Secret Asset (14 page)

30

D
ave got up extra early at his small flat in Balham, to give himself plenty of time to get to Thames House by eight for his meeting with Wetherby. He was shattered. Dressing, he had thought of putting on a jacket and tie, but decided that instead of impressing Wetherby with his seriousness, it would simply seem out of character. But he was determined to convey his concern.

Now in Wetherby's office he was on edge. Wetherby wore a light grey summer suit and was standing by the window, watching the antics of a large heron on a mudflat below. He seemed preoccupied. As Dave briefed him on the events in Wokingham, including the discovery of traces of fertiliser, he listened without comment. When Dave finished he stood silent for a moment. “So we almost had them,” he said suddenly, then sighed morosely. “What bad luck.”

Dave took a deep breath. “That's just it, Charles. I'm not convinced luck had anything to do with it.”

Wetherby turned around. “What are you trying to say?” he asked Dave sharply, looking at him with the fixed gaze Dave called the “X-ray stare”—Liz never seemed to mind Wetherby's scrutinising look, but Dave found it disconcerting. It made him feel guilty, like a little boy caught out by his father telling a lie.

Dave tried to speak calmly. “According to the neighbours, the suspects left very suddenly. They seemed to be in a big hurry. As if they'd had advance warning we were coming.”

“You mean they'd been tipped off? Who would have done that?”

“That's the problem. I'm confident it wasn't the agent who let the house, and I very much doubt the neighbours did. The woman next door said she and her husband had barely spoken to the men.”

“Who else?”

“The local Special Branch, which doesn't seem likely.” He paused, hesitant to continue, then reminded himself that's why he was here. “And Thames House,” he said quietly.

Wetherby's gaze did not shift. “Someone inside the Service?” he asked. Dave found it impossible to tell how he was reacting to the suggestion.

“I realise it may sound bizarre,” said Dave, trying to make it clear he wasn't happy to broach the idea, “but the fact is, our suspects seem to have known we were coming—twice. It's too much of a coincidence. After all, there was no good reason for them not to show at the bookshop.”

“That could have been a lot of things,” Wetherby declared. “They might have been put off by the number of people who would see them visiting again. Or they may not have entirely trusted the Imam. Who knows? I don't really see how that and their departure from Wokingham are related.”

“Because in both cases they didn't do what one would expect,” said Dave. Wetherby waved a dismissive hand, but Dave stuck to his guns. “If you assume, for argument's sake, that the no-show and their flight from Wokingham
were
connected, then of all the people involved, there's only one group who knew about both. The neighbours weren't the same, the police weren't the same. It's only us—those involved here in Thames House—who knew about both operations.”

“Ah,” said Wetherby, returning to sit behind his desk. He was all business now. “That's precisely where I don't follow you—your assumption that these two situations are linked. It seems to me far more likely that something inside the bookshop alarmed them. And they may have left Wokingham when they did because that's when they'd always planned to leave.

“If these suspects know what they're doing—and so far they've only made one mistake—then they'll have another safe house to go to. Probably more than one. It would be normal for them to keep on the move, right until the day of their action. I imagine they're travelling light so they can leave quickly. That doesn't mean they think we're on to them.”

What had seemed an airtight argument to Dave, shaving in Balham two hours before, now seemed flimsy, unsubstantial. “Charles, I'm not trying to make a legal case,” he said, floundering for words. “I just wanted to say my piece. I thought you should know.”

Know what
? Dave's words sounded lame even to himself. “I don't want to get involved in a wild-goose chase,” Wetherby said forcefully. “It would only distract us from the real task, which is to catch these suspects before they do anything.”

Dave nodded unhappily. Wetherby sat back in his chair, easing off slightly. “Does the name James Angleton mean anything to you?” he asked.

It rang a bell, but only a faint one, so Dave shook his head.

