Bruno shook it. “I’ve been asked to come up and share the strain,” he explained with a broad smile. “Lend a helping hand.”
Liz forced a smile of her own. “Well, as you can see, the strain’s not too unbearable yet. Have you had anything to eat?”
“No. I’m ravenous. I might just go and have a quick word with Truly Scrumptious over there. Would you mind …” Dropping his keys proprietorially on the table, he marched off to the bar, where he was soon locked in intimate consultation with Cherisse.
“Something tells me you’ve been stitched up,” murmured Goss.
Liz emptied her face of her feelings. “No, I’ve just had my phone switched off. I obviously missed the message that he was on his way.”
“Get you anything?” Bruno called out cheerfully from the bar.
Liz and Goss both shook their heads. Cherisse’s eyes were shining, Liz noted with irritation. Mackay, meanwhile, looked roguishly at home.
“Bit of a personality, then, your chum?” Goss remarked drily.
“Indeed,” Liz confirmed.
The rest of the meal was distinctly unrelaxing. There were too many listeners-in at nearby tables for any discussion of the case to be possible. Instead, Mackay quizzed Goss about the area’s competing attractions. Treating him, thought Liz, like a Norfolk Tourist Board representative.
“So, assuming that I was in the market for a weekend cottage, where would you advise me to buy one?” asked Mackay, pocketing the credit card with which he had just, with cavalier nonchalance, paid the bill for the three of them.
Goss regarded him levelly. “Perhaps Burnham Market?” he suggested. “That’s very popular with the Range Rover set.”
“Ouch!” Mackay displayed his preternaturally white teeth. “That’s me well and truly put in my place.” He stood up and reached for his keys. “Liz, might I just detach you from Steve here for an hour or two? Ask you to bring me up to speed?”
“I’m due back to Norwich at two o’clock,” said Goss. “So I’ve got to make a move anyway.” He gave Liz the ghost of a wink and raised a hand to Mackay. “Thanks for lunch. Next one’s on me.”
“Cheers,” said Mackay.
“Will you just excuse me a minute?” Liz murmured to Mackay when Goss had left the bar. “I’ll be right back.”
She called Wetherby from the public phone outside on the sea front. He picked up on the second ring, and sounded tired.
“Please,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he answered. “You have to have Mackay with you. I’ve no choice on this one.”
“Fane?”
“Precisely. He wants his man there. In fact he insists on him being there, as indeed he has every right to insist.”
“Full disclosure? Full data-sharing?”
The briefest of pauses. “That was the agreement between our respective sevices.”
“I see.”
“Make him work,” suggested Wetherby. “Make him earn his keep.”
“I certainly will. He’s here for the duration?”
“For as long as it takes. He’s reporting direct to Fane, just as you are to me.”
“Understood. I have a meet with Zander tonight that I’m hopeful about. I’ll call you afterwards.”
“Do that. And take our mutual friend to the meet.”
The phone went dead and Liz stared for a moment at the receiver in her hand. Conventionally, agent RVs were only ever conducted by one officer at a time. Shrugging, she returned the phone to its cradle. Strictly speaking, Zander was no longer her agent, but Special Branch’s. And reading between the lines—interpreting the pauses rather than the words—she knew that Wetherby wanted her to continue playing her own game, whatever the notional ground rules. At the same time, however, she was under no illusions that Mackay would be sharing everything that he and his service knew with her. He would also be playing his own game. For that reason, it made sense to be the one who initiated the data-share.
“My room’s called Victory,” grinned Mackay, when she went back into the saloon bar. “I thought you might like to know that!”
“Fascinating. You’ve booked in already?”
“I have indeed. With Miss Scrumptious.”
“I hope you’re not teasing her,” said Liz. “She’s a potentially useful source on this one, and I’d like to keep her onside.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t frighten her away. In fact I have the feeling I’d be very hard pressed to do so.”
“Hooked already, is she?”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant that she’s not a girl who gives the impression of scaring easily.”
