Rogue Elements (13 page)

They had strayed, Danny noticed with alarm, into the exact area the café owner had warned them against. The Englishman seemed relaxed, arms loose by his sides as if out for a stroll, although his eyes never stopped scanning the people around them. Most were kids, inventing games amongst the rubble and scrap metal, or silent women laden with babies and torn grocery bags. But every now and then a street corner would be held by two or three young men. They wore faded blue jeans, fake Timberlands or old army boots, and most had a red-and-white keffiyeh looped casually around their necks. Some chatted in low voices over a cigarette; others were silent, watching these outsiders with suspicion. Handguns protruded from several belts.

For some reason, Danny was alarmed to note, his rescuer always seemed to turn into the streets manned by these unnerving sentinels.

Eventually they were blocked. Turning a corner, they found themselves facing four men with handguns openly displayed. Danny instinctively turned back, only to see three more approaching from behind. Surrounded by Palestinian weaponry, he had never felt more Jewish.

That was when the Englishman started speaking Arabic. Danny watched him make an open gesture, sweeping from chest to forehead, as the indecipherable words tumbled out. Then he pointed at Danny and spoke a single, forceful sentence in which the only decipherable word was ‘Shabak’.

They were led into a well-guarded apartment block and made to sit next to a window that looked out on the security wall. Open sewers ran downhill towards it; if nothing else, the people of Shu’fat could demonstrate their contempt for the wall by sluicing it with effluent. Beyond lay the green and orderly – if illegal – Jewish settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev. Kids on bicycles, cleaners and gardeners at work in villas boasting satellite dishes and double garages. It struck Danny as surreal to be surrounded by automatic rifles so close to a scene of such suburban calm.

The man giving the order was no less alarming than his foot soldiers. He leaned in close to Danny and said, ‘Israeli.’

‘No,’ stammered Danny. ‘American.’

‘Jew?’

The man was around fifty years old, a greying beard covering much of his face, with teeth that were stained but perfectly straight. His nut brown eyes were heavily creased. He wore a collarless tunic of rough grey cloth, and his black-and-white keffiyeh was tightly wrapped around his head so that a fringe of tassels hung over his left eyebrow.

‘Yes, he’s Jewish,’ the Englishman answered quickly for him.

The Palestinian scowled. ‘This man says the Shabak tortured you. Why do they torture a Jew?’

Helplessly, Danny said, ‘I guess they were pissed at me.’

A disconcerting scrape of metal from one of the young sentinels broke the silence that followed. Not understanding English, he’d chosen that moment to check the breech of his automatic. Irritably, the older man ordered him from the room. He turned back to Danny with a grin. ‘You pissed on the Shabak?’

Danny nodded towards his rescuer. ‘Not as much as he did.’

The grin widened. ‘You pissed on the Shabak.’

‘Uh . . . yeah.’

‘And you need my help.’

Danny glanced unsurely at the Englishman, who said, ‘We need to cross the border. You have ways to bring in . . . supplies from Jordan. Vehicles with modifications, perhaps. With your permission, we could be the return cargo.’

The Palestinian considered them both, all signs of mirth gone. ‘You have money?’ he demanded. ‘Two thousand dollars? This is the transit tax you must pay the Authority.’ He waved airily towards the window. ‘For our schools and clinics.’

‘Seems reasonable,’ said the Englishman, opening his backpack and extracting a bulky envelope. ‘We need to leave immediately.’

One of the foot soldiers led them to an alley behind the apartment block where a gleaming white 4WD Toyota stood waiting. On the doors were the scraped remnants of a UN agency’s markings. Danny waited until the engine had started. ‘You realize what they’re gonna use that money for?’ he demanded in a furious whisper.

His rescuer looked at him curiously.

‘Shit, you just funded terrorism!’

A little perplexed, the Englishman said, ‘I suppose that’s possible.’

‘
Possible?
What else is he going to do with it?’

‘My guess is a new TV and a gold necklace for his girlfriend.’

The Toyota moved at pace through the streets of the camp. Pedestrians stepped smartly out of its way and two cars pulled over to let it pass. Within a few minutes they were clear of the concrete warren and moving into open land, with only a few older buildings scattered across the parched landscape.

‘And what if he spends your two grand on a stack of suicide vests headed for Tel Aviv buses?’

‘I’ve seen too many real tragedies to worry about hypotheticals.’

The vehicle picked up speed as they left the village of Anata and turned onto the main highway through Wadi Qelt. Other than an IDF base to the right, there was nothing around them but the grey-brown hills of the Judaean Desert.

‘Maybe you should check out a demolished nightclub sometime. See what a pile of Semtex can do.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said the Englishman. Danny heard the warning in his tone and fell silent.

