At Park Royal, he got off again, but this time he left the station. He took the pedestrian subway to the south side of the roundabout for the North Circular, and walked along Hangar Lane until he suddenly turned around and reversed his steps, stopping just short of the subway and going down a dingy side street of small shops.
Near the end of the line of shops was a small premises, with a hanging sign outside reading G. M. Olikara. On the front pane of the shop were dozens of manufacturer’s stickers for every conceivable make of vacuum cleaner, and the window was packed with old and new models. On the glass window in the door, next to the small sign that said OPEN, was another sign, hand-lettered and stuck on with sticky tape. It read We Fix Hoovers!
Inside an assistant was demonstrating a Dyson machine to a customer, deliberately tipping the contents of an ashtray onto the thinning carpet of the shop before sucking up the mess into the vacuum’s transparent tank with a single pass of the machine.
Ben Ahmad ignored both men and walked straight through the shop to the rear, through a bead curtain, past the stockroom and the single, squalid lavatory, and out into the yard at the back. Here, in contrast to the shabbiness of the shop, a new Portakabin had been installed, freshly painted, its door unlocked. Ahmad found it prepared for his visit; a full kettle sat waiting to be boiled, and in the miniature fridge in one corner was a fresh carton of milk.
He switched the kettle on and sat down, suddenly tired by the tension of his trek. He knew he had to take every possible precaution. British surveillance was legendary, a daunting mix of the latest technology and intelligent legwork - and agents of Mossad were also all over London. But he was confident he had not been followed to the shop, which was rented in the name of the Syrian Christian who managed the business, but paid for in full by the Syrian Arab Republic.
He did not have long to wait. Before the kettle came to the boil, there was a sharp rap on the door. ‘Enter,’ commanded Ben Ahmad, and he was joined by the man he knew as ‘Aleppo’. Aleppo was wearing a black leather jacket, his face was flushed and he was breathing heavily. Without removing his jacket or so much as glancing at his host, he sat down hard in one of the two director’s chairs on either side of the cabin’s small desk. He was clearly on edge: ‘It’s not convenient for me, meeting here,’ he complained angrily.
Ben Ahmad shrugged. They had had this conversation before. ‘It’s safer out here. You know that. I have to insist on it.’
Aleppo frowned, shook his head in disgust but did not argue further. His mind and his eyes seemed elsewhere, and he suddenly switched to the classical Arabic spoken from Morocco to the Gulf. He spoke it beautifully, while Ahmad, who had grown up in a poverty-stricken village on the Hawran Plateau, could never entirely shed all traces of the demotic from his speech. Aleppo said tersely, ‘There’s been a leak from your people.’
‘A leak?’ Ben Ahmad was shocked; this was the last thing he had expected. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘Someone’s been talking. To the West - the British, most likely. They know the two names I gave you and they know they intend to derail the conference in Scotland.’
‘How did you learn this?’ asked Ben Ahmad. He was beginning to tremble, as the awful implication of what was being said hit him.
‘It’s my business to know.’ Then, sarcastically, ‘It’s not as if I can expect your people to protect me.’
‘How do you know the leak comes from Syria?’
Suddenly, Aleppo’s eyes turned hot and angry, fixed thunder on the man across the table. His voice was biting. ‘Where else could it come from? Unless your Damascus masters are in the habit of sharing secrets with their enemies.’
Ben Ahmad was trying to think, though panic was slowing his brain. He must reassure and pacify Aleppo. ‘I will report this at once,’ he declared. ‘I give you my word, we will root out the traitor.’
Aleppo was unappeased. ‘You’d better, or this is the last you’ll see of me. And why has no action been taken against these two people yet? I took great risks to get that information. I assumed you would see its importance. But the two are still operating. Against you, I need hardly say.’
‘I appreciate that. But my superiors are cautious.’
‘Why? Do they doubt my information?’
