The Saxon Network

by Norman Hartley

  I was still pondering the problem when I got a text from Kate. It read simply ‘Come see!’

  I was expecting to be surprised but when I knocked on the bedroom door, I was completely taken aback by the sight of the woman who opened it for me.

  ‘I’ll have to finally chuck out the ‘natural blonde T-shirt!’ Kate said, ‘what do you think of this!’

  The transformation was truly stunning. There was no trace of the temporary dye I had helped her with. Her hair was now a dark raven shade, cut close but with real style. Her sun tan had also undergone a subtle change. It had been covered by a deeper shade which looked as though it had been cultivated for fashion rather than exposure to sea winds. She was still wearing jeans but now they were a grey-blue lightweight designer model topped by a dark red shirt which subtly emphasised her figure.

  Sally was obviously pleased with her handiwork and stood back to let me admire the result.

  ‘I’m genuinely amazed,’ I said, ‘it’s really spectacular.’

  ‘It feels really odd to look smart,’ Kate said, ‘I told you I’ve never done smart, never ever.’ She laughed. ‘If I’d ever had money to buy jeans like these, I’d have bought a new sail.’

  Oxburgh closed her bag and held out her hand.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll have any trouble now,’ she said, ‘but I’d stay away from boats for a bit. On shore, Kate won’t have too much trouble keeping up the look. In a boat, she’ll revert and…

  ‘And start being an honorary man,’ Kate interrupted with a grin.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Pity,’ Kate said, ‘I was going to take John sailing.’

  ‘Better to practice being a fashionable young woman for now.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Kate admitted reluctantly, ‘but at least John can take me out to dinner. He still owes me a first date.’

  Cronin made a booking for us at a waterside pub, with a terrace overlooking Felton Broad. On the walk along the towpath, Kate received several admiring glances, but none of recognition. The pub was busy and the Australian waiter warned us in a friendly way that the food service would take some time. Our table was out of earshot of other diners and Kate was pleased that we were close to the water.

  ‘Bob came to see me while I was having my makeover,’ she said.

  ‘To do a bit more work on you, to convince you that he really isn’t a corrupt traitor?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I like him, but I’m reserving my judgement. We’ll know soon enough whether there is anything in all of this.’

  ‘What else did he have to say?’

  ‘He talked a lot about you. He gave you quite a write-up.’

  ‘Oh God. What else did he say?’

  ‘He said you were the best field intelligence officer of any country that he’d come across in twenty years in the CIA.’

  She smiled. ‘He said the only reason you hadn’t soared to the top of MI6 was that you were too honest. Mr Straight Arrow, he called you, but he wasn’t being snide. It was a compliment. He said you don’t play anyone’s games and always called it straight. He said that’s truly scary to someone like Ray Vossler who believes everyone can be manipulated.’

  ‘Vossler won last time.’

  ‘So we’ll have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’

  The waiter interrupted by bringing a bottle of Chilean Sauvignon. He started to pour without bothering with any tasting ritual then took our orders for food, cheerfully promising to try to bring something before we collapsed from hunger. I ordered some mineral water and explained that I never drank before flying.

  ‘Cronin told me about Maywood Manor,’ Kate said, ‘I assume that’s where we’re going?’

  ‘Yes, but there’s one thing you have to understand.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Bob believes I can conjure up some kind of private army, but I can’t ruin the careers of men I admire and respect just to solve my own problems.’

  Kate nodded. ‘Bob knows that but he reckons you’re due a bit of help. Anyway, you have to do something. He’s absolutely right. If you don’t, you’re fucked. He knows you’re bright enough to see that.’

  She broke off. ‘Let’s just leave it at that and pick it up in the morning. Isn’t this supposed to be our date?’

  As the waiter brought our crab starters, we watched two young children manoeuvring dinghies with a single oar as they collected in the marker buoys from the afternoon regatta.

  ‘This feels really weird,’ Kate said, ‘I was brought up in a world like this. I was marking regatta courses when I was six. The tourists on the shore were part of my scenery, as I was part of theirs. It’s really odd to be on different sides for a change.’

  ‘When did you make the shift to the open sea?’ I asked.

  ‘Quite early on. My brothers took me first. Then I suddenly realised I was better than they were. I could read the water better. I had better judgement about when to take risks and when not to. My navigation was more instinctive.’

  ‘Did they mind?’

  ‘Of course they did. But they got used to it.’

  ‘Where are your brothers now?’

  ‘One’s in the Navy. The other two are still in Gloucester. They run a sail-making company.’

  ‘I presume that your father is more than just comfortably off, if all of you hang out with people who fly their own Gulfstreams.’

  Sure,’ she laughed, ‘Dad’s what you’d call a typical American millionaire.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’m serious,’ she said, ‘when the media compiles rich lists they always focus on the glamorous high-tech tycoons, but ninety-five percent of all the millionaires in the States made their money in a really humdrum way. Jake bought his Gulfstream on the back of a hotel coat hanger concession. My father invented a frozen fish packaging system.’

