Dead Line

EIGHTEEN

Liz had dressed up for her lunch with Miles Brookhaven. She was wearing the flared silk skirt and the strappy sandals that she’d bought for her mother’s party. She’d been determined to put Edward in his place with her sophisticated elegance. But as it turned out, that wasn’t necessary. Now she was giving the clothes an airing for a different reason.

But looking at the Closed sign on the front door of Ma Folie, a bistro on the South Bank, she wondered if they’d be wasted again. What had happened to American know-how and where was Miles Brookhaven? When he’d rung to arrange lunch, he’d said he’d booked the restaurant. ‘You’ll love the place. The food’s so good you could be in France.’ You certainly could, thought Liz now, since like many of its French counterparts, Ma Folie turned out to be closed for the entire month of August.

She was wondering what to do next when she heard footsteps hurrying along the pavement, and saw Miles approaching.

‘There you are!’ he cried, with such a friendly smile that Liz couldn’t be annoyed. He cut an eye-catching figure in a light grey summer suit with a bright blue shirt and yellow polka dot tie. Gesturing towards the bistro, ‘I take it you’ve seen the bad news’, he said. ‘But never mind: I’ve got an alternative I think you might enjoy. I hope you have a head for heights.’

Twenty minutes later Liz was a third of the way up the London Eye, sipping a glass of fizz. Miles had booked a private ‘pod’ with a champagne lunch.

The ascent of their capsule was so gradual that they didn’t seem to be moving at all, though Liz noticed that the top of Big Ben, which a few minutes before had been at eye level, was now below them. It was a perfect day for the Eye, sunny and clear, and all that was preventing Liz enjoying herself was the thought of how much this must have cost. Had Miles paid for it himself or was this on the expenses of the CIA station in Grosvenor Square? She suspected the latter and if she was right, why was she worthy of such extravagant cultivation? What were they hoping to get out of her?

‘I have a small confession to make,’ she said, as Miles offered her a plate of smoked salmon sandwiches.

‘What’s that?’

‘I’ve never been on the Eye before.’

He laughed. ‘Most New Yorkers have never been up the Statue of Liberty. Now have some lunch.’

She sat down on the banquette next to him. ‘Is that where you’re from – New York?’

‘Nothing so flash. I am a native of Hartford, Connecticut.’ He paused, then added with a smile, ‘The insurance capital of America. As interesting as it sounds.’

‘How long have you been with the Agency?’

‘Five years. I joined two years after 9/11. I graduated from Yale and was doing an MA in international relations at Georgetown. Being virtually next door, it’s a natural recruiting stop for Langley. Plus, I speak Arabic… I’m sure that’s why the Agency was interested in me in the first place.’

‘It’s quite unusual for an American to know Arabic, isn’t it? No offence.’

‘None taken. You’re quite right – when I joined you could count the number of Arabic speakers in the CIA on the fingers of one hand. Seven years on, you now need two hands to count them.’

‘How did you get interested in it?’

‘My father was an insurance broker; he specialised in oil tankers. One summer he took all of us with him on one of the super tankers. We went all around the Gulf, then through the Suez Canal. I just fell in love with the region, and the language.’ He gave a shy grin.

‘Is this your first posting abroad?’

‘I was in Syria for three years. In Damascus.’ He looked out of the pod’s window dreamily. ‘It’s the most beautiful country, Liz. Much maligned by my countrymen.’

Even sitting down, Liz could see the distant suburbs to the north and south come into view. From the Eye, the city was curiously flattened, stretching out like a pancake in every direction.

She said, ‘London must seem very humdrum. A different world altogether.’

‘Not really. Sometimes it seems half the Middle East has moved here.’ Miles stood up and pointed west towards the horizon. They were at the apex of the Eye’s trajectory and seemed dizzyingly high. ‘What is that? It looks like a castle.’

Liz said drily, ‘Well done. It’s Windsor Castle.’

