At Risk

by Stella Rimington

  And despite an extensive search operation involving several units of the Moroccan police, MI6 had still not located Price-Lascelles. The latest theory, based on the fact that the Garth House headmaster had loaded several spare containers of diesel into his jeep before leaving Azemmour, was that he had not gone to Casablanca, as reported by the house-boy, but had driven up to the Atlas mountains. The search area, Judith Spratt had reported glumly, had expanded to approximately a thousand square miles.

  Liz looked around the room. The police and firearms officers were in one group, the Army officers in another, the SAS team in a third. Bruno Mackay, she saw, was standing with the SAS team, and at that moment laughing uproariously at something that Jamie Kersley had just said.

  Liz had taken a seat next to PC Wendy Clissold, who had spent much of the meal giggling on her phone. At the table’s far end, a tactful distance away, sat half a dozen excruciatingly polite young Army Air Corps helicopter pilots.

  “They reckon today’s the day, then,” said Clissold, “that they’re going to have a bash at that Yank base.”

  “That’s what they reckon,” said Liz.

  “It’s not what I reckon,” said a familiar voice at her shoulder.

  Liz looked round. It was Don Whitten, and he had clearly had a bad night. His eyes were bloodshot and the bags beneath them purplish-grey. The tips of his moustache, by contrast, were yellowed with nicotine.

  “Remind me never to join the Army, Clissold. The beds don’t suit me. You’re not allowed to smoke in them, for a kick-off.”

  “Isn’t that a violation of your civil rights, Guv’nor?”

  “You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?” said Whitten mournfully. He turned to Liz. “How did you do? Accommodation satisfactory?”

  “Quite satisfactory, thanks. Our hut was very comfortable. Are you going to have some breakfast?”

  Whitten patted his pockets for his cigarettes and peered at the serving counter. “I’m not sure whether all this fried food is appropriate for a fitness guru like myself. I may confine myself to a Filter King and a cup of tea.”

  “Go on, Guv’nor. It’s free.”

  “True, Clissold. Very true. Have you heard from Brian Mudie this morning?”

  “What d’you mean, Guv?”

  He looked at her wearily. “When he rings you, tell him I want that inventory on the forensic from the bungalow fire ASAP. Everything. Every button, every razor blade, every Kentucky fried chicken bone. And packaging. I particularly want to know about packaging.”

  Clissold looked uneasily at her fingers. “As it happens, I have just been speaking to Sergeant Mudie. They’re still making up the inventory …”

  “Go on.”

  “There was one thing he said …”

  “Tell me.”

  “When you were a kid, Guv, did they have that stuff called Silly Putty? That bouncy stuff you squeeze and …”

  Whitten seemed to sag in his chair. Beneath the strip lighting, his skin was the colour of a corpse’s. “Tell me,” he repeated.

  “More than a dozen melted containers, Guv. All empty.”

  His eyes met Liz’s. “How much would that make?” he demanded tonelessly.

  “Depends on the size of the containers. Enough to flatten this building, though.”

  Wendy looked from one to the other of them, mystified.

  “C4 explosive,” explained Liz. “Putty’s one of the principal ingredients. The toy shop sort is best.”

  “So what’s the target?” Whitten demanded.

  “RAF Marwell seems to be the popular favourite right now.”

  “You don’t think that, though?”

  “I haven’t got a better suggestion,” said Liz. “And we’ve rather run out of time.”

  Whitten shook his head. “That lot over there”—he nodded at the Army officers—“think that Mansoor and D’Aubigny are just going to walk slap-bang into one of our search teams. They’re crediting them with no intelligence whatsoever.” He shrugged. “Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps we’re overcomplicating things. Perhaps the two of them are just going to find the largest concentration of people that they can, and …” He made a starburst with his hands. From the Army officers’ table, there was more laughter.

  “I told Jim Dunstan,” said Whitten. “I said we wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for you.”

