Max looked around the workshop. It was in stark contrast to the empty appearance of the front of the unit. The place was heaving with stuff.
‘How much is this kit worth?’
Pete did a comedy blow through his teeth.
‘Probably cost you four hundred grand at today’s prices. I’ve added to it as I’ve gone from task to task. Reason I get so many jobs is because I have everything here.’ Pete pointed around the room. ‘Bugging stuff, scanning gear, jammers, mikes, cameras … This jammer’s worth a few quid,’ he said, picking up a small box.
‘What would you use that for?’
‘I take it on the train. When some twat starts wah-wah-wah-ing it, I jam his phone.’ Pete grinned. ‘Doing loads of cars at the moment. The thieves have worked out where the manufacturers put the tracking devices, so they have them off and ship the cars over to Qatar before you can blink. They won’t find ours though. Only trouble is, most of the time it takes two trips. Nobody’s making bumpers out of metal these days, so we have to go round the night before and glue a metal plate inside the bumper. Then we fix the tracking device the next day with magnets. You see, the tracker has got to be able to see the sky.’
Pete would have chatted all day. He liked people. But he could see Max was ticking. ‘What can I do you for then, mate?’
‘How small a tracker have you got, Pete?’
‘What for? A human?’
‘A painting.’
‘A painting. Hmm. That isn’t so easy.’
‘And it needs to be hidden.’
‘Frame?’
‘No,’ Max said, shaking his head. ‘We don’t have access to the frame. Only the canvas and the wooden stretcher.’
‘You might be in luck. Got the very latest miniature tracker in, a couple of weeks back.’ Pete delved into a drawer, pulled out a few cardboard boxes and then held up something the size of a very thin box of matches.
‘How about this?’
Max nodded. He was pretty confident they’d be able to hide it.
‘That should be okay.’
‘Power, though. That’s the problem with trackers. They need power. How often do you need to contact it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, if you want a constant signal, the battery will run out very quickly. But if we programme it to give off a signal, say, once every five minutes, the battery will last much longer.’
‘Once every hour is more than enough.’
‘How about geo-fencing it?’
‘What?’
‘I can get it to tell you when it’s leaving a certain location.’
Max thought about that, but it sounded too complicated. ‘Once an hour, Pete, that’s all I need.’
‘Okay. We can turn it off, anyway. Which is not a bad idea. It saves the battery and makes it harder to detect. We’ll follow the tracker on the Internet. Through a server based in France. Don’t worry, it will have its own account. No one else can see the information.’
‘Can you follow it for me?’
‘Sure. No problem.’
Nothing was a problem for Pete. Drilling into hotel bedroom walls to place listening probes, installing keyboard loggers into computers, or scanning rooms for listening devices. It all came easy to Pete, as long as he was paid.
Eton
It felt weird, driving under the archway into College Yard. The place hadn’t changed much since it was built in the 1400s. Max appreciated it more now than he had done when he’d walked there every day for the best part of four years.
He pictured himself rushing under the arch in his tails and scholar’s cape. Terrified of being late for a lesson and placed on Tardy Book. Max Ward: one small insignificant dot in Eton’s history. A sometime scholar who’d completely wasted the opportunity to really make something of himself.
He looked at the immaculate lawn – showing the effects of winter now, but he remembered how regimentally striped it always was in the summer. Boys, of course, weren’t allowed to walk on it. He was tempted to saunter across it and see if anyone shouted at him.
You can leave Eton, Max mused, but Eton never leaves you: the ethos, the discipline, the respect, the fear of failure – even when you know you’ve already failed. Ten years on, and he still woke up with issues swirling around his head.
It was the physical aspects of school that he treasured. The smell of the cloisters outside the head master’s study. The organ bellowing out bass tones that reverberated through your ribcage. The vast expanse of playing fields sloping down to the Thames. The rowers thrashing up the river. And the mud being ground into your face while you played the Wall Game.
Strange, Max thought, that the situation he was now in was so closely linked to Eton. If it hadn’t been for the school, he wouldn’t have joined the Office. He wouldn’t have been sent to Saudi – and later to Moscow. And he wouldn’t be in The Hague now.
Pallesson cast a shadow over everything, but the endgame was fast approaching and only one of them was going to come out of this in one piece.
Max checked his watch. He was quarter of an hour early, and he knew that if anything annoyed M. J. Keate more than a boy being late, it was a boy that was early.
Max wondered if the other beaks at Eton realised what a dark horse Keate was. On the surface, a slightly bumbling tutor. But underneath, a covert, active spy. Max knew that Keate was always economical as to the extent of his work with Tryon. But he assumed it was more than he let on.
He walked round the corner, past the school office into the cloister below Upper School. To a passing tourist, the noticeboards stuck on the stone pillars were random information. To Max, the team sheets posted on them had meant the difference between exhilaration and utter depression. He remembered the day he’d walked up to see who else had been picked to play in the first eleven football team, assuming that he was a certainty. But his name hadn’t been on the sheet. Max felt sick even thinking about it now. He walked on through School Yard, past the Founder’s statue into the inner cloister. The last time he’d been here was when he was expelled.
In four years, he’d never taken in the spirit and tranquillity of this quadrangle. Jutting out from the walls were memorials to fallen Old Boys in both wars, dedicated by their mothers and sisters.
For Valour, one large slab of marble read. King Edward VII was quoted: In their lives … they maintained the traditions that have made Eton renowned.
The last Old Etonian, of many, to be awarded the VC caught Max’s eye.
1982 VC Lt Col H Jones Parachute Regiment
‘Colonel
