Liz wanted to keep him away from talk of danger. She needed to engage his curiosity instead of his fear. Make him think, Liz thought, get him interested. “Tell me,” she said, “what do you think happened to the person Keaney recruited?”
“What you mean is, do I think they’re still there?” said Maguire almost contemptuously.
“Among other things, I suppose,” Liz said with a diffidence she didn’t feel. Don’t let him take over the interview, she told herself. “Assuming Keaney’s story is true.”
“Why does it matter?” asked Maguire irritably. “There couldn’t have been any damage done, could there? If there really was a mole in place, it’s pretty hard to see what good it did Keaney and his pals.”
He stopped when he noticed that Liz was shaking her head. He looked at her, curiosity subduing contempt, and Liz said sharply, “You’re missing the point.” There was no reason to try to appease this man, she decided. “Keaney probably never expected his plant to help the IRA directly—after all, he couldn’t be sure they’d ever do work on Northern Ireland, could he?
“It was subtler than that. Keaney probably found an entry-level person. Someone flagged as a high-flier, with the potential to rise within the organisation. An Oxford graduate, presumably, who might in the course of time be able to do a lot of damage. I don’t suppose the aim was to help the IRA directly; the objective was to screw up the Brits in some way or another.”
Maguire looked intrigued by this, but equally clearly wasn’t going to say so. Instead he argued, “I can’t believe Ireland is top of the agenda these days. The war is over. So what does it matter. I’d have thought it was imams you were after, not Irish.”
Liz shrugged. “That’s the worry of course. That it all gets ignored in a post-9/11 age. Then it starts up again. It’s done that often enough before.”
“You think this mole might be active? Even today?” Maguire sounded interested now despite himself.
It was Liz’s turn to shrug. “There’s no reason to think a person like that would want a cease-fire, is there?”
The waiter brought Liz’s coffee over, and as they waited for him to go, Maguire seemed to check himself. “I don’t believe it,” he declared. The look he gave Liz was unfriendly. “And, in any case, it’s your problem. I’ve passed on Keaney’s message as he asked. And that’s it, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t care what you do with it.”
Liz said quietly, “I was hoping you might be able to help,” then concentrated on stirring her coffee, which was hot despite the layer of rich cream at the top of the cup.
“What could I possibly do?” demanded Maguire indignantly. “Even if I wanted to.”
“Help us find out who Keaney recruited.”
“What makes you think I can do that?”
“Maybe you can’t,” Liz admitted. “But you’re better placed than we are to find out. You say Keaney said the mole was recruited at Oxford. There must have been some link between Keaney and the University, but it’s not exactly an obvious one to us.”
“Keaney hated my guts.”
“Yes, but you knew him. We couldn’t get close. At least you can try.”
“Why don’t you use another of your touts?” he added caustically, “I’m sure you’ve got plenty to choose from. Use someone Keaney trusted.”
“We couldn’t do that without telling the person about the mole. Too big a risk. You must see that.”
Maguire ignored her. Suddenly he demanded, “What’s in it for me?”
She didn’t even bother to reply. He had never asked for money, and she didn’t think he wanted to be paid now. It was just a way of deflecting her request.
Maguire went on. “What would I be helping, can you tell me that? The situation’s changed completely. Whoever this person was, there’s nothing they could do to hurt you—or help the IRA. The world’s moved on. The war’s over. So why do you need me? Other than to help you close the file?”
Liz took a deep breath. Instinct told her that her only chance of winning Maguire’s support was to level with him.
“You know as well as I do, Mr. Maguire,” she said, “the war’s not over. It’s just reached a different stage. I don’t need to give you a lecture on the history of the IRA. Or on the nature of treachery,” she added. She saw Maguire flinch. “Everyone has their reasons, and treachery is nearly always also loyalty. But what matters is the nature of the cause we’re loyal to. That’s why we need to find this person. Their cause, whatever it is now, is not ours. Nor yours either, Mr. Maguire. This is unfinished business. And I’m not talking about the file.”
