Keys to the Kingdom (16 page)

CHAPTER 23

London

There was a spring in Worley’s step as he approached the offices of MI6. His cold had almost cleared and he was beginning to feel more or less human again. He hadn’t seen an apparition in more than two days. His mind felt as clear as a bell and he was confident that he could run a half marathon with ease. The river Thames rolled along beside him as he walked, reminding him of the continuum of life. He had been preparing to return to Riyadh when he had received Burfield’s urgent call for a meeting. The call had both surprised and bothered him. There had been something in Burfield’s voice that had been new. Some of it was undoubtedly due to strain but there was something else behind that strange new tone.

‘Mr Worley, Sir,’ Burfield’s secretary said into the handset when Worley entered the outer office. She replaced the phone on its cradle and turned to face him. ‘You can go right in.’

‘Arthur,’ Burfield opened the door and stood aside to allow Worley to enter. ‘Sorry to force a change of plan on you but I really thought we should meet before you left. Save Her Majesty’s Treasury all that money we spend on coded cables and the like.’ He smiled thinly and looked at Worley. The tan had re-appeared on his handsome face and he looked the very picture of health. ‘Managed to kick that cold of yours I see.’ Maybe there is life in the old dog yet, he thought. He knew in his heart of hearts that he should get Arthur out of Riyadh at this very minute. They needed somebody who was not just one hundred percent fit but a thousand percent fit. But there was nobody in the Service had anything like Arthur’s local knowledge or his contacts. It was one hell of a dilemma. He would have no qualms having a fit Arthur Worley on station but the man before him was, in his doctor’s opinion, far from a fit man.

‘Thank God for the good old British weather, it will cure you or kill you.’ Worley went immediately to the chair in front of Burfield’s desk. He watched his friend and colleague as he sat heavily in his seat. It wasn’t only Burfield’s voice that was on the blink. His normally ruddy complexion was ashen and the skin seemed to hang loosely on his face. There was a sheen of sweat on his pallid skin. He was a perfect example of why one should not become a senior civil servant.

‘You’ve heard the news about the Junior Oil Minister?’ Burfield asked.

‘Yes,’ Worley answered. ‘He was a decent sort. Harvard MBA and all that. Any idea who’s behind it?’ He had a fairly good idea himself who was behind it.

‘So far nothing. The Embassy hasn’t a clue. Pity you’re not there.’

‘So why are you holding me up,’ Worley said pleasantly as he sat down. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if I was on station?’

Burfield opened the file in front of him. ‘There was a meeting of Division Heads yesterday. It appears that the Treasury is launching what they call a ‘management review’. Some fool economist has decided that the intelligence agencies are no different from other Government Departments. The meeting was full of ‘management speak’. Words like ‘leaner and meaner’ and ‘getting more done with fewer resources’ were being bandied around.’ He closed the file and stared at Worley. ‘It seems that most of the senior managers, all in their late forties and early fifties are being earmarked for redundancy. I always thought that I was going to bat for the full innings but now I’m not so sure.’

Worley sat back and watched his troubled friend. He believed that Burfield was genuinely worried about his future but there was another reason why he had been held back from returning to Saudi.

‘And then there’s this,’ Burfield fiddled with the file on the desk before him. ‘Miranda tells me that in the middle of the night she can hear me intoning ‘Yamamah’. You have no idea the pressure that making sure the deal stays on track puts on me. Yamamah means thousands of British jobs and cushy boardroom seats for former ministers. For Christ sake, Arthur, Yamamah has already paid for the building of a business school at Oxford. It’s the arms deal of the century and if it gets ballsed up then the whole damn castle will fall on me and some poor sods in the Foreign Office. We’re batting on a bloody sticky wicket.’

Worley sighed. He found the cricketing metaphors tiring but they were de-rigeur within the Foreign Office apparatus. ‘What do you mean?’ 

