Scorpia Rising Page 8

  But nobody did. Everything had happened exactly as Scorpia had intended. As far as the world was concerned, Julius Grief was dead. And nobody was watching that night as a fishing boat with a single smiling passenger slipped out of Gibraltar harbor beneath a full moon and a starry sky and began its journey south.

  6

  SECRETS AND LIES

  THE REPORT WAS MARKED TOP SECRET with the two words stamped on the cover in red ink, but in fact there was no need for them. Only three copies had been printed, one for Alan Blunt, the head of MI6 Special Operations, one for his deputy, Mrs. Jones, and one for the chief science officer, and since almost everything they did was secret in one way or another anyway, they hardly needed to be told. Sometimes Blunt wondered how many tens of thousands of documents had passed across the polished surface of his desk, here on the sixteenth floor of the building that called itself the Royal and General Bank on Liverpool Street in London. Each one of them had told its own dirty little story. Some of them had led nowhere, while others had demanded instant action. An operation might be set up on the other side of the world, an agent sent out to run it. How many people had died on the turn of a page?

  But there wouldn’t be many more files coming his way. Alan Blunt sat back in his chair and looked around him, his mind still sifting through the details of what he had just read. He had occupied this office for seventeen years and could have described it with his eyes closed—right down to the last paper clip. It was simply furnished with an antique desk and a scattering of chairs on a neutral carpet, two paintings on the walls—landscapes that were barely worth examining—and a shelf full of reference books that had never been opened. Rooms tell a lot about the people who occupy them. Blunt had made sure that this room said nothing at all.

  And soon he would be leaving it. The new prime minister had decided that it was time to make changes, and the entire department was being reorganized. Blunt still didn’t know who would be taking his place, but he rather suspected it might be Mrs. Jones. She hadn’t said anything to him, of course, nor would he have expected her to. He very much hoped that she would be promoted. She had been recruited straight from Cambridge University, bringing with her a first-class degree in political science. There had been tragedies in her life—the loss of her husband and two sons—but she had risen above them. She had a brilliant mind. Blunt wondered if the prime minister would be smart enough to recognize her talents. He had thought of sending a memo to 10 Downing Street but had decided against it. They could make the decision for themselves.

  What did the future hold for him? Blunt was fifty-eight years old, not quite retirement age. He would certainly be given a knighthood in the New Year’s Honors, his name appearing between celebrities and civil servants. “For services to government and inland security.” It would be something nice and bland like that. He might be offered the directorship of a bank, a real one this time. He had once considered writing a book, but there was no real point. He had signed the Official Secrets Act, and if you took the secrets out of his life, there would be nothing left.

  Briefly, he found himself examining the empty chairs opposite him. Blunt was not an emotional man, but he couldn’t stop himself from remembering some of the men and women who had sat there. He had given them their orders and they had gone, often not to return. Danvers, Wilson, Rigby, Mortimer, and Singh . . . who had done so well in Afghanistan until his cover had been blown. And John Rider. Blunt would never have dreamed of saying so, but he had always had a special regard for the agent who had finally been assassinated on the orders of Scorpia just as he was leaving for the south of France with his young wife. John Rider had been a much more effective agent than his younger brother, Ian.

  And then, of course, there was Alex Rider, who had in many ways surpassed them both. Blunt half smiled to himself. He had known from the very start that there was something special about the fourteen-year-old, and he had refused to listen to the voices that had insisted it was mad to bring a schoolboy into the world of espionage. Alex had been the perfect weapon because he was so unexpected, and he had done something that very few other agents had achieved. He had been sent out on eight missions and he had survived.

  In a way, though, Alex had been the cause of Blunt’s undoing. When the prime minister had found out that MI6 was using not just a teenager but one who was under sixteen, he had hit the roof. It was against every rule in the book. The public would have been horrified if the facts had ever leaked out, and of course the prime minister would have shared some of the blame even though it had nothing to do with him. Blunt had no doubt that Alex was the reason he had been asked to step down. He had also been told in no uncertain terms that Alex was not to be sent out again, or to be replaced. So that was that. In a way, Blunt was glad. He had seen enough body bags. It would have been difficult to look at one that was half sized.