  Liz shook her head. “Wouldn’t be where? Inside a razor-wired enclosure trying to pretend we know what we’re doing? Waiting for a couple of trigger-happy maniacs who could be anywhere in East Anglia to do us the favour of showing themselves?”

  Whitten regarded her in silence. Liz, angry at herself, took an exploratory bite of her toast, but she seemed to have lost all sense of taste. More than anything she wanted to walk out to her car, and leave. Draw a line under the case. Leave it to the police and the Army. She had done all that she could do.

  Except that she knew she hadn’t, quite. There was still a single thread, tenuous but nevertheless logical, to be followed. If the D’Aubigny parents thought that their daughter had no connection of any kind with East Anglia, and had never been there, then they would unquestionably have said so. Julian Ledward could huff and puff as loud as he liked, but the fact was that the D’Aubigny parents’ silence had to mean that they knew of a connection. And if this was the case, given that they didn’t have much clue about the path their daughter’s life had taken after she left home, the chances were that it was a connection established before she left home. Which took her—and Liz—back to school, and Garth House.

  Go for it, Jude. Find the key. Unlock the door.

  “It’s like a bullfight,” said Wendy Clissold.

  Liz and Whitten turned to her.

  “I went to one once, in Barcelona,” explained Clissold hesitantly. “The bull comes in, and the matador comes in, and everyone knows that … that there’s going to be a death. You dress up, put perfume on, and buy a ticket to watch a death. Then you go home.”

  Whitten tapped a cigarette on the plastic tabletop. His eyes were the colour of old beeswax. “Key difference, love. At a bullfight, you’re pretty sure who’s going to be doing the dying.”

  F rom the confluence of the Lesser Ouse and the Methwold Fen Relief Drain to West Ford was about three miles as the crow flew, but the towpath distance was closer to four. The going was not uninterruptedly easy, either. There were broken-down stiles to negotiate, stretches hundreds of yards long where the towpath became impassable cattle-trodden marshland, and places where farmers had interrupted the right of way by running barbed-wire fences to the water’s edge. All of these obstacles had to be surmounted or bypassed, and by 10 a.m., despite the cold of the riverbank and the gusty wind, Jean was sweating freely.

  They saw several helicopters, but these were far away, swarming like gnats over the dim eastern horizon behind them. None came within five miles of them; above their heads there were only the clouds, racing thinly on the wind. And with every step she and Faraj lengthened the distance between themselves and the search’s epicentre at Marwell.

  They passed several people on the riverbank. There were walkers hunched into jackets and coats, there was a pair of elderly fishermen with thermos flasks, keeping a chilly vigil beneath their umbrellas, and there was a blowsy woman in a turquoise windcheater chivvying an elderly Labrador along the towpath. None of them paid Faraj or Jean any attention, preferring to remain enclosed in their private worlds.

  Finally, at about quarter to eleven, the edge of the village came into view. The first dozen or so houses passed by the towpath were red-roofed boxes with pseudo-Georgian detailing, part of a late-twentieth-century speculative development. Beyond these, the river narrowed and passed between, on the north side, a stand of mature yews marking the boundary of the churchyard, and on the south side a coppice of rough evergreen woodland bisected by a public footpath.

  Jean and Faraj were on the south bank of the Lesser Ouse, and a flight of shallow stone steps led them into this patch of woo
dland. When Jean thought of it, it was as it had been that summer ten years ago—a place of slanting green light and curling hash smoke. In December, however, there was little magic about it. The path was boggy and littered with bottles and fast-food wrappers, and the trees had a dank, sodden look about them.

  But they provided cover, which was all that was necessary at that moment. Beyond the wet trees stood the village cricket ground. By following the path through the woodland it was possible to approach the back of the cricket pavilion, a crumbling 1930s structure resembling a miniature mock-Tudor villa.

