Skinner's festival

42

Six called just after four. Copies of the Macdairmid tape had been rushed down on the 1:00 pm shuttle, carried by a Special Branch typist. She had handed them over to a motorcyclist waiting at Heathrow, and they had reached their destinations by 2:45 pm.

'Sorry to take so long to respond.'

Skinner thought for a moment that the Deputy DG was joking, but remembered that she had no sense of humour. The woman was rarely flippant, and most certainly never on a scrambled telephone.

'It took us a little while, because we believed we were listening to an Arab. But we were wrong. The reason he sounds that way is because he learned his English in Libya. Actually, the subject is a Peruvian. Our friend Macdairmid has got himself into some seriously bad company. The man on the telephone is Jesus Giminez.'

She paused.

Skinner knew the name at once. He had been shown the file on Giminez, a legendary figure among the world's security services.

The man was an international terror consultant, wanted in many countries around the globe, but most of all by the Israelis. He was known to be responsible, either as hitman or as planner, for a string of political assassinations over around thirty years. His name had run like a scarlet thread around the world's trouble spots until 1991, not long after the death of Robert Maxwell, when he had vanished abruptly from the distant surveillance which the international intelligence community had managed to maintain, tenuously, for a quarter of a century. Some believed that he was dead, but the most commonly held opinion was that at the age of fifty-five he had decided to retire, like any businessman might.

One of the most impressive things about Giminez had always been his anonymity. Other terrorists had become household names, but, to the international media and to the world at large, Giminez had remained unknown.

'Of course, we had no idea he was active again,' the Deputy DG continued. 'God knows what he's up to, but an operation like the one you've got on just now is right up his street. And if he was involved, he'd run it through someone just like Macdairmid, a radical front-man with an axe to grind. One thing about Giminez, his only principle is money. He works for cash only. Big cash. So if he's a player, someone's paying him: not less than seven figures sterling. Can you think of anyone in Scotland with access to that sort of cash?'

'It's possible, but what about contact? The man's a shadow. So how do you set about hiring him?'

'He has an agent, believe it or not – or rather a string of them.

They're contactable through officials of a certain Middle Eastern government with a very dark name for that sort of thing.'

'But if wasn't aware of that, how could someone like Macdairmid be in the know?'

'Well, he is an MP, after all. He does mooch around Whitehall.

You can get anything there if you really want it. Of course, maybe they approached Macdairmid.'

'Meaning?'

'Meaning if your thing up there wasn't hatched in Scotland at all. Not everybody loves us Brits. You should know that more than most. Suppose someone wanted to do us a really bad turn.

We've already got Ireland on our hands as an endemic problem.

Stir up Scotland, then the Welsh, then a bit of ethnic warfare – in Bradford or Manchester, say. Mix all together, and Britain would become ungovernable. Our economy, our whole society would collapse. You know. Bob, I really do think you should catch these people.'