  The file . . .

  Very unusually, Blunt had let his mind wander. He forced himself to focus once again. Forty-eight hours ago, a body had been found floating in the River Thames, just to the east of Southwark Bridge. The body was that of a middle-aged man wearing a suit and tie, and he had been shot in the back of the neck. Identification had not been difficult because the man had only one eye and had once served in the Israeli army, which still held his medical records. His name was Levi Kroll and he was known to be an active member, indeed one of the founding partners, of Scorpia. As soon as that connection had been made, the red lights had begun to flash and the file had been passed here, to Special Operations.

  It seemed almost incredible that such a senior member of Scorpia would have been murdered and, even more so, that his body would have been allowed to be found. It raised all sorts of questions. What was Kroll doing in London to begin with? Was it in some way connected to the appearance of Zeljan Kurst, just a few months before, and the violence at the British Museum? There were no records of Kroll having entered the country, although that was hardly surprising, as he would have had at least a dozen different identities, each one with its own passport. Who had killed him? According to the reports, he had taken a .300 Winchester Short Magnum bullet in the back of the neck, possibly fired by a Belgian FN Special Police Rifle from a distance of around seventy yards. Could a rival organization have declared war on Scorpia? Blunt considered the possibility. There was no doubt that Scorpia’s reputation had declined in the past twelve months. Another group could well have decided to steal its territory.

  There were several clues mentioned in the report. Blunt had underlined them in red ink, putting a star beside them in the margin. To begin with, the MI6 investigators had suggested that Kroll might have been in Egypt. The shirt that he had been wearing when he died had been purchased at a shop in the Arkadia Mall, overlooking the Nile. It was made by Dalydress, an expensive Egyptian manufacturer, and it was part of their new spring collection, so it must have been bought recently. Of course, the shirt could have been a present, but they had trawled through hundreds of hours of closed-circuit television footage from all four of London’s airports, concentrating on flights that had come in from Egypt, and finally the work had paid off. A man with a beard and an eye patch had indeed come off a British Midlands flight from Cairo the day before Kroll had been washed up.

  He had been carrying two items that gave the MI6 men plenty to play with. The first of these was a crocodile-skin wallet in his inner pocket, purchased from Cartier in Paris and fairly new. It contained several credit cards in the name of Goodman, which must have been the identity he had chosen for this visit to England. The cards had been checked for their credit history. Only one purchase had been made. “Goodman” had bought three magazines and a newspaper at Heathrow Airport. The newspaper was the Times Educational Supplement—normally read by teachers and academics. Blunt had drawn a line beside this and added a question mark.

  The wallet also contained a magnetic key card such as might be used in any hotel in the world, but it was unmarked and, Blunt knew, very hard to trace. Kroll had been carry
ing $350 in different currencies: English pounds, American dollars, and Egyptian pounds, another connection with Cairo. Finally, the wallet held the stub of a ticket to the Milan opera house dated from one month ago, a receipt for dinner at Harry’s Bar in Venice, and a photograph of a ten-year-old boy with his arm around a Rottweiler dog. His son? It wasn’t even known if Kroll was married.

  But of even greater interest was the Apple iPhone that had been found in the same pocket as the wallet. Of course, the water had almost completely destroyed it, but even so, the MI6 technicians had managed to retrieve a few tiny scraps of information from its memory. These had been printed on a separate sheet for Blunt and he laid it out in front of him.

  . . . progress . . . the vicar

  Shafik (43) . . . payment

  31st May—4th Ju

  . . . target . . .

  Blunt examined the words, searching for any possible associations. Assuming this referred to a Scorpia operation, Kroll would have been unusually careless to enter anything into his mobile phone. But then of course he wouldn’t have known he was about to die. The dates, three weeks from now, rang a faint bell—although were they referring to June or July? Shafik was an Arabic name; 43 might be his age. Was he the target mentioned in the last line? Or could he be an assassin? That would certainly explain the need for payment. And what of the vicar? The word sat at the top of the page, underlined. That would suggest some sort of operation involving religion, but frankly, church was the last place you would expect to find anyone from Scorpia.

