The Lucifer Network Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Geoffrey Archer

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Geoffrey Archer’s gripping thrillers are inspired by a deep knowledge of international intrigue gathered during more than 25 years of reporting for ITN’s News at Ten. The Lucifer Network is the second novel featuring M16 agent Sam Packer, who first appeared in Fire Hawk. It follows his other international bestsellers: Java Spider, Scorpion Trail, Eagle Trap, Shadow Hunter and Sky Dancer.

  ALSO BY GEOFFREY ARCHER

  Sky Dancer

  Shadow Hunter

  Eagle Trap

  Scorpion Trail

  Java Spider

  Fire Hawk

  The Burma Legacy

  Dark Angel

  The Lucifer Network

  Geoffrey Archer

  This book is dedicated to the RN Submarine Service

  whose pivotal role in great dramas cannot always be

  revealed.

  The Service celebrated its centenary in 2001.

  1

  Zambia

  Tuesday, 25 August 1998

  THE ENGLISHMAN SWITCHED off the engine of the hired car. The emptiness of the parking area in front of the game lodge was broken by a handful of four-wheel-drives. Beyond and above the lattice of trees ringing this small country club a few miles outside Kitwe, the African sky was purple with the start of a still night. Cicadas tickled themselves in the trees. Under the bonnet of his rented Toyota something clinked as it cooled.

  The last time he’d been in Africa the job had been dirty and it was dirty again. The same muck as before. ‘Clearing up’ London had called it. ‘You were in at the start, old son. Only proper you should be there at the end.’

  By rights it was a job for an in-house man, someone under diplomatic cover, but they’d sent him because he was deniable. And because the matter was personal – if the man he’d come to see were to talk and was believed, it would be his head on the block as much as the Service’s, his career at an end.

  The car window was open, the night air still warm but with a freshness not there during the day. Sam Packer wanted a drink. Something large and volatile. But he knew to restrain himself this evening. At the table Jackman would order the house red, because that’s what he always drank here. Brain glue, he called the stuff that came in a deceptively plain bottle from the Cape. A year ago Sam’s headache had been memorable. This time he would limit himself to a single glass. There was a deal to be struck. A man to be got the better of. A man who was unprincipled and full of guile.

  In his late thirties, Sam Packer had a strong, square face with a chiselled chin whose determination was concealed by a close-trimmed beard. He disliked facial hair but had grown it two years ago out of a need to change his appearance. He had thick, dark hair and eyes that seemed distant, yet recorded all they saw. He was a man women tended to take an interest in.

  He watched a Range Rover pull up and four men get out. White men with the look of engineers – here for the copper mines, he guessed. With wives who tinkered with oil paints and did voluntary work at the local school. The group made its way in to the restaurant, bantering gently.

  He knew that decades ago whites fell in love with this sultry continent, never wanting to leave it, but his own experience had been recent and the parts of it he’d seen had smelled of death. It was a place where he didn’t want to be, particularly for a mission like this.

  Headlamps swept round the car park, as a vehicle turned in from the Kitwe road. Packer slumped in the seat. Was this Jackman already, doing the same as him, coming twenty minutes early to check the place out? He felt crazily jumpy tonight. Too much was hanging on the outcome of this meeting. The halogen beams bounced round the potholed parking area and died close to him. He raised his eye-line above the door sill, enough to see out. It wasn’t Jackman climbing out of the vehicle parked a few feet from his, but a young and beautiful Zambian couple. As they walked with the grace of gazelles towards the lodge, they entwined fondly. He felt a twinge of envy. He pushed open the car door and stood up.

  Tall and straight-backed, he wore freshly pressed tan slacks and a blue cotton shirt. He stretched to shake out the stiffness from his shoulders – there’d been little sleep on last night’s flight from London. The air smelled of some alien vegetation. Dust dry. It’d be December before the rains came, according to the hotel porter who’d carried his bags earlier that day. As he closed the car door and locked it, he listened to the rhythm of the tree crickets.

  Pools of darkness surrounded the car park. He peered into them one by one, looking for shadows that moved. A year ago Jackman had told him the price for a contract killing in Zambia was fifty pounds. Sam touched the pocket of his trousers to check the wallet was there, then crunched over the gravel to the lodge, running a finger under the sweaty collar of his shirt to free it from his neck. Lights set high in the dark-leafed trees at one side of the building illuminated well-watered lawns and a few hardwood easy chairs and tables. But it was the mosquito hour and the guests were indoors. Instinctively Sam smacked a hand against a cheek, imagining some winged malaria-carrier braving the repellent he’d daubed on earlier.

  The lodge was reed-thatched, as were the two small accommodation chalets that stood slightly apart from it. A private venture, Jackman had told him, a more restful haven than the hotels in town for visiting relatives of European mining specialists. And the restaurant served good steaks in reasonable privacy. The lodge was of timber, darkly varnished. On its walls, paintings of elephants, baboons and exotic birds glowed under their picture lights.

  ‘I’m meeting Harry Jackman here,’ Sam announced to the shirt-sleeved European who greeted him inside.

  ‘May I ask your name sir?’

