TURKISH DELIGHT by Barry Faulkner (learn to read activity book .txt) 📕

footage our people saw a holdall and two characters on our surveillance list go in during the afternoon so we brought the visit forward. Of course, after the unsavoury incident on the stairs we reviewed the video, and hey presto! You and the Gold Digger make an appearance, or should I say exit. So putting that together with the type of attack our chap endured, I would say the circumstantial evidence points to you. Assault and battery – nasty episode, five years minimum.’

I reached for the phone. He guessed my reaction.

‘Don’t bother, you don’t need a lawyer. I don’t think I mentioned anything about pressing charges, did I?’ Woodward smiled, the sort of smile your chess opponent gives when he’s made a move that says ‘checkmate’. ‘I have no intention of pressing charges. I want to know why you were there Nevis, that’s all.’

Time to break my silence, ‘Eve Rambart came and asked me to do some security work for her – she’d been recommended. I was just checking the premises out, seeing what alarm system would be best, checking the locks. She said somebody had tried to break in recently so when your man showed up I thought it was the same person coming back,’ I lied, hoping it sounded reasonable. I didn’t think I’d better mention the small matter of a million quid to kill hubby.

Woodward shifted in his chair and let out a long breath. ‘I’m going to take you into my confidence Nevis, and if any of this makes its way into the public domain I will have no problem in pressing the charges I spoke about and making sure your PI Licence is revoked, understand me?’

I nodded.

‘Good. We have had the Rambarts under surveillance for some time –  we know her husband supplies Iran with illegal arms, and they then send those arms onto ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups in the Middle East. We need to know how they get there. Of course diplomatic channels have put pressure on Iran, but their denials are just the normal lies; the Revolutionary Guard have no scruples, and their main raison d’etre is to basically blow up the West so if they can supply arms to terrorist groups they will. However, recently their armaments have got more sophisticated and include missiles capable of being nuclear tipped for both ground and air launching. We have evidence that Rambart is the supplier. He doesn’t handle the product himself, he’s too clever to take that chance – he is a middle man between supplier and buyer. He is also the legal middle man between suppliers and buyers in the West, which is how we think he operates. He fuses the two, buys on behalf of a Western country or a Western Allied Middle Eastern country, which enables him to get his orders signed off by the governments of the Arms Suppliers countries without any fuss – the UK Ministry of Defence included – and then the product gets diverted on route to countries that are not signed up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.’

‘And the original country doesn’t ask where are our missiles?’

‘Depends – depends how much their current Minister of Defence takes in bribe money and showers around to keep eyes closed and mouths shut. Sometimes if it is a genuine order that goes AWOL and into Rambart’s plan the country won’t want it known as the news of such a loss they would mean they certainly wouldn’t get authority to purchase anymore.’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’

‘You’re going to work for us.’

‘I am?’

‘Either that or time in one of Her Majesty’s establishments awaits you and the SIA will revoke your PI licence. Your choice Nevis.’

‘Looks like I’m working for you then.’

Woodward gave another checkmate smile, ‘Good, I thought you might prefer that. It’s a very simple job: get inside the Rambarts’ organisation and feed back their contacts and their buyers to me – and most importantly find Nicholas Rambart; he’s gone off the radar for the past three months, disappeared, which means he’s putting together a big deal somewhere and doesn’t want to be disturbed. That’s worrying us, it means he’s probably handling armaments he’s not licensed to handle. He is the top suspect for supplying the missiles that destroyed Saudi Arabia’s oil tanks and if one of his terrorist friends are planning a similar attack who knows where it could be. We and the US have operatives looking for him, but so far we haven’t located him. You now have an inside position in the family as Eve Rambart’s security advisor and that could be our best shot yet. You are of course nothing to do with the department, and if anything untoward happens to you we will deny even knowing who you are.’

I was beginning to regret saying I was working for Eve Rambart, but circumstances and video footage had pushed me into a position I didn’t want to be in. I had no exit.

‘That was always normal procedure, nothing new in that.’

‘Quite, and you report directly to me.’

‘To you?’ That was surprising as MI6 operatives usually have a handler as a point of contact, not the big boss.

‘Yes, to me and me only. There will not be any leaks on this assignment Nevis.’ He reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a burner phone which he put on the desk. ‘This phone is programmed to go straight through to me, just press the call button – it has a lithium battery so you’ll get five days continual use before it needs charging. The number it calls is my personal phone, which is programmed to take your call and override any other call that I may be taking at the time. If it looks like it might fall into other people’s hands at anytime, press 999 and all call logs on it will be cancelled and scrambled.’