Rip Tide

‘You had visitors,’ she said. ‘A couple.’

‘When was that, Coco?’ asked Maria, wondering if her parents had come round. They’d only been here once, when she’d first moved in, and Coco had never met them.

‘After lunch.’

‘Really?’ That seemed odd; her parents knew she was usually out at that time of day. The faintest suspicion flickered through her mind.

‘What did they look like?’

Cocoa shrugged. ‘I didn’t see them. Mr Pharmakes told me they’d been here.’ He was a retired gentleman who lived on the top floor of the building. ‘He came across them in the hall outside your flat.’

This was odder still. The door to the foyer was kept locked, so non-residents couldn’t simply wander in and out of the building.

‘Did he describe them?’

Cocoa laughed, and stubbed out her cigarette end with a carpet-slippered toe. ‘All he said was that one was pale and the other dark.’

‘Which was which?’ Maria asked instinctively.

Coco shrugged her shoulders. ‘Don’t ask me. And I wouldn’t bother asking Pharmakes. He has cataracts in both eyes.’

Maria thanked Coco and went up to her flat. The visitors probably had been her parents after all. Her mother was an English rose, with pink skin that easily burned in the sun, while her father was a typical Greek with nutmeg-coloured skin and dark hair.

But as she let herself into her flat, she still wasn’t satisfied. Why would her parents come here in the middle of the day? It would have to be about something urgent… her mother’s sister had been very ill. Maybe it was something to do with that. But surely they would have left a message. Maybe she should ring Bruno Mackay and report this. But he’d probably think she was very green, getting jumpy for no good reason. Don’t be silly, she told herself, even though, when she rang her parents, her mother told her they hadn’t been out all day.

By the end of the third week, Maria was beginning to wonder how long she would be able to put up with the boredom of this new assignment. The extra money she was being paid by the British Embassy was nice to have, but she didn’t feel that she was doing anything to earn it. Then on the third Tuesday morning, as she was leaning on Falana’s desk drinking her morning coffee and chatting, Berger came out of his office and asked to see her.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked as she sat down.

‘The job’s fine. But I’m afraid I haven’t uncovered anything.’

‘Don’t apologise,’ he said with a laugh. ‘I’d much prefer to be wrong about all this.’

‘I can’t say if anything’s going on or not. I certainly haven’t noticed anything. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I ever will.’

‘Well, that brings me to what I was going to tell you… we’ve got a good chance now to find out, one way or another. Our next shipment is due out in three weeks. I want you to start to build up the manifest.’

‘Doesn’t Mr Limonides usually do that?’

‘He does, but I’ve got a special project I want him to work on.’ Berger raised one eyebrow. ‘Now, let me give you an idea about this cargo. It’s going to be rather special…’

For the next few days Maria immersed herself in putting together the manifest, and by late Thursday evening she was glad to be finished with it. She had been so busy working that she hadn’t even realised Katherine Ball had gone back to London.

Maria and Berger had agreed that she would be careful to keep the details of the new shipment secret. She wouldn’t talk about it and she would make sure that all paperwork concerning it was carefully locked up. Manifests should always have been handled in that way but it seemed very likely, given the relaxed atmosphere in the office, that these rules had not been followed.

This shipment was as special as Berger had indicated. The drugs alone were worth a fortune and included large amounts of liquid morphine and a pharmacist’s range of codeine-based painkillers. More field-hospital kit was going out as well, with surgical apparatus enough to equip a decent-sized hospital. There were three high-end Range Rovers, and, most temptingly, $100,000 in cash. Maria carefully noted and valued all of this. None of it was being documented in UCSO’s London office, so that if any information leaked out, it would be clear that it had come from Athens.

The most important fact about the cargo which Maria had spent the week working on was that it did not actually exist. The details had been planned purely to tempt any spy inside the organisation. The actual cargo of the next UCSO shipment to pass the Horn of Africa would be much less attractive, consisting as it would of foodstuffs – powdered milk, sacks of grain – and vitamins by the gross. Desperately needed by its eventual recipients, but of only of modest resale value and thus not worth the attention of Somali pirates – unless they had been told the cargo was something else altogether.