Secret Asset

20

After Wetherby’s meeting, Liz decided to go home once it was clear there was nothing useful she could do by staying. As the lift doors on the fourth floor started to close, a hand intervened and they slid open again. Tom Dartmouth entered, and gave Liz a weary smile. She was tired, too. It seemed incredible that she had started the day in Belfast with her mind focused on Liam O’Phelan and since she had arrived back in London she had thought about nothing but Sohail. She was looking forward to getting back to her flat and trying to get the day’s events in some sort of order.

“What a day,” he said, loosening his tie with one hand. “Especially for you. Fancy a drink?”

It was said casually, but warmly. She was still angry, but no longer with Tom—in fact she felt badly for having been so aggressive with him that afternoon. “Why not?” she said, and glanced at her watch, though she had no plans at all for the evening.

They went to the bar in a new steel and glass hotel not far from Thames House, a venue far slicker than the pubs which were the usual watering holes for MI5 staff. “I’ve nothing against the Compton Arms,” Tom explained, “but I thought it would be a little quieter here.”

The bar was full of well turned-out business types, not the rather seedy bunch of civil servants and journalists that haunted the pubs round Horseferry Road and Westminster. She was wearing the linen jacket she had taken to Belfast, which she was relieved to see had survived its two-day excursion in good order, so she felt reasonably comfortable there. It was the first time she had seen Tom other than in meetings or in the fraught circumstances of earlier in the day and she noticed now how attractive he was. He was a tall man, one or two inches over six feet, and square shouldered, but rangy not muscle-bound. In his lightweight blue suit, a bright tie that any television news-reader might have envied, and the remains of his tan, he was turning a few female heads.

Liz ordered dry white wine and as she found herself almost obsessively crunching her way through a large bowl of rice crackers on the table in front of them, she realised how hungry she was. The last time she’d eaten was breakfast in the Culloden Hotel. She wasn’t sure whether Tom saw this outing as an opportunity for a social chat, or as business.

“I wanted to ask you about Marzipan,” he said as soon as their drinks arrived. “I know Dave was running him while you were off, but you knew him longer.” He took a rice cracker from the rapidly emptying bowl and munched it thoughtfully. “If there was anything in Marzipan’s history that was worth pursuing, you’d be the one to know.”

“I’ve been racking my brains.”

“Of course,” he said. “I was just wondering about his friends—you know, that perhaps he’d said something to one of them he shouldn’t have. Even the best agents sometimes feel the need to confide in someone.”

“He was a genuine loner,” said Liz. She took a sip of her wine. “It’s one of the things we established when he was first recruited. He didn’t have a best friend, or even any really close pals, though he got on all right with his schoolmates. Most of them are at university now.” She faltered slightly. “As Marzipan was supposed to be…” She looked down for a moment to compose herself. She hated being emotional in front of a colleague.

“I know this has been hard for you,” he said sympathetically.

“It’s hard for Dave too,” she said a little curtly, then reminded herself that Tom was trying to be nice and besides, none of it was his fault. She added, “Did you ever have this sort of thing happen to you in Pakistan?”

“Yes, I did once,” he admitted, “and it happened to colleagues too. It’s always awful. The worst in my experience was a Pakistani named Fahdi. He was extremely Westernised—I think he’d been to college in Texas. But he worked in Lahore and had relatives on the Afghan border.”

“Like the Imam,” said Liz.

“Yes, only Fahdi was definitely on our side. He was certain that his rural cousins had been helping Bin Laden. This was after the Yanks missed him in the caves at the end of the Afghan war. I have to say I was sceptical—we were getting about twenty sightings a day, none of which materialised—but he was absolutely positive. So we packed him off, with a GPS transponder sewn into the bottom of his rucksack.”

Tom stopped and took a long swallow of his drink.

“What happened?” asked Liz.

“Two weeks later we got notification of the signal. It was just over the Pakistani border in Afghanistan. We sent in a small group of SAS with American backup from Special Forces. They went in at night expecting a firefight—the area was full of Taliban and Al Qaeda. They’d pinpointed the source of the GPS signal in a valley, and the helicopter landed on the hillside above it. But when the SAS moved down the hill there was no one there.”

“What about the signal?”

