Three Great Novels (8 page)
Read Three Great Novels Online
Authors: Henry Porter
Tags: #Thrillers, #Action & Adventure, #Fiction
‘Vanity?’ she offered.
Dolph turned back. ‘That’s why I like you, Isis. You get it all. Do you think this weird mood in the office has anything to do with the Chief going?’
‘Might have.’
‘Oh come off it. Talk, for Christ’s sake. I want to know what you think.’
She smiled. ‘I am talking, but this isn’t the best place for it.’
Dolph eyed the waitress and then let his gaze fall on Herrick. ‘Okay, tell me about you. What happened to the man in your life - the academic?’
She shrugged. Daniel Brewer, outwardly a soft-hearted academic, had turned out to be an incipient drunk, a clever Cornish working-class boy prone to bouts of despair and unreason. ‘He found someone who listened better than I did. And he didn’t like our business - the vanishing act, the secrecy. He felt excluded.’
‘You told him what you did?’
‘No, but he guessed. That was part of the original attraction, I think.’
‘What about your father? Did he like him?’
‘Didn’t say.’
Dolph ordered some wine. ‘Did you know I went to your father’s lectures? My intake was the last to get the Munroe Herrick treatment. He was very impressive. Believe me, I’d never have survived all that crap in the Balkans if it hadn’t been for him.’
‘Yes - he had stopped by the time I was taken on.’
Dolph regarded her sympathetically with his handsome, dissolute face. As he was choosing the wine she had noticed his expression suddenly betray the very sharp intelligence which lay behind the façade of effortlessness. ‘I often think about you,’ he said. ‘I wonder what’s going on with you.’
She shrugged. ‘Nothing Dolph, just bloody work. I’m considering taking the Cairo job.’
‘You should have some fun.’
She revolved her eyes in an arc, knowing what was coming next. ‘Yes, I should,’ she said. ‘Which is why I’m going to take Cairo.’ She smiled a full stop.
He laid his hand on hers. ‘Look, this is embarrassing. But I’m really fond of you, Isis. Really, I mean, I think you’re the one.’
‘And I’m fond of you too. But I am not going to sleep with you.’ She let his hand remain for a while then gently removed it.
‘Pity,’ he said morosely. ‘Are you sure?’
She nodded.
‘You’ll miss the pillow talk that keeps the girls coming back.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s hardly an inviting prospect, Dolph - the idea that I would be one in a bus queue of women listening to your ravings.’
‘God, you’re so fucking prim. Perhaps we should do it now - I mean the pillow talk.’
‘If you can do it discreetly.’
‘Loosen up, Isis. That’s the point of pillow talk.’ He drank a glass of wine and smiled at the restaurant. ‘Your friend, the man in the bookshop, was doing interesting things with his PC.’
Herrick set down her glass and looked at Dolph’s black eyes dancing. ‘Can you talk about this
now
?’
now
?’
‘Of course. He has a novel line in screensavers. Actually it’s one screensaver - an aquarium with fish swimming across it. You know the kind of thing.’
She nodded.
‘Only, his aquarium is different, you see. It’s got a little timer in it that ticks away and then releases information.’
‘There was a message hidden in the image?’
‘Not quite. What happens is this. He logs on in the morning and automatically downloads the same screensaver - same bloody guppies, same bloody eels, same bloody octopus with the smiley face. Then half an hour later, maybe an hour, maybe two hours later - the interval changes according to the day of the week - he clicks on one of the guppies and a message is sent from the screensaver to a pre-prepared file on his hard drive. You only have a few minutes to read it before it disintegrates.’
‘Where’d you get this?’
‘Friend of mine - a bloke I play poker with in the office. Good guy. Crap at cards though.’
‘Why’d he give it to you?’ She lowered her voice. ‘This is sensitive stuff.’
‘He owed me a couple of bob from a game. I told him he had to tell me something interesting to stop me breaking his legs.’ He saw Herrick’s brow furrow. ‘Look, I’m joking. Don’t be so fucking serious.’
