Rip Tide

by Stella Rimington

  The officials of the New Springfield Mosque had made all the travel arrangements and they were kept very secret. ‘They told me to go to my uncle in Rawalpindi, where I would be contacted, so I did. One day three men came to see me there, and I went with them. They gave me Pakistani travel documents and arranged for me to go to Athens.’

  He went on to describe how he had got to Mombasa by ship, then by road to Somalia where he joined a group of Arabs who ran a training camp in the desert. ‘It was very difficult getting there overland – we arrived ten days later than expected.’ It was then that the decision was taken to take new recruits in future directly from the ships off the Horn, rather have the human cargo unloaded a thousand kilometres away in Kenya and wait for it to make its way north to Somalia.

  So the Arabs moved camp, to a compound that was already inhabited by Somali pirates, on the coast about ten miles south of Mogadishu.

  Liz interjected, ‘And the Arabs then tried to hijack the Aristides?’

  ‘Yes. They saw how easy it was – the pirates had been doing it successfully for years, so the Arabs decided to do it themselves. That way they’d get their new recruits and also make money by ransoming the ships and stealing the cargoes.’

  ‘Didn’t the Somali pirates object?’

  Amir shook his head. ‘Their leader wasn’t happy, but he was frightened of the Arabs. So was I, to tell you the truth; and the Arabs knew it. The leader was a tall, thin man with burning eyes – I think he was mad – who made me go with the others on a pirate raid because he claimed it would make me brave. I think he just wanted an eye kept on me.

  ‘It was terrifying. They made me go up the ladder first and when the French Navy boat came up, they sailed off and I fell in the sea. And that’s how I got captured. The others were captured, too, and they told me if I said anything they’d find out, and then they’d kill me. Are some of them are here in this prison?’

  He looked at them both with frightened eyes. Martin shook his head. ‘They’re not here, and there is no way they could know anything about what’s happened to you.’

  I hope you’re right, thought Liz, as she sat and listened to Amir’s story unfold. And as she and Martin questioned him further about the details over the next two hours, she couldn’t get out of her head her first visit to this prison, and the man with the book in the back pocket of his jeans whom she had felt sure was following her. Was he Al Qaeda too? Possibly, which meant Amir was right to worry about his safety and Tahira’s if she ever came here.

  Chapter 53

  ‘I have some news for you,’ said David Blakey, leaning forward in his chair and putting his elbows on the desk. There was a self-satisfied air to the man which surprised Liz, since she had come to his office after getting back from Paris, expecting to be the one who did the talking. But she let him speak first, knowing that nothing he was going to say would alter the facts that had come to light.

  He went on: ‘Mitchell Berger in Athens has been doing a little investigating of his own. He’s grown suspicious of the man who arranges the leasing of our ships there. His name is Mo Miandad and it turns out he isn’t entirely what he seems. Berger has discovered that he’s been meeting a woman who works in the UCSO office. Her name’s Claude Rameau – she’s been with us a long time. Quite senior; she’s a roving co-ordinator for our local aid supplies. Travels all the time, mainly in Africa.’

  ‘Why is she based in Athens?’

  ‘There’s no real reason – I inherited her, she’d got a routine, and frankly, I didn’t see any reason to change it.’

  ‘Why does this mean that Miandad is the source of the leak?’

  Blakey seemed a little taken aback. ‘Well, we haven’t got any hard evidence, if that’s what you’re driving at. But Rameau has always been a bit of an anarchist – she’s very anti-American, for one thing. And of course it means Miandad has a secret life.’

  ‘Cheating on his wife doesn’t make him an Al Qaeda agent.’ Liz sighed at Blakey’s reasoning. None of this would stand up in court; none of it, in fact, was standing up with her.

  ‘I think you’re missing my point. It’s not his choice of bedmate that’s at issue here.’ Blakey looked at her resentfully. ‘I thought you’d be interested in this. Berger’s convinced Miandad’s up to no good. Remember, you don’t know the people we’re talking about.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Liz. ‘But there are some other things I’ve discovered which you ought to hear.’

  ‘About the Athens office?’

  ‘Actually, no. A bit closer to home.’

