‘And they have repeated their threat against us?’
‘That’s right, John. In his statement the man calling himself Ishmael says:
Economic jihad is one of the most powerful ways in which we can take revenge on the infidels at the present stage. The right target may generate a rate of return many times greater than the size of the initial investment
. The signs are that this gang intends to pull off a spectacular attack on our infrastructure, possibly on the city of London. The security forces here appear to be concentrating their efforts on securing the Thames Barrier in advance of the coming storm.’
‘That’s because in the earlier video, released several weeks ago now, there was reference to a tidal wave.’
‘That’s right, John. The Barrier seems to be the target. And the warning issued today by the Met Office Storm Tide Forecasting Service of a low-pressure area approaching across the Atlantic, together with a projected higher-than-normal tide, suggests that we may be facing a scenario that tests the Barrier to its limit. If the terrorists chose this moment to attack, London could suffer cataclysmic damage …’
The sudden whoop of a police siren and a wash of coloured lights in the rear-view mirror startled her. There was a police car behind her on the hard shoulder, flashing its lights at her. Terrified, for a moment she thought of running. On her right lorries thundered by and on her left was an exposed bank of grass. A policeman was approaching. There was nowhere to go. She jabbed at the off switch on the radio. The policeman tapped on the window.
‘Are you all right, madam?’ he asked once she’d opened the window.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I felt dizzy, that’s all.’
‘How do you feel now?’
‘Better. I’m OK now.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ the policeman said, ‘there is a service station just up ahead. We’ll escort you there. You can take a rest.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
She drove seven miles in the slow lane to the service station and the police car followed her into the car park, before tooting its horn and leaving. She sat for a while with her head in her hands.
11 September 2005
Miranda stood for a moment by the stile at the back of the graveyard with the Sussex Downs behind her and the spire of the early Gothic church before her. The air was full of petals from the wisteria on the cemetery wall. She had no idea what to expect.
Norma Said was standing by a graveside among the yew trees, wearing a long dark-blue cashmere overcoat and court shoes. She looked up as Miranda approached and her eyes were shining. Miranda realised that her cheeks were wet with tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I miss him. He was a difficult man …’ She tailed off, contemplating her husband’s grave, which was decorated with a fresh bouquet of lilies. ‘The right hemisphere of his brain, which is what you use for sorting and recognising faces, was damaged. Towards the end he developed something called Capgras syndrome. He took it into his head that Jonah was being impersonated. In his eyes Jonah was no longer Jonah. He used to become very agitated on those rare occasions when Jonah visited. He would shout at him. It must have been very hard for Jonah to see his father in that condition.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘It was typical of my husband that even his delusions were prescient.’
They stood for a moment.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘I thought that it was best to meet discreetly.’
‘The police are looking for me,’ Miranda told her.
‘As far as the Secret Service is concerned my son is a terrorist traitor and you are one of his accomplices.’
‘I don’t believe that Jonah is a traitor,’ Miranda said.
‘When I joined the Intelligence and Security Committee I fully expected to learn things, often unpleasant things. I did not expect them to be so close to home. I admit I underestimated my son. I knew that he was determined. He was a very determined child. When he was small he had a plastic horse on springs that he called Go. Sometimes when he rode it he would pass into a kind of trance and bounce for hours, back and forth, back and forth, with a blankness in his eyes. I found it worrying. I used to have to hold his shoulders down to stop him. What is worrying in a child rapidly becomes disturbing in an adult. I suppose I was taken in by his impersonation of a directionless and unsettled young man. He was my son but I did not like him very much. When I first read his name in a file I admit I was deeply surprised. I was forced to reappraise him.’
‘There’s somebody coming,’ Miranda observed.
A serious-looking man in a grey suit approached from the direction of the highly polished black car parked at the cemetery’s main entrance. He stopped just within earshot.
‘Are you OK, ma’am?’ he asked Norma, cautiously.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she said, pleasantly. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Very well,’ he said, and retreated to the car.
‘I was unused to protection,’ she said, ‘but then I learned secrets and lies and I grew to believe that the prime minister was right when he said that I must have it. You’d better not stay long. The people who protect me may also be watching me now. I have submitted a letter of resignation. I do not believe that it will be long before the prime minister accepts it.’