‘Within the last month a certain amount of pressure has been put on our Saudi allies from various sources,’ Burfield opened the file again and flicked through the papers. ‘Some damn fool Congressman has moved a bill in the US Senate to have the Saudis immediately repay every dollar they owe American defence contractors. That’s $9.3 billion. The Saudi’s rescheduled that debt three years ago and now the men wrapped in the Stars and Stripes want it all back in one fell swoop.  We both know that there just isn’t the money in the Saudi coffers to pull that one off.’ Burfield sighed heavily as he continued to leaf through the file. His voice had a highly agitated tone to it.  ‘Then there are the three cases lodged in American courts by businessmen who claim that they have been cheated by members of the Royal Family. And we’re not just talking the normal punitive damages here. Some of the amounts being mentioned are astronomical.’

Worley noticed the dark rings under his friend’s eyes. He’d always reckoned that of all his colleagues in MI6 Burfield was the one who could hold his nerve right to the very end. Now he wasn’t so sure. It was just like their political masters to squeeze some little public service functionary like a ripe lemon while they accepted the gold watches and the seats on the boards of the defence industries they had supported during their tenure in government.

‘That’s all old hat,’ Worley adopted his most reassuring tone. ‘How many times have we heard some populist politician in the States launch into a bit of Arab bashing that the Administration just ignores? And you and I have lost count of the number of court cases that have been launched against the Al Sauds. Everybody who deals with them knows that they should count their fingers and hold onto their shirt until the deal is completed. God only knows the Princes and their friends should be happy enough with what they rake off on so-called official deals without trying to rob everyone blind. Since they’re true Bedouin, I suppose they just can’t help themselves.’

Burfield played nervously with the file in front of him. His fingers drummed on the stiff cardboard cover. 

‘There’s something else isn’t there?’ Worley asked.

‘My, but we are perceptive,’ Burfield said with a tinge of cynicism in his tone. ‘Yes indeed there is, as you say, something else. About three weeks ago we began to get reports that someone somewhere was beginning to speculate in the Saudi Riyal. Since then I’ve used every channels at our disposal to find out who is behind this raid, so far we’ve come up with nothing except a baffling number of shell companies and some not very reputable banks. The upshot of their efforts has been a de-facto devaluation of the Riyal of about twenty-five percent. And the devaluation is accelerating daily.’

Worley leaned forward in his chair. During the past two weeks his search for Gallagher had consumed his life. He hadn’t bothered with either the newspapers or the television. Even if he had, he doubted whether the attack on a currency like the Saudi Riyal would make the headlines. ‘How exactly are they attacking the Riyal?’

‘Oh, it’s all being done very subtly.’ The sweat was visible on Burfield’s face and there was a slight catch in his voice. ‘Financial institutions are being bombarded with faxed offers to buy or sell large quantities of Riyals. Bankers are a rum lot and they begin to get the wind up as soon as the market starts to wobble. Pressure is building on the Saudis to officially devalue the currency but they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. If they devalue locally, every Saudi holding or being paid in Riyals is going to see the effect. And we’re not talking minor devaluation. We could be talking as much as fifty percent.’ Burfield swallowed hard. ‘Maybe even more.’ The pressure on the Saudis was becoming intolerable. If the currency continued to plummet, the government would have to use whatever hard currency they had to bolster the Riyal. That would mean shelving spending programmes like Yamamah. Wherever his train of thought began it always ended with the arms deal of the century. His life had been taken over by the preservation of that deal. He removed an article from the Financial Times from the file and pushed it across the desk.

Worley read the short piece. ‘Someone out there must be reading our minds.’

‘Why,’ Burfield asked.

‘You know at the Embassy sessions we play ‘what if’ games about the country we’re in. ‘

Burfield nodded sharply.

‘This was one of the doomsday scenarios we developed a couple of years ago. The Saudi GDP has grown from 83 billion dollars in 1990 to 576 billion in 2011. The International Monetary Fund is saying that Saudi will be in deficit in 2016. The Saudis themselves admit that is a doomsday scenario. Someone is just hurrying along the doomsday. The banks are the driving force of the local stock exchange so a run on the banks will bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.’  Worley was beginning to get a knot in his stomach. He could see that the hair at the nape of Burfield’s neck was wet. Somebody was running a very well organised number on Saudi Arabia and there was very little they could do to put a stop to it. ‘And what are the Saudis doing about it?’ he asked.

