Stella Rimington - At Risk

“Really?” murmured Liz. “Fancy that.” This was a flanking attack, and what it was really about was her coming home. She had grown up in the small octagonal gatehouse of which her mother was now the sole tenant, and the unspoken hope was that she should return to the country and “settle down,” before spinsterhood and the City of Dreadful Night claimed her for ever. Not necessarily with Rob Dewey-he of the sodden shorts-but with someone similar. Someone with whom, at intervals, she could enjoy “French cuisine” and “the theatre” and all the other metropolitan amenities to which she had no doubt grown accustomed.

Extricating herself from the maternal web last night had meant that Liz hadn’t got on to the motorway until 10 p.m., and hadn’t reached the Kentish Town flat until midnight. When she let herself in she found that the washing that she’d put on on Saturday morning was lying in six inches of cloudy water in the machine, which had stopped mid-cycle. It was now far too late to start it again without annoying the neighbours, so she rooted through the dry-cleaning pile for her least crumpled work outfit, hung it over the bath, and took a shower in the hope that the steam would restore a little of its élan. When she finally made it to bed it was almost 1 a.m. She had managed about five and a half hours’ sleep and felt puffy-eyed, adrift on a tide of fatigue.

With a gasp and a long, flatulent shudder, the tube train restarted. She was definitely going to be late.

Thames House, the headquarters of MI5, is on Millbank. A vast and imposing edifice of Portland stone, eight storeys in height, it crouches like a great pale ghost a few hundred yards south of the Palace of Westminster.

That morning, as always, Millbank smelt of diesel fumes and the river. Clutching her coat around her against the rain-charged wind, watching for the sodden plane-tree leaves on which it was all too easy to turn an ankle, Liz hurried up the entrance steps. Bag swinging, she pushed open one of the doors into the lobby, raised a quick hand in greeting to the security guards at the desk, and slotted her smart pass into the barrier. The front of one of the security capsules opened, she stepped inside, and was briefly enclosed. Then, as if she’d travelled light years in an instant, the rear door slid open, and she stepped out into another dimension. Thames House was a hive, a city of steel and frosted glass, and Liz felt a subtle shift inside herself as she crossed its security threshold and was borne noiselessly upwards to the fifth floor.

The lift doors opened and she turned left and moved at speed towards 5/AX, the agent-runners’ section. This was a large open-plan office lit by strip lights and lent a faintly seedy character by the clothes stands that stood by each desk. These were hung with the agent-runners’ work clothes-in Liz’s case a worn pair of jeans, a black Karrimor fleece, and a zip-up leather jacket. Her desk was spare-a grey terminal, a touch-tone phone, an FBI mug-and flanked to one side by a combination-locked cupboard from which she took a dark blue folder.

“And, coming into the home straight…” murmured Dave Armstrong from the next desk, his eyes locked to his computer screen.

“Courtesy of the bloody Northern Line,” gasped Liz, spinning the cupboard lock. “The train just… stopped. For at least ten minutes. In the middle of nowhere.”

“Well, the driver could hardly sit and smoke a joint in the station, could he?” asked Armstrong reasonably.

But Liz, folder in hand and minus coat and scarf, was already halfway to the exit. En route to Room 6/40, one flight up, she hurried into a washroom to check her appearance. The mirror returned an image of unexpected composure. Her fine, mid-brown hair fell more or less evenly about the pale oval of her face. The sage-green eyes were a little bruised by fatigue, perhaps, but the overall result would serve. Encouraged, she pressed on upwards.

The Joint Counter-Terrorist group, of which she had been a member for the best part of a year, met at 8:30 a.m. every Monday morning. The meetings’ purpose was to coordinate operations relating to terror networks and to set weekly intelligence targets. The group was run by Liz’s forty-five-year-old head of section, Charles Wetherby, and made up of MI5 investigators and agent-runners and liaison officers from MI6, GCHQ and Metropolitan Police Special Branch, with Home Office and Foreign Office attending as required. It had been created immediately after the World Trade Center atrocity, following the Prime Minister’s insistence that there must be no question of terror-related intelligence being compromised by lack of communication or turf wars of any kind. This was not a point that anyone had been in a mood to argue with. In her ten years with the Service, Liz could not remember such unflinching unanimity of purpose.

To her relief, Liz saw that although the doors to the conference room were open, no one had yet sat down. Thank you, God! She would not have to endure all those patient male glances as she took her place at the long oval hardwood table. Just inside the doors, a bullish duo from Special Branch were regaling one of Liz’s colleagues with the inside track on the Daily Mirror ’s cover story-a lurid tale involving a children’s TV presenter, rent boys, and crack-fuelled orgies at a five-star Manchester hotel. The GCHQ representative, meanwhile, had stationed himself close enough to listen, but far enough away to pre-empt any suggestion of obvious prurience, while the man from the Home Office was reading his press cuttings.

Charles Wetherby had assumed an expectant attitude by the window, his pressed suit and polished Oxfords a mute reproach to Liz’s clothes, on which the vaporous bathroom air had failed to work any significant magic. The ghost of a smile, however, touched his uneven features.

“We’re waiting for Six,” he murmured, glancing in the direction of Vauxhall Cross, half a mile upriver. “I suggest you catch your breath and adopt an attitude of saintly patience.”

Liz attempted to do so. She looked out at the rain-slicked expanse of Lambeth Bridge. It was high tide, and the river was swollen and dark.

“Anything come up over the weekend?” she asked, placing the dark blue folder on the table.

“Nothing that’s going to keep us here too long. How was your mama?”

“Annoyed that the weather isn’t colder,” said Liz. “She wants some frost to kill the vine weevils.”

“Nothing like a good frost. I hate this running-together of the seasons.” He ran large-jointed fingers through his greying hair. “Six are bringing over someone new, apparently-one of their Pakistan people.”

“Anyone we know?”

“Mackay. Bruno Mackay.”

“And what’s the whisper on Mr. Mackay?”

“He’s an old Harrovian.”

“As in the story of the woman who walks into a room where there are three former public schoolboys. The Etonian asks her if she’d like to sit down, the Wykehamist pulls up a chair, and the Harrovian…”

“… sits on it,” said Wetherby with a pale smile. “Exactly.”

Liz turned back to the river, grateful that she had a superior officer with whom she could enjoy such exchanges. On the far side of the Thames she could see the rain-darkened walls of Lambeth Palace. Did Wetherby know about Mark? Almost certainly. He knew pretty much everything else about her.

“I think we finally have a full house,” he murmured, glancing over her shoulder.

MI6 were represented by Geoffrey Fane, their coordinator of counter-terrorist operations, and by the newcomer, Bruno Mackay. Hands were shaken and Wetherby moved smartly across the room to close the doors. A summary of weekend reports from overseas security services lay beside each place.