Authors: Stella Rimington
“Charles. Thank you so much for ringing. It’s about Liz Carlyle.”
47
I
t was an eventful morning. Arriving at the house in Eaton Square, Liz had not expected to find a residence in mourning, but still thought there would be a subdued atmosphere in the Brunovsky household. Yet there had been no sign at all that Marco Tutti’s death was affecting business as usual: as Liz arrived, Brunovsky was shouting for Tamara, Mrs. Grimby had brought up a pain au chocolat, still warm from the oven, and Mrs. Warburton was supervising Emilia the maid’s dusting with an eagle eye.
Only Monica had made reference to the recent mortality, stopping in the doorway to the dining room. “Poor Marco,” she said, before asking Liz if she had ever been in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. It was not so much callous, thought Liz, as Monica’s usual way of dealing with the past—sticking her head in the sand.
Then Brunovsky had shouted again, this time calling for Liz. Has he started to think I’m working for him? she’d wondered as she rose from her chair.
“Yes,” she had said coolly when she got to the door of his study.
He was standing by his desk, holding a passport. “Do you have one of these?” he’d asked. It sounded urgent.
“Of course,” she’d said, for she had long before taken the precaution of having one in the name of Jane Falconer.
“With you?”
She nodded. The mugger had got some of her cover documents when she stole her handbag, so for the time being, until they were replaced, she was carrying her passport with her as proof of identity. He breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Thank goodness,” he’d said. “You can come along then.”
“Where to?”
Brunovsky looked at her with surprise. “Why, Ireland, of course. With Marco dead, I got in touch with this Miss Cottingham right away. She is not keen to visit London, so I thought why not let the mountain visit Muhammad, no? My plane is at Northolt and it will take only an hour to fly there. Harry will meet us and we can drive to this lady’s mansion in thirty minutes. We’ll be back in time for supper. Well, late supper anyway.”
Liz stared at him incredulously. He was obviously determined to go, indeed he seemed to have instigated the plan. Liz was certain he’d be walking straight into a fraud, if not something worse. She was convinced that
Blue Mountain
was no more authentic than
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. But now that Tutti was dead, who was running the scam? It must be Forbes, the American—he’d been tied up with Tutti in the past. Both of them had been after Brunovsky’s wallet since the beginning.
She hesitated. Brunovsky returned to the charge. “Jane, you must come. I need you,” he said in his little-boy voice. “Not perhaps for your Pashko expertise,” he winked at her, a rare acknowledgement that she was working undercover. “It’s just that I respect your judgement. These are complicated matters—you will look after me.” He smiled at her winningly.
“Are you taking Jerry Simmons?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “Of course. I will need him to drive me when we land.”
Thank God. If Brian wasn’t going to move Special Branch in to protect the Russian, at least his bodyguard should be around.
Liz glanced around. There was no one in the room or in Tamara’s office outside but she walked with deliberate slowness to the door and closed it. As if surprised, Brunovsky sat down at the table, and Liz came to a stop in front of him.
“Nikita,” she said—it was the first time she had ventured his Christian name but suddenly it seemed appropriate—“it’s not my job to protect you. But you did ask for me to be here to keep an eye out and give you advice about your security and I’m doing that now. You know that you are under a threat.
Blue Mountain
could be a fake or a fraud as you are well aware, but it could possibly be some kind of a set-up to catch you and your protection on the wrong foot in the wrong place. What I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s wise for you to go to Ireland.”
She stopped, wondering what on earth his reaction would be.
For a moment he gazed at her with simple unfeigned astonishment, his mouth opening and then closing. “Thank you for the warning,” he said, “but it is very important to me to go. There will be no danger.”
Then suddenly he grinned expansively. “You’ll come then? That’s my girl! Is that the right thing to say to a member of the British Security Service?”
And ninety minutes later she was walking with Brunovsky out on to the tarmac towards an Embraer Legacy jet, its steps down and the pilot, casual in a windcheater, standing on the top step. She’d tried to ring Peggy but she was not at her desk. The message she left must have sounded inane to the young woman—flitting off across the Irish Sea spontaneously, in search of a painting that didn’t exist. It was all getting out of hand. When I’m back, Liz decided, I’ll tell Brian to get me out of here or I’ll go and talk to DG.
