“What if I said you’ve been selected for a job?”
“What job?” Suspicion etched his voice.
“Finding people.”
He burst out laughing. “Come to the wrong house. It’s not what I do.”
“What do you do?” There was a scathing intonation in her voice.
He should have thrown her out on the spot yet he badly wanted to know what this was all about. “What sort of people?”
“Illegals.”
“A job for Immigration, I’d have thought.”
Cavall said nothing. Tallis tried to fill the gap. Immigration remained in rather a pickle, which was why the latest Home Secretary, like all the rest, had pledged to take a robust approach to failed asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants.
“We’re talking about people released from prison after serving their sentences,” she told him, “and mistakenly released into the community.”
“Mistakenly?” Tallis suspected some inter-agency cock-up.
“They should have been deported,” Cavall said, ice in her voice.
“Not exactly original.” Tallis shrugged. “It’s happened before.”
“But these individuals are highly dangerous. It’s feared they may reoffend.”
“Ditto.” And everyone knew the recidivist rate was high. The only difference was that released British lifers were monitored. One slip, even for a relatively minor offence like drunk and disorderly, could land them back in prison. The people Cavall was alluding to had presumably dropped off the radar.
“A decision has been taken at the highest level to have them located.”
Tallis shrugged. So what? he thought. Bung them on a website or something.
Cavall’s face flashed with irritation. “You don’t seem to understand the seriousness of the threat.”
“Oh, I understand. It would be a source of great political embarrassment should it come to the attention of the public, particularly if one of them should reoffend.”
“We don’t want to spread panic and fear,” she said evenly.
“So put your finest police officers onto it.”
“We already have.”
“We?”
“I represent the Home Office.”
This time Tallis’s smile was genuine. Which bit? he wondered. “So this is an arse-covering exercise.”
“Damage limitation,” she corrected him.
To protect reputations and ease some politician’s way up the greasy ladder of success, he thought. “Britain’s finest failed, that right?”
“I’m sure you’re aware of the pressure on police resources.”
Code for they’d got nowhere. Doesn’t quite square, he thought. The British live in a surveillance society. With over four million cameras tracking our every move, each time we log on, use our mobile phone or sat nav in our car, fill in a form, make a banking transaction, someone is logging it. Except, of course, the information is fragmented. It takes a measure of expertise to draw the right inferences, match the electronic footprints and plot the trail back to an identity. While the ordinary citizen might feel threatened and guilty until proven innocent by the power of technology, a determined criminal could still manipulate it and evade detection. Either he stole someone else’s identity or had no identity at all. “Why not wheel out the spooks?”
“Snowed under with the terrorist threat.”
Tallis flinched. The security service had foiled many plots since 9/11 and 7/7. They were mostly doing a fine job in difficult circumstances, but the death of Rinelle Van Sleigh was a stain on their history. Somehow, somewhere, there’d been a chronic lapse of intelligence, and for that an innocent woman had paid with her life. To a far lesser degree, so had he: life as he’d once known it was over. “So these individuals aren’t on control orders?”
“They pose no terrorist threat,” Cavall confirmed.
“What happens if and when they’re found?” He suspected a form of extraordinary rendition.
“They’re handed over and deported, like I said.”
“Handed over to whom?”
“I think you’re forgetting that these are extremely dangerous individuals.”
“They still have rights.”
“So did their victims.” Her look was so uncompromising, he wondered fleetingly whether she’d been one of them. “Rest assured, they’ll be handed over to the authorities responsible for deportation.” She smiled as if to put his mind at rest.
“How do you know these people haven’t already left the country?”
“They don’t have passports.”
Tallis blinked. Was she for real? “Heard the word ‘forgery’?”
“No evidence to suggest that’s the case.”
Tallis stroked his chin. That had not been a good answer. There was something fishy about all this. Too much cloak and dagger, smoke and mirrors. What authorities, what agencies? “You say a decision was taken at the highest level.”
“From the very top.”
“And it’s legal?”
“Yes.”
He studied her face—impassive, confident, certain, the type of woman who once would have appealed to him. He idly wondered, in a blokish way, whether she was beddable. “Why me?”
“Because you have the right qualities. We need someone who’ll follow orders, but also kick down doors. We need someone with a maverick streak, Paul.”
Tallis frowned. He didn’t recognise the man she was describing.
“At eighteen years of age, during the first Gulf War, you were part of a reconnaissance troop that came under friendly fire by the Americans. You rescued a colleague showered with shrapnel and pulled several others to safety then, still under fire, retrieved an Iraqi flag, waving it in surrender until the firing ceased. For that you received the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for Heroism. The citation ran ‘outstanding courage, decisiveness under fire’. On joining the police, you became a firearms officer, during which time you fell out with a sergeant who tagged you as a chancer.”
A stupid, dangerous bastard, Tallis remembered. So concerned with procedure, the man daily risked the lives of his men. “I was put back on the beat.”
“And swiftly caught the attention of CID, where you became rather a good undercover operative until you got your old job back and then graduated to the elite undercover team. You also speak a number of foreign languages. Your credentials are impeccable.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
A killer smile snaked across Cavall’s face. “Trust me, Paul. I forget nothing.” She glanced at her watch, an expensive Cartier. “Goes without saying there’ll be generous terms and conditions.”
“Well, thank you but, no, thank you.”
“You don’t have to decide straight away.”
“The answer’s the same.”
Her smile lost some of its light. Tight creases appeared at the corners of her mouth. It was enough, Tallis thought. She’d briefly shown her cards; she hadn’t banked on him refusing her kind invitation. “Don’t be too hasty, Paul. This could be your chance to redeem yourself.”
“Redeem myself?”