by Chris Ryan
"That's right. They have some... cleaning they want me to do."
There was a brief silence. Finally Howard spoke.
"I
want you to lend them a hand on this one, Alex.
Accepting an upgrade like you did last year means eating a shit sandwich from time to time and this is one of those times."
"Yeah, but ..
"No buts, Alex. This problem of theirs has got to be dealt with and I can't think of a better man than you to do it. I'm sorry, Alex, but that's a must. What I can promise is choice of posting when you're done.
You've got my word on that."
Alex said nothing. By the time he was done, he reflected if he was ever done things would have changed. The 'choice' would dissolve, as it always did.
"How's Karen?" he asked. Karen was Don Hammond's widow.
"Bearing up, as is Sue. They've both got people round with them. I'll have someone call you about the funerals."
Sue, Alex guessed, must have been the wife of the dead Special Forces pilot.
"Help our friends out, Alex. There's no room for manoeuvre on this one."
The phone went dead.
Dawn Harding drove a two-year-old Honda Accord and drove it with an almost aggressive respect for the speed limit. When she was cut up at traffic lights outside Reading she merely slowed to let the other driver get away, while on the M4, where the prevailing speed was around 80, she seemed happy to roll along in the high 60s.
"Saving the engine?" Alex ventured at one point.
"No. Hanging on to a clean licence," answered Dawn. She gestured towards the traffic pouring past them.
"And I've nothing to prove to a bunch of stressed-out commuters. Where is it you want to go exactly?"
Alex had tried Sophie earlier but got her voice-mail.
He got it again now. For a reason that he couldn't quite put his finger on something to do with wanting to hear her reaction to the news of his return he didn't want to leave a message.
"Sloane Square," he answered.
"Anywhere around there."
"Late-night shopping in the King's Road?" Dawn archly flicked a glance at his shirt.
"No, I've got some friends at the barracks," said Alex. And sod you too, he thought.
"OK. Sloane Square it is. And I'd be grateful if you didn't go chatting to all your Territorial Army mates about this afternoon's events, if that's all right with you."
He stared at her.
"It's not my habit to "go chatting", as you put it, to my mates or to anyone else. I was a badged SAS soldier before you .. ." He faltered to silence. How old was she?
Twenty-five? Twenty-six?"... Before you sat your GCSEs," he finished weakly.
She smiled.
"So, have you ever killed anyone, Captain?"
"I've hurt a few people's feelings!"
Dawn nodded sagely.
"And are you very conscious of your age? Is that a problem for you? After all, most captains must be ten years younger than you. My sort of age, in fact."
"Listen," said Alex, 'if you think your superiors' he stressed the word 'have got the wrong man for the job, I'd be very happy to step down. Just stop the car and I'll fuck off."
"You'll... fuck off?"
Alex reached over to the back seat for his bag.
"Yes," he said.
"I'll fuck off." He looked at her meaningfully.
"There is no aspect of this project that I'm looking forward to, none whatsoever. I've had dealings with Thames House before and regretted it every time. For my money you jokers can dig yourselves out of your own shit."
"I see. Well, that's certainly telling it like it is. Did it ever occur to you, Captain Temple, that we might all actually be on the same side? Pursuing the same objectives?"
Alex said nothing. At that moment he was at least as angry with himself as he was with her. She'd wound him up and he'd gone off like a fucking clockwork mouse. You're a dickhead, Temple, he told himself.
Get a gr~p.
She slowed to negotiate the lights at Barons Court.
As she pulled on the hand brake Alex watched the muscles in her forearm tauten. She had long fingers and short, square-cut nails.
"You're saying," she went on, 'that it's really of no concern to you that some .. . some maniac is torturing and murdering our people?"
"I was only wondering why you couldn't deal with the whole thing in-house."
"The decision has been made to do otherwise," said Dawn curtly.
Which pretty much brought the argument to a close.
