At Risk

by Stella Rimington

  “Did you give evidence at the inquiry?”

  “What would have been the purpose of that, other than to draw attention to myself? Like everyone else, I knew what its conclusion would be. No, as soon as my wounds were healed I returned to Mardan.”

  “That was two years ago?”

  “That was almost exactly two years ago. Inside myself, now, I was a dead man. All that remained was the necessity of vengeance. The matter of izzat—honour. At the madrassah they were sympathetic—more than sympathetic. They sent me to one of the North West Frontier camps for a few months, and then sent me back across the border into Afghanistan. I took up work at a truck stop which operated as a cover for one of the jihadi organisations, and there, a few months later, I was introduced to a man named al Safa.”

  “Dawood al Safa?”

  “The same. Al Safa was interested by my story. For some time he had been considering revenge against those responsible for the Daranj massacre. Not a general action, but a specific, targeted reprisal. Just as they had come to our country to bomb, burn and kill, so we would do the same. The Americans and their allies would be left in no doubt of the length of our reach, or of the inexorability of our purpose. Al Safa had just visited a camp in Takht-i-Suleiman, he said, where Fate had delivered to him a pearl beyond price. A brave fighter, a young Englishwoman, who had dared to take the name of Asimat—bride of Salah-ud-din—and the sword of jihad. An Englishwoman, moreover, with highly specialised knowledge. Knowledge that would enable us to take a revenge of such exquisite appropriateness …”

  “I didn’t know any of this,” she said. “Why wasn’t I told?”

  “For your own safety, and that of our mission.”

  “Do I know everything now?”

  “Not yet. When the time comes, trust me, you will know everything.”

  “It’s tomorrow, isn’t it?”

  “Trust me, Asimat.”

  She stared out into the darkness. At that moment, the rain-dripping chamber beneath the bridge was the whole world. If this was to be her last night on earth, then so be it. She reached out her hand, and found the roughness of his cheek. “I am not Farzana,” she said quietly, “but I am yours.”

  Silence, and from beyond the stillness surrounding them, the long sigh of the fenland wind.

  “Come here then,” he said.

  W ell, at least we now know for certain what the target is,” said Jim Dunstan. From behind him came a hydraulic hum followed by a muted shudder as the main entrance to the hangar closed.

  “I’m afraid there was never much doubt that it was going to be one of those USAF bases,” said Bruno Mackay, unwrapping an Army Air Corps–issue Mars Bar. All the phones in the place, for once, were silent.

  “It’s certain that the AC-130 involved in the Daranj incident was one of the ones based at Marwell, then?” asked Whitten.

  “No doubt at all, according to the report,” said Liz.

  “What’s the provenance of the report?” asked Mackay, a little testily. “Can you tell us that?”

  “Everything in it except the involvement of Faraj Mansoor is public domain,” said Liz evasively. “The story slipped beneath the radar here at the time—the Northern Ireland Assembly had just been suspended, and Saddam Hussein had just submitted his arms declaration—but the Arabic-language press went to town on it in a big way.” She turned to Mackay. “I’m surprised the reports didn’t cross your desk.”

  “They did,” said Mackay. “And as far as I remember the Islamabad Stars and Stripes burners made quite a meal of the incident. I was just curious as to the Mansoor link. That’s not mentioned in any file we’ve ever received from Pakistan liaison or any of our people in the field.”

  “I’m assured that the source is reliable,” said Liz, conscious that Don Whitten was watching Mackay’s discomfiture with undisguised pleasure.

  “And tomorrow’s the anniversary,” said Jim Dunstan. “Do we think they’ll try to stick to that?”

  “Symbolism and anniversaries are hugely important to the ITS,” said Mackay, recovering his authority. “September the eleventh was the anniversary of the British mandate in Palestine and of George Bush Senior’s proclamation of ‘New World Order.’ October the twelfth, when the Bali nightclub bombing and the attack on the USS Cole took place, was the anniversary of the opening of the Camp David peace talks between Egypt and Israel. This is more local and perhaps more personal, but I think we can count on them moving heaven and earth to stick to it.”

