Dead Line

by Stella Rimington

  ‘Okay, Ty, let’s keep him in place then. You can come clean with the Brits, but make it clear we expect them to keep it to themselves. If they tell the Israelis, then we might as well have got some credit by telling them ourselves.’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Aleppo had told no one where he was going. He would be coming here again in three weeks’ time, but that would be official and with colleagues. Now he needed to see the lay of the land for himself. He had his own agenda.

  He caught the train at King’s Cross, and promptly fell asleep for three hours. He was tired. Although his meetings rarely lasted long, the tension and the painstaking counter-surveillance before and after each rendezvous exhausted him.

  He woke up in Northumberland, or so the old man across the aisle was telling his wife, and he looked out of the window as the countryside grew hilly, wilder, starker. He didn’t understand the British: if he’d been in charge, he would have placed the bulk of the population up here, rather than in the tame, cramped environs of the Home Counties.

  The border came and went unnoticed and it was only as he heard the train guard announce Edinburgh that he knew he was in Scotland. As the train left the city behind, Aleppo, knowing he was nearly at his destination, watched intently, noting with surprise the rolling landscape, soft and agricultural. He had expected crags and mountains; they formed his image of Scotland.

  But when he left the train at a small station further north, an hour later, he could see the Cairngorms in the distance. There were no taxis in this remote place, but a minibus waited in the small station yard to pick up Aleppo and the two obviously American couples, laden with luggage and golf clubs, who left the train with him. The driver, a plump man with a uniform cap, was chatty.

  ‘Here for the golf?’ he asked amiably, eyeing his passengers in the mirror.

  Aleppo didn’t feel the need to reply as his fellow passengers were only too willing to talk. They said they were.

  ‘Greens are very quick just now,’ said the driver.

  ‘I’ve booked a hack with the riding school,’ said one of the women.

  ‘We’re forecast lovely weather. You’ll get great views of the hills out there.’ They chatted on as they drove towards the setting sun, which was casting the nearby low hills in a rose-coloured light.

  Soon, the bus turned in between two low stone walls surmounted with gold letters: Gleneagles.

  A vast golf course lay to the left of the drive, its clubhouse a handsome, low building of cream stucco with a grey slate roof. On the other side of the drive, on the wide sweep of lawn beside two lakes, were more golf holes. He seemed to be entering a golf obsessive’s paradise.

  Dominating the scene was a vast nineteenth-century pile, with a castle tower on its front corner, flying a blue and white flag, waving in the stiff evening breeze. The driver turned at a little roundabout, down a formal drive that ended at the hotel entrance. Across the manicured lawns were long hedgerows of rhododendrons and tall trees.

  Aleppo was amazed to hear the sound of bagpipes playing as the minibus drove up to the door; a huge doorman in a kilt and green tweed jacket, who had been standing with the piper at the top of the steps, came down to take the luggage. As he checked in at the reception desk in a wide panelled hall, lit by vast saucer-shaped Art Deco lamps hanging from the ceiling, Aleppo felt as if he had arrived on the set of an American musical.

  He had purposely booked one of the best rooms, at the front of the hotel. It was spacious and comfortable, with a view of the golf courses and behind them, only a couple of miles further on, green hills that rose gradually from the valley.

  Aleppo looked over his quarters with care. The bathroom was large and brightly lit, with a white porcelain bath and a steel-framed shower in the corner. Taking his shoes off, he climbed onto the closed seat of the lavatory, then carefully pushed at the square tiles of the ceiling above it. One gave way; moving it aside, he raised both hands and carefully pulled himself up to look into the horizontal ventilation shaft. Inside its long tunnel you could fit a small suitcase; at a pinch, lying flat, a man could fit as well. It would take a professional about twenty seconds to find anyone hiding there, but it was good to know nonetheless.

  Climbing down, he stripped off and showered, then changed into smart casual clothes - a blazer, cotton trousers, slip-on shoes - and went downstairs in search of food. From the various restaurants he chose the middle-range Italian-style trattoria, where he sat in the middle of the room and ate supper while looking carefully through the brochure he had found in his bedroom.

