This Is Not a Pipe (Mike Kingdom Thrillers Book 2), page 5
She looked at Walter and then at Stewart.
She continued, “I will keep your passport until both interviews have been completed. I understand that you are to stay in the same hotel for the next two nights. Please leave your mobile phone turned on, as we may wish to speak with you at any time. Do you understand and do you have any questions?”
Walter fidgeted slightly in his chair.
“It sounds eminently fair,” Stewart chipped in as Walter glanced at him.
“Mr Flushing?” the prosecutor prompted.
“Yes. Fine. May I leave the hotel?”
“Yes, but don’t leave Colmar.”
Walter looked about as enthusiastic as the big rabbit.
Back in his hotel room, Walter was sitting on his bed taking stock. His mobile phone was on charge on the desk, and the window was open, letting in the sunshine. He wanted to phone his mother or sister in Cornwall, but he knew that was impossible. The next couple of days would drag on, he was sure.
He sensed he was getting annoyed. Up to this point, he had been scared about what had and might happen to him, but now he was just annoyed.
Shouldn’t the FCO have protected him a bit more? First of all, they had sent him to Algiers on a research project that had turned into a baptism of fire, then they had sent him to Paris, but not with a full contract and the usual protections. They wanted him to assist Brendan in looking after Johnny Musselwhite for a couple of days, which would also have been no problem had Brendan not cried off and dumped Walter in it. And now, Stewart was buggering off back to Paris, leaving Walter to be interviewed by various police and investigating officers over the next twenty-four hours. Twenty-four? he thought. I’m only twenty-four.
Walter resolved that, the second he got his passport back, he would fly back to Paris and terminate his contract.
Growing up in a mobile home in the corner of a field above the River Tamar, after his father had disappeared, was not that bad. He and his sister had plenty of friends in the village, and he had the advantage of being a bright kid. The generations mixed together in a way that he hadn’t seen elsewhere, whether in the pub, at the music festival or in the gig racing. He was tall with strong arms, which made him a natural choice to be part of the six-person gig team, rowing in the competitions around Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. His artistic talents also made him a regular as the painter of the stage scenery for the local amateur dramatic productions.
While irritated at the FCO and the French authorities, he had been treated fairly by Madame Bettancourt, the prosecutor. The last couple of days had been a roller coaster, and he still couldn’t bring himself to relax until the interviews were over and he had his passport in his hands.
The enormity of the situation kept welling up inside him. Who would kill a British minister, and in France? Why? The killer or killers must have been in the hotel. Had he seen them? He didn’t think so, but how close had he come to being killed himself if he had stepped out of his room at the wrong moment? He shivered. The killers were probably professionals from Russia or some ‘rogue’ state, as the prosecutor had described them.
Why did they take Johnny’s laptop, phone and passport? Or was that what they were after? They didn’t need to kill him to steal those things, did they? They could simply break into his hotel room while he was out.
Whether it was because he was annoyed, affronted, patriotic, inquisitive or bored, he decided to investigate a few things himself. What else was he going to do? For the next twenty-four hours, he was trapped in Colmar, and he was intrigued. He opened up his laptop and searched ‘Johnny Musselwhite’. There was enough to keep him occupied for weeks.
Having been married three times, resulting in four children, one of whom was a well-known model (warranting pages of salacious gossip herself), he was the son of Sir David Morton Musselwhite, the MP for Cheltenham. How he had ended up following his father into politics was the stuff of legend, mostly made up of privilege, luck and deep, pale-blue eyes that seemed to charm both young and old and male and female alike. Most people would agree that, for his first marriage, he had chosen well (that’s ‘well’ in the financial, bottomless-pit sense of the word). The divorce settlement set him up for the next ten years. His second wife had a minor title from her father, who was some baronet. Then came the drinking and the drugs – and that was just her. He laughed it all off and made a success of several business ventures that various school friends seemed to front for him. Despite some financial impropriety here and there, he managed to float to the top.
Being the Minister for Energy was the pinnacle of his parliamentary career, which surprised many – not only because of his debauched and incoherent lifestyle but also because he was a vociferous Remainer and defender of the EU.
Walter took a break from the screen and wondered who would want to kill Johnny (he was thinking of those other than some madman from a rogue state). He probably had his share of enemies, but poisoning was pretty extreme and, ultimately, traceable. What was he doing that a rogue state wanted to stop – permanently? He stood up and looked obliquely down at the still water of the canal. If only the sea off Newlyn were this calm during the annual gig race.
He walked back to the desk, past his jacket draped over the chair.
On impulse, he lifted it and took out the business card that Johnny had been using to cut his cocaine. He looked at the name again: the name of someone he had seen in Algiers.
