Dead Line

TWENTY-SIX

Whatever its ups and downs – and recently there had been plenty of downs – Geoffrey Fane made it a rule not to let his personal life intrude into his professional affairs. But this morning he was finding it difficult.

A letter had come from Adele, his ex-wife, now living in Paris. It had opened cordially enough, but on the second page she had dropped the bombshell:

I have been thinking about the farm in Dorset. Frankly, it’s becoming more and more apparent that Philippe and I are unlikely to go there very often in future, if at all. We’ve been looking for our own place in Brittany and in the circumstances it doesn’t make much sense for me to retain my interest in the farm. Before doing anything, I would of course want to offer you the chance to acquire it – at a fair market price of course!

The farm had been in Fane’s family for generations. Since the war, the actual farming of its six-hundred acres had been leased out to a neighbour, but the house – a large stone building at one end of a valley five miles from the market town of Blandford – had been used by generations of Fanes at Christmas and Easter, almost every half-term, and throughout the summer months.

Not for much longer, thought Fane, since he couldn’t see any way he could afford to buy Adele out. If there had been one consolation in the financial disaster of his divorce, it had been Adele’s willingness not to force the place’s sale. But now that’s just what she was doing.

He didn’t understand why it bothered him so much. He hardly ever went there any more, and the prospect of retiring there in a decade’s time or so had always been more imagined than likely. His son Michael loved the place when he was young – even spoke touchingly, if unrealistically, as a teenager about trying to make a go of farming it. But that wouldn’t happen now, and with the news that Adele no longer had any interest, Fane had no one to share it with.

Perhaps that was the problem. If he’d built another life, even had another family, then he might have felt some urgency about protecting his legacy. Instead he just felt a depressing lassitude. He was engaged with his work again, felt his old confidence had largely returned. But outside it there was a void that work didn’t fill.

Who could fill it?

There was no shortage of candidates: he’d tried some of them. Adele had half a dozen friends in London whose marriages had also split up. But none of them appealed to Fane; they were too like Adele, interested mainly in clothes, restaurants, the latest holiday in Verbier or Provence. He knew too that his appeal to them was based entirely on his supposed status and (he had to laugh, thinking of what the divorce had cost him) the money they thought he had.

No, he knew now that he wanted a companion he could talk to, one with a head on her shoulders, one he could share his work with – something he’d never been able to do with Adele, who’d resented the constant moves round the world, the secrecy and above all the fact that as an MI6 officer he was most unlikely to become an ambassador, so she could never be ‘Her Excellency’. All those problems disappeared if one’s partner had the same kind of job. But he was too senior now, too experienced, to find solace in some junior denizen of Vauxhall Cross, and the eligible women nearer his own rank and age were either thin on the ground or, inevitable in MI6, stationed abroad.

There had been one possibility. Liz Carlyle had always struck him as refreshingly intelligent, forthright, very much her own woman. And very attractive. Best of all, she worked across the river, so there would be none of the competition and the incestuous gossip that characterised romantic relationships between colleagues.

But it had all gone wrong somehow. Well, not ‘somehow’; rather, in the specific debacle of Fane’s own involvement in what he thought of as The Oligarch Operation. He knew some of it was his fault. But no one could have foreseen the disastrous consequences, and surely no one could have thought Fane indifferent to them. Yet a coolness had resulted between him and Liz, just when he had thought they were growing close. And now she was in hospital, and Charles Wetherby was blaming him.

His secretary came in. ‘This has just come from Bruno,’ she said, and handed him a sheet of paper.

Fane found Bruno Mackay just as irritating as most people did. But no one doubted that, given a task, Bruno was utterly reliable. He was going off on two weeks’ leave, but had promised to come back first to Fane with whatever he’d unearthed about Miles Brookhaven, and here it was.

Bruno had begun with Washington, talking both to MI6 there and then to friendly American sources they’d put his way. It seemed that Brookhaven was well thought of in the CIA, and had risen rapidly at Langley. Intelligent, personable – and he spoke Arabic, which made him a rarity.

It was Brookhaven’s Syrian posting that interested Fane most, and he read on carefully. In Damascus Brookhaven had stood out both for speaking the local language and for his eagerness to learn all about Syrian life and culture. With few colleagues to share his enthusiasm, he had made friends instead among the larger community of diplomats, international businessmen, and intelligence officers. Among the latter one in particular became a close friend – Edmund Whitehouse, the head of MI6’s Syria station.

Whitehouse had been a mine of information for Bruno. He was an old Middle East hand; he’d worked in Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia before running the station in Damascus. Whitehouse had been happy to take Brookhaven under his wing; after all, a friendly source in the CIA station was always useful. Brookhaven struck him as enthusiastic but, as an intelligence officer, naïve. He’d been surprised by how little supervision Brookhaven seemed to get from his own head of station.

But Whitehouse had been positively dumbstruck when Brookhaven had met him for a drink one evening in the bar of the Champ Palace Hotel, and told him he’d received an approach from a man in the heart of Syria’s labyrinthine intelligence network. There had been nothing boastful in the American’s account, for he soon made it clear that this potential agent did not want to work for the Americans -he wanted to be put in touch with the British, which was why Brookhaven was telling Whitehouse about him. Whitehouse could not help but look with new respect at the young American he’d thought so naïve; his protégé now turned patron.

For that’s what it had been – a gift, handed over to the Brits, with the understanding that the donor, the CIA, would also be the recipient of whatever secrets this new source turned over to the British. And MI6 had lived up to its end of the bargain, for the most part. Reading the report, Fane thought about the pains he had taken to disguise from Andy Bokus and Brookhaven the source of his information about the threat to the conference – or was it a threat to Syria? He’d been hiding a source from the very man who’d given it them in the first place.

When he had finished reading, Fane stood up and walked to the window. On the Thames a barge chugged upstream at low tide, and a covey of gulls hovered hopefully around its stern. A group of young schoolchildren, marshalled by three teachers, was crossing north on Vauxhall Bridge, probably heading for the Tate. Fane watched them, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

He went to his desk and picked up the phone, confident he was delivering useful news. He got through right away. ‘Charles, it’s Geoffrey Fane. We’ve done some checking into the background of our American colleagues in Grosvenor Square. The younger one in particular. I think you might find it makes interesting reading.’