At Risk

by Stella Rimington

  “That man Greeley,” she said eventually.

  “Go on.”

  “What did he mean when he was talking about Mansoor and D’Aubigny’s ‘grievance’?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He said something about ‘this trigger-happy duo and their grievance.’ Why did he say that? What grievance?”

  “I’m assuming he meant the same grievance that’s led the ITS to bomb, shoot and incinerate innocent civilians all over the world.”

  “No, I don’t buy that. You wouldn’t use that word about members of a professional terror cell. They didn’t kill Ray Gunter and Elsie Hogan out of a sense of grievance. Why did he use that word, Bruno?”

  “Grievance schmievance, Liz, how do I know? I never met the guy before in my life.”

  “I didn’t say you had.”

  He braked. The BMW came to an untroubled halt. He turned to her, solicitous. “Liz, you have to cool it. You’ve done brilliantly, and I’m genuinely in awe of the way you’ve moved this thing forwards, but you have to cool it. You can’t carry the entire case on your shoulders or it will break you, OK? I’m sure you think me the worst kind of cowboy operator, but please—I am not the enemy here.”

  She blinked. The sky was steel-grey over the long, level horizon. The temporary energy burst provided by Greeley and Delves’s coffee had worn off. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. I’m letting it all get to me.”

  But he might well have met Greeley, she thought. Central Asia, when all was said and done, was not such a large theatre. We deployed on the Afghan border … Why did she feel as if she was in free-fall? Exhaustion? Lack of sleep? What didn’t she know? What didn’t she know?

  They proceeded in silence towards Swanley Heath, and were five minutes away from the Army Air Corps base when a squawk from her mobile alerted Liz to a text message. It read CALL JUDE. They pulled up at a roadside telephone box, Mackay tipped his seat into the recline position, and Liz climbed out on to the wet verge and rang Investigations. Distantly, several fields away, she could see a police search team in fluorescent yellow jackets moving through the scrubland. The light was fading fast.

  “OK,” began Judith Spratt, “here’s where we are. We’ve got from the parents that from the age of thirteen Jean D’Aubigny attended a boarding school near Tregaron in Wales named Garth House. Small co-ed establishment, progressive in character, run by a former Jesuit priest named Anthony Price-Lascelles. School has a reputation for accommodating troubled children and those unresponsive to conventional discipline. Classroom attendance optional, no organised sport, pupils encouraged to undertake free-form artistic projects, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve had people visit the school but the place is locked up for the Christmas holidays and Price-Lascelles is in Morocco, at a place called Azemmour, where he has a flat. Six have sent a man round to the flat this morning but learned from the house-boy that Price-Lascelles has gone into Casablanca for the day, destination and time of return unknown. So they’ve got a bloke sitting outside the flat waiting for him.”

  “Isn’t there anyone else we can ask about the school? Find out who was there with her, and so on?”

  “Well, the trouble is the place is really very small. It has a website of sorts but there’s no real information on it. We’ve done the usual online searches and talked to everyone we can find who went there, but no one remembers anything significant about Jean D’Aubigny beyond the fact that she was there about ten years ago, had longish dark hair and kept herself to herself.”

  “No ex-teachers you can talk to?”

  “We haven’t been able to track down any that remember anything significant about her. The impression we’re getting is that there were fairly severe money problems and staff came and went pretty fast. A lot of the teachers and domestic staff were from overseas, and almost certainly paid on a cash-in-hand basis.”

  “Can’t the police just unlock the place and go through the records? The Prevention of Terrorism Act makes that possible, surely?”

  “It does, and that’s in hand right now. As soon as we’ve got anything I’ll let you know.”

  “And locally? Around Newcastle under Lyme? Who did she hang out with there, during the school holidays?”

  “The parents aren’t saying. The police have asked around and turned up a Pakistani family who knew her from the local Islamic centre, but that’s about it.”

  “Anything from the Paris end?”

