The Old Enemy by Henry Porter (read with me .TXT) 📕

ahead of the car and turned right at the end of the street. They weren’t interested in Zoe, so the only conclusion must be they were searching for him, and he knew exactly how they’d found him, but he couldn’t do anything about that now. He left the doorway and sprinted the 150 yards towards the Tube station. As he reached the right-angle bend he heard the bike behind. He ran across the street, vaulted the barrier and tore up the stairs of the Victorian station. A District Line train was standing at the platform. It was going north. He leapt on as the doors closed and looked back to see a figure in a hoodie reach the top of the stairs as the train drew out.

On the train, he turned off the three phones he carried and took the batteries out. The only way they could have found him was to track one of his numbers. He changed lines and went to Victoria, where he used a payphone to call Cedar’s reservations number. He got through to Ivan; his maître d’ stand faced the entrance to the restaurant and gave him a good view of the street. Having worked at Cedar for twenty years, Ivan knew the street better than anyone and was on good terms with the club doormen, the prostitutes that trawled for Middle Eastern men and the security details of nearby embassies that made up the particular Mayfair ecosystem.

‘Notice anyone strange hanging about the place today?’ Samson asked. ‘Two men on a motorbike; one is large and freakish. Can you put the word out on him?’

‘Nothing of that nature so far,’ Ivan replied. ‘Most of the freaks are in the restaurant.’

Samson laughed. ‘What are our numbers like tonight?’

‘Good – a hundred and sixty-five-plus covers.’

‘Excellent. There’s something I need you to do. There’s a box in the office beneath my desk. You can’t miss it. Can you bring it in a cab and pick me up at Victoria Station, by the Gatwick Express entrance.’

Half an hour later Ivan arrived in a cab with the box. As they travelled back to the restaurant, Samson unlocked it and replaced the two phone sets inside with the three in his pockets. Ivan gave him a quizzical look.

‘It’s a Faraday box. Blocks all signals. The phones can’t be accessed or tracked when they’re in it. One of these has been giving away my position. Any news from your street network, Ivan?’

‘Maybe some surveillance earlier in the day, but there’s always something going on and it’s hard to say who the hell the target is.’

‘You got that information quickly.’

‘We’ve got a message group to alert each other to problems. The girls started exchanging information on police in the area, men to avoid, high rollers from the clubs – that kind of thing. Our group is called Mayfair Ladies.’

Samson grinned. ‘No one’s seen the big fellow on a bike yet?’ He opened up one of the new phones and found the film of the Matador on social media. He froze it and took a screengrab, which he sent to Ivan’s phone. ‘Can you circulate that to Mayfair Ladies? He had a go at me with a knife yesterday and followed me this evening.’

‘Then we must make sure he doesn’t have another opportunity,’ said Ivan, seemingly untroubled by the news that someone had tried to murder his boss, which was, after all, not an uncommon event.

At Cedar, Samson took a screen grab of the man who had poisoned Hisami at the Rayburn Building, and sent it together with the one of the Matador to a number belonging to Vuk Divjak. Vuk had helped Samson on the search for Naji and had been at Narva. He was well connected to the Balkan underworld. If there was anyone who’d be able to help Samson find out about the pair it would be him, although the information would undoubtedly arrive scrambled in Vuk’s version of English.

He sent his new number to several people, including Macy Harp, his assistant, Imogen, Naji and Jo Hayes and then called Jo, wondering if she was going to spend a second night at the flat. She’d brought a bag with her the night before and he couldn’t remember seeing her leave with it. There was no response to the call, or his earlier message. He phoned down to Ivan. The street appeared to be clear, but he left by a side entrance and worked his way north to a mews where he met the cab ordered by Ivan.

The taxi dropped him about a short walk south of the Junction and he approached on foot. He passed through it twice on either side, noting one or two lights springing from different parts of the Edgar Coach and Engineering Works, and by the time he took up position in Cooper’s Court – where he’d left the motorbike, which had vanished – he was sure that no one else was watching the building; at least, there was nothing like the operation he’d seen a couple of days before. This seemed odd, given Jo’s insistence that the place held a special interest for the security services and the two members of MI5 had more or less confirmed that at the meeting in Carlton House Terrace.

He pulled out the small binoculars from his jacket and scanned the building, but saw nothing. After half an hour, his attention was drawn to a car that issued from a loading bay a little way along Herbert Street, to the east of the Junction. Previously, he’d ignored the loading bay because it was so far from the entrance, but it was conceivable that it served the Edgar. He crossed the road for a better view and placed himself in a recess between a locksmith and a wine warehouse. Knowing that an encounter with Zoe was extremely unlikely, he decided to give it another half-hour before leaving for his flat.

He waited and watched. As the bars up Herbert Street emptied and the traffic on the pavements