‘There is nothing that you and I can do for him, Lottie,’ Roza pointed out, ‘other maybe than finding Gilbert Land, or whoever else was driving that car.’

  Mann was unconvinced. ‘I’ll need to think about that,’ she murmured, as the door swung open again, and a lean tanned man stepped into the room.

  Instantly, Comissari Roza sprang from her seat and saluted. ‘Ministre.’

  ‘Ssh,’ the newcomer said. ‘Let’s not be formal.’ He turned to Mann, who was in the act of rising. ‘Chief Inspector, I am Manuel Mateu. I’m the security minister of Catalunya and as such I am in charge of the search for my friend Bob. Sit back down and let’s talk about what has happened. Major Teijero gave me a brief explanation, but I need to hear it from you, and from Comissari Roza, whom I have never met but of whom I have heard important things.’

  ‘Shall I ask the major to join us?’

  Mateu shook his head; Mann thought she saw a small grimace. ‘No, that will not be necessary. He has other duties. One of those is to consider why he failed to mention to me the fact that Madrid had told him the Americans would be conducting an off-the-books national security operation in Catalunya.’

  ‘Madrid knew about it?’ Roza repeated.

  ‘Yes, that much I know, but that is all. How much they knew, that’s another matter. Major Teijero doesn’t know any more himself, of that I am sure. He was told by his opposite number in the Policia Nacional so that his officers might not interfere in any unorthodox situations that might arise. That’s how he put it.’

  ‘By which they meant,’ Mann growled, ‘if they see a man being drugged and kidnapped, they should look the other way?’

  ‘I don’t like that any more than you do, Chief Inspector,’ the minister said, glancing at her. ‘That’s why the major declined to tell me; he knew I would raise hell. Bob told me about you, by the way. He said you were a good choice for this assignment, formidable. I can see why he thinks so.’

  She suppressed a smile and said nothing.

  ‘I know that you are here because of a link between a homicide investigation in Scotland and a man called Gilbert Land, in whom we also have a certain interest. He owns a house near a town called Riudaura and I know that Bob was there. Did he tell you anything about it?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But he was there when it was open and his reaction was . . . interesting. That’s the word I would use. Would you agree, Lita?’

  Roza nodded. ‘Yes, I would. I would say that what we found when we went in there was not what he expected. But what we’ve found since then, that’s exactly as he predicted; the place is unnaturally clean, and absolutely empty.’

  ‘The swimming pool was sparkling too,’ Mann added. ‘His daughter was with him when they checked the place and she confirmed that it was almost black with algae.’

  ‘Is she still in Spain? His daughter? Does she know about the kidnap?’

  ‘Yes, and she does. So does Sarah . . . that’s Sir Robert’s wife.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘My chief constable. Everyone’s agreed to keep it secret, for his sake, but now that we know that it’s the Americans . . .’

  ‘Now that I know,’ Mateu said heavily. ‘This is Catalunya; we might not be independent, yet, but we do have autonomy. Now that I am in the picture I will make the decisions about how this appalling situation is handled.’

  ‘In that case, Minister,’ Mann suggested, ‘can you make them before the Gaffer winds up in fucking Guantanamo!’

  He smiled grimly. ‘An unlikely eventuality, but yes, I will intervene.’

  As he spoke, the sound of a mobile’s vibration alert came from his pocket. He frowned as he produced it and stared at the screen. Roza could see it from her angle and read, as he did, ‘Número ocult’.

  ‘Not many people have my number,’ Mateu murmured. ‘My opposite number in Madrid, perhaps. She is among them. Whoever it is, I must take it.’ He clicked ‘Acceptar’, and put the phone to his ear.

  Seventy

  Sarah was staring at her fifth mug of coffee since midnight when her older son came into the breakfasting kitchen. ‘Mum,’ Mark said. ‘Are you all right? Scratch that, silly question; you’re not all right. What’s the matter?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing, darling, honestly.’

  ‘Mum, please, give me some credit. I’m sixteen years old, I’m an adult near as dammit. It’s bloody obvious you’re upset.’

