The Deceiver (46 page)

Rowse drove back to Gloucestershire the following morning to take up the reins of his life again and await the promised contact from Hakim al-Mansour. As he saw it, when he received the information concerning the docking of the arms ship, he would pass the tip to McCready. The SIS would trace the ship backward from that, identify it in the Mediterranean, and pick it up in the Eastern Atlantic or in the English Channel, with Mahoney and his team on board. It was as simple as that.

The contact came seven days later. A black Porsche crept into the courtyard of Rowse’s home, and a young man climbed out. He looked around at the green grass and beds of flowers in the late May sunshine. He was dark-haired and saturnine, and he came from a drier, harsher land.

“Tom,” called Nikki. “Someone to see you.”

Rowse came around from the rear garden. He let no trace of expression mask the polite inquiry on his face, but he recognized the man: It was the tail who had followed him from Tripoli to Valletta, then seen him off on the flight to Cyprus two weeks earlier.

“Yes?” he said.

“Mr. Rowse?”

“Yes.”

“I have a message from Mr. Aziz.” His English was reasonable but careful, too careful to be fluent. He recited his message as he had learned it.

“Your cargo will arrive at Bremerhaven. Three crates, all marked as office machinery. Your normal signature will secure release. Bay Zero Nine, Warehouse Neuberg. Rossmannstrasse. You must remove them within twenty-four hours of their arrival date, otherwise they will disappear. Is that clear?”

Rowse repeated the exact address, fixing it in his mind. The young man climbed back into his car.

“One thing. When? Which day?”

“Ah, yes. The twenty-fourth. They arrive at noon of the twenty-fourth.”

He drove away, leaving Rowse with his mouth open. Minutes later he was racing to the village to use the public phone, having ensured he was still clean of a tail. His own phone was still tapped, the experts had confirmed, and it would have to stay that way for a while longer.

“What the hell can they mean, the twenty-fourth?” raged McCready for the tenth time. “That’s in three days! Three bloody days!”

“Mahoney’s still in place?” asked Rowse. He had just driven up to London at McCready’s insistence, and they were meeting at one of the Firm’s safe houses, an apartment in Chelsea. It was still not safe to bring Rowse to Century House—officially, he was persona non grata there.

“Yes, still propping up the bar at the Apollonia, still surrounded by his team, still waiting for a word from al-Mansour, still surrounded by my watchers.”

McCready had already worked out that there were only two choices. Either the Libyans were lying about the twenty-fourth—another test for Rowse, to see if the police would raid the Neuberg warehouse. In which case al-Mansour would have time to divert his ship somewhere else. Or else he, McCready, had been duped—Mahoney and his team were decoys and probably did not know it themselves.

Of one thing he was certain: No ship could get from Cyprus to Bremerhaven via Tripoli or Sirte in three days. While Rowse was motoring to London, McCready had consulted his friend at Dibben Place, Colchester, home of Lloyds Shipping Intelligence. The man was adamant. First, it would take one day to sail from, say, Paphos to Tripoli or Sirte. Allow another day for loading, more likely a night. Two days to Gibraltar, and four or five more to northern Germany. Seven days minimum, more likely eight.

So either it was a test for Rowse, or the arms ship was already at sea. According to the man from Lloyds, to dock at Bremerhaven on the twenty-fourth, it would now be somewhere west of Lisbon, heading north to clear Finisterre.

Checks were being made by Lloyds as to the names of ships expected in Bremerhaven on the twenty-fourth with a Mediterranean port of departure. The phone rang. It was the Lloyds expert on a patch-through to the Chelsea safe house.

“There aren’t any,” he said. “Nothing from the Mediterranean is expected on the twenty-fourth. You must have been misinformed.”

With a vengeance, thought McCready. In Hakim al-Mansour, he had come up against a master of the game.

He turned to Rowse.

“Apart from Mahoney and his crew, was there
anyone
in that hotel who even smelted of IRA?”

Rowse shook his head.

“I’m afraid it’s back to the photograph albums,” said McCready. “Go through them over and over again. If there’s any face—anything at all—that you spotted in your time in Tripoli, Malta, or Cyprus, let me know. I’ll leave you with them. I have some errands to run.”

