Secret Asset

by Stella Rimington

It felt strange returning to Belfast after ten years. Thank God I no longer have to check whether the car is being followed, or worry whether someone has put a bomb under it, she thought. Both had been standard concerns when she was last here, in the era when security was precarious.

  She thought back to her first posting, several months on the Northern Ireland desk. Based in Thames House she had spent three short stints in Belfast. She remembered how nervous she’d been on her first visit with expectations of violence, fostered by the television images of armoured cars and rioting mobs she had grown up with. But she had missed the worst of the Troubles. In her time there in the mid-nineties, Northern Ireland was on the cusp of peace. There was an occasional sectarian killing, but overall the fragile cease-fire held.

  Not that there weren’t plenty of other opportunities for conflict, mused Liz, though of a non-violent sort, between the Northern Ireland office, the intelligence-gathering factions of MI5, Army Intelligence, and the then Royal Ulster Constabulary and its Special Branch. She’d had a rapid education in the politics of intelligence-gathering in Northern Ireland. I had to grow up fast, she thought now, remembering how when she’d been given a low-level informant to run, she’d discovered an RUC Special Branch officer trying to pinch him. I soon sorted him out, thought Liz with satisfaction.

  Driving north on Stranmillis Road, past the lush Botanic Gardens, Liz parked on a quiet, tree-lined side street off University Road. The neighbourhood of the University was an oasis of calm respected by both sides of the sectarian divide. She walked diagonally across the lawn of a quadrangle, ringed by Victorian High Gothic buildings, looking enviously at the students sprawled on the grass with their books, soaking up the sun, an oddly summer-like scene for May. She felt a pang at the sight. So familiar and so carefree.

  With a few false starts, she eventually found the Institute of Irish Studies, one of a row of grey Victorian houses. Liam O’Phelan had his office on the second floor.

  He had been almost prissily precise about the time he would see her (11:45 a.m.) but when she found his room and knocked on the door there was no reply. Then a voice called out from along the corridor, “Just coming.”

  From the file Peggy had given her, Liz knew that O’Phelan was forty-two, but his thinning hair and worry lines made him look older. He wore a pale green tweed jacket and flannel trousers. She’d seen many versions of that jacket on middle-aged men who frequented her mother’s garden centre, but this one was beautifully cut, and didn’t look as if it had been within a mile of a potting shed.

  “Dr. O’Phelan.”

  “That’s right,” he said extending a dry soft hand. He looked at her with sharp blue-green eyes. “And you must be Miss Falcon. My favourite bird of prey.”

  “Falconer, actually,” she said.

  “Better still,” he said as he opened the door.

  The lavish, almost voluptuous decoration of the room took her aback. It was not what she expected in this otherwise drab house. At one end there was a false fireplace of white marble, and covering the wooden floor, oriental rugs in reds and blues. The walls were studded with paintings, prints and drawings, and she recognised portraits of Yeats and Joyce.

  O’Phelan motioned Liz to one of two old stuffed armchairs in the middle of the room. “Please sit down,” he said formally, “and I’ll make some coffee.”

  While he did, Liz got her papers out and looked at the notes she’d drafted the night before. She never stuck rigidly to any order of questioning, preferring to let an interview develop naturally, but she wanted to make sure she got answers to all her questions.

  O’Phelan brought a tray with two china cups and saucers, and placed them on the small table between them. Sitting down, he languidly crossed one leg over a knee, and sipped the hot coffee, while Liz discreetly examined him. He had straight sandy-coloured hair, slightly crooked teeth and a thin straight nose. Like a younger Peter O’Toole, she reflected.

  “You’re here to talk to me about one of my old students, I gather.” His accent was cultivated, with none of the harsh burr of an Ulsterman.

  “That’s right. Michael Binding.”

  “And you’re from the Ministry of Defence.” He was watching her carefully.

  “Yes. You wrote a reference for him when he first applied to the MOD. You do remember him?”