  ‘Foster. Simon Foster.’

  Today’s name. And last year’s. The one Jackman had known him by when they’d done the deal that was now causing the firm such pain. Twelve months had passed, almost to the day, a year that had proved, if proof were ever needed, that even the best of intentions could go sour.

  ‘When he comes I’ll tell him you’re in the bar, sir.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The restaurant was small, not more than a dozen tables, several set against wide windows overlooking a small lake. Beyond it, the western horizon glimmered deep violet, its colours mirrored in the water. The four men he’d seen emerging from the Range Rover were already seated, studying menus and gulping beers.

  The almost empty bar was separated from the dining room by a Chinese lacquered screen and lit by flickering oil lamps. Packer glanced around pretending to be looking for a friend. Two couples sat at tables, white haired and with the even-tanned complexions of the well-heeled. He returned their smiles, then made for a cane armchair in the shadows at the far end. The barman followed him to his seat.

  ‘Mosi please,’ he asked, remembering the name of the local beer. The African retreated to prepare a tray.

  Packer felt intensely uneasy. Hi
s tactics were bad. He aimed to wrong-foot the wily old gun-runner, yet their meeting was at a time and place Jackman himself had set. His home ground. There’d been no other way, of course. The Service wanted a solution fast and Jackman held all the cards. Short of silencing him with a bullet, there had to be a negotiation. A gentle probing to see what he wanted. So it had been the phone call from an untraceable number at the headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. ‘We’re upset, Harry. Just don’t get it. Why are you doing this? We need to talk.’ And now this dinner date where, if the man was truly bent on discrediting his own country’s Intelligence Service, he might well have invited the press along to join them.

  There was movement beyond the Chinese screen. Sam half covered his face. Instinct. Pure self-preservation. But it was only more dinner guests arriving.

  Jackman could well arrive with a snapper, he realised. Some hack who’d flown out – maybe even on the same plane as Sam – to get the proof their story needed. Proof that the British government, through its intelligence arm, had involved itself in a coup in the small independent African state of Bodanga a year ago. A coup which had failed, leaving thousands dead, including the European staff of a refugee camp whose raped and machine-gunned bodies had been shown on a billion TV screens across the globe.

  And it was Sam who’d paid Jackman to provide the guns for that coup. Paid him with a briefcase full of British taxpayers’ sweat, handed over twelve months ago. The cash had bought a lot of guns. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of thousands of bullets.

  After the débâcle he’d asked himself if it would have felt less dirty had the coup succeeded. A quick clean kill, a tyrant overthrown, victims in the dozens, not thousands. No violation of those sweet girls from Surrey and County Clare. Probably. The politicians would have crowed, assured of a place in history when the cabinet papers came out in thirty years. Consciences clear, instead of being burdened by guilt – and now by panic.

  Two more elderly white couples entered the bar, greeting one of those already there. There was air kissing and many gentle embraces.

  ‘My dears, it’s been an age . . .’ The flat accents of Europeans bred south of the equator.

  No Jackman yet. No cameramen, thank God. Just these people. What were they? Tobacco farmers? Traders who killed with cancer instead of lead and never gave it a moment’s thought?

  The Service had been baffled by what Jackman was threatening. Why would a man who’d been the only real beneficiary of that deal to arm the coup plotters try to blow the lid off it? Why had he told a prominent British newspaper editor of MI6’s complicity in the botched coup? And why that editor, Frank Hampson, a man whose links to the Intelligence Service had been common knowledge for years, a choice of mouthpiece that had led to the story being quickly blocked. Bad luck on Jackman’s part, or deliberate? Telling a brown-noser because he wanted his intentions known by SIS? But what did he want, this man enriched by decades of illicit dealings?

  Packer finished his beer. The chilled amber liquid had been pleasant, though watery. He rejected the barman’s offer of another. He wanted the clearest of heads this evening.

  The file on Jackman was thin – a few A4 sheets sketching suspected involvement in international intrigues and criminality, but little hard proof. The sort of bundle a graduate trainee would compile during induction at Vauxhall Cross. For more than twenty years Jackman had worked the rich vein of Africa’s corruption, first gold and precious stones, then tapping the richer lode of arms. The Angolan war had bought him homes in Zambia, South Africa and Spain. Congo and the ANC had helped him accrue property back in England under nominee names. There’d been money laundering and sanctions busting. Wisps of evidence. Not enough to convict, but possibly enough to frighten. It was Sam’s only card, but hardly an ace.

  The skin crawled on the back of his neck, telling him he was being watched. He turned his head slowly but couldn’t see from where. A few minutes later the maître d’ appeared in the bar.

  ‘Mr Jackman asks if you will kindly join him in the restaurant, sir.’

  ‘Does he? Right.’

  Sam stood up without hurrying. He stepped past the Chinese screen, pausing in the entrance lobby to glance through the glass into the car park. A drab green Land Rover stood ostentatiously beneath one of the floodlights, its occupants dressed in army fatigues. Fear rippled through him, but he rebuked himself for it. This was friendly territory he was on, not some madhouse like Iraq.

