Marius

by Laurence Todd

  Marius was Harry Ferguson.

  Now nothing was making sense.

  When I first came into contact with Ferguson, I’d just transferred across from CID to Special Branch, and he’d been one of the instructors on an induction course I’d attended at a very exclusive central London hotel. I’d been most impressed with his breadth of knowledge on the ways and mysteries of the secret world I was entering, particularly his notions of old allegiances breaking down and new alliances emerging, often from the same conflicts. He’d been very critical of the West’s intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, poured scorn on Tony Blair’s belief in Saddam having weapons of mass destruction which could reach the West in forty-five minutes and explained that, in his view, terrorist bodies like Muearada had been the inevitable result of such folly. We’d talked afterwards and then ended up having a beer in a pub just off Piccadilly. Since then I’d had the occasional talk with him about various issues and, on one occasion, he’d told me his codename in MI5 was Marius.

  “Why Marius?” I’d asked.

  “I read Classics at Cambridge. Marius was a general in the Roman army, and I liked the stories he figured in, so, when I needed a codename for ID purposes, I went with that.”

  Glett was meeting with Harry Ferguson. Why?

  *

  I drove to Swiss Cottage, ensuring the siren was silent as I came off the Finchley Road and turned into Eton Avenue. I pulled in behind an expensive, foreign-looking sports car which looked like it could be entered into Formula One racing. I could see Glett’s car further along the road. I waited.

  Just over an hour later Glett emerged from Ferguson’s flat on his own. He hurried towards his car and drove away. I started up, reversed and followed him, staying two to three vehicles behind. He wasn’t expecting to be followed, so, as long as I was careful, I had an easy run.

  He turned right onto the A41 and then, a series of left and right turns later after leaving the main road, I could see the Alexandra Palace coming up. My guess was Glett was going to visit George Duncan.

  I pulled away at the next turning and, with a few detours and the aid of satnav, I was parked on a side road and waiting by the time Glett turned into Duncan’s road. He parked, walked up to the front door, knocked and went straight in. Interesting he’d not had to wait to be admitted. Had he called in advance and been expected? When Glett and I had approached Duncan, he’d been quite surly and aggressive, yet Glett had just gone straight in. Had they been acting out a role for my benefit?

  I waited about twenty minutes. Glett then came out and drove away, but this time I didn’t follow him.

  I could now draw a line connecting Glett to Drake Mahoney, to a shooting earlier today at Ehmat Chackarti’s house, on through to Harry Ferguson and now to George Duncan.

  What the hell was going on?

  *

  I went off duty around seven after I’d spent a couple of hours checking through various files. I was attempting to see at what point Glett and Ferguson might have come into contact, but I couldn’t find any connections. They’d never worked together on any operation I had access to the details of.

  I was curious about other points as well. How well did Glett know George Duncan if he could just walk straight into his house? Had all the posturing and bravado outside Duncan’s house on the occasions we’d visited just been an act for my benefit to disguise the fact they knew each other? This made me wonder whether Duncan or Ferguson knew Drake Mahoney. Names seemed to be floating around in the ether like stray fragments of a mind map and I couldn’t connect any of them up.

  *

  Taylor and I went out to eat and had a nice evening just talking about life and whatever else. It was just lovely spending time with her. Tomorrow morning, she was holding an interview with the leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, Ian Mulvehill, in his office in Westminster, which was to appear in Wednesday’s Evening Standard. She was excited at the prospect because he’d agreed to give an exclusive interview to her paper about forthcoming changes to Labour party policy which were likely to prove controversial, so she’d spent the afternoon researching her topic. She’d been very impressed when, after she had told me about the forthcoming interview last week, I’d said I knew him as I’d spent a number of weeks as one of his personal protection officers earlier in the year. I gave her a few tips as to what I’d found him to be like, and asked her to remember me to him.

  I’d been somewhat distracted throughout the evening, my thoughts occasionally straying to what Glett’s role might be in everything going on. Was he playing some security service game of bluff or double bluff, or was he involved with something more sinister?

  But lying in bed, with the woman of my dreams cuddled up alongside me, put everything into its proper perspective.

  E L E V E N

  Monday

  WAKING EARLY this morning and lying in bed, I’d spent some considerable while thinking about everything that’d happened across the past several days, and, after struggling to make any discernible pattern out of what I knew, I’d concluded the person I needed to focus on wasn’t Glett at all; it was Harry Ferguson.

  I’d reached this conclusion mainly because Adam Redlands and Murray Kirkwall, or whoever they really were, had been in possession of valid driving licences, which made me think they had to have someone in their corner with enough influence to acquire them from the DVLA. Also, being able to disappear as easily as they appeared to have done suggested someone with the ability to pull strings was helping them do this. And even though he was no longer in MI5, Ferguson could still pull strings with people he knew, plus all the contacts he undoubtedly still had in organisations such as Prevental.

  I was especially curious as to how he and Glett would know each other. Glett was drugs squad when I first knew him but was now working in the Gangs and Organised Crime division. What would have been their point of contact?