She gave him her mobile and office numbers, and asked him to ring her as soon as he knew where he was staying.
Mentally Alex determined not to do this.
"Do you know your way to Thames House?" she asked.
"Millbank, last time I visited."
"Tomorrow at 9 a.m." then. I'll meet you at the front desk."
"It's a date."
Unsurprisingly, she didn't smile. A few minutes later, as she brought the Honda to a halt outside the Duke of York's Headquarters in the King's Road, he nodded his thanks and grabbed his bag.
"Tomorrow," she repeated, flipping a long brown envelope on to the passenger seat.
Alex hesitated before reaching for it.
"Expenses," she said.
"According to our records, you don't have a London address. And unless you've left some clothes at Miss Wells's and my guess is that you're not really the type for that cosy domestic scene - I'd say that you're going to need to add to your wardrobe some time between now and tomorrow.
Keep it simple, would be my advice, and dress your age. Harrods is still open for a couple of hours. See you." She didn't even leave at speed, just drew gently away from the kerb.
He watched after her for a moment, shaking his head with intense dislike. The reference to Sophie had had its intended effect: to let him know that Dawn Harding and her organisation could jerk his chain any bloody time they felt like it.
"Not if I see you first," he murmured, but knew that his words had no meaning.
He and Dawn Harding were locked together for the duration, like it or loathe it. He punched the recall button on his Nokia.
Five minutes later a silver Audi TT convertible pulled to a swerving halt at the kerb.
"Hey, sexy!
Looking for business?"
For the first time that day Alex smiled. Sophie was wearing a screamingly loud Italian print shirt and, despite the lateness of the day, sunglasses. The sight of her made his heart dance.
"Jump in," she ordered.
From that moment, things picked up. Alex explained his clothing predicament, Sophie made a rapid series of phone calls and five minutes later a willowy young man in leather trousers was unlocking a warehouse in Chelsea Harbour. Lights flickered on to reveal at least a dozen rails of men's clothes and several shoulder high pyramids of shoeboxes.
"Help yourself to anything you want," the young man told Sophie and Alex.
"I'll find you some bags."
"What is all this stuff?" Alex asked.
"Mostly bits and pieces from shows and magazine fashion shoots," Sophie replied.
"A lot of it hasn't even been worn.
They eventually settled on a selection of items that Alex thought slightly over-fashionable and Sophie disappointedly described as 'somewhere between dreary and invisible'.
"In my world," Alex explained, 'the grey man is king. How much do we owe this guy?"
"Oh, give him a couple of hundred."
"Are you sure?"
"Don't worry. It'll get written off as damaged."
"You lot are worse than army quartermasters."
Sophie swung the keys of the Audi from a slender forefinger.
"My place?"
In the flat overlooking Sloane Street they heated up a Sainsbury's Prawn Vindaloo, drank Kronenbourg beer from bottles and watched Goodness Gracious Me.
For Alex, after weeks of rations consumed in exclusively male compan
y, the evening was heaven.
When she saw that he had unwound a few notches, Sophie settled herself against him on the sofa.
"Is it good news that you're back?" she asked him tentatively.
"Does it mean that you've got some time off?"
"Yes and no," he said.
"I'm here to .. . chase something up.
"Anything you can tell me about?"
He shook his head.
"I'm sorry.
"Dangerous?"
He shrugged.
"Doubt it. I've got to find someone, that's all. Brain work, not bullets. So I'm going to be around, yeah, but I'm also going to be coming and going."
She nodded.
"Is it always going to be like this?" she asked.
"Me asking, you not telling?"
"For as long as I'm in, yes," he said.
"You mustn't take it personally."
"I don't take it personally," she said, with a flash of irritation, quickly suppressed.
"It's just that we've been together for a year now, on and off, and I'd like to feel that I had some.." access to your life."
"You have full access to my life," he told her gently.
"It's just my work that's off limits. And I promise you, you're not missing anything there."