48
H
e had never, ever, had an interview like that in all his time in the Service. DG had spoken, not emotionally, not even overtly angrily—either would have been preferable to the icy coldness of the dressing-down he had just received. When Brian had been eight years old, he had been caught cheating on an exam at his boarding school and sent to the headmaster. That was how he felt now.
Barely noticing the river view, he stood resting his forehead on the window of his office, until it clouded up from the exhalation of his breath. Absent-mindedly he drew a grid for noughts and crosses, etched a large O and a smaller adjacent x, then forgot about the next move as he played back in his head DG’s accusatory tones.
You have placed an officer’s life in danger. And for what purpose? I want you to act at once to retrieve the situation.
And the final terse warning:
I must warn you that I shall be taking disciplinary action.
Was that how his career was going to end? Thirty years’ service abruptly terminated because someone got nervy. He didn’t doubt for a minute that Adler’s original story had been correct. The Russians were up to something—they were
always
up to something, that’s what people didn’t understand. But it was Brunovsky they wanted, not Liz Carlyle. Silly, panicky woman. It was his misfortune to have got stuck with her on this operation.
He sat down at his desk and stared at the green marble slab and its unused pen. He wondered where DG had got his information. Who had spoken to him? Who had gone around his—Brian’s—back? He’d find out in the end who’d undermined him. But that would have to wait—he had to act immediately, if only out of self-preservation, and do what DG had ordered.
He sighed, then dialled the mobile number, only to get a voicemail’s recorded announcement. Damn. It was bad enough having to eat humble pie, but worse having to postpone the meal. He put down the phone, then picked it up again, and dialled an internal number. “Could I see you please, right away?”
Peggy Kinsolving came in within sixty seconds. She seemed an efficient sort of lass, if a bit too close to that Carlyle woman for his liking. Very young, but a competent investigator. He did not ask her to sit down; this wouldn’t take long.
“I’m trying to reach Liz Carlyle but her mobile’s on voicemail.”
“I’ve been trying to reach her too. You know that we’ve been in touch with the Danes and the Germans to try to identify the Illegal that they thought might have come here. I’ve just had a message.”
Peggy took a piece of paper from the folder she was carrying and put it on the desk under Brian Ackers’ nose. He gazed abstractedly at its few terse sentences and at the name.
“Has this woman surfaced here in any way? Do we know anything about her whereabouts?”
“She is close to Brunovsky.”
“My God!” said Brian excitedly. “This could be our first sight of Victor Adler’s plot.”
Then suddenly the implications of Peggy’s statement struck him like a thunderbolt. Liz Carlyle could be in real danger after all. Trying not to look as shaken as he felt, he began issuing rapid-fire orders. “I want you to go to the Brunovsky house and find Liz. Pretend you’re an old friend, or her sister—I don’t care, just make sure you find her. Tell her I want her to get out of there at once—she can think up any excuse she likes but she must leave immediately. Is that understood?”
“I can’t, Brian,” Peggy said, looking at her feet.
Jesus, he thought angrily. What’s wrong with these women? “Nonsense,” he said harshly. “Do as you’re told.” If DG could talk to him like that, then he could act the same way with his subordinates. “This is your immediate priority. Is that clear?”
“I’m sorry, Brian,” said Peggy, but she was not apologising. “Liz isn’t there. She’s gone to Ireland with Brunovsky. She left a message for me about an hour ago from Northolt. They’re taking his private jet.”
“Oh God,” Brian groaned. “What is she doing there?”
“She said they’ve gone to try and buy this picture from some old lady west of Cork.”
“Will this…woman…be with them?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right,” said Brian. He knew now how wrong he had been, but he found himself almost eerily calm. There was no point in self-recrimination. “Get me Michael Fane,” he said to Peggy. “I’m going to send him over there as quick as we can manage. I want you to get on to the Garda right away. Tell them we’re urgently trying to find a colleague. Get them to meet Michael when he lands at Cork.”
