Mochaccino. Cappuccino. Iced Mochachino Latte …
‘It must be Americano,’ he said eventually. ‘That looks the closest.’
‘Americano!’ the girl shouted to her colleague and, given that there were four or five people queueing up behind him, Taploe felt that he could not now change his order.
‘Is that a shot of espresso with plenty of boiling water?’ he asked.
‘That’s right, sir,’ she said, pointing to the counter on her left. ‘Your order’ll be ready in a few minutes. Can I help anyone please?’
Taploe had found a small round table at the rear of the basement where any conversation would be drowned out by the tapping of computer keyboards, the quack and beep of the World Wide Web. Twenty or thirty people, mostly students, were crowding up the seating area.
Taploe sensed Keen before he saw him, a sudden intimation of good taste and disdain moving through the room. He was wearing a long, dark overcoat and carrying a small white cup of espresso in his right hand. Taploe was reminded of a Tory grandee.
‘Christopher,’ he said.
‘Stephen.’ Taploe’s view of his joe was already coloured by the basic antipathy that existed between the organizations to which both men had dedicated the bulk of their working lives. But the sense Keen gave off of living in an infallible bubble of privilege added a particular hostility to his contempt.
‘Did you find the place all right?’ he asked.
‘No problem at all. But it’s bloody cold outside. They say it might snow.’
‘Well, thank you for agreeing to the meeting at such short notice.’ Taploe sipped at his coffee but found that it was still too hot to drink. ‘I hope we didn’t put you out.’
‘Not at all. I have a dinner engagement in the West End at nine o’clock. The timing was rather convenient.’
Slowly, Taploe drew the tips of his fingers across the wooden surface of the table. It was an unconscious manifestation of his anxiety, and he was irritated with himself for showing it.
‘Can I get you anything from upstairs?’
Taploe could not think why he had asked the question. Keen simply lowered his eyes and indicated his espresso with a downward nod of the head.
‘Oh yes, of course.’
There was an embarrassed silence that Taploe eventually broke.
‘This shouldn’t take long,’ he said. ‘It was just to find out about your enquiries.’
Keen could see a Japanese student poring over notes held in a loose-leaf folder to the right of his chair. If Taploe considered this a secure environment in which to talk, he would take that on trust, but keep his remarks general to the point of being obtuse. Christian names. No specifics. Operational shorthands.
‘My view is very straightforward,’ he said. ‘If the lawyer is involved to any extent with the Russian organization then my son knows nothing about it. That would indicate to me that this is something that is happening only at the very highest level within the company. That is to say, only Thomas and perhaps Sebastian know anything about it.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘Body language. A certain openness about the way he answered my questions. No obvious nerves. As our American friends might put it, Mark is out of the loop.’
By his expression, Taploe seemed unconvinced.
‘What did he say about the lawyer?’ he asked.
‘Nothing that you won’t already know. Bit of a chancer, man about town. Taste for what certain people regard as the finer things in life. Champagne, oysters, bliads.’
Keen assumed correctly that Taploe would recognize the Russian slang for prostitute.
‘Is that right?’ He pursed out his lips. ‘To what extent is he involved in that when he’s in Russia?’
‘Happens mostly in Moscow, by the sound of it. You know the form. They hang around the hotel lobbies and mezzanine floors, looking for businessmen with a wedding ring …’
Taploe essayed an exaggerated frown, as if the moral implications of Macklin’s behaviour had briefly overwhelmed him. He looked visibly disappointed.
‘And is Mark involved with them as well?’
‘Good God, no.’
Keen’s reply was abrupt and Taploe wondered if he might have offended him. He found himself saying ‘Of course, sorry,’ and then again resented his own awkwardness. A clatter of schoolgirls came down into the basement bearing tall beakers of coffee. One had a lit cigarette in her hand and was smoking it without skill, like someone sucking on the end of a pencil.
‘Is that an area you’re investigating?’ Keen asked. ‘Women being trafficked from eastern Europe, Russia and so on?’
Taploe’s eyes flicked across to the Japanese student who was still engrossed in his notes. Next to him, about three feet away, sat a vast man in his late thirties – surely American – dressed head to toe in Reebok sportswear. He was slowly typing an email using only the index finger of his left hand.
‘It’s certainly a possibility,’ he said, and swallowed a long intake of still-hot coffee. The roof of his mouth throbbed. ‘Did Mark add anything else in connection to that?’
‘Only that Thomas fools around with them in his hotel room. Perhaps he gets a discount.’
Taploe did not smile.
‘The impression I was given,’ Keen continued, ‘is that our lawyer friend is somewhat overwhelmed by the glamour of the way things work over there, the influence those boys wield. Unchecked power and unlimited violence. Excessive privilege for the select few. Free access to money, girls, narcotics, fast cars, restaurants; he’s in thrall to it all. The adrenalin, you see? Nothing like it over here, back in the old country.’
‘Yes,’ was all that Taploe managed to say, though everything that Keen was telling him fitted the emerging profile of Thomas Macklin. London surveillance had revealed nothing out of the ordinary: an on–off girlfriend (a receptionist in the City), the occasional escort, no tendency to gamble, a mild, recreational cocaine habit. He had an enthusiasm for lap-dancing and expensive clothes, few close friends, and a tendency to become aggressive when drunk. Macklin paid his bills regularly, but at any one time his major credit card – Visa – was never less than two or three thousand pounds in the red. He had sufficient funds in other bank accounts to pay the debt off, but for some reason failed to do so; Paul Quinn, Taploe’s closest associate on the case, had put this down to little more than negligence. There was nothing unusual about Macklin’s phone records, either at work, from home or on his mobile, save for the fact that he always called his Kukushkin contact in London from public telephone boxes, from which the calls were harder to trace. That, at the very least, hinted at a degree of concealment. The Internet, thus far, had revealed little that Quinn and Taploe did not already know: Macklin used email frequently, but only to stay in touch with developments within Libra worldwide. There had been nothing of any consequence to the ongoing investigation in the analysis