  She shrugged and offered a weak, unconvincing smile. ‘Menopause, that’s all.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ he countered. ‘You’re a month short of forty-three. You’ll need a better story than that.’

  She felt tears come. ‘I can’t tell you, love, I really can’t.’

  ‘Does it involve Dad?’

  She nodded, clutching her mug.

  ‘Are you splitting up?’

  She gasped, eyes widening. ‘God no!’ she protested.

  ‘Then what? Is he ill? Has he had an accident?’

  ‘Something like that,’ she offered. ‘Please don’t ask me anything else, because that’s all I can say.’

  ‘In that case do us . . .’ he said, gently, ‘do us all a favour and go back to your room before Seonaid or Jazz come down and see you like this. She’ll just cry and he won’t rest until he’s got the whole story out of you.’

  She nodded. ‘You’re right,’ she murmured. ‘You’re a good kid, you know, Markie. And you’re adult enough for me right now.’ She tightened the belt of her dressing gown and headed for the door. She was halfway there when her phone rang in her pocket; she snatched for it, spilling her coffee. Mark stepped forward and took her mug from her as she pressed ‘Accept’.

  ‘It’s me,’ a familiar, if slightly hoarse voice said, ‘I’ll explain everything later but I’m all right. For now, please let everybody know who needs to, and I’ll call again when I can. Love you.’

  For the first time in her life, Sarah Grace Skinner fainted.

  Seventy-One

  ‘Where will they be taken?’ Skinner asked, looking from a window as the private ambulance drove away, three casualties inside.

  ‘Don’t know, don’t care,’ Merle Gower sighed. ‘The Embassy will handle all that. It’ll be a private hospital somewhere near here, then back to the US for evaluation. Fucking Secret Service!’ she exploded. ‘They think they have no operational boundaries. I didn’t want them for this mission but they were forced on me.’

  ‘You got my phone?’ he asked brusquely. ‘There’s a call I must make.’

  ‘Yes, it was in your back pocket.’ She took it from her jacket and handed it over. She waited as he called his wife. ‘Bob, I’m sorry,’ she said when he had finished. ‘That was never meant to happen.’

  ‘But it did,’ he said, ‘and now you’re going to tell me why.’

  ‘Looks like I have to,’ Gower acknowledged. ‘You’ve got all the guns.’

  ‘I have more than that,’ he told her. ‘I have influence. Never mind the firearms; they’ll be fine where I put them, in the freezer . . . although you’d better not forget them when you check out of here. Where the hell are we, incidentally?’

  ‘We’re in a house near a village called Rupia. It’s the US Consul General’s summer place. It was made available to me for the purposes of this operation. Those three were meant to invite you to meet with me, to explain a certain situation. I told them to be polite and to mention my name if you had a problem or needed assurance that it was legit. I did not say anything about drugging you and dumping you into a diplomatic vehicle, I promise.’

  ‘I like to think you’d have known better,’ Skinner observed. ‘Are you going to feed me before you explain what this is all about? I reckon I’m two meals down. The freezer seemed well stocked when I put the guns in there.’

  ‘We have burgers if you’d like . . . with a vegan option. I can do some on the Foreman grill. Those three could have done with Big George earlier on,’ she added, with a wry grin.

  ‘Nah.’ He shook his head. ‘These days he’s too old, too fat, too slow. You can shove the vegan option,’ he continued. ‘I’ll have meat, and some eggs if you have them.’

  She led him to the well-appointed kitchen, where she took four thick burgers and half a dozen eggs from the fridge.

  ‘And coffee,’ he added, as she switched on the grill.

  ‘Naturally.’

  He watched her as she set to work. ‘How long’s it been, Merle?’ he asked. On several occasions in his police career Skinner had interfaced with US Federal agents, in the UK and in America. Merle Gower had been one of those; initially they had clashed, but a mutual respect had grown.

  ‘Very,’ she replied. ‘I moved on from the London Embassy a long time ago. My life’s changed since then, as has yours, obviously.’

  ‘What are you now? Still FBI?’

  ‘National Security Agency. I don’t have a title or a job description as such. If I did, “Troubleshooter” would cover it.’