  There was a rear door through which the pavilion could be entered, secured by a simple lock. It quickly yielded to Jean’s Banque Nationale de Paris credit card, and scrambling into the dimness with the rucksacks, they pulled the door closed behind them. Exhausted by the release of tension, they slumped down on to a wooden bench that ran the length of the back room. Having weighed up the risks, they had agreed that as long as they kept completely silent and showed no lights, they were probably safe in there. If there was a danger, it was that other people might try to break into the place. Kids, perhaps, looking for somewhere to do drugs or have sex. Beyond that, neither of them could think of a reason why anyone would want to go into a cricket pavilion in midwinter.

  Jean looked around her. They were in some sort of changing area, lit by two small, high, cobwebbed windows. A line of hooks ran along the wall above the wooden bench, a couple of them still holding limp cricket shirts, and a heavy stoneware sink stood in one corner. Beside the sink a door led into a toilet stall. There was a faint residual smell of damp and linseed oil.

  Cautiously, she opened the door to the forward part of the pavilion. This was an open area, wooden-floored, fronted by a locked door and two sets of green-painted shutters covering windows through which players could watch the game. As in the back room two high side windows admitted a thin light to the interior, showing stacked deckchairs and wicker laundry baskets holding pads, bats and batting gloves. On the long wall hung a pair of umpires’ coats and several dusty team photos.

  “Play up, play up and play the game!” murmured Faraj.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Just a poem I learned in school.”

  Jean stared at him blankly for a moment. “We need to make a lookout position. Maybe cut a hole in these shutters or something.”

  He shook his head. “Too risky. And we haven’t got the tools to do it with.” Climbing on to the pile of deckchairs, he peered through the small side window. “Try this.”

  He climbed down and she took his place. Through the small opening, barely a foot square, she could see right across the northwest quadrant of the cricket ground. Beyond the post-and-rail fence at its boundary, several hundred yards away, the perimeter road was visible, and on its far side the rain-darkened sweep of the Terrace and the George and Dragon.

  Disappearing into the back room, Faraj returned with the binoculars and passed them up to her. Outside Number One, the Terrace, stood a dark red Jaguar. On the ground floor, through the tall windows, she could see a tall, unmoving figure. Was that him? she wondered. The man who, on the other side of the world, had been selected to die. To die with his family around him, as so many innocent citizens of Iraq, Afghanistan and other states had died. Blown to pieces without warning. Casually—jokingly, even—and by strangers, as if they were no more than a cluster of pixels in a computer game. And then dismissed as “collateral damage.”

  She shook her head. These people were about to learn about damage. About to learn the difference between the real and the remote.

  The tall figure moved away from the window, and Jean was about to lower the binoculars when a figure in the road caught her eye. A man in a pale raincoat had just exited a black car in order to stretch his arms and legs.

  “There’s security there,” she whispered urgently. “A man in a car, and … yes, another inside the car.”

  Faraj nodded. “It was to be expected. We’ll have to approach the house from the back.”

  “There’s a back alley running between two of the houses. When it’s dark I’ll find my way in there. The garden’s probably alarmed or spotlit, but I should be able to lower the device over the wall. It’ll go off near to the side door of the house.”

  “They’re well built, these old houses, no? Solid?”

  “Pretty well built.”

  “We might not kill them all.”

  “It’s the only option we’ve got, Faraj.”

  “Let me think about it. And get changed, you have to buy us some food.”

  She nodded, and went into the back room. There, making sure to keep her head below the level of the windows, she washed her hands, using a cracked rind of Lifebuoy soap that she found in a saucer by the sink, and dried them on one of the cricket shirts. Then, locating her washbag, she took out her small stock of make-up, and went through the half-forgotten ritual. A faint skim of foundation, a touch of shadow on the eyelids, and a pale dab of lipstick. She wanted to look like someone who had woken up in a comfortable middle-class home and had muesli and fresh orange juice for breakfast, not like a terrorist who had slept filthy and hungry beneath a fenland bridge. From her rucksack she took one of the knotted bin-liners of clothes. There was a soft lilac cashmere sweater, grey combat pants and a fitted denim jacket with a quilted lining, all bought in a mid-range Parisian department store. As she had hoped, the hiking boots looked more or less OK with this outfit, in a studenty sort of way. And the ensemble teamed up well with its final component—a small grey mono-strap backpack.

