Close Call

by Stella Rimington

  At the Embassy he found a message from the Ambassador’s secretary, summoning him to see Rodgers. He went along anxiously, thinking he must have been spotted meeting Baakrime two days before, and wondering how to explain this violation of the Ambassador’s orders to stay well away from the Minister. But he found the Ambassador unaccountably good-humoured, honouring Miles with a beneficent smile as he entered his office. ‘Miles, Miles, how good to see you. All going well?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Miles said cautiously, wondering what was coming next.

  ‘I’ve got some news. You remember our conversation about Minister Baakrime?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miles.

  ‘Well, you don’t have to worry about him any more.’

  ‘Oh. What’s happened?’ He felt a sense of dread. Had Baakrime been right to fear for his safety? He should have done more to protect him.

  The Ambassador didn’t answer him directly. ‘Yes, you won’t have to avoid that gentleman any more.’

  Miles stared at Rodgers, unable to pretend he was anything but horrified. ‘Is he—’

  Rodgers nodded. ‘Yep. The Yemeni government has informed me this morning that Mr Baakrime is currently a resident of Moscow, courtesy of an Aeroflot flight he caught yesterday in Istanbul. Fine by me, I have to say, though the Yemenis are not at all amused. They reckon he took twenty-five million bucks of government money with him. I bet the Russians won’t let him keep a dime of it. What do you know about that?’

  Far more than you, thought Miles, wondering what Bokus was going to say when he learned that Baakrime had not needed any of the US government’s money – he was perfectly capable of paying his own way.

  Chapter 37

  There had been no further emails to Milraud from the young jihadi Zara in the UK. When Seurat pressed him Milraud merely shrugged, and said that when he’d met the young Arab both in Paris and Primrose Hill he had not been given a schedule for his next communication. Milraud’s insouciance infuriated Seurat, but he did his best not to show it – he didn’t want to give his former colleague the satisfaction of seeing him get angry, when getting angry wouldn’t do any good.

  But he needed to move things forward. Liz had told him that the Americans’ source in Yemen, the government Minister who had started this whole operation going, had now fled the country; she had also told him of MI5’s discovery that Zara, far from being the Yemeni student he claimed, was a native-born Briton. It was quite possible that whatever Zara was plotting could be well advanced, which made it crucial to find out what else Milraud knew. He clearly wasn’t going to volunteer information, so Seurat had to find some way to lever it out of him. He knew Milraud well enough to know that threats and confrontation would get him nowhere, so he fell back on his ace card – Annette.

  He arranged to meet her at a café near the Seine, a few streets from the Musée d’Orsay. The café straddled an intersection of two streets that met at right angles; its outside tables allowed a clear view of both the pedestrians and the cars that drove past. When Annette arrived, accompanied by her two guards, Milraud had been sitting for fifteen minutes, and was satisfied that he would recognise any returning cars or pedestrians that might indicate surveillance. The coast seemed to be clear, as he expected it to be.

  As Annette sat down, her two guards took up positions at a nearby table. The waiter came over and she ordered a large Campari and soda before asking Seurat, ‘To what do I owe the privilege of being let out of my cage?’

  ‘I thought you might enjoy a little outing.’ He knew that Annette was allowed out once a day for a stroll, but only when accompanied by her armed escorts. Meeting Seurat here, she could at least enjoy the pretence of being an ordinary Parisian.

  ‘Come, come, Martin,’ she said. ‘We both know your concern for my welfare is strictly professional. You never cared a damn about me.’

  ‘That’s not true at all—’ Martin protested.

  Annette dismissed this with a curt wave of her hand. ‘Even if you did regard me as a friend back then, you are not going to let that affect you now. So tell me what you want from this tête-à-tête.’

  Seurat said nothing while the waiter was putting Annette’s drink on the table. The two guards, alert and watchful, weren’t even pretending to talk to each other; they were scanning the comings and goings at the café tables and in the street. When the waiter had left, Seurat said quietly, ‘Antoine is holding back on us, Annette. I don’t know if he’s actually lied to us, but he certainly hasn’t told us the whole truth.’

