Secret Asset

15

At 9:18 the next morning, as Liz finished her coffee in the dining room of the Culloden Hotel and got ready to check out and drive to the airport, the watcher in Doris Feldman’s flat rang Dave Armstrong. He was at his desk in Thames House, writing up his report on his abortive trip north.

“Marzipan hasn’t shown up,” the watcher said.

“Perhaps he’s running late,” said Dave, annoyed to be interrupted in mid-sentence—writing reports was for him the worst part of his job.

“He’s never been late before. We thought you’d want to know.”

“Okay,” said Dave, suddenly attentive, for he realised that what they said was right. Sohail was always punctual. “Ring me in ten minutes and let me know if he’s shown.”

By ten o’clock they had rung three more times. There was still no sign of Marzipan. Very worried now, Dave decided to ring Sohail’s mobile—something he would normally have been reluctant to do, in case he was with someone else. He was trying to combat the knot in his stomach, hoping this was all a false alarm.

It wasn’t. The number rang and a man said, “Hello?”

An Englishman, Dave noted, with an Estuary accent. Dave asked quietly, “Is Sohail there?”

“This is the Metropolitan Police. Please identify yourself.”

Landing at Heathrow, Liz bought a copy of the Evening Standard before getting on the Underground. It was forty-five minutes into central London, but she had a seat, something unknown in her morning commute to work.

She had been thinking on and off about O’Phelan. Lying to her, if that’s what he had done, didn’t mean he was necessarily an IRA recruiter, and she couldn’t believe it was Michael Binding he would have wanted to recruit. His contempt for his former pupil had been the one part of her interview she had found absolutely authentic.

Yet what if O’Phelan held truly extremist radical views, semi-disguised in respectable intellectual garb? He was slightly larger than life. He could be assertive to the point of overbearing. Take a nineteen-year-old undergraduate with an undivulged grudge and an itch to be a revolutionary. Combining him with O’Phelan could be potentially explosive.

She picked up her copy of the Standard and looked through the news pages. She felt as if she had been away for much more than twenty-four hours, but the stories seemed wearyingly familiar: protests from retailers about the effects of the congestion charge, delays in the construction of the new Wembley Stadium, an MP arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol in an insalubrious part of South London. Then on page five she saw an item that riveted her:

“You all right, love?” Liz looked up to find an elderly man from across the aisle looking at her with concern. She realised she must have been staring at the same page, glassy-eyed, for several minutes.

When she had last seen Sohail Din, in the safe house at Devonshire Place, he had been wearing a blue anorak, jeans, and a pair of hiking boots.