At Risk

9

Faraj Mansoor,” said Charles Wetherby, returning his tortoiseshell reading glasses to his top pocket. “Name mean anything to you?”

Liz nodded. “Yes-person of that name bought a fake UK driving licence last weekend in one of the northern ports… Bremerhaven, I think? German liaison flashed him to us yesterday.”

“Any terrorist form?”

“I ran him through the database. There’s a Faraj Mansoor who’s on a long list logged by Pakistan liaison of all those spoken to or contacted by Dawood al Safa in the course of his visit to Peshawar earlier this year.”

“Al Safa the ITS bagman? The one Mackay was telling us about yesterday?”

“Yes, that one. This Mansoor-and it’s got to be quite a common name-is identified as one of half a dozen employees of an auto repair shop on the Kabul road. Apparently al Safa stopped there and looked at some second-hand vehicles. Pakistan liaison had a couple of guys on his tail and when al Safa moved on they dropped a man off to list the employees.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Wetherby nodded pensively. “The reason I’m asking is that for some reason I can’t presently fathom, Geoffrey Fane’s just called me with a request to be kept in the loop.”

“About Mansoor?” asked Liz, surprised.

“About Mansoor. I had to tell him that, as things stood, there was no loop.”

“And?”

“And that was it. He thanked me and hung up.”

Liz allowed her eyes to wander round the bare walls. Wondered why Wetherby had called her to his office for a conversation which could easily have taken place over the phone.

“Before you go, Liz, is everything all right? I mean, are you… OK?”

She met his gaze. He was someone whose face, try as she might, she could never quite summon from memory. Sometimes she could recall the dead-leaf brown of the hair and eyes, sometimes the wry asymmetry of the nose and mouth, but the precise collision of his features evaded her. Even now, facing him, he seemed elusive. As always, a subtle irony seemed to pervade their professional relationship, as if they met at other times and on some different basis.

But they never had, and outside the context of their work Liz knew very little about him. There was a wife who was supposed to have some sort of chronic health problem, and there were a couple of boys at school. They lived somewhere on the river-Shepperton, perhaps, or was it Sunbury? One of those Ratty, Toad and Mole places out to the west.

But that was about the limit of her knowledge. As to his tastes, interests, or what car he drove, she had no idea.

“Do I look as if I’m not OK?”

“You look fine. But I know this Marzipan business hasn’t been easy. He’s very young, isn’t he?”

“Yes. He is.”

Wetherby nodded obliquely. “He’s also one of our key assets-or promises to be-which is why I gave him to you. You debrief him, say nothing, and let me see the product-I don’t want him declared for the time being.”

Liz nodded. “I don’t think he’s registered on Fane’s radar yet.”

“Let’s keep it that way. We have to play a long game with this young man, and that means no pressure from this end whatsoever. Just concentrate on getting him solidly dug in. If he’s as good as you say he is, the product will follow.”

“As long as you’re prepared to wait.”

“For as long as it takes. Does he still think he’s going to university next year?”

“No. Whether he’s told his parents or not I don’t know.”

Wetherby nodded sympathetically, stood up, and walked to the window. Stared out over the river for a moment before turning back to face her. “Tell me. What do you think you would be doing if you weren’t working here?”

Liz looked at him. “It’s funny you should ask that,” she said eventually. Because I was asking myself more or less the same question only this morning.”

“Why this morning in particular?”

“I got a letter.”

He waited. There was a reflective, unforced quality to his silence, as if the two of them had all the time in the world.

Hesitantly at first, uncertain of how much he already knew, Liz began to sketch the outlines of her life. Her fluency surprised her; it was as if she was rehearsing a well-learned cover story. Plausible-verifiable even-but at the same time not quite real.

For more than thirty years her father had been manager of the Bowerbridge estate, in the valley of the river Nadder near Salisbury. He and Liz’s mother had lived in the estate’s gatehouse, and Liz had grown up there. Five years earlier, however, Jack Carlyle had died, and shortly afterwards Bowerbridge’s owner had sold up. The woods and coppices which comprised the sporting estate had been sold to a local farmer, and the main house, with its topiary, greenhouses and walled garden, had been bought by the owner of a chain of garden centres.