“All right,” said Peggy. “Shall I tell them the whole story?”
“No, for goodness’ sake,” said Brian. “Just tell them what they need to know.” He waved a bony hand to indicate she’d better get a move on. So why wasn’t this girl going? She was looking at him in a way he found unsettling. It was a look he’d never seen before in one of his staff—contemptuous but pitying at the same time.
“Don’t you think, Brian, you’d better speak to Geoffrey Fane and the Foreign Office? We don’t know how this is going to turn out. And I think I’d better try and find out who’s gone to Ireland with Brunovsky and Liz.”
49
T
he view of the lake had not changed for a hundred years (when the last of the woodland had been felled), and Letitia Cottingham had been alive for eighty-six of them. This morning as she took her small constitutional around the box hedge of the terrace, she wondered vaguely who all these people were flitting in and out of her house.
Perhaps they would have a party. That would be nice, like her childhood again, those days before the war when Thomas, her brother, would bring friends all the way from Cambridge to stay. The house was filled with laughing voices then, and they played lawn tennis and swam just down there, next to the boathouse. In the evenings there was dancing, and she was allowed to stay up and watch from the stairs.
But it had all ended with the war. The locals had been unhappy when Thomas had enlisted in the British Army—some of their mutterings had been positively pro-German. But even they had shown sympathy after that bleak morning when the postman had cycled up the drive, carrying the telegram announcing Thomas’s death at El Alamein.
Her parents had never recovered; both were dead within five years. And so the place had come down to her—plain Letitia Cottingham, whom nobody had wanted to marry until she had inherited the estate. She’d had her revenge, saying no to half a dozen suitors after that, and though she had never made a success of the place—selling off parcels of land every few years—she was still here. The roof leaked so badly there were buckets in the attic; the sash windows were rotten to the core; woodworm and rot in the floorboards meant that half the bedrooms were uninhabitable; but the fact was, the house was still Letitia’s. They would have to carry her out with her boots on.
The new carer was nice. Better than the last one who’d come from Dublin and seemed to hate the countryside. What was this girl’s name? Svetlana? Something like that. From one of those countries in Eastern Europe everyone used to complain about. She was such a gentle girl, even if her English wasn’t very good. Her friends were nice as well, though those foreign men who’d been the week before were rather brusque. And that unpleasant woman. Still, it was good to have life in the old place again.
50
B
runovsky was in love with his aeroplane. He sat in one of the vanilla leather-padded chairs, wearing a fawn cashmere blazer and Gucci loafers that looked as soft as slippers, talking to Liz in loving and monotonous detail about the attributes of the Embraer Legacy 600: its range of 3,400 nautical miles, wingspan of 68 feet, approach capability of 5.5 degrees (whatever that meant), and last but not least, its $23.6 million price tag.
The engines revved and the jet accelerated down the short Northolt runway until they were pushed back against their seats. It cleared the outer perimeter fence with what looked to Liz no more than twenty feet to spare; for a moment she wondered if the pilot was planning to join the cars heading west on the M40.
A friend of her father’s had once flown in the Concorde back from New York, and said that its interior was like a padded cigar tube, but Brunovsky’s jet was remarkably spacious. It could seat fourteen passengers, but on board now were only Liz, the oligarch and Jerry Simmons, sitting by himself on a two-seater sofa near the galley in the rear. As soon as they were airborne a slim young blonde stewardess in a smart navy blue suit with the shortest skirt Liz had ever seen on a uniform offered them smoked salmon and cold Sancerre. This is the life, thought Liz, settling back in her chair, realising without any feeling of guilt that she was the only one to accept the wine.
Sitting up front, alone with Brunovsky, she was wondering how much if anything she should tell him about Peggy’s recent discoveries. But she hesitated. She didn’t see it as any part of her job to tell Brunovsky that all his pals were crooks. He might well be aware of it already and he wouldn’t thank her for pointing it out. Tutti, for example. It was remarkable that Brunovsky had not even mentioned his supposed suicide. He might well know more about Harry Forbes than she did, and if that club was where he had met Monica, he must have a pretty good idea already of what sort of a girl she was.