  “Again, nothing significant. One fellow student named Hamidullah Souad knew her quite well. They studied for exams together and so on and apparently went to the cinema once or twice, but they stopped seeing each other when she told him that she disapproved of his lifestyle. Apparently she supported herself by giving English classes to business people through a language school, but the arrangement came to an end after complaints that she had expressed ‘extreme attitudes’ in front of clients.”

  “So we’ve still got no connection with East Anglia?”

  “None at all. Does she need to have one?”

  “No, she could just be Mansoor’s cover, in which case all she has to be is English. But the pair of them are running now, and if she’s ever been here before it might just point us to where she’s gone to ground, or even what the target is. So don’t let up, Jude, please.”

  “We won’t.”

  Ten minutes later she and Mackay were back in the Swanley Heath hangar, sitting opposite Deputy Chief Constable Jim Dunstan. A large, bluff man with thinning sandy hair, he retained the bullish, blustering air of the prop forward who, three decades earlier, had led the Joint Services team to victory over the Barbarians at Twickenham.

  “Bugger all,” he told them morosely. “Not an effing sausage. We’ve had helicopters up all afternoon, both ours and the Army’s, we’ve got dog-handlers and TA search teams beating the woodland from here to the coast, traffic backed up practically the same distance …”

  “It was always going to be difficult, surely?” said Mackay diplomatically.

  “Course it bloody was. That’s what I’ve told the Home Office. I explained that just for once it’s not a question of resources, and that the point comes when you’ve got to hold back or risk unmanageable levels of confusion and wire-crossing. In my view our best hope is for a sighting by a member of the general public, and to that end we’ve been pushing the local media angle. It would be a damn sight easier if it wasn’t a Sunday, of course, but what can you do?” He looked from one to the other of them. “Have any of your people come up with anything?”

  “Nothing that points to a specific target,” said Liz with deep frustration. “And nothing that puts D’Aubigny in East Anglia at any time in the past. The parents have got some heavy-duty human rights lawyer telling them to keep their mouths shut, so …”

  “So they’d rather see her head blown off by those headbangers from Hereford. I know. Brilliant.” He looked without enthusiasm at the activity around them and jutted his chin forward belligerently. “What we actually need is a break. A bloody great slice of luck. Right now, that’s the best we can hope for.”

  Liz and Mackay nodded. There wasn’t much else to say. The silence was broken by Liz’s mobile. Another text message, this time a letter code announcing an e-mail. Retiring to an empty stretch of trestle table, she switched on her laptop.

  O ut!” said Faraj urgently. “Put the bags under the tree and then help me with the car.”

  With care, Jean arranged the rucksacks at the base of the willow. It had begun to rain again, the light was fading, and the place was deserted. In summer there might have been a few people around: an angler, perhaps, after a chub or a perch, or a couple of picnickers. Late on a wet December afternoon, though, there was little to draw the passerby down the rutted lane and through the stand of trees to this bleak intersection of the Lesser Ouse and the Methwold Fen Relief Drain.

  Jean D’Aubigny knew the place, knew that the water was deep there and that visitors were few. Remembered in a rush of me
mory almost painful in its intensity what it was like to be sixteen years old, to smell the green, muddy aroma of the river and feel the dizzying rush of vodka and cigarettes on an empty stomach.

  It had taken them a fair amount of time to find the place, and they had been further slowed by the need to take minor roads and farm tracks across country, but they were now a clear twenty-five miles south of the village from where they had stolen the MGB, and since the roadblock they had not encountered any police. They had heard a distant siren as they crossed the King’s Lynn road, and ten minutes later they had seen a helicopter far to the north of them whose camouflage identified it as military, but that was all. Given that they had to assume that the theft of the MGB had been swiftly reported, they were grateful.

  Faraj wound down the MGB’s windows, and pulled back the vinyl top. The car stood beside the old bridge across the river. In front of it a flight of cracked concrete steps led down to a narrow towpath. From the far side of the river the narrower drainage channel led off northwards. The river was deep here, but slow, which was why, for all the place’s bleakness, it had always been so good for swimming. Not that you would want to swim in it now. The level was much higher than Jean remembered it, and the water was a dense, swirling coffee-brown. A scum of foliage, cigarette ends and fast-food containers circled at the foot of the steps.

