Secret Asset

by Stella Rimington

  Liz thought of the weekend Tom had “dropped by” her mother’s house. She hadn’t told Wetherby about Tom’s overtures, but then, had she been right about them? Could she have imagined more than there was to his invitation? It was only supper, after all. Was some personal vanity she wasn’t aware of skewing her judgement? But then she remembered the hotel receipt, and Tom’s lies about his friends on a farm. No, she wasn’t imagining things. He had been trying to use her for his own twisted reasons.

  “No, Charles,” she said, “I do take it personally. He was never loyal to the Service or to any of us. He was using us as a means to an end. He was loyal only to his own warped sense of mission to destroy everything we work for. In the wilderness of mirrors he was the wrong way round.”

  “Of course you’re right,” conceded Charles with an easy smile. “It’s meaningless to make a distinction between the Service and its officers. What was it E. M. Forster said? ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ I’ve always felt our duty was precisely the opposite.”

  “Me too,” said Liz simply.

  They sat in silence for a moment. Wetherby asked quietly, “How’s your mother?”

  He is a nice man, thought Liz. Here he is, with—let’s face it—his career in the balance after such a near disaster, and he manages to remember my mother. “Okay, I think,” she said gratefully. “She’s had the operation and it seems to have gone well.”

  “Good,” said Wetherby encouragingly.

  “Yes, they think they’ve got it all,” said Liz. And for some reason she thought of Tom and the damage he had caused. “At least it seems that way,” she said, adding carefully, “though you can never be sure.”

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Stella Rimington joined Britain’s Security Service (MI5) in 1969. During her nearly thirty-year career she worked in all the main fields of the Service’s responsibilities—counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism—and successively became Director of all three branches. Appointed Director General of MI5 in 1992, she was the first woman to hold the post and the first Director General whose name was publicly announced on appointment. Following her retirement from MI5 in 1996, she became a nonexecutive director of Marks Spencer and published her autobiography, Open Secret, in the United Kingdom.

  ALSO BY STELLA RIMINGTON

  FICTION

  At Risk

  NONFICTION

  Open Secret

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2006 by Stella Rimington

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Originally published in Great Britain by Hutchinson, an imprint of the Random House Group Limited, London, in 2006.

  This edition published by arrangement with Hutchinson, the Random House Group Limited.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rimington, Stella.

  Secret asset / Stella Rimington.

  p. cm.

  1. Terrorism—Prevention—Fiction. 2. Intelligence officers—Fiction. 3. Great Britain—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6118.I44S43 2007

  823'.92—dc22

  2006048798

  eISBN: 978-0-307-26703-0

  v3.0