Proof of Life

by R.J. Ellory

Genres: Thrillers; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

THE GRIPPING ESPIONAGE THRILLER FROM AWARD-WINNER RJ ELLORY
'Tense, atmospheric, totally belivable' The Sun

The mission was supposed to be simple.

Stroud is a former war photographer who left the frontline before his luck ran out. His closest friend and mentor, Vincent Raphael, was not so fortunate.

To prove his friend is dead.

When Raphael is allegedly sighted in Istanbul - six years after his death - Stroud is drawn back into a life that nearly destroyed him. So begins a journey that takes him from the Balkans to the Netherlands, from Berlin to Paris, as he hunts down the truth.

But first he'll have to prove he ever existed . . .

With his every move closely monitored by international intelligence agencies, Stroud is on the trail of a revelation that will make him question everything he has ever believed . . .

'This tense, atmospheric, totally believable thriller harks back to the golden age of espionage but is also about how well we really know our friends' THE SUN

* * * * *
PRAISE FOR RJ ELLORY

'Thriller writing of the very highest order' GUARDIAN
'In the top flight of crime writing' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 416

Sample

1

Airports, like crowded cities, seemed a perfect contradiction to Stroud.

People escaping, people returning, the swollen hearts of tearful separations and long-awaited reunions, emotions exaggerated inside an endless wave of anonymity: at once both the crossroads of humanity and yet somehow the loneliest places on earth.

From a bench in Schiphol Airport, Stroud watched faces and eyes and body language. A girl alone, beautifully fragile. A small man, muscle-bound and furious, patience tested in every direction as he hurried his wife and children along the concourse. An elderly luggage attendant, carrying not only the world-weariness of someone to whom things just happened, but also the knowledge that he was powerless to change them.

Stroud wanted a drink, badly. He wanted another cigarette but had smoked too many already. He had decided to go back to London and face the music. If he knew one thing, it would not be a melody he wished to hear.



In truth, Stroud’s primary motivation for leaving Amsterdam was money. The flight, the hotel, the promise of a further two hundred pounds just for showing up. ‘No obligation, no expectation,’ he’d been told. Marcus Haig, subeditor at the foreign department of The Times. Long ago, they’d been compatriots. Despite the time, the distance, the memories they both wished to forget but perhaps never would, they’d remained friends.

‘Just come and talk to me, Stroud. Let me tell you what’s happened, and you can decide if you want to get involved.’

Involved didn’t sound like something he wished to become.

‘Two hundred pounds. Cash.’

‘No promises, right?’

‘Christ almighty, Stroud, just get on the sodding plane, will you?’



No matter where he went, Stroud carried the same things. His cleanest dirty shirt, his ever-faithful camera, his notebooks, his pens. He carried shadows and awkward memories, moments of his life that seemed hollow and unrelated to anyone or anything else.

Behind him were a number of failed relationships, none so significant or burdensome as his marriage, the bitter divorce that followed, the daughter he’d left behind. Eva. A girl he’d not seen in a decade. As had been said, it would all be okay in the end. If it wasn’t okay, it just wasn’t the end.

Stroud wanted to believe this. He needed to believe it.



The flight out of Schiphol was delayed. Stroud found a bar, drank two doubles, smoked three more cigarettes. The news played on TV in the background. The Israeli Defense Forces had pulled off a rescue mission at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Two hundred and forty-six passengers and twelve flight crew had originally departed from Tel Aviv. A layover in Athens saw a further fifty-six passengers and four hijackers board the aircraft. The hijackers took control, diverting the plane to Benghazi for refuelling, and then continuing to Entebbe. Once there, a number of hostages were released – the elderly, the sick, mothers with children. They were flown to Paris, and it was from these people that Mossad had secured their intelligence. Full details were not known and would not be known for some time. Regardless, an Israeli mission had been initiated, and the hostages had been rescued with negligible collateral damage. Prime Minister Rabin and Defence Minister Peres were outwardly resolute, inwardly jubilant.



Stroud was thirty-seven, looked at least forty-five. He had covered everything from Khrushchev in the US, the Belgian Congo, the OAS insurrection in Algeria, the Paris riots of ’68, Biafra, Yom Kippur and Palestine to the Black September hostage crisis at the Munich Olympics. Between March of ’65 and February of ’68, he’d been into Vietnam nine times. In March of ’75, just a little more than a year ago, he’d been asked to cover the fall of Da Nang. He’d refused. By that time, too many seams had come undone.