The outgoing owner, a generous man, had made it a condition of the sale that his former manager’s widow should occupy the gatehouse rent-free for the remainder of her days, and retain the right to buy it if she wished. With Liz working in London, her mother had lived in the octagonal lodge alone, and when the estate’s new owner converted Bowerbridge House and its gardens into a specialist plantsman’s nursery, she had taken on part-time work there.

Knowing and loving the estate as she did, the job could not have suited Susan Carlyle better. Within the year she was working full-time for the nursery and eighteen months later she was running it. When Liz came up to stay with her at weekends they would go for long walks along the stone-paved avenues and the grassy allées and her mother would explain her hopes and plans for the nursery. Passing the lilacs, rank after cream and purple rank of them, the air heavy with their scent, she would murmur their names like a litany-Masséna, Decaisne, Belle de Nancy, Persica, Congo… There were entire acres of white and red camellias, too, and rhododendrons-yellow, mauve, scarlet, pink-and orchards of waxily fragrant magnolia. In high summer, every corner turned was a new and dizzying revelation.

At other times, as the rain beat against the glass and the damp green plant odours rose about them, they would pace the iron walkways of the Edwardian greenhouses, and Susan would explain the various propagation techniques as the lines of cuttings and seedlings extended before them to perspective infinity.

Her hope, clearly, was that at some not-too-far-distant point Liz would decide to leave London and involve herself in the management of the nursery. Mother and daughter would then live in happy companionship in the gatehouse, and in the course of time “the right man”-a dimly imagined Sir Lancelot-like figure-would happen along.

Liz was by no means wholly resistant to this idea. The dream of returning home, of waking up in the bedroom in which she had slept as a child and of spending her days surrounded by the mellowed brick and greenery of Bowerbridge, was a seductive one. And she had no objection to handsome knights on white chargers. But in reality she knew that earning a living in the countryside was grindingly hard work, and involved a deliberate narrowing of horizons. As things stood her tastes and friends and opinions were all metropolitan, and she didn’t think she had the metabolism to deal with the countryside on a full-time basis. All that rain, all those bossy women with their petty snobberies and their four-wheel drives, all those local newspapers full of non-news and advertisements for agricultural machinery. Much as she loved her mother, Liz knew, she just wouldn’t have the patience for it all.

And then that morning the letter had arrived. To say that Susan Carlyle had decided to buy. That she was investing her savings, along with the money that she had earned from the nursery and the life insurance payout after her husband’s death, in the Bowerbridge gatehouse.

“Do you think she’s trying to draw you back there?” asked Wetherby quietly.

“At some level, yes,” said Liz. “At the same time it’s a very generous decision. I mean, she can live there for nothing for the rest of her life, so it’s me she’s thinking of. The trouble is, I think she’s hoping for a…” she put her glass down and shrugged despairingly, “a corresponding gesture. And right now I just can’t think in those terms.”

“There’s something about the place one grew up in,” said Wetherby. “You can never quite return there. Not until you’ve changed, and can see the place through different eyes. And sometimes not even then.”

A spasm of knocking seized the radiator behind his desk, and there was a faint smell of heated dust. Outside the windows the skyline was vague against the winter sky.

“I’m sorry,” Liz said. “I didn’t mean to burden you with my not very important troubles.”

“It’s anything but a burden.” His gaze, touched with melancholy, played about her. “You’re very much valued here.”

She sat unmoving for a moment, conscious of things unsaid, and then rose briskly to her feet.

“A-you’ve been promoted,” hazarded Dave Armstrong a couple of minutes later, as she arrived back at her desk. “B-you’ve been sacked. C-despite heavy-handed official disapproval you’re publishing your memoirs. D-none of the above.”

“Actually,” said Liz, “I’m defecting to North Korea. Pyongyang’s heaven at this time of year.” She swivelled thoughtfully in her chair. “Have you ever talked to Wetherby about anything except work?”

