Authors: Hector Macdonald
On this day we celebrate the life and work of a great leader, a brave pioneer, and a dear friend.
Simon Arkell watched the initial interrogation in something of a trance. Three ABIN officers with faultless English but little insight into this unfathomable enemy got nowhere.
‘Do you admit to murdering President Andrade by presenting him with a flower you knew to be poisoned?’
‘Do you admit to conspiring to murder Anneke van der Velde, Murilo Andrade and Terence Mayhew?’
‘What was your relationship with Gavriel Yadin?’
‘Who are you working for?’
‘How did you obtain the dart gun and poison?’
Clare Hopeflower did not answer their questions, and in the presence of Canadian and British observers they did not attempt to force answers from her. This was all for show, Arkell realized: the interrogators did not expect results from their restrained questioning. They would get them later, behind closed doors. His troubled, bewildering Klara sat silent on a bench in the corner of the windowless basement room, bare-headed, cuffed hands lifeless in her lap. The blood-spotted place on her shirt where the electrodes had pierced her side was just visible beneath her elbow. What hell was she about to go through?
Taking the ABIN Director General aside, Wraye murmured, ‘You probably don’t need us any longer, and there’s a flight to Lisbon I’d like to be on this evening. Simon and I have some rather urgent business in London. But before we leave, would it be possible to have a quick word with Miss Hopeflower alone?’
Murilo Andrade believed above all else in furthering the best interests of the people – not only of Brazil but of all the world. So when he chose to make his number one priority the legalization of drugs, he did so in the interests of the people of the world, knowing that it would probably cost him his job. Now, it has cost him his life.
Under the suspicious gaze of the ABIN officers, Madeleine Wraye led the prisoner, escorted by Simon Arkell, into the nearest toilets, a capacious room with eight cubicles and a dozen urinals. ‘It’s unlikely to be bugged,’ she said as she checked the cubicles, ‘but we might as well take precautions.’
Arkell set all the taps running. ‘Stand here,’ he said. ‘And speak softly.’
‘We haven’t told the Brazilians or the Canadians about Tony,’ explained Wraye, in a voice that was easily muffled by the gushing water. ‘I’m going to break it to the powers that be in London tomorrow. It would be helpful – though I assure you not essential – to have your testimony.’
Wraye took a paper towel from the dispenser and wiped the edge of the washstand. Leaning against it, she said, ‘You walked into this situation with your eyes open, knowing you would be arrested and imprisoned. I presume, therefore, that you are expecting Tony to intervene somehow on your behalf. Perhaps he can compromise the evidence against you. Perhaps there is a deal to be done. More likely he has persuaded you to believe these things, even though he knows them to be impossible. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Brazilians bring back the death penalty for the murderer of their president.
‘Regardless of what you think is ultimately going to happen, in the short term things are going to get very nasty for you. Intelligence services in these parts have long histories – black histories. There are plenty of mothballed facilities and officers with the old skills. So I’m going to give you a choice. We can allow you to disappear into the Brazilian security system for the next few days, during which time you may lose your teeth, your fertility, your eyesight, even your memories. Or I can promise personally to stay with you, ensuring that your human rights are scrupulously observed, and call for all possible British diplomatic cover until such time as your long-term fate is decided. I will do this for you in return for ten minutes of straight talking. Otherwise, Clare, I believe I’m going to throw you to the dogs.’
The thing about drugs is that they will always exist and we will always want them. That is our nature. Murilo Andrade was a great leader, a brave pioneer and a good friend, but above all else he was a realist. Today, in his name, I am asking you to be realistic. End this decades-long futility of denial. We like drugs and we always will. For Murilo, let’s come together to make them reliable, regulated and safe.
‘So why don’t we start at the beginning,’ suggested Wraye. ‘When and how did you meet Tony? What did he first ask you to do? And why did you take on a German identity?’
The gushing of water from twelve stainless-steel taps was strikingly loud in the pause that followed. Arkell watched them both as if through a distorting lens: the two women seemed impossibly far away. When the younger spoke, her voice took him by surprise. It shouldn’t have done – it was to be expected. The neutral BBC accent was nevertheless shocking to him.
‘I’m very sorry,’ said Clare Hopeflower. ‘I appreciate what you’re offering to do for me, but I really can’t discuss any of this.’
‘Shall we try Gavriel Yadin? You can’t be concerned about self-incrimination, surely, when you’ve already declared yourself to have been his lover.’
Hopeflower just shrugged apologetically.
‘Presumably Tony asked you to become intimate with him?’
This time there was no reply at all. As the water thundered from the taps, Wraye changed tack.