For the last year he had drifted without anchor. Prague, Paris, a couple of weeks back in London, back again to Paris and then south for warmth and wine. In Montpellier he had met a girl. Elise Durand. She was from Marseilles, so there was fire and violence in her blood. Stroud was English: stubborn, prone to bouts of harsh self-criticism, so quick to find blame elsewhere. Hard now to say which of them was more damaged. Their relationship had been a car crash of personalities. Drunken sex, hangover arguments, often unnecessarily recriminatory and bitter. With hindsight, even though it was only three months in the rear-view, Stroud knew that neither and both of them were to blame. Their union had been one of strangers, to one another and to themselves. The person he’d been with Elise was now someone he would not recognise. As was the case with so many love affairs, people tried so very hard to be that which was desired, forgetting who they really were in the process.

Leaving Montpellier, Stroud had headed for Amsterdam. Despite its supposedly libertarian and free-thinking reputation, he found the city self-absorbed and unengaging. He had stayed in a series of shabby hotels, money running out fast, and when Marcus Haig had called him, he had been down to his last few hundred guilder. He had considered fleeing the hotel, but they’d checked his passport on arrival. Haig – one-time foreign correspondent, a man who’d dodged bullets and venereal disease on three continents – was settled in London, holding down a nine-to-five, married, a family, and yet requiring of help for some unspecified task. If he had called Stroud, then whatever he had in mind was foolhardy and potentially fatal, and he had run out of options.

Stroud had worked with Haig on the Sharpeville massacre in March of 1960. They’d covered the Elisabethville killings in the Congo, the Greek–Cypriot war just four years later, and together they’d watched the horrors of Biafra unfold. The last time they’d shared column inches was in Dacca. In an attempt to subvert Bangladesh’s hopes for independence, Pakistan had resorted to genocide of the Bengalis. For Haig, it had been the last in a long line of horrors. ‘If I stay, I will lose my mind or my life,’ he’d said, and left the next day.

Haig was a good man – tough, uncompromising, yet somehow forgiving of others where he would not forgive himself. He was a professional, through and through, and Stroud didn’t resent the man his Chelsea flat, nor his weekend place in St Albans. Of course, the wife had money. She came from a long line of money. Haig had been seduced and tamed by it.



It was through Haig that Stroud had met his wife. His ex-wife, to be exact. Marcus Haig and Julia Montgomery were cousins, and Haig had been the inadvertent catalyst that brought them together.

For Stroud, Julia Montgomery had represented everything he had once believed unreachable.

For Julia, Stroud had been a challenge, perhaps more of a challenge than she’d anticipated. Each promised the other a life they could never have otherwise had.

What he’d imagined he would find in her he didn’t know, and still didn’t understand. Perhaps some kind of peace, some sense that not everyone in the world was hell-bent on self-destruction. What she had found in him was the absence of routine and predictability, at first exciting, after a while merely exhausting and fraught with worry.

‘You have a death wish,’ she said. ‘It’s not normal.’

‘You didn’t marry me for normal.’

‘Sometimes I wonder what I did marry you for.’

‘Because you thought you could make me into the husband you really wanted.’

‘You weren’t this cynical when we met.’

‘You weren’t this complicated.’

‘I can’t talk to you. And frankly, I have lost the will to listen.’

And Stroud – weary, a little battered, feeling like a stranger in his own life – would smile and say no more.

They’d met in 1960. Between coverage of Berliners escaping the east in April and Belgians fleeing across the Congo River, Stroud had been back in London. A private art exhibition in Kensington, his attendance secured by Haig’s promise of infinite free booze and good-looking, unattached rich girls. He had gone, was immediately out of place in leather jacket and shabby boots, spent much of the time haunting the open bar, glass of Scotch in his hand, listening to people he didn’t understand talk about pictures that made no sense.

‘You don’t belong here.’

That was Julia Montgomery’s opening line.

‘There are very few places I do belong.’

She smiled and introduced herself, said she was Marcus’s cousin.

‘I’m Stroud.’

‘What’s your first name?’

‘I’m just Stroud. Have always been called Stroud. I don’t answer to anything else.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘Honestly? Haig told me there’d be an infinite supply of free booze and good-looking single rich girls.’

Julia smiled. ‘I might be one of those good-looking single rich girls he promised.’

‘How rich are you?’

She laughed suddenly, sprayed Stroud’s sleeve with champagne. She grabbed a serviette. ‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That’s pretty disgusting.’

‘If having pretty rich girls spray you with champagne is disgusting, then all I can say is that you’ve led a very sheltered life.’

