Close Call

Chapter 8

It was eight o’clock in the evening and Liz was tidying up the kitchen after her supper. Unusually for her she’d been cooking. Martin was convinced that only French women knew how to cook and she had promised herself that next time he came to London for the weekend she was going to surprise him by producing the perfect soufflé. So she had been practising on herself and this evening she reckoned she’d cracked it. She had just eaten what she considered to be a masterly example – cheese and spinach soufflé à la mode de Carlyle. She was just wondering what to do with the half that remained, asking herself if it would be OK if she heated it up again for tomorrow night, when the phone rang. It was the Duty Officer.

‘Evening, Liz. The Six Duty Officer has just rung with a message for you from Bruno Mackay,’ he said. ‘Would you join him and Geoffrey Fane at Grosvenor tomorrow morning at half past eight for a meeting with Mr Bokus? Apparently something urgent has just come in from Langley. He said you should bring an overnight bag.’

‘Oh thanks,’ said Liz. ‘And did he say what I should put in it? Jeans and a T-shirt, a fur coat or a long black garment suitable for interviewing Arab sheiks?’

‘’Fraid that’s all the message said.’

‘OK. Thanks. I suppose I’ll just have to use my initiative.’

‘Good night then,’ said the Duty Officer cheerily, and rang off.

At quarter past eight the following morning she was walking across Grosvenor Square towards the American Embassy, carrying an overnight bag, when she spotted Geoffrey Fane and Bruno Mackay getting out of a taxi. It was uncanny how similar they looked. Fane, his tall, slim, pinstriped figure, nowadays with a slight stoop that made him look even more heron-like than when he was younger. Bruno, equally tall and slim, equally elegantly clad, though his suit was finely checked rather than pinstriped and the colour lighter than Fane’s navy blue. Bruno’s shock of fair hair and deeply tanned face contrasted with Fane’s pale skin and black hair, but they might have been, if not father and son, at least related. They certainly came out of the same mould.

‘Good morning, Elizabeth,’ said Fane as they all reached the steps up to the Embassy front door together. ‘Glad to see you’ve come prepared,’ he added, glancing at her bag.

‘Good morning,’ she replied, her heart sinking as she noticed that Bruno was carrying a black leather valise. It looked as though wherever she was going, he was going too.

In Andy Bokus’s office in the CIA suite of rooms behind the locked and alarmed steel door in the Embassy, a plate of oversized bagels and cream cheese was set out on the table. ‘Help yourselves to breakfast,’ said Andy, waving his hand at the plate. ‘Coffee’s over there.’

Fane shuddered slightly at the sight of the bagels, and from the corner of her eye Liz caught Bokus’s grin. Liz enjoyed watching Bokus and Fane playing a game with each other. It was a game that neither acknowledged but she suspected both understood. In Fane’s presence Bokus played up his roots as a son of humble immigrants – his grandfather had been a coalminer in the Ukraine and his father had landed on Ellis Island at the age of sixteen with nothing but the clothes he stood up in. Bokus senior had ended up running a gas station in Ohio and making enough to put Andy through college. Andy was bright, or he wouldn’t be where he now was, heading the CIA station in London. But he didn’t like London and he didn’t like most of the Britishers he met. And in particular he didn’t like Fane, who struck him as snobbish, self-satisfied and devious. So to Fane, Bokus presented himself as rather stupid and very uncouth, hence the enormous bagels. Fane responded by shooting his cuffs and adopting an exaggeratedly public school drawl and a patronising manner.

How much of all this psychological drama Bruno was following Liz didn’t know. He was contentedly munching a bagel, seemingly oblivious. But she knew that you could never tell with Bruno.

‘Well, I’ve got things you folks need to know,’ said Bokus. ‘We’ll go down to the Bubble.’ The Bubble was the secure room in the bowels of the basement, purpose-built to foil any attempt at eavesdropping. It always struck Liz as strange and illogical that, as the main threat of eavesdropping in London must come from the British intelligence services, the Agency conducted its most sensitive conversations with the British in their most secure room.

The door of the windowless room closed with a pneumatic hiss behind them and they sat down on padded benches around a central table. The faint hum of the high-frequency-wave baffler had a rather soporific effect on Liz and she hoped that the hastily convened meeting was going to produce something worthwhile.

‘Geoffrey, you and Bruno know something of what I’m going to say, but I’ll just recap for Liz here. We recently sent an officer to Sana’a. He had one objective, to make a quick pitch to a highly placed official who’d been making it pretty obvious to the Commercial Counsellor – a State Department man – both that he was in the arms business and that he could be bought. So we sent young Miles Brookhaven. You all know him from his time here.’ He grinned at Liz; she pretended not to notice. ‘He made a quick pitch and it came good. The guy is now signed up. He’s going to give us stuff on arms supplies going through Yemen, to rebels and jihadis. As you know we’re particularly looking for anything coming out of Europe and the States.’

Fane shifted in his seat, unwrapping his long legs and crossing an ankle over a knee. He clearly found the narrow benches uncomfortable but, more importantly, he couldn’t bear to let Andy Bokus talk for more than a few minutes without interrupting. ‘I mentioned to Elizabeth that you thought young Brookhaven was making progress,’ he said.

‘Yes. He’s done quite well.’ He looked at Liz, ‘You heard he had a rough time in his last posting? Quite badly injured.’

‘Yes. I heard.’ Liz was wondering when he was going to get on to whatever had brought them here.

‘So,’ said Bokus. ‘What he’s got from this new source – we’re calling him Donation – is that there is a European arms dealer who is arranging supplies from somewhere in Eastern Europe, the old Soviet Union probably.’ He paused for effect. No one spoke; they all knew there was more to come. ‘We don’t know what nationality the arms dealer is. They call him Calibre. But Donation says that he’s using someone to help him ship the arms – a transport expert, I guess. And this expert is a Brit.’

‘Are you sure this Donation isn’t just telling Miles what he thinks he wants to hear?’ said Liz after a moment. ‘It all sounds a bit too pat.’

‘Wait till you hear the rest,’ said Bokus. ‘He says that there’s a meeting arranged between Calibre and a jihadi leader, tomorrow in Paris.’

‘Big city, Paris,’ said Bruno dreamily.

‘In the Luxembourg Gardens,’ Bokus went on. ‘At twelve noon.’

‘So that’s where we’re going,’ said Liz, turning to Bruno.

‘That’s where you’re going,’ he replied with a grin. ‘I’m going to Sana’a.’