“I don’t think so,” said Dave, stabbing pensively at his keyboard. “He once asked me if I knew the test match score, but I think that’s as personal as it’s ever got. Why?”

“No reason. But Wetherby’s sort of a shadowy figure, even for this place, wouldn’t you say?”

“You think perhaps he should appear on Celebrity Big Brother? As part of the new accountability?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I guess.” He frowned at his screen. “Do the words Miladun Nabi mean anything to you?”

“Yes, Miladun Nabi is the Prophet’s birthday. Sometime at the end of May, I think.”

“Cheers.”

She turned her attention to the flashing message light on her land-line. To her surprise, there was an invitation to lunch from Bruno Mackay.

“I know it’s hideously short notice,” came the languid voice, “and I’m sure you’re already booked, but there’s something I’d like to… mull over with you, if I may.”

She shook her head in disbelief. That was so Six, the suggestion that the day-and the business of counter-terrorism-was really one long cocktail party. Mull? She never mulled. She anguished, and she did it alone.

But why not? At the very least it would be an opportunity to examine Mackay at close quarters. For all the supposed new spirit of cooperation, Five and Six would never be serene bedfellows. The better she knew her opposite number, the less likely he was to outmanoeuvre her.

She called the number he had left her and he picked up on the first ring.

“Liz!” he said, before she had opened her mouth. “Tell me you can come.”

“All right.”

“Fantastic! I’ll come and pick you up.”

“It’s OK. I can easily-”

His words cut airily across her. “Can you be on Lambeth Bridge, your end, at twelve forty-five? I’ll see you there.”

“OK.”

She hung up. This could be very interesting, but she was going to have to stay on her toes. Swivelling round to her computer screen, she turned her thoughts to Faraj Mansoor. Fane’s anxiety, she supposed, sprung from his uncertainty as to whether the buyer of the fake driving licence in Bremerhaven was the same person as the al Safa contact in Peshawar. He’d probably have someone in Pakistan checking the auto repair shop right now. If they turned out to be different people, and there was still a Faraj Mansoor repairing jeeps on the Kabul Road, then the ball was fairly and squarely in Five’s court.

Odds were that they were two different people, and that the Mansoor in Bremerhaven was an economic migrant who had paid for passage to Europe-probably some hellish odyssey in a container-and was now looking to make his way across the Channel. There was probably a cousin in one of the British cities keeping a minicab driver’s position open for him. Odds were the whole thing was an Immigration issue, not an Intelligence one. She posted it to the back of her mind.

By 12:30 she was feeling a curious anticipation. As luck would have it-or maybe not-she was smartly dressed. With all her work clothes either damp from the washing machine or languishing in the dry-cleaning pile, she had been forced back to the Ronit Zilkha dress she had bought for a wedding. It had cost a fortune, even in the sale, and looked wildly inappropriate for a day’s intelligence-gathering. To make matters more extreme, the only shoes that went with the dress were ribbed silk. Wetherby’s reaction to her appearance had been a just-detectable widening of the eyes, but he had made no comment.

At twenty to the hour a call came to her desk which, she suspected, had already bounced several times around the building. A group of photographers describing themselves as plane-spotters had been intercepted by police in an area adjacent to the US base at Lakenheath, and USAF Security were insisting that they all be checked out before release. It took Liz a couple of minutes to pass the buck to the investigation section, but she managed it, and hurried out of the office with the Zilkha dress partly covered by her coat.

Lambeth Bridge, she discovered, was not an ideal rendezvous in December. After a fine morning the sky had darkened. A fretful east wind now whipped down the river, dragging at her hair and sending the litter dancing around her silk shoes. The bridge was, furthermore, a no-stopping zone.

She had been standing there for five minutes, her eyes streaming, when a silver BMW came to an abrupt stop at the kerb and the passenger door swung open. To the blaring of car horns she bustled herself into the seat, and Mackay, who was wearing sunglasses, pulled back out into the traffic stream. Inside the car a CD was playing, and the sounds of tabla, sitar and other instruments filled the BMW’s high-specification interior.

