The Corporal's Wife (2013) (4 page)

His door opened, no knock. Petroc Kenning might have run from his taxi and used a staircase rather than wait for a lift – it was always so exciting when the building came to life after hours, personnel were recalled, and an atmosphere of crisis management flourished.

‘Well done, PK. Good to have you here, where you ought to be. Your push, and there’s a nasty little creature in the jam jar. First class – you deserve it. It won’t go unrecognised. Dunc’ll bring you up to speed.’

Dunc Whitcombe briefed. There were the cutbacks, and the Secret Intelligence Service was no more secure against financial stringencies than Work and Pensions, Education or Transport; the heating was off and wouldn’t come on till dawn so they all had on their coats and scarves, and Mandy Ross was wearing a shapeless woollen hat.

Tadeuz Fenton waved for Dunc to wrap, then he held court. ‘Don’t get ensnared with his rank. He drives Brigadier Reza Joyberi of the Qods division. That’s a high rank in the Qods, as you know better than I do, PK. The Qods has brigadiers you can count on the fingers of one hand. They’re important players. You don’t make brigadier if your job description is OC latrines and cookhouse. Take this perspective: and our leader, bless him. Go up to the clouds with our own supreme leader’

He waved expansively at the ceiling. Two floors above, at the extreme western corner of the building, was the office suite of the director general.

‘Who knows him best? Not me, not his deputy or any of the branch heads, and certainly not the politicians who appointed him and wouldn’t have the bottle to fire him. I’d say, without fear of contradiction, that Benny does. Benny knows him better than anyone, probably better than his wife, certainly better than Henrietta the bull terrier in the outer office. Benny has a Browning in the glove box. There’s no security with them. The director talks. Benny would never acknowledge that he’s listening, and would never comment unless invited to. Benny would be his sounding board, would keep an unwritten diary in his head. They go everywhere together. Benny’s there when the sun’s coming up and he’s still there at the end of the day. He sees everything, learns everything and is totally trusted. What I’m saying, PK, is that the brigadier’s driver is probably as good as it gets. We’ll get him out of there fast. Shift him to where we can do the work. I expect a treasure chest of good material. We’ve started making arrangements for his flight.’

‘You going to bring him here?’ Kenning asked.

Mandy, alternating between the phone and her keyboard, raised her eyebrows. Sara looked up from the pad she was scribbling on and shook her head decisively. Dunc frowned.

‘Not here – at arms’ length. We’re going to Vienna. Best place. Fewest questions asked, and we get a free run at him, no interference. I mean, he’s not going to turn into a best friend, is he? We milk him – or bleed him – then cut him loose and he can set up a kebab stall in Munich or drive a taxi in Warsaw – Christ, I don’t know. We’ll have a file on the man he chauffeurs and who whispers in his ear. He’ll know where all the skeletons are buried. I’d say, with what would happen to him, a loyal driver who can’t keep his dick in his trousers thereby disgracing his unit and his boss, he should be grateful to us. You’ve done well, PK.’

The meeting broke up.

Sara Rogers asked him quietly, ‘Austria – Vienna? You’re sure about that?’

‘It’s totally right. We’ve a good history there – and he’ll be at arms’ length.’

‘Not dangerous for us?’

‘Not at all. I feel good about this. It’ll be straightforward, no complications, believe me. And I can only sit at the top table if I have something to play with and something significant to barter.’

‘Why are we doing that, skip?’ A navigator’s question to his captain.

‘Ours not to reason why – that sort of stuff.’ A captain’s answer to a reasonable question, concerning the diversion of a C17 Alpha Globemaster, prize product of the Boeing Corporation and in the dark camouflage colours of RAF Transport Command, from its normal flight path out of Bastion in Helmand, north of Kandahar.

‘I’m not inside that loop. The touch-down, I’m told, will be of minimal duration, like fifteen minutes for the take-on of two passengers. One will be assessed as a potential security risk and watched by the loadmaster. They’ll sit in the cargo section, away from the personnel, en route to Akrotiri.’

