Secret Asset

by Stella Rimington

  Moving quickly, she looked out. Immediately below her was the low roofline of a modern annexe of the College which adjoined the shop.

  An easy way out, Liz thought. And then she saw him.

  Leaning against the slanted line of tiles, holding on to the frame of a wooden skylight cut into the roof.

  It was Tom.

  He was trying to open the skylight, and Liz realised that if he succeeded, he would jump down and disappear into the building. Yes, Matheson’s men might find him, but since Liz imagined warren-like interiors with hundreds of places to hide, she wouldn’t want to bet on it.

  She had her mobile phone in her bag—she could call and make sure the building was surrounded by police. But by the time she got through—and to whom? Dave was downstairs, Charles at St. Aldates checking on the surviving terrorist—Tom might have escaped.

  “Tom!” she shouted, leaning out of the window. Her voice rang out, echoing in the tiny courtyard below.

  He paused, but only momentarily. He didn’t look back, but deciding to give up on the skylight, began to edge his way along the roof.

  He was headed towards the line of older buildings. There he could move at greater speed along the gabled roofs stretching to the gardens at the back of the College. Then he’d be off.

  “Tom!” she called again. “There’s no point. You might as well come back. They’re waiting for you on the ground.”

  This time he did react. He hauled himself up onto the roof ridge. Crouching there, he looked almost boyish, like an undergraduate, climbing in after the gates were locked at night. Slowly he turned around, and his eyes swept across until they reached the window where Liz stood.

  There was nothing playful in his steady stare. His eyes were steely, and his face looked filled with determination.

  “Tom,” Liz said again, mildly this time, trying to keep her voice under control. But before she could say anything else, he shook his head emphatically. And then, swinging nimbly down the far side of the slanted roof, he disappeared out of view.

  Liz stood stunned for a fraction of a moment, waiting for Tom to reappear. Then realising he wasn’t going to, she acted at once, running towards the staircase. She was halfway down when she ran into Dave Armstrong, coming up. “Quick,” she said, grabbing his arm and turning him round. “He’s on the roof next door. Hurry!”

  As they ran out of the shop onto the Broad, blinking in the bright sunlight, they could see Matheson standing next to an ambulance, talking to two uniformed policemen.

  “He’s next door,” Dave shouted out to him, and he and Liz kept running fast towards the entrance to Trinity. The small gate by the lodge was open. The porter came out, trying to stop them.

  “Police!” Dave shouted. “Get out of the way!” Liz veered around the man and, ducking under the branches of an enormous cedar tree, headed right across the quad. The lawn and paths were empty and she wondered if the College had been evacuated with the rest of the street. That would make it easier for Tom to escape, she thought, as her eyes scanned the line of gables for any sign of him.

  Dave yelled, “I’ll take the far end.” Liz continued towards the courtyard under Blackwell’s window. Coming through its archway, she slowed down, her neck craned skyward, examining the roof where she had last seen Tom. The skylight looked undisturbed—he had not come back this way.

  She heard a footstep behind her and started. “It’s all right,” a voice said, and she turned around to find Matheson with a young policeman. “I’ve got men searching the College,” he said.

  “We’ll need them on the rooftop too,” said Liz, pointing upwards. She suddenly stopped, listening intently. “What’s that noise?”

  “What noise?”

  Then she heard it again. Through a second archway, leading back into the recesses of the College on this side. It was a low wailing sound, as if someone were in distress. Its painful keening was almost animal.

  She moved quickly through the archway and found herself in a long, outside gallery, bounded on three sides by College buildings. At the open far end Liz could see the flowering shrubs of a large garden. There was no one in sight. So what had she heard?

  And then to her left she saw a girl—she looked barely out of her teens. She was standing by the entrance to a stairwell, crying uncontrollably. Behind her, almost in the corner, there was a man on the ground, lying flat on his back, motionless.

  Liz walked quickly over to the girl. “It’s all right,” she said gently, as Matheson went over and knelt down by the man.

  The girl stopped crying and looked up at Liz, with a face that was young and fearful. From the far end of the gallery, Liz heard a shout and looking up, saw Dave running towards them.

  “What happened?” Dave demanded, looking first at the girl, and then at the body in the corner. Matheson was holding the prone man’s wrist, checking for a pulse. He stood up, looked at Liz and shook his head.

  “He must have fallen,” said Liz quietly. And she raised her eyes to indicate the roof above them.

  “Unless he jumped,” said Dave.

  Stifling her sobs, the girl spoke for the first time. “No,” she said, wiping her eyes. “He didn’t jump.”

