At Risk (2 page)

T
hames House, the headquarters of MI5, is on Millbank. A vast and imposing edifice of Portland stone, eight storeys in height, it crouches like a great pale ghost a few hundred yards south of the Palace of Westminster.

That morning, as always, Millbank smelt of diesel fumes and the river. Clutching her coat around her against the rain-charged wind, watching for the sodden plane-tree leaves on which it was all too easy to turn an ankle, Liz hurried up the entrance steps. Bag swinging, she pushed open one of the doors into the lobby, raised a quick hand in greeting to the security guards at the desk, and slotted her smart pass into the barrier. The front of one of the security capsules opened, she stepped inside, and was briefly enclosed. Then, as if she’d travelled light years in an instant, the rear door slid open, and she stepped out into another dimension. Thames House was a hive, a city of steel and frosted glass, and Liz felt a subtle shift inside herself as she crossed its security threshold and was borne noiselessly upwards to the fifth floor.

The lift doors opened and she turned left and moved at speed towards 5/AX, the agent-runners’ section. This was a large open-plan office lit by strip lights and lent a faintly seedy character by the clothes stands that stood by each desk. These were hung with the agent-runners’ work clothes—in Liz’s case a worn pair of jeans, a black Karrimor fleece, and a zip-up leather jacket. Her desk was spare—a grey terminal, a touch-tone phone, an FBI mug—and flanked to one side by a combination-locked cupboard from which she took a dark blue folder.

“And, coming into the home straight . . .” murmured Dave Armstrong from the next desk, his eyes locked to his computer screen.

“Courtesy of the bloody Northern Line,” gasped Liz, spinning the cupboard lock. “The train just . . .
stopped.
For at least ten minutes. In the middle of nowhere.”

“Well, the driver could hardly sit and smoke a joint in the station, could he?” asked Armstrong reasonably.

But Liz, folder in hand and minus coat and scarf, was already halfway to the exit. En route to Room 6/40, one flight up, she hurried into a washroom to check her appearance. The mirror returned an image of unexpected composure. Her fine, mid-brown hair fell more or less evenly about the pale oval of her face. The sage-green eyes were a little bruised by fatigue, perhaps, but the overall result would serve. Encouraged, she pressed on upwards.

The Joint Counter-Terrorist group, of which she had been a member for the best part of a year, met at 8:30 a.m. every Monday morning. The meetings’ purpose was to coordinate operations relating to terror networks and to set weekly intelligence targets. The group was run by Liz’s forty-five-year-old head of section, Charles Wetherby, and made up of MI5 investigators and agent-runners and liaison officers from MI6, GCHQ and Metropolitan Police Special Branch, with Home Office and Foreign Office attending as required. It had been created immediately after the World Trade Center atrocity, following the Prime Minister’s insistence that there must be no question of terror-related intelligence being compromised by lack of communication or turf wars of any kind. This was not a point that anyone had been in a mood to argue with. In her ten years with the Service, Liz could not remember such unflinching unanimity of purpose.

To her relief, Liz saw that although the doors to the conference room were open, no one had yet sat down.
Thank you, God!
She would not have to endure all those patient male glances as she took her place at the long oval hardwood table. Just inside the doors, a bullish duo from Special Branch were regaling one of Liz’s colleagues with the inside track on the
Daily Mirror
’s cover story—a lurid tale involving a children’s TV presenter, rent boys, and crack-fuelled orgies at a five-star Manchester hotel. The GCHQ representative, meanwhile, had stationed himself close enough to listen, but far enough away to pre-empt any suggestion of obvious prurience, while the man from the Home Office was reading his press cuttings.

Charles Wetherby had assumed an expectant attitude by the window, his pressed suit and polished Oxfords a mute reproach to Liz’s clothes, on which the vaporous bathroom air had failed to work any significant magic. The ghost of a smile, however, touched his uneven features.

