The Hidden Man. Charles Cumming

story: ice on the runway at Sheremetjevo and the locals too pissed to fix it. He rang Graham outside in the car, told him the bad news, and settled back in his chair with a collapsing sigh. A family of Africans in some kind of traditional dress walked past him weeping, two of them pressing handkerchiefs to their eyes as they pushed trolleys piled six feet high with luggage and bags. Ian couldn’t tell if they were happy or sad. He lit a cigarette and opened the Standard.

      4

      Christopher Keen had taken the call personally in his private office. It was a routine enquiry, of the sort he handled every day, from a businessman calling himself Bob Randall with ‘a minor difficulty in the former Soviet Union’.

      ‘I’ve been informed,’ Randall explained, ‘that Russia is your area of expertise.’

      Keen did not ask who had recommended him for the job. That was simply the way the business worked: by reputation, by word of mouth. Neither did he enquire about the nature of the problem. That was simply common sense when speaking on an open line. Instead, he said, ‘Yes. I worked in the Eastern Bloc for many years.’

      ‘Good.’ Randall’s voice was nasal and bureaucratically flat. He suggested a meeting in forty-eight hours at a location on the Shepherd’s Bush Road.

      ‘It’s a Café Rouge, in the French-style. On the corner of Batoum Gardens.’ Randall spelt out ‘Batoum’ very slowly, saying ‘B for Bertie’ and ‘A for Apple’ in a way that tested Keen’s patience. ‘There are tables there which can’t be seen from the street. We’re not likely to be spotted. Would that be suitable for you, or do you have a specific procedure that you like to follow?’

      Keen made a note of the date in his desk diary and smiled: first-time buyers were often like this, jumpy and prone to melodrama, wanting codewords and gadgets and chalk marks on walls.

      ‘There is no specific procedure,’ he said. ‘I can find the café.’

      ‘Good. But how will I recognize you?’

      As he asked the question, Bob Randall was sitting in Thames House staring at a JPEG of Keen taken in western Afghanistan in 1983, but it was necessary cover.

      ‘I’m tall,’ Keen said, switching the phone to his other ear. ‘I’ll be wearing a dark blue suit, most probably. My experience is that in circumstances such as these two people who have never met before very quickly come to recognize one another. Call it one of the riddles of the trade.’

      ‘Of course,’ Randall replied. ‘Of course. And when shall we say? Perhaps six o’clock?’

      ‘Fine,’ Keen said. He was already hanging up. ‘Six o’clock.’

      Two days later, the businessman calling himself Bob Randall arrived at the café on Shepherd’s Bush Road half an hour early and picked out a secluded table, his back facing the busy street. At 17.55, he took a call from Ian Boyle, informing him in a jumble of code and double-speak that the BA flight from Moscow had eventually landed some ninety-five minutes late. The subject had used a public telephone box – not a mobile – after clearing Passport Control, and was now picking up his luggage in the hall. The call had been made to a west London number that was already being traced.

      ‘Understood,’ he told him. ‘And was there any sign of Duchev?’

      ‘Nothing.’

      ‘Well keep on it, please. And brief Paul Quinn. I’m going to be walking the dog for the next two hours. Contact me again at eight.’

      And at that moment he saw Christopher Keen coming into the café, indeed wearing a dark blue suit, a striking man possessed of a languid self-confidence. Demonstrably public school, he thought, and felt the old prejudice kick in like a habit. The photograph at Thames House had not done justice to Keen’s well-preserved good looks, nor to his travelled, evidently disdainful manner. The two men made eye contact and Randall gave a thin smile, his moustache lifting slightly to reveal stained yellow teeth.

      Keen sensed immediately that there was something unconvincing about his prospective client. The suit was off the peg, and the shirt, bought as white but now greyed by repeated launderings, looked cheap and untailored. This was not a businessman, with ‘minor difficulties in the former Soviet Union’, far less someone who could afford to employ the services of Divisar Corporate Intelligence.

      ‘Mr Randall,’ he said, with a handshake that deliberately crushed his knuckles. Keen looked quickly at the ground and registered his shoes. Grey – possibly fake – patent leather, tasselled and scuffed. Further evidence. ‘How can I help?’

      ‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’ Randall was trying to release his hand. ‘Let me start by getting you a drink.’

      ‘That would be very kind, thank you.’

      ‘Did you find the café OK?’

      ‘Easily.’

      Keen placed a black Psion Organiser and a mobile telephone on the table in front of him and sat down. Freeing the trapped vents of his suit jacket, he looked out of the window and tried to ascertain if he was being watched. It was an instinct, no more than that, but something was out of place. A crowd of office workers had gathered at a table on the other side of the window and an elderly man with a limp was walking into the café alone. The traffic heading north towards Shepherd’s Bush Green had been slowed by a van double-parked outside a mini-supermarket. Its rear doors were flung open and two young Asian men were unloading boxes from the back.

      ‘It’s part of a chain, I believe,’ Randall said.

      ‘What’s that?’

      ‘The café. Part of a chain.’

      ‘I know.’

      A waitress came and took their order for two beers. Keen wondered if he would have to stay long.

      ‘So, I very much appreciate your meeting me at such short notice.’ The businessman had a laboured, slightly self-satisfied way of strangling words, an accent located somewhere near Bracknell. ‘Had you far to come?’

      ‘Not at all. I had a meeting in Chelsea. Caught a fast black.’

      Randall’s eyes dropped out of character, as if Keen had made a racist remark. ‘Excuse me?’

      ‘A fast black,’ he explained. ‘A taxi.’

      ‘Oh.’ In the uneasy silence that followed, the waitress returned and poured lager into his glass.

      ‘So, how long have you worked in your particular field?’

      ‘About seven or eight years.’

      ‘And in Russia before that?’

      ‘Among other places, yes.’ Keen thanked the waitress with a patrician smile and picked up his glass. ‘I take it you’ve been there?’

      ‘Not exactly, no.’

      ‘And yet you told me on the telephone that you have a problem in the former Soviet Union. Tell me, Mr Randall, what is it that you think I can do for you?’

      Leaning back in his seat, Randall nodded and swallowed a mouthful of lager. He blinked repeatedly and a small amount of foam evaporated into his moustache. After a momentary pause he said, ‘Forgive me. It was necessary to employ a little subterfuge to prevent your employers becoming suspicious. My name is not Bob Randall, as perhaps you may have guessed. It is Stephen Taploe. I work across the river from your former Friends.’

      Keen folded his arms and muttered, ‘You don’t say,’ as Taploe pushed his tongue into the side of his cheek, his feet moving involuntarily under the table. ‘And you think that I can help you with something …’

      ‘Well, it’s a good deal more complicated than that,’ he said. ‘To come straight to the point, Mr Keen, this has become something of a family matter.’