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Chapter Two: Joy of Life
They always looked so nervous when it was their first time. Ros could see the man standing by the joy of life fountain, looking in each and every direction. Jumpy and jittery, he couldn't seem to hold still. He may as well be wearing a big sign saying "I am a spy". To end his misery a little sooner, she quickened her pace as she walked the circumference of the fountain; glancing into the poisonous green waters, keeping him in her line of vision until he was blocked by the statues in the centre. A few paces later and he reappeared again. This close up, she could see the package in his hands. If that was meant for her, she'd have to teach him the dead drop as a matter of urgency. Luckily for them both, however, Hyde Park was relatively quiet. It was Tuesday morning, too early for the dipsos and too late for the dog walkers.
As she drew closer her footsteps drew his attention, the man's restive gaze flitted onto her and he clocked her looking back at him. Eye contact was made, just enough to make him wonder whether she, Ros, was the one. She, naturally, had already checked him out, but as a first timer, he had no idea about her. He quickly looked away again, as though worried he may be mistaken and didn't want to appear rude by gawping at a lone woman walking in the park.
"Christopher Goodwin?" she asks, although she's certain he's the same man as in the photograph Ruth showed her. Tall, sparsely built, early forties and greying brown hair.
He immediately jumps to attention. "Yes, are you from M-"
"Yes, I am," she curtly cuts over him. "To the bench."
Ros neither stopped nor slowed down, expecting him to follow. But her footsteps were not joined by his.
"Is – is that code for something?" his voice sounded from behind her.
Still with her back to the man, Ros rolled her eyes.
"Yes," she briskly replied. "Code for: 'my feet are killing me and I want to sit down.'"
Still without turning; ignoring his stammered apologies, Ros sat on the nearby bench. Eventually, Christopher joined her. When he was finally up to speed, Ros showed her ID card, proving where she had come from.
"So, you have some information you think might be of interest to us?"
He nodded. "Yes…" he trailed off, his brow furrowing deeply. "I mean, I think I do. I don't know. I don't know if I'm doing the right thing, or if I'm going to the right people. I mean, I-"
"Mister Goodwin," Ros cut over him again. "Just tell me what it is and if we can't help you, I'll put you on to those who can."
That seemed to calm him down. He took a few deep breaths as he handed her the package. It was just a disc. A plain DVD disc he'd probably burned off himself.
"You probably already know I'm head of public relations at D'Vere's jewellers," he began, glancing sidelong at her.
"Yes, congratulations on the promotion last month," she replied, revealing just how much she already knew. She was curious about this man, it wasn't often that someone in the diamond trade had a conscience.
"Well, that's just it," he explained. "They sent me out to their mine in Sierra Leone and, well, the footage is on that disc."
Ros hid her disappointment. "If you have concerns about third world working conditions, the Fair Trade Foundation are probably your best bet-"
"No! It's not that; well, okay, that's part of it," he replied, quickly as though he'd anticipated such a brush off. "What I need to tell you is that, on record, D'Vere's does not mine diamonds from Sierra Leone. What I found out is that they're mining diamonds at a fraction of their market value from an illegal mine – ten miles north of Freetown – run by ex-soldiers who fought in the Civil War. The diamonds are smuggled to Antwerp, Switzerland or, if Europe is too risky, Liberia. The rough diamonds are registered there, given the paper work and documentation there, and that is where we officially – er, on paper, if you like – buy them from; that becomes their new country of origin. It avoids awkward questions about blood diamonds."
Now Ros was interested. "But, the Kimberly Process filters out such illegally mined or conflict diamonds, doesn't it?" She knew she sounded naïve, but she had to ask. All she knew for sure was that the Kimberly Process was intended as such, and that Angola and Sierra Leone were both signatory countries to that trade agreement. Understandable, given the sheer brutality of the diamond wars fought in both countries during the 80s and 90s.
"The Kimberly Process isn't worth the paper it's written on," he stated, turning to look at her fully. Now that he'd said what he needed to say, he seemed more confident. "It is down to the consumer to ensure the diamonds they buy are Kimberly certified. And, as I said, companies can get around it by buying the diamonds in one place, but forging their origin elsewhere. Even places in Europe where no diamonds are harvested. No one is asking questions."
"Did you hear what the proceeds of these diamonds is being spent on?" she asked, keeping her voice low.
Christopher ran trembling hands through his hair and sighed. "I'm sorry," he replied, remorsefully. "I didn't think, I… I just didn't know what to do. All I could think of was secret filming and it's all on that disc-"
"You've done well, Christopher," she assured him after seeing his continued nerves. "You've done the right thing."
It sounded more like it was a job for Six, rather than Five. But it didn't matter, she would get it to the right people once she'd checked out the footage on the disc.
"Thanks," he said, flatly.
"Look, Christopher, with the information you've given me," she said. "You're more than likely to get a call from us, or Six, asking you to dig up more information. You'll have to go back to work, act completely normal, say nothing to anybody and turn spy on your own employer. The risks are huge. Do you think you can do that?"
