At Risk (6 page)

Liz nodded. “Yes—person of that name bought a fake UK driving licence last weekend in one of the northern ports . . . Bremerhaven, I think? German liaison flashed him to us yesterday.”

“Any terrorist form?”

“I ran him through the database. There’s a Faraj Mansoor who’s on a long list logged by Pakistan liaison of all those spoken to or contacted by Dawood al Safa in the course of his visit to Peshawar earlier this year.”

“Al Safa the ITS bagman? The one Mackay was telling us about yesterday?”

“Yes, that one. This Mansoor—and it’s got to be quite a common name—is identified as one of half a dozen employees of an auto repair shop on the Kabul road. Apparently al Safa stopped there and looked at some second-hand vehicles. Pakistan liaison had a couple of guys on his tail and when al Safa moved on they dropped a man off to list the employees.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Wetherby nodded pensively. “The reason I’m asking is that for some reason I can’t presently fathom, Geoffrey Fane’s just called me with a request to be kept in the loop.”

“About Mansoor?” asked Liz, surprised.

“About Mansoor. I had to tell him that, as things stood, there was no loop.”

“And?”

“And that was it. He thanked me and hung up.”

Liz allowed her eyes to wander round the bare walls. Wondered why Wetherby had called her to his office for a conversation which could easily have taken place over the phone.

“Before you go, Liz, is everything all right? I mean, are you . . . OK?”

She met his gaze. He was someone whose face, try as she might, she could never quite summon from memory. Sometimes she could recall the dead-leaf brown of the hair and eyes, sometimes the wry asymmetry of the nose and mouth, but the precise collision of his features evaded her. Even now, facing him, he seemed elusive. As always, a subtle irony seemed to pervade their professional relationship, as if they met at other times and on some different basis.

But they never had, and outside the context of their work Liz knew very little about him. There was a wife who was supposed to have some sort of chronic health problem, and there were a couple of boys at school. They lived somewhere on the river—Shepperton, perhaps, or was it Sunbury? One of those Ratty, Toad and Mole places out to the west.

But that was about the limit of her knowledge. As to his tastes, interests, or what car he drove, she had no idea.

“Do I look as if I’m not OK?”

“You look fine. But I know this Marzipan business hasn’t been easy. He’s very young, isn’t he?”

“Yes. He is.”

Wetherby nodded obliquely. “He’s also one of our key assets—or promises to be—which is why I gave him to you. You debrief him, say nothing, and let me see the product—I don’t want him declared for the time being.”

Liz nodded. “I don’t think he’s registered on Fane’s radar yet.”

“Let’s keep it that way. We have to play a long game with this young man, and that means no pressure from this end whatsoever. Just concentrate on getting him solidly dug in. If he’s as good as you say he is, the product will follow.”

“As long as you’re prepared to wait.”

“For as long as it takes. Does he still think he’s going to university next year?”

“No. Whether he’s told his parents or not I don’t know.”

Wetherby nodded sympathetically, stood up, and walked to the window. Stared out over the river for a moment before turning back to face her. “Tell me. What do you think you would be doing if you weren’t working here?”

Liz looked at him. “It’s funny you should ask that,” she said eventually. Because I was asking myself more or less the same question only this morning.”

“Why this morning in particular?”

“I got a letter.”

He waited. There was a reflective, unforced quality to his silence, as if the two of them had all the time in the world.

Hesitantly at first, uncertain of how much he already knew, Liz began to sketch the outlines of her life. Her fluency surprised her; it was as if she was rehearsing a well-learned cover story. Plausible—verifiable even—but at the same time not quite real.

For more than thirty years her father had been manager of the Bowerbridge estate, in the valley of the river Nadder near Salisbury. He and Liz’s mother had lived in the estate’s gatehouse, and Liz had grown up there. Five years earlier, however, Jack Carlyle had died, and shortly afterwards Bowerbridge’s owner had sold up. The woods and coppices which comprised the sporting estate had been sold to a local farmer, and the main house, with its topiary, greenhouses and walled garden, had been bought by the owner of a chain of garden centres.