  “Do we discount all possibility of a dirty bomb?” asked the balding lieutenant colonel. “They wouldn’t have to be very near to their target if they meant to detonate one of those. A few miles upwind would do it.”

  “We’ve not found any trace of radioactive material near the Dersthorpe bungalow or in the Vauxhall Astra they were using,” said Whitten. “We made a point of checking that.”

  “I’d put money on them using C4,” said Mackay. “It’s the ITS’s signature explosive and, as you gentlemen will be aware, you can buy most of the ingredients in the average high street. The question is: how are they planning to deliver it? A field mouse couldn’t get through the security surrounding that base.”

  “Jean D’Aubigny,” said Liz. “She’s the key.”

  “Go on,” said Jim Dunstan.

  “I just can’t believe that Mansoor’s controllers would waste an asset like her on a pointless assault on a high-security installation. I stand by what I said before: she must have privileged information of some kind.”

  But even as she said it, Liz was unsure that this was the case. Wasting operatives on hopeless suicide missions was an ITS speciality.

  “Have your people got through the door of that Welsh school yet?” asked Mackay pointedly.

  “Yes, they have. They’re e-mailing me a list of D’Aubigny’s contemporaries as soon as they can.”

  “Right … They’ve rather taken their time about it, haven’t they?”

  “It takes time,” replied Liz acidly.

  As you’d know if you’d any real experience of such things, she might have added. Her colleagues had had to get a warrant signed, inform the local uniform, transport an Investigations team to mid-Wales, disarm the school’s BT Redline alarm system, and pick the locks of the front door and a filing cabinet—and that was before they came face to face with Price-Lascelles’ chaotic filing system.

  “Frankly,” said Jim Dunstan, “I can’t see how the hell an investigation of this young woman’s school career is going to move things forwards. It seems to me that we’ve gathered all the intelligence we need. We know who we’re after and we know what they look like. We have a target, we have a motive, and we have a date. We have a counter-strategy and we have people in place to implement it. All we have to do now is wait, so why don’t you get some sleep, young lady?”

  Not over-keen on your lot, Whitten had said about Jim Dunstan, and to begin with she had thought him mistaken in that respect. But the chain-smoking, baggy-eyed DS had been right. The old resentment lingered. Senior policemen, with their public face and their accountability, had long distrusted the state’s secret servants, and the fact that she was a woman probably further prejudiced the Deputy Chief Constable against her. It didn’t help either that the only other woman currently in the room, PC Wendy Clissold, was at that moment obediently carrying Don Whitten a cup of tea—white, one sugar.

  Liz looked around her. The faces were friendly enough but the message from each of them was the same. This was the endgame, the point at which theory was translated into action. The cerebral stuff—the intelligence-gathering and analysis—was over. She had nothing further to contribute.

  And she sensed something else. A muted but definite anticipation. The Army people, in particular, were like sharks. Twitchy with adrenalin. Smelling blood on the current. They wanted Mansoor and D’Aubigny to try and hit Marwell, she realised. They wanted the pair to dash themselves against its impenetrable wall of armed manpower. They wanted them dead.r />
  A text message announced incoming mail from Judith Spratt.

  Have school list for D’Aubigny’s leaving year. Checking now.

  D enzil Parrish arrived back in West Ford knowing that an unpromising evening lay ahead. His mother had warned him well in advance that her new in-laws were not the easiest-going people she’d ever met—“uptight suburban control freaks,” in fact, was the expression she’d used—but she had also warned him that he was expected to put in some “serious quality time” with them, “and not go bunking off to the pub every night.”

  So Denzil had agreed to put a brave face on it and do his best. The fact that his stepfather’s parents were digging in for a whole week had only been sprung on him once he himself had agreed to come down from Tyneside as soon as term was ended, and the subterfuge still rankled. His absence today until well after sunset had been part of the punishment he had chosen to inflict. Deep down, however, he understood his mother’s predicament, and was forced to admit that since her remarriage she’d been happier than he could remember her, and since Jessica had been born she’d been almost … well, girlish, he supposed, although it had to be said that this was by no means a desirable attribute in a forty-year-old parent. Whatever, she was smiling again, and for that Denzil was grateful.

