A Gentleman's Game (9 page)

8

London—Vauxhall Cross,
Office of the Deputy Chief of Service
17 August 0959 GMT

Crocker hadn’t closed the door
to the Deputy Chief’s office before Donald Weldon was offering him a red file folder.

“Read,” Weldon said.

The folder was labeled “Most Secret,” but the operation designation line had been left blank. A bar code had been assigned, stuck to the lower-right corner of the front of the file, and the tracking boxes along the front were empty but for four entries: C at 0723 that morning; Weldon at 0808; Rayburn at 0858; and Weldon again at 0949.

Crocker knew what it was without opening it, but he did so anyway, to be certain of the particulars. Within were two sheets, clipped together, neatly typed. The first was a directive from the Prime Minister, authorizing SIS to undertake action as described in the concept of operations following. Despite the nature of the operation, Crocker noted that the PM had omitted any reference to retaliation or retribution. Instead, he’d declared the proposed action as one of self-defense and protection vital to the Crown and its holdings.

The second sheet was the conops, as prepared by the Intelligence Oversight Committee, including the Prime Minister, C, and various other members of the FCO and Cabinet, as well as the Chief of the Defense Staff. It was, even given the vaguely legal nature of its language, short to the point of being curt: it ordered SIS Director of Operations Paul Crocker to immediately plan and execute the assassination of Dr. Faud bin Abdullah al-Shimmari.

Minor provisions were given, all of them standard. The operation was to be carried out with due care to prevent collateral damage to secondary targets, but only in furtherance of primary mission objective; requisite concealment of authorizing agency and operative(s), inclusive; declassification date declared fifty years to the day of mission completion. The mission completion date was open-ended, and Crocker presumed that was Rayburn’s doing, considering that Faud was most likely at his home in Jeddah, and there was no way in the world they’d be able to hit him there and get away with it.

There were things that were different about this conops, though, things that it took Crocker a moment to realize. There was no equivocating, no double-speak. It was as blunt a directive as he had ever received, in that sense, and the message was clear: Kill Faud, we don’t give a damn how. Even the clause excusing collateral damage “in furtherance of primary mission objective,” the Government’s way of saying that if an agent had to, perhaps, machine-gun three of Faud’s closest friends on the way to target, well, it was a pity, but it would be forgiven.

At the bottom of the page were the signatures of those who had authorized the action, including the Prime Minister and C.

Crocker flipped the folder shut with one hand, dropped it back onto Weldon’s spotless desk with a frown.

The Deputy Chief folded his hands across his broad middle. He wasn’t so much an overweight man as a stocky one, built like the support column one found in underground car parks, with the addition of a liberal head of graying brown hair. Neither of them made enough to afford the tailors that men like C did, and Weldon, like Crocker, purchased his suits at Marks & Spencer. Unlike Crocker, who stayed religiously in the black, blue, and gray spectrum, Weldon went more to the browns.

“Directive came down this morning, as you can see. You’re to undertake the operation immediately.”

“I’m not going to send a Minder into Saudi.”

“I repeat, Paul, you’re to undertake the operation immediately. According to D-Int, Faud is at his home in Jeddah. Poole can take him there.”

Crocker shook his head. “I’m not putting a Minder into Saudi to perform an assassination. I’d never get him out again.”

“With proper planning—”

“It’s Saudi Arabia, not Croydon, sir. Travel in the country is restricted, even to nationals. We’d have to give the Minder cover that would not only get them into the country, but get them from Riyadh to Jeddah, and then out again.”

“There are other routes out of the country.”

“To where? He’s supposed to take a boat across the Red Sea into Sudan or Egypt? Or do you think he should tab overland to the UAE, maybe to Jordan? There are too many things that could go wrong.”

Weldon’s hands slipped down, then came up again to rest on the desk, now in the form of fists. “Your job is to undertake and execute a successful mission, that’s all.”

“Safe egress is part of a successful mission.”

“Not a vital part.”

“I beg to differ with you, sir, but if you’ll direct your attention to the concept of operations, we’ve been directed to conceal the origin of issuing body. Poole dead in Jeddah becomes a very big clue as to who is responsible, don’t you think?”

“Not if his cover holds.”

“It won’t hold after he’s dead, not if they know he’s the one who pulled the trigger. They’ll go over his movements with a microscope, and eventually they’ll find their way back to us.”

Weldon’s fists tightened, then relaxed.

