Atom Bomb Angel

by Peter James

  ‘Now, at this point, it could be that Sleder merely wanted to get inside information on the nuclear energy business in these countries; the men came from different fields – some were working for governments, some for private industry.

  ‘The next thing that happened was that Sir Isaac disappeared. There was no immediate connection at all – until Mr Flynn, following Whalley, saw him pick up a videotape from a contact in Wales and deliver this tape to the BBC. That was the videotape that went out on the air last Monday.

  ‘The final thing, of course, was the discovery and rescue of Sir Isaac from the Aeroflot plane.’

  ‘Do you think, Sir Charles,’ asked Peter Nettlefold, the Commander of C4, ‘that the Russians are planning some form of worldwide sabotage of nuclear power stations?’

  ‘We received a report yesterday from Sir william’s department,’ Fifeshire was referring to MI6, an organization for which he normally had little regard, ‘perhaps you’d like to relate it, Bill.’

  Sir William Atling had a dark sunken face, and his eyes were a long way back in their sockets, shrouded by enormous, squirrel-like eyebrows. He was fairly tall, but very thin, and wore a sombre dark suit and dark tie that would not have made him look out of place in the clerical department of a firm of undertakers.

  ‘This “Operation Angel” was mentioned in a report I received from Moscow in July, and it has been mentioned several times since. I do not know what it is – no one has been able to find out, and my people are trying very, very hard. In Moscow there is a complete veil of secrecy drawn over it. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that something is going on that is greatly exciting the Politburo. What it is, I do not at the moment know. It could well be this Operation Angel.

  ‘As you probably know, the Politburo is mainly a bunch of old men, and it is not often that old men get excited. I know from experience that if the Politburo is excited, gentlemen, then we should be worried – very, very worried.’

  There was a long silence. Nettlefold broke it. ‘What are your views on the Libyan connection, Bill?’

  ‘Well – Libya is a major international terrorist base. Its neighbour, Chad, has massive uranium reserves, and the Libyans have been moving in on Chad for a long time – but that’s not necessarily relevant here. Maybe the Russians are going to get the Libyans to blow up all these power stations for them. Perhaps it’s not the Russians’ baby at all – it could be someone else’s plot and they’re just footing the bill, or someone could be fronting for them – there are a lot of possibilities.’

  ‘Could it be an IRA plot?’ asked Ross.

  ‘There’s no evidence at the moment to suppose it is,’ said Fifeshire, ‘and the IRA would be concerned only with Britain.’

  ‘What about the other Intelligence services?’ said Ross, flapping a pair of bony white hands like an excited schoolboy.

  If you met him in the street, and didn’t know he was the Home Secretary, you would think he was a complete twerp. He was gangly, very thin, and boyish-looking, with a conical head thinly layered with neat, mousey hair. He had a penchant for bright flowery ties which did not go with the grey chalk-striped suits he wore, and he walked with a distinctive bounce on flat, white, rubber-soled lace-ups. His voice and gestures had become, by the month, increasingly camp, ever since he had taken the opportunity of his appointment as Home Secretary to announce to the world that he had decided to ‘come out’. His problem was that, having come out, he didn’t have any idea where he was. He was an embarrassment to the entire government, yet the Prime Minister dared not sack him, for fear of upsetting the not inconsiderable gay electorate.

  ‘Which other countries have you informed?’ he asked.

  ‘None, and at the moment I don’t intend to.’ Fifeshire said emphatically. He didn’t like Ross at all, and referred to him, when he was out of earshot, as ‘the pogo-stick’. ‘If I tell any of those organizations, or the Canadians, I might as well send a copy of anything I say directly to the Russians. Besides, we do not know for sure that any of these countries are involved. I don’t want to go raking up a hornet’s nest that could blow our only chance of finding out what’s going on before it’s too late. If I feel we need their help, or if I find out something that they must be told, then at the appropriate moment they will be told. Until then, we must play this whole affair close to our vests and find out what we can ourselves.’ Fifeshire looked at the Director General of MI6, and Atling nodded pensively. It was rare that the two men ever communicated with each other, such was their mistrust for each other’s organization. MI5, under Fifeshire, and without the knowledge of any politicians of any party, had over the past fifteen years built up a formidable overseas espionage division – something quite outside the original sphere of responsibility for the internal security of Britain. Fifeshire maintained that internal security could not be effective without deep inside-knowledge of what was happening elsewhere in the world, and he did not trust MI6’s information. Similarly, Sir William Atling and his predecessors had always felt that an overseas intelligence network could not be run without an effective home intelligence network, and he did not want to be in the hands of MI5. So the two men ran their organizations independently, both doing similar work, spying often on the same people, Fife-shire with a slight edge in the United Kingdom, and Atling with the edge overseas. It was Fifeshire who had made the overture to Atling, because he felt that that edge, however small, might right now be needed.

  ‘Secrecy,’ Fifeshire continued, ‘is to be our major weapon. The Russians do not know we have Sir Isaac back. A corpse will have been found in the plane in the exact part of the hold where Sir Isaac was concealed. The Russians will have told the French that it is the body of one of the hijackers – a Jewish dissident—’

  ‘Won’t the French want proof of identity?’ interrupted Ross.