Wetherby got up and walked slowly back to the window. His voice was calmer now, almost reflective. “Angleton was an American, a senior CIA officer, head of Counter-Intelligence for many years. A very bright man, much respected. But he believed what a series of defectors told him and became convinced that the KGB had penetrated Western Intelligence at the highest level. It became his obsession, to the exclusion of everything else. It was the classic ‘wilderness of mirrors.' Everything he saw had something behind it. No action was straightforward, no decision had anything but a hidden, ulterior motive; nothing was what it seemed to be.”

Dave gave a hollow laugh. “Yes, I know. And we had Peter Wright.”

Wetherby picked up a pencil and thumped its end on the desk. “Yes, Peter Wright caught the same bug. He and his cronies even investigated the Director General, Roger Hollis, for years. On no hard evidence at all. Sheer pernicious nonsense, and it did a huge amount of damage.”

Dave was mortified that Wetherby seemed to be putting him in the same category as a deluded American spymaster and Peter Wright. “I don't think
I'm
being paranoid, Charles,” he said, aggrieved.

“Nor do I actually,” replied Wetherby, absentmindedly running a finger down his tie. “But without any hard facts, I can't afford to worry about your hunch. I'm glad you shared your concerns with me, but it's evidence we need.” He smiled benevolently, which only made Dave feel worse as their meeting ended.

Yet sitting over a coffee in the cafeteria downstairs, Dave was unconvinced. He understood Wetherby's reluctance to think anyone in the Service could be helping the suspects, but he was troubled by the vehemence of his reaction. It was as if Wetherby had had the same idea himself, then rejected it. He isn't going to follow it up at all, Dave thought sourly, cheering up a bit when he realised that Wetherby had not actually forbidden him from doing so.

31

L
iam O'Phelan had an extremely low tolerance of ambiguity. This made him notoriously impatient with students who dithered or didn't know quite what they thought, and now it made him impatient with himself. For in the wake of his visit from “Miss Falconer” he didn't know what to do.

Part of him was tempted to let sleeping dragons lie, as he sensed that stirring them might be dangerous. If the man in London thought he had put all this behind him, then he might be less than pleased to have O'Phelan re-emerge, like the black sheep of a family suddenly returning to the fold.

Who knows? The man might panic and tell all. O'Phelan wondered fleetingly if he could be prosecuted for recruiting him. Then he reminded himself that they had never called on the fellow actually to
do
anything.

Yet part of him—the greater part, he began to recognise as days turned into a week, a week turned into two—wanted to stir things, if only for the sake of his own curiosity. What would have happened to his recruit after all these years? Would he have changed much? Got married, settled down, done his best to forget he'd ever had another agenda dominating his life? Or would the flame still burn? Would he share O'Phelan's disgust with the state of affairs in Northern Ireland, this wretched phoney peace that was no more than a sell-out?

Curiosity won out, and with an energy he hadn't felt in years he went to work in a half-exhilarated, half-anxious state. It took a dozen phone calls, but finally he had the number he wanted. It was a mobile phone number. The first three times he phoned, it was switched off. Finally, stealing five minutes from marking a stack of first-year exams, he rang yet again. This time the other end answered right away.

A sly smile appeared upon O'Phelan's face. “Hello there,” he said. “Do you know who this is?”

He waited, and what he heard seemed to please him. “No flies on you, even after all these years. Now listen, I'm bothering you for a reason, even though it's really you who owe me a call. Very naughty that. But a woman came to see me, asking questions.

“I thought that might get your attention. What's that? Of course I can. I'd say she was in her thirties, mid-thirties. Light brown hair, shoulder length, green eyes, average height. Dressed smartly—not at all bureaucratic in appearance. Attractive in a brisk kind of way, well spoken. Rather cleverer than I thought at first. She said her name was Falconer, and that she was from the Ministry of Defence. I did my best to look as though I believed her. We know better, now don't we?”

32

S
till sceptical?” asked Charles Wetherby, looking up from the menu. He was wearing his horn-rimmed reading glasses, which Liz thought made him look slightly professorial, though the smart light grey suit and polished shoes would have been out of place in a Common Room.