“Fateh Nusrat Ali Khan,” said Mackay, as they swung round the Millbank roundabout. “Huge star on the subcontinent. Know his stuff?”

Liz shook her head and tried to finger-comb her windblown hair into some sort of order. She smiled to herself. The man was just too good to be true-a perfect specimen of the Vauxhall Cross genus. They were crossing the bridge now, and the music was reaching a flurrying climax. As they slotted into the traffic-crawl on Albert Embankment the speakers finally fell silent. Mackay took off his sunglasses.

“So, Liz, how are you?”

“I’m… fine,” she answered. “Thank you very much.”

“Good.”

She looked sideways at him. He was wearing a pale blue shirt, open at the neck and with the sleeves rolled halfway up so as to provide a generous expanse of tanned and muscled forearm. The watch, which looked as if it weighed at least half a kilo, was a Breitling Navitimer. And he sported a faded tattoo. A sea horse.

“So!” she said. “To what do I owe the honour…”

He shrugged. “We’re opposite numbers, you and I. I thought we might have a bite of lunch and a glass or two of wine and compare notes.”

“I’m afraid I don’t drink at lunchtime,” Liz rejoined, and immediately regretted her tone. She sounded shrewish and defensive, and there was no reason to suppose that Mackay was trying to be more than friendly.

“I’m sorry about the short notice,” said Mackay, glancing at her.

“No problem. I’m not exactly a lady who lunches, unless you count a Thames House sandwich and a batch of surveillance reports at my desk.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” said Mackay, glancing at her again, “but you do actually look quite like someone who lunches.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. In fact, I’m dressed like this because I’ve got a meeting this afternoon.”

“Ah. You’re running an agent in Harvey Nichols?”

She smiled and looked away. The vast and intolerant bulk of the MI6 building rose above them, and then Mackay swung left-handed into the convolutions of Vauxhall’s one-way system. Two minutes later they were turning into a narrow cul-de-sac off South Lambeth Road. Pulling into the forecourt of a small tyre and exhaust centre, Mackay parked the BMW, jumped out, and opened Liz’s door for her.

“You can’t just leave it here,” protested Liz.

“I’ve got a little arrangement with them,” said Mackay breezily, waving a greeting to a man in oil-streaked overalls. “Strictly cash, so I can’t claim it as a business expense, but they do keep an eye on the car. Are you hungry?”

“I think I am,” said Liz.

“Excellent.” Taking an indigo tie and a dark blue jacket from the back seat, he rolled down his sleeves and put them on. Had he taken them off just for the drive? Liz wondered. Just so she didn’t think him too much of a stiff?

He locked the car with a quick squawk of the remote. “Do you think those shoes will carry you a couple of hundred yards?” he asked.

“With a bit of luck.”

They turned back towards the river, and after negotiating an underpass came out at the foot of a new luxury development on the south side of Vauxhall Bridge. Greeting the security staff, Mackay led Liz through the atrium into a busy and attractive restaurant. The tablecloths were white linen, the silver and glassware shone, and the dark panorama of the Thames was framed by a curtained sweep of plate glass. Most of the tables were occupied. The muted buzz of conversation dipped for a moment as they entered. Leaving her coat at the desk, Liz followed Mackay to a table overlooking the river.

“This is all very nice and unexpected,” she said sincerely. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“Thank you for accepting.”

“I’m assuming a fair few of these people are your lot?”

“One or two of them are, and when you walked across the room just then, you enhanced my standing by several hundred per cent. You will note that we’re being discreetly observed.”

She smiled. “I do note it. You should send your colleagues downriver for one of our surveillance courses.”

They examined the menus. Leaning forward confidentially, Mackay told Liz that he could predict what she was going to order. Taking a pen from his pocket he handed it to her and told her to tick what she had chosen.

Taking care not to let him see, holding the menu beneath the table, Liz marked a salad of smoked duck breast. It was a starter, but she wrote the words “as main course” next to it.

“OK,” continued Mackay. “Now fold the menu up. Put it in your pocket.”

