Stella Rimington - Dead Line

‘Yes. What else?’ Suddenly Lieutenant Wilentz stamped down with his boot, about six inches from the print. ‘Look,’ he ordered.

Grossman peered down, and then he saw it. ‘It’s almost identical.’

‘Exactly. It’s an army boot that made this print. An Israeli army boot.’

Wilentz called to the other men in the patrol and barked orders. They left the truck where it was and moved on foot, Wilentz out in front. As they got further from the road, the footprints became clearer and Wilentz, following the tracks, walked without hesitating.

After half a mile they came to a small rise with a mix of large boulders and loose shingle on its lower slope. The officer signalled his men to halt, then walked back to the group to issue more orders. Five minutes later Private Grossman was clambering up the rocky slope accompanied by Alfi Sternberg, a Haifa conscript he knew from college. Why would a soldier be out here on his own? he wondered. Gone AWOL? But then why was he heading for the Syrian border?

He saw the water bottle first, lying beside a boulder in a small dip in the rock. As he moved towards it, he realised that behind the boulder, sheltered by a larger boulder balanced above it, there was a big space. He gestured with his hand to Sternberg, and together they moved cautiously towards the spot, their rifles at the ready.

Suddenly a hand reached out and grabbed the water bottle, then a man rose to his feet from behind the boulder. He was tall and lean and wore fatigues. He stood facing them with the assurance of a veteran soldier, cradling a T.A.R. assault rifle in his arms.

‘Glad to see you,’ he said laconically. ‘I’ve been watching you out there for some time.’

Sternberg laughed in relief and relaxed his grip on his rifle. Grossman hesitated; he didn’t understand what this man was doing here. ‘Who are you?’ he blurted.

‘I’m Leppo,’ the man said at once. ‘Sammy Leppo. I’m out here on Special Patrol. You’ll know what that means, I’m sure,’ he added meaningfully.

Sternberg nodded, but Grossman was still uneasy. With Hezbollah in the vicinity, he could understand why Leppo had hidden when he first heard them moving along the plateau – but something about the situation seemed odd. He said, ‘I’ll need to check that out.’

Leppo nodded easily, but then he said, ‘That’s not really a good idea.’

‘Why?’ asked Grossman, his suspicions returning.

Leppo suddenly swung his rifle round and covered him and Sternberg. ‘Drop your weapons,’ he ordered. There was nothing relaxed about his voice now. Sternberg dropped his rifle at once, and Leppo pointed his rifle at Grossman. ‘Drop it.’ Grossman obeyed, suddenly certain this man would kill him without hesitation.

Then a voice said, ‘You drop it.’

Behind Leppo, Lieutenant Wilentz appeared; he’d circled the rise and climbed down. Now he stood on top of the boulder behind Leppo and snapped his finger. The four other members of the patrol appeared, weapons pointing at Leppo’s back.

Wilentz said, ‘You’d better come with us. There will be plenty of time for you to tell us all about this Special Patrol.’

This time Ma Folie was not closed; it was doing a busy lunchtime trade. At the bistro on the South Bank, the food was French, old-fashioned and excellent. As Liz took her last bite of onglet , grilled in shallot butter, she felt a curious contentment.

The near-disaster at Gleneagles had not derailed the peace conference, though none of the participants would have claimed it a total success. Three days of intensive talks had led to no dramatic breakthrough, but the discussions had been conducted in a positive spirit by all sides. Enough had been accomplished for another conference to be scheduled in four months’ time, long enough to allow informal follow-up talks, but soon enough to ensure that all momentum would not be lost. Liz and her colleagues had sighed with relief when the venue for the next conference had been announced: France.

The Czech girl, Jana, had cracked within minutes at Liz’s second interrogation, though what she’d had to say had not added much to what was already known. It served mainly to confirm Kollek’s skill at manipulating people. Jana had fallen so completely under his spell that she hadn’t hesitated when he’d asked her to wipe a rag over the nose of the German pointer, even though she was rather scared of dogs. She hadn’t even questioned why she was doing it, or why he’d given her money to send young Mateo into the hills to collect a package.

Liz assumed she just didn’t want to know. Kollek had a lot to answer for, she thought, remembering Jana’s face (this time her tears had been genuine), but at least there was the satisfaction of knowing that, having been captured by the army just two miles from the border with Syria, the man would be explaining himself at some length. He was in the hands of Mossad now and it was pretty likely that a certain squat, tough veteran of Israel’s many wars would be yet again postponing his retirement until he had finished the interrogation.

Miles had rung Liz a week after her return to London, and just twenty-four hours after his own from the Middle East. By some unspoken agreement they’d spent most of lunch talking about almost anything but the events at Gleneagles. He’d asked about her family, and she’d told him about her mother, and how wrong she herself had been about Edward Treglown – Miles had laughed when she’d described the gold-digging old buffer she’d been expecting. Then he told her all about Damascus, describing a capital city, and indeed a country, which was an odd mélange of the old and new, a land where the latest computer software and the ancient souk were uneasy bedfellows, and Islam pushed against a form of Christianity that was equally well established.

It was only now, as she declined the waiter’s offer of dessert and they both ordered coffee, that Miles fell silent, and Liz felt it was appropriate to make some reference to the complicated chain of events they had both been involved in.

‘You know, you were instrumental in helping us to solve all this Kollek business.’

‘I was?’ Miles looked pleasantly surprised. Liz thought again there was something attractive about his modesty.

‘Yes. If you hadn’t gone to Tel Aviv and got all that out of Teitelbaum, we’d never have known what was driving Kollek – why he did what he did.’

Miles acknowledged this with a reluctant nod. ‘I suppose that’s true,’ he said, and went silent again. There was a lot to think about. Kollek’s plot was probably quite simple to begin with, but it had grown infinitely complicated by the time it concluded so bizarrely – with an explosion that, if it had taken place on land as he’d intended, would have killed both the Syrian President and the Israeli Prime Minister. As it turned out, it was only the dog handler’s skill at redirecting the dog back to the island in the little lake that saved them all. In the end, the dog had been the only victim. Sad, even poignant, but a minor disaster. Certainly very far from the worldwide impact that Kollek had hoped for.

But Kollek had been very clever, thought Liz – at least at first. She said as much to Miles.

‘What about the Oval?’ he said, just as Peggy had done at Gleneagles.

She shook her head. ‘Even that worked to his advantage. When we spotted them, we immediately suspected Bokus, not him. In fact, every time we found some link with Kollek, we always assumed he was being run by an intelligence service, particularly Mossad of course. But he was playing them – all of us, in fact.’

Miles poured Liz the last of the bottle of Crozes Hermitage. She’d ignored her usual limit of a single glass of wine at lunch – what the hell, she’d decided, sensing a valedictory quality to the occasion.