“You’ve come up in the world,” he teased as he ambled towards her, indicating the hotel’s ornate lobby, a mix of marble columns, panelled walls and chandeliers. “I thought of giving you dinner at your hotel,” he said, “but when I heard which one it was, I decided we’d go somewhere with a little more local colour.”
They drove in his old blue Rover to a fashionably revamped pub, with large open rooms, wooden floors, and a brick fireplace. The noise of music and raucous voices hit them as they went in. No chance to talk here, thought Liz. From the welcome Fergus received it was obviously one of his regular hangouts. “Have faith,” said Fergus, as they were shown through the bar to a quiet table in an alcove at the back.
Over drinks, they spent time catching up. It had been four years since they’d seen each other, during a trip Fergus had made to London. Liz had been working on organised crime then, though shortly afterwards she’d been transferred to the counter-terrorism branch.
Fergus raised an eyebrow. “It’s ironic that just as life has calmed down here, it’s heated up for you.”
“So,” said Liz, “if you’re not chasing the UVF these days, what are you working on?”
“Who says I’m not chasing the UVF?” he said with a grin. “Same people, different crimes. Murdering Catholics out, extortion, prostitution and gambling in. Standard stuff really.”
As the waiter brought their food, Fergus asked what she was doing in Northern Ireland. Liz gave him her cover story about the new vetting procedures. “I’ve been sent to interview someone who gave a reference for one of my colleagues fifteen years ago,” she said, hoping her tone suggested a bureaucratic interference she could have done without.
Fergus grinned. “I’m glad we’re not the only ones with intrusive bosses,” he said. “Who did you see?”
“A lecturer at Queen’s. We used him as a referee for one of his pupils. He taught History at Oxford for a while, then came here about ten years ago to teach Irish Studies. He had strong views. If Ireland had only stuck with Parnell, the country would be unified today.”
Fergus gave a hollow laugh as he cut into his sirloin. “He probably thinks Gerry Adams has sold out. He sounds what my father used to call an ‘armchair Fenian.’ What’s his name?”
Liz leaned forward before she spoke. “Liam O’Phelan.”
“I’ve heard of him,” he said, musing. “Didn’t he originally come from Dublin?”
“I don’t know much about him,” Liz admitted. “But I don’t think he was being straight with me.”
“About his ex-pupil?”
“No, that rang true. A few other things didn’t though.” She didn’t want to go into too much detail about the interview.
Fergus speared a chip and stared at it for a moment as he answered. “I could check and see if we have a file on him. We may well do. At one point during the height of the violence we were very concerned about Queen’s.”
“Would you mind? I’d appreciate it.”
“Sure,” said Fergus easily, “but use me while you can. I won’t be doing this forever.”
Was Fergus going to retire? It seemed inconceivable. Liz said so, sitting back in her chair, looking at him with affectionate scepticism.
“I’m older than you think,” said Fergus. “I’ll have done twenty-five years this autumn.”
“What would you do next?” asked Liz. She couldn’t envisage him back in Antrim, bringing in the wheat crop.
Fergus shrugged, a little dolefully, and Liz wished she hadn’t asked. He’d already explained, regretfully, that he was single again, and she knew it was a sadness that he had never had children.
Wanting to change the subject, Liz remarked, “I saw in the paper that another former agent has gone public.”
“I’m sure there will be more,” said Fergus seriously. “It’s hard now for some of those people who worked as secret assets, sources, agents, whatever you like to call them, during the Troubles—for us, you lot, and particularly for the Army. As politics brings old enemies together, they’ve got difficult decisions to make. Partly, they’re afraid they’ll get blown anyway as more and more information comes out through enquiries, freedom of information, or whatever. They won’t probably, but they’re not sure of that. For some of them, I think, there’s a sort of crisis of conscience. They have a need for understanding what they did and why—after all, they don’t see themselves as traitors. They’ll be feeling they made a contribution to peace in their own way and they’d like some recognition for it. Going public is a dangerous route—but some will go on taking it, even though the peace process won’t protect them.”