She did so. She was certain that he hadn’t seen what she’d written.

When the waiter came Mackay ordered a venison steak and a glass of Italian Barolo. “And for my colleague,” he added with a faint smile, nodding at Liz, “the duck breast salad. As a main course.”

“Very clever,” said Liz, frowning. “How did you do that?”

“Classified. Have some wine.”

She would have liked some, but felt that she had to stick with her not-at-lunchtime statement. “I won’t, thanks.”

“Just a glass. Keep me company.”

“OK, just one then. Tell me how you…”

“You don’t have the security clearance.”

Liz looked around her. No one could possibly have seen what she’d written. Nor were there any reflective surfaces in sight.

“Funny guy. Tell me.”

“Like I said…”

“Just tell me,” she said, overcome by irritation.

“OK, I will. We’ve developed contact lenses that enable us to see through documents. I’m wearing a pair now.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. Despite her determination to remain objective, and to view the lunch as a kind of reconnaissance, she was beginning to feel distinctly angry.

“And you know something,” he continued in a low murmur, “they work on fabric too.”

Before Liz could respond, a shadow fell across the white tablecloth, and she looked up to see Geoffrey Fane standing over her.

“Elizabeth. What a pleasure to see you on our side of the river. I hope Bruno’s looking after you properly?”

“Indeed,” she said, and fell silent. There was something chilling about Fane’s efforts to be friendly.

He gave a slight bow. “Please give my regards to Charles Wetherby. As you know, or should know, we hold your department in the highest esteem.”

“Thank you,” said Liz. “I will.”

At that moment the food arrived. As Fane moved away Liz glanced at Mackay, and was in time to see a look of complicity-or the shadow of such a look-pass between the two men. What was that all about? Surely not just the fact that one of them was entertaining a female of the species to lunch. Was there an element of the put-up job about the occasion? Fane hadn’t seemed very surprised to see her.

“Tell me,” she said. “How is it, being back here?”

Mackay ran a hand through his sun-faded hair. “It’s good,” he said. “Islamabad was fascinating, but hard-core. I was undeclared there rather than part of the accredited diplomatic team, and while that meant I could get a lot more done in agent-running terms, it was also a lot more stressful.”

“You lived off-base?”

“Yes, in one of the suburbs. Nominally I was employed by one of the banks, so I turned up every day in a suit and then did the social circuit in the evening. After that I’d usually be up all night either debriefing agents or encrypting and flashing reports back to London. So while it was fascinating being at the sharp end of the game, it was pretty knackering too.”

“What drew you into the business in the first place?”

A smile touched the sculpted curve of his mouth. “Probably the same as you. The chance to practise the deceit that has always come naturally.”

“Has it? Always come naturally, I mean?”

“I’m told that I lied very early. And I never went into exams at school without a crib. I’d write it all up the night before with a mapping pen on airmail paper, and then roll it up inside a biro tube.”

“Is that how you got into Six?”

“No, sadly, it wasn’t. I think they just took one look at me, decided I was a suitably devious piece of work, and dragged me in.”

“What was the reason you gave for wanting to join?”

“Patriotism. It seemed the right line to take at the time.”

“And is that the true reason?”

“Well, you know what they say. Last refuge of the scoundrel, and so on. Really, of course, it was the women. All those glamorous Foreign Office secretaries. I’ve always had a Moneypenny complex.”

“I don’t see many Moneypennys in here.”

The grey eyes flickered amusedly around the room. “It does rather look as if I got it wrong, doesn’t it? Still, easy come, easy go. How about you?”

“I never had a secret agent complex, I’m afraid. I was one of the first intake that answered that ‘Waiting for Godot?’ advert.”

“Like the chatty Mr. Shayler.”

“Exactly.”

“Do you reckon you’ll go the distance? Stay in till you’re fifty-five or sixty or whatever the cut-off is for your lot? Or will you leave and join Lynx or Kroll or one of those private security consultancies? Or go off and have babies with a merchant banker?”

“Are those the alternatives? It’s a grim list.”

