Secret Asset

61

In contrast to the morning, the drive back to London seemed to take forever. As they left Oxford, low scudding banks of cloud moved in from the south, dispelling the sun and turning the sky a dull hazy grey. Rain began to fall, first in fierce short-lived downbursts, then in a steady monotonous drizzle. The M40 soon clogged up in an unending line of slow-moving lorries and cautious cars.

Numbed by what had happened, not quite certain whether to be pleased that they had prevented an atrocity or dismayed that they had almost allowed it to happen, Liz and Charles barely spoke to each other at first. Then as if by mutual consent, they talked almost compulsively about anything and everything. Except the events of the day. Favourite holidays, favourite restaurants, favourite parts of the country, even The Da Vinci Code, which neither she nor Wetherby had read. Personal talk, but not intimate: Wetherby’s wife Joanne wasn’t mentioned, and Liz didn’t say who had accompanied her on any of those favourite holidays. It was an almost manic defence against the sheer unbelievability of what they had just witnessed. And a defence, too, against the questions, the accountability certain to come.

Yet both being realists, the avoidance strategy couldn’t last. As they swept down into the large bowl at High Wycombe, Wetherby sighed, cutting short his account of a particularly happy holiday spent sailing around The Needles. “How did you know Tom would be there?” he asked.

“I can’t say I knew,” said Liz. “It was just a hunch.”

Wetherby gave a small snort. “I have to say your hunches are better than most of the rational analysis I receive.”

It was a compliment, but Liz couldn’t help feeling that luck had played as large a role as prescience. And what if Tom hadn’t slipped? She felt in her bones that he would have got away.

Wetherby seemed to read her thoughts. “Where do you think Tom was going to go?”

Liz gazed at a golf course carved out of the side of a hill, and thought about this. Presumably Tom would have left the country, and gone on the run abroad. But where? It was not as if Tom had had some cause or place to defect to—he wouldn’t have gone unnoticed for forty-eight hours in Northern Ireland and, in any case, the IRA wouldn’t want him anywhere near their newly peaceful selves.

“Tom spoke fluent Arabic,” she said at last, “so conceivably he would have tried to slip into one of the Middle Eastern countries, and carve out some sort of new career for himself with a new identity.”

“He’d have run the risk of being spotted. It’s a small world—Westerners in the Arab world.”

“Perhaps he’d have gone to New York,” said Liz. “You know, following his father’s footsteps. I think there was certainly more he wanted to do.”

“More of the same?” asked Wetherby mildly.

“Who knows? But revenge on some other institution, I think. The newspaper who fired his father. MI6, I would imagine. Then he’d probably have had another go at us.”

“He’d have had to keep moving, whatever new identity he tried to assume.”

“That’s true,” said Liz. “But maybe that would have suited him.”

They were nearing the junction with the M25, and the road signs listed Heathrow, which somehow seemed appropriate for this talk of Tom’s plans. “But why did he run in the first place?” she asked rhetorically. “I mean, if he had stayed put, what exactly would have happened to him? Or more precisely, what would we have been able to pin on him? O’Phelan’s death wasn’t solved—no witness, no fingerprints, no trace of Tom in Belfast. The same with Marzipan. The forensic investigation found absolutely nothing to point towards his killer.”

Wetherby smiled wistfully. “I see your reasoning, but I think you are missing the point. Tom fled because Tom wanted us to know.”

“But why? What difference would that make?”

“To Tom,” said Wetherby patiently, “all the difference in the world. For Tom, the point was to humiliate us. He wanted us to be in his control. He wanted us to feel powerless and small. Helpless actually.”

“Like his father must have felt,” murmured Liz.

“I suppose,” said Wetherby. “But my point is, Tom’s motives weren’t political. If they had been, the detonators would have worked.”

“And he wouldn’t have made the phone call.”

“Quite. He didn’t want to kill dozens of people. He just wanted us to know he could have. And he would have wanted to show us that again and again, each time probably killing one or two people who got in his way—like Marzipan. The irony is, he probably would have ended up killing as many people as he would have today with a bomb.” Wetherby shook his head in dismayed wonder.

“So was he simply mad?” asked Liz.

“We’ll never know now,” said Wetherby. “What we do know is that he wasn’t who we thought he was.”