Stella Rimington - At Risk

Arriving at a decision, she walked purposefully to the MGB, deftly slashed the wet vinyl top with her clasp knife, dipped in her hand, slipped the lock, and climbed into the driver’s seat. Next to her, in the passenger seat, was a man’s sheepskin jacket, which she laid over her sodden knees. Drawing back her booted foot, she smashed her right heel into the covering beneath the steering wheel. It was plastic, but old plastic, and half of it cracked away, revealing the white metal ignition barrel beneath.

Glancing quickly around her to make sure that she was still unobserved, she wrenched the four wires out of the bottom of the barrel, and stripped them back with the knife. Taking the red wire-the main ignition lead-she quickly touched it to the others in turn. With the third, a green wire, there was a brief lurch as the starter turned over. Isolating the green wire, she quickly connected the other two to the red one. The dashboard was now live. Depressing the clutch, she ran through the gears a couple of times before slipping the MGB back into neutral.

OK, she told herself. Here we go- Inshallah!

Carefully, avoiding the thumping electric shocks she’d suffered the first couple of times she’d tried it, outside a housing project in southeast Paris, she touched the green starter wire to the other three and depressed the accelerator an inch or two. The MGB howled, terrifyingly loud, and Jean jumped. But the weather must have dampened the noise, because no furious owner, beer glass in hand, appeared out of the pub. Instead, rainwater poured into Jean’s lap from the knife slash in the vinyl top.

With the engine turning over, she switched on the heater and windscreen-wipers, put the MGB into reverse, let off the handbrake, and backed out of the parking space. Even the gentlest manoeuvre seemed to engender an outraged snarl from the old sports car, and Jean’s heart was thumping painfully in her chest as she shifted to first gear, nosed towards the car park exit, and turned sharply southwards.

On the open road she felt no less self-conscious. This, surely, was a vehicle that local people would know and recognise. But the area seemed deserted. People were either at the pub, she guessed, or behind their locked front doors, watching TV sport or the Sunday soaps.

A mile beyond the village she came to the spot they had located on the map, where the cut they had walked along disappeared into a culvert under the road. She pulled up just beyond it, ensuring that the engine stayed running. Within moments, Faraj’s head and torso appeared, and he was hauling himself up through the sodden dead brambles. Jean leaned over to open the door and Faraj handed in the black rucksack, which she placed alongside her own in front of the passenger seat. Dripping copiously, he climbed into the seat, arranged the rucksacks beneath his knees, and pulled the door closed.

“Shabash!” murmured Faraj. “Congratulations!”

“It’s not perfect,” she admitted, as the windscreen-wipers thumped noisily back and forth, “but it was the easiest to steal.”

She pulled back on to the road. The petrol gauge read a quarter full, and her brief elation faded as she realised that they weren’t going to be able to refill the tank, which almost certainly only ran on leaded fuel. Right now, though, she couldn’t face explaining this. Her senses felt simultaneously taut-wired and dulled to a kind of slow motion. She was running on empty herself. It was too complicated.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

But why this man?” asked Liz. “Why send this particular man? He’s never been here, he’s got no family here… As far as we know he’s got no connection to Britain whatsoever.”

“I can’t answer that question,” said Mackay. “I genuinely have no idea. He certainly never came to our attention in Pakistan. If he was a player out there, it was at much too low a level to show up on our radar. But then I’m afraid that’s how things were. There was a very high noise-to-signal ratio.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that while there were any number of overexcited guys on street corners who were happy to scream and shout and burn the Stars and Stripes-especially if there was a CNN crew around-there were rather fewer who translated their resentment into direct action. If Pakistani agents were clocking every garage hand that al Safa so much as looked at, then they were doing what every agent has done since time immemorial-padding their reports to make it look like they were worth their salaries.”

“But they were right about Mansoor. Right to have him on file, at least.”

“So it turns out. But I’d guess that that’s more coincidence than inside knowledge.”

They were driving in Mackay’s BMW to the Marwell USAF base. The MI6 man had returned from Mildenhall to Swanley Heath shortly after midday, and after swapping phone numbers with Jamie Kersley, the SAS captain (who, it turned out, was also an old Harrovian), and sitting down for a ten-minute sandwich lunch with Liz and the police team, had prepared to leave for the last, and nearest, of the three USAF bases. Mackay had asked Liz if she felt like coming too, and with both terrorists positively identified but with no other positive leads it had seemed as constructive a course of action as any other. Thanks in part to the atrocious weather, the search for D’Aubigny and Mansoor had stalled, despite the arrival of teams from the regular and Territorial Army.

By 1:45, finally, the weather was showing signs of letting up. The rain had almost stopped and the hard battleship grey of the sky had softened to a paler blur.

“They’ll make a mistake,” said Mackay confidently. “They almost always do. Someone up there will spot them.”

“You think they’re still contained in the search area?”

“I think they’ve got to be. I’d back Mansoor to make it through alone, but not the two of them.”

“Don’t underestimate D’Aubigny,” said Liz, obscurely irritated. “This is not some thrill-seeking teenage bimbo, but a fully trained graduate of the North West Frontier camps. If either of the two has made mistakes so far, it’s Mansoor. He got himself jumped by Ray Gunter and ended up leaving us vital ballistic evidence, and I’ll bet you anything you like it was him who killed Elsie Hogan this morning, too.”

“Do I detect a note of empathy there? Admiration, even?”

“No, not an ounce. I think that she’s a killer too, almost certainly.”

“What tells you that?”

“I’m beginning to get a sense of who she is and how she operates. What I want is for her to start feeling twenty-four-hour pressure-the sense that she can’t afford to rest, can’t afford to stop, can’t even afford to think. I want it on top of the pressure that’s already there, the sense of being torn between two utterly opposing worlds.”

“She doesn’t seem very torn to me.”

“Outside, maybe not. Inside, believe me, she’s being pulled apart, and that’s what makes her so dangerous. The need to prove to herself, through violent action, that she’s committed to this… to this militant path.”

He permitted himself an oblique smile. “So would you rather the rest of us just withdrew, and left the two of you to get on with it?”

“Funny guy. In any campaign, the first stronghold that you have to occupy is your enemy’s consciousness.”

“That sounds like a quote.”

“It is a quote. Feliks Dzerzhinsky.”

“Founder of the KGB. A suitable mentor.”

“I like to think so.”

Mackay put his foot down to pass a green MGB. They had just passed through the village of Narborough. “I had a car a bit like that once,” he said. “An old ’74 MG Midget. Bought it for five hundred quid and restored it myself. God, but that was a beautiful car. Teal blue, tan interior, chrome bumpers…”