Stella Rimington - At Risk

Discerning this, Liz had made the necessary time, and gradually, like flowers laid at her feet, the information had come in. Some of this was of dubious value; like many agents avid for their handlers’ approval, Ferris had a tendency to flannel Liz with half-remembered irrelevancies. But he managed to note and pass on the landline and mobile phone numbers of several of Eastman’s associates, and to list the registration numbers of vehicles which visited the Romford works unit where Eastman then had his HQ.

This was useful, and added substantially to MI5’s knowledge of Eastman’s operations, but Ferris was never admitted to Eastman’s inner circle, and had little or no access to hard intelligence. His days were spent as a glorified minicab driver, ferrying female croupiers from Eastman’s casinos to and from lunch with Eastman’s business associates, delivering smuggled tobacco to pubs, and distributing cases of bootleg CDs and DVDs around the markets.

In the end, it had proved impossible to build a satisfactory case against the highly security-conscious Eastman, and as a result he had grown stronger. And probably, thought Liz, moved into the sale of worse and more profitable commodities than dodgy CDs. He was certainly responsible for the regular distribution of Ecstasy to the many nightclub dealers in his area-a hugely profitable enterprise-and the Branch were certain that several of his legitimate businesses were covers for scams of one sort or another.

Essex Special Branch had remained on the case, and when Liz moved to Wetherby’s counter-terrorism section, the running of Zander was taken over by one of their officers, a hard-bitten Ulsterman named Bob Morrison. It was Morrison rather than Liz that Ferris should have rung.

“Tell me, Frankie,” Liz began.

“Big drop-off Friday, at the headland. Twenty, plus a special, from Germany.” Ferris’s voice was steady, but he was clearly nervous.

“You’ve got to tell Bob Morrison, Frankie. I don’t know what this means, and I can’t act on it.”

“I’m not telling Morrison any fuckin’ thing-this is for you.”

“I don’t know what any of it means, Frankie. I’m out of that game, and you shouldn’t be ringing me.”

“Friday, at the headland,” repeated Frankie urgently. “Twenty plus a special. From Germany. Have you got that?”

“I’ve written it down. What’s the source?”

“Eastman. Took a call when I was there a couple of days ago. He was furious-really done his bollocks.”

“You still working for him?”

“Bits and pieces.”

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“You in a phone box?”

“Yeah.”

“Make another call before you leave. Don’t leave this as the last number dialled.”

They hung up, and for several minutes Liz stared at the scraps of phrases on the notepad in front of her. Then she dialled the Essex Special Branch number and asked for Bob Morrison. Minutes later he called her back from a motorway payphone.

“Did Ferris say why he called you?” the Special Branch officer asked her, his voice echoing indistinctly in her earpiece.

“No, he didn’t,” said Liz. “But he was adamant he wasn’t talking to you.”

There was a brief silence. Reception was poor, and amongst the static Liz could hear the whine of car horns.

“As a source,” said Morrison, “Frankie Ferris is a total write-off. Ninety per cent of the money Eastman pays him goes straight over the betting shop counter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s using, too. He’s probably made the whole thing up.”

“That’s possible,” said Liz carefully.

There was a long moment of crackle.

“… going to get anything useful while Eastman’s putting money his way.”

“And if he isn’t any more?” asked Liz.

“If he isn’t, I wouldn’t give much for his…”

“You think Eastman would get rid of him?”

“I think he’d consider it. Frankie knows enough to bury him. But I don’t think it would come to that. Melvin Eastman’s a businessman. Easier to see him as a business overhead, throw a bit of cash…”

More car horns. “You’re…”

“… useful work out of him. They’re joined at the waist, basically.”

“OK. Do you want me to send you what Frankie told me?”

“Yeah, why not?”

They rang off. Liz had covered herself; as for the information being acted on, that was something else.

Once again she stared at the fragmentary phrases. A drop-off of what? Drugs? Weapons? People? A drop-off from Germany? Where would that have originated? If it was a sea landing, and the word “headland” suggested that it was, then perhaps she should have a look at the northern ports.

Just to be on the safe side-and it could be hours before Morrison got back to his office-she decided to have a word with a contact in Customs and Excise. Where was the nearest UK landfall from the German ports? Had to be East Anglia, which was Eastman’s patch. No small craft bringing dodgy cargo from the northeast was going to run the gauntlet of the Channel; they’d go for the hundred-odd miles of unguarded coastline between Felixstowe and the Wash.

The Susanne Hanke was a twenty-two-metre Krabbenkutter stern-trawler, and after more than thirty hours at sea Faraj Mansoor loathed every rust-streaked inch of her. He was a proud man, but he did not look like one as he crouched in the vomit-slicked fish-hold with his twenty fellow passengers. Most of these, like Faraj, were Afghans, but there were also Pakistanis, Iranians, a couple of Iraqi Kurds and a mute, suffering Somali.

All were identically dressed in used blue mechanics’ overalls. In a warehouse near the Bremerhaven docks they had been stripped of the rancid garments in which they had travelled from their various countries of origin, permitted to shave and shower, and fitted out with second-hand jeans, sweaters and windcheaters from the city’s charity shops. They were also handed the overalls, and by the time the twenty-one of them were gathered around the bonfire of their old clothing they looked, to the casual eye, like a team of guest workers. Before embarking on the sea crossing they had been given bread rolls, coffee, and individual servings of hot mutton stew in foil cartons-a meal which, over the course of the eighteen months that the Caravan had been up and running, had proved acceptable to the bulk of its clients.

The Caravan had been set up to provide what its organisers described as “Grade 1 covert trans-shipment” of economic migrants from Asia to Northern Europe and the United Kingdom. The passage was not luxurious, but a concerted attempt had been made to provide a humane and functional service. For twenty thousand US dollars, customers were promised safe travel, appropriate EU documentation (including passports), and twenty-four hours of hostel accommodation on arrival.

This was in marked contrast to previous people-smuggling endeavours. In the past, in return for hefty cash sums at the point of departure, migrants had been delivered filthy, traumatised and half starved to motorway lay-bys on the UK’s south coast, and abandoned without currency or documents to fend for themselves. Many had died en route, usually of suffocation in sealed containers or trucks.

The organisers of the Caravan, however, knew that in an age of split-second communications their long-term interests were best served by a reputation for efficiency. Hence the overalls, whose grim purpose became clear the moment the Susanne Hanke cleared the port of Bremerhaven. The cutter’s draught was shallow, perhaps a metre and a half, and while the vessel was equal in terms of stability to anything the North Sea might throw at it, it pitched and rolled like a pig in bad weather. And the weather, from the moment the Susanne Hanke made open sea, was very bad, blowing an unremitting December gale. On top of this the Caterpillar power plant, pushing out a steady 375 horse-power, swiftly filled the converted fish-hold with the queasy stink of diesel.