There was a grin. ‘Spook stuff?’

And a gentle put-down: ‘I wouldn’t know and wouldn’t care to ask.’

‘I didn’t think we were still up for that sort of thing.’

‘Please, just the route – Bastion to Al Dhafra, UAE, then out of Al Dhafra for Cyprus . . .’

‘On the priority scale, must be something high up the ladder. Agreed, skip?’

‘Maybe they’re bringing a box of dates – or a sack of camel dung for the Brize rosebeds.’

The diversion would be plotted, with the extra fuel it would necessitate. Take-off was in fifteen: the first of the personnel for rotation were streaming off the buses towards the steps, and an Afghanistan deployment would be over – thank Christ and good riddance to the fucking place, as most would say . . . The cockpit and cabin crew would be wide-eyed when a passenger with a security issue and an escort came on board at the first touch-down, the captain could guarantee it.

It was long past midnight, and Mandy Ross had the home number of the head of the section that handled ‘increments’. The cutbacks had not only chilled the building at night, but had reduced to freelance and short-term contracts those who did jobs for which full-time employment was no longer considered justifiable: the increments.

She was told, ‘Bloody hell, Mandy, they don’t grow on trees. We’ve hardly done that sort of thing since the Cold War. Had a bit of a spike at the Libya time . . . Anyway, this is the best I can do. Full names first, then home phones. You want three, right? . . . Here’s five names, and good luck. From the top, what they like to be called . . .’

‘It’s not a kids’ party we’re organising. Do they want paper hats as well?’

‘Funny crowd, the babysitters. They like to be called Auntie, Father William, Nobby and—’

She interrupted, ‘Who do we have in Vienna?’

‘Just a man who stayed on after retirement – well, redundancy, actually. He was a bottle-washer to Hector Kenning – remember him? Uncle of Petroc and—’

‘And when he has to be tucked up, what name does he prefer?’ Mandy Ross tried for sarcasm and thought she came over as peevish. She was given another number and told that if she called it she would reach Sidney.

She hung up, allowing the man to go back to bed. She didn’t know the world of the so-called ‘babysitters’, and knew equally little about defectors, if that was what the wasp in the jam jar proved to be – volunteer or compromised. She drank some cold coffee, lifted the phone and punched the number for ‘Auntie’. It would be a learning curve, about as steep as it could get.

He sat in a corner of the secure room. Katie had solid shoulders and fancied she might need them: the responsibility for the business going forward rested on them. He had lifted his head and stared at her.

The senior man in Abu Dhabi, eighty miles and ninety minutes up the coast road, was in a Qatar-based conference hosted by the Agency, and the Bahrain station people were there. The Service  couldn’t get their hands on a charter for another six hours, and by then the diverted flight would be on approach over the Gulf.

His confidence was the precious commodity. He was a wild animal in a cage, she reckoned, stunned by the suddenness of the trap closing, therefore hunkered in that corner, baleful, watching and uncertain. Katie had not the experience to begin a debrief, or the rank to offer deals. He gazed at her. She wondered how she compared with the Ukrainian tart on the video, whom she had met briefly in the brothel: a pleasant-enough woman, with a sweet smile, generous with her cigarettes; she looked raddled under the brightness from the cubicle’s centre light. Katie, in comparison, might have seemed flat-chested and wide-hipped; her hair – cut short – wasn’t coloured. The corporal-driver would never have come across a woman like Katie, a junior officer in the Service, carrying a burden that practically bent her double.

She assumed his confidence would grow. She and the ex-marines would not be able to frogmarch him up the steps and onto the aircraft if he chose to resist. He would be an idiot, she thought, to go voluntarily.

He had refused food and coffee.

Disorientation was what she hoped for, and confusion, the inability to think clearly – his mind should be addled with doubt.

