Sleeping Soldiers: (Tom Marlowe Book 1), page 3
‘Don’t rock boats right now.’ Doctor Fenchurch rose, walking around the desk to face Marlowe. ‘Being benched is good for you. You’re not making noise. Which means certain Whitehall corridors can’t hear you.’
‘I’m not getting out into the field any time soon, am I?’ Marlowe asked.
In response, Doctor Fenchurch shook her head.
‘I could rubberstamp you right now and something else would come up,’ she replied. ‘They don’t want you out there right now. Go home. Heal up. The country will carry on without you for a while.’
She straightened Marlowe’s black tie, tightening it up once more.
‘Go to the funeral,’ she said. ‘See old friends. Drink toasts to fallen soldiers and all that. Then go home and find a hobby to take up for the next two weeks. I’ll speak to you after that.’
Knowing there was nothing more to say here, Marlowe nodded, turned away from Doctor Fenchurch, and walked to the door.
‘I really am an excellent agent,’ he said. ‘No matter what those wankers in Whitehall think.’
‘The fact they think about you at all confirms that,’ Doctor Fenchurch smiled. ‘Just keep away from all that spycraft stuff.’
She stopped, frowning.
‘You are keeping away from all that spycraft stuff, aren’t you?’
‘Sure,’ Marlowe lied. ‘Nobody’s speaking to me these days, anyway.’
Doctor Fenchurch stared at Marlowe for a long minute before nodding.
‘I’ll see you soon, Thomas.’
Smiling in return, an expression as fake as Fenchurch’s had been, Marlowe left the office, walked over to the elevators and took the first one that arrived down to the lobby. The building he’d been in was a tall, glass and chrome monstrosity in London’s Canary Wharf, and every other floor was filled with law firms or hedge fund corporations, all unaware of who the building’s in-house performance coach truly worked for when she wasn’t amping up commodities traders and legal partners.
Marlowe didn’t know how many of these satellite offices there were, but he assumed there were a lot. He was a basic level spy, and he alone had two safe houses he could use and three “go bags” placed in locations around London, purely if needed.
But for Whitehall, outsourcing was the current buzzword. And that, if he was truly honest, worried Marlowe. That when he was finally cleared, there wouldn’t be a job for him in Section D, as it’d all been farmed out to agencies like Phoenix.
Sighing, and forcing himself to be calm, he held out a hand, flagging down a passing taxi. Fenchurch had been right; there had been a funeral he needed to go to, starting in an hour. He didn’t want to go, didn’t want to admit it was even happening, but he owed everyone to be there.
And, as he gave an address to the driver and climbed into the cab, the slim man across the street placed his phone away as he watched Marlowe leave, waving down an unmarked black Mercedes that stopped beside him, and sliding into the back seat as it U-turned in the road, following Marlowe.
After all, you were only paranoid if they weren’t out for you.
2
ASHES TO ASHES
Marlowe really hated funerals.
But sometimes you couldn’t get out of them, and other times you wanted to go, because you felt you owed it to the person. And Marlowe owed Marshall Kirk a lot more than he could ever repay … although that was going to be an impossibility now.
They’d said it was a heart attack, but Kirk was one of the healthiest people Marlowe had ever known. Even touching seventy, he still ran ultra-marathons, swearing off saveloys and chips after the last mission they’d been on, claiming that if he’d eaten healthier, the server at the counter of the chip shop (who turned out to be dating one of Frank Robertson’s goons) wouldn’t have met them, and therefore wouldn’t have informed on them. After that utter shambles of a mission, he’d become a vegetarian, focused on non-processed foods and, when he retired five years ago, he looked healthier and younger than before he’d met Marlowe, which, to be brutally honest, pissed Marlowe off.
And then, just like that, Marshall Kirk was gone.
Everyone was sad and stated to the heavens that it was simply his time, but Marlowe didn’t subscribe to that belief. Kirk had been murdered, and he was sure of it.
