Close Call (18 page)
Authors: Stella Rimington
‘What kind of connection?’
‘Not sure yet.’ Liz was working largely on intuition now; she couldn’t give Halliday any specifics because she didn’t have any. She went on, ‘That’s where you could be of help. Can you keep an even closer eye than usual on what goes on at Slim’s?’
‘Yeah, I can do that. But what am I looking for?’
‘I know it sounds rather pathetic but I can’t actually tell you. Anything that looks stranger than usual. It’s about bringing stuff into the country. Importing stuff that could be arms but it probably wouldn’t look like that.’
‘If you seriously think he’s into weaponry, it would probably be wise to run it by Manchester SB, just to be diplomatic.’
‘Do you have to? I thought you said Slim’s was on your patch?’
There was a pause, then Halliday said, ‘No, I don’t have to if you’re not going to.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘I see you don’t trust McManus either.’
The overnight team outside Dinwiddy House had had a busier time than expected. At twenty past seven in the evening Zara had emerged, dressed now in a black hoody and jeans and carrying a small backpack. He had walked to Euston Station and after collecting a ticket from a pre-paid ticket machine, boarded a train for Manchester Piccadilly. Two of the team had accompanied him, while the Ops Room had dispatched another team to Manchester to be ready to meet the train, in case he stayed on all the way to Manchester.
Which he did. At Manchester the original team handed him over to the new team, which went with him, first on the metro to Manchester Victoria station and then on a local train, from which he got off at Eccles.
By this time it was past eleven o’clock and Liz in bed was on a conference call link to the Ops Room in Thames House. ‘Eccles,’ she said. ‘What on earth can he be going there for? Does anyone know anything about Eccles?’
Peggy, in her flat in Muswell Hill, a few miles further north from Liz, was in on the call and also searching the internet. ‘Eccles is part of Salford, about four miles from Manchester. The interesting thing is that it has quite a large Yemeni community. There have been Yemenis in Eccles since the 1940s,’ she read out from a website. ‘Large numbers came in in the 1950s. There’s a Yemeni Community Association. Perhaps he has friends there.’
Meanwhile the team in Manchester was reporting that they had followed Zara to a small terraced house, No. 31 Ashby Road. The door had been opened by a lady, probably in her late sixties, in traditional Muslim dress, who had kissed Zara and welcomed him into the house. They hoped Liz did not require overnight watch on the house, as it was a very quiet neighbourhood and therefore it would be difficult to remain unobserved. Liz had agreed that they could stand down for the night; it seemed most unlikely that anything was imminent. She and Peggy would meet in Thames House at seven in the morning and decide what to do next about Zara.
Miles woke up slightly hungover, the after-effect of a long evening at the French Embassy, and discovered that his mobile phone was ringing. ‘Hello,’ he said tentatively; the screen read ‘number unknown’.
‘Ah, the croaky voice of a man who’s had a good night out.’
It was Bruno Mackay. At the best of times, Miles felt a mild antipathy towards his British Intelligence counterpart, and right now there was a jauntiness about the man he could do without.
‘What can I do for you, Bruno?’ he said shortly.
‘I’ve had a communiqué from London. It seems there’s been some progress. Better if we talk face to face, old man? I’ll see you at Sharim’s café in an hour.’
Miles made it in fifty minutes, feeling slightly revived after a long shower and a shave. He drove cautiously into the old city, keeping an eye on his rear-view mirror; after their experience on the road from
Donation
’s farm, he felt that his car might be a marked vehicle. Parking in a Diplomatic parking bay, under the eye of a policeman, he walked along the pavement until he saw the wide awning of Sharim’s – and Bruno, in a white cotton jacket and pink tie, sitting at an outside table.
Miles joined him. Bruno gave a commanding wave and a waiter scurried over with a fresh pot of coffee and a cup for Miles, who watched while the man poured out the syrupy local brew. Miles added two sugar cubes from the little clay pot on the table. As he stirred them in with a tiny wooden spoon, he said to Bruno, ‘So what’s the news?’
‘London’s identified the guy they sent the photographs of. The one at the meet in the Luxembourg Gardens that we were going to ask
Donation
about. His name is Samara and he’s Yemeni. He’s doing a Master’s degree at London University, the School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS we call it. On the surface he looks perfectly legit. Only quite obviously he’s not. I’ve been asked to check out his credentials here, and I thought you might be able to help me.’
Why? wondered Miles, but then Bruno said, ‘You’re a bit better placed to ask, I think. If you get my drift.’
And Miles now understood. Official Yemeni–American relations were blossoming. A cynic might say that the United States was propping up a weak local government to further its own interests, but for whatever reason, a request for help from the American Embassy was likely to get a quicker, more favourable reaction than if the Brits had asked.
‘It may take me a little while,’ Miles said.
‘Not a problem, old boy. We’ve got a couple of hours on London as it is. They’ll still be fast asleep.’
Miles’s contact was a middle-level officer in the Yemeni Intelligence Service called Arack, who had been a graduate student at the University of Southern California. It was never entirely clear what he had studied there, and he seemed to know the beaches north of Santa Monica rather better than the classrooms of USC. But he was a useful
contact, since the Yemeni bureaucracy was both legendarily
cumbersome and unreceptive to foreign approaches, and Arack was always willing to help the Americans, provided the request was relatively easy to fulfil and his reward readily forthcoming. He was known to Miles and his colleagues, semi-derisorily, as ‘Sweet Tooth’ because of his love of sugary cakes and desserts, which made payment for his services unusually easy.
Miles and Arack met now for coffee and a baklava-like concoction in a café near the Yemeni Ministry of Defence. Arack listened sympathetically while Miles explained what he was looking for. ‘We just want confirmation that the personal details we have for this student are correct and that he is known to your authorities and is in London legitimately.’
