Three Great Novels

by Henry Porter

  ‘Albania,’ said the man who was evidently their leader. ‘This Albania. Albania is shit. And you? Who you are?’

  ‘Mujahadin,’ replied Khan, thinking that this was his only recognisable credential, but at the same time regretting that he had resorted to his past. His name was Karim Khan now.

  ‘Mujahadin is shit also,’ said the man.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It seemed to Herrick that life continued with bright, feverish simplicity. The Saturday papers learned that Norquist had been travelling in the Prime Minister’s car and concluded that the events of May 14 could only be read as an attempt on the Prime Minister’s life. No one seemed to take any notice of the reports in the International Herald Tribune that asked how the terrorists knew Norquist’s travel plans when his own secretary hadn’t been told. It also questioned the nature of the information that the British had been acting on. Was it a tip-off or the result of secret surveillance? The most important issue, said a columnist from the Herald Tribune, was how the Pakistani assassins mistook the President’s old ally for the British Prime Minister. The two men could not be more dissimilar, even in the reportedly wild conditions on the M4 that day.

  After finishing the papers, Herrick did a couple of hours impatient shopping, which produced two new suits, a pair of blue jeans and a white shirt. She dumped the clothes without looking at them again at her house in West Kensington and returned to Heathrow, this time on an entirely unofficial basis. What had hardened in her mind was the absolute need to link the identity switch with the operation against Norquist. But the contrast between the care and timing of the switch and the haphazard nature of the hit, which had apparently only succeeded because of a stray police bullet, suggested that different minds were behind them - unless the disparity had been planned.

  At Heathrow, she went to the viewing terrace and began asking the plane spotters tucked away in a shelter whether they had seen anyone acting unusually in the last week or so. They were unsurprised by the question because the police, for which she read Special Branch, had already been to talk to them and they had provided a description of a man in his late thirties. He had Mediterranean looks, was overweight by twenty or so pounds and spoke fluent English with an Arab accent. His knowledge of aircraft was good but he seemed a lot more interested in the carriers than their planes. Referring to their notes from May 14, one or two were able to place him in the context of planes arriving and leaving and claimed to remember him making a remark about two Russian planes. No one could remember seeing him after that day.

  She took the description to the incident room at Hounslow police station, where she had arranged to meet a Chief Superintendent Lovett who was leading the investigation into the fire at the home of the washroom attendant. The policeman was cagey but eventually agreed that the washroom attendant Ahmad Ahktar had associated with a man who more or less fitted this description. He had made contact at the mosque in central London which Ahmad had attended when his work allowed him. They were treating the case as multiple murder because the injuries on Ahmad’s head and back could not have been sustained by the roof collapsing. There was another, more telling clue: the youngest child was found to have high levels of Tamazepam in her body. The remains of the other members of the family were being tested and there was some hope of retrieving enough tissue for analysis.

  Herrick had all she needed. The Ahktar family had been murdered to stop Ahmad talking about the identity switch and it was possible that the man who had watched the planes come in was responsible for this. But the important fact was that her line of inquiry had already been followed by Special Branch. They had made the connection between the man on the viewing terrace and the fire in Heston. In other words, someone was acting on the memo and the medley of CCTV clips she had sent.

  Late that afternoon, she called Dolph and arranged dinner in a room above a pub in Notting Hill. Dolph arrived late and for a time they talked about ‘the office’ in neutral terms and drank some cocktails of Dolph’s invention.

  ‘They’re holding their breath, Isis,’ he said, ‘waiting for something to happen - or not to happen. The whole bloody place’s on edge. You can feel it.’

  Herrick murmured that she thought something was already happening, but that they were being kept out of it. Dolph didn’t pick up on this.

  ‘They’re constipated,’ he said, ‘bent double with it. They need a fucking good dump.’

  Herrick grimaced. ‘You’re a barbarian.’

  ‘You can’t deny there’s something weird about it.’ He paused and looked across the room of mostly young diners. ‘Look at this lot,’ he said. ‘There’s not a person in this room who earns less than we do - and that’s including the waiters. What do we do it for?’

  ‘Vanity?’ she offered.

  Dolph turned back. ‘That’s why I like you, Isis. You get it all. Do you think this weird mood in the office has anything to do with the Chief going?’

  ‘Might have.’

  ‘Oh come off it. Talk, for Christ’s sake. I want to know what you think.’

  She smiled. ‘I am talking, but this isn’t the best place for it.’

  Dolph eyed the waitress and then let his gaze fall on Herrick. ‘Okay, tell me about you. What happened to the man in your life - the academic?’

  She shrugged. Daniel Brewer, outwardly a soft-hearted academic, had turned out to be an incipient drunk, a clever Cornish working-class boy prone to bouts of despair and unreason. ‘He found someone who listened better than I did. And he didn’t like our business - the vanishing act, the secrecy. He felt excluded.’

