A Fatal Game

by Nicholas Searle

  Derek was waiting impatiently by the entrance into the building, holding the door open. ‘Lift’s held,’ he said curtly. Stuart’s Private Secretary was waiting in the lift; he smiled at Jake but said nothing.

  ‘Jake,’ said Stuart. ‘So glad you could make it. Tea? Coffee?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘All righty. Greg, don’t think we need you for this. Close the door behind you, would you, please?’

  Stuart sat in the armchair, leaving Jake to perch on the sofa.

  ‘I can understand why you’re not happy.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Jake.

  ‘How will Leila cope?’

  ‘She’ll do fine.’

  ‘I was right after all. This is in your interests as much as anyone else’s, you know. No one wishes to place you in the way of harm. You’re better off out of it.’

  ‘What shall I do now I’m here?’

  ‘Do what you want. Catch up with your expenses. Write some think-piece on the future of the covert human intelligence source if you want. No contact with anyone up there, though.’

  ‘Leila’s in the firing line now?’

  ‘Comes with the territory. I understand it was you and George who pushed her virtues so hard. So we’ll see.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘You need to see the bigger picture, Jake. There is a context.’

  There’s always a context, thought Jake.

  ‘What with the inquiry, we’re struggling for credibility. It’s important we get this op right. People wouldn’t be impressed if we fouled up and the officer at the centre of it all was in fact the person in charge of Abu Omar. I’m being blunt, you understand, for brevity. Busy day.’

  ‘Why didn’t you move me earlier, then? It’s not the greatest timing.’

  ‘I’ve been saying for some time. George was resistant. Recent developments –’

  ‘The disclosures at the inquiry? The Americans?’

  ‘Amongst other things, yes. We’ve had to re-calibrate. You’re much better out of it …’

  There was more. There usually was with Stuart.

  ‘I’ve been wondering,’ he said. ‘There may be a way out of this pickle. The inquiry and all that.’ He waved his hand vaguely.

  Jake waited. Stuart looked at him, steepling his fingers.

  ‘This inquiry,’ he said, ‘is more than inconvenient. It’s becoming damaging, especially since the American thing. There are those agitating for it to be troublesome whom we’d normally expect to be on our side. I can’t expect it’s much fun for you either.’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘I’ve been chatting to the lawyers. They wondered whether it might be in your best interests to refuse to give further evidence.’

  ‘On what basis?’

  ‘On two grounds. First and foremost because it could prejudice any future legal proceedings that may take place. If, for instance, you were to be prosecuted, God forbid, the case could be put out of court because of statements you made under duress in the inquiry. The second reason would be because of that very badgering. You could claim, with justification, that the questioning to which you’ve been submitted amounts to harassment of a witness and that it has placed you under mental stress. This way, you see, we can turn the so-called latitude the Chair’s extended to our advantage.’

  ‘How do you think that would play with the public?’

  ‘We’d just have to play it by ear. Take it on the chin. Better than the alternative.’

  ‘What about government?’

  ‘Government’s rather hoist by its own petard. Made it a judicial matter, so has to play by the rules the judiciary set. Just duck out of the inquiry for the next couple of days. Claim illness, stress, whatever. Get your lawyer to talk to them. We’ll help.’

  ‘You asked me to find my own legal advice because the Service’s interests might diverge from mine.’

  ‘You know very well that was no more than a legal nicety. We’ve always stood shoulder to shoulder. Look, it’s a racing certainty that after next Wednesday the inquiry will be ancient history. Kicked into the long grass. Government loves to associate itself with success.’

  ‘And dissociate itself from ignominious failure.’

  ‘Don’t speak like that. It’s all going to be fine. HMG will want the inquiry out of its hair. Some way will be found.’

  ‘And the possible charges against me that the inquiry’s raised in people’s minds? Murder? Manslaughter? Misfeasance in public office?’

  ‘I was coming to that. I think we can massage that. The legal process is a tortuous thing. But I think that if we apply enough leverage the CPS may well come to a judgement that if they bring charges at all it will be for lesser offences.’

  ‘But no guarantees?’

  ‘You’ve run enough assets, Jake, to know that you can’t give guarantees. You’ve spoken the words enough times, you probably helped write the script.’

  ‘Yes. And the point is, surely, that you actually can’t influence the CPS. Other than with genuine legal arguments. They don’t take kindly to leverage.’

  ‘Well, ye-e-s. But I’d like to think that, in exceptional cases, for reasons of national importance –’

  ‘One bound and we’re all free. Except for me of course. I was forgetting that. The fact that you’d like to think that doesn’t exactly sound like any kind of assurance, Stuart. But I’ll give it due consideration.’ He looked, expressionless, into Stuart’s eyes.

  ‘Your brief knows how to contact our legal team.’

  ‘Yes. So I do whatever I want today?’

  ‘Stick around London. Don’t go back. Pop up to the ops room about half five. Things should be starting up in earnest then. I’ll be there.’

  ‘Think I might catch up with some personal correspondence.’

  ‘Good,’ said Stuart, ushering him to the door.

  ‘Don’t have any writing paper or envelopes, though.’