“It’s academic, anyway,” Crocker continued. “Egress isn’t the problem. Travel restrictions in Saudi are so tight there’s a good chance whichever Minder we put into the country would never make it to target in the first place. And since I’ve only got three of them, I’d rather we get it right the first time.”

“It’s been two weeks since the attacks, Paul, and the Government is impatient. C won’t suffer you dragging your feet.”

Crocker glared at Weldon, biting back his immediate urge to snap a response.

“The clock is running,” Weldon added unnecessarily.

“I will not initiate an operation that’s been half-planned solely to appease C,” Crocker said. “And begging your pardon, sir, but neither should you. You should be defending me on this, not urging me forward.”

“C is of the opinion that you coddle the Minders. Stalling on this will not help alter that.”

“They are not coddled.” Crocker didn’t bother to hide the acid in his voice. “The mere fact that I’ve lost two of them in the past eighteen months should make that perfectly plain. I have three Special Operations Officers, sir, three highly trained, highly committed agents, and any one of them, from Lankford to Chace, would march straight to Jeddah right now if that’s what I ordered. They all know their job.”

“But do you know yours, Paul?”

“I’ll see that the mission is completed.”

“See that you do.” Weldon pushed the folder toward Crocker, then sat back in his chair.

“And to hell with the Minder who falls in the process,” Crocker muttered, and taking the folder, departed the Deputy Chief’s office for the safer confines of the sixth floor.

9

London—Vauxhall Cross, “the Pit”
17 August 1139 GMT

Chace was eating
a sandwich and reading about surplus grain production in Shanxi Province, China, when the black phone on her desk started beeping for her attention. Lankford, at his desk across from her, immediately stopped what he was doing to watch her answer, then reluctantly turned his attention back to the paperwork before him as he realized it wasn’t the red circuit that had rung.

Poole, who by now knew the different tones of each phone, didn’t bother to react.

“Minder One,” Chace answered.

“D-Ops has requested the pleasure of your company in his office,” Kate said. “He asks that you come with haste, and that you bring with you those wayward young men with whom you share an office.”

“He didn’t say that.”

“No, he said get the Minders the hell up here now, but I thought my version was more polite.”

“More florid, at least,” Chace said. “We’ll be right up.”

•

Kate ushered them into D-Ops’s office, and Chace led the way inside to find Crocker standing behind his desk, surrounded by a cloud of his cigarette smoke and speaking on the telephone. With the hand holding the cigarette, he waved for the Minders to come in and then waved a second time, dismissing Kate, all the while listening intently to whoever was speaking on the other end of the line.

Kate closed the door behind them, and Chace motioned for Lankford and Poole to take the two chairs already positioned in front of the desk, then moved to the corner to push the third chair closer, for her own use. As she did, she glanced at Crocker’s desk and the red folder waiting there. She could read quite well upside down—another skill acquired as a child—and solely from the labeling at the top, she knew that conops had at last arrived.

She settled into the chair, Lankford and Poole to her right, wondering what it meant that Crocker had brought them all upstairs for the news, and not her alone. The job had been promised to her, and she didn’t like the idea that things had changed, and that it might now be up for grabs.

“I can’t mount an operation based on that, Simon,” Crocker was saying. “No, I understand that it’s hard to get reliable intelligence out of the region, but until we have a confirmation on his location, I’m not committing anyone to the field.”

From the corner of her eye, Chace saw Lankford shoot a curious glance her way. She shrugged, and he slid his attention back to Crocker, shifting in the chair, trying to relax.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Crocker told the phone, then slapped the receiver back into its cradle, harder than was necessary. He put the cigarette to his lips, drawing on it and looking over the three of them, and then, exhaling, he said, “Each of you is heading out to the School for a refresher. I don’t want to drain the Pit, so you’ll go one at a time, starting tomorrow, and starting with Minder One.”

“Why me?” Chace asked.

“Because the last time you were at the School, Ed was still alive,” Crocker snapped. “Because I bloody said so, that’s why. I’ve talked to Jim Chester, he knows you’re coming. You’ll do the course over two days, first day standard, second day active drills. You’re the damn Special Section, I expect your scores to be five point oh, nothing less. That’s for each of you.”

All three of them nodded, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Crocker focused on Poole. “And don’t think the SAS attitude is going to help you. Last time you took the motor course, you barely passed. Not again, Nicky.”

