Soft Target by Stephen Leather Page B

was a tenth the size of MIs's,
    but it contained surveillance photographs of Charlie and Angie arriving at Heathrow airport and leaving Malaga airport. Kerr was balding, a big man with broad shoulders.
    He was a head taller than Angie and in several of the photographs he had an arm round her as if he wanted to establish ownership. There were also photographs of them at their 72 villa in Spain, and at various restaurants with several Costa del Crime faces. There was nothing wrong with the Kerrs wining and dining with major criminals, of course, drinking Dom Perignon and tipping with fifty-euro notes. It wasn't a criminal offence to associate with villains. Yet. There were reports of Kerr's trips to the United States, Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI reports on whom he had met in Miami. There was no information on any pending US investigations in the file, so either they weren't telling the Church or the Church was playing Secret Squirrel with its overseas information.
    In theory, the intelligence services, Customs and the police were supposed to co-operate on major cases, but in practice they guarded their turf jealously. There was a lot of resentment on behalf of the police and Customs that MI5 had moved into anti-drugs work. The Security Service had shown little interest in catching drugs barons until their own jobs were on the line and now whenever they were involved in a major seizure their press-relations people went into overdrive,
    trumpeting every drugs bust as a major victory for MI5. Also the spies were able to operate in decidedly grey areas, while the police had to follow the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to the letter. And while Customs had to fight for every penny of its budget, it seemed that MI5 had a blank cheque book to play with.
    Customs had tried using an undercover agent to infiltrate Kerr's circle in Marbella, but two weeks into the investigation he'd been sussed and had made a rapid withdrawal. He was only identified by his cover name in the reports he'd filed. There was nothing in them that would have resulted in charges: he had met with Kerr three times in various nightclubs but the only conversations they'd had were social chitchat.
    According to the agent, Charlie Kerr was notoriously unfaithful to his wife, and on the nights he was out without 73 her he usually ended up bedding one pretty girl or another,
    although he was always back in his villa by dawn. The agent had suggested sending in a pretty female undercover agent but the head of Drugs Operations had vetoed a honey trap.
    Charlie Kerr was too dangerous: a borderline psychopath.
    The Marbella operation had been aborted one night after the agent had been out in a group with two of Kerr's associates,
    Ray Wates and Eddie Anderson - the men Angie had talked about. They'd sat on either side of the agent and plied him with drink. When Charlie had left with a young Spanish waitress they'd suggested they move on to another club. The agent had had a bad feeling about the way the men were smiling at him. He'd pretended to be more drunk than he was and said he had to go to the bathroom. He'd broken a window, climbed down a drainpipe and caught a plane back to London. Shepherd understood the man's decision.
    Sometimes you had to go with your instincts. If a situation felt wrong it probably was.
    The police file contained more hard intelligence than those of MI5 and the Church put together. In his mid-twenties Charlie Kerr had been charged with armed robbery three times. Each time the case had collapsed before it had got to court. Witnesses were intimidated or paid off; evidence mysteriously disappeared. In one case CCTV footage was wiped in police custody. Kerr was thought to have been responsible for more than two dozen building-society and bank robberies over a five-year period, netting, according to police estimates, close to a quarter of a million pounds. Sometimes he worked alone, sometimes with a partner, and he hadn't served a day in