  ‘No, I doubt it very much. This whole incident is immensely embarrassing to them, particularly at a time when détente for them has never been better, and their trade with Russia is booming. I should think the French are relieved as hell there’s only one corpse, and they’ve probably already got it off their hands and sent it to Russia. In case the Russians try and check up on its identity, and manage to steal Sir Isaac’s dental records, we’ve had it equipped with an exact copy of Sir Isaac’s set of teeth – it was fairly easy, as Sir Isaac has no teeth at all, only dentures.’

  Quoit blushed. At least it brought some colour to his face.

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to alter Sir Isaac’s dental records?’ asked Ross.

  ‘Of course it would have been,’ snapped Fifeshire. He didn’t like people questioning his methods – particularly people he didn’t like. ‘But for all we know, the Russians might have made a copy before the kidnap took place; we didn’t want to take the risk. Now are there any questions on what I have said so far?’ Fifeshire looked around the group.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ross. ‘How are the Russians going to explain Quoit’s death to us?’

  ‘The Russians don’t know that we have Sir Isaac back; they will believe we assume Quoit to be in Russia, and that, having said his piece, he probably doesn’t need to make any more public appearances. In a few months’ time, I expect they will notify us that he has been killed in some sort of accident – probably a car crash – and that will be the end of it.’

  ‘Thank you. Now, my next question,’ said Ross, assuming command of question time, ‘is what precisely are the steps you are taking, and how much time do you think we have?’

  ‘I don’t know how long we have. I’m assuming it’s only a matter of weeks. With regard to the steps we are taking: Flynn has a twenty-four-hour surveillance on Whalley. We are hoping Whalley will soon meet again with his contact – the man from whom he collected the videotape. The contact gave Flynn’s men the slip last time, but next time they will hang onto him with glue. Unfortunately, we know nothing about him except that he drives a dark-coloured Ford Capri with false licence plates. The owners of every dark
-coloured Ford Capri in Britain are being checked on, but it’s a massive task. Frankly, we’ll be lucky if anything comes from that. Whalley is by far our best bet; he’ll lead us somewhere, I’m certain.

  ‘We’re also taking a close look at Sleder, and we hope that Sir William’s team in Moscow is going to come up with something. Other than that, Mr Ross, we’ll just have to sit on our pert little bottoms, and wait.’

  12

  It was probably because I was deep in thought after the meeting that I didn’t think hard enough about the message waiting for me on my desk. It was short and clear, and read: A man telephoned. He said he was a friend of Ahmed. He will wait for you at the farthest table at the back of the downstairs floor of Richoux in Knightsbridge until three o’clock.

  I grilled the girl who had taken the message, but she could give me very little help. The voice was foreign, unsteady, and the caller obviously had a limited vocabulary. I could have had the voice played back, as all incoming telephone calls are automatically taped, but there wasn’t enough time to go winding backwards and forwards through the tape, and since I didn’t know anyone who didn’t speak English fluently, hearing the voice probably wouldn’t have helped me. I put my jacket and coat on and went out through the front entrance of number forty-six into Carlton House Terrace.

  It was a bitterly cold day, sleeting slightly. I did up my coat buttons, put my hands in my pockets, and started to walk down towards Pall Mall to find a taxi. I was surprised to hear the familiar diesel rattle after only a few moments, and turned around, to see a taxi with its ‘For Hire’ light on, coming down right behind me. I flagged it down and climbed in. ‘Harrods,’ I said, Richoux being right across the road from the department store, which would give me a chance to see if there was anyone hanging around watching Richoux who shouldn’t have been.

  ‘Pardon?’ he said in a thick accent. He was young – couldn’t have been much more than twenty-two – with a Middle-Eastern complexion, and a large gold-coloured watch.

  ‘Harrods,’ I repeated.

  ‘Harrods, Knightsbridge?’ he asked.

  ‘Correct.’ During the best part of thirty-two years living in London, I had never come across more than one Harrods. This man obviously knew better. The watch was a genuine Rolex. I wondered at which branch of Harrods he’d bought it. The cab was smart – almost brand new; maybe it came from Harrods too. I leaned forward to the partition window. ‘Nice new cab,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he laughed nervously, ‘yes, this is my cab.’

  An advert on the back panel told me I needed a new postal franking machine. The driver crashed the gears badly going from third to fourth as he negotiated St James’s Street. I have always had a love-hate relationship with London’s taxi drivers. When I am driving myself, I think the entire bunch of them are miserable bastards who reckon they own every inch of the road, who never let anyone out, and who carve anyone up given the slightest chance, even if they have to go out of their way to do it. When I am a passenger in a cab, I think they’re bloody marvellous, terrific people, ace drivers, and I can more than fully understand their contempt for the average drivelling moron creeping his saloon around the centre of London’s roads at five miles per hour, and letting the whole world and his dog go before him at every opportunity.

  But right now, my confidence in the London cabbie was taking a severe battering. For the privilege of having to stump up the best part of a week’s wages for every tenth of a mile that I travelled, I felt I was entitled to expect someone who was at least able to drive, who could, at the minimum, string a few sentences of the English language together, and who didn’t think there was a Harrods on every street corner.

