Rogue Elements (7 page)

‘Martin,’ he responded smoothly. ‘How nice to hear from you. Actually the Syrians do it superbly. Lemon juice and paprika, really makes it zing.’ Just the kind of thing a business analyst in Damascus would say, should anyone be listening.

‘Wonderful! We must catch up properly sometime. I was thinking about you because I came across an old English teddy bear in the Sana’a market the other day. Checked yellow trousers and scarf, red jumper. Most unlikely, and it reminded me you had a favourite bear not far from here until a couple of years ago?’

There was silence from Damascus. When he spoke again, Pearman was newly brusque. ‘That’s right,’ he muttered.

Arkell was relieved. He had been confident the Rupert Bear reference would be lost on any Yemeni or Syrian listeners; he wasn’t at all sure his Accelerated Arabic classmate would get it. ‘I was trying to remember where that bear ended his days. Was it under our flag?’

‘It was last seen in bed, close to our flag.’
Rupert Ellington died in his sleep in the diplomatic quarter of Riyadh.

‘So nothing . . . odd?’ Arkell tried to phrase the question gently. Ellington had been Charlie Pearman’s closest friend in the Firm, and he had taken his death very badly.

‘No. Completely unexpected, but natural.’

There was a measure of anger in Pearman’s voice. Arkell thanked him quickly and brought the call to a close.

So Rupert Ellington hadn’t been gunned down in a Saudi street by Islamic militants desperate to seal the leak created by Saeed. No, it was much, much worse than that.

‘Let me get this straight,’ interrupted Wraye. ‘Without consulting your superiors, breaking all protocol, you decide to scoop up this Saeed character and rush him back to London. Why?’

‘Isn’t that obvious? If his story was true, we were looking at a major conspiracy, quite possibly involving the Middle East desk. Saeed was the star witness. The Chief and Jeremy needed to hear what he had to say.
You
needed to hear it. I wasn’t going to let anyone else near him until we knew exactly what had happened to Ellington.’

‘How did you get him out of Yemen?’

‘Via Aden. I put him on a freighter to Mombasa.’

‘With what funds?’

‘Two thousand dollars from the Exceptional Circumstances Fund.’

‘So immediately half a dozen people on the ECF committee know something is up,’ said Wraye. ‘Mombasa?’

‘I flew ahead and met him off the ship. We decided he could pass for a Greek. There was a charter flight to Rome, direct from Mombasa. I travelled via Nairobi. Hired a car and picked him up.’

‘Passport?’

‘Central Facilities supplied it while he was on the ship.’

‘So they knew all about Saeed?’

‘They didn’t have his identity or nationality. Just a request for a Greek passport in a false name.’

‘You must have sent a photograph.’

‘Deliberately obscure. I got a man in Aden to touch up the ears and jawline. No recognition system could have identified Saeed from it.’

‘They had his travelling name. Which means they could have obtained CCTV images at Rome immigration. Did you bring him into the UK on that passport?’

‘We came through the Tunnel. They barely glanced at our passports.’

‘But they had your registration. You used a Firm identity to hire the car, I presume?’

‘There was no link to Saeed.’

‘Every service station CCTV system between Rome and London could have captured his face beside that number plate.’ She shook her head. ‘Any tourists fiddling with cameras on your Eurotunnel shuttle?’

Arkell reddened. ‘The Firm doesn’t have the resources to run that kind of operation without a very good reason.’

Wraye stood up angrily. ‘You’ve just told me this man was incarcerated on the same day a perfectly healthy SIS officer dropped dead, barely hours after he was passed a warning about one of the greatest terrorist atrocities of our age. Show me a “very good reason” if that isn’t it.’

He didn’t reply.

‘So you assumed I was the one who sent Yadin to kill you, because I was the only person you knowingly informed. Yet in three minutes you’ve suggested any number of other SIS personnel whose paranoia you might have pricked if they had something to hide about GRIEVANCE.’

She stared pointedly at the rope still hanging from his left hand. Following her gaze, he tossed it aside. ‘You agree it was someone in the Firm, then?’ he said roughly.

‘And here’s another thing: I never received your Porthos message. So you have to ask yourself,
who did
?’

‘Porthos was totally secure.’

‘Except from the directors with snooping rights.’

‘
What
?’

‘“Who watches the watchers?” Answer: the most senior watchers. What did you expect? The Porthos messaging system was a rich seam of intelligence on the thinking and intentions of our officers. It was inevitable that we were going to mine it.’

‘Who? Which directors had access?’

‘We’ll come to that. I want to be very clear about the possible implications first. Let’s choose a cryptonym . . .’ She cast her eyes around the room, the desk, the fireplace. ‘ASH. Maybe it’s a man, maybe it’s a woman. Maybe it’s more than one person. We’ll hypothesize an entity within the Firm named ASH who somehow became aware of your interaction with Saeed. Assuming both Saeed’s story and your story are true, what can we deduce about ASH?’