  I needed to know more about Ferguson. I knew about his expertise and his reputation concerning terrorism in the security service, of course, and I knew about how he’d been compelled to leave the service. But I also knew Colonel Stimpson harboured doubts about Ferguson, and there’d have to be some basis for this doubt, so I wanted an insider’s perspective, someone who’d know things unofficially, someone on the inside who knew the right people to ask to get something off the record. And I knew who this person was.

  *

  Christine Simmons answered her phone immediately. She was a friend whose brains I’d picked on several occasions since we’d worked together thwarting Red Heaven’s attempt to plant explosives near the Albert Hall. At one time I’d even been convinced I was in love in her, but I’d realised after a short while I was being ridiculous.

  After a brief chat, she said she was expected at a high-powered meeting at the Foreign Office, chaired by the Foreign Secretary, to talk about the issue of Muslim students who had entered the country from friendly nations, but who had then undergone the process of radicalisation whilst in the country and were now considered by the security service to be potential threats to national security. She had to be there for eleven, but could meet for a quick coffee at the Starbucks nearby at ten thirty. I told her who I was interested in and asked whether she knew of or could find anything pertaining to him and his time in the security service. I explained why I was interested. She said she already knew something and would quickly do some ferreting around.

  I was in Starbucks when she arrived and, immediately, I could see why I’d become infatuated with her. At the time my previous relationship was virtually dead and I suspect I’d simply fallen under the spell of a fatal attraction. Happily, I’d not gone as far as making a fool of myself.

  After a few moments of each asking how you doing? I leapt straight in, as she was rushed for time. “You get the chance to find out anything about Harry Ferguson?”

  “Harry? God, yes, man’s a legend in the service.” She sounded awestruck by his reputation. “I’d been in the service a few years when they r
etired him on health grounds.”

  “But?” I sensed a but coming.

  “But” – she leaned forward – “there were a few hushed whispers doing the rounds even before the time he was compelled to resign. The officer I was working with, someone who’d known and worked alongside Ferguson for many years, told me the unofficial word was he was being retired because of suspicions about him inside MI5 that’ve never gone away. His second mild stroke gave the service chiefs all the excuse they needed to get him out.” Her expression changed to very serious and I could tell from her eyes she had something important to say. “The man who told me this has now retired himself, and he forbade me to tell anyone what he’d told me, but this is pertinent background if you’re planning a formal investigation, so I’m gonna trust you, Rob.” Her eyes bored into me. “What I’m about to tell you, you never heard it from me, right? I have your word?”

  “Heard what?” I grinned. She knew she had my word.

  “I’m gonna start by assuming you’re aware there’ve been suspicions about Ferguson for quite some time,” she stated formally.

  I agreed I’d heard a few whispers but wasn’t certain as to their veracity.

  “There’re a couple of reasons, but the main reason for the lingering suspicion that’s dogged him for years, certainly amongst the big chiefs in the service, is the thought he might have been involved in how the IRA obtained Semtex in the 1980s.”

  “Harry?” This surprised me.

  “Yes, Harry,” she said, firmly enough to make me believe she was telling the truth. “It was bad enough finding out the IRA had just got its hands on a quantity of good-condition AK-47s, rumoured to be about forty, but Semtex as well?”

  “How did this come about?” I was wholly intrigued to know this.

  “The situation’s this.” She looked very serious, leaned forward and spoke quietly. “He was stationed in Libya for a few years in the mid-to-late eighties, which is when the IRA was said to have acquired its Semtex. He was working with another agent in Libya, who was monitoring the people involved in the deal because we knew there were a couple of IRA men in the country, one in particular who was said to have good links to Libyan intelligence, an IRA man who’d later fled to America; the other was from Belfast. But the agent he was working with, whose name was never made known, was shot dead one night. The service never found out who did it, and not too long after he died, Semtex was available in Belfast and being used. Ferguson was questioned about the operation and he always claimed he’d been waiting to hear from this agent before he could take any action at his end, and by the time he learned this other agent had been shot, the Semtex had already been shipped out. So the IRA got their hands on it. You remember the bombing at the Arndale centre in Manchester, in the mid-nineties?”

  I did. I’d only been a kid at the time, but I remembered seeing the pictures on the news of a large shopping centre with major bomb damage, and the amazed look of my parents. Half the centre was missing and a couple of hundred people had been injured.

  “The IRA used around 3,000 pounds of explosives in that one, and there was a lot of Semtex involved, traced back to Libya, who, of course, denied any involvement.” She sipped her coffee. “But the thing is, and this was the problematic part for security chiefs, Ferguson couldn’t be directly implicated in how they acquired it. He was there, but he could give credible answers to every question which came up when the investigation into the dead agent and how the IRA got its hands on the Semtex was launched. He has plausible deniability.” She made quotation marks with her index fingers. “Operationally and procedurally, he’d been correct when he said he’d been waiting to hear from the other agent before he could move. This agent was liaising with the officer in charge of the team waiting to move in and intercept those at the docks looking to acquire the Semtex, which I’m assuming was an SAS snatch squad, but, as he was dead, the deal went through whilst Ferguson was supposedly kicking his heels waiting to hear what was happening, and the SAS couldn’t move to intercept because their captain never received the order to do so. The whole operation was botched.”

