Chapter Eight

LONDON HAD NEVER looked more beautiful than the night I flew in – St Paul’s Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament and all the other old citadels of power and grandeur standing like sculptures against a red and darkening sky.

It was less than twenty hours since my promotion, and I had travelled without rest. I was wrong about the location of the ranch house – it was in the Black Hills of South Dakota, even more remote than I had imagined. From there it was a two-hour drive to the nearest public airport, where a private jet had flown me to New York to connect with a British Airways transatlantic flight.

A Ford SUV, three years old and splashed with dirt to make it look unremarkable, picked me up at Heathrow and took me into Mayfair. It was a Sunday night and there was little traffic, but even so progress was slow – the vehicle was armour-plated and the extra weight made it a bitch to drive.

The guy wrestling the wheel finally turned into a cul-de-sac near South Audley Street and the garage door of an elegant town house swung up. We drove into the underground garage of a building which, according to the brass plaque on the front door, was the European headquarters of the Balearic Islands Investment Trust.

A sign underneath told the public that appointments could be made only by telephone. No number was given and, if anyone ever checked, London directory assistance had no listing for it. Needless to say, nobody ever called.

I took the elevator from the basement to the top floor and entered what had always been the Rider of the Blue’s office – a large expanse of polished wood floors and white sofas, but no windows or natural light.

The building itself had a concrete core, and it was from this cell within a cell that I began trying to unravel my predecessor’s web of deceit. Late into that first night, I called secret phone numbers which telephone companies didn’t even know they hosted, assembling a special team of cryptographers, analysts, archivists and field agents.

Despite what governments might claim, not all wars are fought with embedded reporters or in the glare of 24-hour news cameras. The following day, the new Rider and his small group of partizans launched their own campaign across Europe, doing battle with what turned out to be the most serious penetration of the US intelligence community since the Cold War.

We had some major successes but, even though, as time passed, enemy bodies started piling up like cord wood, I still couldn’t sleep. One night, chasing down a stale lead in Prague, I walked for hours through the old city and forced myself to take stock of where we were. By my own standards, shorn of all complications, I had failed – after twenty months’ unremitting work I still hadn’t discovered the method by which the Russians were paying the agents of ours – the traitors, in other words – they had corrupted.

The money trail remained as mysterious as ever and, unless we could track it successfully, we would never know how far the plumes of infection had spread. As a result, I resolved to throw everything we had at the problem but, in the end, none of that mattered: it was a shy forensic accountant and a dose of serendipity that came to our rescue.

Ploughing one last time through the mountain of material seized from my predecessor’s London home before it vanished into The Division’s archives, the accountant found a handwritten grocery list stuck in the back of a chequebook. About to throw it away, he turned it over and saw it was written on the back of a blank FedEx consignment docket – strange because none of our investigations had shown any evidence of a FedEx account. Intrigued, he called the company and discovered a list of pick-ups from the address, all of which had been paid for in cash.

Only one turned out to be of interest – a box of expensive Cuban cigars sent to the luxurious Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. It quickly transpired that the name of the recipient on the FedEx docket was fake, and that would have been an end to the matter – except for the moment of serendipity. A woman working with the accountant had once been a travel agent and she knew that all hotels in the United Arab Emirates are required to take a copy of every guest’s passport.

I called the hotel under the guise of an FBI special agent attached to Interpol and convinced the manager to examine their files and give me the passport details of the guest who had been staying in suite 1608 on the relevant date.

It turned out to be a person called Christos Nikolaides. It was an elegant name. Shame about the man.