Illegal Action

by Stella Rimington

  “You know perfectly well this isn’t something for the intelligence services. If Brunovsky’s in danger, he needs protection from Special Branch, not a babysitter from Thames House.”

  “You saw yourself he wasn’t keen on having another bodyguard.”

  “Then you should have insisted. You can’t just offer MI5’s services.”

  A taxi braked sharply and its window descended. Pennington leant in to speak to the driver as Liz opened the back door, determined to continue the argument on the way back to Westminster. “Sorry,” said Pennington, still avoiding Liz’s eyes. “You’ll have to get another cab. I’m going the other way.”

  As he drove off, Liz stared after him with unconcealed fury. Wait until Ackers hears what you’ve done, she thought, starting to walk towards Green Park Underground station. He’ll have an absolute fit.

  16

  But it was Liz who almost had the fit. “I’m supposed to be what?” she demanded. Outside, low cloud piled up like dark balls of wool. It had been threatening to rain all day.

  “Considering Brunovsky’s art interests, it seemed apt. We couldn’t have you posing as a platinum expert, could we?”

  “I’d rather not be posing as anything, thank you very much. The whole thing’s preposterous.”

  Ackers looked taken aback, and fidgeted uncomfortably in his chair. Liz realised he was unused to his staff arguing back. Hadley, his right-hand man, was a classic yes-man; sometimes it seemed he even yawned at the same time Ackers did. Liz sensed that her boss wasn’t altogether happy with the new blood that had arrived in his department almost simultaneously: Michael Fane, Peggy Kinsolving and Liz—especially Liz. She looked at Brian and could see him thinking, “Difficult woman.”

  He said reluctantly, “If you must know, Brunovsky himself asked for you.”

  “Am I supposed to be flattered?”

  Brian didn’t reply so Liz continued, “And you say I’m going to pretend to be a ‘mature student’ who’s studying Pashko?”

  “Yes. That was also Brunovsky’s idea.”

  “Brian,” she said patiently, trying not to show her annoyance, “I read history at university, art history only just came into it. When Nikita Brunovsky showed me the painting he’s planning to buy at Northam’s I could no more have told you who painted it than I can tell you how to make a nuclear bomb.”

  “We thought as much,” Brian said, and Liz wondered who this “we” was. Geoffrey Fane, doubtless. “It’s been decided you should have a quick brush-up on art history, and some intensive tutorials into this Pashko.” He enunciated the name carefully. “You’re not going to be posing as an expert, never fear. Just an enthusiast—someone doing a diploma or whatever, who’s writing a short thesis about him. Only what’s needed to justify your presence in Brunovsky’s household.”

  “Where am I going to have these intensive tutorials? At the Courtauld?” she added, unable to suppress her sarcasm.

  “No,” said Brian measuredly. “But it’s probably just as good. You’re to spend a week in Cambridge. There’s a woman there, a don at Newnham, though I gather she’s retired. She is an expert on Pashko.” He added as an afterthought, “And she’s a Russian.”

  “Whose idea was this?” asked Liz, thinking, I bet it’s bloody Geoffrey Fane again. She glanced out towards the Thames and noticed that the first spits of rain were streaking the windows.

  Liz was still fuming as she left Thames House to go home. Her mood was not helped by the rain, by now sheeting down and being blown erratically sideways by a gusty westerly wind. The umbrella her mother had given her last Christmas, while handily compact when folded in her handbag, was completely useless against these conditions. By the time she got to Westminster Tube station she was soaked from head to toe and her navy blue suede shoes, chosen more for visiting Brunovsky than for wet pavement walking, were squelching hopelessly.

  The rain had let up a bit by the time she emerged from the Underground system, still soaking wet, at Kentish Town and she wondered briefly whether to ring Dave Armstrong, her old colleague and friend from Counter-Terrorist days, and entice him out for a pizza and a moan about Brian Ackers. But remembering this was one of Piet’s weekends, she decided instead to stop at the Threshers wine shop, open late as usual on a Thursday, and indulge herself with a bottle of the New Zealand Sauvignon they kept in their fridge, and a hot bath, before tidying up the flat.

