State Of Emergency: (Tom Buckingham Thriller 3) (23 page)

She took aim at Rolt, but Clements was right beside him. She could take them both – and the others! But there was the knocking again, hauling her back into consciousness.

She raised her head an inch and froze. Her eyes snapped open. ‘Damn and fuck.’ She felt as if an ill-fitting metal helmet had been jammed onto her head. Her eyes focused on the near-empty bottle on the coffee-table, the tumbler at forty-five degrees in her lap. She looked at her watch. Oh dear. She had fallen asleep on the sofa, not for the first time, not by a long way, but she had never slept away a whole night.

The metal helmet seemed to have spikes that drove into her head when she moved.

‘Ma’am? Visitor for you.’

She looked round. The place was empty. Then she remembered she still had security on the door. They had shouted through the letterbox. She levered herself up, the spikes forging deeper into her head. Gone were the days when she could drink any man under the table and rise for a breakfast meeting with her briefs mastered. She moved gingerly towards the kitchen to make some coffee, touching the furniture as she went to steady herself. ‘Just give me a minute!’

This wouldn’t do at all. Getting drunk as a skunk – in fact, she’d been pretty smashed the whole day before. Maybe once was allowed, just to get her through the post-election horror, the eviction from her office, the humiliating demotion, but this was not on. On the other hand, how could she face the prospect of the back benches in anything other than a state of intoxication?

To drown her thoughts, she picked up the remote and pressed the TV into life. Aerial shots appeared of a housing estate engulfed in flames. Well, at least that wasn’t her problem now. Let’s see what a shambles Rolt makes of it, she thought. She completed her journey to the coffee-machine and fumbled for the packet and a spoon, tipping some of it over the counter. When she looked again at the screen there was Rolt, holding up a newspaper. Headline:
The Butcher of Aleppo
, and beneath it, a frame grab of a figure brandishing a long blade.

She flicked on the coffee and went into the bathroom to check herself over. What a sight. She straightened her hair and gave her teeth a cursory brush with plenty of toothpaste. Not that she was likely to be kissing anyone in the imaginable future. The number of people with whom she was on kissing terms had dwindled over recent years to … How many was it? Oh, yes: none. Especially now she was just a common-or-garden MP. From now on when she came into a room, no one would look up.

She took a few deep breaths. The powerful mint flavour of the toothpaste coursing through her pipes helped her to focus. She moved towards the door, keeping half an eye on the TV.

‘Who is it?’

She peered through the spy-hole. The protection cops outside were holding back a girl with long black hair half covered by a loose headscarf. She opened the door.

‘Sorry to bother you, ma’am. This – person insists she knows you.’

She looked about fifteen, with big, dark anxious eyes, in clothes – the headscarf, smart black coat and boots – that seemed meant for an older woman. She had definitely never seen her before. She was about to tell them to send her away when it occurred to her.

‘Adila?’

43

Adila sipped her green tea while Garvey sat very still, listening. It was the tears that made her look even younger than her eighteen years.

‘I’m so sorry for just turning up on your doorstep like this, I really am, but I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t dare phone or text. A neighbour helped me leave the house by going through her garden, and I just covered up with this.’

She touched the headscarf she had stuffed into her overflowing bag. Despite her tear-stained face, in her white shirt and straight black skirt, Adila had a business-like primness about her that appealed to Garvey. Also, she had insisted on taking off her boots at the door because of the snow. And now she sat opposite her on the sofa, bolt upright, her hands wrapped around the mug on her lap. She seemed so horribly vulnerable.

‘All I know is he was detained at Heathrow, taken off the plane from Turkey and just marched away. I don’t have any idea where he is. They won’t tell us anything.’

Garvey glanced at the paper Adila had brought with her, the same one she had seen being held up by Rolt, with the headline
Butcher of Aleppo.
She pointed at the screen shot from the video. ‘And this is definitely your brother?’

Adila’s eyes welled up again. She nodded. ‘But I can’t believe he would do such a thing.’

‘He was out there how long?’

‘Four months, nearly five.’ She balled the handkerchief in her fist and dabbed her eyes. ‘Look, I know he did a bad thing, going there at all, but you have to understand there are so many who saw the Syrians being brutalized by Assad and the West doing nothing. But he was so shocked by the militants. Are they all going to be punished, treated as traitors?’