‘What else did you find out?’
‘This and that.’
She gave him a look of exasperation.
‘Try me,’ he said.
‘Okay, so why was Norquist here?’
‘Cabling - they’re going to lay high capacity cables under the Atlantic so the Americans can get more of the stuff they already don’t have time to read. It’s as simple as that. ’
‘But why was the Prime Minister involved? That’s all a bit nuts and bolts for him, isn’t it?’
‘Strategic matters also, I hear. That is to say, what are we going to do about the Europeans?’ Dolph lit a cigarette and offered her a drag which she declined. ‘We’d be good together, Isis. Really, we’d be fucking wonderful because we get each other.’
She shook her head. ‘So this screensaver works like a virus?’
‘Not quite. It’s more targeted than a virus. For one thing it doesn’t reproduce itself, and for another it’s got a very short life span. If the correct procedure isn’t followed at the right moment the message disappears. And here’s the beauty of it. If the screensaver is intercepted, all you get is fish. Nothing else. It doesn’t work unless you’ve got the software that goes with it - the male plug and the female socket, if you see what I mean.’
‘Yes.’
‘Good pillow talk, no?’
She nodded. ‘What do you think it means?’
‘That Rahe was a shit-load more important than we thought he was.’ Dolph looked out on the muddy evening sky. ‘The men at the airport, why do you think they were all dressed like Senegalese lottery winners? What was that about?’
‘Reverse camouflage,’ said Herrick quietly. ‘The more noticeable your clothes, the less people look at your face. It’s the opposite effect to the one you achieve, Dolph.’
He ignored the remark. ‘Like having a parrot on your shoulder?’
‘Yes. Can I ask something else?’
‘You have my full attention.’ He began to fold his napkin.
‘Do you think the two things were connected at Heathrow?’
‘Of course they were. I quote you the product law of probabilities. “When two independent events occur simultaneously their combined probability is equal to the product of their individual probabilities of occurrence.” That means it was bloody unlikely that the two events were unconnected. They were
syzygial
- yoked, paired, conjoined, coupled - like we should be.’
syzygial
- yoked, paired, conjoined, coupled - like we should be.’
He finished the origami with the napkin and balanced it on his shoulder.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘A parrot - so you won’t notice what I look like.’
CHAPTER SIX
The silence ended with a single dramatic sentence. ‘Youssef Rahe was ours.’ Richard Spelling said it with studied understatement. ‘He was our man.’ He folded his arms and looked at her over a pair of slender reading glasses.
Herrick was not totally surprised. She had been at the point of articulating Rahe’s double role for herself, but hadn’t gone the whole way because of the surveillance operation. Why had they put all that effort into watching a man who was already working for them?
‘Was?’ she said.
‘Yes. His body was found in the boot of a car near the Lebanese border with Syria. He had been very badly treated and finished off with a shot to the head which, without going into detail, made him practically unrecognisable. As well as this, the car had been set alight. However, we are absolutely certain it is Rahe.’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘Was he killed by the second man on the Beirut flight?’
‘We’re not sure. We suspect he had something to do with it but there were others involved.’
She asked herself why they were telling her this. Not out of any sense of obligation, that was for sure. She had been summoned to the high table and was being told an intimate secret for a reason. She looked around the room and wondered what they wanted from her, apart from silence. The constituent parts of this late night gathering were altogether odd. Colin Guthrie, head of the joint MI5-MI6 Anti-Terrorism controllerate, well, you would expect him to be there, but not Skeoch Cummings and Keith Manners from the Joint Intelligence Committee. The JIC provided intelligence assessments for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet and wasn’t responsible for making or implementing policy, yet here they were, comfortably ensconced in the inner sanctum of the intelligence executive. And why Christine Selvey, the deputy director of Security and Public Affairs? What the fuck was she doing there, with her powdery skin and brittle, bouffant hair which Dolph had described as ‘South coast landlady with a passion for china dogs and young actresses’?
