Agent of the State

by Roger Pearce

  There was no mention of Ahmed Jibril until the top of page three, where the Service opted for neutrality, neither fingering him as a terrorist nor excusing him as an innocent. After several briefings from 1830 since her arrival in SO15, even Weatherall knew enough to expect details of Jibril’s entry documentation and a financial profile. But this morning she could not pin down a single shred of quality subject analysis.

  She ploughed through to the end with growing dismay. Philippa Harrington’s people had used hundreds of words to say nothing until the final paragraph, where there was ‘disappointment’ about the failure to consult MI5 from the start and the usual cop-out that operational matters were ‘solely a matter for the police’. She sighed as she realised the Note amounted to a long-winded indictment with a single charge: Commander Paula Weatherall had screwed up. It heightened her sense of loneliness. Dismayed, she closed the dossier and slid it back across the desk.

  ‘Make sense?’ demanded the DG, impatiently.

  ‘Seems a little thin on the personal profiling. I’d like my officers to do some work on Jibril’s financial profile.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Harrington, her head jolting up. ‘My Service will sponsor any new leads on Ahmed Jibril.’

  Weatherall looked across in surprise. ‘So you have people working on this case?’

  ‘That’s an assumption,’ said Harrington, swatting her again. ‘Always unreliable in our kind of work.’

  ‘Are you suggesting you want me to clear everything with you first?’

  ‘I’m saying we have the lead and require you to do nothing. Frankly, I advise you to lay off the man you almost shot dead,’ said Harrington, looking over Weatherall’s uniform. ‘And if you value our partnership so highly, perhaps you should have restrained your Mr Kerr from breaching every protocol in the book. Our joint group is there for a purpose, after all. To agree surveillance targets. This is what happens when one of your senior officers goes off on a jaunt of his own.’

  ‘Senior?’ said Weatherall, blowing her nose again.

  Harrington had acquired a pair of bifocals and shot Weatherall a look of mock surprise. ‘He’s been in this game a lot longer than you, if you don’t mind me saying so, and in my book that spells senior and potential trouble.’

  ‘I’ve already spoken to him.’

  ‘That may not be enough.’ Before Weatherall could collect herself, Harrington opened her desk drawer and removed a single sheet of paper. ‘While we’re on the matter of the troublesome Mr Kerr,’ she said, scanning the text, ‘I’m told he was interfering in one of our technical operations last night. A bit of overactive, unauthorised snooping. Freelance again, I presume, paddling his own canoe.’ She paused, and Weatherall felt crushed under her scrutiny. ‘Would you like to know what it says?’

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’

  Instead of answering, Harrington removed her glasses, pressed a button under her desk and stood up to indicate the interview was over. ‘He triggered one of our remote counter-intrusion devices.’ As she walked Weatherall to the door the PA entered.

  ‘Intrusion?’

  ‘It happens,’ the DG looked Weatherall up and down, ‘and I’m assuming from your reaction you know nothing about it. But your tits are in the mangle, sister. You urgently need to get Kerr back on the leash, restore trust between us, if we’re to be serious about saving your skin.’

  Weatherall knew it was an orchestrated move to inflict maximum humiliation in front of a junior member of staff. She flushed as the PA looked away in embarrassment. ‘Which operation are we talking about?’

  ‘Alison here can give you the background,’ the DG said, ‘but I’d appreciate a call once you’ve spoken to him. There’s no place for mavericks in this line of work, trespassing, crashing around on our patch. What we need from the police is a sharper effort to prevent the next attack. High-visibility patrols, stops and searches in the street, that sort of thing.’

  ‘That’s very much a uniform responsibility.’ Weatherall sniffed.

  ‘And the kind of partnership we need, these days, as I know the commissioner agrees. Leave the intelligence aspects to us and our international allies.’

  Weatherall half-heartedly offered her hand as the PA held the door, but Harrington was already turning back to her desk.