‘You’re one of Marcus’s war junkies, aren’t you?’

‘Is that how we’re known?’

‘Isn’t that what you are? I mean, seriously, why would you want to risk life and limb in some godforsaken hellhole on the other side of the world that no one even knows about?’

‘So that people do know about it.’

She looked at him wilfully, held his stare. She was beautiful, no doubt, but there was something cold and aloof and altogether disconnected about her.

‘And you really think what you do makes a difference?’

‘I don’t want that discussion with you,’ Stroud said. ‘You have your own thing. Your wine-tasting and your art galleries and whatever. We’re just different people who are interested in very different things.’ He nodded towards a gaggle of suited business types on the other side of the room. ‘And to be honest, I’m not really into the sort of conversations you have with trust-fund wankers.’

Julia didn’t flinch.

‘Why are you still here?’ Stroud asked.

‘I’m waiting for you to get a pen.’

‘A pen? Why do I need a pen?’

‘So you can write down my phone number, you belligerent arsehole.’

Stroud smiled. ‘Just tell me. I’ll remember.’

She told him. He remembered. He called her the next day. He took a taxi, paid for on arrival, and he went up to her Knightsbridge flat where they smoked weed and fucked like teenagers.

Stroud married Julia in August of 1961. Her family disapproved. She didn’t care. At least not at first. But when his lifestyle and habits gave her cause for aggravation, she never missed an opportunity to remind him of how she really should have taken her parents’ advice.

‘I should have listened,’ she said.

‘You don’t listen to anyone but yourself,’ he countered.

And so it went on. It was not a bad marriage. Not at all. It was just a marriage that perhaps should never have happened. They didn’t hate one another. Even their fights were strangely half-hearted. They could have been great friends, and had it stayed that way they probably would have been great friends for the rest of their lives.

Ultimately, the only truly good and worthwhile thing to come out of the marriage – aside from memories of those first wild, passionate months – was Eva, born in May of ’62. Their divorce was finalised in September of 1966.

The judge decided that Stroud was ‘neither capable nor equipped to provide a stable domestic environment in which the nurturing of a child could be accomplished’.

Stroud couldn’t disagree. Besides, his legal counsel was no match for Montgomery money. Julia got sole custody.

Haig stayed out of it, taking neither one side nor the other.

Eva was now fourteen. A while ago Stroud had waited outside her school and watched her leave. She was tall and beautiful like her mother, but she seemed to possess more substance. Delusion it might have been, but he knew that there was something of himself in his daughter, something that would soften and temper the harder facets that Julia wore for the world. If he could only have talked to his daughter – really talked to her – he knew he would have been able to make her understand. He had not left her; he had been excommunicated. He had not abandoned her; he had been cast out into the wilderness for various crimes, some revealed, others not. He appreciated one thing, however: she was Eva Stroud, not Eva Montgomery. Understanding Julia as he did, that must have been Eva’s choice. He had been there for the first four years of his daughter’s life. They had been inseparable. Perhaps there was still a true connection, despite the distance, despite the silence. Stroud so desperately wanted Eva back in his life. He had convinced himself that the sentiment was reciprocated.



On the plane, he drank more. More than he should have, but when did he not? If it was there, he would drink it. If it wasn’t, he would find a way to make it there. The blunt fist of alcohol facilitated selective amnesia. He remembered things the way he wanted to, leaving out those moments when he had been the architect of his own undoing. It was a pretence, and he knew it. A lie that he just kept on telling.

One day he would stop drinking, or perhaps it would stop him.



It was gone seven in the evening when Stroud landed. He found a phone kiosk on the airport concourse and called Haig.

‘Where are you?’

‘Outside the airport,’ Stroud said. ‘The flight was delayed. Do you want me to come over to the office?’

‘I have something to do. Let’s meet in the morning.’

‘I don’t have anywhere to stay.’

‘But you have money? You must have enough to get a hotel room.’

‘I’ve got about thirty quid, but it’s in guilders.’

‘Jesus Christ, Stroud.’

Stroud said nothing.

‘Do you know the Grange in Covent Garden?’

‘I can find it.’

‘I’ll call them, get you a room.’

‘Thanks, Marcus.’

‘Bloody hell, Stroud, you really need to pull yourself together.’

‘I’ve been busy. I’ll get to it.’

Marcus hung up.



