Present Danger

by Stella Rimington

  No, thought Judith, thinking of Liz’s account of her meeting with Daryl Sulkey of the FBI. It was the Mattapan Three, the trio of Boston-Irish gun runners sent to prison, of whom only Piggott’s brother had failed to come out again.

  Peggy was back now from breakfast, looking much brighter.

  ‘Let’s suppose they’ve gone off in Mattapan III and taken Dave with them. Where might they be going?’ asked Judith.

  ‘America?’ suggested Peggy hesitantly. ‘That’s the logical place for Piggott to go.’

  ‘Surely even a boat like Phil Robinson described couldn’t sail all the way to America at this time of the year, could it?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Peggy admitted. ‘What about France? Milraud’s base is at Toulon, near Marseilles. They might be going there. Let’s do a bit of phoning round and see if anyone has had sight of Mattapan III in the last twenty-four hours. How far do you reckon they could have got by now?’

  Several hours later they had come up with nothing. It seemed incredible that a boat of that size could disappear on the high seas in these days of heightened terrorism alerts. But none of the obvious port authorities had any record of Mattapan III putting in for the night or for fuelling. When Liz put her head round the door enquiringly in the middle of the afternoon she was greeted with shakes of the head.

  ‘It can’t have disappeared, unless it’s sunk,’ said Peggy gloomily. The lack of sleep was beginning to catch up with her. ‘Do you think we should ask the RAF to put up a Nimrod?’

  ‘No. We can’t do that,’ Liz responded. ‘Binding is still insisting we keep the enquiry low key and DG agrees with him. So in a way we’re working with one arm tied behind our backs. The fear is that if Dave’s disappearance leaks out or Piggott and Milraud detect us close behind them, they may just kill Dave.’

  ‘If they haven’t already,’ said Peggy, now close to tears.

  ‘Peggy, go home and go to bed,’ ordered Liz. ‘You can’t do any more here for the moment. Remember that O’Reilly told Dave that Piggott was into all sorts of drugs – and the vice trade. If he’s been using this cruiser in that business, he may have dodgy contacts in ports all over the place who are prepared to cover for the boat’s movements. And since Milraud is an arms dealer I bet he knows how to move stuff by sea without being detected. We’ll have to hope the police get something useful out of Danny Ryan or the French come up with some development on their side. They’ve got Milraud’s wife under close surveillance, so perhaps we’ll get a breakthrough from that.’

  46

  On the sixth day they cast anchor in mid-afternoon just off the coast near Marseilles. It had been a steady enough voyage, though they had lost half a day by putting in at a small harbour on the Portuguese coast to avoid a late winter storm that had moved in from the Azores. Mattapan III was well known there and Piggott had certain arrangements with the harbourmaster which ensured discreet service. Both Piggott and Milraud had contacts in a number of Mediterranean ports who regularly helped them hide their movements from the attention of the authorities. They did not grudge the expense; it was the only way to be successful in their business.

  A similar storm had delayed them briefly off Cadiz, where they had ridden it out at sea, fearful of straying close to shore and smashing up on the rocks. As they passed the Balearic Islands Milraud had decided to take a risk and ring his wife. The rule they had was no communication when he was away on business, unless he initiated it. He had not spoken to her since he left France. ‘C’est moi,’ he’d announced when Annette answered the phone. ‘Have you missed me, ma cherie?’

  Usually she replied in kind to his endearments, so he’d been surprised by the urgency in her voice. ‘Listen, Antoine. What’s been going on? There’s been a visitor here.’

  ‘Yes?’ He was impressed but not surprised that the British had moved so quickly. ‘Un anglais?’

  ‘Au contraire. A Frenchman. Someone you used to know very well in Paris. Your closest colleague—’

  ‘Enough!’ he said sharply, cutting her off. If the British had already roped in Seurat to help in the search, things were serious. Seurat was good and he was thorough. He would certainly have all angles covered and that meant that the phone line at the Bandol house was being intercepted. ‘Tell me later. Is all well otherwise?’

