The Protector: A gripping, action-packed spy thriller Read online

  When he arrived back in London, he went straight into his office, threw his coat on the hard chair in the corner and began reading the personnel file of Edward Morton, looking for a link. In his long experience with people he knew that very few men truly lived alone. Everyone had someone, or something they trusted. Edward Morton had one and he must now find it. He debated briefly going back to Gabriella Kreski’s with a search warrant but dismissed the idea almost immediately. If she had a copy of the file then he would never find it. The woman had almost invented most of the accepted hiding places that the trade used and, besides, he didn’t want to alienate her.

  The file was thick with cross references to vetted acquaintances and people at Cambridge – and he began with those, but only after circling the reference to a daughter in red. By midnight he had made a list of people he wanted to talk to, most of whom were either in Cambridge or nearby. Even those who had retired still seemed to be unable to throw off the gown sufficiently to move away.

  He picked up the phone and dialled the internal extension of the deputy head of section ‘D’, the real reason for Milburn, the Acton Fairies. The man was still at his desk and Black gathered up his coat and walked down the stairs to his office.

  Jonno Smith was a street smart ex-field operative who had risen up the ranks slowly and was finally given the section’s day to day management by Callows after being run over by a Renault while on a job in Spain. He was one of the few Fairies whose snap judgements were impeccable – and now, with a twisted spine, he had to make them from a desk.

  “Hello,” he said cheerfully, “come to audit my expenses or is this social?”

  “Social… sort of,” Black answered.

  The grinning ex-fairy pulled open his bottom drawer and hauled out a bottle of Scotch. Black nodded.

  “Need a man Jonno,” he said taking the proffered chipped glass, “but it must be a back door job. No-one to know.”

  “Breaking rules?” Jonno answered. “Sorry sport. See the boss…”

  “No,” Black said, “it’s legit, but I want it kept quiet. Not up on the deployment board. No chat.”

  Jonno raised an eyebrow. “You’ll sign the chit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good enough. What’s the job?”

  “Minder. Could be very boring, but if it happens I want the best you have. No qualms, no questions. I don’t want some gung-ho little prat. Give me a man who’s been round the traps a few times. A bloke who can keep his mouth shut and do the invisible shield bit.”

  “Pity. I have lots of gung-ho prats. Invisible shield?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Strenuous stuff?”

  Black shook his head and sipped his drink. It burnt like fire in his throat.

  “Mr Pope,” Jonno said.

  “Christ, he must be sixty!” Black shot back.

  “Best close protection man I’ve ever seen. He’s been around and he knows the business. He looks like apensioner and he moves like a ferret.” He stood and walked awkwardly to the filing cabinet against the wall. After pulling a buff folder clear, he passed it to Black. “Most of his jobs go of without a hitch, and when there is a hitch the hitch ends up in a morgue. The last time was that Israeli diplomat. Remember in the foyer of the Guild Hall? That was Mr Pope. No-one saw a thing, not even the cameras. Well, Pope did. Took out the Hezbollah guy from across the room. Two rounds, one between the eyes and the other under the jaw as his head flicked back from the first round...” He paused. “Anyway, he is all we have available.”

  “The Israeli was five years ago,” Black argued scanning the files contents.

  “He’s retiring next month. Nice quiet job for the last time.”

  “Oh fucking magic Jonno,” Black moaned.

  “Do you want someone or not?”

  “Yes... yes I do. I also want to draw a firearm. For me.”

  “Oh dear!” Jonno laughed. “You have been making friends haven’t you?”

  He briefed Jonno as best he could on the body and the job and finally handed over a piece of paper with the address in Greece. Nowhere on the paper did it mention the name of the friend she was staying with, and in fact Adrian Black didn’t know. He also said that Pope was to report to him and him alone.

