At Risk (34 page)

“Are you from the Firm too?”

“I’m afraid not.”

He grinned warily. “Box, then?”

Short for Box 500, one of the Service’s former postal addresses, this was one of MI5’s many sobriquets. Traditionally, as Liz was keenly aware, the Army had always had a rather warmer relationship with MI6. As politely as she could, she ignored the question.

“Why don’t you take a seat, Captain Kersley? When Bruno Mackay shows up I’ll steer him in your direction.”

“Er . . . thanks. I’ve got two four-man teams unloading a Puma outside. Let me get them squared away and I’ll be back.”

She watched as he marched briskly away, and then turned to her laptop.

SAS here mob-handed,
she typed out.
But ITS target still unknown. Unusual, surely. Something I shd know???

Signing off with her identifying number, and encoding the message with a couple of swift key-strokes, she dispatched it to Wetherby.

The reply came back less than a minute later. Highlighting the text, she watched as the random-looking letters and numbers disappeared, to be replaced with legible text.

Agree unusual. Regiment present at request of G Fane. Essential ready deploy at short notice he told COBRA. Yr guess good as mine.

As she watched, the eight SAS soldiers passed the entrance to the hangar. Despite the rain, or perhaps because of it, they walked bare-headed and with studied casualness. They were dressed in black fireproof battledress and carrying a wide assortment of weapons including carbines and snipers’ rifles.

Altogether, a hellish volume of firepower was being brought to bear. Against what exactly? Liz wondered.

T
he pub in Birdhoe was called the Plough, and the sign showed the seven stars of that constellation. By 12:30 the car park was almost full; Sunday lunch at the Plough was a popular fixture, and there wasn’t another pub for three or four miles in either direction.

Exiting the ladies’ toilet in the corner of the car park, where she had been waiting until the coast was clear, Jean D’Aubigny looked about her. Luckily, it was still raining. No one was hanging around in the car park to chat. The car she had identified as the easiest to steal, if not necessarily the most suitable, was an old racing-green MGB. It was probably a quarter of a century old, but without being a collector’s piece looked reasonably well cared for. Its great advantage was that due to its age it had no steering lock that had to be disabled. Jean was capable of breaking a steering lock—a length of piping braced beneath one of the struts of the wheel and forced downwards usually did the trick—but it was a hard operation to perform unobtrusively.

Arriving at a decision, she walked purposefully to the MGB, deftly slashed the wet vinyl top with her clasp knife, dipped in her hand, slipped the lock, and climbed into the driver’s seat. Next to her, in the passenger seat, was a man’s sheepskin jacket, which she laid over her sodden knees. Drawing back her booted foot, she smashed her right heel into the covering beneath the steering wheel. It was plastic, but old plastic, and half of it cracked away, revealing the white metal ignition barrel beneath.

Glancing quickly around her to make sure that she was still unobserved, she wrenched the four wires out of the bottom of the barrel, and stripped them back with the knife. Taking the red wire—the main ignition lead—she quickly touched it to the others in turn. With the third, a green wire, there was a brief lurch as the starter turned over. Isolating the green wire, she quickly connected the other two to the red one. The dashboard was now live. Depressing the clutch, she ran through the gears a couple of times before slipping the MGB back into neutral.

OK, she told herself. Here we go—
Inshallah!

Carefully, avoiding the thumping electric shocks she’d suffered the first couple of times she’d tried it, outside a housing project in southeast Paris, she touched the green starter wire to the other three and depressed the accelerator an inch or two. The MGB howled, terrifyingly loud, and Jean jumped. But the weather must have dampened the noise, because no furious owner, beer glass in hand, appeared out of the pub. Instead, rainwater poured into Jean’s lap from the knife slash in the vinyl top.

With the engine turning over, she switched on the heater and windscreen-wipers, put the MGB into reverse, let off the handbrake, and backed out of the parking space. Even the gentlest manoeuvre seemed to engender an outraged snarl from the old sports car, and Jean’s heart was thumping painfully in her chest as she shifted to first gear, nosed towards the car park exit, and turned sharply southwards.

On the open road she felt no less self-conscious. This, surely, was a vehicle that local people would know and recognise. But the area seemed deserted. People were either at the pub, she guessed, or behind their locked front doors, watching TV sport or the Sunday soaps.

A mile beyond the village she came to the spot they had located on the map, where the cut they had walked along disappeared into a culvert under the road. She pulled up just beyond it, ensuring that the engine stayed running. Within moments, Faraj’s head and torso appeared, and he was hauling himself up through the sodden dead brambles. Jean leaned over to open the door and Faraj handed in the black rucksack, which she placed alongside her own in front of the passenger seat. Dripping copiously, he climbed into the seat, arranged the rucksacks beneath his knees, and pulled the door closed.

“Shabash!”
murmured Faraj. “Congratulations!”

“It’s not perfect,” she admitted, as the windscreen-wipers thumped noisily back and forth, “but it was the easiest to steal.”

She pulled back on to the road. The petrol gauge read a quarter full, and her brief elation faded as she realised that they weren’t going to be able to refill the tank, which almost certainly only ran on leaded fuel. Right now, though, she couldn’t face explaining this. Her senses felt simultaneously taut-wired and dulled to a kind of slow motion. She was running on empty herself. It was too complicated.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

B
ut why
this
man?” asked Liz. “Why send this particular man? He’s never been here, he’s got no family here . . . As far as we know he’s got no connection to Britain whatsoever.”

