The Man Between. Чарльз Камминг

      Still in a state of apprehension, Carradine took a detour on the way home, purchased a roll of masking tape and found an Internet café in Paddington. He wanted to be certain that Mantis was a bona fide Service employee, not a Walter Mitty figure taking advantage of him either for his own amusement or for some darker purpose which had not yet been made clear.

      The café was half-full. Carradine stood over a vacant computer, tore off a small strip of the masking tape and placed it over the lens at the top of the screen. The computer was already loaded with a VPN. In his most recent novel, Carradine had written a chapter in which the principal character was required to comb the Dark Net in order to create a false identity. He had spoken to a hacker a few weeks before and still remembered most of what she had told him during their cloak-and-dagger meeting at a coffee shop in Balham. The trick – apart from disabling the camera – was to use the VPN both to create a false IP address and to encrypt his Internet usage. That way, his activities would be concealed from any prying eyes in Cheltenham and Carradine could investigate the mysterious Mr Mantis without fear of being identified.

      As he expected, none of the ‘Robert Mantis’ listings on Facebook could plausibly have been the man he had met in Lisson Grove. There was no Twitter account associated with the name, nor anything on Instagram. Carradine ran Mantis through LinkedIn and Whitepages but found only an out-of-work chef in Tampa and a ‘lifestyle’ photographer in Little Rock. Remembering a tip he had been given by the hacker, he looked on Nominet to see if any variant of ‘robertmantis’ was listed as a website domain. It was not. Whoever he had met that afternoon was using a pseudonym which had been cleaned up for the obvious purpose of protecting his true identity. Mantis was not listed as a director at Companies House nor as a shared freeholder on any UK properties. A credit check on Experian also drew a blank.

      Satisfied that he was a genuine Service employee, Carradine put the computer to sleep, removed the strip of masking tape from the lens and walked home.

       6

      The following morning, Carradine was woken early by the sound of the doorbell ringing. He stumbled out of bed, pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and struck his foot on the skirting board as he picked up the intercom.

      ‘Delivery for Mr Carradine.’

      He knew immediately what it was. He reached down, grabbed his toe and told the delivery man to leave it in his postbox.

      ‘Needs to be signed for.’

      The accent was Jamaican. Carradine buzzed the man into the building. He waited by the door, rubbing his foot. A moth flew up towards the ceiling. Carradine clapped it dead between his hands. He could hear the lift outside grinding towards the landing as he wiped the smashed body on his shorts.

      The delivery man was a middle-aged, dreadlocked Rasta wearing a high-vis waistcoat. A Post Office satchel was slung over his shoulder. It was possible that he was a convincingly disguised errand boy for the Service, but Carradine assumed that Mantis had simply sent the items by Special Delivery. He signed an illegible version of his name on an electronic pad using a small plastic tool that slipped on the glass, thanked him and took the package inside.

      On any other morning, Carradine might have gone back to bed for another hour’s sleep. But the contents of the package were too intriguing. He walked into the kitchen, set a percolator of coffee on the stove and sliced the envelope open with a knife.

      There was a paperback book inside. Mantis had sent a French translation of one of Carradine’s novels, published four years earlier. He opened the book to the title page. It was unsigned. The rest of the text had not been marked up nor were any pages turned down or altered in any way. The book was in pristine condition.

      He waited for the coffee to boil, staring out of the window at the treetops of Hyde Park. If the novel was to be used as a book cipher, then Mantis possessed an identical copy which would allow him to send coded messages to Yassine without risking detection. He was using a French, rather than an English version of the book because Yassine was most likely a French-speaking Arab. For Carradine to give him a copy of the novel at their meeting was an ingenious and entirely plausible piece of tradecraft. They would be hiding in plain sight.

      He took out the second item, the sealed package for ‘Maria’. The envelope was sturdy and bound with tape at both ends. Carradine weighed it in his hands. He could make out the outline of what he assumed was a passport. He bent the package slightly and thought that he could feel a document of some kind moving beneath the seal. Carradine had an obligation to open the envelope, because it was surely crazy to board an international flight carrying a package about which he knew so little. But he could not do so. It was against the spirit of the deal he had struck with the Service and would constitute a clear breach of trust. It was even possible that the package was a decoy and that the Service had sent it solely as a test of his integrity.

      He set it to one side, drank the coffee and switched on the news. Overnight in New Delhi two vehicles had been hijacked by Islamist gunmen affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba and driven into crowds at a religious ceremony, killing an estimated 75 people. In Germany, an AFD politician had been gunned down on his doorstep by a Resurrection activist. Such headlines had become commonplace, as humdrum and predictable as tropical storms and mass shootings in the United States. Carradine waited for news of the Redmond kidnapping. It was the third item on the BBC. No trace had been found of the van in which Redmond had been driven away, no statement released by Resurrection claiming responsibility for the abduction.

      Settling in front of his computer with a bowl of cereal, Carradine watched amateur footage of the crowds screaming in panic as they fled the carnage in New Delhi. He read an email written by the slain AFD politician, leaked to the press only days earlier, in which he had referred to Arabs as a ‘culturally alien people’ welcomed into Germany by ‘elitist pigs’. He learned that one in eight voters had given AFD their support in recent elections and that the group was now the second largest opposition party in the Bundestag. Small wonder Resurrection was so active in Germany. There had been similar assassinations of nationalist politicians in France, Poland and Hungary. It was only a matter of time before the violence crossed the Channel and a senior British politician was targeted.

      Carradine took a shower and WhatsApped Mantis, acknowledging delivery of the package with a succinct ‘Thanks for the book’. Within thirty seconds Mantis had replied: ‘No problem’ adding – to Carradine’s consternation – two smiling emojis and a thumbs up for good measure. He put the package in a drawer and attempted to do some work. Every ten or fifteen minutes he would open the drawer and check that the package was still there, as if sprites or cat burglars might have carried it off while his back was turned. Later in the afternoon, when his once-a-fortnight cleaner, Mrs Ritter, was in the flat, he removed the package altogether and set it on his desk until she had left the building.

      Though he had yet to complete any specific tasks on behalf of the Service, Carradine already felt as though he had been cut off from his old life; that he was inhabiting a parallel existence separate from the world he had known before meeting Mantis and witnessing the abduction of Lisa Redmond. He wanted to talk to his father about what had happened, to tell him about Morocco and to gauge his advice, but he was forbidden by the Secrets Act. He could say nothing to anyone about what Mantis had asked him to do. He tried to work, but it now seemed ridiculous to be writing about fictional spies in fictional settings when he himself had been employed by the Service as a bona fide support agent. Instead he spent the next two days re-reading Frederick Forsyth’s memoirs and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, trawling for insights into the life of a writer spy. He watched The Bureau and took a DVD of The Man Who Knew Too Much to his father’s flat the night before he was due to fly to Casablanca. They ordered curry from Deliveroo and sat in semi-darkness munching chicken dhansak and tarka daal, washed down with a 1989 Château Beychevelle he had been given by an old friend as a birthday present.

      ‘Doris Day,’ his father muttered as she sang ‘Que Sera Sera’ to her soon-to-be-kidnapped son. ‘Was she the one Hitchcock threw the birds at?’