and serious crime, for which I have lead responsibility. In my area of operation, I must stress to you that we are tasked by other agencies: it's not our role to initiate or to act independently, and we'll only accept an assignment if it is the collective view of everyone involved that we can make a difference to the investigation.'
She paused. 'That's the background; now let's get to the specifics.' She looked beyond Skinner. 'Rudy, would you like to take over?'
Rudolph Sewell nodded and drew his chair closer to the table. For all that he outranked her, he was several years younger than Amanda Dennis; but he was dressed in the same Whitehall civil servant mode. His suit was dark blue, and he wore a white shirt with a crested tie that suggested a public-school background. His hair was conservatively cut and he seemed to have no distinguishing features; then he looked up, and his round, rimless spectacles made his eyes grow huge and froglike, attracting instant attention.
'My section,' he began, 'operates in a variety of ways, across a very broad remit. We rely particularly on the co-operation of intelligence agencies from other countries, or, as in this case, groupings. Some weeks ago, the director general received a warning from NATO intelligence officers that a group of four Albanians had left their own country and were moving through Europe, heading for Britain. These were people with known criminal backgrounds, but in Albania that doesn't exactly mark them out. You'll be aware that it was the last totalitarian communist state in Europe, and that for decades it operated a policy of total isolation, from everyone except the Chinese, who, in fact, didn't care for them at all, and since they were strategically useless found them more of an embarrassment than anything else.' He allowed himself a thin-lipped smile. 'Imagine, if you will, Osama bin Laden being revealed as an Arsenal supporter: he'd be greeted at Highbury with the same warmth that Beijing showed to Tirana.' Sewell paused, as if inviting laughter, but none came.
'The old Albanian regime,' he continued, 'was so brutal and repressive that there was no semblance of an opposition voice; not a political one, at any rate. So, when it imploded, in the aftermath anarchy ruled, criminality became the norm, and the place became a magnet for all sorts of dangerous activity. The people we were warned about are right in the thick of it. They ran protection rackets, controlled prostitution, regulated the drugs trade and supplied all sorts of illegal armaments to all sorts of people, including a significant number of those against whom the war on terror is being fought.'
'Sounds like a nice wee empire,' Skinner mused aloud. 'Why did they leave it all?'
'That's what our NATO source didn't know for sure, and it's what we've been tasked to find out.'
'So what do you know?'
'We know that they left the Albanian port of Durres, crossed the Adriatic and landed in Brindisi, on the heel of Italy. From there they travelled by road to Genoa, crossed into France by hiring a helicopter, and disappeared.'
'Completely?'
'For a while, until their scent was picked up in Rotterdam: they stopped there for long enough to pull off a bank robbery in Amsterdam.'
'Risky. Why would they do that?'
'We think they needed currency; at home they deal in US dollars, and we suspect that they didn't want to flash too many of them about. Significantly, while they took euros, they also took all the sterling that the bank held.'
'A pointer, I'll grant you.'
'Eventually, after some damned good detective work based on witness descriptions, the Dutch police traced them to an address, a great barn of a place in the Oosteinde of the city. They had been living there, under their own names, for over a month, but they had gone by the time the place was raided. Their hosts were Kosovar refugees, ethnic Albanians. They were arrested and interrogated, and of course they pleaded innocence, claiming that they had
She paused. 'That's the background; now let's get to the specifics.' She looked beyond Skinner. 'Rudy, would you like to take over?'
Rudolph Sewell nodded and drew his chair closer to the table. For all that he outranked her, he was several years younger than Amanda Dennis; but he was dressed in the same Whitehall civil servant mode. His suit was dark blue, and he wore a white shirt with a crested tie that suggested a public-school background. His hair was conservatively cut and he seemed to have no distinguishing features; then he looked up, and his round, rimless spectacles made his eyes grow huge and froglike, attracting instant attention.
'My section,' he began, 'operates in a variety of ways, across a very broad remit. We rely particularly on the co-operation of intelligence agencies from other countries, or, as in this case, groupings. Some weeks ago, the director general received a warning from NATO intelligence officers that a group of four Albanians had left their own country and were moving through Europe, heading for Britain. These were people with known criminal backgrounds, but in Albania that doesn't exactly mark them out. You'll be aware that it was the last totalitarian communist state in Europe, and that for decades it operated a policy of total isolation, from everyone except the Chinese, who, in fact, didn't care for them at all, and since they were strategically useless found them more of an embarrassment than anything else.' He allowed himself a thin-lipped smile. 'Imagine, if you will, Osama bin Laden being revealed as an Arsenal supporter: he'd be greeted at Highbury with the same warmth that Beijing showed to Tirana.' Sewell paused, as if inviting laughter, but none came.
'The old Albanian regime,' he continued, 'was so brutal and repressive that there was no semblance of an opposition voice; not a political one, at any rate. So, when it imploded, in the aftermath anarchy ruled, criminality became the norm, and the place became a magnet for all sorts of dangerous activity. The people we were warned about are right in the thick of it. They ran protection rackets, controlled prostitution, regulated the drugs trade and supplied all sorts of illegal armaments to all sorts of people, including a significant number of those against whom the war on terror is being fought.'
'Sounds like a nice wee empire,' Skinner mused aloud. 'Why did they leave it all?'
'That's what our NATO source didn't know for sure, and it's what we've been tasked to find out.'
'So what do you know?'
'We know that they left the Albanian port of Durres, crossed the Adriatic and landed in Brindisi, on the heel of Italy. From there they travelled by road to Genoa, crossed into France by hiring a helicopter, and disappeared.'
'Completely?'
'For a while, until their scent was picked up in Rotterdam: they stopped there for long enough to pull off a bank robbery in Amsterdam.'
'Risky. Why would they do that?'
'We think they needed currency; at home they deal in US dollars, and we suspect that they didn't want to flash too many of them about. Significantly, while they took euros, they also took all the sterling that the bank held.'
'A pointer, I'll grant you.'
'Eventually, after some damned good detective work based on witness descriptions, the Dutch police traced them to an address, a great barn of a place in the Oosteinde of the city. They had been living there, under their own names, for over a month, but they had gone by the time the place was raided. Their hosts were Kosovar refugees, ethnic Albanians. They were arrested and interrogated, and of course they pleaded innocence, claiming that they had
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