  The next morning Black briefed Sir Martin Callows and, as Black left with a travel bag heading for Cambridge, the D D-G called John Burmeister into his office, and briefly covered the gist of Black’s report. “I have had enough of this one John,” he concluded. “I have lost good men. When we find whoever is responsible, don’t bother with Five or Special Branch. Get a couple of those psychopaths downstairs to take care of it. I don’t want to know the details. Understood?”

  Burmeister smiled bleakly and nodded just once.

  Pope stepped off the ferry gangway awkwardly, an old black raincoat over his left arm, his suitcase in his left hand, a trilby hat firmly on his head. Only someone looking for it would have noticed that his right hand was free. He looked like a retired policeman, or perhaps a retired non-commissioned army officer, with a short grey bristly moustache that ran to exactly the edge of his lip either side. He wore steel rimmed spectacles and beneath the round lenses his brown eyes were flat and hard. Although pressed, his charcoal grey suit was shiny with age at the knees and elbows and his black shoes were polished to a high gloss.

  Here on the small wharf he stood out like a sore thumb and he knew it. He would have to get some other kit if it looked like being a long job.

  No-one in the service had ever called him anything but Mr Pope. He was the kind of man who was mocked, in his absence, with a certain amount of fear by his younger colleagues, but given a goodly amount of respect by most when actually present. He lived with his sister in a small terrace house in north London and took the Underground to work and read the Daily Mail. In his spare time he worked on a complex network of miniature railway lines that ran through the converted attic, that on Sunday mornings would carry the perfect replica model trains he loved. He knew that the Americans would have taken one look at the attic layout and called him a control freak, but it wasn’t control. It was the detail, the miniature perfection of it all. His sister constantly referred to them as toys and he would fix his flat eyes on her for a second and she would remember they were models.

  To the people at Milburn he was just Mr Pope, an old fashioned operative from a time when to be an Acton Fairy was to be respected, a tired old war-horse in a technological age where ethics were dying.

  Walking down the waterfront amongst the jostling happy tourists, he turned suddenly up an alley and disappeared from sight.

  *

  Later that afternoon, as Quayle was reading on the veranda and Holly was washing her hair inside, he looked down the path to see a figure walking steadily up towards the house. It was not one of the locals. He closed the book and sat watching. It was only as the figure got nearer that his eyes narrowed with recognition. Mr Pope, he thought. You are not welcome here, none of you are. Not any more. He stepped up the edge of the low wall and, as Pope took the last steps up the steep pathway, he too with some surprise recognised the other.

  “Mr Quayle, isn’t it?” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  Pope wasn’t sure what to say for a moment. There had been no brief to expect an ex-service man. No-one had said that Titus Quayle was involved. If he was here, then no-one needed a body guard.

  “I am looking for Mrs Clements, nee Morton,” he said formally.

  “What for?” Quayle asked softly, his suspicion rising.

  Pope knew then that Quayle knew nothing of any threat.

  “Is this your place, Mr Quayle?”

  Quayle nodded.

  “So Mrs Clements is your house guest here?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Perhaps we better have a chat, Mr Quayle. There have been one or two problems in London and I have been sent out to guard her.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Not my d
epartment,” Pope answered stiffly, “but my brief is to make sure that Mrs Clements is covered until further notice.”

  “She has reverted to Morton,” Quayle said absently, his mind racing. Jesus, what is going on? The service putting a bodyguard on Holly?

  “How are your instructions coming in?” Quayle asked.

  Pope said nothing, which didn’t surprise him. He was now an outsider, and so hadn’t really expected an answer.

  “So be it,” he said, “on your way. When you decide to advise me of the nature of the threat to my guest then I might allow you close enough to do your job. Until then, bugger off!”

  Pope shrugged. It was a fairly normal reaction. People didn’t like being guarded and normally didn’t see themselves as threatened. He would wait until his first call scheduled for the next day and advise his controller in London of who his body was staying with.

