The Geneva Trap

Chapter 11

‘It’s a great story, Elizabeth. But is it true? Or is something else going on here?’

‘Good question, Geoffrey, but I can’t answer it. I just don’t know.’

They were sitting in Geoffrey Fane’s office in MI6’s headquarters building in Vauxhall Cross. The wide greenish-tinted windows looked down on the sweep of the Thames as it flowed by, past the long MI5 building with its shining copper roof, towards Parliament. Today a sharp breeze was whipping up little waves on the river and the tourist boats were rocking in the swell as they turned underneath the bridge to return to their starting point.

On Fane’s desk was the message that Liz and Russell White had composed in Geneva the previous evening. He picked it up and stabbed his finger at it.

‘What do we know about this friend of yours anyway? He says he’s a patriot not a traitor. Wasn’t that exactly what all defectors used to say in the Cold War? It was difficult enough to believe it then – and most of them turned out in the end to be pretty self-seeking – but it’s even more difficult to believe it now.’

‘Look, Geoffrey. I agree with everything you say…’

‘Well, that’s unusual for a start,’ he broke in.

Liz smiled. ‘It’s true. We don’t know anything about Sorsky. Or what his motives really are. Asking for me by name was certainly a weird way of making contact. But it worked. Whatever he is, he’s not a fool. And even if he is the front man in some complicated deception operation, what could it be about? Designed to set us against a third country perhaps or cover up something real that the Russians are doing? Who knows? But we can’t afford to ignore what he says. We are going to have to look into this Operation Clarity, if it exists.’

She sighed. She had some experience of searching for infiltrators – moles – and it was a hard, messy business. Any mole as well placed as this one must have covered his tracks very cleverly, which meant that innocent people would become suspects, and distrust and disruption would be rife.

Geoffrey Fane stood up and walked over to the window. He turned his back to the view, leaned on the window ledge and surveyed the room – and Liz in particular. She looked tired today, he thought, not surprisingly. She’d done a good job in Geneva. Russell White had told him that she thought someone had had her under surveillance as she went to the meet. White thought she’d been imagining it, but he didn’t know her. Fane did know this girl and if she’d suspected surveillance, it was very probably there. They would need to look after her – though she was very difficult to look after. He wished she were more malleable. Together they could be a great team. But now she seemed to spend all her spare time in Paris. He sighed and Liz looked up, her grey-green eyes reflecting the light from the window.

‘Even though it may be a bluff, we’ll have to tell the Americans,’ she said.

Fane eyed her. ‘Why don’t you leave Bokus to me? I think I’ve got his measure by now ’

Andy Bokus was the CIA Station Head in London. He was a big, blunt Midwesterner, an ex-American football player, who enjoyed pretending he was stupid when in fact he was very shrewd. Liz wasn’t at all sure that Fane had got his measure – he tended to respond to Bokus’s pretence of stupidity with his own ‘English gentleman’ act, which meant that they both got embroiled in role-playing and ended up merely annoying each other. Liz would have much rather gone home at this point in the day, but she thought she’d better go with Fane and try to hold the ring. She said, ‘I’d prefer to be there.’

‘Suit yourself,’ he replied sourly. ‘Let me try and get Bokus on the blower now.’