  Because mobile phones and pagers were prohibited inside Thames House, Weatherall had to wait a couple of minutes before they located hers from the rack behind the reception desk. She called up Barry, her civilian driver, and saw the Toyota turning into the Embankment as she walked down the steps. She was speed-dialling Donna from the rear seat as soon as they pulled away from the kerb.

  ‘I need to speak with DCI Kerr in my office now.’

  ‘He’s on the plot in Kentish Town,’ lied Donna, who had no idea where Kerr was.

  ‘So get him back to the Yard. I’ll be at the office in ten minutes.’

  Glimpsing the driver’s reproachful eyes in the rear-view mirror, Weatherall turned to the Thames. Since she had told him he was to be replaced by a woman from the government car service, Barry had worn the saggy look of a man whose days were numbered. Weatherall sneezed, resigning herself to another bad day at the office.

  Twenty-eight

  Tuesday, 18 September, 10.23, Lambeth

  Kerr was less than a mile away when he took Donna’s call, greeting forensic scientist Anne Harris with a kiss on the cheek. For Kerr’s special requests, they always met under the gloomy Victorian railway arches on the opposite side of Lambeth Bridge from Thames House, with the lab practically in view. She glanced at his Italian raincoat with the collar up and told him he looked furtive.

  Kerr took out his BlackBerry and shrugged an apology as he received Donna’s summons. ‘I’m in Lambeth.’

  ‘Wrong, you’re racing back from Kentish Town.’

  Kerr cut the call and handed Harris a plastic exhibits envelope. Earlier that morning he had walked to the end of Strutton Ground, at a safe distance from the Yard, where Karl was waiting to slip him Tania’s hairbrush and a photograph. The exhibits envelope contained the brush and the swabs from Marston Street. ‘Just the basic DNA for now, Anne, if you get the chance. But there may be a follow-up.’ Harris had just sent him an invitation to her post-divorce celebration. At the wrong side of fifty, he thought she looked good in her raincoat and waterproof hat, curvy and fresh-faced. ‘You sure this is OK? I mean, it won’t drop you in it?’

  Anne Harris was one of the country’s foremost authorities on the forensic interpretation of petechiae, the tiny specks of blood that may prove a victim has been strangled. She had spent all her working life in the Met’s forensic laboratory, before its absorption into the Forensic Science Service. ‘Poor girl. Is she alive or dead?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You really love this “need to know” stuff, don’t you?’ Harris was famous in her modest way. Every unofficial meeting with Kerr was a risk to her career. But the cause was good, and she could be sure Kerr would have all the bases covered. ‘And you know I’ll have to give some sort of reason.’

  ‘You’ll think of something. It’s an HCR, Anne, you told me yourself.’

  Kerr’s requests, though rare, required complete secrecy and use of expensive laboratory resources without trace. He described them as favours, but she rationalised them to herself as hot-case reviews, carried out in the national interest.

  ‘I’ll call you in a couple of days.’

  ‘Perfect,’ said Kerr, pushing the rain hat to one side and kissing her cheek again. ‘Have a great party.’

  He reached the Yard in seven minutes and tossed his raincoat at Donna’s coat-stand. ‘Smartarse,’ she murmured, waving him into Weatherall’s office.

  There were no pleasantries. ‘I understand you made a covert search of a house in Knightsbridge without authorisation,’ Weatherall said accusingly, even before he had sat down. Without being invited Kerr took the chair nearest her desk, thinking fast. While she checked her notes he glan
ced at a flip chart in the corner of the room, covered with scrawled speaking notes in green felt-tip. The title was ‘Heraclitus and the State of Permanent Flux: My Champion of Change Management’.

  ‘Marston Street,’ she said. ‘What the hell were you doing there?’

  He knew Weatherall had just returned from Thames House, and assumed she must have learnt about his trespass from Philippa Harrington. That meant either someone had told MI5 about him and Jack Langton, or else they had a remote technical operation running. He dismissed the first, because he and Jack had told no one about their clandestine visit.

