Henry Porter: Empire State

She flipped through the list once more, making notes and adding to a chart she’d begun on a large sheet of drawing paper bought from a shop in Victoria that afternoon. A series of names plus lines and arrows and several brief sentences were written in her neat hand. She knew the diagram didn’t add up to much, but she found it a useful way of working through a problem, putting a thought down, discarding it and moving on. On her desk were two packets of sandwiches, a piece of fruit cake wrapped in cellophane, a bottle of water, a banana and a bar of chocolate – not a feast considering the quantities of food she put away during periods of concentration. She ate one of the sandwiches distractedly and turned to the papers propped against her computer screen and on the floor around her feet. These were printouts of web pages showing the landing and take-off times for planes that passed through Terminal Three the day before – a timetable that varied considerably from the published schedules, she noted.

She didn’t expect to prove anything conclusively; it would be enough to show that Rahe’s disappearance was important, though he clearly had no role in the shooting of Norquist. She now knew for certain that he had not got off KU102 in Kuwait. Half an hour before, a clear head-shot had arrived of the man travelling on Rahe’s passport, taken in Kuwait City airport before the individual flew on to the United Arab Emirates. By this time he had disposed of Rahe’s clothes and adopted the local white jellabah. However, the Kuwaiti Intelligence service, al-Mukhabarat, were certain it was the stand-in.

She emailed the picture to Heathrow security and asked them to go through CCTV film to see if he’d come from London or arrived on another flight. Her belief was that he’d flown into Heathrow that morning, which was why she was trying to match possible suspects’ names with passengers who had ended up in Terminal Three, a forlorn task if ever there was one. Still, she liked the solitary purpose of working late and was buoyed by the idea that while the rest of the Secret Intelligence Service was absorbed by muffled agony over the killing of Norquist, she was at least making some positive steps to unravel the events at the airport.

As she talked on the phone to a security officer named George, she looked out of the window and into the streams of traffic moving along the north bank of the Thames. Her focus drew nearer, to her reflection in the window, which she examined without reproof or anxiety. She looked good for thirty-two, although the lights made her appear haggard and – God – she had to get some new clothes!

George still had nothing for her. She put the phone down and went back to the watch list, thinking that Manila was the perfect place for the stand-in to embark. Just then she noticed a movement behind the glass panel in the office wall and saw Richard Spelling, deputy head of MI6, and his side-kick, Harry Cecil.

Before she had time to compose herself or her desk, Spelling was inside the door. ‘Mr Cecil here says you’ve got something good.’

‘That would be a bit premature of Mr Cecil,’ she said, smiling at Cecil without affection.

‘Well, you must have something if you’ve been asking favours of our friends in Kuwait City.’

‘I was checking on the man who took Rahe’s place on the Kuwait flight. As you know, I told Thames House yesterday afternoon, but I think they’re rather tied up at the moment and nobody has got back to me about it. So I thought I’d do some ground work.’ This was weak. She knew she was going way beyond her role of walk-on part in the surveillance of Rahe.

Spelling sat down on the other side of her desk and indicated to Cecil that he was dismissed. ‘I’ll say the Security Services are tied up!’ he said.

Herrick cautioned herself not to say too much. She nodded.

‘It doesn’t get much worse than the President’s special envoy being killed before his meeting with the Prime Minister. I mean, how bad does that make us look?’ He gave her a despairing look and then exhaled heavily, which caused his lips to vibrate. She didn’t like Spelling, his punchy name-dropping manner or the managerial style that someone had described as exultant decisiveness. Around the building it was said that his intelligence was sharp rather than deep and that he had none of the incorruptibility, shrewdness or ease of the outgoing Chief, Sir Robin Teckman. Spelling had won the appointment as a moderniser. There was much talk of horizontal management structures and the flow of ideas between different levels, but the evidence pointed to the opposite leaning. He was a hierarchical bureaucrat pretending to be a general.

‘What do you make of it?’ he asked. ‘The shooting, I mean.’

‘Well, I’ve been pretty busy today. I haven’t had time to catch up with the people I was working with yesterday.’

‘Yes, yes, but you have a view. You must wonder.’

‘Yes, I wonder why Admiral Norquist was on a scheduled flight and there was no security prepared and ready to meet him. It all seems a bit slapdash.’

‘And further down the time line…?’

Time line was a typical Spelling phrase. ‘You mean later on – when the shooting occurred?’ She put it as neutrally as possible. ‘It looks pretty confused.’ ‘Yes, it was certainly that.’

She remained silent. It was still his call.

‘And you don’t have any theories about where that bullet came from?’

‘Nothing apart from what I’ve read. I imagine they’ll know if they retrieved it from his body.’

‘Oh, I don’t think that will happen.’

‘So there was an exit wound. I didn’t notice that mentioned in the papers. They said it was lodged in his spine.’

‘They tend not to publish too much of that sort of thing – it’s distressing for the family.’

‘I see,’ she said, understanding that there would be no official revision of the story. Norquist had been ‘assassinated’ in an operation involving a pair of young men, traced by the registration of one of the vans to the Pakistani communities in the Midlands, and the truck driver, who was also believed to be of Asian origin. With the two men dead and the driver still missing after an escape through the undergrowth along the railway embankment, the British media happily accepted the theory of a carefully coordinated plan. The enthusiasm for this account had not been dampened by the fact that no detonator had been found attached to the drums of petrol on the lorry.

His eyes scanned her desk. He reached forward and turned one of the Terminal Three schedules towards him. ‘Now, tell me what you’re doing here, Isis.’

‘I’m trying to see what Rahe’s likely destination was yesterday. ’

‘Any ID on the man who took his place?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Could you write a side of theory backed up by a few facts? The Chief’s very interested in what happened out at Heathrow.’

She hesitated.‘You want a report on this? It’s all very preliminary…’

‘By tomorrow then. If you need help, Sarre and Dolph are around. Tell them this is for me and the Chief.’ He made for the door, but before he reached it, stopped. ‘And in your report, leave out all mention of the shooting. Just focus on the contemporaneous events at Heathrow. That’s what interests us.’

Herrick went back to the airline schedules. Out of seventy-two flights to land between 5.55 a.m. and 1.45 p.m., fifty-one had come from the United States or Canada, which she excluded for the moment because of the heightened airport security and emigration watches in North America. The remaining twenty-one flights came from places such as Abu Dhabi, Dhaka, Johannesburg, Beirut and Tehran, cities where controls were far less stringent. She guessed that most of the aircraft were wide-bodied jets, carrying an average of two hundred passengers, which meant that around four thousand people had landed at Heathrow that morning. It would be an enormous task to search all the flights for a man matching the picture, and to establish what had happened to Rahe.