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

I’m waiting for someone! Why are you asking these questions? Where the fuck are you going?’

Reid wasn’t used to people talking like that to him. Anger flashed in his eyes, but he controlled himself. ‘Jackson Hole. It’s the nearest airport to my place.’

‘Last time we really talked – before all this – we were at an environmental fundraiser, and yet here we are, taking private planes. Strike you as hypocritical?’

He shrugged.

‘What do you want?’ she asked. ‘Why does this mean so much to you?’

‘I told you. I believe that some evil forces are at work and I’m one of the few people who can help you and Denis. Good to see you, Ana. I’ll be in touch. In the meantime, I strongly advise you to stay away from Warren Speight. I believe he’s at the very heart of this affair. Have a good flight.’

The FBI vehicle had gone. She left the flight centre and walked a short distance along a road called Wind Sock Drive, turned right at the end towards the main Dulles terminal and took a path leading to a grassy bank, which she climbed, relishing the air and the tiny amount of exercise she was getting after being cooped up in the hospital. Resigned to a long wait in one of the lounges, she went to the airline desk to book the next flight to Vienna, where she would transfer to Athens. Overnight, she had arranged to meet in the Greek capital with key members of the Ayshel Hisami Foundation who were working with newly arrived refugees in the Aegean and along Turkey’s land borders with Greece and Bulgaria, where people were being gassed, stripped of their clothing, and sometimes shot. As she reminded Tulliver, there was more than one crisis in her life. The teams were in need of money and support, and she could give them both.

She missed her original flight and bought a ticket for the next, which meant a two-hour wait in the airport. At length, she presented her Greek passport in the name of Anastasia Niklaou Christakos to the automatic reader, retrieved a boarding card and headed for Security, all the time dreading that she would be stopped. But she reached the gate and boarded the flight without a hitch. A text message came from Tulliver as she settled into her seat. ‘Call me soonest.’ She dialled his number.

‘I have to tell you that Paul Samson was attacked in his apartment,’ he said. ‘His friend was also hurt. Samson had to kill the man. He was very, very lucky.’

‘Jesus. Are they going to be okay?’

‘Macy says yes. But the main point is that you have to be very careful, Anastasia. These people aren’t going to give up, and if they think you know what Denis was going to reveal at the hearing, they will try to kill you, too.’

Chapter 16

Bubble Wrap

‘What’s your question?’ snapped Jo Hayes when she answered Samson’s call. ‘I’ve got about two minutes before I see my boss.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Well, it’s not fucking ideal. I only dumped you this morning.’

‘It was about the Edgar Building. It was raided and someone was arrested. I hoped you might tell me about them.’

‘No, I bloody can’t.’

He didn’t persist. There was no point with Jo. ‘How’s your arm?’

‘Shit. How’s your leg?’

‘Fine.’ It wasn’t. A doctor called from the hospital and said he shouldn’t have been discharged because he thought the knife might have cut into the muscular branch of the sciatic nerve as well as grazing the femoral artery. That would account for the shooting pain Samson was experiencing.

‘You looked terrible this morning.’ She stopped and exhaled bad-temperedly. ‘Oh, fuck it! I guess you did save my life. The people they picked up weren’t the ones they were looking for. They got the wrong building.’

‘How so?’

‘I don’t flaming know.’

But she did, and she had much more time than she’d made out. He talked it out of her over the next ten minutes, and used some guile in the process by deliberately stating things that he knew were wrong, such as the number of people taken away for questioning after the police raided the building – he said six were arrested – and the reason for the raid, which he suggested was suspected terrorist activity. No, she said, succumbing to the natural instinct of human beings, especially current and former lovers, to correct each other – just two people had been questioned and only one was taken away from the Edgar. As for the motive of the police and Security Service, he was completely wrong. It had nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with some highly unusual encrypted communications coming from the area, which had piqued the interest of GCHQ, Cheltenham, who prompted the security services to look into the source at the Edgar Building; they in turn had involved the police. Some of this traffic had been decoded and found to contain establishment names in Britain and the United States – politicians and well-known businesspeople. But that was all they had extracted from the messages.

Given the prominence of the people and the novelty of the cryptographic techniques, it was decided to watch the building and see who was sending these communications. One of the organisations that came under suspicion was a porn site called Secorum, which attempted to disguise the ugliness of its product with good lighting and tasteful surroundings; Jo called it the House & Garden of porn. Filming was done on sets constructed in a suite of rooms rented by a man named Harry Diamond. Above the porn site’s studio was the office of reactt.org.uk, one of the many inflammatory racist organisations the security services monitored as a matter of course. Run by an individual named Toby Fawcett and three others, all of them known to MI5, ReacTT seemed to be the likely culprit. However, GCHQ technicians realised the infrequent bursts of communication came from both organisations, plus another site that was engaged in the illegal sale of hard-to-find