  It was a puzzle, but Blunt didn’t need to waste any more mental energy trying to decipher it. Half a dozen different departments within Special Operations would have been working on the note from the moment it had been found, and he had called a meeting for nine o’clock in the morning, expecting to hear results. As if on cue, there was a knock at the door and Mrs. Jones entered, followed by a younger woman, casually dressed, with fair hair and freckles. This was Samantha Redwing. She was only twenty-seven, but she had risen quickly through the ranks of MI6 to become chief science officer. Redwing had a photographic memory and the analytical skills of a world-class chess player. Surprisingly, she was also very normal, with a boyfriend who worked in advertising, an apartment in Notting Hill Gate, and a proper social life. Blunt thought she might well be unique.

  The two women sat down. They were each carrying their copy of the Scorpia file. Blunt nodded at them. “Good morning. What progress do we have on this business with Levi Kroll?”

  “We’ve made some headway.” Mrs. Jones opened her file. She was dressed, as always, in dark colors, which with her jet-black hair and dark eyes made her look not just businesslike but almost as if she were on her way to a funeral. The next head of MI6? Blunt noticed a sheaf of pages stapled behind the original report. She had, of course, come prepared. “First of all, Kroll had been in the water for around ten hours when he was found, suggesting that he was shot around eleven o’clock at night. We’ve examined the tidal reports for the Thames, and if he was going to end up being washed ashore at Southwark, then he would have had to have entered the water farther east, probably somewhere around Woolwich.”

  That was close to City Airport. A question formed in Blunt’s mind, but he didn’t interrupt as his deputy considered.

  “We’ve been focusing our efforts on the electronic key card and the information we were able to retrieve from his iPhone,” Mrs. Jones went on. “It’s a shame that all his telephone numbers were lost—and the phone itself won’t tell us very much. It’s the latest model, the iPhone 4, purchased in New York the day it came out.

  “But we think we may have decoded the actual words. They don’t mean very much on their own, but you have to put them together with the other things that Kroll was carrying. The key to it all is the Times Educational Supplement that he bought at Heathrow. I have this week’s edition here.” She produced a copy and laid it on the desk. “What would a man like Kroll want with a paper like this? Was he interested in something that might involve a school? If we assume that Ju means June, not July, then the dates—the thirty-first of May to the fourth of June—just happen to coincide with the next half-term in many schools in the UK and around Europe. We know that Kroll had just come from Cairo. And Shafik—the name on the phone—could well be Egyptian.”

  “So Scorpia might be interested in a school somewhere in Egypt.”

  “That’s exactly the conclusion we arrived at and that’s how we’ve been directing our research.”

  Mrs. Jones unwrapped a peppermint and slipped it into her mouth. Blunt waited for her to continue.

  “There are twenty-eight men and women with the surname Shafik working in different schools around Egypt,” she said. “Eleven of them are in Cairo. To start with, we assumed that the figure—forty-three—referred to their age. That narrowed the field to three and only one in Cairo, a Mrs. Alifa Shafik, the headmistress at a primary school. But we checked her out and there’s nothing that could possibly make her of interest to an organization like Scorpia. The school is in a poor area of the city. We decided that trail went nowhere.”

  Blunt nodded his agreement. He was quietly impressed. Mrs. Jones had moved quickly and there was no doubting the logic of what she had said. “Shafik is a fairly common name,” he muttered. “The link with the educational supplement is interesting and it may well be that a school is involved. But it could be in Alexandria or Port Said or even Luxor. Do we have anything more specific?”