  “Very well,” announced O’Phelan. He raised his forefinger, as if to make an announcement. “I was his thesis supervisor but not for very long. He switched supervisors when I left Oxford to come here.”

  “Is that normal practice?”

  “What? For me to come here?” He laughed lightly at his deliberate misunderstanding. “Actually, it depends. In his case I think he probably wanted to change. Certainly I did.”

  “You didn’t get on?”

  O’Phelan shrugged. “Not particularly, but that was neither here nor there. I didn’t agree with his whole approach.”

  “To his thesis?” O’Phelan nodded, and she asked curiously, “What was it about?”

  “Charles Stewart Parnell.”

  “Anything in particular about Parnell?”

  He seemed surprised by her interest. “His political speeches. How they reflected the politics of the age, and vice versa. Usual stuff. It was only an MLitt.”

  “But you say you didn’t like the line he took.”

  “No, I thought it entirely wrong. Of course, I’m of the school of historians which Conor Cruise O’Brien once called ‘highbrow Fenian.’ Parnell to me is first and foremost an Irish nationalist.”

  He seemed to be savouring his words, as if mentally punctuating the sentences as he spoke. He continued, “Binding saw him only in the context of British parliamentary democracy. He seemed to believe that if Parnell had been lucky enough to be English, he would have done great things—on the other side of the Irish Sea.”

  “Whereas you think Parnell was great as he was?”

  Liz waited for his reply.

  “Absolutely,” he said, and for the first time there was enthusiasm in his voice. “But the fundamental problem I had with Binding wasn’t that we held different views. I mean, if I taught only people who agreed with me I wouldn’t be a very busy man. No, it was rather—how shall I put this politely?—the simple fact that he wasn’t very good.”

  He elaborated on this for a few minutes, explaining in soft tones that Binding had been poor at research, neither thought nor wrote clearly, and, in short, had possessed none of the basic intellectual skills one expected of a postgraduate student at Oxford University.

  It was a masterpiece of denigration, couched in tones of such apparent regret that it took Liz a moment to see it for the poisonous demolition job it was. Even O’Phelan found the front of ostensible charity impossible to sustain, and he concluded witheringly: “I was astonished to learn that his thesis had been accepted.”

  “I see,” said Liz neutrally. She picked up her pencil from the table. “I also wanted to ask you about his private life.”

  “Ask away, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to help you. I didn’t know him particularly well. I was at St. Antony’s and he was at another college—Oriel, I think. One of the smaller ones at any rate.”

  “Do you know if he had many friends?”

  O’Phelan shook his head. “No I don’t.”

  “Or girlfriends?”

  He paused and smiled slightly. “He had girlfriends—more than one.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. They used to wait for him sometimes when he came to see me. It happened several times, and there were at least two different girls. I remember thinking, ‘Such devotion.’”

  Liz smiled politely. “Did he belong to clubs or play a sport?”

  O’Phelan opened his hands to express mild bewilderment. “That’s not something I would know, I’m afraid.”

  “What about politics? Was he interested?”

  O’Phelan looked thoughtful. “He was, as a matter of fact. More than most of my pupils at any rate. He loved
to argue the toss—he liked to quote the Daily Telegraph at me, as if that were an impartial source.”

  “So he was a Conservative?”

  “Yes. But then so in many ways I am too. It was on the subject of Ireland we disagreed. He’d bring in some Anglo-Protestant rubbish and quote it to me, probably just to annoy me. It usually did.”

  After a few more questions, Liz made a show of checking her list, but O’Phelan had told her what she wanted to know about Binding.

  I wonder, she thought, and, reaching down into her briefcase, she extracted another sheet of paper from a folder. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to read you a list of names—they are people who were at Oxford at about the same time as Binding. I’m just wondering if you knew any of them.”

  And she slowly started to read out the names of the others on her list of suspects, while out of the corner of her eye she watched O’Phelan’s reaction. But he sat still, his face impassive and his hands in his lap.