“About the mole? No,” said Liz crisply, giving a hint of a smile to acknowledge that her views had changed. “I think we may have a problem after all.”

“Let's order first,” said Wetherby, signalling to a waitress. “Then we won't be interrupted while you tell me about it.”

Keyed up as she was, it was frustrating to have to wait to tell him her news, but Liz was used to momentous events occurring within a framework of otherwise trivial life. She knew the impact even the most banal detail could have: the missed train, the child's cold, the mobile phone that lost its charge. In her last year at school, taking A level English, she had become addicted to W. H. Auden's poems, and she remembered one of her favourite lines describing how even the most dramatic event “takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

They were lunching well away from Thames House and casual observation, at Café Bagatelle, a chic restaurant with a dramatic glass roof in the enclosed sculpture garden of the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square. Liz had asked to see Wetherby that morning, immediately after the phone call from Ireland. He had suggested lunch, which struck Liz as unusual, since previously they had only ever shared tables in the Thames House canteen, and most recently a sandwich at an RAF airfield in Norfolk.

The waitress came up at last. They ordered from the set menu. “I'm going to have a glass of wine,” said Wetherby, and Liz followed suit gratefully. He seemed relatively relaxed today. Though he was by natural disposition reserved, his sense of humour kept him from taciturnity, and sometimes quite unexpectedly he could be positively voluble, suddenly enthusiastic in a way Liz still found surprising, though she warmed to it. Overall, though, his attitude was one of benign, mildly ironic detachment. He was a cool customer in the nicest possible way, Liz had concluded, and she often wondered if he thought the same of her.

She looked around the airy dining room. It was Wednesday and the restaurant was comparatively quiet—a few businessmen, two or three tables of “ladies who lunch,” and some American visitors to the galleries. Even if it had been more crowded, the round tables and wicker chairs were spaced far enough apart to talk freely without fear of being overheard. Wetherby had chosen it mainly for its privacy.

When the waitress finally left them, Wetherby unfolded his napkin and turned to Liz. “So what have you found out?”

“I had a call this morning from James Maguire.”

Wetherby looked surprised. “I thought he wasn't speaking to us.”

“So did I,” said Liz.

Wetherby looked at her and gave a wry smile. “You must have got to him after all, Liz. Well done.”

Liz shrugged. She remembered her tense, argumentative meeting with Maguire in Rotterdam. “I'm not sure I had anything to do with it. His conscience woke up, that's all.”

“Will he help us?”

“He has already. He went to see Sean Keaney's daughter in Dublin. It turns out that one of her great pals at university was an acolyte of her father's. An IRA sympathiser named Kirsty Brien.” Liz paused, and lowered her voice, though there was no one at the two tables nearest them. “Kirsty had a male friend who in turn became an academic. First at Oxford, now at Queen's Belfast. What's more, she told Maddie Keaney that she was only seeing the man for Keaney's sake.”

Wetherby's eyebrows raised, the sole sign of his surprise. “So you've closed the circle,” he said. “Well done. I was sure you were right to have misgivings about O'Phelan—you don't often get it wrong—but I thought it just possible he knew someone on the list, without it having anything to do with the IRA. It could have been any sort of connection.”

He clasped both hands together and inspected them thoughtfully. “But now that you've linked him to Keaney, it makes it far more likely he was the recruiter.” Liz noticed his cufflink—gold worked into the shape of a cricket bat. Wetherby said, “But who is it? And what's your next step?”

“I had been planning to interview O'Phelan again anyway, but I was waiting to see what Peggy Kinsolving came up with. I wanted some ammunition this time.”

“You've got that now,” said Wetherby.

Liz nodded. “I know. I think I'll go early next week. I don't want to alarm him by making it sound too urgent. We still can't prove anything.”

“No, that sounds right to me.”

Their starters arrived, and Liz cut into her goat's cheese galette. “Charles, have you thought about what you're going to do if we do find a mole? I mean, especially if he or she was never activated?”