  Turning, she looked around her. Nothing. Then Faraj caught her wrist hard and she froze, backing away from the bridge. There was movement in the relief drain. Something was silently displacing the bullrushes and reeds. An animal? she wondered. A police dog? A police diver, even? Nothing was visible, just that slow, terrifying bending of the reeds.

  They were well back from the bank now, crouching behind the car. Both were holding their weapons; both released their safety catches as a stray gust of wind caused rain to cascade from the wet branches overhanging the river.

  The reeds in the relief drain parted, and the pointed grey-green nose of a kayak moved silently into view. Sitting inside it was an unmoving figure in hooded olive waterproofs. Jean’s first, paralysing assumption was that this was a Special Forces soldier, and when the figure slowly raised a pair of binoculars to its face this seemed to be confirmed.

  But the figure was scanning the bankside vegetation, and completely ignoring the MGB standing by the bridge. There was another shower of raindrops from the trees, and a small, nondescript bird flew from under the bridge and alighted on the broken stem of a bullrush. Smoothly and unhurriedly the binoculars swivelled to focus on the bird, and now a smile was visible on the face of the hooded figure in the kayak. It was a young man, probably a teenager, and his lips seemed to be moving in soundless appreciation of the bird.

  Her heart thumping with the sick, dragging ebb of tension, Jean thumbed on the Malyah’s safety and glanced sideways to see if Faraj had registered that the young man was not a threat. The bird must have caught her slight movement, because it swung quickly away from its perch and darted back beneath the bridge. The young man looked after it for a moment, lowered his binoculars, paddled himself forwards into the bridge pool, reversed his kayak, and disappeared the way he had come.

  They watched his progress, or at least the movements of the reeds, until nothing could be seen. For ten agonisingly extended minutes they waited by the car in case he should return, but the fenland landscape out of which he had so unexpectedly appeared had reclaimed him.

  “We’ve got to get rid of the car,” Jean said eventually. “Those were military helicopters we saw earlier, and it’ll show up through the trees on their thermal imaging cameras.”

  Faraj nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  Leaning into the car, he checked that it was in neutral and released the handbrake. They pushed from the rear. The old MGB was heavier than it looked, with a very low centre of gravity, and took several seconds to budge in the rain-slick mud. Then it nosed as if unwillingly to the top of the steps, lurched over the first of them, and with a loud grating noise stuck fast. “Axle’s caught,” muttered Faraj. “Bastard thing. We have to keep pushing.”

  They pushed, their shoulders to the MGB’s chrome back-bumper, the cleated soles of their boots digging deep.

  At first nothing happened, and then everything happened. The cement facing of the brickwork steps cracked, the rear of the MGB swung upwards, flipping Jean off balance so that Faraj had to grab her to prevent her skidding into the river, and the car commenced a slow-motion descent of the steps. At the bottom, with something close to stateliness, it somersaulted on to its roof with a crashing displacement of water and began to sink, coming to rest upside down with a single rear wheel exposed.

  “Bastard thing,” repeated Faraj, releasing Jean and wiping river water from his face. Moving down the cracked wet steps he sat himself on the bottom one and, reaching out with his feet, braced them hard against the exposed nearside wheel. Straightening his legs, jamming his back against the steps, he pressed with all his strength. The car rocked a little, but otherwise refused to budge.

  “Wait,” Jean ordered him. Pulling back her wet hair, she climbed down beside him, put an arm around him and grabbed a fistful of his jacket to brace herself. Hesitating for a moment, he did the same. She felt the heavy pressure of his arm against her. “On three,” she said. “Now!”

  They pushed until they were trembling and the steps at Jean’s back were cutting agonisingly into her spine. At her shoulders, she could feel Faraj’s arm quivering with strain. Against her heel, the faint give of the tyre.