"Yes," he replied, visibly pulling himself together. "I can't do nothing. Not after what I saw. Watch what's on that disc, and you'll understand."
Without having yet viewed the footage, Ros just responded with a brief nod of agreement.
"This is it, for now," she said, getting back to her feet. "We'll be in touch."
Ruth leafed through the pages of the file she was reading, resolutely ignoring Harry as he passed between his office and the kitchen, or crossed the Grid to speak with one of the other agents. She could feel his gaze raking over her every time he passed, but she kept her head down and, without realising, read the same line of text several times without actually taking in a single iota of its meaning. A loose strand of hair slipped free of its clip, as she sorted the problem Lucas North extricated himself from Harry and fixed her with a red-eyed, pale-faced smile. 'He's hung over', she thought as she watched closed the space between them, 'good'.
He flopped down in the vacant seat beside her own and wheeled himself the rest of the way to her side. Ruth didn't particularly want to have to look at Lucas, either. But he was being persistent. Head propped in hand, he was leaning across the desk looking at her imploringly, attempting to grind her down and, despite herself she was soon struggling against the rising tide of reluctant amusement.
"It's not working, so go away," Ruth sighed, flipping the file closed.
"I'm sorry, it was all my fault," said Lucas.
"Oh, put a gun to his head, did you?"
Harry said he'd be half an hour. Instead, he came rolling home past midnight and half cut. She realised the death of Vaughan Edwards was hardly cause for full mourning clothes and lowering of the flags to half-mast, but she didn't see what there was to go out drinking in celebration, either.
"It wasn't like that," Lucas assured her. "We needed to sort some things out."
Ruth turned to him with a quiet sigh of resignation. Opening the file again, she nudged it over to him and pointed to the first page. Whatever was happening with Harry and her, it would have to wait. Because while she and Harry were honeymooning, Lucas had been relying on Tariq to dig for dirt on the fake Lucas. The young techie had done well, better than Ruth had expected, but there was still only germs of truths and half-stories embedded in a finely cultivated legend. It needed the Analyst's mind to pluck the reality from a tangle of lies.
Lucas looked down at the file, a dark shadow obscuring the clarity in his deep blue eyes as he read the name on the front. His demeanour changed; Ruth could sense him going rigid in his seat as he read over what she had so far. She had gained access to the CIA database, through her magic portal, to dig up more information on the fake Lucas. They had been watching him, but never said anything about the legend. Then there were the prison records, such as they were. She had spent the day making sense of it all.
"There's things we already knew in there," Ruth explained, pointing to sentences she'd high-lighted in pink marker. "He was gun-running between Liberia and Sierra Leone during the late '90s, at the height of the wars in that region." She paused again, to unroll a detailed map of West Africa. Again, there were parts that she'd high-lighted. "Here is Senegal. Once he was finished there, I would say he travelled South through Guinea, which shares a border with both Sierra Leone and Liberia. Through Guinea, he would have had easy access between the two warzones. Large areas of the border were unpatrolled, allowing him to pass through undetected, despite the weapons he was carrying."
"But that was then," Lucas stated, turning to look at her. "What's he up to now?"
Ruth took a deep breath and replied with a rueful shrug.
"That, I haven't been able to find out," she confessed. "He could still be in prison, but I haven't been able to contact the Senegalese authorities yet. If he is out, then he won't be using the Dylan Hughes legend anymore, seeing as he knows that we know about that one."
Lucas' shoulders were hunched up as he squinted back down at the map. He was restless and tense, but small wonder given how mysterious the situation was. "What about the Somali link?" he asked. "Is there anything there?"
"Not after the bombing in Dakar, no," she replied. Ruth carefully pulled the file out from under Lucas' elbow and selected another page. "There. Hughes, who was using the Lucas North legend at that time, was running errands for the Somalis. But that's the opposite side of the continent. I can only surmise that all links to them were severed as soon as the bombing happened. Lucas North, to all intents and purposes, was dead by then."
Lucas ran both hands through his hair, leaning back in his seat. Ruth could see he was still struggling to make sense of everything, as well as growing increasingly frustrated at the lack of information. He looked paler, now. His eyes were bloodshot and lined with dark circles, suddenly making him look older than his years. It was the uncertainty that was getting to him. 'Our doubts are traitors,' she thought to herself.
"We may yet be worrying over nothing," Ruth tried to assure him.
He tried to smile, but managed only a twitch at the corners of his mouth. A reply on his lips that was cut off by the arrival of Ros, stalking purposefully across the Grid. She had him fixed in her line of vision. "Lucas, you're needed," she said, jerking her head towards one of the private offices. With a final nod of thanks, he got up and followed the Section Chief off the Grid. Ruth kept her eye on him as he went, wondering what stone she could possibly upturn next.
Lucas closed the door behind him, triggering the light sensor to reveal a small, cramped space – no bigger than a library cubicle – with a desktop computer locked on the desk. Ros bent over it, tapping in the password without a word of explanation. Space was so limited, he had to press his back against the door to allow her room and kept his gaze fixed firmly on the ceiling. When Ros straightened up again, she looked at him frowning as she reached a moment of indecision.