“I can’t answer that question,” said Mackay. “I genuinely have no idea. He certainly never came to our attention in Pakistan. If he was a player out there, it was at much too low a level to show up on our radar. But then I’m afraid that’s how things were. There was a very high noise-to-signal ratio.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that while there were any number of overexcited guys on street corners who were happy to scream and shout and burn the Stars and Stripes—especially if there was a CNN crew around—there were rather fewer who translated their resentment into direct action. If Pakistani agents were clocking every garage hand that al Safa so much as looked at, then they were doing what every agent has done since time immemorial—padding their reports to make it look like they were worth their salaries.”

“But they were right about Mansoor. Right to have him on file, at least.”

“So it turns out. But I’d guess that that’s more coincidence than inside knowledge.”

They were driving in Mackay’s BMW to the Marwell USAF base. The MI6 man had returned from Mildenhall to Swanley Heath shortly after midday, and after swapping phone numbers with Jamie Kersley, the SAS captain (who, it turned out, was also an old Harrovian), and sitting down for a ten-minute sandwich lunch with Liz and the police team, had prepared to leave for the last, and nearest, of the three USAF bases. Mackay had asked Liz if she felt like coming too, and with both terrorists positively identified but with no other positive leads it had seemed as constructive a course of action as any other. Thanks in part to the atrocious weather, the search for D’Aubigny and Mansoor had stalled, despite the arrival of teams from the regular and Territorial Army.

By 1:45, finally, the weather was showing signs of letting up. The rain had almost stopped and the hard battleship grey of the sky had softened to a paler blur.

“They’ll make a mistake,” said Mackay confidently. “They almost always do. Someone up there will spot them.”

“You think they’re still contained in the search area?”

“I think they’ve got to be. I’d back Mansoor to make it through alone, but not the two of them.”

“Don’t underestimate D’Aubigny,” said Liz, obscurely irritated. “This is not some thrill-seeking teenage bimbo, but a fully trained graduate of the North West Frontier camps. If either of the two has made mistakes so far, it’s Mansoor. He got himself jumped by Ray Gunter and ended up leaving us vital ballistic evidence, and I’ll bet you anything you like it was him who killed Elsie Hogan this morning, too.”

“Do I detect a note of empathy there? Admiration, even?”

“No, not an ounce. I think that she’s a killer too, almost certainly.”

“What tells you that?”

“I’m beginning to get a sense of who she is and how she operates. What I want is for her to start feeling twenty-four-hour pressure—the sense that she can’t afford to rest, can’t afford to stop, can’t even afford to think. I want it on top of the pressure that’s already there, the sense of being torn between two utterly opposing worlds.”

“She doesn’t seem very torn to me.”

“Outside, maybe not. Inside, believe me, she’s being pulled apart, and that’s what makes her so dangerous. The need to prove to herself, through violent action, that she’s committed to this . . . to this militant path.”

He permitted himself an oblique smile. “So would you rather the rest of us just withdrew, and left the two of you to get on with it?”

“Funny guy. In any campaign, the first stronghold that you have to occupy is your enemy’s consciousness.”

“That sounds like a quote.”

“It is a quote. Feliks Dzerzhinsky.”

“Founder of the KGB. A suitable mentor.”

“I like to think so.”

Mackay put his foot down to pass a green MGB. They had just passed through the village of Narborough. “I had a car a bit like that once,” he said. “An old ’74 MG Midget. Bought it for five hundred quid and restored it myself. God, but that was a beautiful car. Teal blue, tan interior, chrome bumpers . . .”

“And a real babe magnet, I’m sure,” said Liz. “All those Moneypennys.”

“Well, it didn’t put them off, that’s for sure.” He looked pensive for a moment. “The guy we’re going to see, just to put you in the picture, is a man named Delves. He’s a Brit, because Marwell is nominally an RAF station, but obviously he’s being kept fully in the picture about the progress of the hunt for Mansoor and D’Aubigny. The American commander is a USAF colonel called Greeley.”

“So is this more than just a courtesy call?”

“Not just. We have to assume our terrorists have done a very thorough recce of their target, whatever it is. Or possibly that someone else has done the recce on their behalf. Either way, we have to look at the station and the security setup through terrorist eyes. Put ourselves in their place. Decide what the weak spots are. Decide what we’d go for.”

“Did you come to any conclusions from the other two stations?”

“Only that the security was damn near impassable. My first thought was that I’d go for a SAM—a surface-to-air missile attack. As you know, there are still quite a lot of Stinger systems in ITS hands. But I found I wouldn’t be able to get anything like close enough to any of the runways. I wondered about concealing a bomb in the car of someone who lived off-base and then detonating it remotely when it had been driven into camp, but I discovered that all off-base personnel are given a strict car search routine—a proper, detailed ten-minute job, not just a quick flash with a mirror on a stick—and they stick to it. None of this stuff is abstract to these guys, believe you me. Those bases, from what I’ve seen, are sewn up tighter than a rat’s proverbial.”

“All security can be beaten,” said Liz.

“Agreed. And the people we’re after wouldn’t be in play if there wasn’t a weak spot somewhere. All I’m saying is that I haven’t found it.”