  “Did you see it?” asked Liz.

  The girl nodded her head. “I was asleep,” she explained. “I woke up and realised I was late for my tutorial. When I came out I saw”—she hesitated—“this man walking across the roof. I thought that’s odd because he seemed too old to be up there.” She gave a nervous laugh, and Liz put her arm around her—the last thing they needed now was hysterics.

  “Then suddenly he seemed to slip and started sliding down the roof. He tried to grab on to the tiles, but he couldn’t. He just kept sliding until…he fell off.” And she began to cry again.

  Liz looked past her at the figure lying on the ground. Letting go of the girl she went and stood next to Matheson, then looked down at the man. She’d known it was Tom from the moment she’d seen the body.

  In many ways he looked as he always did, smart and handsome in his blue suit, looking as if in a minute he would bounce up and be his old self again. Which self is that? thought Liz bitterly. The man she’d thought she’d begun to know? The big man, tall and rangy, confident but easygoing, soft-spoken but knowledgeable, charming—at least when he wanted to be.

  Or the different, secret self of someone she’d never really known at all? A man possessed by internal demons she had never remotely imagined.

  Torn between tears of sadness and tears of rage, Liz shut her eyes and shed neither. Turning sharply on her heels, she walked back towards the crying girl. She could comfort her. There was nothing she could do for Tom.

  61

  In contrast to the morning, the drive back to London seemed to take forever. As they left Oxford, low scudding banks of cloud moved in from the south, dispelling the sun and turning the sky a dull hazy grey. Rain began to fall, first in fierce short-lived downbursts, then in a steady monotonous drizzle. The M40 soon clogged up in an unending line of slow-moving lorries and cautious cars.

  Numbed by what had happened, not quite certain whether to be pleased that they had prevented an atrocity or dismayed that they had almost allowed it to happen, Liz and Charles barely spoke to each other at first. Then as if by mutual consent, they talked almost compulsively about anything and everything. Except the events of the day. Favourite holidays, favourite restaurants, favourite parts of the country, even The Da Vinci Code, which neither she nor Wetherby had read. Personal talk, but not intimate: Wetherby’s wife Joanne wasn’t mentioned, and Liz didn’t say who had accompanied her on any of those favourite holidays. It was an almost manic defence against the sheer unbelievability of what they had just witnessed. And a defence, too, against the questions, the accountability certain to come.

  Yet both being realists, the avoidance strategy couldn’t last. As they swept down into the large bowl at High Wycombe, Wetherby sighed, cutting short his account of a particularly happy holiday spent sailing a
round The Needles. “How did you know Tom would be there?” he asked.

  “I can’t say I knew,” said Liz. “It was just a hunch.”

  Wetherby gave a small snort. “I have to say your hunches are better than most of the rational analysis I receive.”

  It was a compliment, but Liz couldn’t help feeling that luck had played as large a role as prescience. And what if Tom hadn’t slipped? She felt in her bones that he would have got away.

  Wetherby seemed to read her thoughts. “Where do you think Tom was going to go?”

  Liz gazed at a golf course carved out of the side of a hill, and thought about this. Presumably Tom would have left the country, and gone on the run abroad. But where? It was not as if Tom had had some cause or place to defect to—he wouldn’t have gone unnoticed for forty-eight hours in Northern Ireland and, in any case, the IRA wouldn’t want him anywhere near their newly peaceful selves.

  “Tom spoke fluent Arabic,” she said at last, “so conceivably he would have tried to slip into one of the Middle Eastern countries, and carve out some sort of new career for himself with a new identity.”

  “He’d have run the risk of being spotted. It’s a small world—Westerners in the Arab world.”

  “Perhaps he’d have gone to New York,” said Liz. “You know, following his father’s footsteps. I think there was certainly more he wanted to do.”

  “More of the same?” asked Wetherby mildly.

  “Who knows? But revenge on some other institution, I think. The newspaper who fired his father. MI6, I would imagine. Then he’d probably have had another go at us.”

  “He’d have had to keep moving, whatever new identity he tried to assume.”

  “That’s true,” said Liz. “But maybe that would have suited him.”

  They were nearing the junction with the M25, and the road signs listed Heathrow, which somehow seemed appropriate for this talk of Tom’s plans. “But why did he run in the first place?” she asked rhetorically. “I mean, if he had stayed put, what exactly would have happened to him? Or more precisely, what would we have been able to pin on him? O’Phelan’s death wasn’t solved—no witness, no fingerprints, no trace of Tom in Belfast. The same with Marzipan. The forensic investigation found absolutely nothing to point towards his killer.”

