Dead Line (36 page)

‘I’m Leppo,’ the man said at once. ‘Sammy Leppo. I’m out here on Special Patrol. You’ll know what that means, I’m sure,’ he added meaningfully.

Sternberg nodded, but Grossman was still uneasy. With Hezbollah in the vicinity, he could understand why Leppo had hidden when he first heard them moving along the plateau - but something about the situation seemed odd. He said, ‘I’ll need to check that out.’

Leppo nodded easily, but then he said, ‘That’s not really a good idea.’

‘Why?’ asked Grossman, his suspicions returning.

Leppo suddenly swung his rifle round and covered him and Sternberg. ‘Drop your weapons,’ he ordered. There was nothing relaxed about his voice now. Sternberg dropped his rifle at once, and Leppo pointed his rifle at Grossman. ‘Drop it.’ Grossman obeyed, suddenly certain this man would kill him without hesitation.

Then a voice said,
‘You
drop it.’

Behind Leppo, Lieutenant Wilentz appeared; he’d circled the rise and climbed down. Now he stood on top of the boulder behind Leppo and snapped his finger. The four other members of the patrol appeared, weapons pointing at Leppo’s back.

Wilentz said, ‘You’d better come with us. There will be plenty of time for you to tell us all about this Special Patrol.’

FIFTY-EIGHT

This time
Ma Folie
was not closed; it was doing a busy lunchtime trade. At the bistro on the South Bank, the food was French, old-fashioned and excellent. As Liz took her last bite of
onglet
, grilled in shallot butter, she felt a curious contentment.

The near-disaster at Gleneagles had not derailed the peace conference, though none of the participants would have claimed it a total success. Three days of intensive talks had led to no dramatic breakthrough, but the discussions had been conducted in a positive spirit by all sides. Enough had been accomplished for another conference to be scheduled in four months’ time, long enough to allow informal follow-up talks, but soon enough to ensure that all momentum would not be lost. Liz and her colleagues had sighed with relief when the venue for the next conference had been announced: France.

The Czech girl, Jana, had cracked within minutes at Liz’s second interrogation, though what she’d had to say had not added much to what was already known. It served mainly to confirm Kollek’s skill at manipulating people. Jana had fallen so completely under his spell that she hadn’t hesitated when he’d asked her to wipe a rag over the nose of the German pointer, even though she was rather scared of dogs. She hadn’t even questioned why she was doing it, or why he’d given her money to send young Mateo into the hills to collect a package.

Liz assumed she just didn’t want to know. Kollek had a lot to answer for, she thought, remembering Jana’s face (this time her tears had been genuine), but at least there was the satisfaction of knowing that, having been captured by the army just two miles from the border with Syria, the man would be explaining himself at some length. He was in the hands of Mossad now and it was pretty likely that a certain squat, tough veteran of Israel’s many wars would be yet again postponing his retirement until he had finished the interrogation.

Miles had rung Liz a week after her return to London, and just twenty-four hours after his own from the Middle East. By some unspoken agreement they’d spent most of lunch talking about almost anything
but
the events at Gleneagles. He’d asked about her family, and she’d told him about her mother, and how wrong she herself had been about Edward Treglown - Miles had laughed when she’d described the gold-digging old buffer she’d been expecting. Then he told her all about Damascus, describing a capital city, and indeed a country, which was an odd mélange of the old and new, a land where the latest computer software and the ancient
souk
were uneasy bedfellows, and Islam pushed against a form of Christianity that was equally well established.

It was only now, as she declined the waiter’s offer of dessert and they both ordered coffee, that Miles fell silent, and Liz felt it was appropriate to make some reference to the complicated chain of events they had both been involved in.

‘You know, you were instrumental in helping us to solve all this Kollek business.’

‘I was?’ Miles looked pleasantly surprised. Liz thought again there was something attractive about his modesty.

‘Yes. If you hadn’t gone to Tel Aviv and got all that out of Teitelbaum, we’d never have known what was driving Kollek - why he did what he did.’

