At Risk

64

Footsteps, which she disregarded. Someone else’s problem. She began to drift away again, but heard-as if from a great distance-someone speak her name. Then the footsteps again.

Unwillingly, Liz opened her eyes. She couldn’t remember where she was, but from the even bleed of the light through the thin cotton curtains she estimated that it was mid-morning. She blinked. The room was spacious and its walls sky-blue. Between her bed and the window stood a stainless-steel drip apparatus and an oxygen canister on a trolley. There was a breathing tube in her nostrils, her bed was banked with pillows, and the mattress had been tilted at a comfortable thirty or so degrees above horizontal. From outside, she could hear the distant grumble of jet engines.

Slowly, the sedative fog cleared. It was over, and Faraj Mansoor and Jean D’Aubigny were dead. But parts of the previous evening, Liz knew, were lost to her for ever. The bomb blast and her subsequent concussion had ensured that. Something that she remembered clearly, and which afforded her an obscure gratification, was that after witnessing Mansoor’s death, she had refused Bruno Mackay’s help in returning to the emergency services vehicles. She had walked half the way and then fallen to her knees, and an Army Air Corps paramedic crew had run to meet her with a stretcher. She remembered the sting of the needle in her arm, the soft kiss of the rain on her face, sirens, and blue lights. Then there had been the helicopter’s skywards surge, its engine’s narcotic thrum, and the faint crackle of radio communications. Then nothing.

She pulled the breathing tube from her nostrils. Her head ached and there was a thick, stale taste in her mouth. The temperature was ambient, neither hot nor cold. She was wearing a white hospital gown which laced at the back.

The door opened. It was a young blonde woman in combat pants and a USAF T-shirt. “Hi there! How are you this morning?”

“Er… OK, I think.” Liz blinked, struggling to an upright position. “Where am I?”

“Marwell. The Air Force base hospital. I’m Dr. Beth Wildor.” She had a brisk manner and dazzling teeth.

Liz nodded. “Ah, OK. Um… Can I get up?”

“I’ll just have a quick look at you?”

“Fine.”

For the next ten minutes Dr. Wildor peered into her eyes and ears, tested her hearing, took her blood pressure, and conducted other tests, noting the results on a clipboard.

“You have impressive powers of recovery, Miss Carlyle. You were not a well woman when they brought you in last night.”

“I’m afraid I don’t remember much about it.”

“We call it blast trauma. There are elements of the experience you probably won’t recover, but perhaps in this case that’s not such a bad thing.”

“Did anyone die?”

“Apart from the bombers, you mean? No. There were injuries, but no loss of life.”

“Thank God.”

“Absolutely. You’re police, right?”

“Home Office. Can I get up now?”

“You know, Miss Carlyle, I think I’d rather you took it easy. Why don’t you receive your visitor, and when I’ve done my round, we’ll talk?”

“I have a visitor?”

“Indeed you do,” she said with a conspiratorial flash of her teeth. “And he seems most concerned about you.”

“If his name is Mackay, I have no wish to speak to him.”

“I don’t think that was the name he gave. It was…” she glanced at the clipboard, “a Mr. Wetherby.”

“Wetherby?” She felt an inexplicable flutter of surprise. “He’s here?”

“Right outside.” She regarded Liz levelly. “I take it he’s welcome?”

“He’s very welcome,” said Liz, attempting without success to wipe the smile from her face.

“Oh-kay! Perhaps you’d like a minute or two to freshen up?”

“Perhaps I would.”

“I’ll tell him five.”

When Dr. Wildor had gone, Liz swung her legs over the edge of the bed and walked to the washbasin. She felt unsteady, and was shocked by the face that regarded her from the mirror. She looked pinched and tired, and there was a dark mask of bruising around her eyes from the blast. She did the best job she could with a vacuum-sealed washing pack that she found at her bedside, and feeling slightly absurd and fraudulent, rearranged herself decorously in the bed.

Wetherby came in carrying flowers. She would not have found it easy to imagine such a thing, but here he was waving a rather lurid spray of semi-tropical blooms.

“Can I put these somewhere?” he asked, looking around him with worried, unseeing eyes.

“In the sink, perhaps? They’re lovely, thank you.”

He busied himself for a moment with his back to her. “So… how do you feel?” he asked.

“Better than I look.”

He sat himself a little awkwardly on the end of the bed. “You look… Well, I’m glad it’s not worse.”

It struck Liz that hospital visits were a grimly regular feature of Wetherby’s life, and she felt a little ashamed to be lying there like a tragic heroine when, in truth, there didn’t seem to be anything seriously wrong with her. “I gather there were no deaths on our side?”

