Dead Line

by Stella Rimington

  There had been one possibility. Liz Carlyle had always struck him as refreshingly intelligent, forthright, very much her own woman. And very attractive. Best of all, she worked across the river, so there would be none of the competition and the incestuous gossip that characterised romantic relationships between colleagues.

  But it had all gone wrong somehow. Well, not ‘somehow’; rather, in the specific debacle of Fane’s own involvement in what he thought of as The Oligarch Operation. He knew some of it was his fault. But no one could have foreseen the disastrous consequences, and surely no one could have thought Fane indifferent to them. Yet a coolness had resulted between him and Liz, just when he had thought they were growing close. And now she was in hospital, and Charles Wetherby was blaming him.

  His secretary came in. ‘This has just come from Bruno,’ she said, and handed him a sheet of paper.

  Fane found Bruno Mackay just as irritating as most people did. But no one doubted that, given a task, Bruno was utterly reliable. He was going off on two weeks’ leave, but had promised to come back first to Fane with whatever he’d unearthed about Miles Brookhaven, and here it was.

  Bruno had begun with Washington, talking both to MI6 there and then to friendly American sources they’d put his way. It seemed that Brookhaven was well thought of in the CIA, and had risen rapidly at Langley. Intelligent, personable - and he spoke Arabic, which made him a rarity.

  It was Brookhaven’s Syrian posting that interested Fane most, and he read on carefully. In Damascus Brookhaven had stood out both for speaking the local language and for his eagerness to learn all about Syrian life and culture. With few colleagues to share his enthusiasm, he had made friends instead among the larger community of diplomats, international businessmen, and intelligence officers. Among the latter one in particular became a close friend - Edmund Whitehouse, the head of MI6’s Syria station.

  Whitehouse had been a mine of information for Bruno. He was an old Middle East hand; he’d worked in Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia before running the station in Damascus. Whitehouse had been happy to take Brookhaven under his wing; after all, a friendly source in the CIA station was always useful. Brookhaven struck him as enthusiastic but, as an intelligence officer, naïve. He’d been surprised by how little supervision Brookhaven seemed to get from his own head of station.

  But Whitehouse had been positively dumbstruck when Brookhaven had met him for a drink one evening in the bar of the Champ Palace Hotel, and told him he’d received an approach from a man in the heart of Syria’s labyrinthine intelligence network. There had been nothing boastful in the American’s account, for he soon made it clear that this potential agent did not want to work for the Americans -he wanted to be put in touch with the British, which was why Brookhaven was telling Whitehouse about him. Whitehouse could not help but look with new respect at the young American he’d thought so naïve; his protégé now turned patron.

  For that’s what it had been - a gift, handed over to the Brits, with the understanding that the donor, the CIA, would also be the recipient of whatever secrets this new source turned over to the British. And MI6 had lived up to its end of the bargain, for the most part. Reading the report, Fane thought about the pains he had taken to disguise from Andy Bokus and Brookhaven the source of his information about the threat to the conference - or was it a threat to Syria? He’d been hiding a source from the very man who’d given it them in the first place.

  When he had finished reading, Fane stood up and walked to the window. On the Thames a barge chugged upstream at low tide, and a covey of gulls hovered hopefully around its stern. A group of young schoolchildren, marshalled by three teachers, was crossing north on Vauxhall Bridge, probably heading for the Tate. Fane watched them, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

  He went to his desk and picked up the phone, confident he was delivering useful news. He got through right away. ‘Charles, it’s Geoffrey Fane. We’ve done some checking into the background of our American colleagues in Grosvenor Square. The younger one in particular. I think you might find it makes interesting reading.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It had been raining continuously since four. Now it was evening, and Ben Ahmad left the Park Royal Underground with his raincoat soaked. The front had come in from Ireland, a day earlier than forecast. He supposed it was difficult predicting weather on an island, but he missed the certainty of the forecasts in Syria, where there were no surprises and it stayed dry for months on end.

