Authors: Gerald Seymour
Eleven hours after the tape recording of Ciaran McCoy's conversation with the Arab diplomat had been completed the spools were on the desk of a man who used a small office on the second floor of Leconfield House. A transcript had been taken by the duty clerks, who were the first to listen to the play-back, and that too lay on the high-polished oakwood surface. The room occupied by Philip Willoughby-Jones was bare to the point of starkness. A regulation square of carpet, determined by his Civil Service grade, covered the centre of the floor and was surrounded by ageing though systematically polished linoleum. The door to the room was set opposite the only window; on the third wall was a calendar sent out by a firm that specialized in the postal sales of garden bulbs; against the fourth was a steel filing cabinet. Grouped in a semi-circle in front of the desk were four chairs, framed in metal tubing, seats covered with yellow plastic, not designed for comfort but for working men who would leave them when their business was completed. The chair behind the desk offered only a slight concession in two vaguely-cushioned armrests.
Jones - he detested the hyphenated name his father had taken to using after his admittance to the masonic order of a small, East Midlands industrial town - was short and sparely built. He had a sharp gull nose that jutted out above his brush moustache, a legacy of his Royal Air Force days. His thin cheeks, merging into the shape of his bone structure, had neither colour nor verve, and were evidence of a man who had spent most of his time indoors. His hair, wispy and greying, was tended hurriedly and carelessly each morning, and remained in shape only for as long as the water used on his comb maintained order. The brightness lay in his eyes; narrow, deep-set, but alert and alive. It was his lower jaw that separated him from other men, the way the skin, lacking in wrinkles and hair, had been transposed from his right buttock to cover the incinerated layer that he had lost so many years before.
The replacement had no gloss or animation, and at the point where the new skin had been grafted to the old it irritated and annoyed. Jones was responsible for the general surveillance of the activities of Middle East embassies located in London.
Duggan, of Irish Affairs, would be down in fifteen minutes to talk with him, along with Fairclough, Arab Affairs (Palestinian). Before they came there was time to look again at the file on the embassy in Princes Gate. So much of his work was done from the files; the most thorough and successful course of action followed invariably from the writing down of minutiae - that was the Director General's belief, and the way he expected his subordinates to operate. Jones unlocked the second of the three drawers of the cabinet, and rolled it back. Hundreds of typed reports confronted him. Observations, assessments, personal biographies, transcripts of recorded telephone conversations. At the particular embassy several telephone lines were listened to, each extension warranting a separate brown folder. He flicked through them till he came to the one he wanted and lifted it out. Few sheets there. The number was only recently known, and it had been noted that little traffic came through it. Back at his desk he began to read, quickly and expertly, occasionally writing a few words in a neat trained hand on the memory-pad. There was time for a pipe before the others came, and he lit up, sucking far down into the charred wood of the bowl.
Wait till there's a big party, then move, they'd told him.
Abdel-El-Famy had delayed going through the French customs and immigration, waiting till the student group swamped the blue-uniformed officials. He had merged with them, one moment on their fringe, the next right among them. But the checks at Boulogne were casual, guided only by the report from St Omer that they should watch for someone mud-spattered and probably unshaven.
Famy's delaying tactics were unnecessary. His real protection came in the orange shirt he now wore, which had been neatly ironed and that had not suffered from its time in the grip-case; and in his laundered jeans and hip-length navy corduroy jacket. He had shaved, too, so that he fitted none of the descriptions that had been issued to the harbour police. The pistol and the soiled clothes were buried beneath the previous autumn's windfall of leaves in a wood to the east of the town. They would be found, eventually - but long after he had completed the task that had been set for him.
On the crossing Famy had made a conscious attempt to talk to a section of the party. His knowledge of French was variable, but sufficient to allow him to strike up conversation It was the start of a holiday and so spirits were high; there was no shortage of young people to laugh and joke with. The lecturer looking after the students for their eight days in London was vaguely aware that a tall, swarthy man, a little older than the others, and now among them, had not been at the station in Paris. It puzzled him, but he knew only a few of the group, and had had little time on the Paris-to-Boulogne leg of the journey to get close to them. He shrugged it off; perhaps a friend from home, or from school...