“Detective Superintendent Whitten’s in the room next door. He was hit by shrapnel-the bomb casing, they think-and lost a fair bit of blood. A couple of the Army people were also cut about quite badly, and there are half a dozen blast trauma cases like yours. But as you say, no deaths. For which, in large part, we have you to thank.”

“There’s been no shortage of corpses in all of this.” She looked away. “You know about Faraj Mansoor, don’t you? Who he really was?”

He looked at her quizzically. “Would you like some breakfast while we talk?”

“Very much.”

He glanced at the door. “I’ll ask them to bring something. What would you like?”

“I’d like to get dressed. Find a canteen or something. I hate eating in bed.”

“Are you allowed out? I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of that woman with the teeth.”

“I’ll risk it.” Liz smiled, conscious of the faint awkwardness of protocol that prevented them from using each other’s names. Buoyed by a sudden reckless effervescence, she stepped out of bed in her shapeless gown, and twirled around.

Wetherby stood, bowed with ironic chivalry, and made his way to the door.

She watched him go, and then remembering that her gown had no back to it, began to laugh. Perhaps she didn’t feel completely normal.

Her clothes were nowhere to be found. In the locker by the bed, however, some thoughtful hand had placed brand-new underwear, training shoes, a GO WARTHOGS! T-shirt, and a zip-top grey tracksuit. All fitted perfectly. Thus attired, she opened the door.

“Follow me,” said Wetherby. “Fetching ensemble, by the way.”

They stepped out on to the tarmac. It was bitingly cold. In the distance, glinting dully beneath a shelf of black cloud, was a phalanx of Thunderbolt attack jets, with their Gatling cannons pointed skywards.

“ ‘They make a wilderness, and call it peace.’ ”

“Who said that?” asked Liz.

“Tacitus. About the Roman Empire.”

She turned to him. “I assume you were up all night, following everything as it happened?”

“I was in COBRA when your call came through saying that you were on your way to West Ford by helicopter. Five minutes later the police were reporting an explosion with at least a dozen feared injured or dead, and then another report came in almost immediately of some sort of SAS firefight. Downing Street was jumping up and down by this time, as you can imagine, but luckily by the time I got there I’d been able to extract some hard facts from Jim Dunstan-including the fact that one of my officers was down.” He smiled drily. “The Prime Minister was naturally extremely concerned. He informed me that you were in his prayers.”

“That must be what pulled me through. But tell me; I only saw scraps of what happened. Was there time to evacuate the Delves family? One of the police officers in my helicopter was trying to ring them to tell them to get the hell out, but their phone was engaged and she couldn’t get through.”

Wetherby nodded. “Evacuating the area was Dunstan’s main worry, especially as most of the local force was deployed a dozen miles away guarding this place here. In the event he managed to get a warning to Delves’ security people, and they evacuated the pub and got the family clear.”

“Where did everyone go?”

“Church hall at the other end of the village, I gather.”

“And meanwhile we all land on the cricket pitch. Enter Jean D’Aubigny. I can remember her walking towards me. What happened? Why was she walking away from the target?”

“We don’t know. It looks as though she must have changed her mind. She was carrying the bomb and Mansoor had a transmitter. We think he must have detonated it. Explosion followed by total chaos, as I understand it. There was a big helicopter search for Mansoor, somebody reported heat traces around the pavilion, and one of the SAS teams moved up to investigate.” He smiled wryly. “A process of which, I’m informed, you were quite a close observer.”

“I’ll have plenty to say about that in my report,” murmured Liz. “Never fear.”

“I look forward to it.”

The cookhouse was huge-a shining ocean of vending machines and wipe-clean tabletops, thousands of square metres in area. Mid-morning, the place had little traffic-a dozen individuals, perhaps, mostly dressed for sport-and the two of them were the only customers at the long tray-counter. Liz secured herself coffee, orange juice and toast. Wetherby contented himself with coffee.

“You asked me if I knew who Faraj Mansoor really was,” he said, stirring pensively.

“That’s right.”

“The answer is yes. Geoffrey Fane told me early this morning. I came up here on a helicopter with him.”

“So where’s Fane now?”

“Debriefing Mackay on the flight home, I’d imagine.”

Liz stared out disbelievingly over the vast, empty canteen. “Bastards. Bastards! They deliberately kept us in the dark. Watched us struggle. Watched people die.”

“It does rather look that way,” said Wetherby. “How did you find out?”

“Mackay’s behaviour last night. When Mansoor came out of the cricket pavilion with his hands up-and we’d been hunting the man night and day for a week, remember-Mackay barely glanced at him. In fact he kept his head turned away as if he didn’t want to be recognised.”

“Go on.”

“They knew each other. It was the only possible explanation.”