The journey to Jericho was swift and uneventful. The ancient town, a collection of squat grey and dirty white buildings that blended into the background desert hills, seemed tired and faded. An abundance of greenery fed by the Ein es-Sultan saved it from disappearing completely into the surrounding sands. Twenty thousand people lived in Jericho, many of them refugees, but there was little sign of life.

The transfer from Toyota to smuggler’s truck took place in a dusty yard protected from view on all sides by a high brick wall. The Tata vehicle was dirty, rusty and entirely unremarkable. It looked to have been used to transport all manner of legitimate cargoes, from livestock to building materials. Its owner was a cheerful Jordanian who assured them in broken English that he and his truck were well known at the King Hussein Bridge and there would be not one small problem.

Then he sprang a hidden catch on the underside of the chassis, invited them both to urinate against the brick wall, and helped them into the chest-crushingly small compartment concealed above the fuel tank.

The short drive to the border was worse than uncomfortable. Their shoulders and hips were quickly bruised by the jolting of bad suspension on potholed roads. Danny muttered something, an attempt at a joke, but the other man silenced him immediately.

At the Israeli border post, the truck queued for an eternity before receiving a cursory examination from the Magav. They were not interested in an empty vehicle returning to Jordan. The driver pulled up a couple of kilometres into the Hashemite Kingdom and released them from their steel priest hole. ‘You see?’ he beamed. ‘No problem. Never problem.’

At the Englishman’s request, he drove them straight to the US embassy in the western suburbs of Amman. As they climbed out of the Jordan River valley towards the affluent outskirts of the hilltop capital, Danny asked, ‘What happens now?’

‘Now you go home.’

‘What if I don’t want to go home?’

‘You have no passport, no money, no clothes. You’re still in shock. You’re going home.’

‘And you?’

‘I’ve got a job to do.’

‘What kind of job?’

He didn’t answer.

Danny shifted in his seat, trying to find a more comfortable position between the driver and his rescuer. The gear stick was pressed against his leg and a metal spring protruding from the bench seat was digging into his buttock. ‘I could help you,’ he ventured.

‘I don’t need help.’

‘You don’t know what I can do.’

‘I know you’re very clever and not all that smart. Which is why you’re headed back to college. Tell the embassy you were robbed while visiting Petra. Ask for a temporary passport and a phone call to your parents. They can sort out a ticket home for you. For Christ’s sake, don’t mention the Shabak or your activities in Israel to any diplomats. You’ll only embarrass them.’

Two blocks from the squat, sand-coloured fortress designated United States territory, the Englishman asked the driver to pull over, well clear of the CCTV and armed police units that surround every American embassy in the Middle East. He gave him a $300 tip and they parted with much invocation of God’s blessing upon them.

‘Aren’t you coming?’ asked Danny, gazing down the wide, clean boulevard. The outline of a police truck mounted with a machine gun was visible in the distance, guarding one corner of the antennae-strewn building.

‘Your story is you were travelling alone.’

‘How about a drink first?’

‘Sorry. No time.’ The Englishman hailed a taxi.

‘So, like, can we keep in touch? What’s your name, anyway?’

The guy just smiled. ‘Do me a favour. Choose your marks more carefully in future.’

Danny felt genuinely hurt. ‘You won’t even tell me your name?’

The Englishman climbed into the yellow saloon. ‘Matar,’ he murmured to the driver. As the taxi pulled away, he looked up and said, ‘Stay out of trouble, Danny.’

‘His
sister
?’ queried Madeleine Wraye. ‘Martin de Vries doesn’t have a sister.’

‘Not any more.’

‘I wasn’t aware he ever did. We looked into all that when we made him a director.’

‘She was actually his half-sister,’ said Joyce. ‘Different surname.’

‘Beaten to death? You’re sure about that?’

‘There’s a photograph on a Zim Opposition website,’ he said, reaching for his smartphone.

‘I don’t want to see it. Christ, poor Martin. He did press us to intervene in Zimbabwe. He was convinced we could stop Mugabe in his tracks with a few I/OPS or Increment actions. Of course we stonewalled him. We had no idea his sister was on one of those farms.’

‘It’s a hell of a motive.’

‘It’s a
possible
motive,’ she corrected. ‘Keep an open mind. There are four other names on that list.’

Edward Joyce gazed through his binoculars at the wharfs and streets below. ‘Jane Saddle is in the clear. Three days’ leave, covering Bravo Day. Her daughter’s school organized a camping trip to the Brecon Beacons. She was one of the volunteer parents.’

‘You checked she actually went?’

