Prime Target by Hugh Miller Page A

replica of her mother’s voice.

5
    At 9.10 a.m. on Monday, C.W. Whitlock downloaded the final piece of information to expand the details of the list Philpott had given him on Friday morning. The job had been painstaking, frustrating and exhausting. Worse than that, the expenditure of a whole weekend on the work had put a strain on Whitlock’s private life. Following a hurried and stressful cancellation of a Saturday-night dinner party, his wife was no longer communicating.
    After the fourth attempt to reach her that morning he put down the telephone and saw the final lines of text scroll up on the computer screen. He sat back and yawned. Feeling old, he decided, was a matter of how much hope you abandoned. For twenty-four hours he had felt rundown and sinking, aware of no clear end. Seeing the long job finished did not quite lift his spirits, but there was a measure of relief. Relief, in turn, fired a tiny hope: things between himself and Carmen mightwork out with a minimum of fighting. ‘And a pig will go flapping over the UN complex any minute,’ he said aloud.
    Whitlock was a man people tended to like on sight, a native Kenyan with skin a girl once called light umber, and gold-brown eyes his mother swore would break many hearts. His skin colour was part of a legacy from his grandfather, a white British Army officer, whose genes had also conferred a strong jaw and a firm mouth, which C.W. softened with a moustache.
    He leaned forward, tapped the PRINT button and checked the clock. He was up against the deadline. Too often, it seemed, he was handed jobs with no slack in the schedule. He picked up the internal telephone and dialled 3 for Security.
    â€˜Calvin? Has Mr Philpott arrived yet?’
    â€˜He signed in five minutes ago.’
    â€˜Thanks.’
    â€˜Sorry to dash your hopes.’
    â€˜That’s all right, Calvin. The day he does turn up late, I’ll buy you lunch.’ He put down the phone. ‘This,’ he sighed, ‘is no life for a sensitive boy.’
    He was Oxford-educated, a former soldier with wide experience as an officer in the Kenya Intelligence Corps. He had been recruited into UNACO by Philpott himself, and was now the longest serving member of Task Force Three. On two occasions Philpott had openly acknowledgedthat Whitlock was the most versatile and well-informed of his active agents - a distinction, Whitlock believed, that invited abuse.
    As the last piece of information came off the printer he signalled Interpol’s National Central Bureau in Berlin and switched momentarily to voice contact. He thanked the duty information controller for his help and expressed the hope that he could return the favour.
    Two minutes later he walked into the washroom with the accumulated data in a manila folder under his arm. Mike Graham was there, standing by the basins, bending to see himself in the mirror as he combed his hair. His reflection nodded at Whitlock, who looked grim.
    â€˜Morning, C.W. Nice to see a guy who can start the week with a grin.’
    Whitlock put down his folder and rolled back his shirtsleeves. He washed his hands and face, re-tied his tie and buffed his toecaps at the polisher. He came back to the basins and leaned close to the mirror, pulling up one eyelid, then the other.
    â€˜I can’t decide if I’m anaemic, or if clinical depression has crept in.’
    â€˜I hear you’ve been on all weekend.’
    â€˜The Selby case. I did a workup on a list of German citizens, most of them hard to nail. Not a criminal record among them, so I had to trespass on a lot of legitimate secrecy.’
    â€˜Nobody does it better.’
    â€˜Go ahead,’ Whitlock sighed, ‘patronize me. I thrive on that.’
    Mike put on his jacket as he went to the door. ‘Meeting in five minutes,’ he said. ‘Don’t be late.’
    â€˜I’m moving as fast as I can…’
    Three sides of UNACO’s briefing room were