Wetherby peered incuriously at a Coca-Cola machine. “Faraj Mansoor was MI6’s man, as his father had been before him. By all accounts he was a first-class agent. Very brave and steady.”

“And Mackay ran him?”

“He inherited him. Mackay arrived in Islamabad at about the time of the US intervention in Afghanistan, and reading between the lines, he pushed Mansoor a bit too hard. For whatever reason, Mansoor asked Mackay to back off. Said that he was being watched very closely, and insisted that for the time being they cease all contact.”

“So Mackay backed off?”

“He didn’t have much choice. Mansoor was Six’s best asset in theatre. He had to be kept happy.”

“And then the USAF shot up his family.”

“That’s right. A tragic accident or lethal incompetence, depending on your reading of the facts, but Mansoor reads it as revenge. As punishment for breaking off contact with Mackay. So-unsurprisingly, perhaps-he turns, and throws in his lot with the jihadis. His father and fiancée are dead, and some kind of retaliatory gesture is expected of him. It’s a matter of honour, as much as anything else.”

“An eye for an eye.”

“All that, yes.”

“Enter D’Aubigny.”

“Enter D’Aubigny. Somewhere in Paris, at much the same time, she’s telling her controllers that she has privileged information: she knows where the Marwell commander’s private residence is. Messages cross the world and the ITS planners realise that several symbolic birds can be killed with one stone. It’s just too good a chance to miss.”

Liz shook her head. “From the way Mansoor behaved at the end, I’d say that, for him, it was almost entirely personal. When he saw that the task of eliminating Delves’ family was no longer possible, he simply gave up. He was armed, and could easily have taken out at least one of those SAS guys, but by that stage…” She shrugged. “I’d say he saw no purpose in causing further loss of life. He probably didn’t even particularly hate the West.”

Wetherby shrugged. “You may well be right.”

Liz frowned. “Tell me something. If our information about Pakistan was coming to us via Six, and they were suppressing information about Mansoor, how did you find out that it was his family who were killed by the USAF?”

Wetherby regarded her with an oblique smile. “Six’s principal liaison in Pakistan, as you know, is with Inter-Services Intelligence, who answer to the Defence Ministry. Six spend rather less time talking to the Intelligence Bureau, who answer to the Interior Ministry, and whose regard for ISI is, shall we say, a little jaundiced.”

“And you’ve got chums in the IB?” asked Liz.

“I maintain one or two friendships, yes. People to whom I can make a direct approach, if need be. I fed them the name Faraj Mansoor and their data bank threw up a suspected terrorist whose father and fiancée had been killed at Daranj. What they didn’t know, and I didn’t mention, was that Mansoor had been a British agent.”

“So why-why-didn’t Fane and Mackay tell us all this? I mean… we would have understood, wouldn’t we? We would have kept quiet?”

“It’s an information-sharing issue,” said Wetherby. “As Fane sees it, they have to tell everyone-the Americans included-or nobody. And they very quickly decide it has to be nobody.”

“Why?”

“Imagine if Mansoor succeeds. Succeeds in blowing up a London nightclub, say, or doing serious damage to some major defence or business establishment, and perhaps killing a lot of people, and then the world discovers that he’s a former MI6 agent. The damage would be incalculable.”

“And if the establishment and the dead happened to be American…”

“Exactly. It would be off the scale. Much better to keep stumm, get us to find him, and then have him eliminated before he has a chance to speak.”

Liz shook her head. “I’m sorry. I take the political point but I still consider what happened last night indefensible. It was murder, plain and simple. There was no grenade. The man was standing there with his hands in the air.”

“Liz, I’m afraid that’s academic. Mansoor and D’Aubigny killed several innocent people, and now they’re dead themselves. Vis-à-vis the SAS action, there will be an inquiry, but you can guess the conclusion.”

She shook her head again. Beyond the long windows and the even blankness of the cookhouse the sky was a bruised, angry grey. A party of young servicemen and -women wandered in, glanced incuriously around them, and left.

Liz regarded her empty coffee mug for a moment. “We lost, didn’t we?”

Wetherby reached across the table and took her hands in his. “We won, Liz. You saved that family’s life. No one could have done more.”

“We were always a step behind. I tried to out-think D’Aubigny, but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t get inside her head.”

“You got as close as anyone could have done.”

“At the moment her life ended we were face to face. I think she was even speaking to me. But I couldn’t hear what she was saying.”

Wetherby said nothing. He didn’t release her hands, nor did she attempt to take them away.

“What are we going to do?” Liz asked eventually.

“I thought we might get someone to take us over to Swanley Heath and pick up your car. Then I thought I might drive you back to London.”

“OK,” said Liz.