Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) Read Online Free Page B

had come round every day at eleven o’clock and four, pushed by an East End lad called Charlie. It was an open secret, said his uncle, that his close relatives were linked to the notorious Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, the kings of London’s violent underworld in the 1960s. Someone must have decided it was better to have those guys onside. There had been a rough edge to Service employees in those days, thought Luke,unlike the polished smoothies in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Charlie had been there so long that he knew everything about everyone’s private life. They’d given him an MBE and he’d retired to Margate to bask in his glory. Then, said his uncle, there was the old caretaker who could recognize people by their footsteps. He had come back into Century one day, after years stationed in Warsaw, and this old boy had had his back turned away from him but he said, ‘Welcome home, Mr Carlton, nice to have you back.’ Amazing. And then there was the Cut, said his uncle, the Lambeth side-street with its Greek-run brothels and tawdry Italian restaurants where well-spoken Service secretaries met their intelligence officer lovers to share their hopes and dreams of postings to distant embassies, far away from SE1 and the dismal clank of trains pulling into Waterloo on a rainy afternoon.
    Luke stopped at the large green-painted steel gate. High on a wall, a camera swivelled towards him, the CCTV feeding his image back to the security officers’ control room inside. On tiny oiled wheels, the gate slid open and he nudged the Land Rover forward. A man emerged from a sentry box with an inspection mirror, gave the vehicle the once-over, then waved him on. Inside the building he got out of the car and locked it, then pressed his electronic swipe card to a reader, prompting an automatic door to hiss open for him. ‘Carrying sensitive material like documents?’ read the notice on the wall. ‘Then check security procedures.’
    Luke strode quickly past the royal coat of arms and the official commemoration plaque. ‘The Secret Intelligence Service,’ it read. ‘Opened by Her Majesty the Queen on July 14th 1994.’ Incredible to think that in his uncle’s day MI5 and MI6 had officially not existed.
    ‘Shocking, isn’t it?’
    He turned. Springer, a young intelligence officer he barely knew, was holding open the lift doors for him. ‘I mean, what
are
they going to tell his family? Nice bloke, Benton. He was an instructor on my course down at the Base. Useful squash player too.’
    The lift pinged open at Luke’s floor and Springer nodded agoodbye. ‘Hang on,’ said Luke, in turn holding open the lift door. ‘What do you mean, telling his family? What’s happened to Benton?’
    Springer’s face showed that he knew he had said too much, even within those secure walls. ‘Oh, right,’ he said. ‘Well, you’ll know soon enough.’ Then the lift door closed on him.
    For a minute Luke stood on the landing, people rushing past him. He was shocked. He had never met Benton but they had spoken many times on the phone and Luke had seen his reports, always carefully nuanced and caveated. Now he had become a casualty and Luke had no idea how MI6 would handle a man killed in the course of duty. What would they put on his tombstone? ‘Benton. Career spook. Useful squash player. RIP.’ Maybe not.
    ‘Coffee’s on the sideboard. Grab a cup. You’ve got a few minutes to prep before we go in to see the Chief.’ Angela Scott was a woman of few words. Petite and short, her auburn hair was tied back, her clothes neat, stylish but simple, a tiny gold crucifix just visible on her pale, freckled chest. As line managers go, Luke reckoned he could do a lot worse than Angela.
    A former station chief in Mexico City, she had been at the sharp end of agent running. Yet from the first day he had been assigned to her team in the Latin America division she had taken him under her wing, never once patronizing. She had recognized that he