Dead Line (20 page)

‘Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, General,’ Oakes said.

The director nodded, but his gaze remained locked on the grass plaza below. It was as if he smelled trouble brewing, and wanted to take his time before following the scent.

General Gerry Harding was a West Point graduate who had risen to be one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, having served with distinction at the tail end of the Vietnam War, and been a senior commander in the first Iraq War. Showing an aptitude for Washington infighting, he had then served administrations of different political stripes, first as number two to the UN Ambassador, now as director of the CIA.

His appointment had been a sudden, unplanned affair, since the President’s first choice - an obvious political appointment, a man with neither military nor intelligence experience - had fallen at the first hurdle of Senate approval. Harding had sailed through, since his war record had made him an all-American hero, and the only partisan ideology he had ever evinced was ruthlessness.

Now he turned around and eased his long frame into his high-backed leather chair. He pushed it back easily from the desk, then stretched his legs out in front of him.

‘What’s on your mind, Ty?’ he asked, with an edge that poked out through the folksy veneer.

‘I’ve had a visit from our British friends. Their director of counter espionage - Charles Wetherby. He’s an old hand, and a good one. They think there’s a leak of information about the threat to the Gleneagles conference. You’ll have seen the report on that, General. One of their officers working on the lead has been attacked. It seems they’ve been following a Mossad agent operating in London.’ He said significantly, ‘Danny Kollek.’

‘Kollek?’ Harding’s equanimity was fast receding. ‘How the hell did they get onto him?’

‘I don’t know. He didn’t say. Kollek’s undeclared, which has the Brits’ dander up. They don’t trust the Israelis. And unfortunately, their surveillance found Kollek meeting with one of our own.’

‘Andy Bokus runs him, doesn’t he? You mean they saw them together?’

‘That’s what makes it so difficult. The photographs the Brits took show Kollek meeting Andy. It was hard for me to explain that away to Wetherby. I didn’t know what to tell him.’

Harding thought hard for a moment. ‘How about the truth?’

‘I can do that. But I figured I needed your approval first.’

‘You’ve got it.’

Oakes hesitated before saying, ‘It will involve a fair amount of risk.’

‘How’s that? You don’t trust the Brits?’

Oakes shrugged. ‘It’s not that. They’re hyper-anxious about this conference. It’s top of their priorities. They’d tell the Israelis anything, even that we’re running one of their people, if they thought it would help them protect the conference. That could do us a lot of damage. Mossad gives us some very valuable intelligence. They’ll close up like clams if they find out we’ve been running Kollek.’

He could see the General calculating this. Harding was relentlessly, clinically logical, something not always true of the directors Oakes had known. Harding said, ‘What if we throw them a bone?’

‘Who, the British?’

‘No. Mossad. If there isn’t much more we can get out of Kollek, maybe we should just turn him over to his own service. We can say he approached us, and we turned him down. That might earn us some brownie points in Tel Aviv.’

Oakes was appalled. He struggled to hide his outrage at the suggestion they throw an agent to the wolves. The logistics of what Harding was proposing were impossible - Mossad would see through the subterfuge at once - but that was not what bothered Oakes the most. He prided himself on his realism, but he also held firm to certain principles. Foremost among them was a loyalty to his agents, especially penetration agents, who risked their lives to help.

He knew any argument with Harding would all too easily be lost. So he said slowly, ‘Not sure that would work, General. And anyway, I don’t think we’ve got the best out of Kollek yet. It would be a pity to let him go prematurely.’ He thought ruefully of what ‘let him go’ would mean for the Israeli, once put under Mossad’s notorious methods of questioning.

Harding seemed to think about this, then glanced at his diary, open on the desk top before him. He looked intently at his watch, and Oakes realised his time was up.

‘Okay, Ty, let’s keep him in place then. You can come clean with the Brits, but make it clear we expect them to keep it to themselves. If they tell the Israelis, then we might as well have got some credit by telling them ourselves.’

THIRTY-FIVE

Aleppo had told no one where he was going. He would be coming here again in three weeks’ time, but that would be official and with colleagues. Now he needed to see the lay of the land for himself. He had his own agenda.