  Annette lifted her drink and took a long swallow. Putting the glass down, she pursed her lips, as though considering what to say.

  Seurat sighed. ‘I haven’t got time for games, Annette. If Antoine is concealing information, it will come out sooner or later, and then things will go very hard for him. And you.’

  ‘You’ve already made that clear.’ She reached into her bag and brought out a packet of cigarettes – Russian Sobranies. She lit one with a wafer-thin gold lighter from Cartier – he remembered Milraud showing it to him after he had bought it for Annette’s Christmas present years ago. A reminder of more innocent times.

  He said, ‘Yes, but what I haven’t told you is what Antoine has got himself involved in. This isn’t a normal kind of arms deal we are talking about.’

  ‘No?’ Annette said neutrally, but she was tapping the fingers of one hand on the Formica tabletop, and Martin sensed her curiosity.

  ‘No, it’s much worse than that. Your husband would like to think he’s supplying arms to freedom fighters in the Arab Spring, but that’s not the real situation and I think he knows it. He’s helping to arm terrorists – al-Qaeda supporters.’

  Annette frowned and shook her head. ‘You’ve been listening to the Americans too much, Martin. They think anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a terrorist – and that all Muslims are al-Qaeda supporters.’

  ‘Don’t pretend to be simple-minded. What I’m telling you is true. I can’t be sure yet exactly how the weapons Antoine has agreed to supply to these people will be used, but it’s not for any struggle against dictatorship, I can tell you. Antoine’s buyer is a radical jihadi, whose sole purpose is to kill anyone who fits his distorted idea of an enemy of Islam. His mission is likely to be to murder as many people as possible. Innocent people, by any civilised standard.’

  He was staring at Annette but her eyes avoided his face, gazing past him to the street outside. She took a deep drag of her cigarette, then slowly blew it out in a white trail that hung in a plume over the table. She tapped her milky pink nails on the table. ‘Antoine is many things, Martin, most of them good. You may not approve of his life now, but he is as human as you are, in every essential way. I am sure he would never sell weapons to anyone like the man you are describing.’

  ‘He may not have known at first, I grant you that. But I think he’s guessed now and he’s doing it just the same.’

  ‘Can you prove it?’

  ‘No. Not yet. But everything is pointing to the truth of what I’m saying.’ He judged that it was better to be upfront with Annette; if he misled her she would press him until that became clear. ‘What I do know without a doubt is that his customer is English, even if he’s ethnically Arab. And why would an English citizen want twenty thousand rounds of ammunition – and it is even looking possible that it is to be delivered to England – unless he was planning a terrorist attack of some kind? It simply doesn’t make sense if he’s a “freedom fighter” in Yemen, does it?’

  He could see she was taking this in, and beginning to waver from her previous defiance, so he turned the screw further. ‘We don’t know what his plans are, but we need to find out before there’s a bloodbath. You wouldn’t want to have that blood on Antoine’s hands, would you?’ He added more gently, ‘Or on your own.’

  ‘I’d like another drink,’ Annette said loudly, and Seurat signalled to the waiter. Annette sighed. ‘You were always a persuasive bastard, Martin. Antoine used to come home and describe ho
w the two of you had interrogated someone. You know my husband – he’d have been direct and aggressive. But he admired your method; he said you could charm the birds out of the trees.’

  Seurat gave a non-committal shrug. Annette laughed. ‘Still the modest one. That was something else Antoine admired.’

  ‘There was a lot I admired in Antoine too,’ said Martin.

  ‘Yes, perhaps there was.’ She sounded wistful. ‘But not any more. I can see that in your eyes.’

  ‘No. Not any more. Not after what he did. I took that as a personal betrayal.’

  ‘Really?’ She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think I’d realised that – though I suppose I should have done. You were always so upright; nothing tempted you off the path of duty.’ Her face looked sad and drawn as she sat quietly while the waiter brought her drink. When he had gone she sat up straight as though she had resolved something. ‘So back to the beginning – what is it you want me to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Talk to Antoine. If you believe what I’ve told you about his client, and I think you do, then make him believe it too. Forget about jail sentences or clemency or anything like that; I’m not bargaining right now. I just don’t believe Antoine would want to see dozens, maybe hundreds of innocent people massacred because he’d helped their killers.’