“I see. Do you want to walk while I brief you, or sit upstairs? Sea breeze or gas fire, in other words?”
“Let’s walk. I suspect that today’s lunch wasn’t the first outing for that chip oil. I could use some air.”
They walked east to begin with, as far as Creake Manor, where Liz told him about her initial recce of the village and her calculations concerning the sailing club. After passing the Manor they turned, and strolled back to Headland Hall, which Mackay examined with interest.
Liz filled him in. Zander’s calls. The conclusions she had drawn from the armour-piercing round. Her questioning of Cherisse Hogan and Lakeby. Her near certainty that the man in the front of the truck with Ray Gunter was “Mitch.” Her hope that Mitch was an associate of Melvin Eastman, and that Zander would be able to help identify him.
“And if you do get an ID on this Mitch?” asked Mackay.
“Give him to the police to pick up,” said Liz.
Mackay pursed his lips and slowly nodded. “You’ve done well,” he said without condescension. “What’s the score on Lakeby? Are you going to have him lifted too?”
“Not much point, I’d say—he’s just one of the links to Mitch. Once we’ve got Mitch in the bag and talking, we won’t need Peregrine Lakeby.”
“Do you think he knew what was actually going on on that beach of his?”
“Not really. I think he preferred to take the money and not think about it. Hid behind the idea that they were honest smugglers bringing in a few cartons of booze and fags. He may be a snob and a bully, but I don’t think he’s any kind of traitor. I think he’s just someone who found out that when you start taking the bad guys’ money, the ratchet only ever turns one way.”
“What kind of sweets do you like?” asked Mackay after they had taken another half-dozen paces.
“Sweets?”
Mackay grinned. “You can’t walk along an English sea front without a paper bagful of something brightly coloured and sugary. Preferably poured into the bag with a plastic scoop.”
“Is that official MI6 policy?”
“Absolutely. Let’s go and see what the village store has to offer.”
Inside the small shop a woman in a blue nylon overall was straightening copies of the Sun and the Daily Express. Elsewhere there were plastic toys, knitting patterns, and shelves of dusty sweet jars.
“Flying saucers!” Liz heard Mackay exclaim in reverent disbelief. “I haven’t seen these since … And Love Hearts!”
“You’re on your own,” said Liz. “Those fish and chips were enough for me.”
“Oh go on,” said Mackay. “At least let me stand you a liquorice bootlace. They make your tongue go black.”
Liz laughed. “You really know the way to a woman’s heart, don’t you?”
“Gobstopper?”
“No!”
In the end he left with a bag of flying saucers. “At school,” he said, as the door chime rang behind them, “I used to empty the powder out of these and sell it for a fiver a line. No finer sight than a group of well-heeled public schoolboys snorting lemon sherbet and then trying to persuade themselves that they’re completely off their heads.” He passed the bag to Liz. “What do you think our man’s here to do?”
“Our man?”
“Our shooter. Why do you think he’s gone to so much trouble to get himself here in particular?”
&nb
sp; She and Wetherby had discussed this the night before, but without reaching any particular conclusion. “Some sort of spectacular, perhaps?” she hazarded. “There are the USAF bases at Marwell, Mildenhall and Lakenheath, but they’re on a very high state of alert, and would represent very difficult targets for a single individual or even a small team. There’s the Sizewell nuclear plant, I suppose, and Ely Cathedral and various other public buildings but again, a very tall order. More likely, to my mind, is the assassination possibility: the Lord Chancellor’s got a house in Aldeburgh, the Treasury Chief Secretary’s got a place at Thorpeness, and the head of the DTI’s up at Sheringham … Not the most high-profile of targets, internationally speaking, but you’d certainly make headlines if you managed to put a bullet through one of them.”
“Have their people been warned?” asked Mackay.
“In general terms, yes, they’ve been told to step things up.”
“And the Queen’s at Sandringham for Christmas, I suppose.”
