At Risk

47

But why this man?” asked Liz. “Why send this particular man? He’s never been here, he’s got no family here… As far as we know he’s got no connection to Britain whatsoever.”

“I can’t answer that question,” said Mackay. “I genuinely have no idea. He certainly never came to our attention in Pakistan. If he was a player out there, it was at much too low a level to show up on our radar. But then I’m afraid that’s how things were. There was a very high noise-to-signal ratio.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that while there were any number of overexcited guys on street corners who were happy to scream and shout and burn the Stars and Stripes-especially if there was a CNN crew around-there were rather fewer who translated their resentment into direct action. If Pakistani agents were clocking every garage hand that al Safa so much as looked at, then they were doing what every agent has done since time immemorial-padding their reports to make it look like they were worth their salaries.”

“But they were right about Mansoor. Right to have him on file, at least.”

“So it turns out. But I’d guess that that’s more coincidence than inside knowledge.”

They were driving in Mackay’s BMW to the Marwell USAF base. The MI6 man had returned from Mildenhall to Swanley Heath shortly after midday, and after swapping phone numbers with Jamie Kersley, the SAS captain (who, it turned out, was also an old Harrovian), and sitting down for a ten-minute sandwich lunch with Liz and the police team, had prepared to leave for the last, and nearest, of the three USAF bases. Mackay had asked Liz if she felt like coming too, and with both terrorists positively identified but with no other positive leads it had seemed as constructive a course of action as any other. Thanks in part to the atrocious weather, the search for D’Aubigny and Mansoor had stalled, despite the arrival of teams from the regular and Territorial Army.

By 1:45, finally, the weather was showing signs of letting up. The rain had almost stopped and the hard battleship grey of the sky had softened to a paler blur.

“They’ll make a mistake,” said Mackay confidently. “They almost always do. Someone up there will spot them.”

“You think they’re still contained in the search area?”

“I think they’ve got to be. I’d back Mansoor to make it through alone, but not the two of them.”

“Don’t underestimate D’Aubigny,” said Liz, obscurely irritated. “This is not some thrill-seeking teenage bimbo, but a fully trained graduate of the North West Frontier camps. If either of the two has made mistakes so far, it’s Mansoor. He got himself jumped by Ray Gunter and ended up leaving us vital ballistic evidence, and I’ll bet you anything you like it was him who killed Elsie Hogan this morning, too.”

“Do I detect a note of empathy there? Admiration, even?”

“No, not an ounce. I think that she’s a killer too, almost certainly.”

“What tells you that?”

“I’m beginning to get a sense of who she is and how she operates. What I want is for her to start feeling twenty-four-hour pressure-the sense that she can’t afford to rest, can’t afford to stop, can’t even afford to think. I want it on top of the pressure that’s already there, the sense of being torn between two utterly opposing worlds.”

“She doesn’t seem very torn to me.”

“Outside, maybe not. Inside, believe me, she’s being pulled apart, and that’s what makes her so dangerous. The need to prove to herself, through violent action, that she’s committed to this… to this militant path.”

He permitted himself an oblique smile. “So would you rather the rest of us just withdrew, and left the two of you to get on with it?”

“Funny guy. In any campaign, the first stronghold that you have to occupy is your enemy’s consciousness.”

“That sounds like a quote.”

“It is a quote. Feliks Dzerzhinsky.”

“Founder of the KGB. A suitable mentor.”

“I like to think so.”

Mackay put his foot down to pass a green MGB. They had just passed through the village of Narborough. “I had a car a bit like that once,” he said. “An old ’74 MG Midget. Bought it for five hundred quid and restored it myself. God, but that was a beautiful car. Teal blue, tan interior, chrome bumpers…”

“And a real babe magnet, I’m sure,” said Liz. “All those Moneypennys.”

“Well, it didn’t put them off, that’s for sure.” He looked pensive for a moment. “The guy we’re going to see, just to put you in the picture, is a man named Delves. He’s a Brit, because Marwell is nominally an RAF station, but obviously he’s being kept fully in the picture about the progress of the hunt for Mansoor and D’Aubigny. The American commander is a USAF colonel called Greeley.”

“So is this more than just a courtesy call?”

“Not just. We have to assume our terrorists have done a very thorough recce of their target, whatever it is. Or possibly that someone else has done the recce on their behalf. Either way, we have to look at the station and the security setup through terrorist eyes. Put ourselves in their place. Decide what the weak spots are. Decide what we’d go for.”

“Did you come to any conclusions from the other two stations?”

“Only that the security was damn near impassable. My first thought was that I’d go for a SAM-a surface-to-air missile attack. As you know, there are still quite a lot of Stinger systems in ITS hands. But I found I wouldn’t be able to get anything like close enough to any of the runways. I wondered about concealing a bomb in the car of someone who lived off-base and then detonating it remotely when it had been driven into camp, but I discovered that all off-base personnel are given a strict car search routine-a proper, detailed ten-minute job, not just a quick flash with a mirror on a stick-and they stick to it. None of this stuff is abstract to these guys, believe you me. Those bases, from what I’ve seen, are sewn up tighter than a rat’s proverbial.”

“All security can be beaten,” said Liz.

“Agreed. And the people we’re after wouldn’t be in play if there wasn’t a weak spot somewhere. All I’m saying is that I haven’t found it.”

“Why have they sent Mansoor, that’s what I want to know,” said Liz. “What’s his skill? What’s his speciality? Do you think the fact that he worked in a garage has got anything to do with it?”

“If he was a player when he was working at that place-and they’re not garages in the sense we know them, so much as truck stops-it would have been more to do with keeping a lookout, seeing who came and went, that sort of thing. Off the top of my head I’d guess that the Sher Babar people probably sold a few fifth-hand jeeps and reconditioned engines, but that their real business was running people and weapons over the border into Afghanistan. They may well have had a hand in the heroin business, too. You can’t separate all that stuff out over there. What Mansoor wasn’t, and I can pretty much guarantee you this, was a qualified repair guy with a framed certificate from Ford or Toyota.”

“So could he be a suicide volunteer, do you think?”

“I guess we have to assume so, with the D’Aubigny girl here to steer him on to his target.”

“If that’s the case, why was there an arrangement made to ship him out again after the job? Remember what Mitchell said? That the special was to be taken back to Germany in a month’s time? And why’s he carrying a sophisticated weapon like a PSS? What’s he waiting for?”

“To take your questions in order, maybe the return voyage is to get the girl out. The PSS suggests that he’s going to be hitting a target that’s got security on it, and probably at night. And maybe he was waiting in Dersthorpe-which sadly I never had the privilege of visiting-to take delivery of some sort of device.”

“Don’t know, don’t know and don’t know, then,” replied Liz testily.

Mackay smiled his breezy smile and stretched. “That’s about the shape and size of it!”