‘You mean besides the fact that he ordered Ellington killed, Saeed arrested, and my house blown up?’

‘He, she or they,’ she corrected.

‘We can deduce that ASH knew about GRIEVANCE in advance and didn’t want the attack disrupted.’

‘Or didn’t know, but when informed by Ellington had reason to want it to go ahead,’ cautioned Wraye.

‘Or was one of the plotters himself,’ said Arkell grimly.

Wraye did not bother to correct the gender assumption a second time. ‘And if we accept what the Mossad tell us with respect to Mr Gavriel Yadin’s exclusive loyalty to a single master since he left their employ, what else can we deduce which unutterably complicates our current investigation?’

Arkell stared back into her stony eyes. ‘That a senior SIS officer has ordered the assassination of three world leaders.’

The room had grown claustrophobic. They moved to the kitchen, where there was better light and more air. Madeleine Wraye picked up a pad of paper and a Pentel rollerball.

‘Let’s be methodical. Who knew you were asking questions about Ellington?’ Tearing off a single sheet of paper, she set it on a glass chopping board that would capture no trace of her handwriting. In large block capitals, she wrote ASH at the top of the page.

‘Charlie Pearman, I suppose,’ began Arkell reluctantly. ‘Two or three people on the Middle East desk.’

‘Along with anyone else from the controllerate who happened to be in Head Office that day. Then you go off piste . . . George Vine gets to hear you’re missing. He initiates an investigation that uncovers your interest in Ellington . . . who would have handled that?’

‘One of the field coordinators. Or George might have done it himself.’

She wrote down three names, pausing almost superstitiously before adding that of the Firm’s most senior regional chief. ‘You said George telephoned you just before the bombing? Kept you on the line?’

Arkell nodded, a new rage building.

‘Then there’s Personnel Department,’ said Wraye quickly. ‘That could bring another six officers into the frame. Who else?’

‘Central Facilities. The passport for Saeed.’ He gave the names of the two forgers he’d spoken to, along with their managers.

‘And of course the good people of Technical and Operations Support who were probably called on to locate you,’ she said, writing down a cascade of names. ‘All right, that leaves your Porthos message. What did you write?’

Arkell had no difficulty, after nine years, recalling the message word for word. ‘“Saudi citizen Saeed Bin Abdullah Al-Khaneen claims gave full warning of GRIEVANCE attack to ACTOR officer Rupert Ellington day of his death Riyadh. Have Al-Khaneen in my care. Request urgent advice in light of possible ACTOR complicity in GRIEVANCE.”’

Wraye looked up, an expression of mild fascination on her face. ‘That was a remarkably naïve message to send.’

‘My wife died.’ His jaw was clenched. ‘I don’t need to be told I made a mistake.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He nodded. ‘So who had special access to Porthos? Who could have intercepted the message?’

‘It started as a Counter-Intelligence function. The idea was that Linus Marshall should have sight of all Porthos traffic – looking for unusual behaviour that might signal treacherous designs. But there were objections from some of the other directors – they worried it would give Linus too much power. It became quite political. So then access was extended to the Chief and a number of the directors. Perhaps nine other people might have been able to read your message.’

She completed the list and counted the names. ‘Twenty-eight possible candidates. And that’s without considering all the colleagues who might have heard some casual mention of your curiosity about Ellington in the time Saeed was on that ship. Evaluating them all without proper access to Firm records is going to be a nightmare.’

‘No.’ Arkell rocked forward. ‘No, it’s simpler than that. Don’t you see it? You never got my Porthos message, which means ASH deleted it. He has to be one of the nine directors with snooping rights. Forget Charlie Pearman and the forgers and field coordinators. None of that matters.’

Wraye nodded slowly. ‘You’re right. Well . . . you would be right, except for one problem . . .’

‘What?’

‘We had snooping rights, Simon. Not deleting rights.’

‘Someone must have done,’ retorted Arkell. ‘Porthos messages didn’t get lost. It never happened.’

‘You’re sure you addressed it to me?’

‘Oh, please . . .’

Madeleine Wraye tapped the pen against her teeth. ‘There is one possibility. We couldn’t
delete
other people’s messages, but in the first few months there was a small glitch in the Porthos surveillance functionality. Some of us discovered – by chance – that we could
edit
messages.’

‘You are kidding.’

‘No one worried about it all that much. It didn’t occur to us that anyone would exploit the glitch. The whole point of snooping rights is to keep an eye on things without leaving a trace. Interfere with the object under observation and you give yourself away – first rule of surveillance. TOS rectified the glitch eventually, but the idea that anyone would have actually meddled with a Porthos message . . .’