“That’s right, but again, you’d really be pushed to get anywhere near there with a weapon of any kind. Security’s as tight as a drum.”
Mackay placed a flying saucer into his mouth.
“I guess we’d better get back and see what the plods have uncovered. What time do you want to make a move for Braintree?”
“Not later than five?”
“OK. Let’s go back to the Trafalgar, order up a pot of coffee from the lovely Cherisse, spread out a few Ordnance Survey maps, and try and think ourselves into this man’s mind.”
T his is a strange country,” said Faraj Mansoor, ejecting the five-round magazine of the PSS into his hand and placing it carefully on the table. “It is very different from the place of my imagination.”
The woman who had borrowed the name of Lucy Wharmby was peeling potatoes, stropping the blade in fast efficient sweeps so that the strips of peel curled damply over her left hand. “It’s not all like this,” she said. “It’s not all so exposed and bleak …”
He waited for her to finish. Outside, the sun still cast its pale glaze over the sea, but the wind was whipping at the wave caps, lifting them into a fine spray.
“I think the country makes the people,” he said eventually, checking the action of the PSS before slapping back the magazine. “And I think that I understand the British better for seeing their country.”
“It’s a cold country,” she said. “My childhood was spent in a cold flat with thin walls, listening to my parents arguing.”
Pocketing the handgun, he tightened his belt. “What were they arguing about?”
“I was never quite sure at the time. My father was a university lecturer at a place called Keele. It was a good job for him, and I think he wanted my mother to become more involved in the life of the university.”
“And she didn’t want to?”
“She had never wanted to move there from London. She didn’t like the place and she didn’t make any effort to get to know the people. She ended up having treatment for depression.”
Faraj frowned. “What were her beliefs?”
“She believed in … books and films and holidays in Italy and having her friends round to dinner.”
“And your father? What did he believe in?”
“He believed in himself. He believed in his career, and in the importance of his work, and in the approval of his colleagues.” She reached for a kitchen knife, and began quartering the potatoes with short, angry strokes of the blade. “Later, when my mother’s depression became serious, he believed that he had the right to sleep with his students.”
Faraj looked up. “Did your mother know?”
“She found out soon enough. She wasn’t stupid.”
“And you? Did you know?”
“I guessed. They sent me away to school in Wales.” She wiped her hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. “That’s very different countryside from this. There are hills, and even one or two you might call mountains.”
He looked at her, his head inclined. “You’re smiling. That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile.”
The smile and the knife hand froze.
“You were happy there? At this school in the hills that were almost mountains?”
She shrugged. “I suppose I was. I’ve never thought about it … in those terms.”
Unbidden, a memory rose before her, a memory she had not revisited for some years. It had been her friend Megan who had discovered the magic mushrooms growing in the pine woods behind the school. Hundreds of them, clustered on the rotted logs on the pine-needled forest floor. Megan—at fifteen already a formidable biochemist, particularly with reference to Class A narcotics—had recognised them immediately.
The following day, as the school permitted and indeed encouraged them to, the two friends had signed themselves out of classes in favour of a nature ramble. Armed with a tin sandwich box and a bottle of diluted orange squash, they had hurried to the woods, downed a half-dozen mushrooms each, spread out a groundsheet, and settled themselves down to wait for the psychotropic toxins in the mushrooms to take effect.
For at least half an hour nothing had happened, and then she had begun to feel simultaneously nauseous and fearful. Control of her reactions seemed to be sliding away from her; her limbs and her heaving stomach were no longer her own. And then suddenly the fear lifted and it was as if she was drowning in sensation. The sounds of the forest, previously a barely audible chorus of distant birdsong, shifting branches and insect twitterings, were amplified to levels of almost unbearable intensity. The muted pricking of the light through the pine branches, meanwhile, became a phalanx of rainbow spears. Her nose, throat and lungs seemed to fill with the sharp turpentine-scented resin of the pine. After a time—minutes perhaps, but maybe hours—these heightened sensations had begun to shape themselves into a kind of sublime architecture. She seemed to be wandering through a vast and constantly evolving vista of cloud-topped ziggurats, hanging gardens and dizzying colonnades. She seemed to be both inside and outside of herself, a spectator of her own progress through this strange, exotic realm. Afterwards, with the vision’s slow dissolution, she had felt an intense melancholy, and when she had tried to discuss the experience with Megan that evening, she had been unable to find the right words.