  ‘Shirley,’ said Stuart to his secretary, irascibly, ‘get some of that nice notepaper for Jake here, will you? Not the headed stuff. And envelopes.’

  ‘Got any stamps, Shirley?’ said Jake.

  He found a quiet room away from the hurly-burly where he could concentrate. He did not consider himself an impulsive person. The plan had been there all along, never to be implemented. Just another little insurance policy. We all needed insurance; it was just prudent.

  Until now. It had been from Stuart’s call that morning that the idea had suddenly sprung, and then the resolve: do it now. His second instant decision.

  He had a number of tasks. First, he composed a long letter to his lawyer asking him to confer with the Service’s legal team and with the counsel to the inquiry. At all events, he would be unable to attend the inquiry the following day owing to his indisposition through unspecified ill health. For his lawyer’s information only, he indicated that he felt so distressed by the events of the past months and the inquiry that he could not bring himself to give further testimony at this stage. His lawyer had told him earlier that, should he begin to feel under undue stress, a doctor could be found who’d swiftly sign the necessary paperwork. Jake was beyond caring.

  He wrote to George, briefly, to apologize. He wasn’t strong enough, he wrote, and it was an effort to keep self-pity from his tone. He wrote to his parents, asking for their understanding and hoping to see them soon.

  In his letter to Leila he wrote: ‘Be better at coping than I was. I couldn’t square all the circles. I was betrayed, and in the end I too betrayed. You’ll be better at this than me. You have stronger principles. You’re made of sterner stuff.’ Platitudes and clichés rolled on to the page. They were all he had.

  He thought again and added a postscript: ‘I’m hoping that by the time you read this you’ll have had a joyous reunion with our friend (I’m not being facetious or sarcastic, by the way) who’s emerged safe and sound from the day’s events. If so, please pass him my best wishes, together with my apologies; to be woven i
n, of course, with whatever fiction you’ve had to concoct to explain my absence. I’ll think of him often. I hope that, however this unravels, our friend – and you of course, of course – come through with no damage direct or collateral sustained.’

  He paused and looked up before resuming his tasks. He recalled those evenings at the training centre, when the old and not-so-bold retired officers were invited to give the new inductees the benefit of their experience in a last hurrah as they sipped their post-dinner drinks. A different world, these old men – for they were all old and all men – inhabited where, in their imaginations at least, their derring-do exploits were conducted with smooth urbanity at cocktail parties or in business-class lounges, words and tradecraft flowing like sweet water. Yet even in this down-in-the-dirt, life-and-death world the job, he had to admit, was much the same. More fear, more heart-in-the-mouth decisions, but still managing the actualities and the choreography to accomplish that magic: the bond. Still, where he was destined he wouldn’t be offered the option of coming back to deliver his august insights in the form of fireside stories.

  There was little time for such daydreaming. Mind you, at the moment everything felt like a daydream.

  ‘With love,’ he wrote, and sealed the letter.

  He put his office credit card in an envelope together with a note to Finance Section asking for it to be cancelled. He wound an elastic band around his official mobile phone together with its charger and a note explaining that he would no longer need it, and placed both in the internal mail. They would be on their way on Monday. He looked at his watch: twelve thirty and time to go.

  As he left the building he handed his pass to the security guard, saying, ‘Would you mind looking after this for me, please? Won’t be needing it for the foreseeable.’ A puzzled look, nothing more.

  On the Heathrow Express he switched on the mobile, the new mobile, the one that had been waiting in its packaging for almost a year until today, the one whose rental had been paid on the dot by direct debit from the bank account he’d had in Auckland for six years now, against this possibility. He’d used it for the first time in anger this morning on the way down, to make all his bookings.

  He’d always been taught when abroad to have an escape passport, hidden safely, just in case. He’d never thought he’d need an escape passport in England, cached at home in the little safe secured to the bedroom floor inside his wardrobe. Until, that is, one morning it had occurred to him, not in response to an incident, almost simply because he could. Another identity was a resource against the unknown. It was, he supposed, a natural compulsion for someone in the business, and perhaps he’d always known he’d have to run away one day.

  It was more than an escape passport, it was an escape persona, a fully formed being that in fact was him. Had been him, anyway, at a time almost beyond recall, growing up in the Bay of Plenty, going barefoot each day to school in the sun. The New Zealand passport was in his Maori name, with his father’s surname and his original given name – the ones that his parents had thought would expose him to ridicule at school when they’d relocated to the UK – as was the account at the National Bank, the credit card and the mobile phone account, all registered at his uncle’s address just outside Tauranga. From the age of six he’d been someone else entirely, Jacob Winter, adopting his mother’s maiden name as his own last name, and he doubted that records here showed that earlier being at all.

  The orthodoxy with escape passports was: always have as much cash as you can cobble together, and always travel first class if you can. But only as long as you’re fully documented and backed up: you’ll not want to be confused with a drug dealer. It won’t help you with the police or border authorities, but anyone else you meet will always incline in your favour, whatever their training. They’ll think twice, three times, before challenging a wealthy, resourceful, influential traveller. Be bold.