Each minute that passed on the big wall clock by the door closed the window of opportunity – a phrase much used by lecturers of the probationers coming into the Service: a ‘window’ and an ‘opportunity’ were never to be ignored. Katie knew that the damage done to the station’s funds exceeded sixty-five thousand pounds. The money had sweetened the madam, was an inducement to the girls, who would scrap to get their hands on an Iranian. It had paid for the webcam, the microphone in the smoke alarm, and the recording kit in the inner office. Funny, but the man had not seemed concerned about the papers stuffed into an inner pocket of his jacket. Everything from the jacket was now in a plastic bag, with his wallet and his open-return air ticket. A bag, with overnight clothes, stood at the feet of an ex-marine but it contained nothing that interested her.

Katie was not authorised to offer inducements, to mention an annual stipend or cash payment. She couldn’t question him because she had no knowledge of the areas that the interrogators would choose to work over. She could not add to the threats and insults that had been acceptable currency at the start. How to
dominate
?

She strode backwards and forwards in front of him. She had taken a call on her secure mobile from PK, the boss, telling her of the diverted flight. When it had rung a second time, she had gone out into the corridor, leaving him with the ex-marines, and had been told what she could say – no more.

She was a woman who showed him no respect and no fear. She confirmed prejudices and stereotypes. She prayed for the hands of the clock to speed up.

She had a half-blue from Oxford in lacrosse, another in netball. She showed him no kindness. Nothing in her actions betrayed a vestige of sympathy for him. He was a commodity, and the sooner he was shipped on, the better. He would know of the British intelligence apparatus, perhaps have more respect for it than he had for the Agency. Since childhood, he would have learned of the perfidy of the British Service, the tentacles it had spread, and he would know of the evil, duplicitous men employed at the Old Fox’s Den in Tehran – the embassy complex on Ferdowsi Avenue, now closed. He’d regard her as a devil.

It was not her job to be liked, loved, admired.

She paced. The ex-marines stood stock still, one before the door, the other beside it. The clock’s hands edged across its face. He spoke. She would have said then, if challenged, that she was engaged in ‘dirty business’. Had her tutor, who was fulsome in praise of her academic success, known where she was and what she was doing with her first-class honours degree in ancient history, he would probably have cringed. Her mother had oozed pride on the cocktail-party circuit in rural Cheshire because her daughter had passed through the arduous civil-service recruitment process. Katie was of that generation, new to the Service, who believed it a waste of energy to play intelligence games without an end result; to compete without trying to win was alien to her. A ‘dirty business’, but she had signed up for it.

Fearful, a mutter she hardly heard. The question was repeated.

‘What will happen to me?’

Mehrak watched her. He could see the tightness at the thighs and crotch of her jeans as she eased round to face him. The movement tightened her blouse, pulled at the buttons. He could see her arms below the short sleeves, her neck, throat, mouth and hair.

She seemed to consider his question and weigh the options of a reply.

He knew that he smelt of sweat. It was damp on his back and his vest had absorbed it. When he drove the brigadier, Mehrak was always careful to spray the inside of the Mercedes with air-freshener, and to use a roll-on antiperspirant at his armpits and groin. Now he could smell his socks – and the scent from the whore’s body. He had a picture in his mind of the shame and retribution facing him. He had been in a brothel. He had paid for it with cash supplied to him for his travel needs. He would have brought moral disgrace on himself and on the Qods. He had betrayed the trust placed in him by Brigadier Reza Joyberi. He would have lost his marriage – faltering, but so important to him – to Farideh. He could see her face, the expressions flitting across it as the Internet showed pictures of a man from the Qods, in a Dubai brothel with a prostitute older than himself. He had shamed her.

He asked again. ‘What will happen to me?’

He was told. He seemed to see a newspaper in the clattering confusion of a print shop, a TV announcer on a dawn news programme and a coastguard cutter quartering the harbour beyond a section of sea wall. He was told and he slumped. He didn’t know who would mourn him.

He closed his eyes. He prayed to his God that there might be a tear on Farideh’s cheek. The woman spoke brusquely and didn’t seem to want his opinion on what was planned.

He asked one more question: ‘Why am I important to you?’