Secret Asset

by Stella Rimington

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “Yes, I think he is. Have you heard from him?”

  “No. I told the woman before I haven’t spoken to Tom since he went to Lahore. What has he done?”

  “Disappeared, for one thing. We can’t find him anywhere. We think he may be helping some people. People who want to do harm.”

  “What kind of harm?”

  “That’s what we don’t know—and why we need to find him. I’ve been to his flat, but there weren’t many clues.”

  “He didn’t like possessions. He called them clutter,” said Margarita with a hint of a smile. She pointed to the room around them, full of furniture and paintings and bibelots. “As you can see, we couldn’t have been more different.”

  “Was that a problem?”

  “No,” said Margarita a touch edgily. “We worked it out.” She smiled. “I was allowed certain areas for my things; others were strictly off-limits.”

  “A negotiation?” asked Liz.

  “Not really,” sighed Margarita. “More like capitulation on my part. It was usually that way. We got married here, for example, even though my parents were both alive and living in Israel. They wanted the wedding there. But Tom insisted.”

  Margarita stood up and walked over to one of the side tables, covered in framed photographs. Most of them were of her family in Israel—one showed an older man in uniform, smiling as he squinted into the sun—but tucked further back was a picture in a silver frame which she handed to Liz. “I’m afraid this is my wedding album.”

  The photograph had been taken in front of the Marylebone Register Office—which Liz recognised from newspaper photographs of celebrities. Tom and Margarita stood on the steps, arm in arm, facing the camera. What was immediately striking was the difference in their expressions: Margarita, stunning in a pale ivory silk jacket, beamed, her delight quite apparent; Tom, on the other hand, stood in a dark suit with a buttonhole carnation, staring emotionlessly at some point behind the camera. He looks like he’s just been sentenced to six months, thought Liz, handing back the photograph. “You look very happy,” she said diplomatically. “Who was best man?”

  “He didn’t have one,” said Margarita, and the words spoke for themselves. She added dryly, “Our driver that day was the only witness. He took the photograph, too.”

  “Weren’t your parents there?”

  “No. Tom made it clear he didn’t want them. Naturally my mother was very upset.”

  Margarita remained standing, and moved to the window where she stared out at the rooftops across the street. She wore a grey wool sweater which emphasised her full figure; she was tall, Liz realised, and must have caused quite a stir in the orchestra world. It’s not that she is no longer beautiful, thought Liz; it was rather that her beauty was now suffused by a haunting sadness.

  “So Tom didn’t get on with your parents?”

  “He only met them a few times, but it was all right. I’d worried, since he was an Arabist—I thought my father might think he was anti-Semitic. My father lost all his family in Poland, you know, during the War, so he was sensitive about such matters.”

  “Was he right about Tom? Is he anti-Semitic?”

  Margarita deliberated for a moment. “I have often thought about it. It’s certainly true that Tom had little time for Israel. He once told me the Balfour Declaration was the root of all modern evil. But I was sympathetic to the Palestinians myself—contrary to what you read, many Israelis are. So we did not really disagree about politics. That wasn’t the problem.”

  “What was the problem?” Liz asked boldly. This was the tricky bit, the personal probing.

  Margarita turned her head and stared at Liz, who suddenly worried she had pushed the woman too hard and too soon. But Margarita answered her question. “He never loved me,” she said without a trace of self-pity. Liz hated to think how much pain Margarita had suffered before she could speak so dispassionately.

  “At the beginning he was charming. Relaxed, funny, irreverent. But I realise now that it was never really about me. Does that make sense?”

  She looked so imploringly at Liz that she felt compelled to nod sympathetically. Liz had seen something of that mix of charm and ruthless self-absorption in Tom’s aborted overtures to her. Thank goodness I kept my distance, thought Liz.

  Margarita said, struggling for control, “I thought for a while that he did love me.” She added ruefully, “Probably because I so much wanted him to. But he didn’t.”