“No, sir,” Poole said with such seriousness he was clearly mocking Crocker. Chace found herself looking at her knees in order to hide her smile.

“And as for you, Chris, I remind you that despite the events of two weeks ago, your status as Minder Three remains Provisional, pending approval by your Head of Section and me. I’ve given Chester the quick brief on that arsing up you had in St. Petersburg, and he’ll be watching you.”

Lankford nodded, then added, “Very good, sir.”

Crocker glared at each of them in turn, then stabbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and took his seat, drawing the chair in closer to the desk, sitting up straight. He was tall to begin with, and with them all seated opposite, it had the desired effect of making each feel like a reprimanded schoolchild, or so it seemed to Chace.

“Her Majesty’s Government has today supplied me with a directive to locate and neutralize Dr. Faud bin Abdullah al-Shimmari,” Crocker informed them. “The action is to be undertaken at the earliest feasible opportunity and will be carried out by a member of the Special Section. When this window opens, it’ll be one of you who’s going through it.

“This means, with the exception of the refresher at the School, you’re to stay in London. No leave, no sick days, I don’t care if your pet bunny Flossy kicks it, you’re on call. Each of you is to brief on Faud, his associations, his history, his movements, all of it. Since we don’t know what may turn out to be relevant,
all
of it is relevant.

“Right now, Faud is presumed to be at his home in Jeddah, though we’re still awaiting confirmation of that. If he is, he’s safe, and will remain safe as long as he stays in Saudi. Our window will come only when he leaves the country, for whatever reason.”

“How likely is that to happen, sir?” Lankford asked.

“He’s been known to travel in the region. Visited Egypt last year, and Sudan in late 2001. There’s a good chance he’ll be moving again shortly.”

“Not if he thinks he’s a target,” Poole said.

“We already know he thinks he’s a target,” Chace said. “The question is, how much of one? Is he wearing body armor beneath his
thobe,
that’s the question.”

Poole grinned lazily. “Head shots all ’round, then.”

“He’s guarded, we know that much, has been ever since the attempt on his life in 1996,” Crocker said. “It was tribal-motivated, but since then, he’s never seen in public without security. Minimum of four bodyguards, sometimes as many as twice that. Whether he knows he’s caught our attention now, we’ve no way of ascertaining, but he’d be a fool if he didn’t think we were looking at him after what happened on the seventh.”

“And we know he’s not a fool,” Chace murmured.

“He’s in his seventies, isn’t he?” Lankford asked suddenly.

“Seventy-three or seventy-five, depending on the source,” Crocker confirmed.

“Maybe we can scare him to death,” Poole offered. “Send Tara at him in a short skirt and halter top, that should cause a little cardiac arrest.”

“Or fishnets,” Lankford added. “Short skirt with fishnets ought to do the trick.”

“That’s enough,” Crocker said, and Chace was grateful, because it meant she didn’t have to.

Lankford and Poole went quiet.

“Does conops specify method?” Chace asked.

“At discretion, but it’ll have to be precise. HMG is anxious to minimize any collateral damage, so anything short of a sniper shot or a bullet at point-blank is probably out of the question.”

“Hence the refresher course.”

“Hence the refresher course, yes,” Crocker echoed. “So now you know what we’re waiting on, I suggest you get to it. Go on, get out.”

There was a clatter as three chairs moved in unison, the Minders rising, murmuring “Yes, sir,” and “Thank you, sir.” Chace took the time to move the third chair back to its place in the corner, fell in last behind Poole as the others headed out the door. She followed them as far as the hallway, then tapped him on the shoulder.

“I’ll catch up,” she told Poole, then turned back into the outer office. Kate glanced up from her terminal, her fingers still flying over the keyboard, arching an eyebrow. Chace grinned at her as she went past. Crocker had swiveled his seat to scowl at London beyond the window, working a fresh cigarette, the ashtray resting on a bony knee.

Chace rapped her knuckles on the doorframe. “Boss?”

He didn’t move. “Close it.”

She shut the door quietly behind her, then approached the desk. The tang of the tobacco in the air settled at the back of her throat and she felt the crawling memory of addiction. She’d quit smoking almost a year before, and still the cravings could be enough to make her want to commit a little GBH at times.

As if taunting her, Crocker flicked ash into the tray. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“It’s mine.”

“Until we know where, we don’t know how. Until we know how, we don’t know who. If it’s going to be close quarters, Poole’s a better choice.”