‘You received
something
from me, didn’t you?’

Suddenly, it hit her. ‘Your last words. That’s what they were to me. Damn it, I read them out at your funeral!’

‘Tell me.’ It was little more than a growl.

Closing her eyes, she took herself back to that sad little church, the casket with the ashes of a few misidentified body parts. His sister, his parents. God, his
parents
. Did they know he was still alive? And Wraye, calling herself Angela Redfern, a procurement director at the Department for International Development, scraping together what lines she could to convey her officer’s great service to his country without giving away the slightest hint of what he had actually done.

‘“Having a lovely time in Sana’a. Weather’s perfect. Wish you were here.”’

There was a long silence.

‘That’s not even funny,’ shouted Arkell.

‘Believe me, I spent weeks trying to understand the hidden message in your words. I was convinced there was something there that could explain what had happened to you. I called up the Yemeni meteorological records. I tried every code key we’d ever shared. Nothing. They were just words.’

‘Words I never wrote.’

‘Which proves the case against ASH. A deleted message might possibly have been a technical error. An altered message, on the other hand . . .’

‘ASH is one of those nine directors.’

‘Yes.’

‘Their names, Madeleine. Linus Marshall, the Chief, who else?’

‘It couldn’t have been Linus. Even in Kyrgyzstan, I checked Porthos daily. ASH got to your message before I did, meaning ASH had access to a Porthos terminal on the day you sent it. Linus Marshall was hiking in the Drakensberg that week. He’s off the list.’

‘Their names.’

‘And I think we can clear the Chief straightaway. Since his retirement, he’s been a generous supporter of Think Again. He makes speeches in favour of drug reform in the Lords. If ASH is behind the van der Velde murder, it isn’t him.’

‘Their names!’

She looked suddenly drained. ‘You know their names, Simon. You know exactly who we’re talking about.’

Some of the fight went out of Arkell. It was as if both of them were overwhelmed by the simple act of contemplating treachery at such an exalted level.

‘Jeremy Elphinstone,’ he said quietly. ‘Requirements and Production, the heart of everything: he would have been first in line after the Chief.’

‘Yes.’

‘The regions? Did the controllers have access?’

‘Selective access to messages sent by their own people. George Vine in this case.’

‘I’ll bet Jane Saddle wheedled her way in there somehow.’

‘Of course. There wouldn’t be much point in the Chief having a personal secretary if he didn’t trust her with everything he saw.’

‘What about the section heads? Same rule as the controllers?’

‘Not quite. For us, it wasn’t a question of who sent the message but what words it contained. For Counter-Proliferation, I could see messages that referenced “Yongbyon”, “centrifuge enrichment” and so on. For Counter-Terrorism, Tony Watchman could access any message mentioning “Zawahiri”, “USS Cole”, “9/11”, “O’Hare” . . .’

‘“GRIEVANCE”,’ added Arkell glumly.

‘Undoubtedly,’ agreed Wraye.

‘That leaves the three TOS directors. Did they have access?’

‘They did. The Chief reasoned that if we didn’t give the architects of Porthos full access to Porthos, they would take it anyway behind our backs. But remember, Susan didn’t join the Firm until after GRIEVANCE . . .’

‘And Alec was on sabbatical at MIT when I went to Yemen.’

‘So that just leaves . . .’

A slight shudder, but it might have been the chill of midnight. ‘Martin de Vries.’

‘Exactly.’

Simon Arkell hesitated before concluding: ‘Five possible names then, or . . .’

She glanced up. ‘Yes?’

‘Never mind.’ Taking a lighter from his pocket, he set fire to Wraye’s list and dropped the burning paper in a colander.

She let it go. ‘Five suspects: Elphinstone, Watchman, de Vries, Saddle and Vine.’

‘Shouldn’t be hard to narrow down,’ he said, rising.

She caught his arm. ‘Simon, I appreciate Emily’s death is driving you to act. God knows I’d feel the same for that sweet girl. But you’re in no position to investigate ASH. I still have some access and plenty of contacts. Let me do this.’

‘And put ASH in some cosy prison cell? Out for good behaviour in three years?’ He shook his head.

‘That won’t happen,’ she assured him. ‘A public trial would be an impossibility for the Firm, especially with the GRIEVANCE connection. In fact I’ll make you a deal: hunt Yadin and ASH is all yours. That’s in addition to the half-million-dollar fee. Should ASH happen to meet with an accident shortly after I’ve proven his or her guilt to the satisfaction of the Joint Intelligence Committee, well . . . no one in Whitehall will be overly troubled.’

Simon Arkell drained the last of his wine. ‘You can forget the fee,’ he said.

‘So you’ll do it? You’ll terminate Yadin?’