  Then suddenly, when she was almost through, he leapt up. “Excuse me a minute,” he said. “I think there’s someone at the door.” He went and opened it and stuck his head out. “Ryan, I shan’t be long now.”

  He returned, saying, “I beg your pardon,” and sat down again.

  Liz read out the last name on the list: “Steven Ogasawara.”

  O’Phelan shook his head. He smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid none of them means a thing to me.” He raised his forefinger again, this time as if to correct himself. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t know them once. As any teacher will tell you, students come and students go—one simply can’t remember all their names.”

  “That seems entirely understandable,” said Liz. “Well, thank you very much for your time.”

  “Not at all,” said O’Phelan and he stood up when Liz did and walked with her to the door. “Let me know if I can be of any further help,” he said, then opening the door peered out. “Young Ryan seems to have disappeared.”

  13

  It was his turn to close up the shop, and since it was Thursday it was not until seven-thirty that he turned off the lights, took a last tour of the three rooms on the ground floor in case anyone was so immersed in a book that he would lock them in, then firmly shut the front door and turned the key in the double set of Chubb locks.

  It had been exactly a week since the Imam had come to the shop. Then Sohail had deliberately stayed in the stockroom, counting inventory, lest his own tense nerves be obvious. To Sohail’s surprise, Abu Sayed had not gone upstairs, but stayed in the office off the main room for almost an hour. No one joined him, and when Abu Sayed did emerge he had walked straight out of the shop into a waiting car.

  What had gone wrong? Why had the three young men not shown up? Sohail racked his brain to see if he could have got it wrong. But no, he was certain there had been an appointment set up between the Imam and the young men. Yet the uncertainty of why it hadn’t happened gnawed at him like an unappeasable hunger, and he felt he had badly let down both Jane and Simon and their unnamed secret service, which he was certain was MI5.

  Was it possible, and he felt his adrenaline stir at the thought, that the people watching—he knew they must have been there—had been detected? He himself had looked for any sign of external surveillance, on his way to and from work; at lunchtime too, he would look around as he walked to eat his sandwich in the park. There was nothing that he could see, hard as he looked.

  So what reason would the Imam have to suspect something was amiss? Or the bookshop owner for that matter, who had behaved as he always did with Sohail—slightly aloof, but scrupulously polite? In fact, it was Sohail’s colleague Aswan who had been the object of the owner’s attention most recently—when Aswan had asked if he should now retrieve the video from upstairs, the owner had responded tetchily, saying he should listen more and ask fewer questions.

  Yet could it be, and now he began to feel even more jittery, that somehow it was suspected that Sohail was not what he pretended to be? A young man, quiet, devout, serious, working hard to help his family. He tried to be rational: this portrait was not a front; this was what Sohail was, and there was no reason for anyone to think he was anything else at all.

  He waited for the bus for almost fifteen minutes, then had to stand for half the journey home. Usually, he could find a seat and read. He was in the middle of English Torts: A Casebook, for if he had good reason to postpone university for a year, he thought he might as well not let all the time go to waste. He liked the precision and arid tautness of the prose. The book was almost theoretical in its abstraction, but unlike the Islamic literature he was surrounded by during the day, English law seemed incapable of perversion in the hands of fanatics.

  He wondered what it would be like to lead a normal life again. Not to have to worry about what he said, or the expression on his face. To study again, in an environment where different opinions could be expressed in argument rather than violence. It was the approval of violence he found most disturbing in the people around him at work; the casual acceptance of, even applause for, the loss of life, as though lives were not real, as though human beings were just symbols.

  Not that England was free of violence. The BNP had almost won a council seat in the area where he lived with his parents. He himself had twice been chased by white youths, shouting racist abuse, and once he had been shaken down for money by two drunks not more than a hundred yards from his home. But at least with such people, they clearly broke the law; they could hardly claim the law was somehow on their side.

