The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [7]
Keen made a note of the date in his deskdiary and smiled: first-time buyers were often like this, jumpy and prone to melodrama, wanting codewords and gadgets and chalkmarks on walls.
‘There is no specific procedure,’ he said. ‘I can find the cafe’.
‘Good. But how will I recognize you?’
As he asked the question Bob Randall was sitting in Thames House staring at a JPEG of Keen taken in western Afghanistan in 1983, but it was necessary cover.
‘I’m tall,’ Keen said, switching the phone to his other ear. ‘I’ll be wearing a darkblue suit, most probably. My experience is that in circumstances such as these two people who have never met before very quickly come to recognize one another. Call it one of the riddles of the trade.’
‘Of course,’ Randall replied. ‘Of course. And when shall we say? Perhaps six o’clock?’
‘Fine,’ Keen said. He was already hanging up. ‘Six o’clock.’
Two days later, the businessman calling himself Bob Randall arrived at the cafe on Shepherd’s Bush Road half an hour early and picked out a secluded table, his backfacing the busy street. At 17.55 he tooka call from Ian Boyle, informing him in a jumble of code and double-speakthat the BA flight from Moscow had eventually landed some ninety-five minutes late. The subject had used a public telephone box - not a mobile - after clearing passport control, and was now picking up his luggage in the hall. The call had been made to a west London number that was already being traced.
‘Understood,’ he told him. ‘And was there any sign of Duchev?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well keep on it, please. And brief Paul Quinn. I’m going to be walking the dog for the next two hours. Contact me again at eight.’
And at that moment he saw Christopher Keen coming into the cafe, indeed wearing a darkblue suit, a striking man possessed of a languid self-confidence. Demonstrably public school, he thought, and felt the old prejudice kick in like a habit. The photograph at Thames House had not done justice to Keen’s well-preserved good looks, nor to his travelled, evidently disdainful manner. The two men made eye contact and Randall gave a thin smile, his moustache lifting slightly to reveal stained yellow teeth.
Keen sensed immediately that there was something unconvincing about his prospective client. The suit was off the peg, and the shirt, bought as white but now greyed by repeated launderings, looked cheap and untailored. This was not a businessman with ‘minor difficulties in the former Soviet Union’, far less someone who could afford to employ the services of Divisar Corporate Intelligence.
‘Mr Randall,’ he said, with a handshake that deliberately crushed his knuckles. Keen looked quickly at the ground and registered his shoes. Grey-possibly fake-patent leather, tasselled and scuffed. Further evidence. ‘How can I help?’
‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’ Randall was trying to release his hand. ‘Let me start by getting you a drink.’
‘That would be very kind, thank you.’
‘Did you find the cafe OK?’
‘Easily.’
Keen placed a blackPsion Organiser and a mobile telephone on the table in front of him and sat down. Freeing the trapped vents of his suit jacket, he looked out of the window and tried to ascertain if he was being watched. It was an instinct, no more than that, but something was out of place. A crowd of office workers had gathered at a table on the other side of the window and an elderly man with a limp was walking into the cafe alone. The traffic heading north towards Shepherd’s Bush Green had been slowed by a van double-parked outside a mini-supermarket. Its rear doors were flung open and two young Asian men were unloading boxes from the back.
‘It’s part of a chain, I believe,’ Randall said.
‘What’s that?’
‘The cafe. Part of a chain.’.
‘I know.’
A waitress came and tooktheir order for two beers. Keen wondered if he would have to stay long.
‘So, I very much appreciate your meeting me at such short notice.’ The businessman had a laboured, slightly self-satisfied way of