Stella Rimington - Rip Tide

Maria nodded and they concentrated on their lunch for a while. Then she asked, ‘When I was talking to Mr Limonides he had a phone call complaining about an unpaid invoice. I think the company was called Xenides.’

‘Ah, that would have been Mo Miandad – he’s the shipping agent for the company that leases the ships and hires the crew. Mo’s a bit of a rogue, not quite upright enough for the likes of our Mr Limonides. His family emigrated here in 1947 at the time of Partition in India. Mo was born here. The family are now very well off but it’s said that they disowned him because of his behaviour – apparently he became involved with a married woman and got her pregnant. He’s certainly a bit of an acquired taste, particularly if you’re female. Asia’s answer to Casanova.’

As they walked the short distance back to the office, the shops were reopening after the midday break. Maria was about to thank Berger and head off home when a taxi drew up beside them. A blonde woman got out and thrust some money at the driver.

‘You made it,’ Berger said, as the woman stepped on to the pavement, pulling a small suitcase.

‘What a nightmare,’ she replied. ‘The French air controllers had a wildcat strike, bless them. For a while, I thought we were going to fly to Athens via the North Pole.’

‘Let me introduce Maria Galanos,’ said Berger. ‘She’s joining us tomorrow. Working with Mr Limonides.’

The woman stepped forward to shake hands. ‘I’m Katherine Ball. I heard you were starting. Welcome to UCSO.’ She gave Maria a warm smile.

‘You’ll see each other tomorrow,’ Berger said.

‘Yes, see you then,’ said Maria. She turned to Berger. ‘Thanks for lunch. I’ll be in the office first thing.’ And as she walked away, she wondered if there really could be anything sinister about the Athens office of UCSO. Everyone seemed so charming and straightforward.

Bruno Mackay at the embassy had seemed confident there was something wrong there, but then Bruno Mackay had struck her as confident about everything.

Richard Luckhurst had always liked the idea of ‘gardening leave’. But confronted with it, he realised that there was only so much gardening he wanted to do. When in quiet moments at sea he’d thought about retirement, he’d seen himself tending his roses, edging the lawn and erecting the big greenhouse he had always wanted. But faced with the opportunity to do all that, he couldn’t even find the enthusiasm to cut the grass.

His employers had been firm: he couldn’t sail for another four weeks, and even that was contingent on a doctor’s certificate. Not from his own GP, a nice old buffer who Richard knew would say he was fit as a fiddle, but from the company’s medic – a pompous ass who’d ask him how he was feeling ‘in himself’.

Luckhurst felt fine. Not for him this post-traumatic stress nonsense. He’d been well treated by the kidnappers in Somalia, and his only worry had been about the welfare of his crew. But they had been all right too. None of them had been hurt or seriously threatened, just a bit scared and very bored. The food had been disgusting, it was true, but that was all he could really complain about, and even that had had a side benefit – he had lost half a stone, something which he’d struggled unsuccessfully to do for years.

But he’d be putting it all on again if he couldn’t get back to work soon. The company had him down provisionally to take command of an oil tanker sailing from the Gulf of Aden to the east coast of America. But that was a month away, and just now a month seemed an eternity to him.

He was sitting outside on the patio, trying not to notice how long the grass had grown, while his wife Sue was inside, vacuuming. They’d settled in this pleasant Birmingham suburb twenty years before. Their children had grown up here – largely without their father, he thought ruefully. Sue was such an old hand at running the place that he felt he’d only get in her way if he offered to help. She must find it strange having him around so much. In any normal year, he was away at sea ten months out of twelve.

He was listening with half an ear to the radio as he dozed in his deckchair. On Radio 4 a presenter was leading a discussion about the threat posed by home-grown terrorists. What a world we live in, thought Luckhurst. He’d grown up during the Cold War, and like many children of that era had felt scared by the idea of nuclear missiles pointing at his town. When the Soviet Union had collapsed at the end of the eighties, he’d felt a profound sense of relief. But now the Cold War seemed to have been replaced by something just as frightening and more difficult to understand. You couldn’t blame it all on Osama Bin Laden, thought Luckhurst. Even if that sinister character died tomorrow, there seemed to be countless followers around to carry on where he’d left off.

They were saying on the radio that the danger zone was shifting – not everything was coming out of Afghanistan or Pakistan now. Some security expert from an institute somewhere was saying that many of the hardliners were moving away from their traditional hideouts and setting themselves up in lawless places in other parts of the world, where there were no effective governments and they could live and operate without interference. A Middle East correspondent from Reuters added that he’d learned that training camps were being set up in some of these places and new recruits from Britain were being sent there instead of Pakistan. Al Qaeda were planning to use these places as bases from which to hit new targets, he said.

They’re everywhere, thought Luckhurst, only partly reassured when a man identified as ‘a security consultant’ paid tribute to the excellent job the intelligence services were doing in tracking down these new threats. Then the Reuters man piped up again, pointing out how hard it was to track anyone in Yemen where, he said, Al Qaeda had a growing foothold. And if Yemen got too hot for the terrorists, there was always near-neighbour Somalia.

At this mention of the country where he’d been so recently a prisoner, Luckhurst opened his eyes and sat up. Memories came flooding back. He was in the cage again, in the camp somewhere near the Somalian coast. He could visualise dinner coming, carried by Taban – yes, that had been his name, the young boy he’d befriended. Luckhurst wondered what had become of him, remembering that last evening, just before the hostages were freed, when Taban had seemed so alarmed. The boy had said there had been Westerners visiting the camp – not hostages, but associates of the pirates. He’d said one had spoken English – a brown Englishman. Could this be one of the British Pakistanis the man on the radio was talking about?

It took a few minutes for the connection to take root in Richard Luckhurst’s mind, and another hour before he picked up the telephone. But after that things moved fast: just as Sue put the kettle on for tea, Detective Inspector Fontana drove his car into the Luckhursts’ drive and rang the doorbell.

For three weeks, Maria went conscientiously into the UCSO office every morning and spent the day helping Mr Limonides with the accounts, keeping her eyes open for anything out of the ordinary. She wasn’t at all sure what she was looking for. Neither her handsome contact at the British Embassy nor her new boss Berger had been at all precise about what they thought might be going on in the office. ‘Someone taking a nosey interest in the manifests of aid shipments sailing from Athens’ seemed to sum it up, but at the moment there were no shipments being assembled. In fact, not much was going on in the office at all as far as she could see. The only member of staff who seemed to be doing anything interesting or out of the ordinary was Claude, the Frenchwoman, who had just returned from a short visit to Kinshasa. Maria was interested to hear about her trip but Claude was such a dour soul that she made even the most exotic parts of the Third World sound dull.