  “. . . What?”

  “It just sounds like movie dialogue, that’s all. ‘Might be something, might be nothing.’ I process information, John. It is John, right?” It is. “So, all information’s either useful or it’s not. But none of it’s nothing. What’s the name?”

  “Peter Kahlmann,” Bachelor said.

  “And what’s the context?”

  Bachelor said, “One of my people, I look after retired assets, I think I told you that, one of my people thought he saw him making a drop. Or taking a drop, rather.”

  “A drop?”

  “An exchange of some sort. A package. An envelope. Done surreptitiously in a public place.”

  “Sounds kind of old school.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I didn’t know they even did that any more. Whoever they are.” Alec scratched his head. He had thick dark curls. “And even if they did, that doesn’t make it our business. Could be anything. Could be drugs.”

  “A lot of drug money goes places where it becomes our business,” Bachelor said.

  “Yeah, I know. Just thinking out loud. Who’s the asset?”

  “An old boy, one of our pensioners.”

  “Behind the curtain?”

  “Back in the day, yes.”

  Alec nodded. The eyes behind his glasses were dark, but lively. “And where did he see what he says he saw? And where did the name come from?”

  Bachelor ran through it all, start to finish. He didn’t hide what he thought was possible: that Solomon Dortmund, who was sharp but ancient, might have witnessed an innocent stumble. But he didn’t hide, either, that Solomon had seen such games played for real; that he’d played them himself, in places where, when you were caught, they didn’t just make you sit out the next round.

  “So why aren’t you going through channels?”
Alec said, when he’d finished.

  “. . . Channels?”

  “If this is real, and not just an old man’s mistake, it should go on the record. You know how this works. There’s a reason we keep intel on file. It’s so we can see the bigger picture. This Kahlmann, somewhere down the line, if he turns out to be planning an acid-attack on the PM’s hairdresser, I don’t want to be the one sticking my hand up and saying, oh yeah, we had a line on him, but it didn’t go through channels so nobody noticed.”

  Bachelor, freewheeling, said, “If it’s a mistake, it’s a mark against Solly. And you’re right, he’s an old man. They decide he’s being a nuisance, they might pack him off to one of those homes they have, where you’re not allowed more possessions than’ll fit in your locker, and everyone gathers in the home room for an afternoon sing-song. It’d kill him.”

  “But if he’s seeing things that don’t really happen, maybe one of those places is where he ought to be.”

  “Do you have parents, Alec?”

  “Please. Don’t play that card.”