Stroud changed his guilders for sterling and took the Underground into London. The city was suffering a record-setting heatwave. Stepping out into the street, Stroud was sideswiped by the humidity. It didn’t serve to improve the place, nor heal the psychic bruises it had left him with. Though it had been his home for more years than anywhere else on the globe, he didn’t like it. To Stroud, London represented more loss and grief than any other place in the world. It was here that his life had unravelled. It was here that demons awaited his return from whichever far-flung corner of the world he had last tried to escape from them.

Stroud walked streets that had forgotten what it was like to be rained on, the sky between the too-high buildings a featureless gunmetal grey. He found the hotel. Haig had been as good as his word and there was a room for him, though he guessed it was the cheapest in the place. Breakfast was not included.

‘Would sir like a wake-up call?’ the receptionist asked.

‘Thank you, no,’ Stroud replied. ‘Sir would not.’



For a while, Stroud lay awake. The window open or closed, it made no difference. His head hurt. Everything hurt, and the heat just served to exaggerate it. The only reason for being here was because he wanted to know what was worth two hundred pounds to Marcus Haig. It was going to be trouble. Of that he was sure. But what was the worst that could happen? No wife, no family, no house, no money, no job, no prospects. Maybe he was just one step away from having nothing left to lose.

It was with this thought that he fell asleep.

2

‘You look bloody awful.’

‘That’s the welcome I get?’

‘Did you run up some horrendous bar tab at the Grange?’

‘No, Marcus, I went to bed.’

‘Alone?’

‘No, Marcus, with your mother.’

Marcus smiled. ‘What the hell were you doing in Amsterdam?’

‘Looking for the meaning of life.’

‘And you thought it might be prostitutes and grass?’

Stroud looked surprised. ‘It isn’t?’

Haig got up and walked to the window. The view of the city was the same through so many other windows in so many other offices. The view came with the salary, the agreement, the compromise. Stroud doubted he would ever want such a view.

‘So, why am I here?’

‘I’ll get to that,’ Haig said. ‘First, tell me how you’ve been?’

‘Eating badly, sleeping badly, drinking a bit too much.’ Stroud paused. ‘Or maybe too little, depending on your perspective. Single, lonely, broke. Don’t see Eva, not much hope of seeing Eva. Aside from that, there’s been some bad stuff as well.’ He restrained himself from asking Haig about Julia. He didn’t want to find out that she no longer even mentioned him.

‘Whatever else you may have lost, your sense of humour remains,’ Haig said.

‘When that goes, it will herald the End of Days.’

‘And work?’

‘Usual things. Freelance bits and pieces, a couple of editorials. I even did a piece for your magazine.’

‘You did. It was good. Not great, but good.’

‘I am overawed by the generosity of your compliment.’

Haig was quiet for a little while. To Stroud it seemed that he was weighing his words before he voiced them.

‘Are you in trouble, Marcus?’

Haig smiled, then laughed. ‘I gave up getting into trouble when I stopped hanging out with people like you.’

‘But you miss it, right? The rush, the uncertainty, the feeling that everything pulls at you and nothing holds you back.’

Haig didn’t reply. He was still pensive, his attention on his motive for summoning Stroud from Amsterdam.

‘Seriously,’ Stroud said. ‘You’re all right?’

Haig waved the question aside.

‘How’s Cathy? The kids?’

‘Cathy is fine. The kids?’ Haig smiled. ‘Noisy. Expensive.’

He returned to his desk, opened the drawer, took from it a bundle of tenners. He flicked through it, then slid it across to Stroud.

‘Two hundred. Get a haircut, some decent clothes, for God’s sake. You really do look like the rough end of a bad party.’

Stroud pocketed the money. He lit a cigarette and waited.

‘Okay,’ Haig said. ‘In at the deep end. Vincent Raphael.’

Stroud looked up suddenly. Of all the names he’d imagined he would hear, Raphael’s was the last.

‘What about him?’ A strange sense of disorientation invaded Stroud. He felt on edge, uncomfortable.

‘He saved your life.’

Stroud nodded. ‘More than once.’

‘When did you first meet him?’

He shook his head. ‘Why? What does it matter? Why are you asking me about Raphael?’

‘Humour me, Stroud. If for no other reason than the two hundred quid.’

‘I met him here,’ Stroud said. ‘The Times employed him. You know this. You were with us. We did the Transvaal and Brazzaville together. And Cyprus. You were there in Cyprus with us too.’

‘But I didn’t cover Jordan in 1970.’

‘No. So what?’

‘So I wasn’t there when he died.’

Stroud frowned. ‘Why are you asking me questions that you already know the answers to?’