The waiter approached, and before Liz could protest Mackay had pointed at their glasses to indicate a refill. Liz took advantage of the brief hiatus to take stock of the situation. Bruno Mackay was an outrageous flirt but he was undeniably good company. She was having a much better day than she would have had if he hadn’t rung her.

“I don’t think I’d find it easy to leave the Service,” she said carefully. “It’s been my world for ten years now.” And it had. She had answered the advertisement during her last term at university and had joined the next spring’s intake. Her first three years, interrupted at intervals by training courses, had been spent on the Northern Ireland desk as a trainee. The work-sifting intelligence, making enquiries, preparing assessments-had been at times repetitive and at times stressful. Then she’d moved to counter-espionage and after three years-or had it been four?-there had been an unexpected secondment to Liverpool, to the Merseyside Police Force, followed by a transfer to the organised crime desk at Thames House. The work had been unremitting and her section leader, a dour ex-police officer named Donaldson, had made it abundantly clear that he disliked working with women. When the section finally had a breakthrough-a breakthrough for which Liz was largely responsible-things had started to look brighter. She was transferred to counter-terrorism, and discovered that Wetherby had been watching her progress for some time. “I’d quite understand if you’d had enough of it all,” he had told her with a melancholy smile. “If you’d looked at the world outside, seen the rewards available to someone of your abilities and the freedom and sociability of it all…” But by then she was certain that she didn’t want to do anything else. “I’m in for the duration,” she told Mackay. “I couldn’t go back.”

His hand moved across the table and covered hers. “You know what I think?” he said. “I think we’re all exiles from our own pasts.”

Liz looked down at his hand, and the big Breitling watch on his wrist, and after a moment he released her. The gesture, like everything about him, was untroubled, and left no after-trace of awkwardness or doubt. Did his words actually mean anything? They had a well-worn ring about them. To how many other women had he said precisely the same thing, and in precisely the same tone?

“So what about you, then?” she asked. “Where are you in exile from?”

“Nowhere terribly special,” he said. “My parents divorced when I was quite young, and I grew up shunting backwards and forwards between my father’s house in the Test Valley and my mother’s place in the South of France.”

“Are they both still alive?”

“I’m afraid so. In rude good health.”

“And did you join the Service straight out of university?”

“No. I read Arabic at Cambridge and went into the City as a Middle East analyst for one of the investment banks. Did a bit of territorial soldiering at the same time with the HAC.”

“The what?”

“The Honourable Artillery Company. Running round letting off explosives on Salisbury Plain. Good fun. But banking lost its shine after a bit, so I sat the Foreign Office exam. Do you want some pud?”

“No, I don’t want any pud, thanks, and I didn’t really want that second glass of wine either. I should be thinking about getting back across the river.”

“I’m sure our respective bosses won’t object to a little… inter-Service liaison work,” protested Mackay. “At least have some coffee.”

She agreed, and he signalled to the waiter.

“So tell me,” she said, when the coffee had been brought. “How did you see what I’d written on the menu?”

He laughed. “I didn’t. But every woman I’ve eaten with here has ordered the same thing.”

Liz stared at him. “We’re that predictable, are we?”

“Actually, I’ve only been here once before, and that was with half a dozen people. Three of them were women and they all ordered what you ordered. End of story.”

She looked at him levelly. Breathed deeply. “How old were you, again, when you started lying?”

“I can’t win, can I?”

“Probably not,” said Liz. She drank her thimbleful of espresso in a single swallow. “But then who you have lunch with is no business whatsoever of mine.”

He looked at her with a knowing half-smile. “It could be.”

“I have to go,” she said.

“Have a brandy. Or a Calvados or something. It’s cold outside.”

“No thanks, I’m off.”

He raised his hands in surrender and summoned the waiter.

Outside the sky was sheet steel. The wind dragged at their hair and clothes. “It’s been fun,” he said, taking her hands.

“Yes,” she agreed, carefully retrieving them. “I’ll see you on Monday.”

He nodded, the half-smile still in place. To Liz’s relief, someone was getting out of a taxi.