  When she was ready, she looked at herself in the changing room mirror. The transformation was startling. Her hair, instead of falling flat and lank to her shoulders, now neatly framed her face. He had made a surprisingly sensitive job of it. And the make-up, of course, made all the difference. There was nothing remotely threatening about the bland and conventionally feminised creature that looked back at her. Hesitantly, she went through and showed herself to Faraj. He nodded, and said nothing, but some unreadable emotion touched his gaze.

  “I should go shopping,” she said, patting her trouser pockets to check that she had the velcro wallet.

  “I’ll wire up the weapon,” he answered. “Don’t be seen on the way out.”

  “When I knock six times, let me in. Any other number of knocks, it’s not me, or they’ve taken me.”

  “I understand. Go.”

  A quick look through one of the high changing-room windows estab lished that the coast was clear, and Jean let herself out. She walked back into the wood and then took the northeasterly path, coming out at the side of the road bordering the cricket ground. The shops—a panel-beating and exhaust repairs yard, a newsagent’s, and a village stores incorporating a sub-post office, were at the near end of The Terrace, and as she crossed the road she saw a fair-haired young man saunter down the steps of Number One. Like her, he seemed to be heading for the shops. This must be the man’s son, she thought with a crawl of foreboding.

  She steadied herself. In the long term, the action that she was taking today would save lives. It would make the West think twice before raining bombs and bullets on those they considered faceless and of no consequence. The cascading triple detonation in which the British family would die would serve as the scream of those countless others across the world who had died without a voice. The young man would have to give up his life with the rest.

  The two of them reached the village stores at the same time, and he stood aside politely as she pushed the door open. Inside, as she crammed a basket with bread, mineral water, fruit, cheese, chocolate, and for good measure a couple of Christmas cards and a packet of green tinsel, she felt the young man’s eyes on her. Covertly glancing between the aisles, she saw a tall figure in jeans, a T-shirt, and a motorcycle jacket. He was unshaven, and his hair stuck up on one side of his head as if he had slept on it that way. Catching her eye, he grinned amiably at her, and she looked away. She was prepared to kill him, but she couldn
’t bring herself to smile at him. And why—why—did she think that she recognised him?

  Near the counter, and with a heart-thumping shock, she saw a photograph of herself on the front of the Daily Telegraph. It was a particularly unsympathetic portrait that her mother had taken at Christmas three or four years ago. WOMAN, 23, SOUGHT … Taking a copy, forcing herself not to read further, she refolded it so that the images were on the inside.

  “Rain’s stopped, anyway!” It was the young man—a boy he was, really; he couldn’t have been more than eighteen—by now in front of her in the queue.

  “That’s true,” she said flatly. “How long for, though?”

  The question, as she had intended, was unanswerable, and he did not reply, just shuffled good-humouredly from leg to leg. When the till girl had scanned his Cheerios and his six-pack of Newcastle Brown Ale cans, he asked for the total to be put on account.

  “Which account would that be?”

  “Mrs. Delves’—I’m her son.”

  The girl leaned comfortably back in her chair. “That’d be your little sister, then—that Jessica. I had a big smile off her yesterday. She’s gorgeous!”

  “Well, she’s certainly got a strong pair of lungs on her.”

  “Bless! Give her a smacker from me, won’t you?”

  “OK. Er … who shall I tell her it’s from?”

  The girl spread her fingers and glanced downwards. She was wearing an engagement ring with a pale blue stone. “Beverley,” she said.

  “OK, I will. See you.”

  As intended, he had seen and taken note of the ring. The faint but unmistakable note of disappointment in his voice, however, had given Jean an idea. It was not going to be easy, but she knew what she was going to have to do. Dumping her basket on the inclined ramp of the counter and letting the girl take the items out and scan and bag them, she reached out and touched the boy’s arm as he made for the exit. He looked round at her, surprised.