  ‘The trouble in this case being . . .?’

  ‘A Presidential directive; from the man himself and his Chief of Staff. There is a matter that he wants to disappear before it washes all over him. Ever heard of Russell Silver?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course, I’ve heard of him,’ Skinner laughed. ‘I’m a fucking media magnate with interests in the USA, remember?’

  ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘He’s a declared candidate in the upcoming presidential election. A self-made man who’s running as an independent with a very clever platform. He’s cashing in on the increasing polarisation of the major parties, with the Republicans in the grip of the right and the Democrats edging further and further to the left, with young people in office and one or two older mavericks who’re not afraid to call themselves socialists. That’s creating a big gap in the centre, with millions of electors, across both traditional parties, feeling disenfranchised. They’re the block that Silver’s chasing, under the slogan “Make America Care Again”, and the polls are showing him gathering enough support to be a threat to the President and to his main opponent, whichever nutjob the Republicans pick. How am I doing so far?’

  ‘You’re doing very well,’ Gower conceded. ‘But you didn’t say anything about the supervision of campaigns by the Federal Election Commission. How much do you know about that?’

  ‘You didn’t ask me,’ he pointed out. ‘The FEC has six members, three from each main party, usually rendering it toothless when a complaint’s investigated.’

  ‘That’s harsh, but more or less true. However, that goes out the window when a serious independent comes along and starts to gather significant campaign funding. Silver’s been doing that, from legitimate sources, and the Republicans have been crying “Foul”. Maybe it’s sour grapes, probably is, but the Commission is starting to take an interest. Meanwhile, Silver’s campaign is building. He’s never going to win but the polls, public and private, are saying that the greater part of his support is coming from Democrats, to the extent that if the election was tomorrow, with him on the ballot paper, the President would be defeated. Without him, he wins.’

  ‘Understood,’ Skinner said. ‘But how does any of that bring you and me here, and how did it lead to me getting a needle stuck in my neck by the People in Black?’

  ‘That started when the President began to consider the unthinkable: offer Silver the vice presidency and bring him onside. Until very recently that was the preferred option. However, the President’s a cautious man; before going public with the idea, or even floating it in-house among his Cabinet, he asked my Agency to look at Silver and subject him to the most extreme positive vetting you have ever seen.’ Gower stopped in mid-tale. ‘Medium or do you want them burned?’

  ‘They should be fine for me right now.’ He watched as she took the burgers from the grill and laid them on plates, three for Skinner, one for herself, each with two fried eggs. ‘Bring the coffee,’ she instructed. He obeyed, taking the jug from under the filter and a carton of milk from the fridge, and following her back to the other room.

  ‘I repeat,’ she said as they began to eat, ‘I am sorry for what happened.’

  ‘I get that,’ Skinner replied, ‘and I accept it. But if you want me to apologise for the broken toys, forget it.’

  She shrugged. ‘They’re collateral damage. You want me to go on?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Okay. When the vetting began, it didn’t take long to establish that Silver was up to something. Big chunks of his campaign money were being banked illegally, in Liechtenstein and the Cayman Islands. Of the three hundred million dollars he’d raised, approaching fifty million was no longer visible. But Silver’s hands weren’t on the transfers. They were authorised by one of his aides, a man called David Allen, a Canadian, born in Mississauga, Ontario, thirty-four years ago. When we went looking for Allen, he was out of town. His staff, a band of interns working for peanuts, couldn’t tell us where he was.’

  ‘I think I might be able to,’ Skinner murmured, his mind racing, ‘but we’ll leave that for now. What about Silver’s background? Was that phoney as well?’

  ‘No. He made his money, a decent amount of it, a few million in real estate. He married when he was thirty, had a child, but it didn’t last. His wife left him, they were divorced and he kept up the alimony payments until she died six years ago.’

  ‘How about his political activity?’

  ‘He was a registered Democrat into his thirties. Then, out of the blue eight years ago, he ran for Governor of Kansas as a middle ground independent like he’s doing now. He finished third and everyone forgot about him until he surfaced again a couple of years ago, this time with an effective team run by Allen, and started raising money.’