"But your life is your work," she protested.
"I can see that in your face. All those missions in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, all those dead men.. . I can see them there behind your eyes.
He shrugged. It was not something he'd ever talked about in much detail. The demons, it was generally accepted, came with the job.
"I want all of you, Alex. Not just the burnt-out remains. He frowned at his Kronenbourg bottle. At the edge of his vision an RUF soldier crouched in blood sodden shock, his lower jaw shot away. Behind him staggered the blackened figure of Don Hammond.
There was a full company of such men quartered in Alex's head now.
Blinking them away, locking on to Sophie's grey green eyes, he smiled.
"I'm all here. And I'm all yours.
EIGHT.
Alex presented himself at the front desk of Thames House at a couple of minutes to nine. Dawn Harding was waiting for him there, briefcase in hand, and signed him in.
"We're wearing Italian today, are we?"
she said, noting his Gucci loafers and running an appraising glance up and down his grey Cerrutti suit.
"I thought you Hereford boys were more comfortable in Mr. Byrite."
"I know the importance you civil service types attach to appearances," Alex said equably, fixing his visitor's badge to his lapel.
"You wouldn't want me to let the side down, now would you?"
He followed her into the lift, where she pressed the button for the fourth floor.
"And you found somewhere to stay all right?"
"I managed to get my head down."
"I'm sure you did." She stared without expression at the brushed-aluminium wall of the lift. As previously, she was dressed entirely in black and wearing no make-up, perfume or jewellery. Her only accessories were the briefcase large, black and plain and a military issue pilot's chronograph watch. This spareness did not, however, disguise her femininity. In some cuno us way, Alex mused, allowing his gaze to linger around the nape of her neck, it highlighted it.
Or at least it made you wonder.
The lift shuddered to a halt.
"A word of advice," she said flatly, checking her watch as she marched out into a grey-carpeted corridor flanked by offices.
"The correct form of address for the , ,
deputy director is ma am.
Alex smiled.
"So who are you, then? Matron?"
She gave him a withering glance.
"Dawn will be just fine."
The deputy director's office was at the far end of the corridor. Dawn left Alex in an ante-room containing a leather-covered sofa and a portrait of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, and disappeared through an unmarked door.
She reappeared five minutes later. Alex was still standing the leather sofa was so slippery he could hardly sit on it and she led him into an office which would have been sunlit had not the blinds been partially lowered. This, Alex guessed, was to prevent glare rendering the computer monitors illegible. There were three of these on a broad, purpose-built desk, along with a telefax console and a tray piled high with what looked like newspaper cuttings. Maps, books and a large flat-screen monitor covered most of the walls, but a painted portrait of Florence Nightingale and a signed photograph of Peter Mandelson romping with a dog went some way towards softening the room's essentially utilitarian lines. At the near end half a dozen leather-and-steel chairs surrounded a low table bearing a tray with a steaming cafeti~re and four civil service-issue cups and saucers.
Behind the desk, silhouetted against the half-closed blinds, sat the deputy director and once again Alex was struck by her handsome, clear-cut features and elegant appearance. Today she was wearing a charcoal suit, which perfectly complemented her shrewd blue eyes and the expensively coiffed gunmetal of her hair.
To one side of her, both hands thrust deep into the pockets of a suit which had probably once fitted him better, stood George Widdowes. To Alex, the studied informality of the posture looked like an attempt to play down his subordinate status.
The deputy director rounded the desk and held out her hand.
"Since we're to be working together, Captain Temple," she told him with a practised smile, "I think we should at least know each other's real names. I'm Angela Fenwick, and my full title is Deputy Director of Operations. Dawn Harding and George Widdowes you know. Welcome to Thames House."
As they arranged themselves in chairs around the table, Angela Fenwick leant forward and pressed down the plunger of the cafetiere.
"Boom!" whispered George Widdowes. No one smiled.
Angela Fenwick turned to Alex.