Miles acknowledged this with a reluctant nod. ‘I suppose that’s true,’ he said, and went silent again. There was a lot to think about. Kollek’s plot was probably quite simple to begin with, but it had grown infinitely complicated by the time it concluded so bizarrely - with an explosion that, if it had taken place on land as he’d intended, would have killed both the Syrian President and the Israeli Prime Minister. As it turned out, it was only the dog handler’s skill at redirecting the dog back to the island in the little lake that saved them all. In the end, the dog had been the only victim. Sad, even poignant, but a minor disaster. Certainly very far from the worldwide impact that Kollek had hoped for.

But Kollek had been very clever, thought Liz - at least at first. She said as much to Miles.

‘What about the Oval?’ he said, just as Peggy had done at Gleneagles.

She shook her head. ‘Even that worked to his advantage. When we spotted them, we immediately suspected Bokus, not him. In fact, every time we found some link with Kollek, we always assumed he was being run by an intelligence service, particularly Mossad of course. But he was playing them - all of us, in fact.’

Miles poured Liz the last of the bottle of Crozes Hermitage. She’d ignored her usual limit of a single glass of wine at lunch - what the hell, she’d decided, sensing a valedictory quality to the occasion.

‘What I’ve never understood,’ Miles declared, ‘is what Kollek was originally hoping to pull off. I mean, suppose we’d never had the information from Geoffrey Fane’s source in Cyprus. We wouldn’t have known anything at all of what was going on.’

‘Oh, I think that’s pretty clear. He planted the information on the Syrians that Veshara and Marcham were spying on them, hoping that they would try to kill them. He wanted the hawks in Damascus to win out and the heavies to move in. And he almost succeeded. If both Marcham and Veshara had been assassinated, Israel would have been furious, since they were both giving information to Mossad. Kollek would have made sure the finger was pointed at Damascus, and that might well have been enough to scupper the prospects for peace, certainly this time round. It would have created more bad blood for years to come.

‘Of course, that all went awry when news about it leaked from Geoffrey Fane’s source in Cyprus, Abboud. And then, bizarrely, Kollek learned of the leak from Bokus. That was his great stroke of fortune, though you could argue that what he did next was a mistake. By telling the Syrians there had been a leak from inside their secret service, he focused their attention on the mole, rather than on Marcham and Veshara. Then he killed Marcham himself, hoping it would look as though the Syrians had done it. But the way he killed him was too subtle for the Syrian heavies, so we never thought it was them.’

Liz looked ruefully at her wine glass. ‘But we let ourselves get preoccupied with Abboud’s murder -particularly with trying to work out how the Syrians had discovered that he was working for Geoffrey Fane’s colleague. We thought at first the leak could be you and then that it could be Andy Bokus; then when we saw Bokus with Kollek we decided it
had
to be him. Only we were wrong.’

Miles said sympathetically. ‘That’s not surprising. Who in a million years would have thought that the source of the story of the supposed threat would find out that his story had been leaked?’

‘And Kollek exploited the freak opportunity brilliantly. Here we were, two intelligence services supposedly working together, yet increasingly suspicious of each other. While the real ringmaster stood back and let distrust get to work. We were blind to the fact that it might all be just one person driven by his own weird agenda.’

Miles finished his wine and slowly put down his glass. ‘What I always find surprising is that with all our sophisticated technology and the big bureaucracies we work in, a single person can still do so much damage.’

Liz thought about this for a minute. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘when you think about it, so much of our work is about the actions of individuals - not governments or bureaucracies. That’s what makes it so fascinating. If it were just about process or gizmos, do you think you’d want to be doing the job?’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Miles emphatically. ‘And neither would you.’

He suddenly sounded rather sad, and she regretted the melancholy note that had crept into their lunch. But then he brightened up again. ‘There’re a couple of loose ends still, aren’t there?’ he said.

‘More than a couple, I’m sure,’ said Liz. But that was true of every case; there were always threads left hanging. ‘Which ones are you thinking of?’ she asked.

‘I was wondering what was the point of Hannah Gold? Why was Kollek so interested in her?’

‘I think originally he wanted her as a back-up - in case the conference went ahead in spite of his efforts. She’d probably have helped place explosives or trigger them -unintentionally of course. But then quite accidentally, Kollek learned that her daughter-in-law Sophie had been in the Security Service. He may even have thought she still was. I imagine he’d been watching Hannah, and he must have seen me visit and put two and two together. He thought of getting rid of me—’

‘He didn’t just think it, Liz, he tried to do it.’