‘Is there any reason to think he is not?’ asked Arack mildly.
‘No,’ said Miles, though it didn’t take a genius to realise there had to be a question about the ‘student’, or else Miles wouldn’t be checking him out. ‘It’s just a formality.’
Arack nodded, happy to hear that this was not something he would have to call to the attention of his superiors. ‘Naturally births and deaths are registered here, as they are in the United States, and there is a department for that purpose. But you might find its office difficult to navigate. Let me make a few calls and get back to you. Give me the details please, and I would be grateful if you could ask the waiter to come over.’
Arack rang Miles just before dinner. There was a shortage of eligible Western women in Sana’a and Miles was about to have dinner with one of them – a new shapely secretary called, appropriately, Marilyn, who had come out to work in the Embassy the month before. He waited impatiently as Arack went through the standard Middle Eastern formalities, applied rigorously even to a phone call. How was Miles? As if they hadn’t met five hours before. Was not the weather good this day, and would it not be fine throughout the evening? At last Arack came to the point, though even then he spoke elliptically. ‘I am afraid I have surprising news for you, my friend.’
‘Really?’
‘We have no record of this man, you see.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just what I have said. There is no birth certificate, no record of an education and no passport.’
‘Could the name be spelled differently?’
‘I have pursued all possible variants. More important, the residential address you say this fellow gave in Sana’a does exist but . . . it is a bicycle shop. I can assure you, there is no citizen with the particulars you supplied.’
Miles mind was no longer on his date with Marilyn. ‘OK. Thank you for checking this for me.’
‘My pleasure. I wish you luck finding this gentleman. But I can assure you, it will not be in the Yemen.’
Damn, thought Miles as he put down the phone, then picked it up to cancel his date. He hoped Marilyn wouldn’t be too disappointed – though he was, especially since he realised there would be a further call to make. It looked like he would be having dinner with Bruno Mackay instead.
Since Peggy Kinsolving had joined MI5, and particularly since she had been working with Liz Carlyle, she had found out a lot of things about herself that she didn’t know. At school and university she had been a quiet, studious, and rather shy girl. She loved acquiring information, categorising it, sorting it out so she could access it and apply her considerable intelligence and her almost photographic memory to it.
These were the qualities that had taken her from her grammar school in the north of England to Oxford, where as predicted she had obtained a good 2:1 degree. No one, including Peggy herself, had ever thought she had the intellectual confidence and verve that makes a first-class scholar.
Her social life at university had followed the same cautious pattern. She had joined a few societies of the intellectual type and one day, showing much daring, she had gone with a friend to a meeting of the college dramatic society, who were looking for backstage staff. Everyone in the society, it seemed, wanted to be on the stage and in the limelight, and no one was prepared to do the behind-the-scenes work. Peggy thought that job would suit her very well, and it did. She brought her formidable information-sorting skills to organising the props, the scenery, the sound effects; eventually she became completely indispensable to any performance.
She would stand in the wings, noticing every detail, knowing everyone’s part better than they did themselves and making sure that at least from a technical point of view the performance was perfect. She loved the drama but only from behind the scenes. She could never be persuaded to take even the smallest role on the stage. The thought of appearing before an audience petrified her.
Satisfied with her 2:1 and pursuing what she thought was her métier, Peggy had taken a job in a small research library, working on sorting and cataloguing the papers of an obscure female Victorian novelist. But after a couple of years she had begun to find the work dull and unsatisfying, and her social life in a small town where she knew no one was practically non-existent.
So when she saw an advertisement for a research post in a government department in London, with some hesitation she applied and found herself working as a research assistant in MI6. A chance secondment to MI5 a few years later led to her working with Liz Carlyle. At first her work had been purely research, but Liz had seen something in her young assistant that made her think there was more to Peggy than met the eye, and she had gradually encouraged her to take on a more upfront role.
At first Liz had given her some simple interviews to do, then she had moved her on to situations where Peggy had to play a role, to pretend to be someone other than an MI5 officer.
This was when they both realised that Peggy had a penchant for acting a part. Though she would still rather die than go on stage and act before an audience, put in a one-to-one situation she could convincingly present herself as anything from a housewife to a hedge-fund manager – and enjoy doing it.
Today she was an electoral registration officer. She’d dressed primly: a mid-length blue skirt, matching tights, sensible shoes, and dark paisley shirt under a navy blue blazer. She carried a clipboard and pen, and with her glasses firmly in place on her nose looked entirely like the local authority bureaucrat she was pretending to be.
At two o’clock that afternoon she knocked on the door of 29 Ashby Road. Most of the area seemed to be lived in by Muslim families, but she knew from the electoral register that this house was occupied by a Mrs Margaret Donovan. The door was opened by a large red-faced woman whom she guessed to be in her early seventies.
‘What can I do for you, luv?’
‘Mrs Donovan, is it?’ asked Peggy, and she explained that she was from the electoral office, confirming the names of the occupants of voting age in each house along the street.
‘Wasn’t there someone here a few months ago about that?’ the woman asked.
Peggy sighed. ‘Probably. There seems to be a lot of duplication in this job. I’ve only been at it three weeks, but you’re not the first one to tell me it’s all been done before.’
The woman smiled sympathetically, and just then the phone in the hall rang. ‘I’d better get that,’ she said. Peggy started to make her excuses but Mrs Donovan waved her in. ‘Come inside and close the door before you catch your death.’ While she went to the phone, Peggy waited patiently in the hall. The woman wasn’t long. ‘Bloody tele sales,’ she announced, coming back into the hall.