Again the shrug, superficially uninterested, but this time Liz could see Maguire was thinking. Finally he spoke, and for the first time there was pathos instead of anger in his voice. “But don’t you see, I’m finished business? I just want to be left alone.”
And before Liz could reply, he stood up. Without saying a word, he threw some euros on the table and walked away. Liz took another sip of her coffee; it was cooler now. She looked with near despair at the money Maguire had left on the table. And to think she had believed she was getting somewhere.
9
Dennis Rudge was sitting at the wheel of a taxi parked at a rank in the middle of Capel Street. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a copy of the Sun propped on the dashboard. His radio, tuned to Magic FM, was quietly playing soft pop, with occasional voice interruptions, which sounded to passersby like traffic updates. From where he sat he had a clear view of the bookshop and of Doris’s shop front across the road. He was in eye contact with Maureen Hayes and Lebert Johnson, sitting at a table outside the Red Lion pub further down the street. Lebert, who had a glass of something brown in front of him, was doing the Daily Mail crossword. Maureen was drinking mineral water, knitting and listening through headphones apparently to her iPod. In the other direction Alpha 4 and Alpha 5 were sitting in a dirty Peugeot 307, bickering noisily whenever anyone came past. Further members of A4 were parked up strategically in side roads, and a couple more cars were circling around the area.
In Doris Feldman’s sitting room, above her ironmonger’s shop, sat Wally Woods, comfortably ensconced in Doris’s armchair, with Esther the ancient cat sharing his knee with a powerful pair of binoculars.
Doris’s telephone call to the police five days before at three in the morning had turned out to be a blessing in disguise. As always with A2’s surreptitious entries, Special Branch had been told in advance about the operation. Hearing from uniform of Doris’s 999 call, they had promptly rung in to discuss the options with A2 control. The priority was clearly to reassure the caller, and one option was simply to explain that the “burglary” she’d seen was entirely innocent: the fuses had blown and the owner had sent in friends to replace them—something like that. The Special Branch men were adept at making up plausible stories. But if in the normal course of a day she mentioned the events of the weekend to the bookshop owner, it would be disastrous.
So they had decided to take a risk with the old woman, and at half-past three on Saturday morning, the officer from Special Branch sat in Doris Feldman’s sitting room drinking tea and explaining, in the vaguest possible terms, that there were strange happenings going on across the street, which he and his colleagues were trying to find out about. A mention of 9/11 here, a reference to Islamic fundamentalism there, and Doris had readily agreed not to say a word. More important, she happily allowed the use of the flat, which was ideally situated as a static surveillance point. That was how Wally Woods came to be sitting in her armchair, with his colleague at her dining-room table manning the communications. He sat like a spider at the centre of her web, liaising with the people on the street, and with a perfect view of the bookshop.
Coordinating the whole operation was Reggie Purvis in Thames House. He and a couple of colleagues were controlling the A4 teams and all the communications from the Operations Room, at the same time ignoring Dave Armstrong, who sat waiting impatiently beside them. Behind him, Tom Dartmou
th paced back and forth, and from time to time, Wetherby came into the room to check progress.
In Doris’s flat, Wally Woods sat on, patiently waiting. Just before three o’clock a minicab pulled up in front of the bookshop. The driver, a young Middle Eastern man, got out on the street side and walked around to open the passenger door. After a moment, a much older man got out of the car. He was dressed in a white smock and wore on his head a white cap, with lines of gold thread. As he walked slowly towards the bookshop, the young man ran ahead and held the door open for him.
“Fox One has arrived and is now inside,” said Wally and the man at the table immediately spoke into the microphone. “All teams alert,” said Reggie Purvis in Thames House. “Fox One is in. Repeat Fox One is in.”
Nothing obvious changed in the immediate vicinity of the shop, though Dennis Rudge drained his coffee and Maureen put away her knitting. A4 were ready for whatever might happen, which only added to the tension since there was nothing to do but wait.