  Harry Jackman didn’t rise from the table as Sam approached, instead he eyed him with an almost playful look. His bald head was red from the African sun. His eyebrows were smudges on a fleshy face, angled upwards into the middle of his brow, giving him the deceptive look of a clown. He wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt with a thin stripe. Small gold spectacles perched firmly on the bridge of his nose.

  ‘I trust you’ve come alone,’ he murmured as Packer sat, his accent vaguely north of Birmingham.

  ‘You mean you’re not sure?’

  Jackman stifled a smirk. Of course he was sure.

  ‘You on the other hand have brought some friends along,’ Sam remarked, inclining his head towards the door.

  ‘You noticed. I’m glad. You were meant to.’

  ‘You pay them to look after you? Or they do it for love?’

  Jackman chuckled. ‘What do you think . . .’ Behind the small, polished lenses his eyes lacked self-confidence. The look of a man used to peering over his shoulder. The armed men in the car park would be regular escorts, Sam surmised.

  ‘Drink?’ Jackman offered.

  ‘That’d be nice.’

  ‘I’ve ordered some Cape Red . . .’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Brain glue I call it.’

  ‘I know. And a glass of water please.’

  Jackman had only to raise his hand from the table for the waiter to be at his elbow.

  ‘Some water for my guest, Emanuel.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Sam, glancing up. ‘Mind if we change tables? There’s a terrible draught here.’

  The waiter looked to Jackman for guidance. The stony consternation on the gun-runner’s face was enough to harden Sam’s suspicion of a microphone beneath the mahogany.

  Jackman chuckled again. ‘Why not,’ he beamed. ‘Anywhere you like. You choose.’

  The maitre d’ was summoned to reseat them. When they were alone again, Jackman glowered at him. ‘Happy now?’

  ‘Stiff neck. From the flight,’ Sam explained.

  Jackman settled back like a Buddha, nodding knowingly.

  ‘Please yourself. They look after me pretty well here.’ He said it with the smugness of a man for whom being served by others was important. ‘I can remember them building this place,’ he added, reminding Sam how long he’d been around in these parts. ‘The bloke whose idea it was had done well from emeralds and wanted to put down roots. He’d gone native for a while, stupid bugger.

  Had an African lady-friend he was talking of marrying. Didn’t happen, as it turned out. Went for a Norwegian instead. The wife of one of his first clients when he opened the lodge to tourists. Classic long legs, although the blonde hair was from a bottle. Only discovered that when she dropped her drawers.’ He chortled, his laugh rattling unhealthily in his chest.

  ‘He still runs it?’

  ‘No. Sold out five years ago. Moved back to Europe with his Scandi woman. Switzerland, I think.’

  The waiter was back with the wine, a jug of water and two menus.

  ‘Steaks are always good,’ Jackman advised.

  Sam chose a T-bone. A CD of Miriam Makeba played in the background. They were a reasonable distance from the next table and wouldn’t be overheard here.

  ‘Good flight out?’ They were fencing. Waiting to see who would be first to raise the issue they’d come here to discuss.

  ‘A 747 to Lusaka then a hop up to the Copperbelt on a turbo-prop.’

  ‘I trust HMG sends its representatives first class.’

  ‘Limousines at each end a
nd a personal porter.’

  ‘I mean, I wouldn’t want to think that the man I’m being asked to deal with only merits being stuffed in the back of a jumbo with the families and the blacks.’ He said it with venom, as if such status issues really mattered to him.

  Packer’s patience gave way. ‘Fuck the flight, Harry.’ He forced his mouth into a smile for the benefit of anyone watching. ‘What are you up to?’

  Jackman drew back.

  ‘Testing the water.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘That I’ve had enough of this continent, Simon. I want to go home. And I want to be sure I’m treated right when I get there.’

  ‘You’ve a funny way of going about it.’

  ‘Think so?’ The eyebrows shot up again, the eyes beneath them twinkling. ‘You’re here, aren’t you? The string-pullers have sent their boy.’

  Sam bristled. ‘Those string-pullers, Harry, you’ve upset them. Writing outrageous letters to the papers isn’t wise.’

  ‘One paper.’

  ‘Whatever. Wasn’t wise at all. You ought to be careful.’

  ‘Me need to be careful? I think you’ll find the boot’s on the other foot, chum.’

  The waiter returned to reset the cutlery for what they’d ordered. He was joined by a waitress with a basket of bread, a slender woman with braided hair, clad in a low-cut African dress. Her skin had the burnished glow of roasted coffee and her teeth dazzled as she smiled. She leaned forward and her breasts quivered with a life of their own. Then she withdrew and a third server came with soup.

  When they’d all gone Harry Jackman passed a hand over his shiny dome.

  ‘Fancied that one, did you?’

  ‘She was very beautiful.’

  ‘A lot of them are. And a lot of ex-pats develop a taste, of course.’

  ‘Not you? How many years have you been here?’

  ‘Twenty-five, give or take. But no. They’re different, you see, African women. The smell. The shape of their mouths and their arses. To me it’d be like shagging a sheep. Not that I’ve anything against sheep. Or Africans. They’ve got their place in nature’s blueprint and we’ve got ours.’