  At that moment, Holly stepped smiling onto the veranda, rubbing her hair with a big yellow towel. Pope looked at her carefully, as if logging her features in his memory. She seemed happy enough: no tension, no fear. There was no way she was being held here against her will here, that he could see. She was as safe here as she was with anyone. He remembered Titus Quayle well.

  Nodding formally to her, he tipped his hat. “Good Morning, Mr Quayle. Miss Morton.” And, with that, he began to walk back down the hill, his hat and suit incongruous on the rocky steep slope.

  “Who was that?” Holly asked brightly.

  “Never mind,” Quayle said, “just a man I used to know.” But, as he spoke, his eyes scanned the hill, not seeing its beauty or its majestic fall to the gorge like she did, but seeing the shadows and the caves and outcrops and the places a man could hide, like he had done every day since arriving.

  That evening, he talked Holly out of eating in the village and they ate indoors, Quayle making light of the unusual situation by putting a candle on the table and producing a bottle of old Cognac from a dusty box. The atmosphere was tense and he barely drank and Holly noticed that. She also noticed when he rose with the dawn, walked silently to the living room window and looked out across the landscape with a pair of binoculars.

  “What’s going on, Ti?” she asked softly. She knew it was no ordinary morning, because it had been no ordinary night. He had lain awake most of it – not with the nightmares, just awake and alert. Now he was tense and preoccupied.

  “Nothing,” he replied.

  “Don’t patronise me…”

  He turned and looked her squarely in the eye. “I wouldn’t ever do that,” he said.

  “Well, what is going on? Eating up here? Indoors? Awake all night. Now you watching outside with field glasses?”

  He didn’t say anything, just looked at her.

  “I’m not a bloody idiot, Ti! It was that man yesterday, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded. “He was here looking for you”

  She was angry now. “Well, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I know him,” he answered softly.

  “What sort of answer is that?” she snapped. Then, with her face blanching, she realised exactly where Quayle knew him from. “Oh God, he’s one of...”

  “Yes he is.”

  “What does he want with me?”

  “He wouldn’t say. His name is Pope. He’s a close protection specialist. What you would call a bodyguard.” Even as he said the word, he knew that he was much more than that. They only put Pope on people who had a bloody good chance of getting killed because someone was after them. “He is rather good at it.”

  “A bodyguard. For me? What on earth for?”

  “I told him to stay away until he’s prepared to tell us. He’ll have to get authority to do that from London.”

  “Someone has probably made a mistake,” she said with forced cheerfulness.

  “Yes, possibly,” he agreed, smiling. But his eyes weren’t in on the smile. He had seen Mr Pope up on the hill above the house. He must have been there all night.

  It was that afternoon, after they had made love, Quayle lying on the bed with the sheets tangled and damp and scrunched up beneath him, that he knew that he loved her. He was watching Holly wash with water from the big china jug, bars of sunlight filtering through the shutters and striping the shiny glow of sweat on her back, her heavy breasts rising when she lifted the hair off her neck to allow the cool breeze to move over her skin. And he knew, in that moment, that, if anything happened to her, it would be because he was already dead and her God wasn’t in heaven after all.

  Adrian Black had spoken with three of his list of people when he began walking back to his car in the NCP. The interviews were long and he had only managed four the day before, but at least he was steadily eliminating names from the list. He had checked for a tail several times that day – and, finding no-one, had stopped taking precautions. So it was Adrian Black’s misfortune that, as he returned to his car that evening, he didn’t notice that he was being followed, not by one man, but by two.

  Black took the stairs down into the car park two at a time and so was looking straight down at the steps when he was attacked. A figure loomed up from behind a car, Black getting no more than a fleeting peripheral glimpse, and with lightning reactions his own arm flashed up defensively. But it was too late. The container the man had been carrying crashed into him, and in an instant, there was a searing caustic burning in his face. He tried not to scream as he went down, clawing at the pain as the second lunging splash of concentrated sulphuric acid hit him in the face and neck.