  As she opened the front door she saw the flashing red light of her answerphone reflected in the glass pane. Mother, she thought guiltily. She had been meaning to ring her for days, but hadn’t. Ever since her father had died, Liz had felt responsible for her mother. Not enough to persuade her to agree to give up her “dangerous” job and her life in the “squalor” of Kentish Town and come back home to share the running of the garden centre and marry a nice steady young man. But enough to make her drive the long journey down to Wiltshire every month and to keep regularly in touch by phone.

  Susan Carlyle lived at South Lodge, the house in the Nadder Valley where Liz had grown up. When Liz was a child the pretty octagonal lodge had guarded the entrance to the Bowerbridge sporting estate, where her father had been the manager. But Jack Carlyle had died and so had the estate’s owner. Bowerbridge’s woods and coppices had been sold off, and its gardens had become a specialist plantsman’s nursery. Pressed for money, Susan had started work there; now she ran the place. Last year she and Liz had had a scare when a lump Susan had detected had turned out to be malignant. Thankfully, surgery seemed to have been successful, though who could be sure, and she was back working just as before in the nursery.

  Unfortunately the illness had coincided with the investigation of the mole in MI5 and Liz still felt guilty that she had not been able to be more available.

  So, shedding her wet clothes in a heap on the bathroom floor, wrapping herself in her dressing gown and pouring herself a glass of wine, she dialled her mother’s number, bracing herself for a long chat.

  Her mother answered on the second ring. “Hello, darling. I’m so glad you rang. I wanted to ask you a favour.”

  What on earth is this going to be? wondered Liz, noticing her mother’s unusually bright and brisk tone.

  “I’ve been asked to the theatre on Saturday evening and I wondered if I could come and stay with you.”

  “Well, of course you can,” said Liz immediately, trying to disguise her amazement. Her mother had never once expressed any interest in coming to London since Liz had lived there. Quite the opposite. She had always given the impression that she thought London a sink of iniquity. “Who are you going with?” asked Liz.

  “No one you know, dear. I met him when I was ill. He’s got some tickets for that play with Judi Dench in at the Haymarket, on Saturday evening. So if that’s fine with you I’ll catch a mid-morning train and get a taxi from the station. Be with you about two o’clock.”

  “All right, Mother,” said Liz, hardly able to believe what she was hearing. “Shall I come and meet you at the station?”

  “No need, darling,” came the reply, “I’ve got your address and I’m sure the taxi man will find it. Must dash now. See you Saturday.”

  Liz sat down and drained her glass of wine. What on earth was going on? Her mother, with a boyfriend. Is that what it was? It sounded like it. She couldn’t believe it and she felt a flash of resentment. All those weekends she’d forced herself to drive down to Wiltshire when she would much rather have stayed in London. Now there was her mother happily paired up while she still had no close boyfriend.

  What could he be like? She hoped he was suitable. What if he was a fortune hunter? How ridiculous you are being, she said to herself. Mother hasn’t got a fortune. But though she tried to laugh herself out of it, she went on feeling faintly uneasy and disturbed at this totally unexpected turn of events.

  As she sat and brooded, she suddenly remembered Piet. He was expecting to come on Saturday. She would have to put him off. She did not want Piet sharing her bed whilst her moth
er was in the spare room next door, so feeling very confused and thoroughly disappointed at the ruining of her weekend she rang Piet.

  At the end of that conversation she felt worse. When she’d explained what had happened, Piet had replied that he was about to ring her. His meetings in Canary Wharf had been discontinued and he would not be coming to London so often. He had in any case been meaning to tell her that he had met someone in Amsterdam whom he was now seeing regularly, so he thought it best if they stopped seeing each other. He added charmingly that he would miss her and the jolly weekends they had spent together and he wished her the best of luck, before ringing off.

  So, thought Liz, that’s that. Well at least she couldn’t blame the job for the end of that relationship. But as she sat in the bath in her bright, freshly tiled bathroom, she reflected that everyone’s life seemed to be improving except hers. And now she was stuck with this ridiculous scheme dreamt up by Brian Ackers and Geoffrey Fane and was going to have to spend a week in Cambridge with some mad old Russian bat.