  “Almost,” muttered Faraj, panting. “Once more, and this time don’t stop.”

  She dragged new air into her lungs. Once again the cracked cement-covered brick drew agonising stripes across her back. Her body was shaking with the strain, her ears were roaring and her head was dizzy. “Don’t stop!” gasped Faraj. “Don’t stop!”

  Slowly, almost thoughtfully, the inverted car moved from its obstruction, seemed to drift for a moment, and sank on the current into the deep water below the bridge. Gasping for breath, her chest heaving, Jean watched as the chrome of the bumpers faded, became invisible.

  Slowly they climbed the steps again, and Faraj checked the biscuit tin containing the C4 charge.

  “OK?”

  Faraj shrugged. “It’s still there. And we’re still here.”

  Jean took stock. She was cold, filthy, hungry and soaked to the skin, and had been so for several hours. On top of this the day’s terrors—the repeated jolt and ebb of adrenalin—had shocked her into an almost hallucinatory exhaustion. She sensed, as she had for some days now, an implacable pursuing figure. A figure that dragged at her like a shadow, that matched her pace for pace, whispering hell and confusion in her ear. Perhaps, she thought, it was her former self, trying to reclaim her soul. At that moment, and in that place, she would have believed anything.

  Faraj, by contrast, appeared untouched. He gave the impression that his physical state had at some point been unharnessed from his will, so that neither pain nor fear nor tiredness played any part in his reckoning. There was just the mission, and the strategy required for its execution.

  Jean watched him, and insofar as she was capable of a response at that moment, the austerity of his self-control impressed her. It also profoundly frightened her. There had been times, particularly at Takht-i-Suleiman, when she had been certain that faith and determination had empowered her in the same way. Now, she was sure of nothing. She had been reborn, certainly, but into a place of utter pitilessness. Faraj, she realised, had occupied that place for a long time.

  Distantly, perhaps five miles away, the pulse of a helicopter. For a moment neither of them moved.

  “Quick!” said Jean. “Under the bridge.”

  Leaving the rucksacks beneath the tree, they scrambled down the steps to the narrow towpath, and hurled themselves at the sodden canopy of brambles. Thorns tore at Jean’s face and hands and then they were through, crouching in near darkness beneath the arch. There, but for the echoing drip of water, all was
silence. She could feel blood on her face.

  After about a minute the sound of the helicopter returned, louder this time, perhaps three or four miles away, and even though she knew herself invisible and far from the range of their viewing equipment she shrank against the bridge’s curving brick wall. The pulse was steady for a few seconds, and then the sound fell away.

  As Faraj looked into the shadowed dimness of the river, Jean peered through the arch of the bridge and the dark hatching of foliage at the sky. The light was going fast. Close to tears of exhaustion, shaking with cold, she began picking the thorns from her cheek and the back of her hand. “I think we should get the bags down and lie up here for the night,” she said tonelessly. “They’ll keep the helicopters up, but their infrared cameras can’t read a heat signature through brick and concrete.”

  He glanced at her suspiciously, detecting the defeat in her voice.

  “If we’re caught in the open,” she pleaded, “we’re dead. Dead, Faraj. Here, at least we’re invisible.”

  He was silent, considering. Eventually he nodded.

  L iz was about to go online and decode her e-mail when, from the corner of her eye, she saw Don Whitten fold forward and bury his head in his hands. He held the position for perhaps a second before, his face contorted and his fists clenched, silently swearing at the distant roof of the hangar.

  There were now eighteen men and three women in the hangar. Six of the men were Army officers, and all of these except Kersley, the SAS captain, were in combat dress. Of the three women one was a Royal Logistics Corps officer, one was local CID, and the other was PC Wendy Clissold. As one, they all fell silent and stared at Whitten.

  “Tell us,” said Dunstan, levelly.

  “Young man named Martindale, James Martindale, has just reported a twenty-five-year-old racing-green MGB stolen from outside the Plough pub in the village of Birdhoe. Could have happened any time after twelve fifteen this lunchtime when he arrived at the pub.”