  ‘You told him what you did?’

  ‘No, but he guessed. That was part of the original attraction, I think.’

  ‘What about your father? Did he like him?’

  ‘Didn’t say.’

  Dolph ordered some wine. ‘Did you know I went to your father’s lectures? My intake was the last to get the Munroe Herrick treatment. He was very impressive. Believe me, I’d never have survived all that crap in the Balkans if it hadn’t been for him.’

  ‘Yes - he had stopped by the time I was taken on.’

  Dolph regarded her sympathetically with his handsome, dissolute face. As he was choosing the wine she had noticed his expression suddenly betray the very sharp intelligence which lay behind the façade of effortlessness. ‘I often think about you,’ he said. ‘I wonder what’s going on with you.’

  She shrugged. ‘Nothing Dolph, just bloody work. I’m considering taking the Cairo job.’

  ‘You should have some fun.’

  She revolved her eyes in an arc, knowing what was coming next. ‘Yes, I should,’ she said. ‘Which is why I’m going to take Cairo.’ She smiled a full stop.

  He laid his hand on hers. ‘Look, this is embarrassing. But I’m really fond of you, Isis. Really, I mean, I think you’re the one.’

  ‘And I’m fond of you too. But I am not going to sleep with you.’ She let his hand remain for a while then gently removed it.

  ‘Pity,’ he said morosely. ‘Are you sure?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You’ll miss the pillow talk that keeps the girls coming back.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s hardly an inviting prospect, Dolph - the idea that I would be one in a bus queue of women listening to your ravings.’

  ‘God, you’re so fucking prim. Perhaps we should do it now - I mean the pillow talk.’

  ‘If you can do it discreetly.’

  ‘Loosen up, Isis. That’s the point of pillow talk.’ He drank a glass of wine and smiled at the restaurant. ‘Your friend, the man in the bookshop, was doing interesting things with his PC.’

  Herrick set down her glass and looked at Dolph’s black eyes dancing. ‘Can you talk about this now ?’

  ‘Of course. He has a novel line in screensavers. Actually it’s one screensaver - an aquarium with fish swimming across it. You know the kind of thing.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Only, his aquarium is different, you see. I
t’s got a little timer in it that ticks away and then releases information.’

  ‘There was a message hidden in the image?’

  ‘Not quite. What happens is this. He logs on in the morning and automatically downloads the same screensaver - same bloody guppies, same bloody eels, same bloody octopus with the smiley face. Then half an hour later, maybe an hour, maybe two hours later - the interval changes according to the day of the week - he clicks on one of the guppies and a message is sent from the screensaver to a pre-prepared file on his hard drive. You only have a few minutes to read it before it disintegrates.’

  ‘Where’d you get this?’

  ‘Friend of mine - a bloke I play poker with in the office. Good guy. Crap at cards though.’

  ‘Why’d he give it to you?’ She lowered her voice. ‘This is sensitive stuff.’

  ‘He owed me a couple of bob from a game. I told him he had to tell me something interesting to stop me breaking his legs.’ He saw Herrick’s brow furrow. ‘Look, I’m joking. Don’t be so fucking serious.’

  ‘What else did you find out?’

  ‘This and that.’

  She gave him a look of exasperation.

  ‘Try me,’ he said.

  ‘Okay, so why was Norquist here?’

  ‘Cabling - they’re going to lay high capacity cables under the Atlantic so the Americans can get more of the stuff they already don’t have time to read. It’s as simple as that. ’

  ‘But why was the Prime Minister involved? That’s all a bit nuts and bolts for him, isn’t it?’

  ‘Strategic matters also, I hear. That is to say, what are we going to do about the Europeans?’ Dolph lit a cigarette and offered her a drag which she declined. ‘We’d be good together, Isis. Really, we’d be fucking wonderful because we get each other.’

  She shook her head. ‘So this screensaver works like a virus?’

  ‘Not quite. It’s more targeted than a virus. For one thing it doesn’t reproduce itself, and for another it’s got a very short life span. If the correct procedure isn’t followed at the right moment the message disappears. And here’s the beauty of it. If the screensaver is intercepted, all you get is fish. Nothing else. It doesn’t work unless you’ve got the software that goes with it - the male plug and the female socket, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good pillow talk, no?’

  She nodded. ‘What do you think it means?’

  ‘That Rahe was a shit-load more important than we thought he was.’ Dolph looked out on the muddy evening sky. ‘The men at the airport, why do you think they were all dressed like Senegalese lottery winners? What was that about?’

  ‘Reverse camouflage,’ said Herrick quietly. ‘The more noticeable your clothes, the less people look at your face. It’s the opposite effect to the one you achieve, Dolph.’