  Wetherby smiled wistfully. “I see your reasoning, but I think you are missing the point. Tom fled because Tom wanted us to know.”

  “But why? What difference would that make?”

  “To Tom,” said Wetherby patiently, “all the difference in the world. For Tom, the point was to humiliate us. He wanted us to be in his control. He wanted us to feel powerless and small. Helpless actually.”

  “Like his father must have felt,” murmured Liz.

  “I suppose,” said Wetherby. “But my point is, Tom’s motives weren’t political. If they had been, the detonators would have worked.”

  “And he wouldn’t have made the phone call.”

  “Quite. He didn’t want to kill dozens of people. He just wanted us to know he could have. And he would have wanted to show us that again and again, each time probably killing one or two people who got in his way—like Marzipan. The irony is, he probably would have ended up killing as many people as he would have today with a bomb.” Wetherby shook his head in dismayed wonder.

  “So was he simply mad?” asked Liz.

  “We’ll never know now,” said Wetherby. “What we do know is that he wasn’t who we thought he was.”

  62

  The meeting was ending, but the long grim process had only just begun.

  The press coverage of the aborted bomb attempt in Oxford had been sensational. TEN SECONDS FROM DEATH announced the Daily Mail, with a split front page showing the crashed van on one side and a picture of the new Chancellor on the other, looking shocked in his academic gown. IT’S A DUD! proclaimed the Sun, which managed to get a picture of Rashid Khan, his head shrouded in a blanket, being led out to a prison van at the St. Aldates police station. The Express featured a photograph of the Chancellor’s procession, beadles, stewards, vespers and all, which Liz realised had to have been taken years before—it showed the trail of dignitaries on the Broad, which they had never reached, and had at its head the old Chancellor rather than his new successor. The broadsheets were more circumspect. The Times account—BOMBERS’ PLOT FOILED IN OXFORD—was followed by its other upmarket colleagues in emphasising the fact that the conspiracy had been detected rather than how close it had come to success. The Guardian had much the same coverage together with an article by an architect on the damage to the historic railings in the Broad.

  All of course mentioned the deaths of the van driver and his passenger, and also the death of a Security Service officer—though readers eager to learn more about that fatality would not find their curiosity assuaged. A D notice had landed within hours on the desk of every newspaper editor in the UK, so other than reporting the fact of Tom’s death, described invariably as a “tragic accident,” nothing else appeared about him.

  However events were described, the facts were undeniable: two terrorists had been within a whisker of blowing up a symbol of one of Britain’s oldest institutions along with a host of dignitaries. If some of the newspapers credited the security services with foiling the plot, others directly criticised them for letting it get so close to fruition. None suggested it had been anything but a very narrow squeak.

  Fortunately for Liz and her colleagues, the media’s shrill attention proved short-lived—displaced by a particularly horrific attack in Baghdad and by another spat between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Coverage of the Oxford Plot (as it was already coming to be known) moved after two days to the inside pages and the occasional comment column, and though the debacle would be cited endlessly in future as an example of the formidable threats the country was now facing, its news value was reduced with each day’s passing.

  Within MI5 and MI6, however, the impact of the Oxford Plot was anything but temporary. Analysis of what happened and why was just beginning. This initial meeting was going to be the first of many. Already the various sections were starting their own damage assessments, and would be meeting regularly to share them.

  As people gathered their papers and started to leave the room, Dave Armstrong caught Liz’s eye. “Got time for a coffee?” he asked.

  “Maybe later,” she said, for something was making her feel she wanted to stay behind.

  As the room emptied she found herself alone at the table with Wetherby, who was looking tired and subdued even by his undemonstrative standards. He managed a rueful smile at Liz. “I’ve chaired happier meetings in my time.”

  “At least everyone knows what they’ve got to do.”

  “Yes. It’s obviously important to track right back through all this. Everything. Right back to Tom’s recruitment,” said Wetherby, lifting a hand in acknowledgement of the detail they had all just waded through. “We need to understand why we didn’t pick up that there was something wrong about him. Why we didn’t notice anything. There’ll be an inquiry,” he said, with a tone of resignation. “Not a public inquiry, I don’t think, though there’ll be pressure for one, but a big internal one. The Home Secretary’s talking about getting a judge to conduct it. He actually had the nerve to say ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ You’d think he’d have thought of something more original.” Wetherby shook his head in disbelief. Liz had forgotten the little Latin she had learned at school but she knew that phrase very well: “Who is to watch over the guardians themselves?” “I have to say DG was very good in the meeting,” Wetherby added.

  “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 th
ey 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?”