He caught the train at King’s Cross, and promptly fell asleep for three hours. He was tired. Although his meetings rarely lasted long, the tension and the painstaking counter-surveillance before and after each rendezvous exhausted him.

He woke up in Northumberland, or so the old man across the aisle was telling his wife, and he looked out of the window as the countryside grew hilly, wilder, starker. He didn’t understand the British: if he’d been in charge, he would have placed the bulk of the population up here, rather than in the tame, cramped environs of the Home Counties.

The border came and went unnoticed and it was only as he heard the train guard announce Edinburgh that he knew he was in Scotland. As the train left the city behind, Aleppo, knowing he was nearly at his destination, watched intently, noting with surprise the rolling landscape, soft and agricultural. He had expected crags and mountains; they formed his image of Scotland.

But when he left the train at a small station further north, an hour later, he could see the Cairngorms in the distance. There were no taxis in this remote place, but a minibus waited in the small station yard to pick up Aleppo and the two obviously American couples, laden with luggage and golf clubs, who left the train with him. The driver, a plump man with a uniform cap, was chatty.

‘Here for the golf?’ he asked amiably, eyeing his passengers in the mirror.

Aleppo didn’t feel the need to reply as his fellow passengers were only too willing to talk. They said they were.

‘Greens are very quick just now,’ said the driver.

‘I’ve booked a hack with the riding school,’ said one of the women.

‘We’re forecast lovely weather. You’ll get great views of the hills out there.’ They chatted on as they drove towards the setting sun, which was casting the nearby low hills in a rose-coloured light.

Soon, the bus turned in between two low stone walls surmounted with gold letters:
Gleneagles
.

A vast golf course lay to the left of the drive, its clubhouse a handsome, low building of cream stucco with a grey slate roof. On the other side of the drive, on the wide sweep of lawn beside two lakes, were more golf holes. He seemed to be entering a golf obsessive’s paradise.

Dominating the scene was a vast nineteenth-century pile, with a castle tower on its front corner, flying a blue and white flag, waving in the stiff evening breeze. The driver turned at a little roundabout, down a formal drive that ended at the hotel entrance. Across the manicured lawns were long hedgerows of rhododendrons and tall trees.

Aleppo was amazed to hear the sound of bagpipes playing as the minibus drove up to the door; a huge doorman in a kilt and green tweed jacket, who had been standing with the piper at the top of the steps, came down to take the luggage. As he checked in at the reception desk in a wide panelled hall, lit by vast saucer-shaped Art Deco lamps hanging from the ceiling, Aleppo felt as if he had arrived on the set of an American musical.

He had purposely booked one of the best rooms, at the front of the hotel. It was spacious and comfortable, with a view of the golf courses and behind them, only a couple of miles further on, green hills that rose gradually from the valley.

Aleppo looked over his quarters with care. The bathroom was large and brightly lit, with a white porcelain bath and a steel-framed shower in the corner. Taking his shoes off, he climbed onto the closed seat of the lavatory, then carefully pushed at the square tiles of the ceiling above it. One gave way; moving it aside, he raised both hands and carefully pulled himself up to look into the horizontal ventilation shaft. Inside its long tunnel you could fit a small suitcase; at a pinch, lying flat, a man could fit as well. It would take a professional about twenty seconds to find anyone hiding there, but it was good to know nonetheless.

Climbing down, he stripped off and showered, then changed into smart casual clothes - a blazer, cotton trousers, slip-on shoes - and went downstairs in search of food. From the various restaurants he chose the middle-range Italian-style trattoria, where he sat in the middle of the room and ate supper while looking carefully through the brochure he had found in his bedroom.

His waitress was middle-aged, polite, and wore a wide wedding ring, but Aleppo paid more attention to a younger girl who was waiting on the tables across the room. She was sandy-haired, big-boned, with an attractive smiling face and a confident air as she moved around the room, chatting with the people at her tables. She had noticed him, too, the only single male in the room, and glanced his way on each occasion she came out from the kitchen carrying plates of food.

When Aleppo had finished his meal, he waited to get up to leave the dining room until she came out of the kitchen. He caught her eye and she looked back at him. Nothing was said but something invisible passed between them. A plucky kind of girl then, even forward, and he made a mental note of her.