  She smiled. ‘And by the way, I’ve never taken a cent in sponsorship money from my father.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s not fair to the rest of the family. You know what they say about ocean racing: if you want to know what it’s like, stand under a cold shower tearing up hundred dollar bills. Anyway, I had to prove I could get sponsorship without him.’

  The main courses came and as we ate slowly, we chatted about the scene around us and the pleasures of growing up in Gloucester, Massachusetts. I asked Kate about boyfriends but it was clear from her answers that her teenage years had been focused on boats not boys. When we started talking about me and I listened to her questions, I knew that an important change was taking place.

  Of all the skills that had served me well in my years in intelligence, listening was the most important. I’d been in plenty of tight corners when combat skills had mattered, but they had been outnumbered many times over by the occasions when an ability to listen, not just to words, but to nuances and inflexions, had counted for more. I could sense lies, exaggerations, half truths and very definitely – as in this case – shifts in mood. What had changed was the way she was questioning me about my past. On board Ocean Dream, she had been collecting information, anxious to discover what she was getting into. Now, the personal questions were much more the usual pre-sexual skirmishing of a first date. Kate was starting to flirt.

  Eventually, she approached the area I knew she wanted to know about most.

  ‘Tell me some more about your wife,’ she said.

  The undertone of sexual curiosity couldn’t be missed and I knew I had to answer carefully.

  ‘I told you we met while I was at Sandhurst,’ I said, ‘we were very much in love. It was a great marriage to start with.’

  ‘What happened to change it?’

  ‘I told you, Sarah hated Intelligence. She especially hated the life we were forced to lead as a cover. There’s a kind of grey world on the fringes of the military. Ex-officers who work for arms companies, mercenaries who do odd jobs which their gov
ernment wants done but doesn’t want to admit to. I became part of all that.’

  ‘She’d have preferred regular army life?’

  ‘By a very long mile. She liked the army. She was used to it. I told you, her father was a general. She was an ideal officer’s wife. The life we had to lead had no class at all. Living among pigs, she called it on her bad days.’

  I was becoming wary now. I thought the next question was going to be how I felt about Sarah’s death but Kate didn’t ask it, probably, I decided, because she didn’t want the conversation to turn solemn. Instead she said, ‘and what about Marie-Helene and all the others Moira keeps hinting about?’

  She was openly flirting now and I knew she wasn’t really expecting a detailed answer.

  ‘I don’t do kiss and tell,’ I said, equally lightly, ‘let’s just say that Marie-Helene is a woman who doesn’t want deep attachments. That suited both of us. She isn’t particularly upset that it’s over. Moira exaggerates about the others. I’ve had other girlfriends here and there, but nothing remotely serious. You can’t have real intimacy when you can’t tell someone who you really are.’

  I had given her a lead in, a cue to suggest she wanted something different, but she didn’t take it.

  ‘Yeah, I can see that,’ was all she said.

  We finished the meal, but lingered over drinks and eventually, we strolled back to the hotel taking a path up the hillside, away from the Broad.

  ‘That was a first for me,’ Kate said as we walked.

  ‘First how?’

  ‘First time ever being near water without going on it.’

  ‘Will you need therapy?’

  ‘Probably. But I’ll try to manage.’

  When we got to the bedroom, I was reasonably sure that my honorary woman status wasn’t going to last through the night – but I hadn’t reckoned with UpstairsBackstairs. Before getting undressed, Kate fired up the Powerbook for a final check on the websites.

  The first image that came onto the screen hit me like a bucket of cold water in the face. It showed an officer in desert combat fatigues riding on top of an armoured personnel carrier, directing machine-gun fire at a cluster of village huts. A figure in white Arab robes, unmistakably me, was pulling him backwards off the top of the vehicle. We both ended in a heap in the sand and we were pulled apart by some soldiers clustered around the vehicle. I had to wait only seconds for the punch-line I knew was coming. The images from Iraq were followed by an interview in a leafy courtyard of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Facing the camera was the officer with a machine gun, formerly second lieutenant James Wilby of the Rifles, now barrister James Wilby, a junior in a fashionable London chambers. Predictably he told his story fluently and convincingly. He had been engaging the enemy in a fire fight outside Basra until he had been attacked by what he described as a ‘spook with seriously divided loyalties’. He went on to name me and described my Arab upbringing. Then came the word I had been waiting for: in answer to a question, he described me as a traitor who should never have been trusted to gather intelligence on behalf of Britain, a country I hardly knew.

  Virginia Walsh’s hand was all over it but to the ordinary viewer, my apparent treachery and disloyalty to my country were flashed up in plain and spectacular sight.

  Kate was beside me, watching intently and I felt her move slightly away from me.

  ‘He was firing at people who weren’t the enemy,’ I said. ‘The men in that compound had provided us with valuable intelligence. Wilby just got it plain wrong.’

  ‘It’s not going to help,’ she said noncommittally, ‘especially if your friend Cronin turns out to be dodgy.’

  She almost said ‘dodgy too’ but it wouldn’t quite come out.

  ‘To understand the circumstances, you have to have been there. You’ve trusted me this far,’ I said, ‘you’re just going to have to trust me on this also.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ Kate said. ‘I want to trust you, but let’s leave it at that for now.’