  Chapter 38

  Milraud watched as Annette got up from the bed, dressed in a silk slip and nothing else. She took a cigarette from the packet on the bedside table, lit it with the Cartier lighter he had given her years ago, and then went to the window, where she stood staring down at the narrow street that snaked along until, just out of sight, it reached the Seine.

  He sat up in the bed, so that his back was cushioned by the pillows that he’d propped against the headboard. He said softly, ‘Chérie, it is good to be with you.’

  ‘Yes, my darling,’ she said, but there was a hint of sadness in her voice and she didn’t turn round.

  He said, ‘Martin is no fool, you know.’

  Now she did turn round, and looked at him, her eyes filling with tears.

  He went on, ‘He let me come to see you because he knew how much I wanted to. Enough to tell him what he wants, in the hope that he will let us stay together.’

  ‘Yes,’ acknowledged Annette. ‘But better this time together than no time at all.’ She had been surprised, sitting in the flat, reading an old paperback novel she had found on a shelf and trying to ignore the guard who was making tea in the kitchen, when Antoine had arrived. He told her that he had suddenly been told to grab his coat and go for a drive; he’d had no idea that he was being taken into Paris to see his wife. In a rare tactful act, the now-combined force of armed escorts had left them alone, though they were hovering nearby – in the hall outside the flat, on the ground floor with the concierge, and outside by the parked Mercedes that had chauffeured Antoine from Montreuil.

  Milraud looked at his wife, still as attractive to him as she’d been when they’d first met some twenty years before. He tried not to think of what prison would do to her figure, and to her spirited approach to life. It would do the same to him, no doubt, but he had already resigned himself to a long spell behind bars.

  ‘Are there important things you haven’t told Martin?’ she asked.

  Milraud raised his eyes towards the ceiling. He assumed the flat was bugged, especially if they’d let him see Annette here. She understood, and came back to the bed, stopping to turn on the radio on the bedside table. The station was playing Edith Piaf and they both laughed as they heard the song in mid-flow – ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’.

  Annette lay down next to Antoine and whispered, ‘So are there?’

  ‘Of course. But why are you asking now? Has Seurat put you up to this?’ He only slightly lowered his voice; he didn’t care if the microphone picked this up over the radio; he was angry that they were being manipulated.

  She didn’t waver, whispering right away, ‘He says the people you are supplying are much worse than you realise. They’re not rebels fighting in the Middle East. He said they’re al-Qaeda or their equivalent, and they’re planning a terrorist attack.’

  Milraud shifted uneasily on the bed, moving an inch or two away from his wife. ‘How does he know?’ He realised he had not spent any time questioning the intentions of the young Arab he had first met in the Luxembourg Gardens. His initial introduction to the man had come from Minister Baakrime, whom he had dealt with often before. He had simply assumed that the Minister had either been bribed by Yemen’s insurgents to help them get arms, or was actually a secret sympathiser with the rebels.

  He realised now that he had been naïve, but what did it matter? He had never made judgements about his clients, and he had helped arm revolutionaries across most of the world. There was no telling which side was right and which wrong, and if someone in his trade tried to make those sort of judgements they’d soon go mad or out of business. These affairs often ended in a place no one had foreseen. Look at Iraq now, or Libya, or Syria.

  He was about to say as much to Annette, when she put a firm finger to his lips. ‘Listen to me, Antoine. Naturally, Martin wanted me to talk to you; of course he wants me to persuade you to tell him everything you know. I would never hide what he said from you. I don’t think we have any choice. If you know more about what’s going on, then you should tell me and I will tell Martin.’

  ‘But then I have nothing left to bargain with.’

  ‘We are in no position to bargain, chéri. But even if we were, I have to tell you that if Martin is telling the truth – and I think he is – then I don’t want you to help these people. They are killers; they kill children and their mothers. They have no just cause, only hate.’