‘I think that Jonah is trying to stop a terrorist attack.’
Norma glanced at Miranda, an impatient glance that said:
You don’t get it, do you?
‘It’s a conjuror’s trick. A plot plucked from the air: an article of faith.’
‘I don’t understand,’ protested Miranda.
‘There are forces at work,’ Norma Said explained, ‘forces at the heart of this administration that sincerely believe that the overriding purpose of intelligence is to shape the public mood. They believe that any deception is justified as long as it serves that purpose and then it is not deception at all. In believing this they expose us to the gravest risk. I’m afraid that during the course of the last decade, under our current leadership, lying has become integral to the functioning of intelligence.’
‘You are suggesting that there is no plot?’
‘No, I’m not saying that. There may be a plot. There is certainly a threat. There are files full of worst-case scenarios. The vulnerability and interdependency of modern society means that any disruption to the infrastructure has the potential to cause mass civilian casualties. There are genuine terrorists, of both the home-grown and overseas varieties, who mean this country harm. There are individuals like myself and my son, who, for whatever reason, have become embarrassing or surplus to requirements. The ingredients are all at hand. What I am saying to you is that it suits certain individuals who seek preferment within the intelligence services to nurture and encourage an apocalyptic plot, a threat to the very fabric of this nation, so that in foiling it at the very last moment they provoke a strong national reaction – the righteous indignation of the tabloid press – and in so doing hand to their political masters the means to advance draconian legislation at home and project massive force overseas. You have to understand that the belief persists within certain sections of the administration and the Secret Service, even now, after all that has happened, that countering terrorism involves defeating a global insurgency. Afghanistan, Iraq – these are simply moves in a long war, a multi-generational conflict in which pre-emptive attack and regime change must be used to defeat terrorism and spread liberal democracy throughout the world.’
Miranda opened her mouth and abruptly closed it again.
‘It has been my intention since I joined the committee to control the Secret Service,’ Norma Said declared, ‘to shift its powers to separate, smaller agencies and to make each of them separately accountable, and in doing so to dilute their powers.’ She shook her head wistfully. ‘I had not counted on the resourcefulness or ruthlessness of my adversaries. I have been blocked at every turn. And now, by manufacturing a plot and implicating my son in it, they have managed to discredit me.’
‘What should I do?’ Miranda asked.
‘A senior intelligence official within MI6 is behind this. His name is Topcliffe, though he goes by the code name Fisher-King. I do not know the exact details of the conspiracy that he has manufactured but I do know that he will stop at nothing to ensure his own preferment.’
Miranda was suddenly aware of movement behind her and, turning, saw the American FBI agent Mikulski with his hands in the pockets of his battered leather jacket. He seemed to have materialised from the nearest yew tree – not moving, just standing there, half hidden, expectantly waiting.
‘This is Mr Mikulski. I believe that you have met him before. He tells me that he is not a member of any conspiracy. He says that he is simply interested in the truth. In my experience, America gives us the worst of itself and the best of itself. I sincerely hope that Mr Mikulski is a product of the latter.’
‘It’s good to see you again,’ Mikulski said.
She stared at him, unsure of what to say. There was a pause. ‘I didn’t kill Monteith,’ she said, ‘or Andy Beech or anyone else for that matter.’
‘That’s not really what I’m here about.’
‘Then what are you here about?’
‘Can you tell me where Jonah is, Miranda?’
‘I’m looking for him myself.’
‘What about Nor ed-Din?’
She paused. ‘If he comes, then perhaps …’
Mikulski nodded. ‘I’ll walk you to your car,’ he said.
‘We must not let terrifying threats cause us to degrade what is valuable in our society,’ Norma Said told them. ‘God go with you.’
Mikulski walked in the direction of the stile and after a moment’s hesitation Miranda followed. When she caught up with him he said, ‘I don’t know whether by luck or skill, but you’ve done well to evade capture. What have you got for me?’
‘Items that were planted in Jonah’s study …’
‘Show me.’