  The vacuum cleaner shop was just closing when he arrived, and he exchanged the briefest of nods with Olikara, the ‘owner’. In the back yard he hurried to the Portakabin, and was surprised to find when he put his keys in that the metal door was already unlocked. When he opened it, to his astonishment Aleppo was sitting behind the desk.

  ‘How did you get in?’ he started to demand.

  Aleppo dismissed the question with a curt nod of his head. ‘Sit down,’ he said sharply. His black leather jacket and charcoal high-necked pullover made him look especially sinister in the fading light.

  Ahmad found himself with no option but to take the seat in front of the desk. He was alarmed. The control of the meeting had already slipped from him and Aleppo’s steely gaze unnerved him.

  ‘I want you to listen very carefully.’ Aleppo put his hands on the desktop and leaned forward threateningly. His voice was icy. ‘I have at great personal risk supplied your government with crucial information. I did this on the clear understanding that they would act upon it - otherwise I would be a fool to have taken such risks. I am not a fool.’

  Ahmad fought to keep his mind clear. He’d been right to be frightened of this man. There was something so ruthless about him that it seemed pathological. He said earnestly, ‘No one has suggested you’re anything of the sort. But these things take time. I have explained that to you before.’

  Aleppo chopped the air abruptly with his hand, as if mincing the argument. ‘Time is the one thing neither of us has.’

  What was the urgency? wondered Ahmad. Was something going to happen soon that he didn’t know about? Before he had summoned up the nerve to ask, his thoughts were cut short by Aleppo. ‘I do not want lies, I do not want waffle. I want action. Do you understand?’

  Ahmad took a deep breath. He had never found himself so dominated by an agent before. ‘Yes,’ he said reluctantly.

  But Aleppo was dissatisfied; that was clear from the impatient way he shook his head. ‘Let me tell you something. The last man who told me yes while meaning no was South African. They found his torso washed up on a beach near Cape Town. They never found the legs.’

  ‘I give you my word. Something is going to happen this very week.’

  When Aleppo stood up suddenly, Ahmad felt uncomfortable. Would Olikara hear him if he shouted out? No, the shop was closed and he would have gone home by now. He glanced out of the dusty window of the Portakabin and saw that it was dark outside. No one would still be at work in this squalid little precinct of shops.

  Aleppo stepped forward and Ahmad tensed, waiting for the assault. But the agent laughed harshly. ‘Don’t be so frightened,’ he ordered. ‘Not yet, that is.’ And he walked straight out of the Portakabin door, leaving it swinging and squeaking gently on its hinges as the Syrian sat still, trying to regain his composure. Aleppo might be a valuable source, but Ahmad was now convinced he was also crazy.

  He sat there for several minutes until his breathing returned to normal. The odd thing was, he thought as he left the Portakabin, locking the door carefully behind him, he had been telling Aleppo the truth. Something was going to happen that week. Only it wasn’t going to happen in England.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Peter Templeton was hot, even sitting in the shade of the portico in the corner of the monastery’s long terrace. He could hear cicadas on the slope beneath him, but the heat must be too much for the kestrels, for the sky was empty of life. As Templeton peered down the valley the air shimmered slightly, oscillating jelly-like in the unremittin
g glare of the high noon sun.

  He had come, as always, in convoy with his colleague. The other car sat two miles below at the cafe, waiting for Jaghir to drive past. Just outside Nicosia a large Peugeot saloon had joined them, making Templeton nervous. He had been relieved when it had finally turned off, and sped south towards the coast.

  His mobile vibrated. ‘Yes,’ he said, keeping his voice down, though he had the terrace to himself - the monks were all at prayer.

  ‘A couple of miles away. I can see the dust. I’d say five minutes to here; twenty to you.’

  ‘Okay. Keep an eye out for any other cars,’ he added, thinking again of the Peugeot.