‘Let me try out a hypothesis on you, Clare. Something to prime the pump. It’s a hypothesis with quite a few variables, the first of which is how Tony first encountered you. You applied to join SIS, he was a friend of the family, there was a road accident, you met in a bar – it doesn’t really matter, and I’m sure we can find the answer with a couple of hours’ digging. What matters is how he recruited you. Let’s say this is approximately five years ago, and you’re around twenty-three years old. By now, Gavriel Yadin has been working for Tony for almost a decade. He’s pulled off some important executions, but his mood is changing, darkening. The satisfaction of the job well done is losing its appeal, and he’s starting down the road to the angst and alienation that you, I believe authentically, described for us this morning. Tony’s a great reader of people; he would have seen the change in Yadin, and it would have worried him. What can he do to preserve his marvellous secret weapon? He needs someone who can simultaneously distract Yadin from his gloomy introspection and keep a close eye on him. A lover, in fact.
‘There you are, young and impressionable. Tony sets out to dazzle you with his job title, his secrets, his awesome responsibility for national security, his access to Number 10, his undeniable charm. Above all, he stresses, this is essential public service. Someone very gifted is needed to live a double life. Do it for five years and the world will be your oyster. Tony will lay the keys of the kingdom at your feet. A fast-track career in SIS or the Civil Service? A top job in the City? A seat in Parliament even? Tony can make it all happen.
‘Of course, it was important you didn’t fall for Yadin. Tony would have given you long lectures about that, impressed upon you the dangers of getting too close, brainwashed you to a certain extent so that I really don’t think you ever did love your Kidon lover, did you? The poor dead chump. He’s been manipulated and played for years. The question is, Clare – and this is where I want you to pay attention – have
you
?’
Arkell tensed as he watched his one-time teacher shift gear.
‘Somehow in the last year – and this is another of those uncertain variables – Tony has managed to turn you from agent handler into full-blown assassin. My guess is the junkie brother who died of an overdose was real, that you have a major personal issue with the legalization agenda, and that Tony has exploited it to persuade you that killing presidents and prime ministers really is for the greater good. However he did it, the outcome isn’t in doubt: you’ve become a remarkably effective killer.
‘But this time the variable matters – how Tony persuaded you to kill is acutely important. Again, let me hypothesize: you see yourself as basically a good person, fighting a just war through dirty means. But for that to hold you would have to believe that the man directing you, inspiring you, acculturating you, was also basically a good person. You would have to believe he was working on behalf of the British people rather than, say, a foreign corporation with immense commercial interests in the illegal drug trade. You would have to believe the individuals he sent Yadin to kill were evil-doers rather than, say, loyal British intelligence officers. And above all you would have to believe that, as head of Counter-Terrorism for SIS, his efforts were directed at combating terrorism rather than – let’s be conservative in our allegations – facilitating it.
‘Clare, when you were a teenager Tony Watchman helped bring about the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians in Chicago. I’m a very good judge of character and I don’t believe you knew this about him. If I’m wrong, you deserve everything the Brazilians are going to do to you. But if I’m right, Clare, if you’ve been manipulated and used and duped by a man whose real motives were hidden from you, then for the sake of your future, your children, your grandchildren, you have
got
to start talking to me.’
Arkell realized he was holding his breath. The hand Wraye had chosen to play had served SIS officers well over the decades: numerous high-placed assets had been recruited when forced to confront a moral failing in their previous allegiance. But it was a high-risk tactic. It depended entirely on the moral compass of the subject, and on their willingness to accept a total realignment of their world view.
In the case of Clare Hopeflower, alias Klara Richter, it didn’t work. ‘I’m sorry,’ was her only answer.
‘You’d take a lifetime in prison for that man?’
‘I doubt it will be that long,’ she said mildly.
‘You naïve little fool!’ shouted Wraye.
Arkell stepped forward then. ‘Can I have a go?’
He sat on the floor below the gushing taps and after a moment’s consideration she joined him. Taking her charcoal beret from his pocket, he handed it to her. She nodded silently, gratefully perhaps, and pulled it on. They leaned back against the washstand and stared at the cubicles. With Wraye’s departure there was a tangible lightening of the atmosphere in the room, but still it was a while before either of them found the will to speak.
‘Did you kill him?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘But he is dead?’
‘So you do care.’
‘What I said in Rio was true. I did love him. In a way. Not at first, but it’s hard to play the role for so long without it becoming a little bit real.’
‘Then if you and I had spent more time together,’ he said with bitterness, ‘maybe that love would have become real too.’
She bit her lip. ‘Which of us are you talking about?’ When he didn’t answer, she added, ‘We were both trying to deceive each other.’
‘My job didn’t require me to fall in love with you,’ he said stiffly.
She looked down. ‘Neither did mine.’
He stared in confusion at the cubicle opposite, projecting onto the door her smile as it had been in Strasbourg, trying to understand, to assess, to make sense.
‘In Lourdes – I saw you. Not your face, but I saw you do it. You knew what was on that flower. You chose to murder him.’