  His waitress was middle-aged, polite, and wore a wide wedding ring, but Aleppo paid more attention to a younger girl who was waiting on the tables across the room. She was sandy-haired, big-boned, with an attractive smiling face and a confident air as she moved around the room, chatting with the people at her tables. She had noticed him, too, the only single male in the room, and glanced his way on each occasion she came out from the kitchen carrying plates of food.

  When Aleppo had finished his meal, he waited to get up to leave the dining room until she came out of the kitchen. He caught her eye and she looked back at him. Nothing was said but something invisible passed between them. A plucky kind of girl then, even forward, and he made a mental note of her.

  In the morning he ate breakfast in the same restaurant, but there was no sign of her. He had a lot of ground to cover and only one day to cover it. He’d expected a grand hotel and a golf course, but Gleneagles was so much more than that. The place was a resort, more on the American model than the usual British version. It was set on hundreds of acres of coniferous woodland, with hotel rooms, chalets, timeshares, private apartments, and literally dozens of recreational activities. This was a bigger task than he’d expected.

  Finishing his coffee, he walked through the oak-panelled corridors of the hotel’s ground floor, past shops that catered without inhibition to an affluent clientele - diamond jewellery, cashmere sweaters, rare and exotic whiskies -emerging at the back of the hotel next to a swimming pool enclosed in glass. Already guests were reclining on wooden poolside chairs as if on a Mediterranean beach, while children splashed and played in the water.

  Outside again, Aleppo paused. He knew there were timeshare villas, grouped in a village-like settlement across the road, but they could wait until his next visit. As could the equestrian centre further down the road, of no use to him now. He sensed the answer to his own search lay outdoors, not in, so he set to work exploring the grounds.

  It took him till mid-afternoon, walking round all three golf courses, intrigued especially by the biggest, the famous King’s Course, which sloped gradually upwards towards the ridge of hills that he had seen from his bedroom. He walked to the furthest edge of the course, as near as he could get to the hills, and there, from a secluded spot under an oak tree by the tenth tee, he peered through a small pair of Leica binoculars he produced from his jacket pocket.

  The slopes in the distance were unfarmed and looked untended, though there were a few sheep lower down. The grass was bleached yellow from the summer sun, and the slopes looked bare, but careful examination revealed a few pockets of trees, and the odd dip in the hills’ contours. Enough to keep someone out of sight for a while, especially in bad weather - he’d noted the sign warning of the sudden advent of fog and mist.

  At lunchtime, he stopped for a sandwich in the clubhouse, looking out again at the hills, gauging whether they’d be considered a possible threat when the multiple security agencies scoured the area in a week’s time. They would certainly not be ignored. He looked again at the activities listed in the brochure. There was clay pigeon shooting; croquet; fishing supplied on request; off-road driving; a gun dog training school; even a falconry centre.

  Aleppo visited them all, in the guise of an interested foreign tourist, but spent the most time at the gun dog school and the neighbouring falconry centre. He watched for half an hour as a posse of young black Labradors, agile and keen, practised retrieving. Then he
moved off through a line of trees to a two-storey wooden building, with a green metal roof and purple pillars at each end. It looked like an oversized chicken coop, or a prison for dwarves, with small, individual cells with metal bars across their windows. In each cell, a bird of prey sat unwinking on a wooden perch, staring at any observer free to move about in the world.

  A small boy and his father came out of the front door, followed by an instructor wearing a padded glove in one hand, on which was sitting a hawk. Aleppo watched as they proceeded to a mown circle of grass, where the keeper raised his hand slowly until the bird suddenly took off. It flew round in a big arc and then swooped back down again to snatch at the lure the man held at the end of a long cord, the bait an ounce of raw grouse meat.

  He heard the little boy’s father ask, ‘What happens if they don’t come back?’

  ‘They’re carrying a radio transmitter. It’s tiny - just a microchip,’ the man said, pointing to the hawk now back on his extended hand. ‘I can hear it through my earpiece. The closer I get to him, the louder the transmitter squawks.’

  ‘What’s the range of the signal?’