  Regrets? Too many to itemize. Hordes of them, clamouring for attention, crying to be recognized as the decisive one. Had he let everyone down? Of course he had. George and Leila would be disappointed in him, to use a mild expression. It would pass, though; like all of us he was ephemeral. He was not the noble soul even he’d believed himself to be. Integrity was an unaffordable luxury item, not even an optional extra.

  He’d lost sight of the path, any path, and subsided into senselessness, the latest example of which was Zaki’s murder. This escape was a kind of suicide. He was killing Jake Winter.

  A thought for Zaki? The thought was more for himself. His regret was not so much that he had killed him, but that he had concealed the fact, possibly beyond discovery. Sure, murder was wrong, an easy thing to say flippantly. It was absolutely wrong. But there were no right choices. Among the multiple-choice tick-boxes there was no correct one. There was no box labelled ‘none of the above’, with the added rubric ‘not on your flaming nelly’. He could not bring himself to be contrite about the act itself, only about his cowardice afterwards.

  It had been an evil committed on behalf of his fellow-citizens, without their knowledge or approval. He had not taken their sins upon himself; they belonged resolutely to that wholly unholy alliance of state, institution and every individual. He’d been simply an emissary, prepared to confront the contradictions. Someone had to.

  Until now it had always been possible to manage the apparent dissonances: between audacity and keeping people safe, between the partial truths told by sources and the whole truth of what actually happened, between fragments of conflicting information and the necessary precision of judgements, between hope and hard fact. There had always been a course to be navigated, somehow preserving integrity and getting stuff done. Abu Omar had broken that, and Jake had discovered the breach was irreparable. There was no finessed solution here other than the bludgeoning violence he’d delivered. He’d lost the power of ambiguity and lost control. What was left was self-preservation.

  Mrs Masoud, of course, had been right, on all counts. Perhaps she’d known, perhaps she’d simply sensed. Just possibly, she hadn’t known it was Zaki. Although Jake had registered some of the incongruities about the sheikh – the notion that it was a role-play rather than a reality, the artifice of the get-up, those fancy boots – he’d failed to piece it together into a suspicion. She’d seen more clearly, in that intersection between intellect and instinct that had been absent in him. She’d seen something more than a petty crook.

  He checked in at the desk, taking his overnight bag as a carry-on, and headed for the first-class lounge, where he would sit behind a newspaper with a soft drink until his flight was called.

  18

  They were permitted to lie in this morning, so they’d be fresh. There was a wide choice of breakfasts in the canteen: the full English, smoked salmon, steak and eggs if required. Someone would inevitably crack the warped joke about the condemned man and the hearty breakfast. Jon Brough had got up early, as usual, and eaten his normal muesli, yoghurt and fruit. Routine helped.

  Like any other: that’s how you began a day when you might, quite deliberately, kill another human being on a perfectly lawful basis. It had somehow to feel normal, though it never would. He’d killed before, of course he had. While his military training had conferred a certain call-and-response automaticity, a number of processes clicking in beyond instinct in reply to a set of closely defined circumstances until that moment when the trigger was pulled and – tap-tap – it was over, it presented an emotional gap, especially afterwards. It was quite unlike killing as a grunt alongside your brothers-in-arms, in the heat and the noise and the smell and the fog of war. Passion was not required in his line; cool efficiency won the day. Team oppos were present of course, and you had to work together, but each faded to being another objective variable, together with the enemy, as you navigated towards an outcome. Just another set of angles and trajectories to be calculated instantly. It was afterwards that your mind had to work overtime to do its settling of accounts and reconciliation of the balances. Even at that stage, in the m
ilitary life, the same as in this one, you didn’t submit to emotion. Counsellors would take you to one side, to encourage you to open up and unpack all your troubles from your old kit bag, but who in their right mind would do that? Once PTSD was mentioned in your presence you were doomed. Might as well get your coat.

  He stopped looking out of the window and returned to his book. It looked a good day for it out there.

  Adnan was hungover. Situation normal for a Sunday morning. He could shake it off easy-peasy, as he usually did for a game down the parks.

  He wished he could go to the game today. The Liverpool fans would be making their way along the M62 over the Pennines, up the long haul to the tops at Saddleworth and across the moors, bleak and cold, slanting rain that would cease as if by magic once they were this side. Past the little white farmhouse hunched between the carriageways. Past the normal bottleneck at the Bradford and Leeds exits, and further east along the M62, not, however as far as the North Sea coast at the end of the motorway. Sun was out here. Nice day for it. Never mind, he’d record it on the box and watch it on fast-forward, or maybe just see it on MOTD. Impossible not to know the score, though, given where he was going.

  Leila shivered in her quilted jacket as she waited in the back of the van. Far too early, she knew, but it posed no security risk, this nondescript van parked unobtrusively and perfectly legally. She felt she owed it to Rashid to be certain of being there, ready when he needed her. The team that was watching him reported that he was still at home. This was as it should be. A quick calculation showed that he wouldn’t need to leave for another two hours. She was ready.

  Jake had been right. Right, that is, when he’d said he’d got it all wrong. However much she liked him, however much she’d looked up to him, he’d made a horrendous mistake, a series of them, that she was determined not to repeat.