‘Do you use that word for the people you’ve killed?’
‘Andrade was different.’ But as he said it he remembered the face of the family man he’d shot in Kyrgyzstan, the farmer caught up in a rebellion in Chad, the teenage boy with the grenade in Somalia.
‘Not to me.’
He stretched out his bad leg, trying to relieve the throbbing pain in his thigh. ‘You’re talking about your brother.’
‘It’s all true. Look him up. Andrew Hopeflower, 74 Medley Street, Chiswick. The whole sordid story is in the police file.’
‘So drug legalization . . . ?’
‘Stupidest fucking idea in history.’
The welling emotion in her voice, he realized with a shock, almost had him slipping an arm around her shoulders. What was it like to see a brother die so pointlessly? Simon Arkell had a sister, much younger; they had never been close, even before he chose to disappear. He couldn’t begin to understand this still-bereaved woman. Or perhaps he could, he thought, remembering Tom Parke’s white body, streaked with mud, bloodless flesh torn where the groundsman’s rake had hooked him, laid out on the gravel beside the storm drain.
‘There’s nothing I can do for you,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘They’re going to throw away the key.’
She stayed silent. He sensed a shiver run through her.
‘Clare, how could you do it? How could you play the adoring girlfriend to an assassin for four years on the orders of a man like Tony Watchman?’
‘We all have our different talents,’ she said wearily.
‘That’s what you wanted? That’s really the life you dreamed of when you were at Oxford – when any future was open to you?’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t know what I wanted. After Andy died, things got confused. At least it was something I could do.’
‘There’s so much you could do!’
She smiled ruefully, and he wondered if he should correct himself:
so much you could have done
.
‘Simon . . .’
‘It’s a miserable bloody waste!’ he raged.
‘It is,’ she whispered, just audible over the gushing taps. ‘But I didn’t know you then.’
Something small and very delicate seemed to break inside him. To save himself, he said the one true thing that could reliably bring down the shutters between them. ‘I still don’t know you at all.’
None of them spoke in the ABIN car on the way to Brasilia International, nor in the departure lounge, nor on the plane. They checked in separately, using clean identities unknown to SIS or Tony Watchman, and sat on opposite sides of the Business Class cabin.
At Lisbon Portela, Siren took the thick envelope with evident discomfort and headed for Arrivals. Arkell had persuaded her to try a few weeks’ painting in Belém’s mosaic and cobblestone streets – to give her dream one more chance – while recuperating at one of the city’s finer spa hotels. In return, she had accepted his apology.
Wraye and Arkell had two hours to kill before their connecting flight. They found a loud video arcade at one end of the terminal where they could talk safely.
Wraye handed him a folded sheet of paper. ‘Watchman’s London address. His wife and children are at the Buckinghamshire house for the whole summer. There’s a girlfriend who may be around: Gemma, thirty-two, primary-school teacher. Tell her you’re a private investigator hired by Mrs Watchman – that should scare her away. Tomorrow midday, I’ll go to the Cabinet Secretary. It would be helpful if his body hasn’t been found before then.’
‘This is really what you want? Sure you wouldn’t rather see him stand trial?’
‘I might. But it would be impossible for the Firm and catastrophic for the country. The JIC won’t regret his passing when they hear what I have to say. Do it cleanly and quietly, and I’m confident there won’t be much of a police investigation.’
‘What about AMB?’
She smiled then. ‘You didn’t imagine we’d ever be able to touch
them
, did you?’
‘Tell me you’re not serious.’
‘The darlings of the Pentagon and DHS? One of the great American commercial success stories of the last decade? Simon do you have any idea how much AMB donated to Super PACs on both sides of the last election?’
‘Are you forgetting GRIEVANCE?’ he said coldly.
She matched his tone, yielding nothing. ‘GRIEVANCE happened. It’s part of our history. None of those people can be brought back to life by exposing AMB’s role, of which, by the way, we have no proof. Full revelation would only terrify the West and confirm every prejudice and conspiracy theory in the Middle East. The best we can do is deny AMB further access to the Firm’s resources. Meanwhile, we quietly take down the man who made their crimes possible.’
He was staring at her as if he no longer recognized her. ‘When did you become so timid?’
‘We have to pick our battles, Simon.’
Shrieks of laughter came from three kids huddled around one of the arcade games. ‘If there was more evidence,’ Arkell said forcefully. ‘The only reason I . . .’ He stopped. There was no point.
Some things, he had learned over the course of nine years, were best done alone.
Before boarding the BA flight to London, they each bought a sun hat from a souvenir shop. All SIM cards went in a bin. At Heathrow they both disappeared into toilets for exactly fourteen minutes, re-emerging into a pack of passengers disembarking a flight from Dubai. They joined separate Immigration queues, using the rims of their hats to hide their faces from the CCTV cameras. Neither false passport raised any flags, but they had to remove the hats at the desks, and after that they moved very swiftly through the baggage hall and Customs.