  ‘The manufacturer claims it’s twelve miles.’ He scoffed. ‘But that’s because the manufacturer is in Salt Lake City. In this landscape it’s more like twelve hundred yards.’

  ‘Do they go that far?’

  The instructor shook his head. ‘Not usually. They can go up to thirty miles away, but most of the time we find them in the woods.’

  Aleppo moved away and strolled, deep in thought, towards the golf courses, coming shortly to the edge of a little lake, no more than a few hundred yards square, which was nestled in a long hollow beside the main drive. A small island in the middle of the lake boasted a solitary cedar tree surrounded by low rushes that went down into the water. On Aleppo’s side of the lake was a wooden landing stage with a rowing boat tied to an iron ring. Across the water, on the golf course side, sat a small putting green. This could be useful, he thought, suddenly open to yet more possibilities.

  When he returned to the hotel there were three men at the reception desk, wearing suits and ties, white shirts, and tasselled loafers. One had an earpiece, and wore a miniature American flag pinned to his lapel. Aleppo stopped at the desk, ostensibly to ask for a newspaper in the morning, but really to confirm his suspicions that these were Secret Service men.

  ‘It’s just preliminary,’ one of them was saying to the manager. ‘Next week we’ll be up to check every room thoroughly. For now, it’s just to acquaint ourselves.’

  He moved away casually and went up to his room, thinking hard. The Secret Service men would be back for their room-to-room inspection of the place; they’d be followed by British police, using state-of-the-art detection equipment and sniffer dogs.

  It simply wouldn’t be possible to hide anything in the hotel itself. The IRA had done that at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, almost managing to murder Margaret Thatcher and most of her Cabinet. They’d concealed a long-fuse bomb behind the panelling in the bathroom of one of the central tier of rooms. It had been put there so far in advance that it had escaped the sweeps made just days before the Conservative Party Conference had begun. But things had moved on a lot since then in the security world.

  So any action would have to take place somewhere else in the grounds. They’d be heavily policed, of course, and a perimeter would be established out on extended boundaries. But with hundreds of acres to police, it might just be possible to think of something that would escape the combined efforts of the UK police, foreign security, sniffer dogs, and state-of-the-art detection machines. But it wasn’t going to be easy and to do that he’d need help -and from someone who knew the place far better than he was ever going to. Someone with access. He’d need a local ally, with local information.

  That night he dined again in the Italian trattoria, but this time he asked the maître d’ for a table towards the back of its big room, where he knew he would be waited on by the pretty sandy-haired girl.

  ‘Good evening,’ she said, as she came to take his order.

  ‘Good evening, Jana,’ he said, reading the name tag on her blouse. She gave a faint smile.

  Each time she came to the table, he greeted her approach with an admiring gaze that he was glad to see her reciprocate. At last, as she brought his after-dinner coffee, he said quietly so no one else would hear, ‘What time do you get off?’

  ‘And why would that be of interest?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, looking down at his demitasse, ‘I thought you might let a foreigner buy you a drink. In return for some local knowledge.’

  ‘Oh I see, you’re looking for a tutor, are you?’ She gave a knowing smile, but then just as quickly frowned. ‘Seriously, though, we’re not allowed to fraternise with the residents. It would be more than my job was worth.’

  ‘Maybe it wouldn’t have to be in public.’ He opened his hand; in his palm lay his room key, with its number face up ′411. ‘You have a good memory, don’t you, Jana?’

  She looked a little startled by his boldness. ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’

  ‘It’s just a drink. I have a rather enormous minibar. Too much for me on my own.’

  ‘I thought I’d heard them all,’ she said with a laugh, then went off to see to another table.

  But later, as he sat in his room, reading the local paper, he was unsurprised by the slight tap at the door, and when he opened it, the girl Jana was standing there. She was out of uniform now, wearing jeans and a pink crop top. As she slipped quickly into the room, he closed the door behind her.

  ‘I’m not sure I should be doing this—’ she began

  ‘Shhhh,’ he said, putting a finger to his lips and leaning over to kiss her waiting lips.

