‘So not a nurse?’

  ‘She used to be a nurse, before she joined Five. I can’t tell you how useful that has been over the years.’

  ‘But she didn’t know what you were up to?’

  Adeya is shaking her head in confusion. She looks close to tears.

  ‘No, bless her.’

  ‘And you sent her to get close to me? In the hospital.’

  ‘I needed to know if your memory loss was genuine or not.’

  ‘And you were happy for her to help me get into the house?’

  ‘Of course. I needed to know what your reaction was when you saw the photographs. She did a bang up job. Under any other circumstances she’d be in line for a promotion.’

  Adeya - Rayowa - gets to her feet, clearly flustered. ‘I need to go,’ she says.

  ‘Sit down!’ screams Waller, waving the pistol for emphasis. She drops back onto the sofa. Her hands are trembling and she clasps them together in her lap.

  ‘So what happens now, Martin?’ you ask. ‘You take the thumb drive and spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder?’

  ‘Three billion dollars will buy a whole new life,’ he says. ‘I could have my own private island with my own private army.’

  ‘That sounds more like a prison. Alcatraz comes to mind. You’ll be a hunted man for the rest of your life. You were the one who said that the Russians always get their man.’

  ‘But they won’t be looking for me, Phil. They won’t know that I have their ill-gotten gains.’

  ‘What’s your plan then, Martin? You’re going to buy Rayowa’s silence, are you?’

  ‘What?’ says Rayowa. She looks across at Waller. ‘What’s he talking about?’

  Waller ignores her. ‘I was thinking murder-suicide would be the way to go,’ he says. ‘You kill a plucky MI5 officer and then end it all with a bullet to the temple, with the oligarch’s money lost somewhere in the ether. I’ll obviously be grief-stricken by the loss of said plucky officer, and after a few months I’ll take early retirement because of PTSD.’ He shrugs. ‘That works, doesn't it?’

  You grimace. ‘It does, yes. Providing you don’t go on a spending splurge.’

  ‘I was joking about the private island,’ says Waller.

  ‘Of course you were.’

  Rayowa gets to her feet. ‘You can’t do this!’ she shouts.

  ‘Oh yes I can, sweetheart,’ he says, bringing the gun to bear on her chest, his finger tightening on the trigger.

  She throws up her hands as if that might in some way save her and Waller grins. He takes aim but is interrupted by short sharp shouts from the hallway. ‘Armed police! Drop the weapon! Drop the weapon now!’

  Three armed police officers wearing Kevlar helmets, flak jackets and black overalls pile into the study, carbines at their shoulders. Waller’s eyes are wide and fearful but he still has his gun pointed at Rayowa.

  ‘Drop the weapon!’ shouts one of the officers but Waller appears to be in shock and doesn’t comply.

  A single shot rings out and Waller spins around. The gun tumbles from his hand and thuds onto the carpet. He slumps to his knees and then falls backwards, blood oozing into his jacket.

  An armed officer runs forward and kicks the Glock away, then points his carbine at Waller’s chest. Waller isn’t moving. ‘We need a paramedic in here now,’ the cop says into his radio. Waller trembles and then goes still. ‘No rush,’ says the cop. Your eyes are watering from the fumes and you wipe them with the back of your hands.

  Rayowa collapses on to the sofa, sobbing. The three armed police sweep the room and you raise your hands in to the air so that there won’t be any misunderstandings.

  ‘It’s all right, Phil, they know you’re one of the good guys,’ says a voice at the door. You smile when you see that it’s Superintendent McMullen. He looks down at the body of Martin Waller, pushes his glasses higher up his nose, and grimaces. ‘That’s a shame,’ he says.

  ‘They gave him every opportunity of dropping his gun,’ you say.

  ‘He was probably weighing up his options,’ says McMullen. ‘We have him bang to rights, which means years behind bars, where he’d be a sitting duck for the Russians. His life was over, either way.’

  He walks over to the body and picks up the thumb drive. ‘It’s all on this?’

  ‘Please don’t tell me you’re off to buy a private island.’

  McMullen laughs and you laugh with him. McMullen is as straight as they come, married with three children and his first grandchild on the way. The oligarch operation is his swan-song, he’s already put his retirement off twice but the bitcoin wallets on the thumb drive means he can tie it all up and head off to the golf course.

  Rayowa is bent double on the sofa, sobbing, her hands over her face. ‘Sorry about her,’ says McMullen, walking over to stand next to you.

  ‘That she lied to me?’ You shrug. ‘It was her job. And she was only doing her job. It’s clear from her reaction that she had no idea what Waller was up to.’

  McMullen nods. ‘We’ve got it all, sound and vision. Her face when she realised that Waller was going to shoot her... she was genuinely terrified.’

  Rayowa looks up, her cheeks stained with tears. ‘He could have killed me.’

  ‘We were watching everything,’ says McMullen. ‘As soon as he pointed the gun at you, we moved in.’

  ‘He was aiming at my chest and his finger was on the trigger.’ She looks over at you. ‘Why didn’t you tell me what was going to happen?’

  ‘Because we didn’t know that Waller was bad,’ you say. ‘I suspected, I told you that much, but we didn’t know for sure.’

  ‘We can get a car to drive you home,’ McMullen says to her. ‘We’ll need to interview you at some point, but that can wait.’

  ‘My car’s outside,’ she says.

  ‘I’m not sure you’re in a fit state to drive,’ says McMullen.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she says.

  ‘You’ve just been threatened with death by a man who clearly meant it,’ says McMullen. ‘You’re in shock.’

