Fortress

13

Watching this exchange from his car-pool Mondeo, parked on the other side of the apron, James Woolf bit into his cheeseburger without lowering his binoculars and smiled. Even though a fine rain blurred his view, he could tell by the body language how badly the encounter was going. As the two men parted, Ashton in his Range Rover back to the Lines, Buckingham towards the Europcar booth in the terminal, Woolf dropped the remains of the burger into the bag in his lap, screwed it up, threw it into the passenger footwell and speed-dialled Stephen Mandler.

‘Woolf, what a surprise.’

There was a familiar weariness in the boss’s voice that he had learned to ignore.

‘I just wondered if you’d had a chance to read my last briefing.’

There was a muffled exchange while Mandler shooed someone out of his office. ‘I’ve got it here. Give me a minute.’

A soft clicking came down the phone: Mandler’s tongue tapping the roof of his mouth, which he often did when scanning Woolf’s latest missives. There followed a long sigh. ‘You really are rather a cunt, aren’t you, James?’

Woolf said nothing.

‘If I were Buckingham, I think I’d want to punch you very hard in the face. The man’s whole life is the SAS. His part in Eurostar was exemplary. Wouldn’t it have been more decent to just take him aside and make him an offer?’

Mandler had taken Woolf to task before for his over-elaborate schemes, but Woolf had already rehearsed his answer. ‘That would have meant involving his CO — too much of a risk. There can’t be any suspicion. This way the whole world thinks it’s all for real, including Buckingham.’

There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. Woolf knew what was going on. Mandler was more than just his boss: he was his mentor and his protector, but there were limits to how far the old man would go to protect his protégé. Everyone who managed Woolf thought him a handful. Expelled from more than one school, sent down from Oxford and sacked from the BBC, he intimidated some with his intellect, while for others it was his brutal intolerance of inferiors that had dogged his career. Only MI5, his last-chance saloon, had managed to accommodate him, and then only with Mandler’s patronage. And there, as in every job before, his seemingly wilful determination to take the opposite view, which the DG could only describe as pathological, got right up the nose of the staff. That, and his lack of grace, had on more than one occasion brought aggrieved colleagues to Mandler’s door. ‘You’re playing with fire, Woolf, you know that.’

Woolf didn’t respond.

‘Let me spell it out. You are accusing British ex-servicemen of terrorism — on British soil — and you’re proposing to place an SAS sergeant with an exemplary record among them to help you join up the dots.’

Getting it wrong wouldn’t just be Woolf’s undoing: it would be Mandler’s head as well.

‘I think we’re going to have to take some soundings before I let you off the leash. All right?’