In Thames House, Judith Spratt arrived in the Operations Room. A tall woman, she had fine features and always looked effortlessly elegant whatever the circumstances.
“There’s been a phone call,” she announced to Dave and Tom Dartmouth. “To the bookshop. It didn’t last very long.”
“Who was it?” Tom Dartmouth demanded.
“Hard to say. The owner of the bookshop answered, and the caller asked if Rashid was there. He asked in English.”
“Who the hell is Rashid?” asked Dave.
Judith shrugged, as if to say “you tell me.” “The owner said there was no one by that name in the shop. Then the caller hung up.”
Tom asked, “Do we know who made the call? Anything come up on the eavesdropping?”
“Nothing from the mikes. No sound of Fox One at all. Just casual chat and cups of coffee from others in there. But the trace just came through. It’s an Amsterdam number. I’ll get on to it now. Give me ten minutes.” She picked up the phone.
In the AIVD office in Amsterdam, Pieter Abbink was reaching for the phone when it rang. Picking it up quickly, he said tersely, “Abbink.”
“Pieter, it’s Judith Spratt. From London.”
Abbink laughed out loud. “I had my hand on the telephone to call you when it rang.”
“Why was that?”
“We have a surveillance on a house here in Amsterdam. Not so good people. We’ve had a lot of chatter lately coming out of there. Internet, and some telephone. Somebody in the house just called a London number, and I was about to dial and ask if you could find out where it was.”
“It’s an Islamic bookshop in North London. And also a meeting place for some people we’d like to locate. They were meant to show up today, but they’re late.”
“Do you know who they are?”
“No, and that’s the problem. They’ve been sighted once by one of ours, but we don’t have any names. Though your caller asked for Rashid.”
Abbink chuckled. “That is a very big help—it’s like asking for Jan here in Holland.”
“I know. But it looks like there is some connection with Holland.”
“We’ll check the database, don’t worry. But why don’t I send you the photo bank?”
“You read my mind, Pieter. That’s why I was calling you.”
By three-thirty, Wally Woods had told Thames House three times that the men hadn’t shown, and by four o’clock, Reggie Purvis was focused on keeping his teams alert. He sent Maureen and Lebert Johnson off in Dennis Rudge’s taxi and directed the arguing couple to drive round the neighbourhood, keeping close by. When at last the Imam left the bookshop, his departure was greeted with relief by the A4 teams as they slotted in neatly behind him.
But the departure of the Imam meant the three young men were not going to show. Purvis kept his people deployed nonetheless, waiting forlornly until six o’clock when the staff went home and the shop closed. Wally Woods left his armchair to his colleague—a substitute would take over at eight that night—and went back to Thames House. The only lead lay with the Imam. Please God, thought Dave, still in the Operations Room, let him take us to them.
One hour later Charles Wetherby, having joined Tom Dartmouth and Dave Armstrong in the Operations Room, was dismayed (but not entirely surprised) to learn that Abu Sayed had been driven straight to Heathrow Airport, where he had checked in for a flight to Frankfurt on the first leg of his journey to Lahore.
To his seeming indifference, Abu Sayed had been upgraded to club class. At security no apparent attention was paid to his carry-on bag, and he positively sailed through passport control.
His one piece of checked luggage, an ancient but sturdy Samsonite case, received greater scrutiny. Deftly plucked from the conveyor belt in the outgoing luggage shed, it was inspected with a fine-tooth comb by no less than two veteran customs officers and an attending officer from Special Branch, looking for anything that might indicate the identity and whereabouts of the three young men who had failed to show up at the bookshop that afternoon.
They found nothing. Indeed, the only evidence at all that the Imam had even been in England lay in a neat stack at the very bottom of his suitcase. Whatever else Mahmood Abu Sayed had got up to during his stay, he had managed to find time to buy six new pairs of boxer shorts from the Marble Arch branch of Marks Spencer.