"Ruth might need to see this," she said, thinking aloud.
Lucas shrugged. "It could get rather intimate with three of us in here," he pointed out.
Evidently, that changed Ros' mind again. She simply reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a DVD before slotting it into the disc tray on the PC unit. While she worked, she gave him no further information.
"Sit," she curtly instructed him, at length.
The two chairs were crammed so close together their legs were interlocked. When Lucas tried to move the one on the left, the one on the right came with it, banging Ros' shins as it went. He stammered a hasty apology over her hissed curses and flushed deeply. They had barely exchanged a word since he arrived back on the Grid, just over a fortnight previously. The tension between them was almost a physical thing. To distract himself from that awkwardness, he focused on separating the chairs and getting them both seated in as much comfort as possible.
Meanwhile, the show had begun. The media player flashed up on the screen, loading the content of the disc.
"It came from an asset at D'Veres," Ros explained as the footage began. "The Asset was sent to Sierra Leone to organise some company affairs and filmed secretly."
Sierra Leone again; the country was beginning to feature far too prominently in Lucas' life for him to be comfortable. The picture was grainy, at first. It blurred before focusing on a row of miners, shackled at the ankles in a vast human chain. They were as poor as the mud and shit they sifted through, dressed in rags and knee deep in a clay grey swamp. Every so often, the lens of the camera – obviously a mobile phone – was obscured by the thumb of the cameraman, blocking the red light to keep the filming secret. After a second or two of darkness, the camera re-focused on the men who patrolled the perimeter of the mine: armed to the teeth with machine guns, they occasionally stopped and lashed out at random workers with the butts of the weapons they held. Lucas studied their faces as best he could. There were no westerners or white men among them and they spoke in heavily accented English, but what they were saying was lost in the poor quality audio. In the background, occasional shots could be heard, but none of the workers on screen fell.
"Whatever that is, it's highly illegal," Lucas remarked, before the footage had ended. "Who are they supplying?"
"D'Veres," she replied, flatly. "My Asset explained it all. The mine the diamonds from here-" she broke off, pointing to the screen. "But they register the origin of the diamonds somewhere else entirely. Usually Liberia. So something's not right about the whole thing. What do you think?"
Lucas considered what he'd seen. If D'Vere's were profiting from an illegal mine being used to fund god knows what, then it was their business. Because they didn't know what it was funding, for all they knew it was funding terrorist attacks on British streets, he knew he had to make it their business. He said as much to Ros, who listened attentively, smiling in satisfaction. When she didn't say anything further, however, he felt his spirits lift.
"Are we going under cover again?" he asked, feeling hopeful.
He hadn't been undercover since before his trip to Tring and the Vaughan Edwards business. Itching to get back to doing what he did best, he was chomping at the bit to get going already, despite not knowing what they were going undercover as. Whoever Ros' asset was, they could surely get them both within the organisation. Ros, however, was still undecided. She was resting one arm against the back of her chair, looking at him without seeing him and lost in her thoughts.
"Definitely undercover," she replied, finally. "But we need to go over it with the others. Leave it with me for now."
That lunchtime, Harry approached Ruth's desk cautiously. He gripped the paper bag containing the Danish pastry like a shield, holding it in front of him so it would be the first thing she saw as he closed in on her station. She kept her head down, the light of the computer making her face pale, two small screens reflected in her pale blue eyes. He wondered if she had genuinely not heard him, she was so lost in her work.
"Peace offering," he said, leaning in to kiss her cheek.
For a second, he thought she was going to be stubborn and persist in her sulk. But she looked up at him in surprise, then a smile lit up her face.
"I knew I still loved you for a reason," she replied, taking the pastry gratefully.
She shuffled aside, letting him take the seat vacated by Lucas just an hour before. Later, he would be taking her home at six, and the paperwork be damned.
"Any luck with our mutual friend?" he asked, returning to the here and now.
"Little," she replied, reaching for the Danish.
"Ros has some interesting intel on diamond mining in the exact same region," he said. "You'll need to look into that, too. Maybe I'm being overly suspicious, but I dislike how all this is coinciding."
He kept trying to tell himself he was being paranoid. But, in his experience, there was no such thing as a coincidence. He wanted every avenue checked for signs of the fake Lucas North, and his murder of Vaughan Edwards has collided with a rise in illegal diamond mining in the same area. There was absolutely nothing of substance to link the two, but none of it sat right with him. In the meantime, however, they had to sit back and wait. The least he could do was make the wait as productive as possible.
"There's all sorts going on in that region, Harry," she said, striking a note of caution. "But we'll keep an open mind."
Before then, he wanted a proper lunch. He hadn't come all that way just to talk diamond mining and ghosts from the past. He Ruth by the hands and gently pulled her out her chair. "Leave it for now," he suggested. "We need to eat." With that, they left the Grid together, reconciled once more.
Sorry for the delay in getting this updated, it's been a busy week. But thanks for reading and reviews would be appreciated.
