Stella Rimington - Illegal Action

As the taxi emerged from the top of Kensington Church Street and turned right, Maureen gave it five seconds, then sidled out into the traffic and took up a position two cars behind. Various other anonymous vehicles pulled out from their parking places and slotted into the traffic. Rykov, sitting in the back of the taxi, was reading a newspaper, giving no sign at all that he was alert to possible surveillance.

He must just be going home to the Trade Delegation in Highgate, mused Liz to herself, as the taxi proceeded up Albany Street, through Camden Town and Kentish Town to the bottom of Highgate West Hill.

“Bravo team alert,” called Reggie Purvis over the microphone, “Chelsea 1 is coming your way.”

Nothing obvious changed on Hampstead Heath, but a scruffy young man sitting beside the boating pond shifted position imperceptibly and higher up the hill, from a small plantation of trees, a couple strolled out towards the open ground.

At the foot of Highgate West Hill, where the buses turn round, Rykov’s taxi stopped and he emerged and walked slowly on to the heath and up the hill towards the bench, under close scrutiny from the A4 team. At almost the same time, a tall, powerfully built young man in a windcheater emerged from the trees and started walking down the hill.

“Chelsea 2 is here and about to make contact,” came over the loudspeaker in the Ops Room.

“Tell them to stick with him and leave Rykov alone,” said Liz to Reggie Purvis.

The instruction was radioed out. “Roger that,” came back from the heath.

For fifteen minutes there was silence in the Ops Room, then the radio crackled. “Targets are moving. We’re taking on Chelsea 2.”

And for the next ten minutes radio messages went back and forth as the unknown man repeated his movements of two weeks before, leaving the heath on the south side. Again he waited at the bus stop, until a C2 bus appeared. As he got on and walked towards the stairs leading to the upper deck, he passed A4’s Dennis Rudge, already on the bus, sitting downstairs by the window at the front. The bus itself was followed patiently by Maureen and her A4 colleagues in their nondescript cars, as it worked its way south, down into London’s West End.

When Chelsea 2 got off the bus outside Liberty on Regent Street, along with half a dozen other passengers, Dennis Rudge stayed on board, watching as the young man crossed Regent Street and cut down a side street, followed by three A4 colleagues who had emerged from nearby cars. By the time the procession entered Berkeley Square, Maureen in the BMW was parked at yet another meter, and she had a clear view as their target walked to the southern end of the square, entered a large office block and disappeared.

“Can they find out which floor he goes to?” asked Liz, by now warming to the chase.

Purvis relayed the request. “I’ll have a go,” said Maureen.

Liz and Reggie waited tensely, sitting silently, for almost five minutes until Maureen’s voice came through the speaker on the table.

“Fifth or sixth,” she declared. “Multiple occupants and a security guard on the desk.”

“Okay. Leave it now,” said Liz. “We’ll sort it from there. Please say thanks to everyone.”

“Stand down all teams. Well done,” said Purvis.

“Roger. Out,” came back from the heath and Berkeley Square.

By the standards of his earlier career, it was not an exotic view. On Geoffrey Fane’s first posting abroad, in Syria twenty years ago, his office had overlooked the souk, noisy with its milling crowds, quiet only at prayers. Later, in New Delhi, he had watched labourers arrive on bicycles, wearing flip-flops and shorts as they went to work in the liquid heat, erecting a flamboyant new Middle Eastern embassy building across the road.

Here in Vauxhall Cross, high in the office block that sat like a postmodernist Buddha on the south bank, there was nothing so dramatic. Just the heavy, comforting presence of the Thames as it swept from Vauxhall down to the Houses of Parliament. He liked to think its colour reflected the changing seasons—or was it just his mood? Today at low tide the water was steely grey, the colour of old flint.

There was a tap at the door and his secretary stuck her head in. “Liz Carlyle is downstairs. Shall I go and collect her?”

“Please,” he said. He checked the knot of his tie and brushed his jacket lapel automatically. He cared about his appearance; his ex-wife, Adele, had accused him of vanity, but that had been just before they separated, when she’d accused him of a lot of things. It was Adele who had insisted on his buying only Hermès ties. It was she who wanted people to think he was important, and she who had taken all too literally his offhand remark, made over a second Armagnac in a Burgundy restaurant many years before and subsequently much regretted, that if all went well one day she might be Lady Fane.

Adele had never accepted that in his line of work any success had to be private—fame for someone like Fane was an infallible indicator of failure. His reward came from knowing his work was important, rather than from public recognition.

When he’d left his meeting with Pennington at the Foreign Office, he had considered carefully who to approach at MI5. If he stuck to Service etiquette, Brian Ackers should be his first port of call, but the problem there was simple: Ackers instinctively distrusted MI6, considering its officers louche individuals who at best were soft on Communism, at worst were secret sympathisers to the Islamist cause. This meant he would view Fane’s approach with distrust and reject any suggestion about how to proceed in what Fane already thought of as the “Adler Plot.” And though Fane didn’t think he could entirely control the investigation, he was damn well going to keep a strong, guiding hand on it. The last thing he wanted was MI5 running amok, pursuing Brian Ackers’ anachronistic obsessions and creating the kind of diplomatic “incident” Henry Pennington was so scared of.

If only Charles Wetherby were the director in Counter-Espionage rather than Counter-Terrorism: they had worked together well enough in the past. But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since Wetherby’s wife was reportedly terminally ill and he was on extended leave.

It was then he had thought of Elizabeth Carlyle, Wetherby’s talented junior, and remembered that she had been moved to Counter-Espionage after the mole affair. She had poached that young researcher, Peggy Something or Other, whom he had lent to them, but he could only muster a superficial resentment at this, since he knew that in her shoes he would have done the same.

Theirs was not an altogether happy history—there had been an episode in Norfolk Fane would sooner forget—but he determined now to enlist her in sorting out the truth of Victor Adler’s story. Whatever small resentment she might still be nursing, he was sure she could get over it. Elizabeth Carlyle had impressed him in the past with her professionalism. She was intelligent, without needing to demonstrate it, and decisive when it mattered. What’s more, she seemed tactful and discreet. Right now those were the qualities he needed most.

The door opened again and she came in, a woman in her mid-thirties, with light brown hair in a neat bob and a slim figure, which made her look taller than she was. There was a calm watchfulness about her, but her grey-green eyes were striking and alert. As always, Fane found her attractive, the more so because she didn’t make a show of it. She was dressed simply, in a blue skirt and pearl satin blouse. How unlike Adele, he thought, remembering his ex-wife’s weekly trips to that extremely expensive hairdresser in Knightsbridge, and its showy results. As well as her countless shopping expeditions to Harvey Nichols.