CHAPTER SIX
Mike had exhausted herself reading about the three existing pipelines, and she now knew about pounds per square inch, compression stations every sixty miles, and the comparative costs of overground and underground versus underwater. On her computer, she had spent an enjoyable five minutes on Google Maps trying to follow the underground pipelines across the desert and mountains. They sure knew how to disguise them. For most of their length, they were underground, punctuated at key points by compressor stations that pushed the gas along the next stage.
It was while searching for compression stations that she spotted an article on an explosion the previous day at what it called “compressor station no. 6”. The article was in an Algerian newspaper in French and warranted only a few lines. How serious was this? Was it sabotage? Was Randy involved?
Mike’s phone buzzed. The display said “Dr Rose Delavine”.
“Hello, Rose. I never asked you what sort of doctor you were,” Mike began.
“Well, I have to deal with assholes all day …”
“Proctologist, then?”
“… most of them above me,” Leonard continued.
“That image will stay with me all week. What can I do for you?”
“I’m getting kicked by the President to find out what’s happening in Algeria before he visits Morocco.”
“Doesn’t he have a bunch of people in Algiers? You’re in London.”
“Yes, but the intelligence may well come via Five Eyes. Have you found Randy yet? It’s getting urgent.”
“No, but I’m worried that he’s blowing up compressor stations in Algeria.”
“That would be unfortunate – and especially over the next couple of weeks.”
“Leonard, if it’s urgent, can we stop messing about? What’s his cover name? What’s his cell phone number? Where’s he meant to be and what’s he doing?”
“I wanted you to come at this from the side, but, OK, events have overtaken things.” He paused. “Why not check out a name? Ramon Ramirez. And I can give you his cell phone number, but it hasn’t been operational for weeks, and there’s no locational data available since that time.” Leonard read out the cell phone number.
“Where was he last known to be?”
“Málaga, Spain.”
“Doing what?”
“Well, before Putin,” he said, pronouncing it ‘Poot’n’, “got the hots for Ukraine, he was meant to be, shall we say, loading the dice in Morocco’s – or effectively Uncle Sam’s – favour.”
“Doing what? Blowing up pipelines?”
“Yeah, well sort of … stuff like that … but nothing permanent.”
“Why?”
“To encourage the Algerians to reopen the pipeline across Morocco to Spain. The President was hoping that it would make the Algerians play nice.”
“Then, I’m guessing, the Ukraine war happened, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline got shut down, and everyone wants natural gas.”
“And let’s just say that the President’s enthusiasm for the Moroccan claim to Western Sahara has been temporarily downgraded, and the Algerians may suddenly be our new best buddies. He doesn’t want us shitting in the Algerian nest over the next few months.”
“Was he behind the explosion yesterday?” Mike asked.
“I sure hope not.”
“Why hasn’t he made contact for so long?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“What a mess.”
“It won’t be a mess if you find him – quick. Right, I have to go. I have another appointment.”
“Make sure you wear long rubber gloves.” Mike saw Leonard’s smiling face disappear from the line.
Mike felt like a greyhound when the gate opens on the track and the hare is in view. She now had so many avenues to investigate. Of course, Leonard had initially tied one arm behind her back (well, two, actually), but she understood why. He had hoped she could find Randy, stop him from completing his brief, and avoid any comeback on him from a change of President and policy. Not involving her by providing too many links and formal access was Leonard’s clumsy way of handling everything. However, the explosion in Algeria and the US President’s upcoming visit to Marrakech had changed the priorities.
She started by hacking the cell phone account using a piece of CIA software that she had helped to develop. A Ramon Ramirez appeared to have been using this phone for nine months from an address in Málaga. As Leonard had said, it had stopped completely a few weeks earlier. There were surprisingly few calls. Perhaps, he has other phones? she wondered, But it’s a good start. While she wouldn’t recognise any specific numbers, she scanned the country and area codes quickly. Most of the calls were within Spain and France, with some to area codes +212 and +213, which turned out to be Morocco and Algeria, respectively.
Many of the calls were to or from a number in Marrakech, which turned out to be that of a riad, a small urban hotel with a central courtyard. Was this his base in North Africa? Who else was staying there that he would need to call from Málaga?
She jumped up to stretch her left leg and to find a biscuit. She had to move the vacuum cleaner away from the cupboard to get access; cleaning would have to wait. Though why bother? She never had guests, and Leonard turning up twice in a year did not warrant it. In fact, she felt the need to clean after he had left, not before.
When she sat back down, she decided to search for Ramon Ramirez at the Málaga address. This didn’t take long, and she quickly found that he worked for a gas exploration consultancy with offices in Málaga, Marseilles and some northern European locations. Málaga was the head office, and Randy appeared to live in an apartment in the suburbs. A few seconds later, she was looking at his social media accounts, all set up neatly by the CIA to give him a credible backstory. She paused over the very few photographs, which were mainly of motorbikes, some unknown men and industrial pipework on a massive scale. It was no surprise that none of his messages or photographs highlighted blowing up pipelines. In a couple of photographs, there was a girl about five years old. Was this his daughter or part of the cover? The child looked Spanish, but then so did Randy. So had her dead husband, Dylan.