  Blakey looked uncomfortable for the first time. Liz said, ‘There’s another woman we’ve had under surveillance. Not Rameau, though this one’s also blonde. She attended a mosque in North London that we’ve been investigating for some time.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with the leak from UCSO?’ asked Blakey.

  Liz ignored him. ‘Radical Islamists have taken this mosque over; we suspect they’ve been recruiting young British Muslims and sending them to Pakistan for training in their camps. This woman addressed some of the recruits, and a week later, bingo, off they went to learn how to wage jihad.’

  Blakey was listening intently.

  ‘Then the scene shifts to Athens. I don’t think the woman seeing Mo Miandad is Claude Rameau.’

  ‘You don’t?’ It was impossible to tell if Blakey’s surprise was genuine.

  ‘No. I think it’s the same woman who was seen at the North London mosque. Which disqualifies Rameau.’

  ‘So who is it then?’ But Blakey’s question seemed rhetorical. The expression on his face had changed from scepticism to curiosity to alarm – he was clearly starting to draw his own conclusions. And not enjoying them.

  ‘I’m pretty sure you have as good an idea as I do.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Blakey looked shaken.

  ‘Katherine Ball.’ Liz let the words hang between them.

  ‘You think . . .’ Blakey started to say, his voice rising, and then the possibility that she might be right seemed to stop him short.

  ‘I know that she has visited a North London mosque. I know that she’s addressed recruits there. And I know that she’s been your lover for some time.’

  Blakey wanted to speak: his lips moved; a croaking sound came out of his mouth but there were no words. He was staring at Liz without really seeing her. Suddenly he dropped his head into his hands. Liz thought for a moment that he was going to burst into tears, but when he lifted his head again his eyes were dry, and he seemed to have pulled himself together. He said quietly, ‘What a fool I’ve been.’

  ‘How much does she know?’

  ‘Katherine? What about?’ Then, seeing Liz’s cold gaze, he said, ‘She knows the lot.’

  ‘That won’t do. You need to be more specific.’

  Blakey threw his hands up in the air, almost in despair. ‘She knew I asked Geoffrey for help, and she knew when you came to see me.’

  So the MI6 and MI5 operations had been blown from the beginning. Liz sighed, and Blakey seemed to sense her disgust. He protested, ‘I don’t see what use that would be to Islamic militants in Birmingham.’

  Liz shrugged. ‘I wasn’t thinking of Birmingham; I was thinking of Athens. Did she know about that?’

  Blakey flushed. ‘You mean, the girl?’

  ‘I do. Let’s give her a name,’ Liz said icily. ‘Maria Galanos.’

  Blakey wouldn’t look at her, which gave Liz her answer. At last he said, in a voice that was barely above a whisper, ‘Oh, God.’ He was rubbing his hands together now, as if trying to wash everything away. ‘But Katherine couldn’t have killed her,’ he said, almost hopefully. ‘She wasn’t in Greece when Maria was murdered. She was here.’

  ‘Enter Mo Miandad,’ said Liz.

  Blakey’s hands stopped moving, and he stared at them as if they had been stained again by her words. Then he spoke without looking at Liz, averting his face, as if it would somehow make the horror less. ‘You have to belie
ve me, I had no idea. She never gave the slightest indication of sympathising with Islam – I’d have bet you anything that she’d never set foot in a mosque in her life. Her husband was Middle Eastern, but from everything she ever said he was thoroughly Westernised – educated in the States, enlightened, liberal. And the information she got from me – well, I’ll be honest, it was me telling her; I wasn’t being pumped.’

  Pillow talk, thought Liz bitterly, which had cost Maria Galanos her life. Blakey seemed to sense this, for he continued, ‘I have no excuse, I understand that. I’m just trying to explain things. Even now that I know, I find it hard to believe. If she was trying to entrap me, she did a miraculous job of disguising it. I made all the running,’ he said emphatically.

  Yes, thought Liz. An attractive intelligent blonde woman who works in the same office didn’t have to do a lot to catch the interest of a known womaniser whose wife had left him. The smallest signs would do – the chance arrival at the lift when her target was leaving for the day, perhaps turning down the first invitation for a drink but making it clear a second offer would receive a different reception; a few sympathetic words about his personal troubles, a suggestion that she knew ‘how it was’ since she was lonely too. She’d played him very cleverly, you had to give the woman that – even now Blakey was thinking he had seduced her, that he had made all the running.