  His mind was racing back over the blood traces and the MI5 surveillance team watching a couple of thugs remove something from the same house in the darkest hours of Sunday morning. Watching or protecting? And what was so secret that they’d had to reverse their van right up to the railings? Weatherall’s outburst had just made things even more complicated: as he considered his reply, he now had to figure out why his illicit search had excited the interest of the director-general herself. On the flip chart he noticed Weatherall had misspelt ‘Heraclitus’ with a K and a Y.

  Weatherall poured some water and drank it in one gulp, her eyes flickering to the spot where Kerr’s tie should have been. The desk was covered with thick brown policy files and she looked stressed out. Kerr noticed she was already more than halfway through the litre bottle, and wondered if it was the first of the day.

  ‘I was following up on some info from Karl Sergeyev,’ replied Kerr, calmly. ‘He found himself at a dodgy party attended by a Russian principal called Anatoli Rigov, a handful of Britain’s great and good and a couple of hookers. Always an interesting combination. Sex, drugs and probably video, for all we know.’ Weatherall was making notes, so he paused to let her catch up, like a barrister watching the judge’s hand. ‘It was a national security issue and he says he reported it. Didn’t Bill Ritchie brief you?’

  She looked up in surprise. ‘And what has that got to do with you?’

  Kerr shrugged. ‘No one else wants to run with it.’

  ‘How the hell do you know?’

  ‘Am I wrong?’

  ‘Assumptions are always unreliable in our kind of work,’ she said, repeating Harrington’s phrase. ‘Who did you take with you?’

  ‘Rolled up on my own,’ he bluffed.

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ she demanded, scribbling again. Since returning from Thames House Weatherall had changed out of her uniform into a faded dark green tartan suit. Waiting for Kerr to reply, she squeezed out of her jacket, revealing an overwashed Met-issue shirt with epaulettes. One of the buttons came undone in the exertion, revealing a flash of bra. It had lost its whiteness, as washed-out as its owner. He stayed silent while she checked her notes. ‘Who signed the authorisation?’

  ‘It wasn’t intrusive. And whoever organised it has gone, probably taking their blackmail material with them.’ He paused again while Weatherall twisted to drape the jacket over her chair, like an old-style detective out of the movies. Christ, she’d be turning up in braces next. ‘Anyway, the estate agent let me borrow the keys,’ he lied again, wondering how much detail Harrington had given her.

  As Weatherall swung in her chair to reach a box of tissues, a shoulder of the jacket slipped free. ‘Who else have you spoken to about this?’

  ‘No one. Why would I? I’m just wondering, you know. There’s a potential security breach here, surely. Shouldn’t we be notifying Cabinet Office?’

  ‘Mind your own damned business.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a “No”, then,’ murmured Kerr, as Weatherall sneezed heavily into a single inadequate tissue, flashing more bra. She dropped the Kleenex on her desk, surreptitiously wiped her hand on her skirt and picked up her pen.

  ‘I employ you to run my covert policing unit, and you acted way outside your brief. For the second time in less than a week. This is none of your business.’

  ‘I think it is, ma’am, because of what Karl Sergeyev reported. Anything to do with national security is exactly our business. It’s what we used to do in Special Branch. What SO15 should be doing now.’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that,’ said Weatherall, grabbing more tissues. She dropped the used one into the bin. ‘I trust you’re not pursuing any other private adventures, Mr Ritchie, that I know absolutely nothing about?’ To give herself more space she pushed aside a couple of files, inadvertently knocking over the family photograph. Her jacket slipped to the floor. ‘Do you have any idea how close I came to disciplining you again today?’ she snapped, disappearing for a moment behind the desk.

  Kerr leant over to rescue the photograph and caught a glimpse of Weatherall, her partner and teenage daughter in their Sunday best, as flushed as if they had been at the communion wine. ‘Can I ask, ma’am, what it is about me you don’t like?’

  ‘You need to become integrated,’ she said, as she reappeared with the jacket, red-faced and nodding at the flip chart, ‘to embrace change. You’re too set on doing your own thing, taking the law into your own hands, as with the whole Jibril thing and now this ridiculous unauthorised search.’