He said this challengingly, and Ahmad’s palms sweated as he felt the situation running out of his control. It was a cardinal rule for an agent runner to stay in charge, to make it clear that he, not the agent, was running the show. But with this man, Ahmad found it impossible. He was not just prickly and quick to take offence, but there was something dangerously unpredictable about him, an air of menace that Ahmad feared. Had his superiors not valued Aleppo so much, Ahmad would have been happy to break the contact. But he knew that if he lost Aleppo, his career would be finished.
‘Not at all,’ he said reassuringly. ‘No one doubts the truth of what you say. But it has been hard for us to know what these people could do that would damage our interests in any substantial way.’ And, he decided not to add, that would justify the risks of moving against them on foreign territory.
‘So they’d rather take their chances, your masters? Fools.’
‘I didn’t say that. In fact, you can expect action to be taken soon.’ Ahmad thought this was likely, though in truth he didn’t know what would happen or when, and he daren’t give a hostage to fortune by promising the man a timescale. Soon would have to do for now.
Aleppo was clearly unimpressed. ‘Make sure it does.’ He got up from his chair, moving towards the door. ‘Now this has been leaked to the West, I am in danger. I have little confidence that you can plug this leak, which makes it all the more urgent that these people are dealt with right away. Otherwise, you may find it is too late. Tell your superiors that, from me.’ And he went out, banging the door so hard that the flimsy walls of the Portakabin shook.
Was that a threat? Ahmad wondered. Not quite, he decided, and he wouldn’t pass it on to his superiors in Damascus - they might try to insist again on meeting the source, even try and take him over, and then Ahmad would return home without any of the credit he knew he had earned. But he would have to tell them about the leak.
After waiting ten minutes to make sure he would not trip over Aleppo on his way home, Ahmad left the Portakabin and walked through the shop, along the dingy side street and back towards Park Royal station.
He was alarmed by what Aleppo had said. It was desperately worrying if his own service had been penetrated by the West - worrying but not inconceivable. The British were good and Mossad also had infiltrated all its enemies at one time or another. At the station, he bought another copy of the Standard, his attention caught by a late, lurid headline. As he waited for the next train, he read the story, half-fascinated, half-repelled by its details. Auto-asphyxiation - why would anyone want to play at that? And in a church, no less. These English, he thought as he saw the amber beam of the approaching train fill the distant tunnel, they were beyond bizarre.
TWELVE
At least she knew where she was, not that it helped. Seventy feet below ground, thirty seconds out of Chalk Farm station, stuck in a tunnel with no sense they would be moving any time soon.
Across from her a morose-looking woman in a brown cardigan stared at the floor apathetically, while next to her a builder in dust-covered boots noisily turned the pages of the Sun. The headline read ‘Man in Box Mystery’. How ghoulish, thought Liz, then she remembered how an ex-boyfriend, a journalist on the Guardian, had claimed that such headlines were reassuring. ‘If I land at Heathrow and the headline on the Evening Standard reads, “Nurse Found Strangled,” then I know all’s right with the world. No terrorist bomb has gone off, no threat of impending nuclear war. Just a humdrum sex murder to titillate commuters.’
Looking at her watch, Liz saw they had been motionless for over ten minutes. Thank God she wasn’t claustrophobic; Peggy would be climbing the walls by now. Thinking of Peggy, she pondered the girl’s mix of shyness and delight as s
he’d described Tim. Liz could imagine their first dates, all in suitably intellectual places (the National Gallery, the Soane Museum). They’d have chatted earnestly over flapjacks and mugs of tea, discussing the comparative merits of the Metaphysical Poets, or the late Beethoven string quartets.
It was easy to be patronising, but Liz had to admire Peggy’s initiative - going to talks, meeting new people. Meeting men. There was no point in being stuffy about it, thought Liz, not if it worked for Peggy. And it had. And look at her own mother. Sixty-plus, a widow with a lovely house, an interesting job - even she had found company.