“We’re waiting for Six,” he murmured, glancing in the direction of Vauxhall Cross, half a mile upriver. “I suggest you catch your breath and adopt an attitude of saintly patience.”

Liz attempted to do so. She looked out at the rain-slicked expanse of Lambeth Bridge. It was high tide, and the river was swollen and dark.

“Anything come up over the weekend?” she asked, placing the dark blue folder on the table.

“Nothing that’s going to keep us here too long. How was your mama?”

“Annoyed that the weather isn’t colder,” said Liz. “She wants some frost to kill the vine weevils.”

“Nothing like a good frost. I hate this running-together of the seasons.” He ran large-jointed fingers through his greying hair. “Six are bringing over someone new, apparently—one of their Pakistan people.”

“Anyone we know?”

“Mackay. Bruno Mackay.”

“And what’s the whisper on Mr. Mackay?”

“He’s an old Harrovian.”

“As in the story of the woman who walks into a room where there are three former public schoolboys. The Etonian asks her if she’d like to sit down, the Wykehamist pulls up a chair, and the Harrovian . . .”

“. . . sits on it,” said Wetherby with a pale smile. “Exactly.”

Liz turned back to the river, grateful that she had a superior officer with whom she could enjoy such exchanges. On the far side of the Thames she could see the rain-darkened walls of Lambeth Palace. Did Wetherby know about Mark? Almost certainly. He knew pretty much everything else about her.

“I think we finally have a full house,” he murmured, glancing over her shoulder.

MI6 were represented by Geoffrey Fane, their coordinator of counter-terrorist operations, and by the newcomer, Bruno Mackay. Hands were shaken and Wetherby moved smartly across the room to close the doors. A summary of weekend reports from overseas security services lay beside each place.

Mackay was welcomed to Thames House and introduced to the team. The MI6 officer had just returned from Islamabad, Wetherby informed them, where he had been a much-valued deputy head of station.

Mackay raised his hands in modest demurral. Tanned and grey-eyed, his flannel suit murmuring unmistakably of Savile Row, he cut a glamorous figure in this generally nondescript gathering. As he leaned forward to reply to Wetherby, Geoffrey Fane watched with chilly approval. He had obviously gone to some effort to manoeuvre the younger man on to the team.

To Liz, imbued as she was with the restrained, self-deprecatory culture of Thames House, Mackay appeared slightly preposterous. For a man of his age, and he couldn’t have been more than thirty-two or -three, he was much too expensively got up. His good looks—the deep tan, the level grey gaze, the sculpted nose and mouth—were far too emphatic. This was an individual, and every ounce of her professional being rebelled against the idea, whom people would remember. For a moment, and without expression, her eyes met Wetherby’s.

With the courtesies done, the group began to work their way through the overseas reports. Geoffrey Fane started the ball rolling. A tall, aquiline figure—like a heron in chalk-stripes, Liz had always thought—Fane had built his career on MI6’s Middle Eastern desk, where he had acquired a reputation for unswerving ruthlessness. His subject was the ITS—the Islamic Terror Syndicate—the generic title for groups like Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the myriad others like them.

When Fane had finished speaking he darted his patrician gaze leftwards at his younger colleague. Leaning forward, Bruno Mackay shot his cuffs and addressed his notes. “If I might return briefly to my old stomping ground,” he began, “Pakistan liaison has reported a sighting of Dawood al Safa. Their report suggests that al Safa has visited a training camp near Takht-i-Suleiman in the tribal north-west of the country, and may have made contact with a group known as the Children of Heaven, who are suspected of involvement in the murder of a US embassy guard in Islamabad six months ago.”

To Liz’s acute irritation Mackay pronounced the Islamic names in such a way as to make it abundantly clear that he was an Arabic speaker. Just what was it with these people? she wondered. Why did they all think they were T. E. Lawrence, or Ralph Fiennes in
The English Patient
? A complicit flicker from Wetherby told her that he shared her sentiments on the matter.