“They weren’t all so high-minded,” said Liz. “Some of them worked for us for much more selfish reasons—like money. I don’t suppose anyone will ever hear from them.”
“No, you’re right. They’ll just take their grievance somewhere else.”
“Anyway,” said Liz, “it’s not as though the intelligence war is over, is it? Infiltration must be easier now, for the paramilitaries. How many Catholics are there in Special Branch?”
“More than before,” said Fergus, adding cynically, “not that that’s saying much. The new recruiting guidelines call for fifty-fifty overall in the Northern Ireland Police Force. You can imagine how popular that is with some of my colleagues. But infiltration was a worry even when there were no Catholics in the Force at all; it’s just that it came from the Loyalists.
“Look, like most of Special Branch, I’m a policeman first and a Protestant second. But once in a while someone gets his priorities reversed. Of course there’ve been leaks to the Loyalist paramilitaries. When it happens it does a lot of damage. But the greatest damage is the distrust it creates. The damage to the reputation of the Force, if you want to put it that way. You’re lucky not to have that problem.”
“How do you know we don’t?” said Liz. “We certainly did once. Remember Philby and Anthony Blunt?”
But Fergus had said his say and was busy signalling to the waiter.
After dinner, Fergus drove Liz back to the Culloden. They sat in the bar on a sofa of plush red velvet while Fergus drank a large brandy and explained what had happened to wife number three. After a while, Liz called for the bill, explaining she had an early flight back in the morning.
“I don’t suppose you want help packing,” said Fergus, as they walked back out into the lobby.
Liz laughed. “You never give up.” Then shaking hands she kissed his cheek and said goodnight, adding, “You won’t forget about O’Phelan, will you?”
She gave a great yawn as she walked to the lift, but by the time she reached her room her eyes were sharp and alert.
Two hours later Liz was still wide awake, sitting at the desk in her room. A glass of mineral water from the minibar sat next to her, untouched, as she looked, deep in thought, at the notes she had been writing.
What she had written were speculations rather than facts, but they were troubling ones, set off by Fergus’s offhand mention of infiltration in the Northern Ireland Special Branch. “You’re lucky not to have that problem,” he’d said.
But what about the mole? She wondered, not for the first time, what the IRA had expected of an infiltrator. Suppose they were posted to Counter-Terrorism, possibly even to the Northern Ireland desk. What exactly were they going to do?
What could they do, working alone inside MI5? Well, for one thing, they could alert the IRA to the identity of informers in its midst. That’s what Philby and Blake had done in the Cold War. They could tip them off if one of their operations was blown, and warn them of impending arrests, and even more, they could reassure them when one of their operations wasn’t blown.
Yet she could imagine something even more damaging. An infiltrator in the right place might be able to feed targeting information that would help the IRA mount a damaging attack. Even if they were not working on the Northern Irish terrorist target and not able directly to help their masters, they could make up false intelligence that could waste
valuable resources and harm the Service’s credibility. Think of the Iraq dossier and the damage that did to the reputation of the whole of British Intelligence.
Yet wasn’t it all academic? In Sean Keaney’s time frame, there hadn’t been any IRA terrorist activities for the mole to assist. And MI5 hadn’t lost any informers. Its reputation had not been damaged. So did that mean the mole had simply retired from business, having never been activated? Perhaps he had just quietly left the Service.
She tried imagining the situation from the mole’s point of view. There he was, all primed and ready to go, when the message came from his masters: we don’t need you anymore. Or, perhaps worse, no message came at all.
What would that have felt like? How frustrating would that have been? Did our friend the mole cheerfully accept the order, and spend the next decade loyally doing his best in MI5? Was he just one of us, no different from everyone else?
It didn’t seem likely.