  Templeton waited tensely, resisting the temptation to look at his watch. He had called this meeting, prompted by Vauxhall Cross’s agitated requests for confirmation of Jaghir’s original story and, if possible, more detailed information. Against Templeton’s better judgement, Jaghir had insisted on meeting him here at the monastery again. Vauxhall Cross had been so adamant that he talk with Jaghir right away that he hadn’t protested.

  Something stirred in the far corner of the terrace, and Templeton turned quickly, alert. A lizard hopped once, then twice into the shadows cast by the rough stone wall. Then Templeton’s phone vibrated.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s just passed.’

  ‘Anything else around?’

  There was a pause. ‘Negative.’

  Soon Templeton saw the first dust cloud stirring from the track at the base of the hill. He peered across the valley and could just make out a dark saloon edging its way carefully up the slope. Gradually the image magnified as the car approached, taking the sinuous bends carefully, since the track was narrow and perched on a knife-edge high above the valley. On the few short straight stretches the car accelerated briefly, and now Templeton could see the solitary figure at the wheel. Jaghir.

  The car disappeared momentarily where the track cut into the hillside, then reappeared in the last big bend before the final precipitous climb to the top. Templeton could hear the tyres gripping on the sandy surface, the rough throttle of the engine as the automatic transmission slipped in and out of gear. Then a flat thud, like a hand giving a short sharp slap against a rubber mat.

  Suddenly Templeton saw the car veer like a child’s toy out of control. It headed at a sharp angle for the edge of the track, then the tyres seemed to catch themselves and the car moved away from the edge. Like a slow-motion film replay, the car now slewed across the thin wedge of track in widening swerves.

  Templeton held his breath as he watched Jaghir desperately trying to regain control. But the Syrian must have swung the wheel too sharply - the car now careered towards the edge. A front tyre left the track and hung briefly in mid-air, then the back tyre joined it.

  For a moment the car teetered perilously, tilted at an angle, as if in suspended animation. Then the entire vehicle tipped sideways and fell through the air, descending for almost a hundred feet until it just caught the protruding edge of a large boulder sticking out of the hillside. This flipped the saloon 180 degrees and it landed on its side on the sharp downward slope, gaining momentum, crashing through the brush, with a noise like dry cereal crushed by a spoon. The car rolled over and over until it came to the bottom of the valley, where it flipped over with a final movement onto its roof, and stayed completely still.

  Whoomph! The shockwave of its crash landing rose up the valley, filling the hot moist air with a blanket of sound. Staring down, Templeton saw flames begin to creep from the bottom of the wrecked saloon, licking the side windows, then reaching the tyres that sat like circles of dark chocolate on top of the upended car. The fire spread over the exposed chassis, and Templeton, watching horrified from the terrace above, waited for the petrol tank to catch fire.

  It did, in a series of muffled explosions. Now the entire vehicle was ablaze, and Templeton realised that while it was improbable that Jaghir had survived the descent, it was inconceivable he could survive the fire.

  Templeton’s phone vibrated and an agitated voice said, ‘I see smoke.’

  ‘I bet you can. The target went off the track.’

  ‘Did he get out?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is there anything I should do?’

  Soon someone would spot the blaze - if not below in the valley, then here at the monastery when the monks came out of prayers. Fires were no joke in this tinder box of arid scrub - people would watch to make sure the fire didn’t spread; someone would go down to investigate and then the police would be called. There was time, but not much.

  ‘Leave at once. And go back a different way. Meet me back at the office.’

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Just go.’ And he switched off his phone.

  Templeton left the terrace immediately and got into his car. He was shaking as he drove as quickly as he dared down the track, stopping when he came to the bend where Jaghir’s saloon had left the road. He left the engine of his own car running while he got out and looked quickly at the tyre marks that ran through the dust until they stopped, on the edge of the cliff. Templeton peered down, stunned by how steep the fall had been. He could see the massive, obtruding boulder that the car had hit on its way down, leaving a smear of dark paint on the rock. His eyes followed the vertical trail as the saloon had somersaulted, crushing the scrub in its way, until it came to a halt on the bottom where it blazed now, like a final punctuation mark.

