Chapter One
The man looked much older than his reputed thirty-five years. His hair was thinner, and his face was slacker and more sallow than his picture had suggested. I couldn’t compare his height, though. Because he was on the ground, kneeling in front of two Royal Marines.
One of the Marines had a pistol levelled on the bridge of the man’s nose.
And for a moment, I was tempted to let him pull the trigger.
There are dozens of different job roles in all the British Embassies and Consulates around the world, but one thing unites everyone who works in them. A phone number. During their training, everyone – from Ambassadors to janitors to chefs – has it drummed into them. The number to call if they come across anything remotely suspicious. An unfamiliar piece of IT equipment. A strange noise on the phone. An unrecognised entry in a fax journal. A ragged seal on an envelope. A change in a colleague’s behaviour.
The first alarm call from the Boulevard Joseph II was made by one of the Embassy chefs. He was an eight-year veteran of the diplomatic service. Before that, he’d spent twenty-two years in the Navy, feeding multiple generations of Royal Marines. And after dishing out more than thirty thousand meals, he was pretty used to the amount they liked to eat. So when two of the younger guys from the guard duty detail starting sending their plates back hardly touched, he noticed.
The baton was passed to the Marines’ CO, and it didn’t take him long to find out why his men had lost their appetites. The pair of them had been caught carrying on with a couple of local girls. But not by anyone from the Navy. By a man from Liverpool. He called himself Kevin Truly. And he had a simple proposition. Carry an extra rucksack each onto the military plane to England next time they were on leave - neatly sidestepping any customs checkpoints or police officers with sniffer dogs - and their wives need never hear what they’d been up to.
The analysts in London figured the danger most likely didn’t extend beyond garden-variety blackmail, but they needed to be sure. Navy policy ensures every threat - however minor it seems on the surface - is taken seriously. So they told the Marines to play along. And when Truly next got in touch - with instructions to meet him the following night - they decided it was time to send someone in to take a closer look.
That ‘someone’ was me.
It was less than a kilometer from the Embassy to the address Truly had given the Marines. It would have been a pleasant walk. Luxembourg City is beautiful. It felt like a scaled down version of Paris, crossed with Vienna, and set on a series of hills. The idea of taking a stroll through its elegant streets before getting my hands dirty was very inviting, but I couldn’t ignore a nagging doubt at the back of my mind. Given the subject at hand, it seemed unlikely that somewhere so central - or public - was going to be our final destination. My Liaison Officer agreed, and without waiting for me to ask, she picked up her phone and called the car pool.
The rendezvous was set to happen at a trendy waterfront hotel. The building had recently been converted from a grand old department store. A new front entrance had been added, and this was separated from the River Alzette by a broad, block-paved promenade. The alleys on either side were too narrow for cars and vehicle access to the rear of the building was controlled by a secured gate, so I left my driver to his own devices and took a quarter of an hour to wander around the perimeter, observing the place from the outside. Then I made my way into the bar, ordered a glass of still water, and took the seat with the best view of the door.
There were twenty-seven people in the room, aside from me. A group of twelve - half men, half women, mixed ages from twenty to fifty - had pulled three tables together in the corner. They seemed comfortable with each other, and the volume of their conversation was rising steadily as the level of their drinks declined. Four men in their late thirties or early forties were sitting separately at the bar, quietly nursing bottles of upscale Belgian beer. A woman was reclining in an armchair near the window, on her own, sipping cappuccino and tapping away at a laptop. Four couples were huddled around tall, round tables. And a pair of twenty-somethings in suits was sitting near the door, holding cokes but not making much effort to drink them.
A quarter of an hour passed before I spotted the Marines. They strolled artificially slowly through the door, glanced around without letting their eyes settle on anyone in particular, then walked up to the table nearest the bar. They looked just like they had done in the photos I’d been shown, except for their clothes. One was wearing motorcycle boots, faded jeans, and a tasseled biker-style jacket. The other had Timberlands, grey cargo pants, and no coat. And as stipulated by Truly, both wore black Motörhead T-shirts.