by Chris Ryan
A brief colour-film sequence on the screen showed Geneva Airport, an anonymous office block, and a name-plate: Services F-K Commerciaux. This cut to a series of still photographs of Fanon-Khayat in a top-hat and morning-coat in the enclosure at Royal Ascot. Accompanying him was a chic, rather strained-looking blonde woman in an ostrich-feathered hat.
‘Marries Solange de Cotigny June ’75. Buys her a house in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. None of which inhibits him from undertaking a series of extramarital liaisons.’
A series of grab-shots, mostly black and white, of Fanon Khayat with other blonde women in hotel lobbies, outside night-clubs, and on resort beaches.
‘Over the years, one way and another, Fanon-Khayat becomes a good friend to the British government, and a highly important source of non-attributable weaponry. We use him in Afghanistan, when he outfits a couple of our training teams with specially adapted SAMs to counter the Sovs’ Hind assault helicopters. He equips our people in South America for the Gacha job, he arms the SAS Subversive Action Wing team for operation Waterline in Sri Lanka, and he is extremely helpful to the Firm when we need to place undercover operatives in Azerbaijan to keep an eye on developments regarding the pipeline. He has undertaken never, either directly or indirectly, to supply the IRA, and he has passed on marketplace intelligence to us concerning those who have. A useful asset, all in all.
‘For our part, we have always paid him well and promptly, and avoided stepping on his toes overseas. As Terry and Chris in particular will remember, we fell over backwards ensuring that his name was never mentioned in connection with the Matrix-Churchill and Arms-to-Iraq affairs.’
Nods around the table.
‘So far so cosy. Unfortunately all is not so lovey-dovey in our man’s private life.’
A black and white image of Solange Fanon-Khayat, looking distraught, climbing into a white Mercedes outside the Paris house. Cut to an exterior shot of a Paris courtroom, with Fanon-Khayat hurrying up the steps.
‘In 1992, Solange sues for divorce, citing her husband’s physical abuse, mental cruelty and persistent adultery – which has apparently included unprotected sex with prostitutes and Brazilian transvestites in the Bois de Boulogne. She is awarded a huge settlement, which as it happens coincides with a falling off in her ex-husband’s business activities.
‘Shortly after the judgement is announced, Fanon-Khayat sets up a meet with his M16 handler. He needs cash badly, he says, and in return claims that he can offer hard documentary evidence that President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia is providing arms and support to Radovan Karadjic in the breakaway republic of Bosnian Serbia. He claims to have an inside track to the Serbian administration.
‘Unfortunately for Fanon-Khayat, we already have all the evidence we need to that effect, and we turn the deal down. We cut him loose, basically. We distance ourselves from him. The general feeling is that he is becoming too flaky to do business with. And we’re right. The next sighting of him is in – of all places – Serbia.’
A wedding scene. A small local church. Flower-petals in the air. A portrait of the bride – very blonde, very pretty, barely in her twenties.
‘Within six months of talking to us, we learn, Antoine has remarried. Her name is Branca Nikolic, she is twenty-three, and she and her family are well-connected Serbs living in Belgrade. What the cash-strapped Fanon-Khayat is doing socialising with Serbs at that point in history I leave to your collective imagination. It is unlikely to be a coincidence, for example, that his new father-in-law Goran Nikolic is a senior officer of the RDB – the Serbian secret service. From this point onwards Fanon-Khayat’s former contacts and handlers in London hear nothing from him.’
Removing his glasses, Manderson briefly polished them with a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket before once again thumbing the remote control.
Fanon-Khayat and an overweight man in a cowboy hat on a Sheraton-style hotel terrace. Palm trees and a swimming pool visible.
A low-ceilinged airport lounge, the crowd mostly African. Fanon-Khayat in profile at a car-hire desk.
A grainy, long-distance street shot. Three men in coats and fur hats leaving a marble-faced office-block. Snow on the steps.
Manderson replaced his glasses. ‘Six weeks ago word reaches P4, the head of Balkan operations downstairs, that Fanon-Khayat is on the move again, re-activating his old networks. Ten days ago, for the first time in the best part of a decade, he gets back in touch with us. Specifically, he couriers a compact disc to C/CEE, the controller of eastern European operations, who will be speaking to you later this morning. This is some of the photographic material from that disc.’