The outgoing owner, a generous man, had made it a condition of the sale that his former manager’s widow should occupy the gatehouse rent-free for the remainder of her days, and retain the right to buy it if she wished. With Liz working in London, her mother had lived in the octagonal lodge alone, and when the estate’s new owner converted Bowerbridge House and its gardens into a specialist plantsman’s nursery, she had taken on part-time work there.

Knowing and loving the estate as she did, the job could not have suited Susan Carlyle better. Within the year she was working full-time for the nursery and eighteen months later she was running it. When Liz came up to stay with her at weekends they would go for long walks along the stone-paved avenues and the grassy allées and her mother would explain her hopes and plans for the nursery. Passing the lilacs, rank after cream and purple rank of them, the air heavy with their scent, she would murmur their names like a litany—
Masséna, Decaisne, Belle de Nancy, Persica, Congo . . .
There were entire acres of white and red camellias, too, and rhododendrons—yellow, mauve, scarlet, pink—and orchards of waxily fragrant magnolia. In high summer, every corner turned was a new and dizzying revelation.

At other times, as the rain beat against the glass and the damp green plant odours rose about them, they would pace the iron walkways of the Edwardian greenhouses, and Susan would explain the various propagation techniques as the lines of cuttings and seedlings extended before them to perspective infinity.

Her hope, clearly, was that at some not-too-far-distant point Liz would decide to leave London and involve herself in the management of the nursery. Mother and daughter would then live in happy companionship in the gatehouse, and in the course of time “the right man”—a dimly imagined Sir Lancelot–like figure—would happen along.

Liz was by no means wholly resistant to this idea. The dream of returning home, of waking up in the bedroom in which she had slept as a child and of spending her days surrounded by the mellowed brick and greenery of Bowerbridge, was a seductive one. And she had no objection to handsome knights on white chargers. But in reality she knew that earning a living in the countryside was grindingly hard work, and involved a deliberate narrowing of horizons. As things stood her tastes and friends and opinions were all metropolitan, and she didn’t think she had the metabolism to deal with the countryside on a full-time basis. All that rain, all those bossy women with their petty snobberies and their four-wheel drives, all those local newspapers full of non-news and advertisements for agricultural machinery. Much as she loved her mother, Liz knew, she just wouldn’t have the patience for it all.

And then that morning the letter had arrived. To say that Susan Carlyle had decided to buy. That she was investing her savings, along with the money that she had earned from the nursery and the life insurance payout after her husband’s death, in the Bowerbridge gatehouse.

“Do you think she’s trying to draw you back there?” asked Wetherby quietly.

“At some level, yes,” said Liz. “At the same time it’s a very generous decision. I mean, she can live there for nothing for the rest of her life, so it’s me she’s thinking of. The trouble is, I think she’s hoping for a . . .” she put her glass down and shrugged despairingly, “a corresponding gesture. And right now I just can’t think in those terms.”

“There’s something about the place one grew up in,” said Wetherby. “You can never quite return there. Not until you’ve changed, and can see the place through different eyes. And sometimes not even then.”

A spasm of knocking seized the radiator behind his desk, and there was a faint smell of heated dust. Outside the windows the skyline was vague against the winter sky.

“I’m sorry,” Liz said. “I didn’t mean to burden you with my not very important troubles.”

“It’s anything but a burden.” His gaze, touched with melancholy, played about her. “You’re very much valued here.”

She sat unmoving for a moment, conscious of things unsaid, and then rose briskly to her feet.

“A—you’ve been promoted,” hazarded Dave Armstrong a couple of minutes later, as she arrived back at her desk. “B—you’ve been sacked. C—despite heavy-handed official disapproval you’re publishing your memoirs. D—none of the above.”

“Actually,” said Liz, “I’m defecting to North Korea. Pyongyang’s heaven at this time of year.” She swivelled thoughtfully in her chair. “Have you ever talked to Wetherby about anything except work?”

“I don’t think so,” said Dave, stabbing pensively at his keyboard. “He once asked me if I knew the test match score, but I think that’s as personal as it’s ever got. Why?”

“No reason. But Wetherby’s sort of a shadowy figure, even for this place, wouldn’t you say?”

“You think perhaps he should appear on
Celebrity Big Brother
? As part of the new accountability?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I guess.” He frowned at his screen. “Do the words Miladun Nabi mean anything to you?”