‘I know you were close. You worked together, did all those trips to Vietnam, then Stanleyville, then the Paris riots. But how close?’

‘I don’t know what you’re asking, Marcus. The man was my mentor, my best friend. He saved my fucking life more times than I can recall. Anything I ever did that was worth something in this lousy business was because of what he taught me.’

‘Right,’ Haig said. ‘Right.’

‘Tell me what the hell is going on, Marcus. Tell me why I’m here, or I’m leaving.’

Haig looked up. There was something in his expression – a toughness, a sense of resolute determination – that Stroud had not seen for a long time.

‘No one really knows what happened to him, do they?’

‘Yes, they do. He was killed. Some say murdered. A grenade went through the window of his Land Rover and that was that.’

‘And he had half a dozen jerry cans full of petrol in there. According to reports, there was nothing left, not only of Raphael but of the car as well.’ Haig paused. ‘Right?’

Stroud closed his eyes. He didn’t like where this was going.

‘You and I both know that there was no body for them to send home. They buried an empty coffin in a small graveyard in Hereford and that was that. He was like you in the end. No wife, no parents, no one who really gave a damn except us, and we were too stunned and grief-stricken to consider any possibility but what we were told.’

‘Are you telling me that what happened and what we were told were not the same thing, Marcus?’

‘There have been rumours.’

‘There were always rumours. It was nothing but rumours for months after he died. But that was six years ago. Six years.’

‘I know how long ago it was.’

‘So what makes whatever rumour you’ve heard now any different from the rumours back then?’

Haig opened the desk drawer again. From it he took a single photograph. He looked at it for a moment, and then passed it to Stroud.

A street. Somewhere in the Balkans, perhaps. The image was small and blurred, but there appeared to be two men on the corner.

‘This is where? Macedonia? Greece?’

‘Turkey,’ Haig said. ‘Istanbul.’

‘You’re saying that one of these men is Raphael?’

‘I’m saying that the person who took the picture says that one of those men is Raphael.’

‘And who took the picture?’

‘I can’t tell you. Let’s just say it’s someone who would be in the business of being more sure than I am about something like this.’

‘And the other man?’

‘Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations.’

‘You mean Mossad.’ Stroud paused. ‘So if whoever took this picture would be in the business of knowing the identity of a British newspaperman, and he was also interested in a Mossad presence in Turkey, we’re talking Special Intelligence Service.’

Haig remained silent.

‘So, someone from MI6 tipped you off that Raphael was in Istanbul talking to someone from Mossad?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘Then how did you get the picture, Marcus?’

‘Look, there may be nothing in it, okay? People get interested, jump to conclusions. Sometimes people have to jump to conclusions so those conclusions can be verified one way or the other.’

‘So what are you asking me to do? Go to Istanbul and find out if Raphael is still alive?’

For a few moments there was silence.

Haig didn’t need to speak for Stroud to get his answer.

‘You are out of your mind.’

‘I am well aware that that may be how it appears.’

Stroud turned the picture towards Haig. ‘This could be you and me. This could be anyone. This is complete crap, Marcus. Raphael is dead. He died outside Karameh, near the Allenby Bridge. His fucking car blew up and there was nothing left of him.’

‘You saw it happen.’

‘Fuck off, Marcus. You know I didn’t see it happen.’

‘Don’t you wonder? Even now? Not even a fleeting thought?’

Stroud sighed audibly. He got up from the chair. He patted his pocket. ‘Thanks for the contribution to the Stroud salvation fund. I’m going to use some of it to buy a plane ticket, if that’s okay with you, but it sure as hell won’t be to Istanbul.’

‘Before you go, there’s something else.’

Stroud shook his head. ‘I don’t want to know, Marcus.’

‘I think maybe you do.’

Stroud sat down again. He lit another cigarette.

‘The French are after him.’

‘What? All of them?’

Haig smiled wryly. ‘How much do you know about French intelligence?’

‘Aside from the fact that that opens up another line of wisecracks entirely, I’d say very little.’

‘Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. That is… was France’s external intelligence agency. They go all the way back to the late forties. Before that they have a history through the Free French spy network in the Second World War and the Deuxième Bureau. Anyway, back in the autumn of 1965, a Moroccan politician by the name of Mehdi Ben Barka went missing in Paris. He was the head of the National Union of Popular Forces. Anti-monarchists, nationalists, far more extreme than the more established republicans. The guy vanished. Not a trace. French intelligence was implicated. There were rumours that Barka had been kidnapped and murdered by the DGSE. And so the DGSE and its overall administrative senior office were placed under the jurisdiction of the French Ministry of Defence. In essence, the Ministry of Defence is now French external intelligence.’