  She gestured at the wedding photograph on the table, and paused. Liz felt convinced that Margarita had never talked this way before, even to her most intimate friends, if she had any. She seemed too proud, too demure for self-revelation. Paradoxically, only the promptings of a stranger had unlocked the floodgates.

  Margarita shook her head regretfully. “If you want to know what went wrong with our marriage, I have to say nothing really changed. I had thought, Well he is a bit of a cold fish, but he must care or why else would he want to marry me? But then it was as if he had chosen me, then decided to unchoose me. Like returning a dress that doesn’t fit to a shop.” With a strained voice, half raw from emotion, she said, “Love never entered into it.”

  “Was there anyone he did love?”

  “His father,” she said without hesitation. “I mean his real father of course. And that was only because he never really knew him.”

  “Did Tom talk about his father?” The background music now was Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” the cello melancholic and slow.

  “Almost never. And when he did, it wasn’t about his father so much, as the people who had ruined him. That was the word Tom always used—‘ruined.’”

  “Who were these people?”

  Margarita smiled bitterly. “You may well ask. I did, but he wouldn’t answer me.”

  Liz said, “You know, at work Tom was very unemotional, very controlled. Most of us are like that—you have to be in our business. Emotion just gets in the way. But he must have felt strongly about something.”

  “You mean other than his father?” said Margarita, turning her back to Liz and staring at the photograph on the table.

  “I wasn’t thinking about what he loved so much as what he didn’t love. Did he get angry about anything?”

  “He never showed anger,” said Margarita flatly, adding wistfully, “It would have been better if he had.”

  Margarita sat down again. “He did hate school,” she said, “but doesn’t everybody?” She laughed lightly. “It seems a peculiarly English disease, this boarding-school business. And he was made to go to Oundle.”

  “Oundle?”

  “His stepfather’s old school. I know he resented that.”

  Somehow Liz doubted Tom was planning to blow up the chapel at Oundle, wherever that might be. “I wonder—” she started to say but Margarita interrupted.

  “The odd thing is that one would expect him to have loved Oxford.”

  “Didn’t he?” asked Liz.

  “Quite the contrary. I kept asking him to show me round. I’d have liked to see his old college with him, all his old haunts. But he refused. I had to go on my own.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Not really. He was like that: he decided and that was that. He didn’t ever seem to feel the need to explain. I tried teasing him: I said, ‘What if our children want to go to university there?’ This was when I still thought we would have a family.”

  “What did Tom say?”

  “He said the Empire had been built on power and hypocrisy, and that Oxford still was. I thought he was joking. Then he said he’d sooner not have children than send them to Oxford.”

  “Perhaps he was saying it for effect.”

  Margarita looked intently at Liz, and Liz sensed she wanted their conversation to end. Perhaps she regretted her candour with Liz, and soon her openness might turn to post-confessional resentment. She spoke less gently now. “Tom didn’t say things for eff
ect. He was very literal-minded—like an American. He could be very icy, even at the beginning. Towards the end he was like a freezer compartment.”

  Liz decided she had got as much as she was likely to from the interview. It was time to go. “Thank you for the coffee and the chat,” she said, standing up. “It’s been very helpful.” As she moved towards the door, she stopped for a final question. “Tell me, if you had to guess where Tom had gone, where would it be?”

  Margarita thought about this for a moment, then gave a weary shrug. “Who knows? He had no home of homes, not even in his heart. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  Had she learned anything about Tom? Liz wondered as she left the mansion block and walked towards the Tube at High Street Ken. The afternoon was turning sultry: a muggy, moist warmth hung in the air, like a stalking horse for thunderstorms.

  In Liz’s experience, the people she pursued were often fuelled by motives which seemed to an observer almost paltry, even humdrum, compared with the extreme actions they prompted. Money, sex, drugs, a cause, even religion—how could they be justification for the violence to which they drove some people?