McCready did not even consult Century House about asking for American help. Time was too short to go through channels. He went to see the CIA Station Head in Grosvenor Square, Bill Carver.

“Well, Sam, I don’t know. Diverting a satellite isn’t that easy. Can’t you use a Nimrod?”

Royal Air Force Nimrods can take high-definition pictures of ships at sea, but they tend to fly so low that they are seen themselves. Without added altitude, they have to make many passes to cover a large area of ocean.

McCready considered long and hard. If he knew the consignment had gotten through and was firmly in the hands of the IRA, he would have wasted no time alerting the CIA to the threat to their ambassador in London, as reported by the Libyan doctor in Qaddafi’s tent.

But for weeks his concern had been just to stop the arms shipment from getting through to the final destination. Now, needing CIA help, he produced his bombshell—he told Carver of the threat.

Carver came out of his chair as if jet-propelled. “Jesus H. Christ, Sam!” he exploded. Both men knew that apart from the catastrophe of a U.S. ambassador being slaughtered on British soil, Charles and Carol Price had proved the most popular American emissaries in decades. Mrs. Thatcher would not easily forgive an organization that allowed anything to happen to Charlie Price.

“You’ll get your fucking satellite,” said Carver. “But next time you damned well better tell me earlier than this.”

It was almost midnight before Rowse went wearily back to Album One, the old days. He was sitting with a photo expert brought over from Century House. A projector and screen had been installed so that photographs could be thrown onto the screen and alterations made to the faces.

Just before one o’clock, Rowse paused.

“This one,” he said. “Can you put it on the screen?”

The face filled almost one wall.

“Don’t be daft,” said McCready. “He’s been out of it for years. A has-been, over the hill.”

The face stared back, tired eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, iron-gray hair over the creased brow.

“Lose the glasses,” Rowse said to the photo expert. “Give him brown contact lenses.”

The technician made adjustments. The glasses vanished, and the eyes went from blue to brown.

“How old is this photo?”

“About ten years,” said the technician.

“Age him ten years. Thin the hair, more lines, dewlaps under the chin.”

The technician did as he was told. The man looked about seventy now.

“Turn the hair jet black. Hair dye.”

The thin gray hair turned deep black. Rowse whistled.

“Sitting alone in the corner of the terrace,” he said, “at the Apollonia. Talking to no one, keeping himself to himself.”

“Stephen Johnson was Chief of Staff of the IRA—the
old
IRA—twenty years ago,” said McCready. “Quit the whole organization ten years ago, after a blazing row with the new generation over policy. He’s now sixty-five. Sells agricultural machinery in County Clare, for heaven’s sake.”

Rowse grinned. “Used to be an ace, had a row, quit in disgust, known to be out in the cold, untouchable by those inside the Establishment—remind you of anyone you know?”

“Sometimes, young Master Rowse, you can even be halfway smart,” admitted McCready.

He called up a friend in the Irish police, the Garda Siochana. Officially, contacts between the Irish Garda and their British counterparts in the fight against terrorism are supposed to be formal but at arm’s length. In fact, between professionals, those contacts are often warmer and closer than some of the more hardline politicians would wish.

This time it was a man in the Irish Special Branch, awakened at his home in Ranelagh, who came up trumps around the breakfast hour.

“He’s on holiday,” said McCready. “According to the local Garda, he’s taken up golf and departs occasionally for a golfing holiday, usually in Spain.”

“Southern Spain?”

“Possibly. Why?”

“Remember the Gibraltar affair?”

They both remembered it all too well. Three IRA killers, planning to plant a huge bomb in Gibraltar, had been “taken out” by an SAS team—prematurely but permanently. The terrorists had arrived on the Rock as tourists from the Costa del Sol and the Spanish police and counterintelligence force had been extremely helpful.

“There was always rumored to be a fourth in the party, onewho stayed in Spain,” recalled Rowse. “And the Marbella area is stiff with golf courses.”

“The bugger,” breathed McCready. “The old bugger. He’s gone active again.”

In the middle of the morning, McCready took a call from Bill Carver, and they went over to the American Embassy. Carver received them in the main hall, signed them in, and took them to his office in the basement, where he too had a room all set up for viewing photographs.