Marshall Kirk had visited Marlowe twice while he was in hospital, which was a feat in itself, considering he was there under an assumed identity. The first time, Marlowe had been stunned to see Kirk appear in the doorway, a bouquet of flowers and a teddy bear in his hands, a wide, shit-eating grin on his face. They’d talked for an hour or so, and during this, Marlowe had found the bug Kirk had secreted on the teddy. Kirk explained he’d have thought less of Marlowe if he hadn’t, and they kept to small talk, mainly. Kirk now lived in a small house near East Finchley, but even though he reckoned he was fine with retirement, Marlowe saw his eyes light up when they talked about old cases.
The second time was right before Marlowe left the ward, but this time, it was a different Kirk who appeared; one who watched the door intently, one who was distracted, claiming a week of terrible nights as his reason, but Marlowe could see that something was weighing on his mentor’s shoulders. Kirk, in turn shrugged off the worries and, after a few lewd and likely politically incorrect jokes, patted Marlowe on the shoulder and left.
Marlowe never saw him again.
But that second meeting had set off alarm bells in Marlowe’s head and, while convalescing, he’d sent a message to Trix, asking her to check in on Kirk. She knew what he really meant, and within a week Marlowe had a detailed deep dive envelope arriving by Whitehall courier at his Battersea apartment, containing an encrypted USB, one that showed Marshall Kirk falling into old habits.
Old spy habits.
Marshall Kirk had retired. And the done thing, when being a spy, was to stay retired. Of course, if Whitehall decided your retirement for you, then you could scream blue murder and have at it, but Marshall had said he was happy to retire at sixty-five, said his ghosts had all been exorcised, and he was going to take life easy.
And then a year later, he was running forty-kilometre hill races in the Cairngorms.
Doctor Fenchurch had been closer than she thought when she asked if Marlowe was still playing with spycraft – he hadn’t intended to until the USB arrived. And in these pages, Marlowe had seen his fit and healthy, retired friend contact old assets from his time as section chief of the St James office, which was a fancy way of saying “the bloke sent out to feed swans whenever the Russians wanted to swap information, or the CIA wanted to bitch about their President”, as the “St James office” was a bench beside a bridge in St James’s Park, near Buckingham Palace.
During the Cold War, when the British Secret Service were low on usable information on the Russians, they’d arrange pointless meetings there and, while chatting, subtly pick the pockets of the agents they were talking to, stealing wallets, receipts, anything that could give them something to work on, all while blaming the CIA.
And, when they did this to the CIA, they blamed the Russians.
Everyone knew who was really doing it, hell, even the British agents were coming home to find their pockets picked, but the plausible deniability was there for everyone to see. In fact, for several years, it was believed there were more spies from international agencies on the St James’s Park Tin and Stone Bridge than there were tourists.
And Marshall Kirk had met his old friends and enemies there over the last couple of months.
The file wasn’t complete, though; it was a Home Office folder based on intelligence gained from MI5 operatives stalking Kirk as he went about his business. The pages were mostly redacted too, but filled with second-hand reports of Kirk’s meetings, with a couple of photos and even a half-blacked out transcript of a conversation he’d had with an ex-Stasi operative.
The result of the file, and what seemed to be the conclusion of “Operation follow Marshall Kirk” was that he was tipping over stones and rocks to see what came out from under them, but nobody could work out why he was doing this. The agents and assets he’d spoken to were also retired, many had been off grid for years, and even the files on them in the Security Archives had been rubber-stamped as inactive. It was as if Kirk was going to anyone and everyone not currently connected to an intelligence agency. And nobody knew why.
And a week after the last report in the file, Marshall Kirk had died.
Of a heart attack.
Bullshit.
Marlowe really hated funerals; it was a reminder of his own mortality, made more visible by the two bullet wound scars he now sported. He’d never been shot before. Stabbed, sure, and even poisoned, but never shot, although he’d been shot at many times in his career. And, when he’d lain on that tarmac road, bleeding out onto the ground, he’d waited for the flashback of his life that people always talked of. Instead, he had the “what ifs”, as in the life he could have lived if he hadn’t taken this path, the path taken if his mum hadn’t died, and changed his career plan in a split second.