10
The city of dreaming spires looked wide awake to Liz. The sky was a rich enamel blue, and the temperature was moving into an almost summery seventy degrees as she and a half-breathless Peggy Kinsolving mounted the wooden staircase of the Sheldonian. It was hard to believe graduation ceremonies took place in the small area of this strange old building. Built by Christopher Wren, according to Peggy, when he was only thirty-one years old.
Arriving at the top, Liz and Peggy stood in a painted wooden cupola and looked out at a very different view of Oxford from the dense, almost claustrophobic world seen at ground level. Here church spires and college towers jutted like projectiles to form a jagged historical skyline.
Looking down, Liz watched the groups of tourists thronging the pavements of Broad Street—or the Broad as Peggy called it. Cars were parked in a neat line in the wide belly of the street, and a few others moved gingerly along, more in hope than expectation of a space, eventually coming full circle since the street was blocked at the far end by heavy bollards.
She looked across at Blackwell’s bookshop, where she and Peggy had browsed for a few minutes. It was nice to have this brief interlude, thought Liz. They had driven down together in Liz’s car, after she had collected Peggy from the flat she shared with two old college friends on the less salubrious side of Kilburn. Going against the London-bound traffic they made good time, then fought their way through a maddening one-way system and parked in a vast open car park on the western side of Oxford city centre. They walked up past the old prison, now finding new life as a luxury hotel, and into a shopping street indistinguishable in its frontage of chain stores from any other in England. But then they turned into a dark, narrow street of Dickensian houses, complete with overhanging shadows and protruding beams. A further turn and they were at Pembroke College, their first stop.
It was a seventeenth-century foundation with medieval bits, according to Peggy, who had swotted up diligently the day before. More obscure than its namesake in Cambridge, it nonetheless numbered among its distinguished alumni the writer Thomas Browne, Samuel Johnson, and more recently Michael Heseltine.
They were directed by a porter through an old quad, with a small square of tended lawn. On the far wall, window boxes were filled with early geraniums. They walked on into another quad and there against the wall of the older part of the College sat a small statue of a woman, hands folded in prayer or lament. Not a good omen, thought Liz, thinking of the impending interview. She was not conventionally religious, and wondered a little nervously what role theology was going to play in the conversation.
Chaplain Hickson turned out to be an enormous man, with a vast
beer belly and a thick curly beard, more Friar Tuck than the ascetic theologian Liz had expected. A Northerner, he was jolly and startlingly impious, greeting Liz and Peggy effusively before offering them coffee or—“since the sun is over the yardarm in France”—a glass of sherry.
Both Liz and Peggy opted for coffee, and perching on a pair of uncomfortable chairs, held stained mugs of Nescafé while the chaplain hunted high and low for some biscuits. Only when he found them, after several minutes’ searching, did their interview begin. He sat down with a happy thump on the sofa, putting a plateful of chocolate digestives within easy reach. By this time Liz had formed the distinct impression that for Chaplain Hickson, material sustenance was more important than prayer.
Liz began by explaining their visit was strictly a formality, to update the original vetting. She had worried, back in London, whether a man of the cloth would be willing to speak freely about a former student’s personal life, particularly as it was the morally dubious aspects of that life she most needed to know about. But the chaplain was happy to talk about the young Patrick Dobson.
“He took things very seriously and he worked extremely hard. Nothing wrong with that,” he added with a rolling laugh that suggested there was. “But it did distance him a bit from some of the others. There was something almost middle-aged about the boy.”
“Nothing wild about him then?” said Liz with a faint smile.
“Certainly not. On every count, he was a model citizen.” He grabbed a biscuit from the plate. “He joined the Young Conservatives, ate all his suppers in Hall, and avoided temptation. There were no women in his life—not, I should add, because of disinclination on his part. It’s just that he was hardly irresistible to the fairer sex. Funny how that seems to happen, isn’t it?”
“How did you come to know him so well?” Liz asked, a little taken aback by this very personal portrait.
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