  Milraud lay back, his head against the pillow, and stared at the ceiling while he thought about this. Had Annette gone soft on him? It seemed improbable – if anything she had always been the tougher of the two of them, more businesslike, never very concerned about the morality of his trade. He knew she was scared of going to prison, but he also knew that she was very loyal to him – and her concern about what this young Yemeni, if that’s what he was, was going to do with the weapons he was supplying was genuine. And he had to admit it did alarm him too – the thought of this character and his followers or colleagues killing dozens of innocents in Western Europe was appalling.

  ‘OK,’ he said at last, though he didn’t look at his wife, but kept his eyes on the ceiling, as if addressing a deity or, he was pretty certain, the listening ears of his former colleagues in the DGSE. ‘I’ll tell him what I know. But it’s not much.’

  ‘I expect anything will help,’ said Annette lightly.

  Milraud turned on the bed and looked at her at last. ‘The originator of the contact in Paris was a Yemeni minister. That’s why I thought this was legit.’ Legit struck him as a funny way to describe the transaction, but he knew Annette would understand what he meant – he had thought he was simply supplying one side of the innumerable civil wars that seemed to be proliferating all over the region.

  ‘I understand. But now?’

  ‘What Martin has told you could make sense. I haven’t told him everything I know. I haven’t told him exactly where the shipment is being assembled, though he knows the country. He doesn’t know anything about the onward shipping arrangements. He knows there’s a British person involved but he doesn’t know that the order is now to be delivered to England. And he doesn’t know that originally it was to go somewhere else.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here,’ he said simply. ‘Paris.’

  Annette looked shocked. ‘So what changed?’

  Milraud shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But if Martin’s right about these people, it means the target’s changed. Now it must be in Britain.’

  Chapter 39

  This time they were to meet in Fane’s office in the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross. As she walked across Vauxhall Bridge from Thames House, leaning into the gusty wind that was blowing off the river, Liz recalled t
he email exchanges between Grosvenor Square and Vauxhall that had preceded this meeting. Their tone suggested that the encounter between Fane and Bokus was going to be as rough as the weather, and she was not looking forward to playing the role of peacemaker.

  Fane’s office was a spacious room, high up in one of the semicircular protuberances at the front of the building. Its two large windows had a commanding view of the Thames – to the right Parliament and the MI5 building on the north bank, and to the left across to Kensington and ­Chelsea and upriver to Hammersmith. Somehow Fane had managed to acquire the sort of antique official furniture usually only to be found in the Foreign Office, and he had added some oriental rugs and a table that he had inherited from his grandmother. The whole effect was of a country gentleman’s study, and about as far as you could get from the bleak, functional office that Bokus inhabited in the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

  Liz knew that Bokus never felt comfortable in Fane’s office, and when she arrived he was standing by the windows, looking stiff and awkward. Fane’s secretary, Daisy, followed her into the room with a pot of coffee on a silver tray with china cups and saucers. Bokus waved her away when she offered him a cup and sat down heavily in one of the chairs round the table.

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ he said as soon as Daisy had left the room.

  Fane took the chair at the head of the table and gestured to Liz to sit down opposite Bokus. He took his time sipping his coffee before saying, ‘Thank you for the email, Andy; I think we are all sorry to learn that your source Donation has left Yemen. And very surprised to learn that he has gone to Moscow. I for one was not aware that he was in touch with the Russians. Were you, Elizabeth?’

  Liz did not reply, and Bokus broke in, ‘Not Moscow. Our latest information is that he’s gone to Dagestan. We don’t know why. He may have arms-dealing contacts there, or maybe the Russians have shipped him off there to get him out of Russia. But it seems that somehow he’s got himself mixed up with jihadis – and got on their bad side; I told you his son was murdered. This is a man used to playing both sides from the middle, only suddenly he was squeezed from either end. The Yemeni government was growing fed up with him; now the jihadis have as well. So he’s done a runner. But instead of running our way, as he would have done if you’d been a bit quicker on your feet, he’s gone in the other direction.’