“I should have said there was no one there alive. They found the body of Fahdi, pinned by his arms to the ground. In his mouth they found the transponder, popped in like a sweet. Apparently, it was still working when the SAS took it out.”

“How horrible,” said Liz.

“What bothered me most was that I let him talk me round. I thought it was far too dangerous, but he insisted. I shouldn’t have let him call the shots—that was my job.” He looked up at Liz. “So I think I know what you’re going through.”

She shrugged. “I’m all right.”

He signalled for the bill, and when it came insisted on paying, despite Liz’s offer to go halves. “Nonsense,” he said, “I asked you, remember.”

As they walked out of the hotel Liz stopped and pointed in the opposite direction from Thames House. “I’m going that way to the Tube. Thanks for the drink.”

“Would you like a lift?” asked Tom. “I’ve got my car today.”

“You don’t even know where I live,” said Liz firmly. “I might be taking you miles out of your way.”

“Kentish Town, right? Dave Armstrong mentioned it the other day.”

Why was Dave Armstrong talking about her to Tom Dartmouth? She didn’t know whether to feel flattered or annoyed. But drinks had been pleasant, and a lift would save her time—not that she had much to do that evening. Solitary supper, the news on TV, her mandatory five minutes reading before she turned the bedside lamp off and tried to sleep.

“If it’s really not inconvenient,” she said, “that would be great.”

In the car both were quiet at first, as Tom navigated around the evening traffic near Victoria. He said, “I seem to alternate between loving the independence of driving and thinking cars should be banned from all of central London.”

“Compromise. Ban all of them except yours,” suggested Liz, and Tom laughed as he drove towards Hyde Park Corner.

He’s much more relaxed outside work, she thought, without seeming to be someone else—some of her colleagues were like Jekyll and Hyde in their split personas between work and non-work. “Did you grow up in London?” she asked. She didn’t really know a lot about Tom other than a collection of facts from his CV: the schools he’d gone to, the subjects he’d studied at Oxford, the maiden name of his mother.

“Yes. In Kensington.” He glanced over at her. “Back then the middle class could still live there.”

“Then Oxford,” she said quietly.

He seemed taken unawares, then nodded. “That’s right. I did a BA, then another degree. In Arabic Studies.”

“You must have done well to be able to stay on.”

“I scraped a First. My tutor was as surprised as I was.”

“You could have landed a plum job in the City.”

He mused on this. “Perhaps. But banking never really appealed.”

“So why did you apply to MI5? I’d have thought that if you studied Arabic you’d have been natural Six material.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Five does the real business,” he said, with a small deprecating laugh she found appealing. He seemed so self-confident at work that it was refreshing to find he didn’t take himself altogether seriously. “Anyway, it’s your turn,” he said, accelerating through a yellow light in Southampton Row, a manoeuvre Liz approved of, since she hated namby-pamby drivers. “How long have you been in the Service?”

“Almost fifteen years.”

“Never,” he said. “You’re far too young.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Liz declared.

“Well, it certainly won’t get me to Kentish Town,” said Tom as they stopped at a traffic light, and he looked around, puzzled.

And for the next ten minutes Liz concentrated on giving directions, until suddenly she realised they were about to turn into her street and the evening, at least as far as it concerned Tom Dartmouth, was about to end. And to think, she told herself, that before she went to Belfast she had actually cleaned up the flat to visitor standard, a rare feat for Liz when she was so busy at work.

She wondered if she should ask him in—she was still regretting her anger that afternoon, and was actually enjoying his company. She hadn’t learned much about him, she reflected, but he seemed congenial as well as attractive.

In front of her house he pulled into an empty parking space, and kept the engine running. Hesitantly, Liz said, “It’s kind of you to drive me home. Your family must be waiting for you.”

He looked puzzled. “Family?”

“I thought you were married.” Liz saw no point being coy.

“Who told you that?”

“Dave Armstrong, naturally,” she said. “Who else?”

He shook his head with a degree of wonderment. “He was right about Kentish Town, but wrong about me. I was married, that’s true enough. But I’m divorced.”

He said this dispassionately, showing none of the emotional baggage so often carried by divorced men—some bitter, some still in love with their ex-wives, a few jubilant as schoolboys at their liberation from a virago they were all too willing to talk about. What a relief not to hear that in Tom’s voice, just cut-and-dried acknowledgement of a fact.