Maybe not on her watch, but things were different now.

‘The group your brother was with, it’s affiliated to ISIS. And beheadings aren’t exactly about helping the oppressed.’

‘He texted me: “They teach that jihad is not about mercy but extreme retaliatory violence to deter enemies. I cannot do this.”’ She took an iPad out of her bag and powered it up. ‘Let me show you something. It’s been taken down now but I managed to save it. Look.’

She ran the video down to a close-up of Jamal raising the machete and inched it forward over the cut to a wide shot of the girls. ‘Look at the shadows: they’re long in the shot of the women, but they’re short in the image of my brother. The sun is much higher in the sky. It’s a different time of day – or even a different time of year.’

‘Show me again.’

Garvey scrutinized the shots as Adila moved between them. She didn’t regard herself as technically savvy but she did understand shadows. The girl had done her homework. She was impressed. ‘Okay. The first thing to do is get an expert opinion.’ Before, she could have handed it to one of her staff, who would have had it rushed through. Not so easy now she was banished to the wilderness. She scrolled through her contacts until she found Woolf. ‘I’ve got a favour to ask.’

She could hear the wariness in his tone. ‘You know I’m Under New Management.’

‘Yes, funnily enough. And you’ve got your arse to cover.’ She mouthed, ‘Sorry,’ at Adila for her language. ‘Just listen.’ She started to tell him about the video but he cut her off.

‘The little shit.’

A minute later her phone buzzed. A different number but it was Woolf calling her back. ‘Sorry, had to go to somewhere a bit more private. Look, between you and me, the so-called Butcher of Aleppo video, we’ve already had it analysed. There’s no question it’s been doctored.’

Garvey nodded at Adila, whose eyes widened anxiously. ‘Good. So we’ve got MI5’s word for it?’

Adila leaned forward, almost rising out of her seat.

Woolf sighed. ‘Ah, not as such. Rolt’s just ordered us to bury the report – and he’s got Number Ten to go along with it. He’s adamant that this doesn’t come out.’

Garvey felt her hangover come back with a vengeance as the anger rose inside her. ‘I want that report.’

‘It’s more than my job’s worth, ma’am.’

Garvey glanced at Adila again. She was all on her own, trying to do the right thing against forces whose power she couldn’t begin to imagine. She hissed into the phone, ‘If your job is about burying the truth, it’s not worth a shit, is it?’

This time she didn’t apologize for the language.

44

08.30
Bampton Lodge

Tom slept fitfully in Mandler’s spare room. The old man had shooed him off to bed and told him not to move for at least twelve hours. During what was left of the night his dreams were crowded with the events of the last two days, a jumbled montage of incidents, each leaving behind it a trail of unanswered questions.

It might have been the sound of Mandler moving about, preparing breakfast to the sound of the
Today
programme that woke him, but it wasn’t. When Tom’s eyes snapped open it was because he had been recalling Mandler’s reluctance for him to contact Ashton.

Why was that so unwise? What possible danger could there be, unless … He was on his feet now, heading downstairs in his shorts and T-shirt. Mandler was already out of the house and trudging through a fresh fall of snow towards his Jaguar. Tom shot through the front door, feet bare, onto the snow-covered gravel.

‘You know exactly who Rolt’s friend is, don’t you?’

Mandler turned round and looked at him dismissively, taking in his lack of proper clothing. ‘Go back to bed, Buckingham. You’re delirious.’

Tom followed him to the car, the ice stinging his feet. ‘You’ve not been straight with me.’

He caught his arm. Mandler shook himself free with surprising force, climbed into the car and slammed the door. ‘Get some more sleep.’

Mandler fired up the Jaguar and slammed it into drive. As it shot forward, Tom stepped back and watched. The slope up to the single-track road was steep. As the vehicle hit the incline, the rear wheels started to spin and the Jaguar fishtailed inelegantly as it fought a losing battle for grip. Tom folded his arms and watched with grim satisfaction as Britain’s most senior spook tried and failed to make his getaway.

45

Tom adjusted the Range Rover’s rear-view mirror so he could keep an eye on Mandler’s expression. Ideally he would have preferred to eyeball him for this, but that would have meant another sit-down in his kitchen and time was ticking on.