  With the mention of Jibril, Kerr guessed Philippa Harrington had also been giving her a hard time about his unauthorised surveillance without putting MI5 on notice. Harrington was notorious for her weaponry of put-downs, condescension and threats veiled as advice. Wondering how many she had brought to bear this morning, he spoke out, undeterred: ‘But we still believe Ahmed Jibril is a terrorist.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘I,’ he corrected. Kerr’s priority now was to conceal his team’s secret investigation into Jibril. In the Fishbowl on Friday afternoon they had stepped up to the plate to take risks on his behalf. His duty was to protect them by keeping everything secret, strictly ‘need to know’. If Weatherall could be as worked up as she was over his look inside an empty house, how violently would she react if she knew about Justin’s burglaries over the weekend?

  Until he reached the truth Kerr would operate with his team beneath the wire, out of sight of Weatherall and Ritchie.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he continued, ‘MI6 gave Jibril to us for a reason and I’m still convinced this man is a jihadi. And I believe you feel uneasy about his release, deep down.’

  ‘Drop it,’ snapped Weatherall. ‘This is for MI5. You do nothing more on this man without clearance and a specific request from Philippa’s people.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said.

  Weatherall tried to replace the jacket but gave up and laid it untidily on the air-conditioning vent. Beneath all the bluster she looked chastened, like a victim of bullying. ‘From now on you work only on targets agreed with MI5,’ she said. ‘Nothing else.’

  ‘Right.’ Yes, he thought, Harrington had been applying serious pressure.

  ‘So take this as a final warning. We’re a team in SO15. Individualists have no place here, and your corporate profile is practically non-existent,’ she said emphatically, as her shirt gaped open even farther. This time she spotted Kerr’s glance and fastened the button. As she dismissed him she was already reaching for a blue ring binder marked ‘Institute of Management’. ‘Make sure you learn something from this. And on your way out tell Donna to find Mr Ritchie for me.’

  Weatherall’s PA was already dialling as Kerr grabbed his raincoat in the outer office. ‘She wants to see . . .’

  ‘Bill Ritchie. Yes, I know.’

  ‘You got this place bugged, Donna?’ smiled Kerr. ‘And can you ask Alan Fargo to drop by?’

  ‘I already did that, too,’ she joked, looking past him.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ he said, as Fargo appeared in the doorway.

  She put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘And Sir Theo Canning rang. National Crime Agency. Asking me for your number. He wants you to call him tout de suite.’ She held out a piece of paper. ‘Says he’ll make it worth your while.’

  Twenty-nine

  Tuesday, 18 September, 11.17, Farnborough airfield

  To bring Anatoli
Rigov home, Moscow provided a private jet to fly him from Farnborough airfield in Hampshire, south-west of London. In Karl’s absence, the Yard found another liaison officer to escort him from the embassy, a deferential, pinstriped spare from the Royalty Protection Squad with muscle but no background in intelligence work. At the VIP reception desk, Rigov clapped him on the back and sent him away with his deepest respects to all at Buckingham Palace.

  Rigov’s Bombardier Learjet 40XR waited among seven others on the tarmac, but he had one more appointment before he could sink into its plush leather seats for the journey home. As Boris disappeared with his escort, Rigov slipped away from the reception area and into another vehicle waiting for him outside, a four-year-old silver Peugeot. The driver was a Russian in his thirties, harder than Boris and twice as sharp, who only addressed Rigov when he was spoken to. They rejoined the M25, then raced west along the M40, Rigov staying silent until they reached the outskirts of Stratford-upon-Avon.

  The driver dropped him ten metres from an Italian restaurant off Church Street, within a short walk of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. He handed Rigov an unsealed white envelope and a ballpoint pen, then drove away to wait for him by the cricket ground on the other side of the river. The restaurant was in an ancient building with its original oak beams and uneven doors and windows, a private place with subdued lighting, the tables separated by thick black oak pillars supporting the low ceilings. Rigov’s lunch guest was waiting for him in the corner farthest from any natural light and opposite the staircase leading below ground to the cloakrooms. They had arrived before the lunchtime rush, with only three of the twenty or so tables occupied.