‘Of course it is.’ He laughed. ‘And down there are two other fortresses.’ He pointed down at the long block of Thames House on the north bank, its copper roof shining gold in the sun, and a little further along, on the South Bank, the trendy green and white lines of MI6’s postmodernist towers.

After a pause he said, ‘Andy Bokus, my head of station – you saw him at the meeting the other day – Andy says the French have complained for years that even though London is a hub of Middle East terrorist activity, you guys have been far too slow to get onto it. He says he thinks they’re right.’

‘Do you agree with him?’ asked Liz. She’d heard that view too often to react.

‘No. I don’t. I think you do a good job between you. It must be a nightmare trying to keep track of all the foreigners you have here, each with a different agenda. And it’s your side that has come up with this threat to the peace conference. I suppose that came from a source here?’ With his back to her, Miles looked out through the window of the capsule.

Liz said nothing. If Geoffrey Fane hadn’t told the Americans where the information came from, she certainly wasn’t going to. She was surprised at Miles’s crude approach. They must think I was born yesterday, she thought. Maybe this style of intelligence gathering worked well in Damascus lush up your potential source and then pop the question but he’ll have to get a lot more subtle if he’s going to be successful here. She wondered with a smile whether Andy Bokus would refuse to pay the bill for lunch if Miles came back empty-handed.

The silence dragged on. Liz had done enough interviews to know about silences – this was one she was not going to break. Eventually Miles said, ‘I guess we just have to watch for anything unusual that crops up. I know, for instance, that there’s at least one senior intelligence officer Damascus has sent over here recently.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘He’s called Ben Ahmad. He was a senior counterespionage officer in Syria. His presence here doesn’t make much sense to me.’

But it did to Liz. Brookhaven didn’t know that the threat to the conference came from anti-Syrian forces – according to the MI6 source in Cyprus. For that reason, a counterespionage specialist was precisely what Damascus would be sending. Backed up by the muscle Wally Woods and his team had seen arriving at Halton Heights.

They were slowly descending now, the buildings below seeming to grow larger as they grew closer. Miles was tidying up the lunch things while Liz thought about what he’d said. Yes, Ben Ahmad would be worth having a look at, she decided, making a mental note.

When they left the Eye the river was full of boats, taking advantage of the fine weather. ‘Back to the farm?’ he asked, and she smiled at the Americanism, then nodded.

‘Me too. I’ll walk with you.’

They went along the South Bank, with its view of Parliament across the river. Miles said, ‘We haven’t talked about you at all. When did you join your service?’

As they walked, she gave him her own potted history -how she’d answered an advert initially, then found herself progressing through interviews until suddenly she had been offered a job. She’d had no specialist expertise, and would never have predicted during her university years that MI5 was where she would end up.

‘You must be doing very well there.’

She shrugged. She liked Miles, in spite of his rather crude intelligence-gathering technique, but she didn’t need his flattery. She knew she was good at her work: she had strong analytic skills, worked well in the field (especially when interviewing people), and could get along with almost everyone – except, she thought, people like Bruno Mackay, but she hadn’t met many of those. Any pride she took was always tempered by the realisation that her work was never done, and that the successful resolution of one case just meant the introduction of a new challenge. But that was what made it all so interesting.

They’d reached Lambeth Bridge, and Liz stopped. ‘I’d better cross here,’ she said. ‘Thank you for lunch.’

‘A little unorthodox.’

‘It was fun,’ she said simply.

‘How about dinner sometime?’ Miles seemed slightly nervous.

‘I’d like that.’

As she crossed Lambeth Bridge, watching two barges adroitly miss each other just upstream, she wondered about Miles. Asking her to dinner seemed unequivocal enough, but was it all part of a CIA attempt to cultivate her? If it was, it didn’t matter. She felt quite confident that she could see Miles coming, well, miles off. She had a date, she thought, the first in some time. Nice, but she wasn’t going to get very excited. More interesting, for now at least, was this news of a Syrian counter-intelligence officer in London.