For years after her father had died Liz had felt responsible for her mother. Not enough for her to agree to give up what her mother regarded as her ‘dangerous’ job to go back home to Wiltshire to share the running of the garden centre her mother managed. But enough for her to make the tedious journey every month and keep in touch regularly by phone. Then earlier this year, out of the blue, her mother had acquired a boyfriend, Edward, and now she seemed contented and less dependent on her daughter.
Liz knew she should be pleased for her mother, but when she thought of all those weekends she had forced herself to drive down to Wiltshire when she would much rather have stayed in London, the anxiety when her mother had had a cancer scare just as Liz was in the middle of a complex and worrying case, she felt a flash of resentment. It was irrational, she knew it was, but she felt it just the same.
Liz tried to picture this new boyfriend of her mother’s, whom she’d never met but knew she would not like. He’d wear tweeds and be ex-army, a major perhaps, or even a colonel. He’d go on and on about the Aden campaign or wherever. God, how boring, thought Liz, and possibly venal - she was sure part of her mother’s appeal to Edward must be the creature comforts she could provide for him in her cosy house in Bowerbridge. Still, she thought grudgingly, her mother seemed to be enjoying this late romance of hers.
Whereas I’m just stuck in a rut, Liz brooded, watching as the woman in the cardigan yawned and closed her eyes. The only men she met were at work, and yet at work she found her emotions already engaged. By Charles, a man she only saw in the office and who was unavailable anyway.
It suddenly seemed ridiculous. I can’t go on this way, thought Liz, surprised at how obvious this realisation was. She couldn’t blame anyone but herself - it wasn’t as if Charles had ever encouraged her, or asked her to wait for him. She supposed he’d made his feelings clear, in his discreet and dignified way, but equally, he’d never pretended he could do anything about them.
All right then, thought Liz, cut your losses, and move on. Time’s a-flying, however young I feel. There must be men I can meet. The image of Geoffrey Fane flitted briefly through her head. There was something undeniably attractive about him - he was good-looking in an arrogant way, clever, quick-witted, amusing when he wanted to be. And best of all, Fane was no longer married.
But it wasn’t for nothing he was known in MI5 as the Prince of Darkness, and she knew she could never altogether trust him. No, like Peggy, she needed to meet someone outside the service, and she cheered up briefly at the prospect. There was just the small matter of how to meet this new someone.
A hissing noise of escaping air came from the tunnel, and the train slid forward as if on ice. The builder looked up from his sports page and briefly met Liz’s eyes. Across the carriage the older woman was sound asleep, her hands clasped in her lap.
THIRTEEN
It was nearly seven in the evening when Hannah Gold got off the Underground at Bond Street station and started to walk slowly towards Piccadilly. She could have changed lines and got a lot nearer to her destination, but she loved walking in London on these late summer evenings. The weather had been a surprise - she had come to England armed with sweaters and a raincoat and umbrella, but so far she had needed none of them. She might still have been in Tel Aviv, to judge by the climate.
Now, as she walked down Bond Street, she stopped from time to time to admire the clothes and shoes in the smart shops and, as she got nearer to Piccadilly, the watches and jewellery and the paintings in the windows of the galleries. She still found it hard to get used to the idea that she had enough money of her own now to buy practically anything she liked, and the independence to spend it as she pleased.
She hadn’t seen Saul for more than a year - not since she’d sold their home in Beverly Hills, banked her final settlement from the divorce and upped sticks and left for her new life in Israel. Looking back on it all, she could see that she’d been in a state of shocked anger when she left America for good. Thirty-three years of marriage had been suddenly ended by one late-night conversation with her husband. She couldn’t believe her ears. It was no surprise that he was having an affair - he’d had affairs before, often - but this time he wanted a divorce. All those shared years, the experiences, the help she’d given him as he built up his business… all gone in the forty-five seconds it had taken him to deliver his prepared speech. It was over, he’d said, and that was final.