“I'll do whatever it takes to get him or her out of the Service.” He laid down his fork. “Anything else I'll happily leave to the Attorney General. That assumes of course that they weren't activated—Keaney may not have told the truth about that.”

Remembering her own musings in her bedroom at the Culloden Hotel, Liz pressed on. “But just supposing the IRA didn't activate the mole, I wonder how they would have felt about that. Badly let down, I would think.”

Charles paused as the waitress cleared the table for their main courses. “So you've had that thought too. It's been haunting me. I was thinking about something my father once told me. Yours was too young to be in the War, wasn't he?”

Liz nodded.

“Well, my father was commissioned just before the Normandy landings. His regiment was in the first wave of troops, but two days before they were set to sail, my grandmother died, and my father was allowed home on compassionate leave. When he returned to duty, for some reason he was transferred to the Ministry of Defence in London. He never saw combat.”

The waitress put down their plates. Wetherby went on, “I once asked him about it. I said, ‘Weren't you relieved you didn't have to fight?' I'll never forget the look on his face. He told me that it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.”

He looked speculatively at Liz. “So think about this mole. They've made a momentous decision to work for the IRA, managed to be recruited to the Service, all set to go. And then somebody back in Belfast pulls the plug and the whole
raison d'être
is gone. Can you imagine how a person would feel about that?”

“Is that what's worrying you?”

“Yes.” Wetherby's usual air of diffidence was now replaced by obvious concern. “I must admit, that at first I was thinking we've got to find this mole, because they're disloyal, but I was also thinking it's unlikely an IRA plant is going to do us active harm at present, so this may not be top priority. But now I'm not so sure about that.”

He hesitated and for a moment Liz thought he was about to say something else. But the waitress came to fill their water glasses and the moment lapsed. “I'll be leaving work early on Friday,” Liz said. “I have to go and see my mother.”

“Is she all right?” asked Wetherby. He managed to make his interest sound genuine without being intrusive. It was the kind of tactful concern for which Liz was grateful just then.

“I'm not sure that she is,” admitted Liz. “They've found a growth, and she has to go into hospital for a biopsy. I want to go down and take her in.”

“Of course,” said Wetherby. He sighed, looking pensive and fingering the knot in his tie.

“I'm sure it will be fine,” said Liz, putting on a brave front she didn't really feel.

Wetherby must have sensed this, for he looked at Liz with the fixed gaze she had come to know so well. At first, Liz, like Dave, had found the “X-ray stare” unnerving—she couldn't tell if he were amused by her, or slightly doubtful, even accusatory. But she had grown to understand that this look was a sign of concentration rather than some mind-reading exercise.

“Anyway,” she said before the silence became too prolonged, “how are those boys of yours?”

He smiled with real pleasure. “They're fine. Cricket and girls—that's their life, and in that order.”

“And Joanne?” she asked more cautiously.

Wetherby shrugged. “It's been a difficult few months,” he admitted. “She had a blood transfusion last week which the consultant was very hopeful about.” His face seemed to sag. “I'm not sure it's been a success.”

Liz wasn't sure what to say. Wetherby had lived with his wife's chronic illness for as long as Liz had known him. For the most part, Liz tried not to venture too far into the topic she mentally labelled Wetherby's Wife. From his rather embarrassed reactions when she did ask after Joanne, she judged that was how he preferred it.

“I am sorry,” she said with feeling. She added, “It must be very hard on the boys.”

He grimaced slightly, as the waitress took away their plates. Both he and Liz declined dessert, and Wetherby asked for the bill. He looked pensive, Liz thought, rather sad, as they sat waiting for the return of his credit card. Suddenly he reached across the table, and gave Liz's arm an affectionate squeeze. “I'm sorry, I don't mean to burden you with my problems. I know how badly the whole Marzipan business hit you. It was terrible for us all, but much worse for you. I thought you behaved superbly—but I knew you would. I do hope your mother's news is good.”

And then, looking stern, after this unusual display of emotion, he pushed back his chair and stood up.