A jungle scene. Sunlight filtering through light scrub. A South East Asian youth with a red bandanna tied around his head crouching over a dissassembled AK47 Kalashnikov rifle. The spare parts on a cloth on the jungle floor.
A younger man, also wearing a red bandanna, posing with a Dragunov sniper rifle armed with a telescopic sight. Next to him, his faded khaki jacket all but falling apart on his shoulders, a man who might have been his twin, grinning.
Six young men. And a pile of several dozen Claymore-style anti-personnel mines in satchels. In the background, slightly out of focus, a Westerner in a red bandanna carrying a steel ammunition box and a young Asian woman toting a Soviet RPG 7 grenade launcher.
The first young man again, gleefully indicating a wooden box stencilled ‘GRENADES – W PHOS’. Two Western soldiers in tiger-stripe camouflage smoking roll-ups and laughing – something very familiar to Slater about both of them.
A dead woman in DPM camouflage trousers, South East Asian of origin, dragged to a sitting position by the hair by a pair of hands. The freckled forearms vanishing out of shot, but a Cross-of-St-George tattoo clearly visible. Severe burns to the dead woman’s face and neck. High-velocity round entry wounds to her bared upper chest. A cooking-pot over a fire in the background.
A dozen dead soldiers, their uniforms caked with dried blood, in a pile in a clearing by a stream. Several with their ears cut off. Around the corpses, like hunters around a trophy display, a group of red bandanna-clad soldiers carrying AK47s. One wearing a necklace of ears. Crouching alongside them, a tall, Western soldier. Jungle smock, droopy moustache, scar on left cheek.
Three Western soldiers, all known to Slater, crouching outside the bleached stone ruins of an Asiatic temple. On the ground before them a row of sharpened bamboo stakes. Two of these hammered into the ground and topped with human heads. A red bandanna-wearing youth placing a cigarette between the lips of one of the severed heads.
Manderson turned to Andreas. ‘Any doubt in your mind about the identity of any of these instructors?’
Andreas shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Neil?’
‘I don’t know all the names, but I recognise all the faces. They’re Regiment guys.’
Manderson nodded. ‘OK. The background to all of this is that during the eighties a rolling contingent of instructors from 22 SAS’s Subversive Action Wing, usually referred to in this building as the Increment, were attached to “a non-communist wing of the Coalition for the Democratic Government of Kampuchea”. In plain English, to the Khmer Rouge. The idea – queasy though it sounds now – was that the struggle against communism could be effectively continued by supporting the Khmer Rouge’s war of resistance against the North Vietnamese, who had ousted them in 1979. The US started the ball rolling, but the CIA contingent pulled out after Irangate in 1986. Basically Ronald Reagan left Mrs Thatcher holding their joint baby, if that’s not too extreme an image to furnish you with at this time in the morning. The SAS team was based on the Thai-Cambodian border. They fed the Khmer Rouge with weapons – mostly non-attributable AKs and RPGs and white phosphorus grenades – and taught them how to use explosives, improvise and lay mines, and make booby traps.
‘It’s all old history now, of course, but the agent we employed to provide the bulk of that non-attributable weaponry was Antoine Fanon-Khayat. Unfortuna
tely for us, sensibly for him, he kept detailed minutes of the affair. As well as the photographs you’ve just seen there are manifests, banking and shipping documentation – all manner of stuff. And the long and the short of it is that unless his conditions are met, all of this material will be made available to the press.
