Stella Rimington: Dead Line

Liz looked again at the summary report she had started to prepare the day before for her weekly meeting with Charles. A lot was going on: yet another pass had been made by a Russian intelligence officer, this time to a low-level clerk in the Foreign Office who had reported the contact straight away; an Iranian posing as a Saudi was suspected of trying to buy anti-tank weapons from a UK manufacturer; the numbers in the Chinese Embassy continued to grow suspiciously. She’d finish it tomorrow, she thought, as Charles phoned to tell her Fane had arrived.

She stood up and locked the file in her cupboard, running a quick hand through her hair, pulling down her jacket.

Many years of working with Geoffrey Fane of MI6 had taught Wetherby self-control. He knew that however annoying Fane might be, with his lean, elegant figure, his well-cut suits, his languid air and above all his habit of dumping embarrassing situations on Charles at a late stage, the worst thing to do was to show irritation. Managing Geoffrey Fane was a fine art and Charles rather prided himself that he was as good at it as anyone.

That said, however, he had hoped that his move to counter espionage would mean seeing less of Fane, most of whose time was spent on Middle East issues, particularly terrorism. But now, after only a few weeks back at work, he found himself again gazing across his desk at Fane, who was reclining comfortably in one of the two padded chairs in Charles’s office as they waited for Liz Carlyle.

Avoiding his visitor’s eye, Charles looked over Fane’s shoulder, through his office window at the wide view of the Thames at low tide with a bright sun scattering diamond sparkles across the small, receding waves. At least he had one thing to thank Brian Ackers for. Traditionally the director of counter espionage had one of the best offices in Thames House.

Ackers, in his curious, obsessive way, had turned his desk so that his back was to the view, and one of Charles’s first changes had been to turn it round. After that, he had removed Ackers’s lifelong collection of Sovietology from the bookshelves and replaced it with his own eclectic library, assembled over his years in the service. The one extravagance he still allowed himself was buying books and he had long since filled up all the space in the house near Richmond, which now had to accommodate the assorted possessions of his teenage sons as well as his and Joanne’s.

The door of his office opened and Liz Carlyle came in, bringing, for Charles at least, a breath of fresh air and a noticeable lightening of the spirit. Charles had by now admitted to himself that an important part of the pleasure he got from his work came from the proximity of Liz. He found her deeply attractive – not just her appearance, her level gaze, her slim figure and her smooth, brown hair, but her straightforward, down to earth personality, her honesty and her quick intuition.

He thought she felt for him too, but she gave little away. He knew that she expected nothing of him and, while Joanne was alive, he could not expect anything from her. But that did not prevent the tinge of jealousy he always felt when he saw another man’s attraction to her.

The two men stood up. ‘Elizabeth,’ said Fane warmly, shaking her hand. ‘You’re looking well.’

Charles was aware that Liz hated to be called Elizabeth and he suspected that Fane knew it too. He waited to see how she would react. Fane, with his sophistication and his style, was an attractive man; he was also divorced. But Charles knew he was ruthless in pursuit of operational success and probably in his pursuit of women too. Liz and Fane had worked closely together in his absence on a case without a happy outcome for either. Charles, coming in at the end, had seen how it had shattered the confidence of both of them and in doing so had drawn them together. He hoped that Liz would be careful. Fane was not the man for her.

‘Thank you, Geoffrey,’ Liz said frostily as Charles waved her to the second chair in front of his desk.

‘Liz, I thought you should hear what Geoffrey’s just been telling me. It strikes me as rather important.’

Liz looked levelly at Fane, her eyes narrowing slightly with concentration.

Fane said, ‘We’ve had an intriguing report from Cyprus. Our head of station there is Peter Templeton – he’s been in the Middle East for years, so I don’t think you’ll have met him.’ She shook her head. ‘He’s been running a very sensitively placed source for some time. It’s someone who’s given us excellent intelligence in the past.’

Fane paused again, hesitant, and Charles could see that not all of his old arrogance had returned; once, he would have known exactly what he would or wouldn’t say.

Settling himself in his chair, Fane went on. ‘This source has high-level access. The day before yesterday he called an urgent meeting with Templeton. What he had to say was rather concerning.’

And Fane related in economical fashion what Templeton had learned from his source – that two people in the UK were working to blacken the name of Syria and so to destroy trust and wreck the peace conference. And that Syrian intelligence was going to move against them.

‘And that,’ said Fane, ending his account with a dramatic flourish of one cuffed wrist, ‘is the reason I came to see you.’

No one spoke for a moment. Then Liz asked, ‘Is this the threat Sir Nicholas Pomfret was talking about at the Cabinet Office?’

Fane nodded. ‘Yes. Bruno told me Pomfret had addressed you all.’ He smiled knowingly.

Charles was tapping his pencil on his notepad. He looked thoughtfully at Liz, who said, ‘If it’s a matter of protecting two people, that sounds like a job for the police, not us.’

‘This is delicate source material, Elizabeth. It can’t possibly be handed to the police,’ replied Fane. ‘Anyway, I’m not sure whom we should be protecting.’

‘You said these two lives are at risk,’ she responded.

He ignored the implication. ‘This is about the future of the Middle East. If there is some sort of plot to disrupt the conference, and the Syrians snuff it out, who are we to complain?’

Typical of Fane, thought Charles, and seeing Liz’s hackles rising he spoke quickly to pre-empt her response.

‘Did this source have any sense of what these two are planning to do? Are they working together? Who is controlling them? And above all, how did the Syrians find out about this plot?’

‘I’ve told you everything we know, Charles, and I’ve given you the names.’ Charles pushed a paper across his desk to Liz, while Fane leaned back in his chair. Fane said, ‘It’s over to you now.’ And as if the ensuing silence confirmed that the ball had been placed in MI5’s court, a smile bordering on the smug settled on Fane’s lips.

Charles ignored him and started tapping his pencil again, his eyes drifting over to the window and its view of the Thames. ‘It could just be an old-fashioned set- up. God knows, we’ve seen them before, especially from the Middle East.’

Liz spoke up. ‘But what would the point be, Charles? I mean, other than sending us on a wild-goose chase, why would anyone want to plant disinformation of this sort?’ Unusually, Charles noted, she was arguing on Fane’s side.

Fane snapped, ‘They wouldn’t.’

‘Possibly,’ Charles said. ‘But whoever told them may have had their own motives – or some reason we can’t imagine at present.’

‘In my experience, Charles, fathoming motives in the Middle East is the equivalent of building sandcastles.’ Fane was emphatic. ‘You can erect the most impressive structure, and then one big wave can wash it all away.’

Charles suppressed a sharp reply and Liz broke in. ‘These two names,’ she said, looking at the paper, ‘do we know anything about them?’