They sat side by side in the rental car and he quickly leafed through what she had to offer. The postcard, the tide tables, the ship’s diagram, the coordinates. It didn’t seem like much.
‘The time of tomorrow’s high tide is highlighted,’ Miranda told him. ‘Whatever they are planning it’s for tomorrow night.’
‘I see that.’
When he came to the diagram of the ship Mikulski frowned.
‘It’s a Liberty ship,’ he said.
‘A what?’
‘A Liberty ship. It’s a distinctive profile, like a child’s imagining of a ship. They were hastily constructed freighters used to move supplies across the Atlantic during the Second World War. Tin cans really. They’ve got one in Baltimore harbour. It’s a floating museum. My grandfather worked in the port. He used to take me on it as a child. What about the coordinates?’
‘They mark a point about a mile and a half off the coast of Sheerness in the Thames Estuary.’
He handed the things back to her. He seemed mildly disappointed. ‘What else can you tell me?’
She told him about the death of Monteith at the hands of Alex Ross in the bomb-making factory and finding Beech’s body on Barra. She told him what she had learned about Threshold and Greysteel.
When she mentioned Greysteel he became briefly animated and asked, ‘Have you heard the term Those Who Seek The End?’
‘No.’
‘They’re a loose-knit group of powerful people linked to the security industry,’ he said, ‘CEOs, policy-makers, politicians and the like. They are extreme in their views. Let me give you an example. They argue that military and economic functions should be reunited, as in the time of the British Empire when firms like the East India Company were the main instruments of foreign policy, cutting deals and making war. They believe that the commercial security companies that are increasingly responsible for our defence in America and overseas should have a much greater say in the running of the state. Some call them a millenarian cult. Personally, I regard their activities as treasonous. I believe that Richard Winthrop answers to them.’
She explained that all reference to Winthrop had been removed from Jonah’s collage.
‘They’re covering their tracks,’ Mikulski told her. ‘These people are ruthless and utterly unscrupulous. They murder people and call it collateral damage. They thought nothing of executing a CIA agent in Afghanistan because he was threatening their financial interests. They clearly think nothing of fabricating a terrorist attack on British soil. They will not spare you.’
‘So what should I do?’ she demanded.
‘The best thing you can do is to stay out of their reach.’
‘You expect me to do nothing?’
‘Tomorrow they will play their hand. When they do it will be easier for the authorities here to take action.’
‘You can’t protect me, can you?’
‘I can’t,’ he admitted. ‘I told you, these are powerful people. They are very well connected.’
‘I’m going to Sheerness,’ she said.
‘That’s the last place you should go. Didn’t you listen to what Norma Said was telling you? Don’t give them any further excuse to pin this on you.’
‘Nevertheless, that’s where I’m going.’
‘You’ve obviously made up your mind.’
‘I have,’ she said, grimly.
He got out of the car and paused before leaning in the open window. ‘Call me. You’ve got my card, right?’
‘I have. Wait.’
She reached into her bag and withdrew the tape of her interview with Saira.
‘Take this,’ she said, handing it to him. ‘It’s my side of the story.’
11 September 2005
Miranda crossed into Kent on the motorway, driving through chalk cuttings and past red-brick housing estates with red-tiled roofs and pylons with their legs in flooded grass fields. She came off the motorway and on to the A249 northbound, following the signs for the Isle of Sheppey.
She stared through the windscreen at the passing landscape, the barren mudbanks and grasslands of the marshes, and across the Medway the steel stacks and tubes and winking lights of a power station on the Isle of Grain. She crossed the Swale on the elegant arc of the high bridge at Sheppey Crossing, and once on the island, drove through marshes dotted with occasional sheep.The first sign of the port was a chain-link fence and a series of access roads blocked with boulders. The road curved around to the right and she drove alongside a dense leylandii hedge and then past the entrance to a steelworks. On the other side of the road there was a yard filled with rows of concrete Buddhas and a banner advertising
CONCRETE GARDEN ORNAMENTS MANUFACTURERS
. Beyond it was a sign for Blue Town and a glimpse of the twenty-foot-high brick wall that ringed the oldest section of the port.