  It was the students who saved him. Three graduates collecting their car ran to the screams and one, holding a doctorate in chemistry, had seen lab accidents happen and immediately recognised the smell. Together they dragged him bodily to the toilets, one pouring his tin of lemonade over the terrible still burning facial skin as they ran. There they held him over the toilet, pushing his face down and splashing water up over his face and neck, one shouting to blink quickly, and the third then running for a phone.

  No-one noticed that another sandy haired man had appeared at the scene within minutes, and stood with his long coat trailing over his shoulder, watching with some sadness.

  That evening, while a ophthalmic surgeon gently lifted the dressings off the terribly disfigured face, Cambridgeshire Police took an anonymous call. The attack, it said, had been a warning for the fascist to mind his own business.

  Later that night, a man dressed as a porter silently made his way towards Black’s room. Smiling, he held up a staff ID card to the policeman guarding the door and walked in. Seeing he was alone, he looked down upon the heavily sedated figure in the bed. What kind of people are these, he thought, who will blind and maim a man for his diligence? In Afghanistan they would do this and worse – but it was their land and they were savages. He then took a crumpled single stem flower from his pocket and placed it, and a small object wrapped in tissue, beside the bandaged head.

  “Be brave, Englishman,” he said softly – and, as KGB Major Alexi Kirov turned and walked towards the door, Black’s arm painfully inched upwards until his stiffly bandaged hand could grasp the item and hold it tight, wondering what it was and where the voice had come from.

  At Milburn, someone going over Black’s desk came across the Morton file and the ringed reference to a daughter.

  “Bring her in for starters,” Burmeister snapped.

  The Head of the Fairies, tagged as Oberon in the 60s by an erudite wit, looked at the deployment board and allocated three men, one from Athens Station, and two from Rome to collect Holly Morton.

  His deputy, Jonno Smith, had been waiting for the right moment to discreetly advise his boss that there was a single controller deployment not on the board, and instead of telling him verbally had left a time stamped message in the handover file before going on a week’s leave. With all the activity the screen hadn’t been read at the handover time, and now the reference had been dumped onto the history file.

  “What if she’s reluctant?” Ober
on asked, needing to know the scope of his task, ever conscious of Sir Martin Callows three floors up.

  “Just bloody get her here in one piece! She knows something! Anyone gets in the way…”

  “Controller?”

  “Me. Have them contact me once they arrive... Let’s get this sorted out.”

  The man nodded. That was, after all, what the Fairies were good at.

  With all the fuss and drama, no-one really noticed the long distance call for Adrian Black, and the caller – who didn’t leave his name – was told he was off Station.

  If Mr Pope was the old-fashioned kind of operative, then the three men who had just arrived on Serifos were the new breed.

  The leader was a sallow man in his early thirties, who constantly pushed his lank black hair back up from his face as he spoke into the phone. He was from Athens Station and spoke enough Greek to get by outside the tourist areas. The other two were younger and, unlike him, were wearing jeans, training shoes and open-necked shirts with zip-up windbreakers, lounging round a table covered in dirty glasses. The jackets, unnecessary in the warmth, were to conceal the fact they were all armed.

  He finished speaking to Burmeister and walked off, the other two rising and following.

  Quayle recognised them with some distaste a good seventy yards from the house. Fairies. His eyes narrowed briefly with the thought. He flicked a look up the hill to where he had seen Pope the day before, putting his cup down on the tray. He didn’t recognise any of them – although one seemed familiar as they approached. These were not close protection specialists. Nothing so grand. They were just muscle. Hard men. A rugby team, in the trade jargon. He didn’t like the feel of things. They weren’t here for niceties.

  “Go inside,” he said to Holly, draining his tea and again lowering the cup onto the table, this time upside down.

  “Why?” she asked, looking up.

  He nodded down the path.

  “Where?” Her face went pale as she strained to seem normal, trying not to look at the three men now only thirty yards away.

  “The loo,” he said, before thinking again. “No, go right out the back. Get in the rocks. Wait for me to come and get you.”