A family. Children.
A life.
And then he woke up in hospital, under a fake name, and with both bullets removed. Someone had got to him before he bled out and taken him to the hospital, giving a fake legend they knew Marlowe could keep to. And, as of right now, although Wintergreen, his boss, had claimed credit for the rescue, Marlowe still didn’t know who’d really done this, a question that nagged at him daily.
There was the sudden sound of a church organ, and Marlowe was jerked back to the present, almost jumping out of the pew as, around him, everyone in the Anglican chapel stood. Joining them, Marlowe watched as they walked a coffin down the aisle, past him, the six pallbearers all looking like ex-military, which was probably correct. He didn’t recognise any of them apart from one at the back; Anthony Farringdon had been a friend of Marshall Kirk’s while alive, and was wearing his military blazer with pride, his white hair as spotless as ever, and parted on the right. Placing it down at the front, they stepped away from the coffin as the priest officiating the funeral began the service, and Farringdon glanced over at Marlowe, nodding briefly, the most he could give to the associate of a now passed friend. And then, like the others, he walked off, waiting until he was needed again.
Marlowe had been asked if he would speak at the funeral, perform a eulogy for his mentor, but he’d turned down the offer. He still felt a little vulnerable, and, more importantly, was quite happy to sit in the shadows. And, because of this, it was an attractive woman with short, blonde hair, Kirk’s daughter Tessa, who spoke to the congregation.
Marlowe had never really spoken to Tessa in all the years he’d known Kirk, mainly as there was only a couple of years between them, and Kirk, on their first meeting had pointed out very clearly to Marlowe that if he ever tried anything with his daughter, he’d cut off a whole load of very important parts and fry them up in front of him, feeding them to Marlowe as he died of blood loss. It was quite a specific and gruesome visual, and Marlowe had wondered if this was something Kirk had done before, but the message was clear, so Tom Marlowe had made a point of keeping as far away from Tessa Kirk as humanly possible.
People were standing again, and Marlowe realised it was time for a hymn. Picking up his hymn book, he tried to work out where the lyrics were as a woman sitting on the pew behind him tapped him on the shoulder, passing across a tiny strip of paper, folded up.
Quietly and without acknowledging the offer, Marlowe took it, and, as everyone started singing the first verse of “Jerusalem”, he opened it up and read the note.
YOU’RE BEING FOLLOWED
MARY’S CHAPEL AFTER FUNERAL
Marlowe folded the paper up and automatically placed it into his mouth, chewing down on it, pulping it up before spitting it into his hand and pressing it against the back of the hymnbook. Once it dried, it would fall off, but by then the books would be together somewhere else, and Marlowe would be far away. He looked behind once more, trying to casually see who gave him this, but the woman was gone, the space empty.
But, through the space, he could see another mourner sitting at the back of the chapel, two empty rows of pews in front of him. He was in his fifties, slim and in a navy-blue suit.
And he was watching Marlowe.
Seeing Marlowe glance at him, however, the man rose silently, placing his hymnbook onto the pew and, with a nod to the altar, left through the main entrance, still ajar.
Marlowe turned around, thinking back to his previous actions that day. There had been a man across the street when he left Doctor Fenchurch, but he’d paid him little concern. Why would someone be following him, and why would someone warn him about it?
The woman had been old, in her sixties or seventies, with white hair cut short, and asymmetrical, with the buzz-cut side on her left. She’d been slight, with piercing green eyes that belied her age, and Marlowe knew for a fact he’d never met her before. She reminded him of Emilia Wintergreen, the white-haired head of Section D, and wondered for a moment whether this stranger held a similar position of authority.
In fact, Marlowe spent so long considering the options here that the funeral had ended before he realised, with him standing and sitting, singing and praying on an effective autopilot while the rest of his brain considered his options. The coffin was being taken out now and would be walked to the graveside that had been picked out, before being placed in and buried.