  But with Tom she was facing something different. He seemed to be a man with no cause. A man who could not—did not—love anything or anyone. How else to explain an IRA recruit who seemed to have lost interest in Ireland? An IRA recruit enlisting British Muslims in Pakistan to commit who knows what atrocity against his own country? Tom seemed to possess a psychology that Liz had never encountered before.

  What is this all about? thought Liz. She seemed to be pursuing an ice machine. But Tom must once have felt strong emotions. Why did he accept O’Phelan’s approach? Only the most fanatical believer in fighting for a united Ireland would have done so. But did he really feel that strongly? He wasn’t Irish.

  As she brooded over everything she had learned about Tom, she kept returning to her question to Margarita. “Was there anyone he did love?” And the answer had been, “His father. I mean his real father of course.” But how could his love for his father, a disgraced hack who’d killed himself over thirty years before, be a motive now?

  Suddenly Liz thought, I am only looking at this from one end. What if instead of loving, Tom hated, really hated—could that not be the motive for whatever he was doing?

  Who had he blamed for his father’s downfall? She remembered the details from Peggy’s account. Unsurprisingly, Tom’s father had protested his innocence of the charges that he’d faked his story, those many years ago, claiming he’d been the victim of an elaborate sting. According to him, the mythical SAS man—source for his exposé—had been a plant, dangled like bait in front of his nose by…by whom?

  The British of course, some unspecified cabal of the Army and the Secret Service, with the British Consulate in New York thrown in for good measure. Tom’s father had blamed his downfall on “the British.”

  Liz stood stock-still on the pavement outside High Street Kensington Underground Station, as shoppers moved nimbly around her pensive figure. Was that the object of Tom’s animus then? The British—his own people? What had he said to Margarita—a country “built on power and hypocrisy”? And he’d been serious. Deadly serious.

  How stupid I’ve been, thought Liz. She had persisted in trying to discover Tom’s attachments—hoping that would lead her to the place he would go to when all else had failed.

  Don’t try and track him there, thought Liz—that way leads nowhere. There was only one trail to follow, she told herself. Follow the hate.

  50

  Peggy Kinsolving had enlarged a map of the Home Counties and it sat in front of them on the conference-room table. Wetherby had looked in twice already, and now he came in and sat down. He did not look as though he would be leaving. Liz could tell that he was trying to look upbeat, but she sensed his agitated concern, since she shared it.

  She was glad he was there, though, because all afternoon an idea had been brewing in her mind—far-fetched perhaps, but it wouldn’t go away. She was counting on Wetherby to decide if she were being foolish or inspired.

  Outside a long spiral of black cloud was moving in from the west, and the wind had picked up, whipping at the leaves on the plane trees along the pavement across the street. Liz thought for a moment of the garden centre at Bowerbridge. This was just the sort of weather her mother hated because of the damage it caused the young plants. Then Liz felt guilty for not ringing her the night before. Her mother’s surgery was in ten days, and Liz had tried to be in touch every day.

  She looked across the table at Dave Armstrong, back from Wolverhampton and reporting on what he’d found there. “Bashir bought this van a few days after he bought the Golf. The only problem is that there are probably 200,000 of them on the road. It’s like a vocational badge: you can’t call yourself a builder if you don’t own a white van.”

  “What about plates?” asked Liz.

  “I circulated the licence numbers right away. There are 8,000 number-plate recognition cameras in the UK, so if he’s driving with those licence plates they’ll get picked up by a camera at some point. But I’m sure he would have changed them—he did on the Golf. Quite cleverly, he kept the T-reg, because it fitted the year of the car, but he changed the number.”

  Wetherby spoke up, sounding tired. His voice was low. “They’ll probably keep the van locked up anyway until they need it. That suggests that unless they’ve got yet another car, they’re staying in a town, some place with public transport in case they need to go anywhere.”

