Stella Rimington - Rip Tide

‘There’s a job come in for us from Head Office. They’ve got a bit of a situation. The French have managed to catch some pirates trying to board a cargo ship in the Indian Ocean, off Somalia. It turns out the ship sailed from here; it was leased by a London-based charity with an office in Athens.’

‘UCSO,’ Goldsmith murmured.

‘That’s right,’ said Mackay, looking up in surprise. ‘How’d you know that?’

‘It’s the only major international charity with a base in Greece.’

‘Do we have a contact in their office?’

‘Danny knew the boss, an American called Berger, but I’ve never met him. Danny didn’t hand him on when he left; I think he was more of a friend than an official station contact. You know the rules about not getting too close to charities.’

‘Yes. Well, Geoffrey Fane’s in touch with their boss in London and it seems they’ve been having a bit of a hijacking problem for some time. Not alone in that, of course, but this time the French Navy nabbed the pirates and one of them turns out to be a British citizen. Hails from Birmingham, would you believe?’ Mackay leaned back in his chair, stretched out his long legs and laughed.

‘Anyway, that’s one aspect. The other is that the UCSO people are worried that someone’s been leaking information about their shipments. The only ships hijacked have had especially valuable cargo – cash in particular. Those with just the routine stuff have been left alone.’

Arthur Goldsmith pondered this for a moment. ‘Don’t tell me Head Office believes that Somalian pirates have a source inside UCSO?’

Mackay grinned. ‘Who knows what Geoffrey believes or what he’s really up to? He plays his cards close to his chest. But he’s agreed with the London UCSO boss that we’ll put someone in at the Athens end to try and find out what’s going on. Berger’s in on it and we’re going to do it straight away.

‘Apparently there’s a vacancy for an assistant accountant at the moment, and Geoffrey wants us to find someone with the right credentials to apply. Then Berger will fix it for them to get the job and we’ll run them from here.

‘So what I’d like you to do, Arthur,’ said Mackay, standing up, ‘is to look through the station assets and see if we’ve got anyone on the books who fits the bill. It’ll be so much quicker if someone’s already recruited than starting from scratch. I gather there’s some urgency about this.’

Bloody Fane, thought Arthur to himself, as he walked back down the corridor, he must be short of things to do. Back in his office, he took out a dozen files from a combination-locked filing cabinet. After about half an hour he picked up three of them and walked back to Bruno’s room.

The door was open and Bruno, feet propped up on the desk and hands locked together behind his head, was listening to the radio. ‘Just polishing up my Greek,’ he said as Arthur walked in. ‘What have you dredged up?’

There were three candidates who had the necessary credentials.

George Arbuthnot had been on the books for ten years. His track record was sound if not inspiring; he was a chartered accountant who had retired to the island of Naxos. He’d worked as a civilian employee for the British Military delegation in Berlin during the Cold War, had married a German and stayed on after the Wall came down. He had been an occasional but useful source of information since then, as his auditing responsibilities had included some of the businesses set up in the former East Berlin by retired officers of the KGB and the Stasi. Then he’d retired, but after three months of Naxos narcolepsy, as he was fond of calling it, he’d moved to Athens, where he and his German wife found life more lively if more expensive. He still did occasional auditing when one of the big firms needed reinforcement; he found the money useful. Arthur had always found him very reliable.

Then there was Pappas. A Greek native but bilingual, or actually trilingual since his Arabic too was fluent after a decade spent in the Gulf working for a sheikh in the Emirates. It was there he had first come under MI6’s wing, passed on by the CIA during a time of co-operative swaps; he’d been recruited by Langley easily enough, since he loathed the corruption in the regime he worked for. Back in Greece, he’d set up his own accountancy firm, hiring and firing staff as the economy waxed and waned.

But there was a small problem with the Greek. He drank. Arthur remembered a catastrophic dinner he’d had with Pappas and Danny Molyneux; by the time the dessert had arrived, Pappas was stupefied with ouzo. They’d had difficulty persuading a taxi driver to take him home.

The third candidate was new to Goldsmith. Maria Galanos had been passed on from Head Office and signed up by one of the more junior members of the station. Greek father, English mother. Educated at a girls’ boarding school in England; economics degree from Manchester, followed by an MBA at INSEAD. A job with Price Waterhouse in London, where she was first contacted by MI6, was followed by a post in a Saudi bank in Frankfurt; the file didn’t make clear if that was at the Service’s instigation. But whether it was or not, she’d helped the Service and their German counterparts expose an Al Qaeda money-laundering scheme. She’d come to live in Athens six months earlier, for ‘personal reasons’ the file said, and was not currently working. The photograph in the file showed a dark, attractive young woman with a pleasant smile.

Mackay read the summaries that Arthur had prepared and flicked through the files. ‘So tell me your thoughts, Arthur. Who’s it going to be?’

Goldsmith made a show of thinking about it; there was no point in offering an immediate opinion – he’d already formed the view that Mackay was the sort who would always plump for the opposite.

Mackay said, ‘What do you think of Pappas?’

Goldsmith made a drinking motion.

‘I see. Well, we all have our failings, but I don’t think we can live with that one in this instance. What about young Maria then?’ He glanced down at her photograph. ‘Pretty girl, don’t you think?’ When Goldsmith said nothing, Mackay shrugged. ‘Perhaps not. But what’s your view?’

‘Excellent credentials.’ Best to begin with the positive, then move in for the kill. ‘But awfully young. If you think about it, she’s only really had the one mission in Frankfurt.’

Mackay nodded. ‘So you think Arbuthnot’s our man for the job?’

‘I think so. Sound pair of hands.’

Mackay nodded. Arthur was surprised. Perhaps this was going to be easier than he’d expected.

Mackay went on nodding in an absent-minded sort of way. But then he said firmly, ‘Can’t see Arbuthnot myself. Too conventional in my view, and he’s just not going to have the radar for office gossip that we need. My vote’s for Maria – her credentials are just as good, and she’s shown initiative in the past. Yes. I think Maria’s the one for this job.’

The old Sikh had driven Liz all the way to Birmingham International Station, though he obviously suspected she was a hysterical woman who had overreacted to some harmless game played by a pair of boys. She had decided not to call the police, as her attackers were long gone into the maze of streets around the Khans’ house and she did not want to draw the attention of the local constabulary to her interest in the family. She would tell Fontana about it in the morning. He might know the boys – they obviously knew him – and be able to find out what their connection was with Amir Khan, and why they had attacked her.

The train from Birmingham to King’s Cross had been packed and with no seat reservation she’d had to stand all the way, which had not helped her to calm down. So when she got inside her Kentish Town flat, Liz headed straight for the fridge and poured herself a glass of Sauvignon Blanc from the half-full bottle there.