  “Were these serious suspicions, you know, enough for a full inquiry, or was it just a series of coincidences where Ferguson was at the other end?”

  “Not serious enough to take direct action against him, if that’s what you mean. He was in MI6’s office in Tripoli whilst the other agent was at the docks watching a ship, so Ferguson was correct there. It was assumed someone else, possibly Libyan security, had to have been involved in the agent’s death, but no link was ever discovered.”

  She paused to drink some more coffee.

  “But what’s always baffled the security chiefs here is, how did Libyan intelligence even know about this agent? It’s always been suspected one of the two IRA men killed him, but, in order to do that, they’d need to have been tipped off and know who he was as well as where to find him, and here’s the key thing.” She looked directly at me. “Ferguson was the only person who knew this other agent was even in the country. No one else in the Libyan office knew the agent was even there. It was that highly sensitive an operation. The other agent was operating deep undercover, and his only contact with anyone on our side was with Ferguson.”

  “Presumably someone in London knew he was there?”

  “Only his controller, and he was cleared.” She finished her coffee. “The two IRA men then disappear for a few months. Next thing we know, one’s in America and the other’s back in Belfast, but no one knows how he got there. To get through immigration, someone had to have helped him.”

  I was listening intently to what she was saying.

  “And Ferguson was suspected,” I said.

  “Ferguson was questioned in some depth, of course, but it fell some way short of a full-scale investigation into him. Nothing could be proven against him. There was plenty of credible suspicion, but it couldn’t be proven he’d gone off the reservation, so to speak. Every answer he gave was entirely plausible. The timelines were correct and, procedurally, he’d done all the right things in the correct order. All his communications were checked, and they were all in order.” She tapped her spoon absently against her empty cup. “The investigation concluded there was insufficient evidence to say Ferguson had any direct involvement in the IRA getting its hands on Libyan Semtex.”

  “So, what happened afterwards?”

  “After this? He was mainly based in London until he was pensioned off a couple of years ago. Even when he was being considered for promotion, this botched operation was always there in the background. I’ve heard a few long time-agents inside the service say it’s the main reason Ferguson never advanced much higher, only went up another rung or two. The security chiefs never again trusted him one hundred percent, you see. There was always that small shadow in the corner of his service record. You know what it’s like with suspicion, don’t you? Once it’s there, it never, ever goes away.”

  I thought about what I’d heard. Ferguson being involved in helping the IRA acquire Semtex was something I’d not been expecting to hear. I remembered Smitherman saying the suspicion had always been there was a rogue element inside MI5 which’d helped the IRA. Could Ferguson have been this rogue? I now had much to think about.

  Simmons leant back in her chair. “The other thing is, after Arndale, Ferguson was leading the team investigating where the IRA got its Semtex from. Was it from Libya or elsewhere? But the curious thing about that is the report’s conclusions were never made known. It was buried.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Who knows? It was never talked about. The whisper was Ferguson disagreed with what the majority said and tried to change it, tried to claim it wasn’t from Libya, but I can’t confirm that as being completely accurate. So, link this to the suspicion of involvement with Semtex arriving in Belfast from Libya in the first place, and . . .”

  She didn’t finish the sentence. I could see where the suspicion inside the security service was coming from. Was Ferguson attemp
ting to cover up any evidence that might connect him to the IRA’s possession of Semtex?

  I thought about what I’d heard for several seconds. I was still struggling to think of Harry Ferguson as rogue.

  I saw her looking at her watch.

  “Thanks, Christine, I owe you one for this. One thing, though.” I was curious. “Did you already know all this before I phoned?”

  “Ah, now, you’d love to know that, wouldn’t you?” She smiled, raising her eyebrows. “Anyway, gotta dash, mustn’t keep the good mandarins waiting.” She picked up her bag. “You and Sally still good?”

  “Sally?” I half-smiled.

  “Yeah, Sally Taylor, your journalist girlfriend, the woman you live with, that Sally? You involved with more than one, then?” She laughed.

  I was amazed at what she’d said. I’d not told her anything about our relationship. I was about to ask how she knew, but she’d anticipated the question from my expression.

  “Robert, please, who do I work for?” She looked serious for a moment, then grinned. “How did I know this, you’re thinking? All journalists on every major newspaper across the country have a file kept on them. You’re aware of that, aren’t you?”

  I agreed I was. I’d had to update and amend several of them.

  “Seriously, though, I found out because, two or so months ago, she interviewed the Home Secretary, didn’t she?”

  I agreed she had.

  “Wrote quite a good piece as well, if I remember. Well, before any journalist or whoever gets near to a senior political figure, they have to be vetted to ensure they pose no threat to whoever they’re meeting, make sure the Secretary of State or minister’s not likely to be at risk if they meet the person concerned. Standard procedure.” She shrugged. “She’s interviewing Ian Mulvehill this morning, isn’t she?”