She nodded. ‘When that didn’t work, he dropped the Hannah idea. Too risky. So he used her as a red herring instead.’

‘He had a lot of those, didn’t he? The Spanish “sniper,” the non-existent rifle - as well as Hannah.’

‘He was clever and he improvised brilliantly.’

‘I’d say he was lucky, too.’

‘Would you?’ asked Liz. ‘I’d have said we were the lucky ones.’ She thought of the breaks they’d had - her own spotting of the ‘gardener’ at Marcham’s house, Abboud’s position high up in Syrian intelligence, an envious Dougal happening to spot Jana’s assignation with Kollek by the equestrian centre; they were all strokes of luck.

‘Perhaps,’ said Miles. ‘But the point is, you rode your luck. Not everyone would have managed that, believe me.’ He raised a hand towards the waiter and gestured for the bill.

‘This was lovely,’ said Liz. ‘You were right about this place. Next time, it’ll be my shout.’

Miles gave a funny little smile. ‘You’ll have to visit.’

Visit? Her eyes must have betrayed her puzzlement.

‘Yes. Visit Damascus.’ He looked at her intently, and she saw surprise in his eyes. ‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘Know what?’ she asked. She was tired of mysteries; whenever she thought she had disposed of one, another seemed to crop up, even here during an enjoyable lunch with a man she was starting to like a lot.

‘I’ve been transferred; I’m going back to Damascus. I thought Fane would have told you.’

‘Geoffrey? What’s it got to do with him?’

‘He’s part of the reason I’m going,’ said Miles, with a trace of resentment. ‘It was Bokus’s idea to start with -he never liked me, and after the Oval debacle it’s got harder than ever to work with him. Then when Ty Oakes went through the Middle East after the peace conference, your head of station there - his name’s Whitehouse - mentioned that my presence in Syria would be useful to the joint effort. He told me off the record that Fane had instructed him to make the request. It dovetailed so neatly with Bokus wanting to see the back of me that I assumed it was a put-up job.’

It took Liz a moment to follow his logic, for she was still taking in this news. ‘But why did Geoffrey care?’ she managed to ask at last.

Miles gave a small shrug. ‘I’ve got my own ideas of why. I think it may have something to do with you. But you’ll have to work it out for yourself.’

Liz was silent for a moment while she worked it out. Miles could only mean that Fane didn’t like their friendship. Did he object for professional reasons or was it personal? She’d have to think about that.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said eventually, not sure whether she meant she was sorry about Miles’s transfer, or about the fact that he’d been forced into it by Bokus and Fane.

Miles gave a wry smile. ‘Don’t be. I like Damascus. Like I say, you’ll have to visit. Shall we go?’

Outside, a low, bleak sun did little to take the edge off the chill of a cutting autumn wind. Liz buttoned her coat and tied the belt firmly round her waist. They walked in silence towards the river. At the southern end of Lambeth Bridge she turned, and after a moment’s hesitation said goodbye to Miles with a handshake rather than the hug she wanted to give him.

Who knew what might have happened between us, she thought as she crossed the river. Thanks to the professional jealousy of Bokus, and perhaps to the personal jealousy of Geoffrey Fane, it seemed unlikely she would ever find out. It was easy to say she’d get on a plane one day soon and fly to Damascus, but she knew it wasn’t going to happen. So many might-have-beens in my life, thought Liz, which made the clear conclusion of the Syrian plot at once satisfying and yet another reminder of her personal life’s dismaying lack of progress.

Oh well, she thought, as the bulk of Thames House loomed before her, at least I have a career I’m committed to - and care about. At the entrance as she showed her ID, she laughed at the usual bad joke made by Ralph, the security guard at the door, and as she went up in the lift she found a melancholy comfort at being back in her familiar surroundings. Gleneagles seemed to belong to a different world.

Once in her office, Liz began leafing through the stack of papers that had accumulated in her absence. She had not got far down the pile when there was a tactful knock on the open door of her office, and she saw Peggy in the doorway, white as a sheet.