  As we rounded the comer into Piccadilly, we stopped at a red light. At least Mustapha wasn’t colour blind. He opened his door and hopped out. ‘You wait please, one moment – I buy Standard.’ He darted off towards a news kiosk.

  I wasn’t sure afterwards whether it was his Rolex watch, or his lack of knowledge of London, or his lack of driving skill, or my sheer disbelief that with his limited grasp of the English language he could have any use for a newspaper, or the fact that for a quarter to three on a Monday afternoon he had just appeared too damn quickly, but something made me lean forward and look into his cab. There was a hand grenade on the seat and there was no pin in the grenade.

  The explosion happened as I was somewhere between the door and the pavement. It picked me up, and blasted me clean over the railings into St James’s Park, and blasted most of my trousers away. It turned the cab into a ball of fire, and sprinkled smaller balls of fire around the foyer of the Ritz, and other parts of the immediate vicinity.

  I lay for a moment on the cold grass, my ears completely numb, my face stinging, my legs hurting like mad, as I gulped in air; and as I gulped in air, I got mad, and as I got mad, I gulped in more air still, and as I gulped in more air still, I got even madder, and I reached for the inside of my jacket, only to discover I no longer had either a coat or a jacket, but I did still have my holster with a Beretta inside it. I pulled out the Beretta, and snapped off the safety catch. I checked the selector was on single fire. I was going to get that Arab; I was going to get that sodding bastard. I climbed over the rails, gingerly, for everything hurt. There was complete silence. The whole of Piccadilly had come to a halt. I pinched my nostrils with my fingers and blew hard until my ears popped; but still there was silence – silence except for the ticking of car engines. Somewhere in the distance I heard the blast of a horn. The cab burned fiercely, crackling viciously. The paintwork of a Ford Granada parked on a meter next to it was blistering and bubbling. The newspaper vendor was wide-eyed and blinking.

  I stared up and down for the Arab. He was nowhere in sight. I looked at doorways, inside cars, up and down the street, but I didn’t move. I waited. I looked for that one movement, somewhere – but there was none. A pretty girl in a Metro was staring at me; her face was frozen in a mixture of horror, pity and puzzlement. I couldn’t blame her; standing there dressed in nothing but black calf-length boots, blue Marks and Sparks Y-fronts, half a gingham-check blue and white shirt, and a hefty great 9mm Beretta 93R, I couldn’t have looked the world’s prettiest sight.

  I tried to conceal the gun, by sticking it inside my shirt, and I became conscious of the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to stand here much longer without attracting a crowd of several thousand. A front-page news story and my mug plastered over every newspaper would not greatly enhance my career prospects. I needed to move away from here, fast. I began walking; somehow, I just didn’t fancy a taxi.

  13

  Happy fucking birthday. The note was written on my hall mirror in lipstick, in big scrawling letters. Her car was gone and so was she, and I could hardly blame her for going. I had promised, faithfully, that I would be home by seven; it was now eleven hours later. Being a spy isn’t a good career for steady relationships; it’s even worse for rocky relationships, and ours would have been described, in nautical terms, as a ‘force 10 gale on the nose’.

  The first time I met her, she was in my bed. She had a shock of hair that was bright green on one side and bright orange on the other. I didn’t know whether to make love to her or to dust my furniture with her; either way, I decided it would be courteous to wake her up first.

  ‘Screw off,’ were her first words to me. She rolled over and her feet came out the end of the bed. I didn’t need a tape measure to figure out she was tall, very tall – quite a bit taller than me; I ruled out dusting the furniture.

  I shook her again gently. ‘Wakey, wakey,’ I said, ‘you’ve broken into my house and now you’re sleeping in my bed.’

  ‘How very observant you are,’ she replied sleepily. ‘Anyhow, what kept you?’

  ‘What kept me? Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Light me a cigarette, sit down and I’ll tell you.’ She had an Australian accent. It’s normally an accent I don’t care for, but she made it sound good. I lit a cigarette, handed it to her and sat
down in the chair at the end of the bed.

  ‘If you’re that scared of me, why don’t you go stand in the street and I’ll shout to you through the window?’

  It was one o’clock in the morning, I was feeling more than a little drunk, and my brain was taking a little time to figure out all this.

  She sat up a little. ‘You can sit nearer,’ she said, ‘I won’t bite.’

  ‘None of you?’

  ‘I don’t like jokes about my height – I’m sensitive about it.’

  I went and sat down beside her. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know you were sensitive about your height. All I can see is your head and your feet – how do I know how much is in between?’

  I looked at her face carefully. It was a sulky face, about twenty-four years old, with pouting lips and a small chin on top of a very long neck; she had rich blue eyes, with fair eyebrows, and a beautifully clear skin with the trace of a tan. She smiled, and the face sprang to life. Apart from a little mascara and a couple of dashes of rouge, she wore no makeup at all, and didn’t need to. Her hair really didn’t do her justice at all. She had the kind of face men shoot each other over.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said.

  For a reply, I got a long deep kiss – in about forty different places. It was four o’clock in the morning before I was able to talk again.