Liz swallowed a mouthful of tepid mineral water. Time for bed, she thought. As she brushed her teeth, she thought how nothing in the last ten years indicated the mole had done anything—for the IRA. But what if the mole had done something else?
Arranging the over-stuffed pillows, she undressed and got into bed. Could the mole have been placed in MI6? She didn’t think so. Surely the original idea had to have been to place him in MI5, where he could subvert the Service’s work against the IRA. The fact remained that the original recruitment of the mole had an Irish lynchpin—Sean Keaney’s idea to put a mole in place. But as it turned out, the idea had lost its value, like currency taken out of circulation.
She lay back and thought again, uneasily, of O’Phelan. What was it that bothered her about the interview? It wasn’t just a feeling that he hadn’t told her the truth. There was something else.
Why hadn’t she focused on it before? It was obvious: she’d known it all along. When O’Phelan had got up, gone over to the door and spoken to Ryan, the so-called student waiting in the hallway, no other voice had spoken. Because, of course, there wasn’t anyone there.
O’Phelan had got up to create a diversion. To disguise his reaction to something she’d said. What had they been discussing that made him do that? They hadn’t been discussing anything, she realised—she had been reciting the names on her list. Patrick Dobson, Judith Spratt, Tom Dartmouth, etc. That was clearly what bothered O’Phelan, enough for him to try and distract her.
O’Phelan knew one of the names.
She closed her eyes but her mind went on churning all the images of the day. But she was too tired to focus on any of them. She would start again in the morning.
And only then did she remember. She had forgotten to ring her mother.
15
At 9:18 the next morning, as Liz finished her coffee in the dining room of the Culloden Hotel and got ready to check out and drive to the airport, the watcher in Doris Feldman’s flat rang Dave Armstrong. He was at his desk in Thames House, writing up his report on his abortive trip north.
“Marzipan hasn’t shown up,” the watcher said.
“Perhaps he’s running late,” said Dave, annoyed to be interrupted in mid-sentence—writing reports was for him the worst part of his job.
“He’s never been late before. We thought you’d want to know.”
“Okay,” said Dave, suddenly attentive, for he realised that what they said was right. Sohail was always punctual. “Ring me in ten minutes and let me know if he’s shown.”
By ten o’clock they had rung three more times. There was still no sign of Marzipan. Very worried now, Dave decided to ring Sohail’s mobile—something he would normally have been reluctant to do, in case he was with someone else. He was trying to combat the knot in his stomach, hoping this was all a false alarm.
It wasn’t. The number rang and a man said, “Hello?”
An Englishman, Dave noted, with an Estuary accent. Dave asked quietly, “Is Sohail there?”
“This is the Metropolitan Police. Please identify yourself.”
Landing at Heathrow, Liz bought a copy of the Evening Standard before getting on the Underground. It was forty-five minutes into central London, but she had a seat, something unknown in her morning commute to work.
She had been thinking on and off about O’Phelan. Lying to her, if that’s what he had done, didn’t mean he was necessarily an IRA recruiter, and she couldn’t believe it was Michael Binding he would have wanted to recruit. His contempt for his former pupil had been the one part of her interview she had found absolutely authentic.
Yet what if O’Phelan held truly extremist radical views, semi-disguised in respectable intellectual garb? He was slightly larger than life. He could be assertive to the point of overbearing. Take a nineteen-year-old undergraduate with an undivulged grudge and an itch to be a revolutionary. Combining him with O’Phelan could be potentially explosive.
She picked up her copy of the Standard and looked through the news pages. She felt as if she had been away for much more than twenty-four hours, but the stories seemed wearyingly familiar: protests from retailers about the effects of the congestion charge, delays in the construction of the new Wembley Stadium, an MP arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol in an insalubrious part of South London. Then on page five she saw an item that riveted her:
TOTTENHAM RACE KILLING
A man discovered dead in a Tottenham alley this morning was the victim of a brutal attack. The body, said to be that of a young Asian man, was discovered by a passerby early this morning in an alley off Cresswell Crescent, in an area where racial tension has been high. The British National Party (BNP) has been particularly active in the local community. Police said the victim, in his early twenties, was wearing a blue anorak, jeans, and hiking boots. His name has been withheld until relatives have been informed.
