There was an inordinately long pause when nothing was said. A squirrel or something similar ran across the roof, and Leonard looked up as if expecting the ceiling to cave in. He had lived what may be called a ‘sedentary and urban existence’ for all his life. Half an hour spent meeting a contact on a bench in Hyde Park was as close to nature as he ever got, if you excluded the range of insects that seemed permanently attracted to his damp skin.
Mike walked over to the kitchen area and put the kettle on. She stared blankly out of the large picture window that made up most of the gable end and provided almost all the light for the room, framing the forest edge. Eventually, she carried a mug over to Leonard, who accepted the coffee even though it was likely to make him sweat even more.
“OK, you win.” After a few seconds, she added, “but now I want the truth; the whole truth. Start from the beginning and don’t conveniently leave things out.”
Leonard sipped his coffee and tried not to look smug. “I don’t think it will take you long. It’s just that I can’t use my crew for various reasons that will become evident.”
“Was he working for you? I haven’t seen or heard from him since the funeral.”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of yes or sort of no?”
“Sort of unofficially. He was working for a gas company officially.”
“And he’s just disappeared?”
“Sort of.”
“How can you ‘sort of’ disappear?”
“Well, OK, let’s call it temporarily.”
“Where do you think he might be?”
“France … or Spain or Italy or …” He paused. “Algeria or Morocco.”
“Well, that’s narrowed the field down. What was he doing?”
“Well, let’s just say that whatever it is, it’s sort of no longer US policy” – he paused to choose his words very carefully – “under the new president, and I’d like him to stop doing it and update me on the situation – fast.”
“So, this is about covering your ass, not about finding one of your sources?”
“I’ve always been a hands-off kind of boss.”
“Probably a good thing after #MeToo, don’t you think? But ‘lazy shit’ might be more accurate.”
“Will you try to find him?”
“What support do I get?”
“Just me … good old Dr Rose Delavine.” He smiled and handed her a card bearing the fake doctor’s name and various phone numbers and codes. “Let’s keep this off the record. Don’t contact me via the office.”
“I’ll need a lot more background.” She was sipping coffee and thinking that was the understatement of the year.
“I can’t tell you anything more. It’s on a need-to-know basis and all that BS. It’s better you don’t know anything else – trust me. Just find him and tell him to phone home ASAP.”
“You want me to trust you?”
He stood up at the second attempt and began to waddle towards the door. He started to say something, but stopped himself.
“If you were going to mention Dylan, don’t.” She was glaring at him.
“No … quit while you’re ahead, eh?” And with that, he left and went down the outside stairs to his waiting car.
At that precise moment, 3,000 miles south of him in Algeria, an explosion disturbed the soundless desert. It would have been deafening if there had been anyone within ten miles to hear it. However, there was no philosopher in the brown, sandy expanse to discuss whether that meant the noise didn’t exist. The dust plume could undoubtedly be seen from a very long way away, but there were also no photographers anywhere near; not even locals using their mobile phones.
In fact, the nearest people with serious cameras were the press pack in Algiers currently surrounding Emmanuel Macron, the French President, who was just about managing to keep a smile on his face as he stood there in his open-necked, white shirt. He was barely visible in the throng, which was a gift to his security detail, who always preferred to protect a vertically challenged target. The crowd were just beginning to turn hostile as he started to explain that his visit was to improve French-Algerian relations in a post-colonial world. However, even when he visited young entrepreneurs to discuss creating a French-Algerian incubator for digital start-ups, no one was fooled.
“One, two, three, viva l’Algérie,” they shouted, less than two months after Algeria had marked six decades of independence following 132 years of French rule and a devastating eight-year war.
The French President seemed unperturbed, rolled up his sleeves, promoted youth culture and business development, and counted the minutes until he was on the jet back to Paris.
After the explosion, a scrap from an Arabic newspaper dated 30th August 2022 fluttered in the swirling dust storm and landed by the unrecognisable, burnt-out remains of a Toyota pickup. A feral dog was barking wildly. Just another day in the vast sandy and stony desert known as the Grand Erg Oriental.
Explosions, sabotage and all types of guerrilla warfare were regular occurrences in the region around the Western Sahara – 100,000 square miles of contested land over which Algeria and Morocco had fought for centuries. The US had been supporting Morocco in this bitter battle, but it was also claimed by the Polisario Front, which was backed by Algeria, and together they wanted an independent nation for the indigenous Sahrawi people.
The conflict had started in 1975 when Spain withdrew from what had been its colony of Spanish Sahara, and Morocco had claimed what it called ‘the Western Sahara’. Their troops now occupied eighty per cent of the region, and the King of Morocco was working relentlessly to establish Moroccan infrastructure and villages in the area, as well as developing the lucrative phosphate mining, port and fishing industries.
One of Leonard’s agents had been embedded in the region for over a year in an undercover role as a Spanish petrochemical consultant, with the aim of ‘enabling’ (a special word that mostly meant ‘disabling’) anything the US President regarded as needing attention. It was this agent, using a code name, whom Leonard wanted Mike Kingdom to find.
Mike was originally from Oregon, where she had joined the CIA. Early on, she had fallen for Dylan Kingdom, one of her work colleagues. He was a Harley Davidson-riding extrovert who was a field operative in the Central and South American narcotics division. It was Dylan whom she had married, and they had been posted to London together; she was the desk-based analyst, and he was the undercover operative. His younger brother Randy was also in the field, working mostly in South America, having the advantage of speaking fluent Spanish also having grown up in San Diego, California.
Despite her being desk-based, it was Dylan who had taken her on an operation in Amsterdam at the behest of Leonard de Vries, only to be ambushed in a pickup truck along some featureless, straight road on the embankment of a Dutch polder – an event that had changed her life.
Far away in the Algerian desert on that baking August afternoon, when the security patrol and special police arrived at the scene of the explosion, there was little left of the vehicle. The police officer with the unpleasant task of collecting the few remaining body parts hardly took any notice of the pale skin on one arm. Many Tunisians were blue-eyed and fair-skinned, a result of their Berber heritage.