‘And these are the people who are looking for Raphael?’

‘Strenuously.’

‘Why? And what gives them any reason to believe that he’s still alive? Surely more than a grainy picture of two people who could be just about anyone.’

‘We don’t know.’

‘We? Who’s we, Marcus? I feel like I’m in the middle of something written by Fleming or Le Carré.’

‘It’s just an expression, Stroud. I don’t know, okay?’

Stroud looked at Haig. He didn’t know what to think, didn’t know what to feel. The whole thing was sufficiently ridiculous for him to give it no credence. He and Raphael had been joined at the hip. There was only one man who had carried a wilder reputation than Stroud himself, and that had been Raphael. He had been the catalyst for so much in Stroud’s career. That he could still be alive was beyond belief. They had lived together, travelled together, almost died together a hundred times. There was no way that Raphael would not have contacted him in the last six years.

Stroud couldn’t afford to invest any emotion in the idea that Vincent Raphael was alive. He was dead, plain and simple.

‘MI6, Mossad, French Ministry of Defence,’ Haig said. ‘And The Times, of course.’

‘And Uncle Tom Cobley and all,’ Stroud added, doing nothing to mask his cynicism. ‘I’m not interested, Marcus. I don’t care who wants to know. I am not buying the possibility that Raphael is alive.’

Haig paused before speaking. He looked towards the window, the view beyond, and then he cleared his throat. ‘Okay, for argument’s sake, let’s just say he was alive. What would that mean?’

‘I have no idea, Marcus.’

‘It would mean something to you, right? That he hadn’t contacted you? After everything you experienced together, I mean.’

‘You have no idea what we experienced together.’

‘But you do, and so does he. Aren’t you curious… beyond curious to know what could have been so important as to make him vanish like that, to contact no one?’

Stroud paused for just a moment, and then he got up.

‘I’m not even slightly convinced, Marcus.’

‘That’s exactly why I am asking you. You’re not caught up in the myth of Vincent Raphael…’

Stroud shook his head and smiled. Haig fell silent.

‘It’s been good to see you, Marcus. I think you did the right thing, getting out of this ridiculous game. Maybe we’ll catch up another time, eh?’

‘Two thousand pounds.’

Stroud couldn’t conceal his surprise.

‘You heard me. That’s over and above the two hundred I just gave you. Flights, hotels, expenses all covered, and a flat fee of two thousand pounds to find Vincent Raphael. Either find him, or prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that he really is dead.’

‘You are actually serious.’

‘As serious as it’s possible to be.’

‘Why, Marcus? Why are you even giving this your attention?’

‘Because I want to know, Stroud. I want to know what happened. I want to know what he knows. If he did survive Jordan and has been playing dead all these years, what has he been hiding from? You have any idea how big a story that could be? Maybe not as big as finding Lucan, but it would sure as hell sell some papers. The mere fact that MI6 say he’s talking to Mossad, and then we get word that the French are looking for him but won’t say why… Just that alone is enough to get me very, very interested.’

Stroud stood in silence. He knew that Haig could hear his thoughts – loud as church bells.

‘Two thousand pounds.’

‘Two thousand pounds,’ Haig repeated.

‘Flights, hotels, expenses.’

‘Everything except bar tabs.’

Stroud smiled.

‘Not a joke, Stroud. No bar tabs.’

Stroud didn’t reply. A million thoughts went through his head. He was feeling things he hadn’t felt in years.

‘So?’

He looked up. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But I’m doing it to prove, once and for all, that he really is dead.’

‘What do you need?’

‘Photos of him. Clean-shaven, bearded, short hair, long hair. Just give me whatever you’ve got. I’ll need a couple of lenses. Telephotos. I need another two hundred in cash, an agreement on how I get the rest of the money, whatever visas I need for Turkey. I need a day to pack. I’ll leave tomorrow. Get someone to book me a flight. One-way. Cheapest seat. I don’t want it known that I’m going, and I don’t want to draw attention to my reason for being there.’

‘Your passport is up to date?’

Stroud smiled. ‘You know me, Marcus. That’s pretty much the only up-to-date thing in my life.’

3

It all came back. The heat, the smell, the atmosphere. Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. By whichever name it went, it would always be far beyond anything that could be expressed in words alone. Some said that it was impossible to see this