The Dark Room(97)

“How much do you know about the Metropolitan Police?”

“Nothing,” Cain said. He was looking down a short hallway. There was a door on each side, a slate-gray concrete wall at the end. A CCTV camera, mounted near the ceiling, watched him. “It’s the London police, but it’s got a mandate that goes beyond the city. It’s got a building called Scotland Yard. That’s it.”

“There’ve been articles about Special Branch,” the man said. He stepped around Cain and opened the door on the right. “Some of the things we did back in the eighties—did you see those?”

“No.”

“The undercover operations? The infiltrations of animal rights groups?”

Now they were in a windowless conference room. The man sat down, elbows on the table. Cain pulled out a chair and sat facing him.

“You’re saying this has to do with animal rights?”

“It’s nothing to do with that,” the man said. “I’m giving you background. People know about the animal rights groups, but it went beyond that. Far beyond that.”

“Undercover operations. Infiltrations.”

“Yes.”

Yesterday morning, on the phone, the man had hinted that he’d moved on from Special Branch to something even more secretive. He looked the part, with his fine coat and his weary face.

“You were running agents, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“She was one of them.”

“She wasn’t an agent. She was an officer of the Metropolitan Police, Special Branch. She was in California on an undercover assignment.”

The man reached into his coat and brought out a slim envelope. He opened the flap and slid out a three-by-five photograph, then put it on the table. Cain bent forward to look at it. The young woman wore a cadet uniform, and looked into the camera with the thinnest of smiles. She stood next to a Union Jack, hands at her sides. The plaque on the wall behind her said HENDON POLICE COLLEGE. Cain turned the photograph over. On the back, in a neat pencil script, was a name.

Carolyn Stone.

She was the girl from the photographs. There was no doubt of it, unless she had a twin sister. He turned to the old man.

“You sent a London police officer undercover to San Francisco,” he said. “Did you follow any of the protocols?”

“It was too sensitive. Only three people in Special Branch knew what we were doing. There was way too much of that, back then. Special Branch confused itself for another agency.”

“What were you doing?”

The man took the photograph from the table and put it back into the envelope. He had strong-looking hands, but they were trembling. Age, maybe, or a recent stroke. He was doing everything he could to hide it, but his hands were a tell.

“What do you know about Harry J. Castelli?” the old man asked.

“He died this week,” Cain said. “I was one of the last two people to see him alive.”

“Not the son. I’m talking about the father. What do you know about him?”

“He was the ambassador.”

“What else have you turned up about him?”

“I haven’t been focused on the father. He hasn’t come up at all.”

“He’s gone now, or you could sit him down and ask him. He died in ’ninety-one. In Thailand.”

“Ask him what?”

“Let me put it this way—I flew in here yesterday afternoon, came through immigration, and got my passport stamped. To go home, I’d do the same thing in reverse. But what would I do if I lost my passport today? What then?”

“You’d come here,” Cain said. “To your consulate. They’d issue a temporary passport.”

“And I might not even miss my plane,” the old man said. “Because they can print a temporary passport onsite. Right here in San Francisco.”

“It’s not going to do me any good if you talk in circles,” Cain said.

“Harry Castelli Sr., your ambassador, could have done the same thing. And once he set someone up with a temporary passport, she’d be a U.S. citizen as far as immigration is concerned—whatever nationality she’d had when she woke up that morning, it wouldn’t matter.”

“Castelli was issuing false passports?” Cain asked. “We’re talking about the ambassador to the U.K., issuing false passports.”

“Temporary passports. But that’s not how we got into it. We weren’t investigating passport fraud—it wasn’t our jurisdiction, however broad a view we might have had on that subject. We were looking into missing girls. And then one thing led to another.”

“How many missing girls?”

“Twenty-two,” the old man said. He hadn’t paused to think about it. He had the number right there, because it had been weighing on him for thirty years. “Immigrants, mostly. Eastern Europeans, Russians. The youngest was seventeen and the oldest was twenty-six.”

“Immigrants, but living in London?”

“In London, or near it,” the man said. “This was the early eighties. We didn’t have computers like we do now. No program crosschecking the files, flagging related cases. Which meant that back then, these things could go on and on. Like a coal fire, underground—by the time you notice, it’s out of control. It took a sharp young man in Missing Persons to put it together.”