Читать книгу A Divided Spy: A gripping espionage thriller from the master of the modern spy novel - Charles Cumming - Страница 14

They had made it easy for Jim Martinelli.

Kyle Chapman had asked for his address in Peterborough. He had said that four separate UK passport application forms would arrive at his home within the next seven days. He told Martinelli that if he took the forms to work, processed them in the usual way in his capacity as an application examiner, and guaranteed that the passports would then be sent out to the individuals concerned, his debt of £30,000 would be cleared.

Chapman gave Martinelli a warning. He said that if he attempted to contact any law enforcement official in relation to the passports, or kept a record of any of the information contained in the application forms, he would be killed. Chapman told Martinelli that he was working on behalf of a ‘businessman in Tirana’ with connections to organized criminal groups in the UK who would ‘happily’ hunt him down and ‘enjoy listening to you begging for your life in some warehouse in Peterborough where the only thing that moves is a rat taking a shit and a fucked-off Albanian touching an electric cable to your testicles’. Chapman added that if, at any point, he or his client became aware that Martinelli was suffering from ‘stress’ or had taken sick leave, or was in any way considering a change of job within the next six months, he would suffer the same fate. It was a simple exchange. The passports for the debt. No behavioural problems at work. No midnight confessions to the Samaritans after ‘half a bottle of Smirnoff and a good cry’. If he delivered the passports, he would be free of his debt. Nobody would ever come near him again, nobody would ever finger him for abusing his position. Chapman and his associate in Albania were ‘men of their word who believed in loyalty and good professional conduct’.

Martinelli had agreed. He had felt that he had no choice. Five days later, the passport applications had arrived at his home. Two of them had the photographs of Caucasian males attached, the third a picture of a woman in her mid-twenties, possibly with roots in north-east Africa or the Arabian peninsular. The fourth showed a fit-looking male in his early twenties who was almost certainly of Indian or Pakistani heritage. His was the only name that Martinelli committed to memory, because he had felt – looking into the young man’s blank, pitiless eyes – that he was betraying not only himself by allowing such a man to possess a falsely obtained British passport, but also, potentially, the lives of many others.

The young man’s name was Shahid Khan.