Famy saw the white ribbon of cliff as the boat swung to port, beginning its run to the long jetty. Not the clear white he had expected, not the formidable barrier he had read of in the university at Beirut, but shallow and with fields coming down toward the sea. The castle caught his eye, powerful, squat and old-fashioned. He smiled to himself, savouring it; that was his enemy, tired now, outdated, unable to compete in the new and modern world that he was seeking, unable to comprehend the hitting power of the Palestinian movement, unable to defend itself against the new philosophy of revolution and attack.
The two girls from Orleans and the boy from St Etienne were a long time getting their baggage together after the complicated process of docking and tying up. Famy was patient, the rest of the group less so. From the lecturer and other students came cries for the three to hurry themselves.
It suited Famy well. Out of the delay would come anxiety about the train connections for London, and that would mean a concentrated, excited rush at the customs and immigration barriers.
And that was how it was. As Customs quizzed the first four of the party the lecturer began to shout and wave the folder with the rail tickets. Other students joined in, all hugely enjoying the performance. The officials were good-humoured enough, and the party went through. Famy handed over the white immigration card, duly filled in, at the desk, and was talking deeply with the two girls as they swept past the Port Watch Special Branch men. He didn't rate a glance from them. His passport was still in his inner pocket, unrequired, unexamined.
For Famy there was now a moment of indecision. His orders, the orders for the three of them when they left Beirut, had been specific about the next stage of the journey. The instruction was that under no circumstances were they to travel via the direct Dover-to-London rail connection. If for any reason you are suspected, they had said, the authorities have two-and-a-half-hours' grace to make up their minds and intercept at the terminal at Victoria. His people had been adamant about this, and thorough enough to provide the bus time-table that would enable the squad to move down the coast and then link up with a train not connected with the cross-channel services.
Famy reasoned that although he was travelling a full day behind schedule the time-tables would remain constant. He had felt safe with the group and was reluctant to leave them, but his orders made no allowance for personal initiative at this stage. When the girls looked round for him he had disappeared.
There were endless waits at bus stops, interspersing the tedious stages of the journey. Dover to Folkestone, seven miles. Folkestone to Ashford, seventeen miles. Ashford to Maidstone, eighteen miles. And in all that time nobody, with the exception of the ticket men, spoke a word to him
- not a greeting, not a smile, not a syllable of conversation.
In Maidstone, a dull, boring little town, it looked to him, as he walked through the streets busy with Friday afternoon shoppers, he reverted to the railway system, and a slow stopping train to London. As he climbed into the carriage he reflected with satisfaction that he was within an hour of his destination, and the streets on which it had been determined that David Sokarev would die.
It was a difficult meeting in Leconfield House - three men round the one desk, close to their copies of the transcript, attempting to read more into the badly-typed words than they could find. There were many silences, and an adjournment was forced on them by the necessity for Duggan and Fairclough to return to their offices to search for anything that might throw light on the single brief conversation they had been given. After an hour of sparring round the problem Jones had felt it was time for summary and analysis.
'Let's just stop a minute,' he said, wanting to be back with specifics. 'Let's establish what we have from our own material before we start going elsewhere and picking other people's stuff. First, the number our friend McCoy telephoned is rarely used, but was considered of some importance or that little sod who gave it us wouldn't have looked as though he thought he was doing us the favour. When we spoke to him last he seemed to think we were getting the bargain out of it. So, it's sensitive. That's borne out by our second point of reference, the call itself. It's different to other calls on the line, on the number. They've been in some code, but we haven't enough on that yet, and it's not broken.'
He reached among his own papers, taking from one of the files four foolscap sheets, each printed over only three lines.