  He got off the bus early, as he usually did, so he could walk a bit before he reached home. There his mother would have held supper for him on this, the late night of the week, and his little sister would be bathed and ready for bed.

  The dark was drawing in, and he quickened his pace as he walked along the main road of his neighbourhood, then turned into a side street. At its end there was a long alleyway, which ran between a warehouse on one side and the back of a row of shops on the other. It was poorly lit, and a little spooky—his little sister would not walk through it even in broad daylight—but it knocked five minutes off the way home and he turned down it without hesitation. As he hurried along, he thought momentarily that he heard someone behind him, but turning around saw nothing except the long shadow of the warehouse cast by the distant street light. Don’t be so nervous, he told himself, then thought again of how he had let Jane and Simon down. And possibly—he knew it sounded pompous, but it was true—the country as well.

  And it was with these feelings of disappointment that he looked up to see a figure approaching. He was instantly wary, until he saw the person was as dark as he was, and then he relaxed. And as the man came closer Sohail thought there seemed something familiar about him. The man was smiling broadly—even in the dusk Sohail could see his teeth—and he called out, “Sohail!”

  Reflexively Sohail began to smile back, assured this was a friend after all. And sure enough the short man’s face was familiar. I know, thought Sohail, it’s the little chap who didn’t turn up at the bookshop the second time. But what is he doing here?

  14

  This is more like it, thought Liz, as she booked into the Culloden Hotel. With its acres of gardens, spa, pool and rosetted restaurant it was a cut above her normal overnight accommodation, but she had got an excellent deal on the Internet and, unusually for her, she had decided to indulge herself.

  Though I won’t get to enjoy any of it, she thought, as she went upstairs and ordered a room-service sandwich, kicked off her shoes, and opened her laptop. As it booted, she called her voicemail at Thames House but there were no messages.

  Liz wondered if Marzipan had made any progress in identifying the photos that had come from Holland, then she forced herself to stop speculating—it’s not your business now, she told herself firmly, turning her mind instead to writing up her interview with O’Phelan.

  There was something not quite right about that man. What was it? He had given a polished perf
ormance, but it was just that—a performance. But why? Was it simply that he resented anything and anyone to do with the security forces? Behind the jokey front and slightly camp demeanour, she could detect there was something else going on—she could sense it. He was clocking the effect he was making. All the time giving out only what he wanted her to know.

  Yes, the interview had been a performance. Liz could tell that he was a man of very strong convictions. She recalled the intensity of his voice when he talked about Parnell. On impressionable students, surely he must be a powerful influence. Though not, it seemed clear, on her colleague Michael Binding.

  Liz had arranged to have dinner with Jimmy Fergus, an old RUC Special Branch acquaintance, and an expert in the Loyalist paramilitary groups. She had called him from London, to let him know she was coming onto his turf, and the meal had been his idea.

  Waiting for him in the lobby, she glanced at a copy of the local evening paper and saw that a prominent Republican had come forward claiming to have been an agent of the security forces. I wonder what’s behind that, thought Liz. Ten years earlier no one would have dared to make such a claim publicly for fear of being found dead on the border with a bag over his head.

  She saw Fergus across the lobby. He was a big man, with a pock-marked face and a confident grin that Liz had always found infectious. In his private life Fergus was a bit of a lad, what was known in Belfast as a “chaser”—he had been married so many times that, when asked about his current marital status, he liked to say he was “between divorces.” There had never been anything between him and Liz, and never would be, though Fergus always liked to make a ritualistic pass.

  He came from Protestant farming stock in Antrim (“Honest bigots to a man” he’d once declared). As she had got to know him a decade before, she discovered that much of his bluster was a defence—part of a hard man’s carapace erected around a sharp intelligence. He was also discreet, which meant that within obvious limits, she could level with him tonight, pick his brain and, if it seemed useful, ask for his help.