  Braking the Accord a short distance beyond the gate, he backed into the driveway. Halfway down the incline he braked again, and got out of the car to unlock the garage and remove the kayak from the roofrack. It had been, in its way, a fantastic day. He’d never thought of himself as the lone operator type, but there was something about Norfolk in winter—the uncompromising solitude, the vast rain-charged skies—which accorded with his mood. On the Methwold Fen Relief Drain he’d seen a marsh harrier, a very rare bird indeed these days. He’d heard the call first—the shrill kwee, kwee damped by the wet wind. A moment later he’d seen the hawk itself, hanging almost casually on a wing before plummeting into the reeds and rising an instant later with a screaming moorhen between its talons. Nature red in tooth and claw. The sort of moment you remembered for ever.

  A moment not at odds, in a weird sort of way, with the helicopters that, at intervals, he’d seen hovering and whispering in the northern distance. What had that been about? Some sort of exercise? One of the helicopters had come close enough for him to see its military markings.

  Rolling up the garage door, he hauled the kayak inside and shoved it up into the rafters. Then, parking the car and closing the garage door behind him, he returned up the ramp and climbed the balustraded stone steps to the front door. If nothing else, his mother’s remarriage had certainly given the family a leg-up in the world, property-wise. Having pulled off his wet waterproofs and hung them to drip in the front hall, he found his mother in the kitchen, pausing from the preparation of a leg of lamb and the boiling of a kettle to open a jar of prune-based sludge for the baby’s dessert. Jessica herself, meanwhile, temporarily at peace with the world, was lying on her back on a rug on the floor, sucking her toes. With his mother and half-sister stood a uniformed police officer.

  The officer was smiling, and Denzil recognised him as Jack Hobhouse. A solid middle-aged man holding a peaked cap bearing the insignia of the Norfolk Constabulary, he had been to the house several times before when Denzil had been at home—most recently to advise on a new alarm system.

  “Denzil, love, Sergeant Hobhouse has been warning us about something. Apparently there are a couple of terrorist-type people on the loose. Not near here, but they’re armed, and they’ve apparently …” Reaching down in response to a sudden sharp cry from Jessica, she gathered up the child, arranged her over her left shoulder, and started patting her back.

  “Apparently … ?” prompted Denzil.

  “They’ve killed a couple of people up on the north coast,” she said as Jessica, burping, released a milky posset down the back of her mother’s expensive black cardigan. “There was that whole thing about the man who was found shot in that car park.”

  “Fakenham,” said Denzil, regarding his mother’s back with fastidious horror. “I saw something about it in the local paper. They’re looking for a British woman and a Pakistani man, aren’t they?”

  “That’s what they think,” said Hobhouse. “Now as your mum said, there’s no reason to suppose they’re anywhere near here, but …”

  He was interrupted by the ringing of the wall-mounted phone. Denzil made a move for it but his mother snatched it up, listened for a moment, and then replaced the receiver. At the same moment the baby started to cry.

  “Traffic backed up for a mile because of roadblocks,” she announced despairingly over the baby’s wails. “Thinks he’s going to be at least an hour late back. And I’ve got his bloody parents arriving at any minute. Which reminds me, we’re going to need some wine and some more tonic water … My God, Denzil, is that them?”

  “I’ll, er … I’ll leave these,” murmured Hobhouse, handing Denzil two photocopied A4 sheets and replacing his cap, “and be on my way. Any worries, don’t hesitate. And obviously, if you spot anyone …”

  Denzil took the sheets, gave the officer a distracted thumbs-up, and glanced out of the window. Judging by the five-year-old Jaguar and the intolerant bearing of the couple stepping out of it, it was indeed “them.”

