Quintin Jardine: Skinner's rules

‘Tell me, Allingham. Tell me now.’

The white-faced man lifted dark, haunted eyes and looked into Skinner’ face.

‘Don’t make me. I warn you, there are some things that it’s safer not to know. Man, I’m police, like you. I lived in your world not so long ago. But now I’m part of another where, as you said, the game is played in a different way, where the stakes can be whole countries and millions of lives. In that game, rule number one is this simple: there are no rules.

‘When it’s a matter of protecting the state, even the planet, you do what is necessary. That’s why we have Maitland. There is no one better than him at doing what is necessary.

‘He isn’t SAS of course, not in the sense of being a regular officer. He was Special Boat Services once, at the time of the Falklands, when his unique talents were first noted during certain operations on the South American mainland. Now he works with the Special Forces on occasion, but on a consultancy basis.

‘Maitland isn’t his real name, by the way. He was Captain Lawrence in the SBS, but that may have been false too. But whatever his real name, he is, shall we say, the principal executive arm of the Security Services.’

‘You mean he kills people that the Government wants out of the way?’

‘Not the Government. The politicians don’t know about him, not even the Prime Minister. Although the Security Services report to the PM, there are some things that even he isn’t told. That he can’t be told. For example, the fact that he himself, the whole Cabinet, and the entire Opposition Front Bench are kept under permanent surveillance.’

Skinner whistled. ‘Holy Shit!’

‘It goes back to a standing order given by Macmillan after the Profum Affair. He told them to do it forever, as standard practice, and never to refer back to him or any of his successors on the matter.’

He paused. ‘But that’s got nothing to do with this business. As for Maitland, very few people know about him. Those who are aware of his existence sometimes refer to him as “The State Executioner”.’

Allingham looked into Skinner’s face. ‘Now that you know more about him, do you still want to know the rest of it?’

Skinner’s eyes were hard as flint. His voice was soft, but filled with power and a terrible menace. ‘Friend, it’s as simple as this. Your man Maitland recently killed seven people, of whom only one could possibly be described as an enemy of the State. He’s a cold, calculating murderer, without a thought for the sanctity of life. I recognise the fact of the existence of your secret set-up, but I don’t recognise its right to exist. There’s only one society in this country, not two. Your man Maitlan is an outlaw. I’m the posse.

‘Now. Tell me why.’

Allingham sank back into the big green couch, shaking his head.

‘Doomsday.’ The word seemed to crackle. ‘That’s what it’s all about. The brief which Mahmoud gave to your two Scots advocates was going to be used all right, but as a defence.

‘For over a year now, the Western Intelligence community has had whispers that Syria and Iraq had settled their blood feud in private, and had come to a secret understanding on cooperation against Israel. The CIA weren’t too worried at first. They thought that the UN and the coalition air forces had pretty well emasculated Iraq’s nuclear and chemical capac ity. But gradually doubts crept in. Recently the satellites have picked up some movements between Syria and Iraq that were highly suspicious. And some other odd things have been noticed in the mountains to the north of Iraq, where the intelligence community has always suspected that they had kept a top-secret store of goodies.

‘A few months ago, our friend Fazal Mahmoud contacted his old flame Rachel Jameson, and offered her a commission. Miss Jameson, as you will be aware, was a PLO sympathiser in her student days. It seems that she kept that allegiance. When Mahmoud telephoned her and asked her to meet him to discuss business, she told her fiance, Mortimer. She must have told him the whole story, because Mortimer didn’t fancy the idea of Ms Jameson having clandestine meetings with one of his predecessors, and so he took over the negotiation. It seems that he was pro-Palestinian, too, because he agreed to accept the instruction on a joint basis.

‘We knew about the meeting in advance of course. Mahmoud was under routine surveillance, and that involved a telephone tap. But we knew very little of what it was about. After that first meeting, the trail went cold for a while. Naturally, the spooks kept a weather eye on the two advocates, but since they didn’t seem to be involved in any extra-curncular activ ity, it was concluded that the instruction from Mahmoud must have been purely academic in nature.’

Skinner held up a hand, interrupting the narrative. ‘Wait just a minute. They kept them under observation? On my patch? Without me knowing?’

Allingham looked at him nervously. ‘It was done through Fulton. There are resources outside the police force, Skinner.’

‘That’s being brought home to me. Were any ot my men involved?’

‘No one currently serving. That’s all I’ll tell you.’

‘We’ll go into that later. Go on.’

Allingham lit a cigarette and drew deeply. Skinner handed him a rarely used ashtray.

‘As I said, the trail went cold. But then, in October, Mahmoud contacted me.’

‘He contacted you?’ Skinner was surprised.

‘Yes. Most of the diplomats know me as someone to whom they can speak off the record as well as officially. They think of me as a chum. You think of me as a sort of escort. What they and you don’t know is that I’m also a part of the Intelligence services. I maintain my baggage-carrier cover rather well, don’t you think?’

He carried on without waiting for Skinner’s answer. ‘Anyway, Mahmoud was in a fearful state. He asked for a meet under total secrecy. I set it up. Mahmoud was an experienced intelligence operative, but he wasn’t the top man. The Syrians run quite an extensive undercover operation through the Lebanese Embassy. He showed me a signal from Damascus to his head of section. He had read it, although it was not for his eyes, and had taken a secret copy.

‘It was encoded, but he translated it for me, using a secret cipher that not even Langley can crack. It turned my blood cold.

‘It made it clear that the Iraq-Syria love-in story was true after all. The signal briefed Mahmoud’s head of section on a joint operation called Day of Deliverance, a plan jointly drawn up by Al-Saddi and the Iraqi leader.

‘On that day the Iraqi-Syrian Alliance, which had been forged by Al-Saddi even before he made himself President, would launch a preemptive strike against Israel, using Iraqi Scuds and Syrian aircraft. The weaponry would be chemical, not nuclear.

‘Everyone knows that Iraq had stored chemical weapons and wasn’t squeamish about using them. We thought they had all been neutralised, but not so. The real stuff and Iraq’s last-resort nuclear weapons were holed up in that mountain store. What no one knew either, until we asked and the Russians confirmed it, was that, during his mercifully brief reign in the Kremlin, Andropov supplied the Syrians with some very sophisticated chemical weapons as a deterrent against, of all people, the Iraqis. He did it to keep them from drifting into the American camp.

‘On the Day of Deliverance, massive strikes using these weapons were to be made against Tel Aviv, Haifa, Eilat, and all the populous areas of Israel. Only Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank would be spared. There, supposedly spontaneous armed insurrection would break out. Simultaneously, there would be a chemical-backed conventional attack across the Golan Heights, using paratroops to encircle the defending garrison. They anticipated little or no resistance there, once news of the attacks on their cities had reached the Israelis.