There was one other man there and his presence baffled her most. As she entered he had risen, turned and offered her a soft, cool hand and asked after her father, a pleasantry which seemed out of place and was calculated, she thought, to wrong-foot her in some way. Walter Vigo, the former Head of Security and Public Affairs. Isis knew perfectly well that her father would have nothing to do with him. Why was Vigo there and not the Chief? What did Vigo’s presence mean six weeks before the handover from Sir Robin Teckman to Spelling? Vigo was the outcast, the defrocked prelate who’d been exposed by a former SIS man, Robert Harland, for his connections with a gun runner and war criminal named Lipnik. She’d got some of the story from her father, who had trained both Vigo and Harland at different times during the Intelligence Officers’ New Entry Course. Vigo had escaped prosecution because he was in a position to make life seriously unpleasant for the entire Service. Instead he had been declared a pariah, with Teckman forbidding all contact with him and the members of Mercator, the security consultancy he ran in tandem with an antique book dealing business called Incunabula Inc.
There was silence. She was expected to ask a question. ‘If he was ours, why was he under surveillance?’
‘Our relationship was a very, very secret matter,’ Spelling replied. ‘We shared his product, but not his identity with anyone. Only four people knew that he worked for us. Those were his conditions when Walter Vigo came across him two years ago and we abided by them.’
Vigo stirred to give Spelling a nod of gratitude.
‘The surveillance was to give him credibility?’ persisted Herrick. ‘Was that why we laid it in on with a trowel?’
Spelling whipped off his glasses and folded them in his left hand. There was something unpractised and self-conscious in the gesture. ‘Yes, he was worried he’d been tumbled.’
‘Can I ask whether you knew about the operation at Terminal Three in advance?’
He shook his head. ‘No. No, we don’t think even he knew what was happening, though he had told us in the morning that he was going to a meeting with some important people. We were hoping for big game. But we had no notion of the switch you spotted and that means he didn’t have any idea what was to happen at Terminal Three. We now think he believed he was being observed by them at Heathrow and was worried about making a call to us. No doubt he hoped we were there watching him too and we were, which is how you noticed what had happened. We realised he was in trouble when you called in, but by this time things were unravelling, and it’s fair to say we lost sight of what was important. A few hours later he contacted us from a room in the Playlands Hotel in Beirut. They said the meeting would take place in the next few days and that he should stay put until they got in touch with him. Very shortly after making that call he vanished. We didn’t have time to get anyone over to the hotel.’
Guthrie coughed and said, ‘All of which underlines the thesis implied in your report on the events of May the fourteenth, that the alert over the President’s man was a…’
‘A strategic diversion,’ offered Vigo, with his eyes closed.
‘To achieve several things,’ said Guthrie, ‘among which was enticement of Rahe out of the country.’
‘Can I ask you if the information about the hit on Norquist came from Rahe’s computer?’
Vigo shot her a look of interest.
‘What do you know about Rahe’s computer?’ asked Spelling sharply.
‘I assumed that if he was working for us you must have had access to any information that came to him via his PC. After all, he barely left that shop and we had his phone covered so I imagined it was simply a matter of interception somewhere along the line.’ This was feeble but she had to protect Andy Dolph. ‘I’m simply asking if the information about the possible hit on Norquist came from Rahe, by whatever means. From the outside that seems to be the important point.’
‘There was an oblique reference to it amongst the usual blazing rhetoric,’ said Guthrie. ‘But this was released after he left for Heathrow. Another source confirmed in some detail what was to happen.’
Spelling moved to take control. ‘We believe he was unmasked during WAYFARER. As most of you are aware, this was the operation to track a hundred-odd kilos of sulphur and two hundred of acetone from Rotterdam to Harwich and then on to a factory in Birmingham. They must have examined their security arrangements after that and come up with Rahe’s name. He was involved in some of the shipping arrangements.
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