The satellite had done its job well, rolling gently high in space over the eastern Atlantic, pointing its Long Tom cameras downward to cover a strip of water from the Portuguese, Spanish, and French coasts to more than one hundred miles out into the ocean in a single pass.

Acting on a suggestion from his Lloyds contact, McCready had asked for a study of a rectangle of water from Lisbon north to the Bay of Biscay. The continuous welter of photographs that had poured back to the receiving station of the National Reconnaissance Office outside Washington had been broken down into individual snaps of every ship afloat in that rectangle.

“The bird photographed everything bigger than a floating Coke can,” remarked Carver proudly. “You want to start?”

There were more than a hundred and twenty ships in that rectangle of water. Nearly half were fishing vessels. McCready discounted them, though he might wish to return to them later. Bremerhaven had a port for fishing vessels, too, but they would be of German registry, and a stranger showing up to unload not fish but general cargo would look odd. He concentrated on the freighters and a few large and luxurious private yachts, also ignoring the four passenger liners. His reduced list numbered fifty-three.

One by one, he asked that the small slivers of metal on the great expanse of water be blown up until each filled the screen. Detail by detail, the men in the room examined them. Some were heading the wrong way. Those heading north for the English Channel numbered thirty-one.

At half-past two, McCready called a halt.

“That man,” he said to Bill Carver’s technician, “the one standing on the wing of the bridge. Can you come in closer?”

“You got it,” said the American.

The freighter had been photographed off Finisterre just before sundown on the previous day. A crewman was busying himself with a routine task on the foredeck, while another man stood on the wing of the bridge looking at him. As McCready and Rowse watched, the ship grew bigger and bigger on the screen, and still the definition held. The fore-peak and stern of the vessel disappeared offscreen and the figure of the man standing alone grew larger.

“How high is that bird?” asked Rowse.

“Hundred and ten miles,” said the technician.

“Boy, that’s some technology,” said Rowse.

“Pick up a license plate, clearly readable,” said the American proudly.

There were more than twenty frames of that particular freighter. When the man on the bridge-wing filled most of the wall, Rowse asked for all of them to be screened with the same magnification. As the images flashed, the man seemed to move, like one of those stick figures in a Victorian biograph.

The figure turned from looking at the seaman and stared out to sea. Then he removed his peaked cap to run a hand through his thin hair. Perhaps a seabird called above him. Whatever, he raised his face.

“Freeze,” called Rowse. “Closer.”

The technician magnified the face until finally it began to blur.

“Bingo,” McCready whispered over Rowse’s shoulder. “That’s him. Johnson.”

The tired old eyes beneath the thin jet-black hair stared out at them from the screen. The old man from the corner of the Apollonia dining terrace. The has-been.

“The name of the ship,” said McCready. “We need the name of the ship.”

It was on her bow, and the satellite, as she dropped over the horizon to the north, had still been filming. A single, low-angle shot caught the words beside the anchor:
Regina IV
. McCready reached for the phone and called his man at Lloyds Shipping Intelligence.

“Can’t be,” said the man when he called back thirty minutes later. “
Regina IV
is over ten thousand tons, and she’s off the coast of Venezuela. You must have got it wrong.”

“No mistake,” said McCready. “She’s about two thousand tons, and she’s steaming north, by now off Bordeaux.”

“Hang about,” said the cheerful voice from Colchester. “Is she up to something naughty?”

“Almost certainly,” said McCready.

“I’ll call you back,” said the Lloyds man. He did, almost an hour later. McCready had spent most of that time on the telephone to some people based at Poole, in Dorset.

“
Regina
,” said the man from Lloyds, “is a very common name. Like
Stella Marts
. That’s why they have letters or Roman numerals after the name. To distinguish one from another. It happens there’s a
Regina VI
registered at Limassol, now believed to be berthed at Paphos. About two thousand tons. German skipper, Greek Cypriot crew. New owners—a shell company registered in Luxembourg.”

“The Libyan government,” thought McCready. It would be a simple ruse. Leave the Mediterranean as the
Regina VI;
out in the Atlantic, paint out the single numeral after the
V
and paint another in before it. Skilled hands could alter the ship’s papers to match. The agents would book the thoroughly reputable
Regina IV
into Bremerhaven with a cargo of office machinery and general cargo from Canada, and who would know that the real
Regina IV
was off Venezuela?