After the first shock came the anger and it was anger that had fuelled her through the drawn-out wrangling of the divorce proceedings. She had finally been awarded her twenty million dollars, enough for a complete change of life. She could have gone to live anywhere. She could have come to London, where her son David lived with his wife and small children. But she’d finally chosen Israel, though it was not the obvious choice. She was proud to be Jewish, but she was increasingly upset by the way Israel behaved. The situation in that part of the world seemed to be worsening every year, and she simply couldn’t believe that none of it was Israel’s fault. The settlements seemed to her to be madness and the unwillingness of many Israelis to concede that the Palestinians had a grievance, more madness still.
If she was honest, she’d really chosen to live there because she thought it might give her the chance to do something in her own right. She wasn’t naïve enough to think she could change the world single-handed, and she knew she would come across people who disagreed strongly with her. But she hoped that she could have some influence by working for moderation and compromise and listening to the other side’s point of view.
And so far she was convinced she was doing some good in her new homeland. She had joined a peace movement and was taking an active part in organising meetings and debates and helping to write the literature they put out. She had even practically forgotten about Saul - that is, until Mr Teitelbaum had come her way.
It had all started at a drinks party in Tel Aviv given by one of her new friends, another American woman called Sara. Hannah had met a man there, Sidney something, who at first had asked her the usual polite questions about how she found life in Israel, but as they’d talked he had seemed much more interested to hear about her former husband’s doings - particularly about the satellite communications company that Saul had founded and still ran.
After the party, Sara had told her that Sidney was a Mossad officer, and when he’d subsequently rung and asked Hannah to meet him for what he called ‘a chat’, she’d known his interest wasn’t social and had politely but firmly declined.
But then news had come of Saul’s remarriage, and Hannah had learned in a phone call from one of her less tactful Californian friends that the new Mrs Gold was a tall, twenty-three-year-old blonde with a golden tan. For Hannah, who was short and dark and didn’t like the sun, that was the last straw. Twenty minutes later she had rung Sidney and agreed to meet him, though when she’d turned up at the outdoor cafe he’d named, she’d found another man waiting for her.
His name was Mr Teitelbaum-she knew only his surname, and since she was Mrs Gold to them, she reciprocated with a ‘mister’, which gave an old-fashioned flavour to their meetings. Teitelbaum was short and squat and reminded Hannah of a toad. His bald head, which gleamed in the sunshine, sat like a bowling ball on massive shoulders, and his hands were rough as a peasant’s. From the open neck of his shirt, hair sprouted like dark, curly weeds. He said very little, but he listened hard,
apparently mentally recording everything Hannah had to say, for he took no notes. There had been a lot for him to remember.
Her ex-husband’s company sold satellite systems all over the world - Saul had never been choosy about his customers. Many of them were in the Middle East and some were the enemies of Israel. It was these customers Mr Teitelbaum had wanted to hear about, and since Hannah had been the one person to whom Saul had confided all his business secrets, she’d had a lot to tell; she’d seen Mr Teitelbaum once a week for almost three months.
Now as she reached Piccadilly and walked east towards Haymarket and the theatre, she felt she deserved a treat. It was lovely to be here in London. After all the experiences of her first year in Israel she’d badly needed a rest, and after only a week she felt her energy was coming back.
The Stoppard play was tremendous fun - fast-paced, witty and verbally ingenious. All that was missing was someone to share it with; looking around the audience, Hannah felt surrounded by couples.
At the interval she worked her way through the scrum at the bar to buy a glass of wine, which she carried carefully to the safety of a corner. She was just about to take a sip when her arm was knocked sharply and her glass went flying, landing with a small pirouette on the carpet.
‘I am so sorry.’
Hannah turned to find a man behind her looking upset. He was fortyish, tall, with floppy black hair, dressed in a black suit and a charcoal turtleneck. Reaching down, he picked up her glass, which was miraculously unbroken. ‘I am so sorry,’ he said again.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Hannah. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘But of course it does,’ the man insisted. ‘I’ll get you another.’
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