  ‘A bit lonely toute seule, and worried. Your colleague seems very determined.’

  I bet he is, thought Milraud.

  Two days after the call, as the sun began to go down, Milraud started up the engine of a small but powerful motor yacht moored in an unremarkable boatyard in the Marseilles docks. He steered the boat gently out to come alongside the larger and more splendid craft, lying at anchor off the harbour. On the offshore side, a swarthy man helped a pale-skinned, ill-looking figure to transfer from the larger to the smaller boat, which then in turn dropped an anchor. The large cruiser sailed slowly and carefully into the boatyard and slotted itself with some difficulty into the vacant mooring. Then two men in a dinghy sailed out to the smaller boat; the dinghy was hauled on board and in the gloom of the evening the smaller boat sailed on south-eastwards, hugging the shoreline until it passed Toulon.

  Twenty minutes later Milraud could make out the shape of the island, then the hazy glow of light from the houses in its one hamlet on the north side, facing the mainland. He sat in the pilot’s seat with Piggott next to him. As they moved sharply south to the side of the island furthest from the mainland, the lights receded into the night-time black. Here on the south side the island was uninhabited, its shoreline composed of rocky crags rising sheer from the sea and bare of vegetation apart from the odd Corsican pine, clinging on by roots that had miraculously found a hold. As they neared the south-eastern tip of the island, Milraud turned on the boat’s powerful spotlight and saw what he was looking for – a small cove, the only possible landing place, sheltered on each side by rocks. Oustau de Dieu the locals called it. He knew that near the shore a boom lay across the mouth of the cove – a wooden beam, the length of a telegraph pole, designed to keep craft from landing. But he knew the trick of moving it because this was not the first time he’d landed here.

  ‘Voila,’ said Milraud, pointing to the dark shadow of the small cove, and as he slowed the boat down to idling speed, Piggott clambered back to the stern where Gonzales was beginning to lower the inflatable dinghy.

  Two hours later Milraud sat on the rickety porch of an old farmhouse perched a hundred feet above the cove, on top of the rock that rose straight up from the sandy beach below. The house, the only one on this side of the island, was reached from the cove by a twisting path through the trees. It had taken Piggott and Gonzales twenty minutes to climb, half-carrying their barely conscious prisoner, while Milraud took his motor cruiser round to the other side of the island and moored it in the small marina where it was well known enough not to attract particular attention. He then walked back across the island, along familiar paths, guided by a torch.

  The house had woods on either side, but on its inland-facing north end a small meadow fronted onto a now-wild vineyard that had been untended since the death of its owner. That was Annette’s father, who had also owned the house and woods; before him the property had belonged to his family for almost two hundred years. Yet, despite the long family ownership of the place, Annette claimed never to have liked it. She had spent all her holidays there as a child and Milraud suspected that it was only after her years in Paris that this rustic hideaway had lost its charm. After her father’s death, when she had inherited, Milraud had persuaded her to hang on to it and though Annette herself never visited nowadays, the property had served a useful purpose. He had probably spent less than ten hours in the house during the last five years, allowing it to fall even further into disrepair, but its outbuildings, which included a stout brick shed hidden in the woods, had proved an excellent site for storing items that would never be displayed in his antique shops. His boat, kept normally in the Marseilles boatyard, though modest in appearance, was
deceptively fast and roomy. It could comfortably hold a dozen crates of assorted weapons, and sat so lightly in the water that it could come in close enough to shore for his North African employees to load and unload his cargoes, wading waist deep, carrying crates on their heads.

  Milraud was gently swirling the contents of a small balloon glass. It was cold out here, but it was even colder in the house and the Calvados was pleasantly warming. There was a wood-burning stove in the sitting room, but he’d insisted it should not be used – smoke from the chimney might be visible on the other side of the island. He took another sip as he considered his next moves. The MI5 man was safely confined to the cellar; no chance of his breaking out of there. Above him, in a small, draughty bedroom, Gonzales sat playing patience in his shirtsleeves, with a holstered 9 mm pistol under one arm. Piggott was in the sitting room, with his laptop open, doing God knows what.