"I'd like you to know that nothing that is said in this office is recorded, unless you ask for it to be, and nothing you say here is in any way on the record. Basically, you can express yourself freely and I hope you will. The corollary is that you are not to make any mention of what I am about to tell you to anyone, in or outside this agency and that includes your Regimental colleagues, past and present -without my express say so. Do you have any problem with that?"
"No, I don't think so."
"Good. Coffee, everybody? George, will you be mother?"
When Widdowes was done, Angela Fenwick leant back in her chair, cup in hand, and turned to Alex.
"Craig Gidley's murder," she said.
"Did that remind you of anything?"
Alex glanced at the others. They were looking at him expectantly.
"You can speak openly in front of George and Dawn."
Alex nodded.
"PIRA," he said.
"Belfast Brigade took out those two FRU guys by hammering nails into their heads. Early 1996, it must have been, just after the Canary Wharf bomb. Left the bodies at a road junction outside Dungannon."
"That's right," Fenwick agreed.
"Can you remember where you were at the time?"
Alex considered.
"In February 1996 I was in Bosnia," he said.
"I was part of the snatch team that grabbed Maksim Zukic and two of his colonels for the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. But we heard about the Canary Wharf bomb pretty much as it happened, and later about the FRU guys too."
"Ray Bledsoe," added Widdowes.
"And Connor Wheen."
"Yeah, that's it. Bledsoe and Wheen. We didn't see that much of the FRU when we were on tours in the province, but I probably met both of them at various times."
Angela Fenwick frowned.
"Am I right in thinking that you were number two on the sniper team when Neil Slater shot the Delaney boy at Forkhill?"
"Yes, that was a year later."
"The information about the weapons cache at the Delaney farm came from a tout original
ly cultivated by Ray Bledsoe."
"Is that so?" said Alex.
"We tend not be told stuff like that."
"Why didn't you tell me last night that you thought there was a PIRA connection to the murders?" asked Dawn Harding accusingly.
"You didn't ask me," Alex answered mildly.
"But I was pretty certain of it as soon as Mr. Widdowes here mentioned six-inch nails."
Angela Fenwick nodded.
"I just wanted to establish that you knew about the Bledsoe and Wheen incident.
And you're right, the roots of this thing do indeed lie in Northern Ireland. But they go back a little further than 1996. Back to Remembrance Day in 1987, in fact."
"Enniskillen," said Alex grimly.
"Precisely. Enniskillen. On the eighth of November in 1987 a bomb was detonated near the war memorial in that town, killing eleven people and injuring sixty three. A truly horrendous day's work by the volunteers."
Alex nodded. Widdowes and Dawn, sidelined, were staring patiently into space.
"The day after the explosion there was a crisis meeting attended by six people. Two of those the former director and deputy director of this service are now retired. Of the remainder one was myself, one was George, and the others were Craig Gidley and Barry Fenn. I was thirty-nine, a little younger than the others, and I had just been put in charge of the Northern Ireland desk.
"The purpose of the meeting was to discuss something that we were acutely aware of already: our desperate need to place a British agent inside the IRA executive. As you'll probably be aware, we had a pretty extensive intelligence programme running in the province at the time. We had informers, we had 14th Intelligence Company people, and we had touts.
What we didn't have, however, was anyone close to the decision-making process. We didn't have anyone sufficiently senior to tip us off if another Enniskillen was in the wind and there couldn't be -there absolutely couldn't be another Enniskillen.
"So basically we had two choices. To turn a senior player or to insert our own sleeper and wait for him to work his way up. The former was obviously the preferable choice in terms of time but in the long run it would have been much less reliable, as we could never be sure that we weren't being fed disinformation. We tried it, nevertheless. Got some of the FRU people to approach individual players that 14th Int had targeted and make substantial cash offers for basically harmless information. The hope was that we could hook them through sheer greed and then squeeze them once they were incriminated. Standard entrapment routine.