  Liz looked at the Xs marked on the map in biro. “London,” she announced, then pointed slightly west, “then Wokingham.” She moved her hand up, west and north, and jabbed at another spot. “And most recently, up on the Downs near The Ridgeway.”

  “What’s near there?” asked Wetherby. “Wantage?”

  Liz shook her head. “I don’t think that could be the target. It’s a market town. No military installation. And Peggy’s checked for public events.”

  “Every Saturday there’s a market in the square,” said Peggy, “but not much else.”

  “Doesn’t seem likely,” said Wetherby. He pointed at the map. “What about Newbury?”

  “There’s a country fair this weekend,” said Peggy, and Wetherby smiled but shook his head.

  “Swindon?” asked Dave. “HQ of W. H. Smith and the National Trust.” This time Wetherby didn’t bother to smile.

  “How about Didcot?” asked Peggy, who had discussed all these towns with Liz before the two men arrived. She pointed a few miles east from the dumped car’s position on the map. “It’s a bigger town than I realised. Its population is 25,000 and growing fast. There are enough Asians for our suspects to blend in. And most important, it’s got the power station.”

  “Nuclear?” asked Dave.

  “No, coal fired, though people often think it is nuclear because it’s near Harwell. Those cooling towers would be quite a target.” She looked at her notes. “Its main chimney is 650 feet high, and the six towers are each 325 feet high. You can see them from miles away. It was voted Britain’s Third Worst Eyesore by the readers of Country Life.”

  “Makes me think better of the place,” scoffed Dave, who was not a Country Life reader, being strictly Old Labour.

  “Hold on,” said Charles. “If they’re down there, shouldn’t we be worrying about Aldermaston? That’s where the nuclear bombs are made.”

  “But you’d never get near a place like that,” said Dave. “It must be as well protected as anywhere in Britain. And how would they know what to attack without inside information? There’s no reason to think Tom has any.”

  “We’d better get on to Protective Security,” said Wetherby without enthusiasm. “What do you think, Liz?” He seemed to sense her scepticism.

  “I can see them staying in Didcot—it’s such an anonymous place, really just a train junction that’s grown. Much better for them than the countryside. As Asians, they’d stick out too much.

  “But I
can’t really see Didcot power station or Aldermaston as the target. Why would Tom think it important to blow up a power station or a nuclear-bomb factory? There’s no symbolic value in it. And anyway, you’d need a much bigger operation than he seems to have.”

  “That’s all very well,” said Wetherby, “but would symbolism matter to the terrorists? They’d be after maximum impact, surely.”

  “But symbolism would be important to Tom, I’m sure. If he’s doing this lunatic thing, there’s got to be some reason.”

  “You’re confident then that Tom is leading these men and not just helping them?”

  “Yes,” said Liz firmly, thinking of what she’d learned about him in the last two days. “Tom likes to control things, even if it’s behind the scenes. Everything Margarita Levy said confirms that. This is a mission of some sort, and he’s leading it. In his mind there’s a reason for it.”

  “Do you think he’s working with Al Qaeda?” Dave asked.

  “No. I think he recruited Bashir on his own account in Pakistan. He had plenty of unsupervised access to him—he was meant to be recruiting him for Six.”

  Wetherby tapped the end of his pencil on the table. “All right, if not Didcot or Aldermaston, then where?” There was a hint of impatience in his voice. “We’ve got to take some decisions. Which targets are we going to cover? I have a feeling that we haven’t got much time,” he added. “They’re panicking—look at the car. Burning it suggests to me that they are on the verge of doing whatever they’re planning to do.”

  He stared at Liz as if somehow she might hold the answer, and seemed grateful when she spoke up.

  “I think it’s Oxford,” she said.

  “Oxford? Why Oxford? Do you have any particular reason?”

  “No single overpowering one,” she admitted. “But it began with something Margarita said. He hated Oxford, she said, really loathed the place.”

  “Well, if it’s Oxford, what’s the target?” asked Wetherby. “His college? Or a person or some event?”