In the arrivals hall, Arkell spotted a familiar face. Incredulous, he gave a quick warning shake of his head, and turned to Madeleine Wraye.
‘There’ll be more work,’ she said.
‘You know how to reach me.’
‘Perhaps even a way back into the Firm.’
He shook his head. ‘I like it on the outside.’
‘I thought you’d say that.’
‘Madeleine . . .’ His mind returned to that dimly lit room in a Strasbourg pension. To a kind of truth laid bare in the dead of night. ‘How do
you
think he got Clare to do what she did?’
She eyed him darkly. ‘I think he was pushing at an open door.’
She kissed him once, on the lips, and walked quickly away. Danny Levin, approaching, said, ‘Who’s she? No, wait, don’t tell me. It’ll be fun working it out.’
‘Danny, how the hell?’
He grinned. ‘So there’s this thing you can do with incoming flights, where you –’
‘Actually, there’s no time. We’ve got to get out of here.’ Arkell started towards the taxi rank.
‘Awesome! Are we being hunted? In
England
?’
‘It’s a definite possibility.’
There was a queue, but Arkell pushed Danny to the front, saying, ‘I’m sorry, he had a dangerous episode on the plane. I have to get him straight back to the clinic.’ No one objected.
In the cab, Danny said, ‘So, the Fräulein who wasn’t a Fräulein: was that useful?’
‘It was,’ murmured Arkell distractedly. He was looking back at the terminal he’d never seen before, at the new roundabout and the perimeter road, at the car parks and the bus lane, at the number plates and speed cameras, at the road markings, the dusty trees, the white vans, satellite dishes, the garden sheds built for cash in hand, the cranes and Velux windows, the glass buildings in which music and pharmaceutical executives battled to cling on to their markets, the fast-food van in the lay-by, the crumbling churches and advertising billboards and tower blocks and muted skies. England.
He was home.
Simon Arkell entered the Shepherd’s Bush house of the SIS Director of Counter-Terrorism at 16:38. It was empty, no sign of the teacher girlfriend. The alarm was sophisticated but manageable. The locks were straightforward. With the kit he had purchased from a small workshop in Mile End, they were open in under thirty seconds.
He had devoted several hours to dry cleaning in the tube stations, department stores and alleyways of the capital. Tony Watchman could call, for another few hours at least, on the extensive resources of SO15 and the Security Service to capture and contain the two people in Britain who knew his terrible secret. He could access the entire city’s CCTV network, and make good use of the latest facial recognition software to locate and tail them both. Nevertheless, by the time Arkell reached Wraye’s unofficial armourer in Willesden, he was confident no one was following him. By 16:30, dressed quite differently, with a hoody to foil the cameras, he was sure of it.
He sat at Watchman’s desk, Glock 17 and suppressor resting on the blotter in front of him, looking at the family photographs in silver frames. A grinning girl, perhaps twelve years old, on a horse. Another, younger but acting older, beside a pool. A small boy sitting on his mother’s lap on a rattan garden chair. There were documents to photograph, locked drawers to pick, a computer hard drive to clone. He might have an hour before Watchman returned home, he might have five. It didn’t matter. He could continue searching, collecting data afterwards. He could afford a few minutes to consider the wife and children of the man he was about to kill.
Had Watchman been sitting at this desk when he ordered Gavriel Yadin to murder a young couple in Dault Street? Had he been looking at photographs of his wife and baby daughter when he signed Emily’s death warrant? Arkell shrugged off the questions. They made no difference. The handsome family made no difference. There was Saeed and Ellington, Emily and van der Velde and Andrade, and all the many, many victims of GRIEVANCE. And then there was a young English woman who might have been something extraordinary, drawn into murder and a lifetime in prison. The balance of justice was indisputable. The only question lay in himself as executioner.
Was he ready to kill for the first time in nine years?
He had learned something from Yadin, the assassin who sought a greater familiarity with death. He couldn’t have put it into words. He wasn’t certain the insight had anything to do with killing. Rather, the extreme manifestations of humanity. Of soul. Did that help? Was he ready? So much doubt. The blade poised behind the Kidon neck, the paralysis that had cost a president’s life. Standing over Yadin’s body, killed by another – was the feeling he experienced then relief or impotence? Perhaps they were the same thing. Was he ready? Relief was not what he sought. Had never sought. Revenge . . . restitution of all that was valuable . . . or just a symbolic act to alleviate the pain of so much old and new sorrow. Klara-Clare, damned before she’d started living. Simon Arkell did not flinch from the photographs, from the daughters and the son and the trusting wife, as footsteps sounded on the gravel path outside, as a key turned in the lock, as his forefinger settled on the Glock trigger, and his answer, in that time-telescoping moment, was, categorically – yes.
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