  Templeton turned and quickly walked along the track, following the twists and turns of the tyre marks until he came to their first erratic move. What had gone wrong? A blow-out? Possibly, though at such relatively low speed it should have been possible to control the saloon until it had stopped safely on the narrow road.

  He looked carefully around the track to see what might have caused the accident. A nail, broken glass, something sharp; perhaps, he thought, even a small remote-controlled explosion. He found nothing.

  He had better get going. He jogged back up the fifty yards of track, climbed into his own car, then drove down towards the junction, anxious to get away before a patrol car arrived and trapped him on the one-lane track.

  Five minutes later, he was far enough away to think about what had happened. Could it have been a simple puncture after all? Realistically he had to admit that the odds of a blow-out at low speed on the way to a covert meeting, resulting in Jaghir’s death, were minimal. Far more likely that Jaghir’s work for a foreign agency had been discovered and his Syrian masters had extracted the penalty. But he’d found no evidence to support that theory, either. It was only as he saw the residential apartment blocks of Nicosia appear on the horizon that he remembered something else - the dull crack he’d heard just before the ill-fated saloon first veered. His hands shook. If Jaghir had indeed been killed, how had he been detected?

  TWENTY-NINE

  Charles Wetherby was sitting in his armchair by the window of his office reading the draft JIC papers for the next day’s meeting, when his secretary tapped on the door and put a tentative head in. ‘It’s Geoffrey Fane on the line.’

  Wetherby was a patient man, but even he had his limits. What did Fane want now? Yesterday he’d revealed that the two ‘names’ and their threat to the Gleneagles conference had come from some highly placed Syrian source whom the Americans had actually donated to Fane’s people. And who had done the donating? Miles Brookhaven for pity’s sake, seemingly a bit of private enterprise. And what were these two names up to? Just about everything except threatening the conference, so far as MI5 had been able to find out. But Fane had calmly come over and asked him to protect them. From what, exactly? To judge by the attack on Liz, it was MI5 who needed the protection. Just who was deceiving whom? And why in the name of hell and damnation had Fane not found out sooner about Brookhaven’s links to Syria - if that’s what he had - while that young man was enjoying a ringside seat on all the security arrangements for Gleneagles? He’d asked Fane that and got no plausible response. But at least Fane h
ad volunteered to talk to Andy Bokus about it. That might be a tricky conversation. How did you tactfully tell someone like Bokus that his man might be working for the opposition? Well that was Fane’s problem, thank God. And now what did the man want?

  He walked over to his desk and picked up the telephone warily. ‘Hello, Geoffrey,’ he said.

  ‘Charles, I’m afraid there’s been a further development. Not a good one, either. Our Syrian source has been killed in the Troodos mountains in Cyprus. He was on his way to a meeting with Peter Templeton, head of our Cyprus station, who was running him.’

  ‘Was he assassinated?’

  ‘It’s starting to look like it. He drove off a narrow track that leads to the monastery where Templeton was waiting to meet him. The car was completely smashed up, and then there was a fire. Naturally Peter didn’t wait around to investigate, but he’s been talking to his sources in the Cypriot police. Apparently, the rear tyres in Jaghir’s car were both shot out - there must have been a sniper somewhere on the hillside.’

  ‘What have the Syrians said?’

  ‘That’s the interesting thing. They only cooperated minimally with the police. Didn’t seem to want to go into it much.’

  ‘Perhaps they were hoping to hide the fact that he was an intelligence officer.’

  ‘Perhaps. But in Syria they’ve hushed it up as well. I think they must have killed him.’

  ‘Which means we have another leak somewhere,’ said Wetherby bitterly.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Fane. ‘Or it could be the same one.’

  THIRTY

  Liz knew she’d made a mistake. She’d insisted that she felt perfectly well enough to do the interview with Marcham, though everyone - Charles, Peggy, her mother and even Edward, though he’d admitted it wasn’t his business - had disagreed.