‘From the beginning, please. If you don’t mind, sir.’

Mandler sighed heavily, like a deflating balloon. ‘All right, Buckingham. But it goes no further, and if
any
of it comes back on me, I’ll deny we ever had this conversation, understand?’

‘Whatever you say.’ Tom eased the vehicle slowly but steadily up the drive onto Mandler’s lane, then stepped on it. The tyres bit satisfyingly through the snow and the vehicle powered ahead.

‘Umarov – Oleg Emil Umarov,
Dr
Oleg Umarov. He’s your man.’

‘Okay. Go on, sir, if you wouldn’t mind.’

Mandler let out another sigh. ‘We have to go back to the last century, the nineties and the volatile post-Soviet days. Young Oleg had been on our books as something of a sleeper, one of those people we established contact with during the height of the Cold War on the off-chance that he might prove useful later. His Crimean Tartar heritage marked him out as a likely anti-Soviet. His father, Emil, was reputedly an awkward bugger – fought with the Nazis during the war after they overran Ukraine, then joined up with Himmler’s Tartar Legion. After the Soviets took back Crimea the whole Umarov family was packed off to a Siberian gulag, which was where little Oleg was born, and where Umarov senior died of a mixture of exposure and an excess of forced labour. Are you following this, Buckingham?’

‘I’m all ears, sir.’

‘Young Oleg turned out to be a lot smarter than Dad and played the system for all it was worth – talked his way out of the gulag by demonstrating amazing prowess at numbers and, armed with a doctorate in mathematics, which he completed at night school, secured himself a foothold in the Soviet machine. The disadvantages of his ethnicity were more than outweighed by his intellect, and he reached an influential position in the Soviet oil and gas ministry in Ukraine, where his brains earned him the charming nickname “Doktor Kalculyator”.

‘When we first got to him back in the mid-eighties, he was still playing the long game, despite having inherited his papa’s fervent anti-Communism, and just biding his time. But he had never forgotten what the Soviets did to Emil, and was bent on revenge. So we popped him on the payroll and he fed us some scraps of intelligence. Come
glasnost, perestroika
and so forth, he did as every good servant of the centralized Soviet state with any brains was bound to do and metamorphosed overnight into a rampant capitalist, ruthlessly reaping the rewards of sudden privatization and becoming obscenely rich in an obscenely short space of time.’

Since Mandler was in full flow, Tom opted to stay quiet.

‘As I said, we’d had him on a retainer of sorts since the eighties, naïvely thinking that when the time came he would do our bidding. But my predecessors hugely underestimated him. Oleg had his own fish to fry. What they didn’t fully appreciate was that he wasn’t just anti-Soviet, he was anti-
Russian
, anti-Kremlin, never mind who was in power, bent on revenge for their historic and unrelenting persecution of the Crimean Tartars. All this just when we were extending the hand of friendship to our former Cold War foes.’

Tom braked hard as a Porsche Cayenne with two uniformed children in the back pulled out of a drive with no warning.

‘You may as well slow down. This could take some time.’

‘As you wish, sir.’

‘So where was I?’

‘Making up with Cold War foes.’

‘Ah, yes. Not only was he incredibly effective at outsmarting his rivals, whenever the crunch came he had no scruples about liquidating both competitors and even collaborators whom he decided were getting too close to him. While he was still on our payroll, even though by now his income probably exceeded the entire Security Service budget, he had quietly become the covert banker of choice for any up-and-coming anti-Kremlin separatists. South Ossetians, Chechens, Uzbeks, he backed them all, helped them with not only finance but introductions to arms dealers. Although he was very discreet about it, very good at covering his tracks, our association with him was a ticking bomb, as far as SIS was concerned, and at one point we considered liquidating him. But then around the back end of ’ninety-five our interests – that is, HMG’s and his – coincided over the need to quash some opposition to a pipeline we and he had an interest in crossing a certain region in the Russian Federation. Through some of his clients, he, ah – “helped”, shall we say? – remove that resistance.’

‘What sort of resistance?’ In the mirror Tom saw Mandler’s Adam’s apple bob as he pressed a thumb and forefinger over his eyes. ‘Is there a problem, sir?’