Quintin Jardine - Lethal Intent

'That should be good,' Mackenzie murmured.

The DCC glared at him. 'Bandit,' he said, softly, but with menace, 'if you interrupt once more, I'll have you measured for a uniform.' He turned to Dennis. 'Sorry, Amanda: please carry on.'

'Thank you.' She leaned forward, clasping her hands together on the table. 'I'll begin by explaining what exactly MI5 does. I apologise again if I'm telling you things you already know, but in our experience even senior police officers can have gaps in their knowledge. We are an agency charged with responsibility for protecting national security. We're not the only one, of course: we work closely with the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, with the Government Communications Headquarters, and with the Defence Intelligence Staff, among others. Our specific roles are to gather and assess secret intelligence about threats, to advise government of them as they arise, to work with other agencies to combat them and, when necessary, to act directly against them.' She looked around the table at Haggerty, McIlhenney and Mackenzie. 'Understood?' All three nodded, unsmiling.

'Good,' she continued. 'We don't operate outside the law, whatever people may think. We're governed by statute and codes of practice, but we can do things that more public agencies can't,' she smiled, wryly, 'or at least shouldn't. We intercept all forms of communications, we plant bugs, we keep subjects under round-the-clock surveillance; most of the time we're watchers and listeners. Our active involvement depends on the threat.' She leaned back in her chair once again, sweeping aside a few strands of silver hair that had fallen across her forehead.

'Okay. What's our business? Traditionally, we've been spy-catchers: that's why we were set up. However, over the years we've become spies ourselves, in what is colourfully described as the war against terror. At first our brief was almost exclusively Irish, but modern international terrorism has changed all that. It now makes up one third of our total workload and that proportion is rising. But aside from counter-espionage, counter-terrorism and, these days, counter-proliferation, there are two other areas which, taken together, make up about ten per cent of our workload. They are emerging threats, in which my colleague Rudy, who is the assistant director general of the Security Service, is sector head, and serious crime, for which I have lead responsibility. In my area of operation, I must stress to you that we are tasked by other agencies: it's not our role to initiate or to act independently, and we'll only accept an assignment if it is the collective view of everyone involved that we can make a difference to the investigation.'

She paused. 'That's the background; now let's get to the specifics.' She looked beyond Skinner. 'Rudy, would you like to take over?'

Rudolph Sewell nodded and drew his chair closer to the table. For all that he outranked her, he was several years younger than Amanda Dennis; but he was dressed in the same Whitehall civil servant mode. His suit was dark blue, and he wore a white shirt with a crested tie that suggested a public-school background. His hair was conservatively cut and he seemed to have no distinguishing features; then he looked up, and his round, rimless spectacles made his eyes grow huge and froglike, attracting instant attention.

'My section,' he began, 'operates in a variety of ways, across a very broad remit. We rely particularly on the co-operation of intelligence agencies from other countries, or, as in this case, groupings. Some weeks ago, the director general received a warning from NATO intelligence officers that a group of four Albanians had left their own country and were moving through Europe, heading for Britain. These were people with known criminal backgrounds, but in Albania that doesn't exactly mark them out. You'll be aware that it was the last totalitarian communist state in Europe, and that for decades it operated a policy of total isolation, from everyone except the Chinese, who, in fact, didn't care for them at all, and since they were strategically useless found them more of an embarrassment than anything else.' He allowed himself a thin-lipped smile. 'Imagine, if you will, Osama bin Laden being revealed as an Arsenal supporter: he'd be greeted at Highbury with the same warmth that Beijing showed to Tirana.' Sewell paused, as if inviting laughter, but none came.

'The old Albanian regime,' he continued, 'was so brutal and repressive that there was no semblance of an opposition voice; not a political one, at any rate. So, when it imploded, in the aftermath anarchy ruled, criminality became the norm, and the place became a magnet for all sorts of dangerous activity. The people we were warned about are right in the thick of it. They ran protection rackets, controlled prostitution, regulated the drugs trade and supplied all sorts of illegal armaments to all sorts of people, including a significant number of those against whom the war on terror is being fought.'

'Sounds like a nice wee empire,' Skinner mused aloud. 'Why did they leave it all?'

'That's what our NATO source didn't know for sure, and it's what we've been tasked to find out.'

'So what do you know?'

'We know that they left the Albanian port of Durres, crossed the Adriatic and landed in Brindisi, on the heel of Italy. From there they travelled by road to Genoa, crossed into France by hiring a helicopter, and disappeared.'

'Completely?'

'For a while, until their scent was picked up in Rotterdam: they stopped there for long enough to pull off a bank robbery in Amsterdam.'

'Risky. Why would they do that?'

'We think they needed currency; at home they deal in US dollars, and we suspect that they didn't want to flash too many of them about. Significantly, while they took euros, they also took all the sterling that the bank held.'

'A pointer, I'll grant you.'

'Eventually, after some damned good detective work based on witness descriptions, the Dutch police traced them to an address, a great barn of a place in the Oosteinde of the city. They had been living there, under their own names, for over a month, but they had gone by the time the place was raided. Their hosts were Kosovar refugees, ethnic Albanians. They were arrested and interrogated, and of course they pleaded innocence, claiming that they had only been putting up fellow asylum-seekers, and that they had no idea where they had gone. However, further enquiries revealed that one of them had a sister who lived with a Dutch trucker. Under threat of the loss of his licence, he admitted that he had smuggled them across the North Sea on his lorry, sailing out of Zeebrugge to Rosyth, in Fife.'

'What was he carrying, apart from the Albanians?' asked Haggerty.

'Flowers. He's a regular traveller on that route, well known to the Customs people. They took a look at his truck, but not close enough, apparently. However…' Sewell paused, his great frog eyes sweeping round the table. '… he was also carrying four large rucksacks, which from his description were much bigger than anything an asylum-seeker would be likely to have. These were offloaded by the Albanians when they reached their destination in Edinburgh.'

'Oh, shit,' said Skinner, quietly.

'You guess what I'm going to tell you,' the MI5 operative exclaimed. 'Further interrogation of the Kosovars in Rotterdam revealed that, after the second robbery, the Albanians had a meeting in their hide-out with a man whose description matches that of a well-known Dutch arms-dealer. The dealer can't be traced, or hasn't been yet, but we would like very much to know what they were talking about.'

'You don't know for sure?'

'No, but when my Dutch opposite numbers raided his warehouse they found that while his inventory and his stock tallied some of the recorded buyers of items did not. For example, the police chief in Amsterdam did not buy silencers with the carbines he ordered, and he only received half the number of firearms that were shown on the order. Also, the small African nation which was shown to have purchased eighteen American anti-tank missiles for its defence force in fact only received fourteen.'