‘The school posts photographs from every excursion online. She’s in half the pictures from that year. Bright yellow raincoat, posing with the kids on a dozen windy hilltops. No way she could have accessed Porthos.’

Wraye nodded, satisfied. Her fingers were skimming across the screen of a tablet. ‘These are good,’ she acknowledged. She had issued Joyce with two tiny pieces of equipment in that Vauxhall Arches bar: a miniature digital camera with which to photograph logbooks, requisition forms, memos, travel receipts and journals in SIS’s central registry, and a highly unusual flash drive for all the data collated by the IONEC students on the ASH suspects. To smuggle the devices in and out of Head Office, she had shod him in black lace-ups with generous heels, inside each of which was a copper-lined compartment. Proper old-school kit.

The flash drive had no USB interface, but rather a delicate moulded body designed to fit between an Ethernet 8P8C connector and its port on a desktop terminal. To copy the students’ files, Joyce had stayed late in the office, lingering over a set of accounts from Buenos Aires. He had encouraged a pencil to roll behind his terminal, had reached to retrieve it, and had swiftly inserted the device between connector and port. No alarms had gone off. It was as easy as Wraye had promised.

Wraye looked up from the data haul on the tablet and gazed out over Southsea. ‘How are they doing?’

‘Pretty well.’ He handed her the binoculars. ‘Allwood is impressive. Green shirt with blue daypack.’

Wraye found the IONEC student and followed him as he sauntered, with casual purpose, through the tourist crowds scattered around the shops and restaurants of Gunwharf Quays. ‘Who’s the target?’

‘TD7. Blue jacket, thirty metres ahead.’

From Deck 1 of Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower they had a god’s eye view of the surveillance operation. Three other students had adopted a workable formation around the senior training officer, modified to allow for the canal that ran through the middle of their route. One student walked forty metres ahead of the target, guided by radio instructions from Allwood. Another, the back-up, followed behind, out of sight should TD7 turn. The fourth was across the canal.

‘Your front runner is ballooning a little, and the boy in the red shirt is staring more or less continuously – he’ll show out the moment the target looks round.’ She handed back the binoculars. ‘What was he thinking, wearing red?’

Joyce said nothing. TD7 had paused at a shop display. Allwood handled it just right, continuing naturally past while his back-up took over the eyeball position. The student in front had stopped to take a photograph of the Spinnaker Tower, a manoeuvre that allowed her an oblique view of the target. ‘Look again,’ he said, giving Wraye the binoculars once more.

Red Shirt had disappeared. Wraye finally spotted him on a bridge across the canal, now sporting a white T-shirt and blue baseball cap. As the target abruptly started off in a new direction, the four watchers slipped effortlessly into a revised formation around him.

‘Not bad,’ she offered. ‘What do you have on the others?’

‘Nothing on Elphinstone. The man left no footprint that I could find on Bravo Day. Vine was in Damascus station, presumably with access to Porthos. Watchman and de Vries were both in Head Office. A bunch of meetings logged, as well as a conference call with Langley for Watchman at 15:30.’

‘All right. Is Elphinstone in London at the moment? I’ll start with him. Nothing more suspicious than a blank slate.’

‘Start with de Vries,’ said Joyce forcefully. ‘If you’re looking for a traitor, he –’

Wraye interrupted him with a raised hand: a group of noisy schoolchildren were being herded past them by a frazzled teacher. Two were leaping up and down on the transparent section of the floor, seemingly intent on cracking the toughened glass and plunging to their deaths.

When they had ebbed away, Wraye said quietly, ‘Because his sister was murdered? That’s your analysis?’

‘He wrote letters to Blair, to the whole Cabinet, arguing for intervention in Zimbabwe. There are copies on file, the scrupulous bastard. He goes on about “the team” but he despises most of us. I’ve been reviewing the decisions he’s made since the farm invasions: he’s stopped valuable projects, withheld new kit on the flimsiest of grounds, denied logistical support to important missions. This is a man who hates the Firm for doing nothing to stop Mugabe – hates it so much he’s willing to sabotage our vital interests. Maybe retract a genuine terror alert.’

‘Unfounded speculation.’

‘Maybe even kill an SIS officer.’

Wraye looked cautiously around. There was no one within hearing distance. ‘Where did you get that idea?’

‘I know Ellington died in Riyadh on Alpha Day.’

‘In his sleep. Nothing suspicious about a ruptured aneurysm.’

‘Read the TOS travel log. A courier was dispatched to our embassy in Saudi two hours after the retraction of the threat alert. Ellington died that night. Now guess who sent that courier.’

Wraye packed the tablet away. ‘All right. I’ll start with Martin.’