“Our feeling at Vauxhall is that this activity is significant,” continued Mackay urbanely. “Two reasons. One: al Safa’s principal role is as a bag man, moving cash between Riyadh and the Asian terror groups. If he’s on the move, then something nasty’s in the pipeline. Two: the Children of Heaven are one of the few ITS groups thought to have included Caucasians in their ranks. A Pakistani Intelligence Service surveillance report from about six months ago indicated the presence in the camp of, and I quote, ‘two, perhaps three individuals of identifiably Western appearance.’ ”

He extended spatulate, sun-browned fingers on the table in front of him. “Our concern—and we’ve communicated this over the weekend to all stations—is that the opposition may be about to deploy an invisible.”

He let the remark hang for a moment. The calculated theatricality of his delivery did not lessen the impact of his statement. An “invisible” was CIA-speak for the ultimate intelligence nightmare: the terrorist who, because he or she is an ethnic native of the target country, can cross its borders unchecked, move around that country unquestioned, and infiltrate its institutions with ease. An invisible was the worst possible news.

“That being the case,” Mackay continued smoothly, “we would suggest that Immigration be brought into the loop.”

The Home Office man frowned. “What’s your view on likely targets and the timing of all this? We should probably up the security status of all government buildings from black to red, but that causes administrative problems, and I don’t want to move on it too soon.”

Mackay glanced at his notes. “Pakistan is already checking all passenger lists out of the country, with particular reference to . . . let’s see, non-business visitors under thirty-five whose stay has exceeded thirty days. So they’re very much on to the case. No idea of targets yet, but we’ll keep our ears very close to the ground.” He looked across at Wetherby, and then at Liz. “And we need to stay in constant touch with our agents this end, too.”

“That’s already happening,” said Wetherby. “If they hear about anything, so will we, but so far . . .” He glanced interrogatively at the GCHQ rep, who pursed his lips non-committally.

“We’ve had a bit more background noise than usual. No specific indicators though. Nothing approaching the traffic you’d associate with a major operation.”

Liz looked covertly around the room. The Special Branch officers, as usual, had remained silent. Their habitual attitudes were those of busy men whose time was being wasted in a Whitehall talking-shop. But both were now sitting upright and alert.

Her eyes met Mackay’s. He didn’t smile or look away but stared straight back. She continued her scan of the room but knew that the MI6 officer was still watching her. Felt the slow, cold burn of his gaze.

Wetherby, in turn—his tired, forgettable features voided of all expression—was watching Mackay. The circuit held for a long, taut moment and then Fane cut in with a general question about MI5 agents in the UK’s militant Islamic communities. “Just how close to the action are these people of yours?” he demanded. “Would they be amongst the need-to-knows if a major ITS operation was being mounted against this country?”

Wetherby let Liz field it. “In most cases probably not,” she said, knowing from experience that optimism cut no ice with Fane. “But we’ve got people in the right orbits. Time will see them move closer to the centre.”

“Time?”

“We’re not in a position to accelerate the process.”

She had decided not to mention Marzipan. The agent would have been a strong card to play but he had yet to prove his worth. Or, for that matter, his courage. At this early stage in his career as an agent she wasn’t prepared to reveal him—certainly not to a circle as wide as this one.

Wetherby, inscrutable, was tapping his lips with a pencil, but Liz could tell from his posture that he considered her decision the correct one. She had not allowed Fane to bump her into a statement that could later be held against them.

And Mackay, she realised with a faint sinking sensation, was still watching her. Was she unknowingly transmitting some kind of bat-like sexual sonar? Or was Mackay one of those men who felt that he had to establish a complicity with every woman who crossed his path, so that afterwards he could tell himself that he could have had her if he’d wanted? Either way, she felt more irritated than flattered.

Above their heads one of the tube lights began to flicker. It seemed to signal the meeting’s end.