‘Not a bloody lot,’ Burfield said snorting. ‘They’re behaving like rabbits caught in a set of headlights. The civil servants with their bought degrees in Business Administration from Mickey Mouse State University haven’t an idea about how the real world works. Their whole life experience is based on how to squeeze their percentage out of every oil deal or construction contract that passes their desk. The only finance they understand is their bank books and their wallets. It appears that as far as they and the King are concerned the whole place can just go to pot.’

Worley’s mind was running at full speed. There was one possible way to stave off an attack on the Riyal. ‘Couldn’t the Royal Family simply repatriate their money and fight off whoever is behind this raid on their currency?’

‘They could if they were bloody well willing to do so,’ Burfield said angrily. ‘But the grasping bastards won’t repatriate a dollar. There are over $300 billion of Saudi investment outside the country and if the Al Sauds have their way that’s where it’s going to stay. You know full well that when they were asked to repatriate investments in 1993 only $20 billion came back into the country and that was when the local picture looked a lot more rosy than it does to-day.’

‘What about selling off state assets?’

‘Don’t make me laugh,’ Burfield slapped his hand on his desk. ‘Who would buy an inefficient airline, an overfat telecommunications company, a chemical company that’s only profitable because of cheap feedstock.

‘Have the financial markets got wind of this yet?’

Burfield forced a cynical smile. ‘Those rapacious bastards. They’re calling in every piece of paper they have on Saudi Arabia. Every loan denominated in dollars, Euros, Yen, in fact anything except Saudi Riyals is being called in. Right now no trader will touch the Riyal unless it’s to push it further into the cellar. And they only have half the information.’

‘And you have no idea whatsoever about where the pressure is coming from?’

‘Everywhere,’ Burfield said running his fingers through his dark locks. ‘Only the Frogs and ourselves haven’t jumped on the bandwagon. We both have too bloody much to lose. Something is going down and nobody seems to have control of it.’

‘Gallagher,’ Worley said more or less to himself. The thought had been plaguing him all during his conversation with Burfield. One of his lecturers at the MI6 training school had told him that there was no such thing as coincidence. The whole fabric of Saudi society was under attack at the very time that he was sure he had seen one of the world’s foremost terrorists in Riyadh. That was too much of a coincidence.

‘For God’s sake Arthur,’ Burfield stood up from his desk. ‘Forget bloody Gallagher. He has nothing to do with what is going on. He’s simply a figment of your poor overworked brain.’ He sat down heavily astonished at what he had said. ‘I didn’t mean anything,’ he began to stutter. ‘Totally off the top of my head. Didn’t know what I was saying.’

Worley stared ahead stony-faced. His doctor, whether under duress or not, had divulged his medical situation to his superior. His future was now completely in Burfield’s hands and he knew it. One mention of the word ‘burnout’ anywhere outside this office and he was history as far as the Service was concerned. ‘You know I’ve seen the medical advisor,’ he said calmly.

‘Yes,’ Burfield said. He was angry with himself for his slip. It was so damn unprofessional.

‘He’s got it wrong,’ Worley relaxed. ‘Of course, I’ve been overworked and under pressure for a hell of a long time. We all have. Doing more with less wasn’t intended to make our lives easier. Despite the problems I’ve encountered, I still operated at full tilt. I haven’t been well but I’m far from being finished.’ Worley knew he was pushing a point. The headaches, the sweats and the hallucinations might be the symptoms of the Ahab obsession. He needed to convince Burfield that he was fit enough to go back to Riyadh because that was where he would find Gallagher.

‘It’s not just the fixation with Gallagher,’ Burfield said. ‘I know about the hallucinations.’

Worley rubbed his forehead. ‘Tell me that you haven’t thought about your parents in the past ten years. Maybe you’ve even felt their presence in the room with you.’