  Much later, when it was closer to morning than midnight, but while it was still pitch-dark outside, the door of 411 opened, and Jana came out silently, then walked speedily down the corridor to the back stairs. She felt happy to have conducted her rendezvous unobserved, and a little exhilarated, especially since the man had said he would be back in three weeks’ time.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Peggy was being so solicitous that Liz found herself growing impatient. ‘I’m fine,’ she protested again in the face of her junior colleague’s repeated offers of aspirin, ibuprofen, paracetamol. ‘If you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to call the Drug Squad.’

  Mercifully, Charles Wetherby appeared in the doorway and Peggy went back to her desk.

  ‘Liz, Tyrus Oakes is flying in from Washington. He’s due here at ten tomorrow morning, and I’d like you to join the meeting.’

  ‘That was quick,’ she said. Wetherby had only been back from Washington two days.

  He nodded. ‘I think we’ll be getting an answer this time, or he wouldn’t be taking the trouble to come in person.’

  The next morning, when she entered Wetherby’s office, she was unsurprised to find a stranger sitting there, but she was utterly astonished to find Andy Bokus with him. What on earth was going on?

  Wetherby made the introductions. Tyrus Oakes looked dapper in a grey summer suit. He exuded the old-style charm of a Southern plantation owner — he shook her hand, gave a gallant little bow, then pulled back a chair for her. Wetherby watched the performance with barely suppressed amusement. Bokus, looking hot in a khaki suit, just nodded at Liz. ‘We’ve met,’ he said curtly.

  ‘Good to see you, Charles,’ Oakes said affably as they all sat down again. ‘As I promised, I’ve come with an explanation and to clear up a misunderstanding.’

  Wetherby’s eyebrow lifted, almost imperceptibly. ‘Thank you,’ he said mildly. ‘That’s good.’

  The thoughts flashing through Liz’s mind were less charitable. Were they questioning the authenticity of the photographs she saw lying on Wetherby’s desk? It was certainly true that thanks to computer technology, pictures could tell all sorts of lies: you could morph images to seat people next to each other when in fact they were on different c
ontinents; you could delete whole mountains from landscapes, or remove entire buildings from an urban panorama. But in this case the camera was telling the undeniable truth: Andy Bokus was sitting next to a suspected Mossad officer at the Oval cricket ground.

  Or would Oakes try and suggest that Bokus had run into the Mossad man ‘by accident’?

  Oakes said, ‘What I am about to tell you is of course completely confidential and I hope I can count on its remaining that way.’

  Wetherby said sharply, ‘We are looking forward to what you have to say. To put your mind at rest, Liz is here because she is in charge of our investigation of the Israeli trade attaché in the pictures. As I told you in Washington, Ty, we have reason to suspect he is not a trade attaché at all. ‘He pointed to the incriminating photographs on his desk. ‘That’s how these came to be taken. She has also been liaising with your chap Brookhaven about this Syrian business and the Gleneagles conference.’

  Oakes said, ‘My concern is not about who knows what here in MI5 or in MI6. It’s to do with the Israelis.’ When Wetherby looked at him questioningly, Oakes explained, ‘What I’m saying Charles is that yes, your people saw Andy meeting with a Mossad officer - Kollek.’

  Wetherby didn’t say anything. Liz noticed Bokus had reddened and was looking uncomfortable, like an oversized schoolboy who’d been caught with his hand in the biscuit tin.

  Oakes said, ‘What the photographs don’t show is that he’s our agent.’

  Silence fell over the room. Wetherby looked stunned. ‘You’re running a Mossad officer in London?’ he asked at last. His surprise was undisguised.

  ‘That’s right. And until these came to light’ - Oakes pointed to the photographs - ‘this was a very closely held operation. Only a very few in the Agency knew of it. As you’ll well understand, this type of operation is our most sensitive.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Wetherby crisply. ‘Thank you for being frank with us. I’ll need to inform DG of course and Geoffrey Fane, who is aware of the photographs and has I think been frank with you about other things.’ He glanced momentarily at Bokus, then looked back at Oakes with a steady gaze. ‘But there’s no need for anyone else outside this room to be told. Though there are some things we’d like to know about this agent you’re running under our noses,’ he said with the slightest of smiles.