'Stuff like this. Doesn't make much sense, but this is what we have. "Accommodation one-seven-three, six-five, one-six-two." That was put over three days ago, bit of preamble, not much. English accent, probably disguised.
Next night something similar, same sort of style. "Rendez-vous as arranged, seven-seven, one, six." Both times it's the incoming calls that are given the information. On to the message last night. To my mind it represents a failure of rendezvous - clear to the deaf that, nothing remarkable in that piece of deduction. But where the pattern breaks down is that though the voice is the same as the first two calls this time he uses a name. Introduces himself. Doesn't use a code-word, bursts straight in.'
Fairclough spoke. 'Try the simplest way through.
McCoy, the name we have and which is perhaps genuine, he's hanging about last night. Cools his heels waiting for someone. Gets fed up. Wants to know what's happening and calls the number, the contact number he's been given.
Uses the call box. But he's got to be angry, hopping bloody mad. Too angry to remember the drill he's been given.
What's the code-word used in the first two calls?' That he couldn't remember it annoyed Fairclough; a concise, organized man, he liked to have things at his fingers.
'Just one word, it seems,' said Jones. 'Just the word
"Mushroom", then straight into the message, and whatever that means. No delay; very professional. No possibility of a trace on a call of the length they've been using.'
'Bloody impossible,' interjected Duggan, who didn't like the way events were shaping - the pattern that was building. Too ominous, too much that smacked of planning, and who was it that plans even on such unimportant details?
'Back to the scene, back to the facts.' Jones knew the way a meeting could disintegrate into side-tracking, into theory, and end up with a morning gone.
'We establish that for last night's call there is no use of the code. We also establish that our little diplomat feels it worth sitting in his miserable hutch half the evening waiting for the incomings, long after the crowd he works with are off swigging sherbet and tomato juice on the merry-go-round. When we look at him, what we have on him, there's damn all. New here, within the last few months. Ostensibly small job - visas and passports. Oil men and few businessmen, not that many, but he has a phone line of his own and an extension not listed in their directory. Takes calls at any time, either arranged or he sleeps in there.'
He paused. He was talking too much, doing his school-master bit again. Shouldn't be like that with his colleagues, but he'd caught the Duggan chill, and didn't want it to spread. Even among friends doubt and apprehension are corrosive. Bloody daft though, wasn't it? Three grown men, playing schoolboy riddles, working on a braintease.
Fun this one, because they've torn up the answers, won't tell you whether you're right or not. Can change the questions half-way through, can't they, just when you're warming? Their initiative, always the same, always the bastards have the initiative. And the three of them were there, pushing the hot air up, seeking another justification for another lost weekend. Ought to have one's head examined, working oneself into a lather, eighty-hour week, another fraught telephone call home. Bloody stupid.
Plough on, Jonesey, they're all waiting.
'So we come finally to the complication. Mystery Irish voice, the magic accent that gives us all wet dreams at night.' Duggan looked pained; Fairclough smiled.
Jones went on, 'What is McCoy doing - waiting for his mate and, when the blind date doesn't show, phoning a confidential embassy number? Thoughts, gentlemen?'
He'd finished. Let the others pick the bones out of that lot. Nasty smell it left, not too tangible yet, but enough of a stench to alert him.
Duggan's turn. He'd contributed little so far. The area he covered in his work was very different to that of the other two men. They were long-range, working on hypotheses, dealing with the possible, but the unlikely. His concern was the probable, and exact and known threat, that went under the initials of 'PIRA' - Provisional Irish Republican Army. When he had slipped back to his office earlier he had checked against his own list of suspects, and the cross-references, looking for any mentions of Ciaran McCoy. None existed. He had telephoned the headquarters of Military Intelligence at Lisburn, County Down, in Northern Ireland. They would begin their searches, feed his request into the computer. 'Negative' or 'Positive'
would be on the telex by lunch-time at the earliest, mid-afternoon by the latest.