Stella Rimington: Secret Asset

“What about Six?” asked Liz. “What’s Geoffrey Fane saying?”

“I talked to him. He expressed suitable outrage about Tom’s treachery. Though there was just a faint suggestion that we’d been a little careless, seconding a traitor to MI6. But on the other hand if Tom made contact with the bomber in Pakistan, that’s when he was under their control. I intimated that perhaps they need to look at their own supervision.”

Liz nodded, remembering Fane’s initial disbelief when she had named Tom as the mole.

“Is Peggy going straight back to Vauxhall Cross?” she asked.

“Not yet. I’ve asked Fane to let her stay on for a bit to help with the damage assessment.”

“I need to speak to you about her, actually. She’s making noises about trying to stay here. It seems she likes MI5.”

Wetherby raised his eyebrows. “That will really help things with Fane.” He paused and glanced tensely at his watch, then relaxed. He had time to talk, and Liz sensed he wanted to. “About halfway through the meeting I began to have the oddest feeling. As if something were missing. You know that sensation when you’ve left your watch at home or forgotten your wallet? You don’t know what you’ve lost; you just know something should be there that isn’t.” Wetherby looked at Liz. Then, all vagueness gone, his expression hardened. “And then I realised it wasn’t any thing that was missing. It was a person.”

“Tom.”

“Exactly,” he said, his eyes now focused on her.

It was true, Liz realised. Around the table minutes before had sat Michael Binding, looking dour, with a couple of his men from A2; Patrick Dobson, flushed and uncomfortable; Reggie Purvis and his deputy from A4; Judith Spratt, still looking shaky but at least present; Liz, Dave, Charles… all the usual attendees. Except one.

Wetherby said, “He hadn’t been back very long, but he did feel very much like one of us.”

“That’s why he was so hard to catch. He fitted in perfectly.”

“That was part of the plan,” said Wetherby, propping his hand on his chin and looking thoughtful. “And yet,” he said sadly, “part of me still thinks that some of his act was actually sincere. He was good at his job; I think he genuinely enjoyed it. But as it turns out, it was a different job he was doing. He was never with us right from the beginning. But his hatred, it seems to me, was for the Service, not for its officers. Somehow I find it hard to take that personally. Don’t you?”

Liz thought of the weekend Tom had “dropped by” her mother’s house. She hadn’t told Wetherby about Tom’s overtures, but then, had she been right about them? Could she have imagined more than there was to his invitation? It was only supper, after all. Was some personal vanity she wasn’t aware of skewing her judgement? But then she remembered the hotel receipt, and Tom’s lies about his friends on a farm. No, she wasn’t imagining things. He had been trying to use her for his own twisted reasons.

“No, Charles,” she said, “I do take it personally. He was never loyal to the Service or to any of us. He was using us as a means to an end. He was loyal only to his own warped sense of mission to destroy everything we work for. In the wilderness of mirrors he was the wrong way round.”

“Of course you’re right,” conceded Charles with an easy smile. “It’s meaningless to make a distinction between the Service and its officers. What was it E. M. Forster said? ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ I’ve always felt our duty was precisely the opposite.”

“Me too,” said Liz simply.

They sat in silence for a moment. Wetherby asked quietly, “How’s your mother?”

He is a nice man, thought Liz. Here he is, with—let’s face it—his career in the balance after such a near disaster, and he manages to remember my mother. “Okay, I think,” she said gratefully. “She’s had the operation and it seems to have gone well.”

“Good,” said Wetherby encouragingly.

“Yes, they think they’ve got it all,” said Liz. And for some reason she thought of Tom and the damage he had caused. “At least it seems that way,” she said, adding carefully, “though you can never be sure.”

Stella Rimington joined Britain’s Security Service (MI5) in 1969. During her nearly thirty-year career she worked in all the main fields of the Service’s responsibilities—counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism—and successively became Director of all three branches. Appointed Director General of MI5 in 1992, she was the first woman to hold the post and the first Director General whose name was publicly announced on appointment. Following her retirement from MI5 in 1996, she became a nonexecutive director of Marks Spencer and published her autobiography, Open Secret, in the United Kingdom.

At Risk

Open Secret

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2006 by Stella Rimington

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.aaknopf.com

Originally published in Great Britain by Hutchinson, an imprint of the Random House Group Limited, London, in 2006.

This edition published by arrangement with Hutchinson, the Random House Group Limited.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rimington, Stella.

Secret asset / Stella Rimington.

p. cm.

1. Terrorism—Prevention—Fiction. 2. Intelligence officers—Fiction. 3. Great Britain—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6118.I44S43 2007

823'.92—dc22

2006048798

eISBN: 978-0-307-26703-0

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