  She shakes her head fiercely. ‘I’m okay,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll go home with her,’ you say.

  She looks surprised at your offer, and so does McMullen. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ he says.

  ‘She can’t leave her car outside, and this is going to be a crime scene for a while.’ You nod at Waller’s body. ‘Forensics will need to be here for at least a few hours, right? I’ll drive her home in her own car and see you back at the office.’

  ‘Is that okay with you?’ McMullen asks Rayowa and she nods tearfully. ‘Fine,’ says McMullen.

  CHAPTER 47

  Rayowa hands you the keys to her car and you get into the driving seat. It’s strange how quickly you have started thinking of her as Rayowa, as if Adeya had never existed. She hadn’t, of course. Adeya had always been a legend, a back story. It almost certainly wasn’t her car and the flat had probably been obtained and dressed by MI5 experts. Nothing about her had ever been real. She had been playing a part, right from the start. And yet...

  She looks over at you, her eyes still red from her tears. ‘So this was all a test?’ she says.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You brought me with you which means that you must have suspected me, you must have thought that I’d tip him off.’

  You shrug but don’t say anything. She’s right, of course. And to be fair, she did tip Waller off. But then she would have had to, he was her boss.

  ‘You thought I was corrupt, didn’t you? You thought I was working with Waller.’

  ‘Well to be fair, you were working with him. He sent you to the hospital to get close to me.’

  ‘You used me to get to him.’

  You hold up your hands. ‘I didn’t think you were corrupt, no. But I suspected that you weren’t a nurse. Or rather that you were something more than a nurse. You attached yourself to me too easily. I was a patient handcuffed to his bed, a patient who then escaped. You shouldn’t have had anything to do with me. And there’s no way you should have gone to the house with me.’

  She nods slowly. ‘I was too keen.’

  ‘You had to get me to trust you. To depend on you. It felt genuine enough but I’ve been working undercover for years, I know the signs. But I didn’t think for one moment that you and Waller were planning to run off with the money. I told you I needed to go to the house because I needed you to tell Waller. We needed to see which way Waller would jump. We suspected he was bad, but there was always an outside chance that it was someone else at Thames House.’ You pause. Tears have started running down her cheeks again. ‘Why were you still at the hospital? Once I went off to see the Russians in Dubai, surely your role was over and done with.’

  ‘Martin said he wanted me as a fallback position. He wasn’t sure how it would work out with you and the Russians, so he said I should remain in place until he knew for sure. Then he called me to say that there’d been a problem in Dubai and that there was a chance you’d make it back to the UK.’ She manages a smile through the tears. ‘I was glad that you did. When you got in touch I managed to make a call to Martin and he said I should stay close and see what you did.’ She shakes her head. ‘He said he thought that now you had regained your memory you might take the money for yourself.’

  ‘Well there’s the pot calling the kettle black,’ you say.

  ‘He was using me,’ she says.

  ‘He was MI5,’ you say. ‘That’s what they do.’

  ‘That’s what I do, you mean?’

  ‘You were doing your job. I can’t fault you for that.’

  ‘I was betraying you.’

  ‘You were betraying the person you thought I was. I have no problem with that.’

  ‘And you knew that Waller was bad because of what happened at the house? Because of the phone call immediately after you sent the email?’

  ‘I didn’t remember that until I fell off the yacht and my memory returned,’ you say. ‘But I knew before then. When I arrived at the yacht they took away my phone, my watch and my change.’

  ‘Your change?’

  ‘MI5 gave me a fifty-pence coin with a transmitter in it. Only someone within the organisation could have told them that.’

  ‘So Waller betrayed you? He told them you were coming?’

  You nod. ‘I think by then he realised that even if my memory returned and we recouped the three billion dollars, he wouldn’t be able to get his hands on it. There would be too many people watching. But if he could deliver me to the oligarchs and they could force me to remember, then that would be worth a substantial finder’s fee. Ten per cent wouldn’t be unreasonable, so I think he negotiated a deal. If he did, the NCA will find out. There’ll be an email or a phone call and a money trail.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For being part of it. For helping put you in harm’s way.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. You thought you were on an official MI5 operation. You had no way of knowing that Waller had his own agenda.’ You shrug. ‘Anyway, all’s well that ends well.’ You look over at the house. The armed cops are stowing their gear in the white BMW SUV.

  ‘Has it ended well?’

  ‘I’m sorry that Waller is dead, but yes, the outcome is a good one. And in the grand scheme of things, maybe it’s better that there won’t be a trial and all MI5’s dirty laundry stays hidden from public view.’

  ‘And we’ve got the oligarch money. All three billion dollars.’

  You turn towards her and smile. ‘Yes, about that.’

  She frowns. ‘What do you mean?’

  Your smile widens. ‘There’s three billion dollars of their ill-gotten gains on the thumb drive I gave my boss earlier, but there’s another five hundred million tucked away in offshore accounts that only I can access.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Half a billion dollars of untraceable cash for us to use in any way we want. What do you say? We can be thirty thousand feet in the air heading to anywhere in the world with a life of luxury ahead of us before anyone realises that we’ve gone. We could have a lot of fun with half a billion dollars. We can reinvent ourselves and be whatever we want to be.’

  She stares at you in astonishment, and then she slowly breaks into a smile and she wags a finger in your face. ‘You almost had me going there.’

  You grin. ‘Almost?’

  ‘Take me home, Phil. And prepare for payback.’

  THE END

 

 

  Stephen Leather, Recall

 

 

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