Deep inside herself, however, she had known that the images she had seen were not accidental, but meant. They were a sign—a glimpse of the celestial. They had confirmed her in her path, and in her determination.
“Yes,” she said, “I was happy there.”
“So how did it end?” he asked. “Your parents’ tale?”
“Divorce. The family smashed. Nothing unusual.” Lifting the handle of the kitchen knife between two fingers, she dropped it so that its point stuck into the wet chopping board. “And your parents?”
Walking across the room Faraj picked up one of the cheap tumblers on the table, examined it absently, and replaced it. Then, as if shrugging off the Western culture that he had assumed with the clothes she had bought him, he sank to his haunches.
“My parents were Tajiks, from Dushanbe. My father was a fighter, a lieutenant of Ahmed Shah Massoud.”
“The Lion of Panjshir.”
“Just so. May he live for ever. As a young man my father had been a teacher. He spoke French and a little English, which he learned from the British and American soldiers who came to fight with the mujahidin. I went to a good school in Dushanbe and then, when I was fourteen, we moved to Afghanistan, following Massoud, and I went to one of the English-language schools in Kabul. My father hoped that I would not have to live the life that he had lived, my mother’s family had a little money, and both saw education as the means of my betterment. Their dream was for me to become an administrator or government official.”
“What happened?”
“In ’96 the Taliban came. They had money from the United States and from Saudi Arabia, and they laid siege to Kabul. We managed to escape from the bombardment at night, and my father went
north to rejoin Massoud. I wanted to go with him but he sent me south with my mother and my younger sister towards the border country. We had hoped to enter Pakistan from there, to escape the Taliban altogether, but many others had had the same idea, and after months of wandering we finally settled with other displaced Tajiks and Pathans opposed to the Taliban in a village named Daranj, east of Kandahar.”
“What did you do there?”
“We dreamed of leaving. Of finding a better life in Pakistan.”
Falling silent, he appeared to sink into a reverie. His eyes were open but his expression was blank. Finally he seemed to rouse himself. “In the end, it became clear that there was no way that we could legally cross the border. We could have found a way through—there were couriers who would take you over the mountains for a price—but we had no wish to be stateless refugees. We considered ourselves better than that.
“After several years of nonstop warfare my father returned. He had been wounded, and he could no longer fight. With him, though, was a man. A man whom my father had persuaded to take me with him, across the border to Pakistan. A man of influence, who would enroll me in one of the madrassahs—the Islamic colleges—in Peshawar.”
“And this is what happened?”
“This is what happened. I bade goodbye to my parents and my sister, and together with this man I crossed the border at Chaman and journeyed north. A week later we were in Mardan, northeast of Peshawar, and I was taken to the madrassah. As at the border, I was admitted without question.”
“So who was this man? This man of such influence?”
He smiled and shook his head. “So many questions, so little time. What would you have done with your life, had things been otherwise?”
“They were never otherwise,” she replied. “For me, there was never any other path.”
L iz insisted that she and Mackay travel in her car. The meeting with Zander was her operation and she wanted Mackay to realise that he was a passenger, there strictly on sufferance.
Mackay, sensing her determination, did not argue. Instead he made a point of deferring to her, even going so far as to check his appearance with her. This she okayed. It wasn’t the clothes by themselves that would attract attention, although the tan leather jacket and chinos were visibly of better quality than most; it was the clothes in combination with the personality. In a crowded room, he was the sort of person you noticed straight away. He looked flash.
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