The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [61]
27
Act as though nothing has changed. Do your job as if it were just another ordinary day. Make telephone calls to DJs, suppliers, bar staff, journalists, whomever you would normally talk to just to keep Libra up and running. Long-standing appointments? Keep them. A lunch with Macklin or Roth? Do not back out of it. You need to pick their brains and still make out that you’re their best friend in the world. Don’t overplay anything, Mark. Try to remain relaxed at all times. If you start to act suspiciously they will soon become suspicious of you. You have to make sure that when they go home at night the last thing they’re worrying about is Mark’s loyalty to the firm. If you need to contact me, use the informant codeword ‘Blindside’. Do not send emails from the office or make calls from your desk. Go to a public telephone or internet cafe and I can be with you in twenty minutes. My experience tells me that you will get opportunities when their backs are turned. Act on what we’ve taught you in the last two weeks and it will all be wrapped up in no time.
Randall’s advice rang in Mark’s ears, and yet he took to the task with an ease that could only have been bequeathed by his father. A genetic facility for the double life; an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances concealing his true purpose from the world.
A week after the first meeting in Queensway, Mark had set to work. His first destination was the club’s main site in Kennington, where Roth kept unlocked offices containing papers, financial records and computer data that MI5 had never seen.
It was mid-morning, the time of day Mark most enjoyed visiting the club, when he could be alone in the vast, cavernous rooms with only a few cleaners for company. The floors were still sticky with drink and sweat from the weekend and Mark’s shoes squelched as he made his way across the lower level to a private staircase at the western end of the building. Through a security door, then up to level two, past the main bar and into a suite of dingy offices that reeked of stale air and sweat. He looked into all three rooms to check that he was alone, then fired up the closed-circuit televisions at the end of the corridor to warn him of any approaching employees. Having made photocopies of up to fifty documents in Roth’s filing cabinet, Mark turned his attention to his desk. The central drawer was locked, but he knew that he kept a key in a CD case behind the door. Sure enough, there it was, and he began searching through the debris of flyers, demo tapes and foreign currencies littering the interior. The contents were like historical artefacts, decade-old junk and trash from Libra’s earliest days. This was pure nostalgia, a glimpse into their vanished past, a time before the suit and tie and the Ibiza spin-off, when all that mattered was Time Out’s good opinion and three hundred punters on the door.
Then, right at the back, beneath a rave flyer from 1992, Mark found two floppy disks. They were unmarked and covered in fluff and dust, but he copied them on to his laptop with the certain conviction that he had uncovered something valuable. Weren’t disks, after all, the holy grails of espionage? Then, having replaced the key behind the door, he left the office. The entire visit had lasted just over two hours. He had moved through the building as if it were just another ordinary day, his role changed without visible effect from servant to spy.
Two days later, with Macklin in the Czech Republic and Roth skiing in Courcheval, Mark worked late at Soho headquarters and spent five hours going through the contents of their offices. He had doubts about this which he had kept to himself: namely, that any incriminating evidence would almost certainly have been secured in the basement safe, access to which was restricted solely to Macklin