“Yes, Miladun Nabi is the Prophet’s birthday. Sometime at the end of May, I think.”

“Cheers.”

She turned her attention to the flashing message light on her land-line. To her surprise, there was an invitation to lunch from Bruno Mackay.

“I know it’s hideously short notice,” came the languid voice, “and I’m sure you’re already booked, but there’s something I’d like to . . .
mull over
with you, if I may.”

She shook her head in disbelief. That was so Six, the suggestion that the day—and the business of counter-terrorism—was really one long cocktail party.
Mull?
She never mulled. She anguished, and she did it alone.

But why not? At the very least it would be an opportunity to examine Mackay at close quarters. For all the supposed new spirit of cooperation, Five and Six would never be serene bedfellows. The better she knew her opposite number, the less likely he was to outmanoeuvre her.

She called the number he had left her and he picked up on the first ring.

“Liz!” he said, before she had opened her mouth. “Tell me you can come.”

“All right.”

“Fantastic! I’ll come and pick you up.”

“It’s OK. I can easily—”

His words cut airily across her. “Can you be on Lambeth Bridge, your end, at twelve forty-five? I’ll see you there.”

“OK.”

She hung up. This could be very interesting, but she was going to have to stay on her toes. Swivelling round to her computer screen, she turned her thoughts to Faraj Mansoor. Fane’s anxiety, she supposed, sprung from his uncertainty as to whether the buyer of the fake driving licence in Bremerhaven was the same person as the al Safa contact in Peshawar. He’d probably have someone in Pakistan checking the auto repair shop right now. If they turned out to be different people, and there was still a Faraj Mansoor repairing jeeps on the Kabul Road, then the ball was fairly and squarely in Five’s court.

Odds were that they
were
two different people, and that the Mansoor in Bremerhaven was an economic migrant who had paid for passage to Europe—probably some hellish odyssey in a container—and was now looking to make his way across the Channel. There was probably a cousin in one of the British cities keeping a minicab driver’s position open for him. Odds were the whole thing was an Immigration issue, not an Intelligence one. She posted it to the back of her mind.

By 12:30 she was feeling a curious anticipation. As luck would have it—or maybe not—she was smartly dressed. With all her work clothes either damp from the washing machine or languishing in the dry-cleaning pile, she had been forced back to the Ronit Zilkha dress she had bought for a wedding. It had cost a fortune, even in the sale, and looked wildly inappropriate for a day’s intelligence-gathering. To make matters more extreme, the only shoes that went with the dress were ribbed silk. Wetherby’s reaction to her appearance had been a just-detectable widening of the eyes, but he had made no comment.

At twenty to the hour a call came to her desk which, she suspected, had already bounced several times around the building. A group of photographers describing themselves as plane-spotters had been intercepted by police in an area adjacent to the US base at Lakenheath, and USAF Security were insisting that they all be checked out before release. It took Liz a couple of minutes to pass the buck to the investigation section, but she managed it, and hurried out of the office with the Zilkha dress partly covered by her coat.

Lambeth Bridge, she discovered, was not an ideal rendezvous in December. After a fine morning the sky had darkened. A fretful east wind now whipped down the river, dragging at her hair and sending the litter dancing around her silk shoes. The bridge was, furthermore, a no-stopping zone.

She had been standing there for five minutes, her eyes streaming, when a silver BMW came to an abrupt stop at the kerb and the passenger door swung open. To the blaring of car horns she bustled herself into the seat, and Mackay, who was wearing sunglasses, pulled back out into the traffic stream. Inside the car a CD was playing, and the sounds of tabla, sitar and other instruments filled the BMW’s high-specification interior.

“Fateh Nusrat Ali Khan,” said Mackay, as they swung round the Millbank roundabout. “Huge star on the subcontinent. Know his stuff?”

Liz shook her head and tried to finger-comb her windblown hair into some sort of order. She smiled to herself. The man was just too good to be true—a perfect specimen of the Vauxhall Cross genus. They were crossing the bridge now, and the music was reaching a flurrying climax. As they slotted into the traffic-crawl on Albert Embankment the speakers finally fell silent. Mackay took off his sunglasses.