‘What those conditions are, you’ve probably already guessed. Two months ago an SAS snatch team lifted Radovan Karadjic from Eastern Bosnia and conveyed him to custody on the British mainland, where he remains pending transportation to the Hague and trial for war crimes. Fanon-Khayat wants us to get the Home Office to accede to Serbia’s demands for his release on the grounds that the arrest was technically illegal. Now of course we don’t accept that it was illegal and we’re not about to give up Karadjic, but illustrated details of our close involvement with an overtly genocidal organisation like the Khmer Rouge would be very embarrassing indeed. A decade ago John Pilger made a TV programme accusing the British government of aiding and abetting the perpetrators of genocide in Cambodia – names were named, et cetera – but the government of the day denied its principal charges on the record and the whole thing faded. This will bring it all back with a vengeance. There’s nothing like necklaces of human ears and severed heads on stakes to put the citizenry off their morning cornflakes, and the Serbian PR people would make sure that those pictures went round the world. You can imagine how weighty our accusations against Karadjic and his merry men would sound then.
‘Unfortunately, the Cambodia pictures are not the limit of our problems concerning Antoine Fanon-Khayat. Our intelligence reports suggest that his recent world tour, which took in a number of weaponry fabrication sites and known middle-men, had a specific purpose. Namely, to set up a conduit to provide Serbian defence installations with a state-of-the-art surface-to-air missile capability. The system’s called “Ondine”, it’s manufactured in France by Issy-Avionic, and the material we think will be going to Serbia is nominally destined for the “friendly-designated” Burkina Faso. We’re not a hundred per cent certain that Belgrade’s the real end user, but we’re ninety-nine-point-nine per cent sure. We’re also pretty sure that being the kind of operator that he is, Fanon-Khayat’s kept both ends of the chain from meeting in the middle. The sellers won’t know who they’re selling to, the buyers won’t know who they’re buying from. Fanon-Khayat remains the vital link – the man that everyone needs.
‘Basically, our man’s decided to throw in his lot with Serbia. If he succeeds in securing them a high-end SAM capability as well as brokering the release of Karadjic, he can write his own ticket. Serbia would reinvade Kosovo on the back of a huge PR victory, and with the Ondine systems in place there’s not a damn thing – short of a lethal, costly and quite possibly unsustainable ground war – that we or anyone else could do about it. The voting public simply wouldn’t wear the sight of Nato fighter jets being blown out of the sky on television night after night, and Milosevic would win. In Serbia, Fanon-Khayat would be a national hero, with Branca Nikolic as his adoring mink-draped princess. And let’s face it’ – Manderson permitted himself a wintry smile as he re-projected the wedding photos – ‘there are worse ways for a balding, overweight fifty-year-old to live out his days.
‘However . . .’ he looked at them all in turn. ‘We do not intend any of this to happen. We intend — that is to say this department has been tasked – to assassinate Antoine Fanon-Khayat.’
A silence of some intensity followed this pronouncement. Slater flickered a glance around the room. Andreas appeared openly amused, Eve expressionless, Leon and Terry thoughtful, Chris almost absent-minded.
‘At present,’ Manderson continued, ‘the target is in Paris, where he is expecting to conduct a meeting with one of MI6’s Balkan desk officers. The subject is the handover of the Cambodia images against the release of Karadjic. For the sake of believability we’ve given Fanon-Khayat the impression that we may be prepared to negotiate some Pinochet-style deal – not mentally fit to stand trial, something like that – but that we draw the line at conceding any illegality in his arrest. Our best guess is that he will go for that.
‘Now the reason that Fanon-Khayat’s in Paris, and that we’re seeing him in Paris, is that he’s there for a series of meetings relating to the Ondine deal. As I said, he’s handling the whole thing himself, so if we can eliminate him before the deal’s done, there will be no deal, no Ondine system for Serbia. Our intelligence is that the whole thing is expected to be wrapped up by Monday – Tuesday at the latest – so we have two days in which to get the job done.’
Manderson leant back in his chair and spread his hands. ‘So there you have it. Before I ask Eve to go through the operational details, has anyone got any questions? For example does anyone think that eliminating the target is morally or politically unjustified, given the circumstances?’
‘Can we be sure that if Fanon-Khayat is taken out the Cambodia pictures won’t resurface?’ It was Chris who had spoken. She looked, thought Slater, like a Guardian-reading, left-leaning teacher from a Hackney comprehensive. He’d have to watch his p’s and q’s with her.