And partly because of this, Liz thought again about asking him in. Why not? It wasn’t as if she were throwing herself at him; that wasn’t what she had in mind at all. But it would be nice to know him better, see what else lay behind the façade of professional competence. She was on the verge of asking if he’d like to come in for coffee when he looked at his watch pointedly. “Listen, I’d better go and leave you to your beauty sleep. And actually, I could use some myself. I’ve been flat out at work for the last two weeks.”

She nodded, feeling slightly disappointed, though part of her knew she too was exhausted and needed an early night. Then he added cheerfully, “Now that I know how to get here, maybe we could do it again sometime.”

“What?” she asked teasingly. “Another lift home?”

“Why not?” he said. “One of my uncles was a chauffeur. I’m sure I’ve inherited some of his genes.”

Liz was a little surprised, having pegged Tom as middle class through and through. He said, “Do you ever go up to the Heath?”

“Sometimes in summer,” she said. “It’s nice and fresh up there in the evenings. Why?” she asked curiously.

“I used to go there as a little boy with my father. He was absolutely mad about kites, but hopeless at flying them. We’d spend hours trying to get them off the ground.” He gave a little laugh, as if visualising his father’s ineptitude.

“Then one Saturday, my father brought home a new kite he claimed was extra special. It was autumn, and we went to Hampstead Heath right away because the light went so early in the afternoon. The wind was blowing incredibly hard—it seemed like a gale in one of those naval films. The kite was about twice as tall as I was, and I was sure we would never get it up into the air. But somehow we did. And then it flew for hours.” For a moment he seemed lost in memory. Then emerging from his reverie, he turned and gave a quick smile at Liz.

“What were you doing in North London?” she asked.

“Oh, we used to live around here. Though it wasn’t quite so gentrified then.” He gestured at her road. Liz’s neighbours were lawyers, teachers, accountants—the working class in her street had long since moved to cheaper pastures.

“I thought you said you grew up in Kensington.”

He nodded. “I did, but that was after my father died.” He smiled wistfully. “He got knocked down by a car on his way to work. Once my mother remarried, we moved to Kensington. I suppose you could say she did rather better for herself second time round.” He said this lightly as well, but Liz sensed genuine hostility underneath his mild mockery.

They said goodnight, and Tom waited to drive off until Liz had unlocked the door to her building and waved. As she entered her flat and turned on the light, she nodded approvingly at its rare state of tidiness. Tom doesn’t know what he’s missing, Liz thought with amusement, since in three or four days the flat would be back to its normal state of half-controlled chaos.

She kicked her shoes off, poured a glass of Sauvignon from an open bottle in the fridge, then sat down on her one comfortable chair. She realised how much she had liked Tom Dartmouth this evening, though not for the reasons an outside observer might deduce.

Yes, he was good-looking in a kind of rough-hewn way that doubtless made some women swoon; yes, he was excellent at his job, tough-minded yet also sophisticated, highly educated without boring you to death with gratuitous displays of erudition.

None of which cut much ice with Liz. On a personal level what had struck her had nothing to do with credentials. If anything, it was Tom’s wry, levelling sense of humour that first appealed—especially the fact that he didn’t hesitate to poke gentle fun at himself. And he seemed to go out of his way to show he wasn’t as inflated as his CV. She liked the way he said he’d “scraped” a First, though she knew from Watts, the hidebound Merton don, that he’d had the best degree in his year. And he wasn’t afraid to acknowledge his failures, as with the agent Fahdi he’d lost in Afghanistan, or reveal that he felt them deeply.

But the modesty and the sense of humour weren’t really what struck Liz now. Underneath Tom’s easygoing manner, she sensed a deep, lurking sadness that he had long ago decided to keep buried. He is carrying a wound, thought Liz, the way a war veteran might carry shrapnel deep inside. Somehow she doubted Tom often talked about his father—she felt flattered that he had with her.

Don’t get carried away, she told herself, sensitive to the fact that she had no one intimate in her life just then. Still, she was a little intrigued by Tom Dartmouth, and wondered how long it would be before he offered to chauffeur her again. I hope it’s soon, she decided, finishing her wine and deciding to get into bed early. Then she laughed as she had an image of herself, standing outside the fourth-floor lift, with her thumb up, hitchhiker style, but being very choosy about the driver.