Marlowe wasn’t sure if he could face watching that, and as the other mourners, many of whom Marlowe recognised as people connected to the security services, made their way out of the chapel and towards the spot reserved in East Finchley Cemetery for Marshall Kirk, Marlowe instead slid along the pew, emerging on the far left of the Nave, and near where St Mary’s Chapel was.
It was pretty much just an alcove to the side, with a statue of Mary surrounded by candles. In front of it was a wrought-iron rack of tea-light candles which, for a small donation, you could buy and light in memory of someone lost.
Marlowe did this, placing a pound coin in the slot and lighting a tea-light candle, placing it in one row along the top.
‘Here you go, mum,’ he whispered. ‘Hope you’re okay there. Marshall’s come to visit, so look after him. He’ll be scared.’
There was a soft cough behind him, and Marlowe spun around to see the lady standing about ten feet back, watching around the chapel as she spoke.
‘You’re being tailed by MI5,’ she said as a matter of fact. ‘You need to lose him before we talk.’
‘Talk about what?’ Marlowe asked, moving forward.
‘Stay there, and face the candles,’ the woman commanded, and Marlowe did so. ‘You don’t think Kirk died of natural causes.’
‘And how would you know that?’
‘Because you had someone hack in and grab his file,’ the woman replied. ‘You’re not as good as you think, Thomas. Or, rather, she wasn’t as quiet as she thought. Either way, MI5 knows you took the file, and they’re following you to see what else you know.’
‘And what else should I know?’ Marlowe faced the statue of Mary now, effectively talking to it. ‘Because there’s obviously something.’
‘You already suspect it,’ the woman stated calmly. ‘Marshall Kirk was killed.’
Marlowe went to turn around but forced himself not to.
‘I’m guessing you have another place for a meeting?’ he asked. But after a couple of moments of no response, he turned around only to find the woman gone.
‘Of course,’ he muttered. ‘Bloody spooks.’
On the pew she’d been standing beside was another thin strip of paper, however. And, when Marlowe looked at it, he saw an address and time.
NELLIE DEAN - SOHO - UPSTAIRS - 3PM
Reading the note, Marlowe folded it up once more. However, instead of chewing this, he held it over the flame of his tea light, letting it catch alight, allowing the flame to rise up the paper before dropping the charred remains onto the metal rail, beside the tea-lights, watching it until it was nothing but ash. Then, this done, he nodded to the candle and walked out of the chapel. If anyone had watched him, all they saw was a man who lit a candle in memory before rejoining the funeral mourners around the graveside, as the coffin of Marshall Kirk was lowered in.
The white-haired woman was missing now, but as Marlowe glanced back to the grey-bricked Anglican chapel, he saw the slim man in the navy-blue suit, standing beside the porch, watching the funeral continue from afar.
Marlowe forced himself to carry on his gaze past the man, not to give any clue as to seeing him, looking down at his watch as he returned to the graveside. The coffin was lowered, the funeral was winding up, and there was another hour before three. Avoiding the wake in a local pub in East Finchley, there was enough time to get into central London and lose a tail, with a little luck.
Marlowe straightened, rotated his neck to pull out any kinks and, forcing himself to stay slow and steady, he walked out of the cemetery and towards Finchley Central Station, knowing without even looking that the slim man in the navy-blue suit was following.
But Marlowe wasn’t worried, for Marlowe had a plan.
He just hoped it was one that could still work.
3
QUICK CHANGE
The Northern Line train from Finchley Central Station had pulled into King’s Cross Underground Station at half-past two, and although it was a little later than expected, Marlowe was okay with the delay, as it gave him another half an hour to lose the man following him.
He’d spied him on the underground train, a carriage down, sitting and ignoring everyone, reading a magazine he had either found on a seat or already had on his person, giving the public impression of a man without a care in the world. Which, in a way, Marlowe knew he was, as he likely knew Marlowe was a captive audience in the tunnels.