  We undressed without talking and lay down side by side. For the last half hour, I had been planning a move to end my Honorary Woman status. Instead I went to sleep without even letting our bodies touch, knowing that at least part of her believed I was a traitor.

  Chapter 13

  On the early morning flight back from Norfolk, we both felt a growing sense of anticipation. Kate clearly still had reservations about the whole venture, but she seemed glad we were on the move. We arrived in Kent in a fairly positive mood, and with Clive’s help, we had returned the Tiger and retrieved his son’s car without any problems.

  But Maywood Manor, the house that Cronin had identified as Vossler’s headquarters, turned out to be the wrong one. We found it easily but ten minutes of observation ruled it out completely. The house stood on a small escarpment on the edge of Sellhurst village. It was an elegant 16th century estate in the Kentish style, developed over the years to include triple oast houses, paddocks, assorted outbuildings and substantial well-kept gardens.

  At first sight, it looked like just the kind of base Vossler would choose, but it didn’t take long to see that something was wrong. The most obvious problem was that there were no serious security measures.

  The impressive iron gate at the end of the main driveway had only rudimentary locks and there was no sign of any surveillance system at the boundary fence. There were also some children riding ponies in one of the paddocks. Vossler was no family man and it was unlikely he would use a family as cover. The clincher came when two trade vans entered through the main gate without any checks and the side door was answered by a young woman dressed in riding clothes who was probably the mother of the girls in the paddock.

  So we were faced with a complete letdown. Was Cronin’s information entirely wrong, or just out of date, and if so, by how long? This house was clearly not the centre of any political or subversive activity now but had it ever been? I pondered these questions as I unpacked a powerful surveillance lens and began a closer examination of the estate.

  This turned out to be more encouraging. At the side of the house was what looked like a builder’s caravan, with a power saw set up alongside it, suggesting that extensive rebuilding work was in progress, probably for a new owner. A closer scan determined that some kind of device had recently been removed from the main entrance, probably a security system. There were also marks on the facade of the house in positions which would have been right for CCTV cameras. The optimistic view was that Cronin had been right but that Vossler had moved out relatively recently. In her usual kick and rush style, Kate was all in favour of going up to the house and asking outright where the previous occupants had moved to. I vetoed that immediately. For one thing, it was unlikely Vossler would leave any forwarding information and anyway, if he had, he would have left with it instructions to be advised if anyone tried to contact him there. I also ruled out asking a postman who was circulating in the area. In country areas postmen gossiped and we could be remembered if not actually recognised.

  ‘Let’s take a look at the village,’ I said, ‘we may just find a clue.’

  Sellhurst village consisted of a post office, a pub and half a dozen terraced cottages, all in a lane leading to a church. I Googled it on my iPhone and discovered it was wholly owned by the National Trust which regularly rented it out as a 16th century film set. The residents had to agree to certain restrictions which made it easy for the film companies to go back in time. Television aerials and satellite dishes had to be positioned so as to be invisible from the lane and the telephone box was tucked discreetly into a recess in the church wall. All a film company’s location crew needed to do was scatter dirt over the tarmac, ban motor vehicles and remove modern products from the post office window and the centuries could be rolled back in a morning, ready for the cameras.

  ‘Interesting but not especially useful,’ Kate said when I passed the information on, ‘do we dare ask questions in the pub?’

  We watched for a while but apart from a few walkers
who had obviously timed their ramble over Sellhurst ridge to allow for a pint and a pub lunch, there were only a handful of locals. These were divided into local locals and what appeared to be wives and families left behind while husbands went up to the city for the day. The vehicles in the pub car park showed the division neatly. There was one tractor, one local delivery van and one dented Ford, side by side with a Jaguar and three shiny off-road vehicles that looked as though their wheels had never left a smooth tarmac surface.

  The pub obviously catered for the two different clienteles. The saloon bar and the lounge had separate entrances. Through the windows we could see the saloon had little furniture, no carpet and a huge doormat and boot-scraper at the entrance to deal with muddy boots in wetter times. The lounge was prettily ancient, with exposed beams and dried flowers in the ingle-nook.

  ‘Too risky,’ I said, ‘I think it’s time to go the techno route.’

  I Googled the pub and its website promised free Wifi. I asked Kate to park nearby but not in the car park and discovered there was a strong Wifi signal with no access password.

  ‘Good,’ I said, ‘I need to use my laptop. The iPhone can’t do what I have in mind.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘When Vossler and the gang visited the BBC newsroom, they may have had to provide some kind of contact address. We need to look on the BBC network.’

  Kate looked doubtful. ‘They could have,’ she said, ‘but you can’t access the kind of network areas you need without a BBC laptop and that isn’t one.’

  I grinned. ‘It will be in a minute, when I’ve partitioned the hard drive and loaded the BBC corporate desktop software onto it.’

  ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve nicked the software the IT guys use to prepare brand new machines for use on the corporation’s network.’

  ‘But you daren’t log in as yourself.’

  ‘No. I’ll use Aaron Zakowski’s account.’

  ‘Who he?’

  ‘A senior network supervisor in the IT division.’