  He ignored the remark. ‘Like having a parrot on your shoulder?’

  ‘Yes. Can I ask something else?’

  ‘You have my full attention.’ He began to fold his napkin.

  ‘Do you think the two things were connected at Heathrow?’

  ‘Of course they were. I quote you the product law of probabilities. “When two independent events occur simultaneously their combined probability is equal to the product of their individual probabilities of occurrence.” That means it was bloody unlikely that the two events were unconnected. They were syzygial - yoked, paired, conjoined, coupled - like we should be.’

  He finished the origami with the napkin and balanced it on his shoulder.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘A parrot - so you won’t notice what I look like.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  The silence ended with a single dramatic sentence. ‘Youssef Rahe was ours.’ Richard Spelling said it with studied understatement. ‘He was our man.’ He folded his arms and looked at her over a pair of slender reading glasses.

  Herrick was not totally surprised. She had been at the point of articulating Rahe’s double role for herself, but hadn’t gone the whole way because of the surveillance operation. Why had they put all that effort into watching a man who was already working for them?

  ‘Was?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. His body was found in the boot of a car near the Lebanese border with Syria. He had been very badly treated and finished off with a shot to the head which, without going into detail, made him practically unrecognisable. As well as this, the car had been set alight. However, we are absolutely certain it is Rahe.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Was he killed by the second man on the Beirut flight?’

  ‘We’re not sure. We suspect he had something to do with it but there were others involved.’

  She asked herself why they were telling her this. Not out of any sense of obligation, that was for sure. She had been summoned to the high table and was being told an intimate secret for a reason. She looked around the room and wondered what they wanted from her, apart from silence. The constituent parts of this late night gathering were altogether odd. Colin Guthrie, head of the joint MI5-MI6 Anti-Terrorism controllerate, well, you would expect him to be there, but not Skeoch Cummings and Keith Manners from the Joint Intelligence Committee. The JIC provided intelligence assessments for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet and wasn’t responsible for making or implementing policy, yet here they were, comfortably ensconced in the inner sanctum of the intelligence executive. And why Christine Selvey, the deputy director of Security and Public Affairs? What the fuck was she doing there, with her powdery skin and brittle, bouffant hair which Dolph had described as ‘South coast landlady with a passion for china dogs and young actresses’?

  There was one other man there and his presence baffled her most. As she entered he had risen, turned and offered her a soft, cool hand and asked after her father, a pleasantry which seemed out of place and was calculated, she thought, to wrong-foot her in some way. Walter Vigo, the former Head of Security and Public Affairs. Isis knew perfectly well that her father would have nothing to do with him. Why was Vigo there and not the Chief? What did Vigo’s presence mean six weeks before the handover from Sir Robin Teckman to Spelling? Vigo was the outcast, the defrocked prelate who’d been exposed by a former SIS man, Robert Harland, for his connections with a gun runner and war criminal named Lipnik. She’d got some of the story from her father, who had trained both Vigo and Harland at different times during the Intelligence Officers’ New Entry Course. Vigo had escaped prosecution because he was in a position to make life seriously unpleasant for the entire Service. Instead he had been declared a pariah, with Teckman forbidding all contact with him and the members of Mercator, the security consultancy he ran in tandem with an antique book dealing business called Incunabula Inc.

  There was silence. She was expected to ask a question. ‘If he was ours, why was he under surveillance?’

  ‘Our relationship was a very, very secret matter,’ Spelling replied. ‘We shared his product, but not his identity with anyone. Only four people knew that he worked for us. Those were his conditions when Walter Vigo came across him two years ago and we abided by them.’

  Vigo stirred to give Spelling a nod of gratitude.

  ‘The surveillance was to give him credibility?’ persisted Herrick. ‘Was that why we laid it in on with a trowel?’

  Spelling whipped off his glasses and folded them in his left hand. There was something unpractised and self-conscious in the gesture. ‘Yes, he was worried he’d been tumbled.’

  ‘Can I ask whether you knew about the operation at Terminal Three in advance?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. No, we don’t think even he knew what was happening, though he had told us in the morning that he was going to a meeting with some important people. We were hoping for big game. But we had no notion of the switch you spotted and that means he didn’t have any idea what was to happen at Terminal Three. We now think he believed he was being observed by them at Heathrow and was worried about making a call to us. No doubt he hoped we wer
e there watching him too and we were, which is how you noticed what had happened. We realised he was in trouble when you called in, but by this time things were unravelling, and it’s fair to say we lost sight of what was important. A few hours later he contacted us from a room in the Playlands Hotel in Beirut. They said the meeting would take place in the next few days and that he should stay put until they got in touch with him. Very shortly after making that call he vanished. We didn’t have time to get anyone over to the hotel.’