  Blakey was waiting anxiously for her to say more. ‘When are you due to see Katherine next?’ she asked.

  ‘This evening. She’s at a meeting away from the office today; a get-together of other similar charities – it happens twice a year. She said she’d come round to my flat at seven or so. I can give you the address.’

  ‘We’ve got that already,’ said Liz. It was somehow worse having Blakey trying to be helpful.

  ‘I don’t know how I’m going to face her,’ he said plaintively.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll find it’s much of a problem.’

  Chapter 54

  Normally Ivy Howson would have been at home by now. Thursdays were her late day working for Mr Blakey, but even then she was usually off by four, having done two loads of laundry, put them through the dryer (she’d told him twice now it was on its last legs), and ironed the sheets and pillow cases as well as the shirts she hadn’t got round to on Tuesday.

  But today she was still in the neighbourhood a good three hours later, though in fairness it was not because of Mr Blakey. Before she’d gone to work for him, she’d worked for an American family who’d lived around the corner, in a trim little house that the American woman had insisted on calling ‘cute’. It was there that Mrs Howson had met Eloise the au pair, a nice New Zealand girl who’d looked up to Ivy like a second mum. And it was Eloise she’d gone to see today, still working as an au pair, in the same house funnily enough, though now it was for a Chinese couple called Tang or Tong or Ting – Mrs Howson didn’t know.

  Though Eloise was working so close by, Ivy hadn’t seen her for yonks, so they’d had a lovely time over tea, catching up and chatting. Not that Eloise had that much to tell – the Tangs or whatever they were called were quiet people, with one young child, but they didn’t speak that much English, according to Eloise, so it was a bit boring for her. Yet Ivy Howson had more than filled the conversational gap, what with the goings on in the Blakey household since she’d last seen Eloise. How they’d laughed as she’d described this new blonde woman that Mr Blakey didn’t like to admit was his girlfriend. She wasn’t a patch on Mrs Blakey, who, poor thing, was said to be living in Acton now, all on her own. ‘It’s tough on a woman if she gets hitched up to a bastard,’ Mrs Howson had said. ‘You watch yourself, Eloise,’ she’d warned, more than once.

  They’d had a lovely chat, though Ivy had got a bit of a shock when she looked at her watch and saw it was ten to seven. ‘Lordie,’ she exclaimed, thinking how cross Stanley would be, sitting waiting for his tea in the ground-floor flat in Streatham, where they’d lived for seventeen years. Lived ever since Maureen their daughter had moved out to shack up with the first of what even Mrs Howson, loyal mother though she was, would acknowledge had been a string of unsatisfactory partners. Stanley was retired now, and hadn’t found a lot to fill his time, so he didn’t like it that she still went out to do for Mr Blakey. He’d be furious when she got home a good three hours later than usual.

  She put her coat on hurriedly, grabbed her bag and said a quick goodbye to Eloise, promising to come and see the girl again sometime soon. She was bustling down the street, retracing her steps past the mansion block where Mr Blakey lived, when she noticed the cars. They were parked within twenty yards of each other, three of them, all exactly the same, which was why she noticed them in the first place. They were black and as she walked past them she saw that inside each car two men were sitting. Mrs Howson stopped for a moment, simply because this seemed so odd. She found herself waiting, not quite sure what she was waiting for.

  It didn’t take long to find out. A taxi came along fast from Marylebone High Street, its orange ‘for hire’ light going on even before it had stopped. The driver braked sharply and came to a halt across the road from Mr Blakey’s block. Mrs Howson tutted to herself disapprovingly as she recognised the woman who got out. It was that blonde woman Mr Blakey insisted on referring to as ‘Mrs Ball’, and whom Ivy Howson never addressed at all.

  She watched as the woman paid the driver, then swung her expensive-looking bag over her shoulder and started to cross the road. She was smartly dressed in a belted raincoat that reached just below the knees, showing off her well-formed calves, encased today in shiny black tights. I’ll bet they’ll be at it before the clock strikes seven, thought Ivy, then chided herself for her crudeness. Still, there was something that invited it in the way this woman dressed, and walked – she was on the pavement now and heading for the mansion block’s outer door.

