“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.”