  ‘When you couldn’t find Allen, what did you do?’ Skinner asked, mopping up some of the runny egg yolk with a chunk of burger.

  ‘We put Silver under twenty-four-hour surveillance,’ Gower replied. ‘Three weeks ago, less a couple of days, he took an internal flight from Kansas City, where he’d held a campaign rally the night before, to O’Hare, in Chicago. He never left the airport. We thought he might have got off the aircraft before it took off, but he was logged as arriving. We thought he might have changed to another internal flight, but we couldn’t put him on any. It took us ten days to uncover images of a man boarding a flight to Madrid: it was Silver, but he was using a Canadian passport in the name of Gilbert Land.’

  He nodded. ‘You reported back to the President, and he said “Find him and bring him back, or . . . find him and don’t bring him back?” ’

  ‘Only the first; this President isn’t that sort of man. I was tasked with the recovery, and given a Secret Service team. I’d have preferred special forces but I was overruled by the Chief of Staff. It took us five days to track him to Catalunya, that long for his name to come out of the property register. But it did. We went to the house in Riudaura. We got in and we found him, dead. I don’t want to see that again.’ She glanced at Skinner across the table. ‘I don’t imagine you do either.’

  Skinner frowned and shook his head.

  ‘We were watching the place from a distance, Bob. When you and the woman arrived we were there, waiting for a clean-up team to get there,’ she said. ‘Who was she, by the way? The woman?’

  ‘That was my daughter Alex,’ he replied. ‘I’m surprised you don’t know that already.’

  ‘Identifying her wasn’t a priority,’ Gower countered. ‘I only wanted to clear up the mess and get out of there, nothing more complex than that. When the Mossos came I thought that was done for, but they left before dark, rather than keep the house under guard. By that time the clean squad was ready; it went in after dark. We got the remains out of there and worked all night to remove all traces of Silver and anything else human. Once it was done, I knew that I needed to talk to you, to explain what had happened, and to ask you to use the influence that I know you have in Spain to keep a lid on it. And that’s why I sent the team to invite you to come here. Idiots!’ she exploded.

  Skinner grinned. ‘Surely, Merle, with all your resources, you could have come up with my fucking phone number! A quick call, “Hi it’s me, a blast from the past. Can we meet for a coffee?” That would probably have done it.’

  ‘I don’t exist here,’ Gower countered. ‘I couldn’t take the risk of you blowing me.’

  ‘You might want to rephrase that . . . Okay,’ he continued, ‘that’s all history, for my memoirs or yours. What did you do with him?’

  ‘Body bag; he’s been flown back already to Dover Air Force base,’ she replied. ‘It has the biggest military morgue in America and it’s very closed. We don’t do our casualty repatriation in public, like you Brits do at Brize Norton.’ She frowned, her tight grey curls shining as a shaft of morning sunlight, filtered by trees, shone through the window. ‘I would expect the Silver campaign team to make a formal announcement of a sad sudden death whenever Mr Allen returns. If he doesn’t . . .’

  ‘If he doesn’t, what will happen?’

  ‘Then I imagine that his family will break the news. There’s a brother somewhere and we know there’s a daughter too.’ She paused, watching him as he finished his third burger, using the last segment to mop up what was left of the egg yolk. ‘Earlier,’ she continued when he was ready, ‘you said you might be able to help with Allen. What did you mean by that?’

  ‘Do you have an image of him?’ Skinner asked.

  ‘Hold on.’

  In the moment that she stepped out of the room, his phone sounded. ‘Alex,’ the screen read. He took the call.

  ‘Pops!’ Her voice was hoarse. ‘You’re okay?’

  ‘I am, some others, they’re not so good. Darlin’, I can’t speak now. You and Dominick catch your flights. We’ll talk when you’re home.’

  ‘No way! We’re not leaving here until I’ve seen with my own eyes that you’re all right. Isn’t that right, Dominick? He says the same. When will you be here?’

  ‘I’ll know better once I’ve sorted a couple of things out,’ he replied. ‘I must go now; one of those things has just come into the room.’