  It was then that the most amazing thing happened, something Mrs Howson would never forget. From out of nowhere all the blokes in the cars had suddenly appeared – there on the pavement. It was like magic, she later said to Stanley, who couldn’t understand why she’d been so surprised by the sudden appearance of six fellows who just had to be coppers. You don’t understand, she’d complained. It was like a conjuring trick. One minute they weren’t there and the next they were, and I never noticed it happening.

  One of the chaps had approached Mrs Ball just as she was about to enter the building, and she’d smiled – Ivy could still remember the flirtatious curve to the woman’s lips. At the same time another bloke had moved in from the other side, taking her by the arm. It was then that alarm had replaced polite curiosity on the woman’s face. By now the taxi had left and the street was deserted – thinking back, Ivy Howson realised that she’d been the only witness.

  But witness to what? The men had taken the Ball woman to one of the black cars, and you could see she wasn’t given any choice – she was going with them like it or not. But she hadn’t screamed; she hadn’t even looked around. She couldn’t have been abducted because she didn’t struggle. If she was being nicked, the odd thing was that she didn’t seem to mind. What Ivy remembered most of all was the way Mrs Ball had got into the back seat of the car with a smile on her face.

  Chapter 55

  Paddington Green police station was a grim place, even grimmer than Liz had expected. A colleague had once described to her his interrogation of a suspect there and had said that it made Wormwood Scrubs look like a five-star hotel. Now, as she was escorted down two flights of stairs and along a narrow corridor, flanked by cells, Liz understood what he meant. Forbidding though the Santé prison in Paris was, at least it had a history, both fictional and real. Carlos the Jackal and Noriega rubbed shoulders in its corridors with characters from the novels of Alexandre Dumas and Georges Simenon. Here, in Paddington Green, there was no gloss of history, and the brutal concrete walls seemed to match the squalid violence of the modern-day terrorists whom it had been built to accommodate. It was, thought Liz, a truly awful
place.

  The police officer escorting her opened a steel door and stood back to let her enter the room, then followed her inside. A single light bulb illuminated a bare table and chairs, cement floor the colour of day-old porridge, and blank walls. Liz was expecting to find that the prisoner she’d come to see would introduce a note of elegance to these stark surroundings. She remembered the stylish even glamorous woman she had met in David Blakey’s office at the beginning of this whole business, and how she had admired, not to say envied, the understated linen dress the other woman had been wearing and her gold jewellery.

  So she was startled by the appearance of the person sitting at the table. It was difficult to believe it was the same one. Katherine Ball was wearing a plain cotton caftan and long, wide trousers over flat pumps. At first sight Liz wondered if this was some sort of prison uniform, but Katherine Ball had not been charged and was entitled to wear her own clothes, so these must be her choice. Her face was bare of make-up and her hair, which Liz remembered as fashionably tinted blonde, was completely covered by an unflattering scarf. Only her bright blue eyes were unaltered and they seemed to burn as they stared at Liz.

  ‘Mrs Ball,’ said Liz, taking a seat across from her. ‘We met in David Blakey’s office some time ago. My name is Jane Forrester.’

  Katherine Ball arched an eyebrow. ‘I remember you well. You work with that man who was a colleague of David’s when he was in MI6 . . . what’s his name? Tall, dark and not entirely handsome. Fane – that was it. So you’re a spook too.’

  ‘I’m with the Home Office.’

  ‘Oh, I see, we’re talking in euphemisms. What you mean is that you’re MI5, not MI6. Isn’t that what you’re trying to say, Miss . . . Forrester. Now, tell me, what are you here for?’

  ‘ I was wondering – ’

  ‘Don’t wonder,’ said Katherine Ball fiercely, her eyes suddenly ablaze. ‘There’s nothing to speculate about, nothing ambiguous in any of this. Believe me: if you want to know about me, I’ll tell you. Frankly, I’m delighted you’re here; nothing will please me more than to say what I have to say to a representative of Western Intelligence.’