It was at that moment that her phone rang again. She had never been so popular. “Hello.”
“Hello, Mike, it’s Charles. Charles Yelland.”
“Charles, good to hear from you. How are the family?”
“They’re all well. They’re in Mexico at the moment. How are you?”
“Well … and surprisingly busy.”
“Oh.” His voice sounded disappointed. “I was hoping that you could help me with a problem. An urgent problem.”
“Nobody has been kidnapped, I hope?”
Mike had worked for Charles in a private capacity a year earlier – trying to find his daughter, Angelica, who had been kidnapped. He was the CEO of Petronello Oil, an Anglo-Spanish-Norwegian oil exploration company with interests across the world from Antarctica to the North Sea and from Trinidad to Mexico. She had never completely trusted him from the first day she had ridden up the long drive to his manor house in Buckinghamshire to the day that the investigation had finished.
“No, no one has been kidnapped, but I’ve just had a worrying phone call. I wondered if you could discreetly check what’s going on?”
“Who was it from?”
Charles had sounded a little nervous, and he had left a silence that suggested he was going through some mental turmoil. “I don’t know this person, but he said that he’d seen me once.”
Mike had learnt over the weeks when she was searching for Angelica that Charles’s relationship with the truth was perhaps best described as ‘once removed’.
“Charles, remembering last time, will you tell me everything, not just what you think I need to know?”
“He said he didn’t want to talk on the phone, but asked if we could meet urgently when he got back to the UK.”
Mike licked her finger to use it to pick up some crumbs of a biscuit remaining on the top of her desk. “Why’s this worrying?”
“He said he thought that my life was in danger.”
“What name did he give?”
“Walter Flushing. I’ve never heard of him. He said he would call in a couple of days, but I was to be careful.”
“Was he threatening you?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Was he English?”
“Yes, but I didn’t pick up any strong accent. Maybe West Country?”
“Can you give me his telephone number?”
She grabbed a pen and scribbled down on her pad what he told her. “Leaving out the BS, have you been up to anything that might lead to someone wanting to kill you? And remember it’s me you’re talking to.”
“No more than usual. I’m in the oil business, for goodness’ sake; it comes with the territory. I’ve already had protesters glued to the gates of the estate. This phone call is just one more thing.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“Use the helicopter more.”
“I didn’t mean how you were going to get home from your office. I meant what are you going to do about protecting yourself?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll up the protection until you tell me what this is about.”
“Be careful. I’ll do some quick checks.”
It was late afternoon, and Walter was still in his hotel room, after having eaten a quiche with salad from the room service menu. The empty plate and tray were on the carpet near the bed. He was playing some music while reading the obituaries and comments about Johnny Musselwhite in the British and French press, having reached dead ends on his search for the reasons Johnny had been killed. Earlier, he had taken his mind back to his short time in North Africa when he was undertaking his research project. Walter had come across the two planned Mediterranean pipelines. He had written in his report about the political tensions in Algiers over the ways to maximise the financial return from the gas, and about the potential and sometimes conflicting routes to market.
He remembered reading about the involvement of a company called Petronello in the pipeline called PEGASUS; in fact, the ‘PE’ part of the name represented Petronello. There were several other interested parties, including the French government and the Corsican regional government: the Collectivité Territoriale de Corse. Corsica was to be a key part in the long chain from Algeria to somewhere near Marseilles.
The GALSI pipeline, or Gasdotto Algeria Sardegna Italia, was the other possible pipeline; it had been mooted since 2005 and would import 283 billion cubic feet of natural gas from Algeria to Italy each year. Being roughly 930 miles long, the pipeline would follow a route that would start from the gas fields in Algeria and cross via Sardinia to Tuscany, close to Piombino.
Neither of these seemed connected to the British Minister for Energy. What was Johnny’s connection to Charles Yelland at Petronello (the name on the business card), apart from the fact that they were both British. Had Johnny simply been given a business card at some trade show or industry dinner?
Walter plugged the business card into his laptop; he didn’t save the contents but merely read them. There were photographs, some technical specifications and the recording of a phone conversation. What he saw and heard shocked him. He slumped back in his chair and tried to think logically what to do. He got up and paced around the room like a tiger in a compound.
An hour later, Walter was at his wits’ end. He phoned Brendan, who was reassuring.
Walter was waiting eagerly for some notification from the prosecutor’s office to give him the time that the policemen from London would arrive later that day. Madame Bettancourt had made it clear that she wanted to lay down certain ground rules with the British police before they spoke to Walter. He had three boxes to tick: two interviews with, firstly, the British and, secondly, the French police; afterwards, he would be free to fly back to Paris; and then, a couple of days later, he’d fly on to Exeter airport and a family reunion.
He was walking to the en suite bathroom when there was a knock on the door.