As for Greta Darnshof, Liz determined to find out how much Brunovsky knew about her mysteriously funded magazine. She was about to raise the topic when Brunovsky finished his lunch, unbuckled his seat belt and stood up. He pointed towards the cockpit. “Excuse me, Jane, I must leave you for a little while. Monica hates flying, and when we travel together I have to sit and hold her hand. Now I have the rare opportunity to keep my pilot skills sharp. Hopefully, you won’t know if it’s me or the regular pilot who lands the plane.” He laughed and moved towards the nose of the plane.
Looking through the small window, Liz watched the Severn grow larger, then after a short time begin to shrink in the distance behind them. She thought about Brunovsky, trying yet again to get a fix on the man—difficult, since he was so volatile: one minute charm itself, the next volcanically bad-tempered. The deference he’d shown her at first had slowly diminished as she had become a familiar in his household. He obviously had some kind of confidence in her and had listened to her warning like a little boy being told what was good for him, but increasingly he was treating her as his property, in the same peremptory, demanding fashion he treated Monica or, God help us, the hapless Tamara. Another three weeks in Belgravia, thought Liz, and he’d have me taking dictation.
She undid her seat belt and walked back to the galley in search of some water, passing Jerry Simmons in his blue chauffeur’s suit. There would have been something imposing about his gorilla shoulders and big, bland face, had he not been sound asleep, snoring softly with his mouth open.
As they reached the eastern tip of Ireland the cloud thickened and the view disappeared. The plane descended slowly and bumpily until suddenly, only a few hundred feet above land, a gentle, rolling landscape of silky green appeared like a watercolour below. Liz could make out small farms, a hamlet of six or seven cottages, a stream no bigger than a large ditch, and then the wheels gently touched the runway with a delicate kiss.
A jubilant roar came from the cockpit, and as the plane rolled slowly towards the tiny terminal in the distance, Brunovsky emerged with a grin on his face. “I have not lost my touch,” he declared happily as he rejoined Liz, who was taking her mobile out of her bag. As she turned it on, Brunovsky reached out a large hand. “Could I borrow that for a moment?” he asked. “I left mine behind, and Monica likes to know when I have landed.”
Liz was extremely reluctant to surrender her phone, since it held a battery of Thames House numbers, but with Brunovsky’s hand held out, it was difficult to refuse to lend it to him. He took the phone and went back to the cockpit as the plane continued to traverse the long cross-axis of runway.
At last the plane came to a stop outside the terminal, and the pilot pushed open the cabin door, then unfolded the steel stairway. As Liz and Brunovsky came down the steps, with Simmons behind them, a chill westerly wind that had not yet reached London swept across the tarmac, catching them as they walked quickly to the tiny new terminal building of tinted glass and charcoal steel. There was a Boeing 737 parked outside the far end of the building, and a line of Cessna propeller planes on the grass fringe by the airport fence, but otherwise no sign of traffic.
Inside the terminal, landing formalities were cursory. A cheerful young man in a uniform gave a quick look at their passports and waved them through. Baggageless, they moved past an unattended customs desk into a small outer hall, where a solitary girl sat doing nothing behind a desk. Liz thought she had better let Peggy know where she was. “Can I have my phone please?” she asked Brunovsky.
“Of course,” he said, and felt in his jacket pocket. He tried another pocket, then patted all of them with an anxious look on his face. “Oh no,” he said, “I’ve left it in the cockpit.”
“I’m sure I can go back and get it,” said Liz. She couldn’t believe the man at passport control would object.
Brunovsky shook his head. “I am so sorry, Jane, but the plane won’t be there. The pilot’s taken it for refuelling.” He looked at her apologetically.
“There must be a pay phone here.”
Brunovsky looked irritated. “Jane, we are late already. Please wait. We will be at the house in half an hour—you can ring from there.”