In the morning he ate breakfast in the same restaurant, but there was no sign of her. He had a lot of ground to cover and only one day to cover it. He’d expected a grand hotel and a golf course, but Gleneagles was so much more than that. The place was a resort, more on the American model than the usual British version. It was set on hundreds of acres of coniferous woodland, with hotel rooms, chalets, timeshares, private apartments, and literally dozens of recreational activities. This was a bigger task than he’d expected.

Finishing his coffee, he walked through the oak-panelled corridors of the hotel’s ground floor, past shops that catered without inhibition to an affluent clientele - diamond jewellery, cashmere sweaters, rare and exotic whiskies -emerging at the back of the hotel next to a swimming pool enclosed in glass. Already guests were reclining on wooden poolside chairs as if on a Mediterranean beach, while children splashed and played in the water.

Outside again, Aleppo paused. He knew there were timeshare villas, grouped in a village-like settlement across the road, but they could wait until his next visit. As could the equestrian centre further down the road, of no use to him now. He sensed the answer to his own search lay outdoors, not in, so he set to work exploring the grounds.

It took him till mid-afternoon, walking round all three golf courses, intrigued especially by the biggest, the famous King’s Course, which sloped gradually upwards towards the ridge of hills that he had seen from his bedroom. He walked to the furthest edge of the course, as near as he could get to the hills, and there, from a secluded spot under an oak tree by the tenth tee, he peered through a small pair of Leica binoculars he produced from his jacket pocket.

The slopes in the distance were unfarmed and looked untended, though there were a few sheep lower down. The grass was bleached yellow from the summer sun, and the slopes looked bare, but careful examination revealed a few pockets of trees, and the odd dip in the hills’ contours. Enough to keep someone out of sight for a while, especially in bad weather - he’d noted the sign warning of the sudden advent of fog and mist.

At lunchtime, he stopped for a sandwich in the clubhouse, looking out again at the hills, gauging whether they’d be considered a possible threat when the multiple security agencies scoured the area in a week’s time. They would certainly not be ignored. He looked again at the activities listed in the brochure. There was clay pigeon shooting; croquet; fishing supplied on request; off-road driving; a gun dog training school; even a falconry centre.

Aleppo visited them all, in the guise of an interested foreign tourist, but spent the most time at the gun dog school and the neighbouring falconry centre. He watched for half an hour as a posse of young black Labradors, agile and keen, practised retrieving. Then he moved off through a line of trees to a two-storey wooden building, with a green metal roof and purple pillars at each end. It looked like an oversized chicken coop, or a prison for dwarves, with small, individual cells with metal bars across their windows. In each cell, a bird of prey sat unwinking on a wooden perch, staring at any observer free to move about in the world.

A small boy and his father came out of the front door, followed by an instructor wearing a padded glove in one hand, on which was sitting a hawk. Aleppo watched as they proceeded to a mown circle of grass, where the keeper raised his hand slowly until the bird suddenly took off. It flew round in a big arc and then swooped back down again to snatch at the lure the man held at the end of a long cord, the bait an ounce of raw grouse meat.

He heard the little boy’s father ask, ‘What happens if they don’t come back?’

‘They’re carrying a radio transmitter. It’s tiny - just a microchip,’ the man said, pointing to the hawk now back on his extended hand. ‘I can hear it through my earpiece. The closer I get to him, the louder the transmitter squawks.’

‘What’s the range of the signal?’

‘The manufacturer claims it’s twelve miles.’ He scoffed. ‘But that’s because the manufacturer is in Salt Lake City. In this landscape it’s more like twelve hundred yards.’

‘Do they go that far?’

The instructor shook his head. ‘Not usually. They
can
go up to thirty miles away, but most of the time we find them in the woods.’

Aleppo moved away and strolled, deep in thought, towards the golf courses, coming shortly to the edge of a little lake, no more than a few hundred yards square, which was nestled in a long hollow beside the main drive. A small island in the middle of the lake boasted a solitary cedar tree surrounded by low rushes that went down into the water. On Aleppo’s side of the lake was a wooden landing stage with a rowing boat tied to an iron ring. Across the water, on the golf course side, sat a small putting green. This could be useful, he thought, suddenly open to yet more possibilities.