Manderson nodded and frowned. ‘My guess is that he’s flying solo on this, as he is on the Ondine deal. He may have married a Serb, but that doesn’t mean he trusts them. Those pictures are his pension – he won’t have handed copies around to his mates in Belgrade. My estimation, with which P4 concurs, is that he’ll play it straight and give us all of the pictures in return for Karadjic. He knows us well enough to know that if we hear so much as a whisper that copies are still floating about after the deal’s done, we’ll come for him. Except, of course, the whole thing won’t get that far.’
‘Are we certain that he doesn’t know that we know about the SAMs?’ This time it was Leon, the black guy.
‘If he thought we knew about them, he wouldn’t be trying to negotiate with us about the pictures,’ said Manderson. ‘Experience would tell him that the scales were stacked up too high against him. Blackmailing he’d reckon we could accommodate. But re-arming Serbia at the same time? He’d know that was a bridge too far, that if we knew about the Ondine system we’d have to get rid of him. And if he suspected that’s what we wanted to do, then he wouldn’t see us. And he is seeing us.’
Leon nodded. ‘And it wouldn’t be possible to spike the Ondine deal by leaking it to the press?’
Manderson shook his head. ‘Not without risking the lives of some of our most important agents-in-place, no. There must be no sign that we know about it.’
‘Then what will those involved in the Ondine deal think that the motive was for killing Fanon-Khayat?’ asked Leon.
‘A couple of the least damaging of the Cambodia pictures will be found hidden in Fanon-Khayat’s apartment. That’ll send the right message to the right people.’
Leon nodded. His mind, Slater could see, was worrying away at every aspect of the case like a terrier. Terry, by contrast, presented a picture of almost Buddhist calm, and sat unmoving and without expression.
Slater found the atmosphere unsettling. He had been more shaken than he cared to admit to himself by the question of whether or not the hit was justified. He’d have preferred a direct order – waste the fucker and then get the hell out. The soldier was carrying enough of a load without having to consider the moral justification of his actions at every turn. But then, of course, he wasn’t a soldier any more. He was a civil servant.
‘Will this operation save lives?’ he found himself blurting out.
That had always been the question he’d asked himself in Northern Ireland. Would his trigger-squeeze save some unsuspecting squaddie from a bullet between the shoulders, some housewife or child from dismemberment by a nail-bomb? The answer – apart from that terrible night near Forkhill – had been yes, every time. And even the killing of poor, simple Joey Delaney had flushed out McGirk, sent the bastard running from the hills of Armagh and back across the Atlantic.
‘Yes it will,’ said Manderson without hesitation, directin
g the full force of his gaze at Slater. ‘This is not just a matter of political advantage; the target has to be eliminated to avert widescale bloodshed. Without his conduits and underground networks there is no way that a system as sophisticated as Ondine would get anywhere near Serbia. This would mean that as far as air defences are concerned, Milosevic would be stuck with his Russian-made SA7s, which frankly don’t worry us too much. The Ondine system is something else, though, and would really frighten us. If Fanon-Khayat pushes this deal through the Serbs will know that they can re-annex Kosovo with impunity, and then, I promise you, there will be a bloodbath. A bloodbath we will be powerless to prevent. Does that answer your question?’
Slater nodded.
‘Anyone got anything else before I hand over to Eve?’
Silence. A slow shaking of heads.
So, thought Slater. She’s his deputy.
Eve straightened a sheaf of papers in front of her. ‘Right. First things first. The name of the operation is “Firewall” and it is a sealed operation – no one outside this department is involved in any capacity. Nor can we reveal our hand to the French. At best we could expect non-cooperation, at worst – given the touchy-feely relationship between certain of their secret service people and Milosevic – active sabotage. The French, in short, are to be treated as hostiles. We will be on enemy territory.
‘For the purposes of Firewall the team will divide into two groups. The forward team will consist of myself, Neil and Andreas; the back-up team will be Terry, Chris and Leon. Fanon-Khayat’s apartment, which he’s owned since his divorce from Solange, is in the Rue Molitor in the sixteenth arrondissement. This is a smart area, very “bon chic, bon genre” as the Parisians say – imagine Knightsbridge on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Big money, big houses, big privacy.