Stella Rimington - Rip Tide

But then she thought of the young man in the Santé prison. Why was he there? What had pulled him away from a respectable Birmingham family to a pirate boat in the Indian Ocean? She turned with a sigh as Peggy Kinsolving came into her office, looking eager, a file clutched in her hand and her spectacles firmly in place. Peggy smiled and said, ‘Don’t tell me – it was sunny in Paris.’

‘Naturally.’ Liz waved her to a chair. ‘Did this DI Fontana have anything more to say?’

‘No. I told him not to go near the Khan family until you were back.’

‘Good. I’ll ring him. I want to talk to the Khans myself, but if he knows them, it might be best if he came with me.’

Peggy nodded then said, ‘There’s one more thing. One of our agent runners has a source in the part of Birmingham where the Khans live. It’s a young Asian who’s a member of one of the radical mosques there. I thought he could be useful.’

‘He might… we need all the information we can get. The Khan family won’t necessarily tell us everything they know about their son – that’s if they know anything themselves. Who’s the agent runner? I’d like to have a word.’

‘It’s Kanaan Shah. He’s in the office today; I saw him earlier. Let me see if I can find him.’

Peggy bustled out and returned a few minutes later escorting a tall, dark, good-looking young man, wearing chinos and a blue open-necked shirt.

‘Have a seat, Kanaan,’ Liz began.

‘You’ve pronounced it correctly,’ he said with a smile. ‘Most people don’t. That’s why I’m called “K” around here.’

‘How long have you been in the Service?’

‘Three years. But I’ve only been running agents for a few months. I was in protective security before. “Agent”, I should say,’ he added with a grin. ‘I’ve only got the one.’

‘That’ll change once you get the hang of it. You’ll soon find you’ve got a whole stable of them.’ She remembered her own first days as an agent runner – and one particular agent, the boy in the Muslim bookshop, codenamed Marzipan. He had helped to prevent a serious terrorist incident, but had later been killed – his identity blown to the extremists by a mole in the Service. That had been the worst period of Liz’s career. She’d almost resigned over it, even though none of it had been her fault. Now here was young Kanaan, starting out on his career as an agent runner. He’d be asking people to put their lives in his hands in the national interest; making the compact with them that he would look after them in return for their information. It was a compact made in good faith but one, as Liz knew only too well, that was never without risk.

She asked Kanaan about his background; there were still comparatively few Asians at the operational end of the Service. He told her he was from a Ugandan Asian family. His grandparents had been forced to leave when Idi Amin drove out the Asian community. London-born, Kanaan had grown up in Herne Hill and gone to Alleyn’s School for Boys, then he’d read Politics and Economics at LSE. Personable, obviously intelligent, he could have had any number of jobs; Liz asked him what had attracted him to the Security Service.

‘Adventure,’ he said with a boyish grin that was infectious – she found herself smiling back. ‘And,’ he added, the grin disappearing, ‘I wanted to give something back. My grandparents came to Britain with nothing but a single suitcase, but my family has done very well here. My father became a GP, then he changed direction and now he’s a partner at Morgan Stanley. And he’s made sure I’ve had every opportunity to do what I want to do.’

Liz nodded. She was charmed by Kanaan’s willingness to express sentiments that many would find old-fashioned. Her own father had had a very strong sense of duty, of service to his country. He’d carried it through into civilian life from his days in the army, and it had rubbed off on her. That, she thought ruefully, was why she couldn’t just pack it all in and go off to live in Paris. Not yet anyway.

‘Tell me about your agent,’ she said. ‘Peggy says he’s in Birmingham.’

‘That’s right.’ And Liz listened carefully as K began to tell her about a young man in Birmingham called Salim Alavi, codename ‘Boatman’. He was the son of first-generation immigrants from Pakistan. His mother worked as a cleaner; his father was a mechanic in a local garage. Salim had done well at school, getting three good A-levels; he didn’t go to university but instead applied to join the West Midlands Police. His application had been unsuccessful: he’d passed his written tests with flying colours, but he’d failed the medical exam – there was some problem with his eyesight. Yet he was so obviously keen and bright that one of the recruiters had mentioned him to Special Branch and in time he’d been drawn to MI5’s attention.

After his application was rejected, Salim took a job in a hardware store run by his uncle. He seemed to have become embittered by his experience with the police and, for the first time in his life, became extremely religious. He joined a small, recently founded mosque, the New Springfield, and went there daily to pray; he also spent his free time listening to clerics preach and began to participate in discussion groups. If you had asked him why he had previously wanted to become a policeman, Salim would have told you it had been a mistake, a youthful error committed when he hadn’t realised he would be doing the Infidel’s bidding by becoming a copper. He would not have told you about his monthly meetings with an officer of MI5.

After almost two years of faithful attendance at the mosque, ‘Boatman’ was asked to join a small study group, under the tutelage of a cleric named Abdi Bakri who had recently arrived from Pakistan. He agreed at once. At first the sessions were merely versions of the larger discussion groups he still attended. Islam was always on the agenda, and the overriding theme of the talks was how to follow the faith while living in the secular and corrupt society of the West.

But gradually the tenor of the cleric’s study sessions became more political – and Abdi Bakri shifted emphasis from adhering faithfully to Islam to defeating its enemies. This transition was noted by Boatman – and reported to his new MI5 controller, Kanaan Shah.

‘How did Boatman take your arrival on the scene?’ asked Liz. Agents usually hated any change to their controller – such relationships were of necessity close ones, and made closer by their clandestine nature.

‘I think he was a bit surprised. He was recruited by Dave Armstrong and I took him on when Dave was posted to Northern Ireland. I’m sure he was expecting another white man, and at first he was suspicious of me. But the fact we were both Asians helped – even though I’m Indian and a Hindu, not Muslim.’ He added with a little laugh, ‘Boatman was willing to overlook this flaw when he discovered that I hated cricket too.’

Kanaan continued with his account. In this new elite group, Boatman slowly felt his way; it took him over a month even to learn the names of his fellow members. But his patience paid off, and one of them in particular, an old hand named Malik, seemed to trust him. It was from him that Boatman learned that there had been earlier incarnations of this little group, taught by another cleric now thought to be in Yemen, and that some of his disciples had travelled to Pakistan.

‘And what happened to them after that?’ asked Liz.

‘Most came back. I got three names from Boatman and they’re under surveillance. But the interesting thing is that at least two others don’t seem to have returned.’

And now those in the present group were being offered the chance to travel to Pakistan as well, to ‘study’, they were told, with a renowned imam near the Afghan border.