  So Milraud had come out here on the southern side of the house, overlooking the cove, where they had tied the dinghy up under some bushes at the edge of the small beach. Peering out over the top of the rock cliff, he could just make out the black well of the Mediterranean, which stretched directly south all the way to the North African shoreline of Algeria. As he finished his drink he pondered the situation. Ever since Gonzales had pulled a gun on Willis in the Belfast shop, he had been managing a fast unravelling crisis, acting by instinct. Now that they had arrived at the house, for the first time he had a chance to look calmly at what had happened and think what to do next.

  Maybe if Willis had admitted straight away to being an MI5 officer the situation could have been saved. Milraud could have apologised for Gonzales’ behaviour, put it down to a mistake, claimed perhaps that they’d thought he was a crook trying to get his hands on illegal weapons and let him go. But Willis had denied it, putting on a professional, almost convincing performance. Milraud had been in the same profession once and he recognised the drill. Willis had done well in an impossible situation.

  Piggott had wanted to kill Willis without more ado and Gonzales was just waiting to pull the trigger. But Milraud knew that if they had killed him there and then, the sky would have fallen in on all of them. And if Piggott had allowed Gonzales to kill Willis, why wouldn’t they have killed him too? He didn’t think for a moment that his long working relationship with Piggott would have saved him if he’d been in the way. Milraud had needed to get control of a situation that was rapidly running away from him and the only way that he could think of at the time was to do what he’d done: persuade Piggott that a better plan to damage British intelligence and to save themselves at the same time was to transfer Willis to another group as a hostage. The publicity that would then result, he had persuaded Piggott, would ruin the reputation of MI5 for good.

  Piggott had bought the plan and agreed to come here to the island house which Milraud had described as a safe base where they could hide out while he arranged the onward transfer of Willis. And that’s what Piggott was expecting him to do now. He felt fairly sure he could do it too. He had mentally drawn up a list: the FARC – the Colombian rebels with their longstanding links to the IRA; the Basque separatist movement ETA, weakened now but not to be underestimated and in need of a coup; an Al Qaeda cell who would be natural customers though he had little faith in their internal security; the emissary from Hezbollah he had done business with once before.

  But this would take time to arrange and even from his short conversation with Annette it was quite clear that there was little time left. The British, helped by his former colleagues, were on their tail. There was no time for the complexities of a hostage transfer, though he had no intention of telling Piggott that. Particularly because he was convinced now that Piggott was unhinged. He had started ranting in an excited fashion that was untypical of the steely character Milraud had known for years. ‘We’ve struck a blow against the Brits they won’t forget,’ he’d crowed as he stood at the helm of Mattapan III, and in his exuberance he’d revved the throttle up so high it crossed the red danger line on the cockpit dial. ‘The prime minister himself will know what we’ve done.’ And now, having just arrived, he was already talking about leaving the island, blithely mentioning a possible run to North Africa to buy drugs, before returning with the shipment to Northern Ireland – where he seemed to forget that the province’s entire security forces were looking for him.

  No. Milraud made up his mind. There was only one way out for him and that meant acting fast. He’d need Annette’s help. For all her Paris-acquired chic, she was still a girl with a steely rustic core – she’d always helped him, pulled him clear when doubt threatened to paralyse him, always kept his eyes firmly fixed on what to do next. Probably she was already under surveillance, but the encrypted email he’d send her in the morning would warn her of this, and tell her that they needed to meet, but only if she could be confident she wasn’t being followed. There were ferries from the mainland to this island all day long, but it wasn’t worth the risk unless she knew she was alone. She should make a trial run, he’d told her, just as far as Toulon to flush them out, see if they were onto her already, and more important, see if she could shake them off. Well, at least they could communicate now, to make a plan, even if they couldn’t meet. It would take Seurat and the Brits some time to get into his email.