According to Omar Singh, a local Labour Party councillor, “This killing has all the hallmarks of a racial murder. Assaults against young Asian men have become commonplace in the last two years, and this seems to be the culmination of an increasing trend of racist violence.” The BNP refused to comment.
“You all right, love?” Liz looked up to find an elderly man from across the aisle looking at her with concern. She realised she must have been staring at the same page, glassy-eyed, for several minutes.
When she had last seen Sohail Din, in the safe house at Devonshire Place, he had been wearing a blue anorak, jeans, and a pair of hiking boots.
16
Wetherby was sitting at his desk gazing out of the window at the sun sparkling on the Thames, but his face showed no pleasure in the view. The restless tap-tapping of his pencil on a pile of paper was the only sign of his anger and frustration. He was waiting for Tom Dartmouth, whom he had summoned to his office. Wetherby was a man who managed his staff by consultation and advice rather than by diktat, but when things went wrong he took responsibility. It was then that he gave orders without discussion.
And things had gone very wrong indeed. The death of an agent was the worst nightmare for any intelligence service. Agents were recruited by persuasion, cajolery and sometimes by the promise of payment. Some agents, and Marzipan was one, offered their services out of loyalty to the country. In return they were promised protection. That was the deal. For the Service to break its side of the bargain, particularly with a young man like Marzipan, was a professional failure of the worst possible kind.
“Do we know when it happened?” Wetherby asked immediately when Dartmouth came in.
“Apparently it was sometime last night,” Dartmouth replied, sitting down cautiously.
“I see,” said Wetherby, standing up, and walking to the window. The spring sunshine had given way to a sudden heavy shower. River and sky merged, obliterating the barge in mid-river.
He turned back to Dartmouth, who was looking tired and ruffled, all of his usual spruceness gone. “So how did it happen?” asked Wetherby.
“At first glance, it looks like a racist attack,” said Dar
tmouth levelly.
“Combat 18?”
“Conceivably. We’ve got no intelligence at all and nor have the police.” He hesitated. “Could be a lunatic member of the BNP—they’re strong in that area. They almost won a seat in the last local council elections.”
“But?” asked Wetherby, noting Dartmouth’s pause.
“Well,” said Dartmouth with a hint of dryness, “slitting someone’s throat is an uncommon method of murder in this country.”
“So?”
Dartmouth paused. “I think we have to assume that this murder is tied to our investigation.”
“I want maximum effort put on this, Tom. We’ve got to find out what’s happened.” Tom nodded. “And keep me closely in touch,” said Wetherby. He paused, then asked, “Has anyone spoken to Liz Carlyle?”
“I gather she’s expected in just after lunch.”
Wetherby looked at Dartmouth. He was a clever man, that was obvious, and not just because of his first-class degree. He had come back from Pakistan by his own choice—who could blame him, after four tough post-9/11 years? Geoffrey Fane of MI6 had said his performance there had been outstanding. But he was also hard to read. Wetherby had yet to see him show any feelings.
Wetherby said, “Someone has to tell her Marzipan is dead. It should be me, but I’m due to see the Home Secretary in half an hour. I need to explain the background to Marzipan’s death. Where’s Dave Armstrong?”
Dartmouth gave a small sigh. “He’s gone with the police to talk to Marzipan’s parents.” He waited for a minute, then said quietly, “I’ll tell Liz, Charles. After all, it’s my operation.”
Wetherby nodded. He looked again out the window, seemingly lost in thought. Then the moment of contemplation passed and he turned to Dartmouth. “I suppose you’ll have to,” he said conclusively.
Secret Asset Page 8