  “Mum, you’ve got sick on your back.” He took a deep breath, thought briefly but longingly of the serenity that the afternoon had held, and made the supreme sacrifice. “Give me Jessica. Go upstairs and change. I’ll hold the fort.”

  F araj watched dispassionately as Jean, kneeling naked to the waist on the flagstoned towpath beneath the bridge, bent forward to rinse her hair in the river. Beyond the arches of the bridge lay a grey, baleful dawn. It was 9 a.m., and very cold. Jean’s fingers scrabbled methodically at her scalp, a thin soapy cloud drifted downstream, and finally she raised her head and wrung out the dark rope of her hair. Still crouched over the water, she took a plastic comb from the unzipped washbag, and dragged it repeatedly forwards from the nape of her neck until her hair was no longer dripping. Then she shook it out, and pulled her dirty T-shirt back on. Her hands were shaking now after their immersion in the river, her head ached with the cold, and hunger was knotting her guts. It was essential, though, that she be presentable.

  It was the day.

  Pressing her flattened hands into her armpits to warm them for a moment, she searched in the washbag, found a pair of steel hairdressing scissors, and handed these and the comb to Faraj. Events had taken on a strange clarity. “My turn for a haircut,” she said, a little self-consciously.

  He nodded. Frowned as he took the scissors. Flickered them experimentally.

  “It’s simple,” she said. “You work from the back to the front, cutting so that every strand”—she held up her index finger—“is this long.”

  The frown still in place, Faraj seated himself behind her. Taking the comb and scissors he began to cut, carefully dropping the severed locks into the river as he went. Fifteen minutes later he laid down the scissors.

  “Done.”

  “How does it look?” she asked. “Do I look different?”

  A word of tenderness. A single word would do.

  “You look different,” he said brusquely. “Are you ready?”

  “I just want to take a last look at the map,” she said, glancing sideways at him. He was not yet thirty, but the stubble on his chin was silver. His face was blank. Reaching for the book, squinting in the dim light, she re-examined the topography of the area. As the crow flew, they were just three miles from the target.

  “I’m still worried about the helicopters,” she confessed. “If we go across country and they spot us, we’re finished.”

  “It’s less risky than taking another car,” he said. “And if they’re as clever as you say they are, they won’t be searching round here anyway. They’ll be concentrating on the approaches to the US bases.”

  “We’re probably fifteen miles from Marwell here,” she admitted. “Maybe sixteen.
”

  But fifteen or sixteen miles still didn’t seem very far. It was the infrared cameras that she really feared. Their heat signatures on a screen, two pulsing dots of light growing larger and larger as the beating of the rotors grew louder and louder, roaring now, blotting out all sound and thought …

  “I think we should walk to West Ford along the towpath,” she said, levelling her voice with a conscious effort. “That way, if we hear any helicopters, we’ve … we’ve got a chance of hiding under the next bridge.”

  He looked expressionlessly down at her hands, which had begun to shake again. “All right,” he said. “The path, then. Pack the bags.”

  I n the Swanley Heath mess hall, Liz sat in front of an untouched slice of buttered toast and a cup of black coffee. So far, Investigations had turned up nothing of interest concerning any of the names on the Garth House school list. Several of the pupils lived in Norfolk or Suffolk, or had done so at some point in the past, but while most remembered Jean D’Aubigny, none had any significant connection with her. A loner, had been the universal judgement. Someone who was happiest by herself.

  And at a school like Garth House, where most of the children would have had problems of one sort or another, the desire for solitude was something you respected, Liz guessed. Children knew when to leave each other alone in a way that adults often didn’t. Mark had rung her the night before but she had left her voice mail to field the call. She would not be returning it.

  Investigations had also informed her that the D’Aubigny parents were still refusing to talk, or indeed to assist the police in any way. Reading between the lines, Liz suspected that this was the lawyer’s doing, and that if any pressure was put on the parents—if they were charged with the wilful obstruction of justice, for example—Julian Ledward would use the case as an opportunity for civil rights grandstanding.