“I can kill a man as well as the next guy,” Chace said mildly.

“It’s a matter of strength, Tara, and Nicky’s stronger than you are. If it’s neck-breaking, it’ll have to be him.”

“Give me a pistol and a suppressor, I can do it just as well and a damn sight quicker.”

Crocker took another draw from his cigarette, let the smoke go slowly, so that it climbed along the window and curled back toward them from the ceiling. The silence spread like the smoke, but it didn’t bother Chace. She could wait. She was well versed in the nuances of Crocker’s moods. When D-Ops acted like this, you didn’t rush him, because he was still working his angles. There was a validity to what he was saying about Poole, but she knew it wasn’t the real reason. She may have lacked the upper-body strength of Nicky Poole or Chris Lankford, but she was faster than both men and, with a knife or a gun or even her bare hands, just as lethal.

“How’s Lankford coming along?” Crocker asked.

“He’s been hitting the books. Having a hard time learning patience, but I had that problem, so did Ed.”

“Not Poole.”

“That’s only because he came to us wrong way ’round.”

Crocker nodded, accepting the assessment. Almost every Minder had been seconded from within SIS to the Special Section, normally after serving some field time, but just as often was taken straight from the School at Fort Monkton. While some Minders came with prior military experience—Wallace had been a Royal Marine, Butler a sergeant in the Coldstream Guards—neither Chace nor Lankford had come to the job with armed services experience. It wasn’t a prerequisite.

Poole was an exception, because he was homosexual. Unlike the American military, there was no Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in the British armed forces, as a European high court decision in early 2000 had declared such policies, and indeed Britain’s general ban on gays in the military, to be an unwarranted discrimination. The fact that Poole fancied men shouldn’t have mattered in the least under the ruling.

But it was still the S.A.S., arguably Britain’s most prestigious regiment, and when one of Poole’s fellow troopers, a man by the name of Hart, had fired a bullet into Poole’s body armor during a training exercise in the Killing House, events had threatened to explode into the public eye. Faced with the choice of letting the matter stand or pursuing Hart with charges—an act that would have brought yet more scrutiny upon the S.A.S., still reeling from the bad press of the last decade—Poole had instead decided to leave the Army altogether.

It would have been an extraordinary waste of the thousands of hours and millions of pounds that had been spent on his training, and fortunately, that was exactly what Poole’s CO had thought as well. After some pointed inquiries through the MOD, Poole’s CO had contacted the Colonel who headed the SPT, the military-trained Special Projects Team tasked directly to SIS under control of D-Ops, asking about an opening. Poole’s personnel jacket was forwarded as a matter of course, with a copy to D-Ops as protocol dictated. Normally, it wouldn’t have earned a second look, but Kittering’s replacement, Butler, had just died in T’bilisi, and for the second time in less than a month Crocker had found himself scrambling for a warm body to fill the post of Minder Three.

Poole had caught his eye. Minders were hard to come by at the best of times; few who could do the job actually wanted to, and those who wanted to were, almost universally, the most likely to completely arse it up. The last thing Crocker wanted in the Section was an agent who imagined himself the next Jack Ryan or, worse, the next James Bond. In the face of that, an agent who was homosexual was laughably mundane, and a liability only if the agent let it be one. Crocker didn’t give a damn if Poole fancied women, men, or livestock, as long as it didn’t get in the way of the job.

Crocker put out his cigarette, set the ashtray back on the desk.

“It took eight months to find Lankford,” he told Chace. “Took three months of additional training after we’d found Poole to get him ready for action.”

He’d lost her for a second, then Chace realized what he was saying and she nodded slightly, trying to conceal her surprise. Crocker wasn’t sentimental, she knew that, but all the same, it touched her. He could afford to lose Lankford, he could even afford to lose Poole, but what she was reading between his words now was that he
couldn’t
afford to lose her. The needs of the Firm came first.

“You think it’ll be a one-way trip?” she asked.

The scowl came back. “An hour ago the Deputy Chief was trying to convince me to put a Minder into Saudi. I held him off, but I don’t know if I can do the same if it’s C who’s behind him on the next go-round.”

“It’d be madness.”

“I did point that out to the DC.”

“If Faud moves, goes abroad—”

“No guarantees, Tara.”

“I’ll make it back, you know I will.”

The look he gave her was uncharacteristically sincere, and abruptly sad.

“No,” Crocker said. “I don’t.”