  47

  Martin Seurat put down the phone. The poor girl. She sounds distressed, he thought, looking out of the window of his office at the thin sprinkling of late snow that lay like powdered sugar on the old parade ground. Not surprising. She seems to have a mass murderer loose in Belfast, bodies buried in the countryside and her colleague still missing. Unfortunately he had nothing new to tell her. There had still been no sign of Mattapan III in French waters and Isabelle had so far turned up nothing useful from the checks in Bandol and Toulon. Milraud and Piggott, if they were together, seemed to have disappeared, along with Liz Carlyle’s colleague. He couldn’t understand what had got into Milraud.

  Liz Carlyle had wanted to know if Milraud had a boat. There was nothing on his files about a boat, though given where Milraud lived and the business he was in, he must have one.

  Seurat was just about to pick up the phone to the DCRI to pass on the enquiry to Isabelle when his phone rang again.

  It was Isabelle. ‘I have some news for your Liz Carlyle. Milraud has been in touch with his wife. The conversation was most uninformative and it’s clear they know we are listening. The call came from Majorca, so yesterday he was in the Mediterranean region. You can tell her we’re happy to share the information with the Spanish if she wants to involve them.’

  ‘Many thanks, Isabelle. I’ll pass that on. Just before you phoned, she rang to ask whether Milraud owned a boat. I have no record here of such a thing. But could Milraud have been at sea when he made that call?’

  ‘Possibly. But I have something else for your Liz. Tell me, how well do you know the wines of Provence?’

  ‘What?’ he said, puzzled. ‘What’s that to do with Liz?’

  ‘Seriously, Martin, have you ever come across a wine called Chateau Fermette?’

  A small farmhouse chateau – the name a joke, he supposed. He sighed. ‘No, Isabelle, I haven’t. Are you doing a crossword puzzle?’

  ‘Martin, you sound cross. Don’t be. The wine I’m referring to was made on the Ile de Porquerolles. It lies just off the coast in the south. The nearest town of any size is Toulon. The vintner was named Jacques Massignac.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He had a daughter, something of a beauty according to people who knew her years ago. She inherited the vineyard but she moved to Paris, and had no interest in making wine. Chateau Fermette is no more.’

  ‘I’m beginning to get your drift. You are talking about Annette Milraud, aren’t you? She told me she had southern roots.’

  ‘I am. Monsieur Massignac’s daughter is Annette. When he died she was his heir and as well as the vineyard she inherited the ‘fermette’ for which its wine was named. It seems she was going to
sell it after her father’s death, but according to the tax people she didn’t – just last month they had a cheque for this year’s taxes.’

  Now they were getting somewhere. ‘Isabelle, tell me everything you know about the Ile de Porquerolles and this fermette.’ After listening to what Isabelle had to say, Martin Seurat felt confident that he had something useful to tell Liz Carlyle.

  Lightning, ear-shattering thunder, cascading rain – no film version of a storm could have been more dramatic. The clouds that had been hanging over the hills for hours had finally come east, and stayed put. Having watched half an hour of these pyrotechnics through her office window, Liz was wondering if the storm would ever pass.

  The phone rang and she reached for it mechanically, her eyes still on the display outside. ‘Liz Carlyle.’

  ‘Liz, it’s Martin Seurat again. I think I may have some news for you.’

  Liz listened raptly as Seurat recounted Isabelle’s discovery that a farmhouse and vineyard on the Ile de Porquerolles belonged to Annette Milraud, a legacy from her late father.

  ‘Where is this exactly?’

  ‘Just off the south coast, and only a few kilometres by sea from the harbour in Toulon.’

  ‘An island you say?’

  ‘It’s one of a small group. Not very large – it’s about seven kilometres wide, perhaps three across. Said to be very pretty, and quite unspoiled. It’s mainly a holiday resort in summer. Most of the island now belongs to the state, I believe. There is an old fort there; it’s now a museum.’

  ‘Does anyone live there?’

  ‘Very few people live there all the year round. There is one village, also called Porquerolles, on the north side of the island, near the fort, with a small harbour. Other than that there are a few hotels and restaurants open in the summer. There’s a passenger ferry to it from a tiny place called Gien. Outside the village there are virtually no houses.’