The Dying Light by Henry Porter Page B

morale.’

    ‘American law firms aren’t cosy,’ she said. ‘But I agree; there’s certainly more surveillance than I thought possible in a free country.’

    ‘Of you?’

    ‘Maybe.’

    ‘Then we must talk. We don’t want a repetition of the Soeprapto business.’

    ‘Not only do you avoid talking about the one thing that wasn’t explored in the inquest but you make it plain that you’ve been reading my office file - only a very few people knew about the Soeprapto.’

    ‘I knew about the whole case. A classic example of an intelligence officer picking up a scrap of information at a social gathering - at a ladies’ tea party, I think, an accountant’s wife or some such. Soeprapto’s was unmasked, the bank collapsed but not before you ensured British interests were protected; no money was lost.’

    ‘A long time ago,’ she said.

    ‘But there was a postscript, wasn’t there? Which is why I’m digging this up. Soeprapto put out a contract on you from jail, which was taken up by a member of a Chinese gang, who came looking for you in London.’

    ‘Yeah, just after my husband Charlie’s funeral.’

    One evening she had noticed the young Chinese get off at her stop on the Underground and a day or two later saw him hanging about Queen’s Gate near her flat. She changed her routine and established she was being followed, then informed the police. The assassin was arrested in the lobby of her building with a gun. It was clear she would remain at risk in London and after nine months of being comforted by Eyam, she left SIS and accepted an offer from Sam Calvert, Ricky’s father, to join the family law firm in New York. She never told MI6 that she’d tipped off Ricky Calvert about Soeprapto’s banking fraud.

    ‘You’ve lost a lot of men in your life,’ he said quietly.

    ‘Yep, but I can’t see why anyone would be interested in David now.’

    ‘You’re wrong. David’s legacy is bound to excite some interest. They will want to know whether it contains anything that’s a threat to national security. Shall we say early next week?’ He raised his eyebrows interrogatively then glanced at his watch. ‘Good. Now I must be getting along. I’ve got a train to catch.’

    He made straight for the door with an unambiguous intention to leave - no goodbyes, no nods to people he’d talked to. And then he was gone.

7

    The Cut

     
     
     
     
    The Jubilee Rooms were being cleared so that they could be made ready for the Eyam dinner. She went up to her room, changed into a pair of jeans, sweater and a short leather jacket but kept what she now regarded as Eyam’s scarf. She briefly looked up Kilmartin on the web. A dozen entries appeared under his name, mostly in reference to a recently published book, The Town of Naram-Sin , a study of ancient Babylonian and Assyrian cities. Further down a brief item from a newspaper archive gave her the information she needed. Since leaving the Foreign Office, Peter Kilmartin had acted intermittently as the prime minister’s special envoy to central Asia and the Caucasus, spending much of that time in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, during which he had produced a book about Tashkent called S tone City . A number of diplomatic posts were listed, including first secretary to the Tehran Embassy and second secretary in Damascus and between them spells at the Foreign Office Research and Analysis Department. She felt reassured. Like McBride, Kilmartin seemed to be from the school of spy adventurers who went back to the days of the great game in Afghanistan. It was noted by newspaper clippings that Kilmartin spoke Farsi, Turkish, Uzbek and Tajik and had some Pashto. He had founded a small school outside Tashkent with private money.

    She left the hotel at six fifteen p.m. Instead of going by the square to Mortimer Street she strolled down to a seat overlooking a section of the town’s medieval wall and sat for ten minutes in the gathering dusk. She turned round a few times and