  “As a matter of fact we do.” Mrs. Jones flicked through the pages of the newspaper. “We read the Times Educational Supplement from cover to cover, looking for stories that related to Egypt, trying to make a connection. There were none—but in the back there was an advertisement for a new head of security at the Cairo International College of Arts and Education, which is in Sheikh Fayed City in the outskirts of Cairo. That seemed like quite a coincidence, so we contacted the school. And we discovered something rather interesting. They need a new security chief because their last one was run over and killed as he was arriving for work. His name, as it happens, was Mohammed Shafik. The driver didn’t stop. The accident—if it was an accident—took place two months ago on the fourth of March.”

  Blunt stared at the page. “The fourth of the third,” he muttered. “Four three. It’s the same numbers.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So we can assume that’s why Zeljan Kurst was in London,” Blunt murmured. “If this school is recruiting a new security man . . . Scorpia could be trying to get someone inside.” Blunt quickly read the advertisement in the Times Educational Supplement. A recruitment office in London was handling the appointment, but it was nowhere near Woolwich, the place where Kroll might have been killed. “Has this agency recruited anyone to take Mr. Shafik’s place?” he asked.

  “Yes. They have. The new man is named Erik Gunter. Scottish mother, German father. He was brought up in Glasgow and spent time with the First Batallion Scots Guards before he was wounded in Afghanistan. He received the Queen’s Medal for courage. I have his file here.”

  She passed it across. Blunt scanned it briefly. Gunter had come under fire while he was on patrol in Helmund Province. According to the report, he had almost certainly saved the lives of his entire platoon, but he had taken four bullets himself and had been invalided home.

  “What about this business with the vicar?” Blunt asked. “Does the school have a chaplain?”

  “No.” Mrs. Jones glanced at the science officer, who had been sitting silently through all this. “The reference to the vicar wasted a great deal of time,” she said. “It didn’t seem to be at all relevant. At first, we assumed it must be a code name. You’ll remember that some years ago we dealt with an assassin who was known only as ‘the Priest.’ But in the end, Redwing worked it out.”

  “It’s a mistake,” Redwing explained. “If you take the initial letters of the Cairo International College of Arts and Education—CICAE—and type them into an Apple iPhone, the machine auto-co
rrects them and you get the word vicar.”

  “It’s the final confirmation,” Mrs. Jones added. “Scorpia’s operation has to involve this school. But just to make sure, I checked out the electronic key. I sent Crawley out to Cairo and he reported back this morning. The school is guarded, fenced in, and monitored twenty-four hours a day. But there’s been a security leak. The key opens a door into the kitchen.”

  Blunt sat in silence. Outside, an ambulance raced along Liverpool Street, the scream of its siren hanging in the air. And what would it find at the end of its journey? Another life or another death? “Tell me about the school,” he said.

  Mrs. Jones was ready for this. She wouldn’t have come to Blunt’s office without being fully briefed. “The CICAE makes an interesting Scorpia target,” she said. Target. That was the other word that had been retrieved from the phone. “The school maintains a very large security staff—and with good reason. It has about four hundred children from countries all over the world, and if you look down the names, it’s like a who’s who of the rich and famous. They’ve got parents who are oil millionaires, politicians, diplomats, sheikhs, princes, and even pop stars. The Syrian president has a son there. The British ambassador has a daughter. The chairman of Texas Oil—one of the biggest oil companies in America—has no fewer than three children at the CICAE. Can you imagine if one of them was kidnapped—or worse still, killed? Suppose Scorpia was planning to take over the whole school? They could threaten hundreds of the most powerful parents on the planet. They’d have enough leverage to start a world war.”

  “We can’t be sure that’s what they’re intending,” Blunt said. For a brief moment, something entirely different flickered across his consciousness. Seventeen years as head of MI6 Special Operations had turned his brain into a computer that never stopped functioning. Always there were connections, connections . . . What was it? Oh yes. A report that had crossed his desk a week before. The death of that boy in Gibraltar. Julius Grief. All this talk of schoolchildren had reminded him. He considered it for a moment, then moved on. The boy had tried to escape in a car and driven over a cliff. The body still hadn’t been recovered, but there was no way he could have survived. So that was that. It couldn’t be related.