  17

  She had been trained to deal with any crisis, if necessary with violence, just as she’d dealt with that mugger the other month. In her lengthy training, they had made her kill. They took convicts out of the prisons—those who’d been sentenced to death—and put the trainees up against them. At the beginning they’d intervened to make sure the trainees survived. But later in the course, it was a free contest. No one interfered; it was a fight to the death. She had been determined that whoever died, it would not be her. She had surprised herself with the ease with which she killed—stuck the knife in or pulled tight the garrotte—and they had noticed too, the instructors, those hard-eyed, expressionless men whose job it was to turn out graduates of their courses who could survive in the most extreme situations. So she was chosen for assignments where violence was likely, though she had not expected to have to use it so early in this job, and not on the streets of London.

  But, as she sat in her latest apartment off Victoria Street, it was not the possibility of violence that was causing her concern. It was something completely unexpected—the intrusion on the scene of British Intelligence. What, she wondered, had brought them buzzing around Brunovsky like flies? There must have been a leak, or why else would they have suddenly turned up? And why had he encouraged them? How much did they know and how best to deal with the situation?

  Unzipping the computer bags, she took out the laptop and its small black companion, that would, she hoped, provide her with the answers, and laid them out on the dining table. Half an hour later, she leant back in her chair with a satisfied grunt and, looking out of the window at Westminster Cathedral, glowing pink in the setting sun, she imagined her message bouncing around the world, disguising itself as it moved from server to server, on its way to its eventual destination, a desk in a Moscow office building. A government office building.

  18

  He knew it was crucial to show you were in charge from the start. On the training course they had taught him that if you began with an iron fist you could lighten up later on, but that it never worked the other way around.

  Michael Fane ignored the butterflies fluttering in his stomach. This was his chance to show what he could do. He looked out of the thin window at the trees above Berkeley Square. The weather had reverted: after a glorious early morning, a sepia trail of cloud moved in with the easterly wind like ominous writing in the sky.

  He sat down but found he couldn’t sit still. The people here at the agency had given him their interviewing room, which was small and square, down the hall from Brigadier Cartwright’s spacious office. When Liz Carlyle announced she’d be away for a week and asked him to do the interview in her place, he was thrilled. You had to belly up to the bar sometime, he told himself, using the cowboy lingo of the westerns he loved. His father had been contemptuous of those movies, implying that he knew about the real thing. He probably did, Michael thought crossly, and doubtless this forthcoming interview would be beneath him. Geoffrey must have recruited countless agents in his time—in much more difficult circumstances. What else could he have been doing all those years abroad? Even the teenage Michael Fane had known enough to understand his father wasn’t really a cultural attaché.

  Not that he’d seen much of him. There was the occasional outing—a day at Lord’s, watching the Australians in the Test; lunch at the Traveller’s Club when Michael turned sixteen—as if his father, suddenly remembering he had a son, had dutifully decided to try and “bond.” When his mother at last grew fed up with Geoffrey’s absences, always excused as a matter of work, and her patience had finally snapped, Michael didn’t blame her. Now she lived in Paris, remarried to Arnaud, an international lawyer—the kind of stable haut bourgeois she should have married in the first place.

  Michael had applied to join MI5 wanting to outplay his father at his own game—but from the safe distance of a rival service. He had had a letter from him, suggesting lunch, just two weeks before he joined. At first Michael had accepted, then, when the day came, he’d left a message that he was ill. There’d been no communication since, which, thought Michael, suited him just fine.

  He looked at the dossier Peggy Kinsolving had helped him put together. He’d spent the last hour practising his set recital, checking the pictures for the umpteenth time and arranging the chairs. Instead of the sofa and low table near the door, used for more informal chats, he opted to stay behind the desk at one end of the room. That should give him an air of authority.

  He wished he didn’t look so young. Even the photos he’d seen of his father as a young man made Geoffrey Fane seem at twenty confident, commanding. No one had ever called his father lacking in maturity. The phrase used by Michael’s girlfriend Anna to explain why she was breaking up with him. The memory still rankled.

  There was a sharp knock and the door opened. The brigadier marched in, looking stern, followed by the tall leggy woman from HR. Behind them, standing in the doorway, stood a man in a blue chauffeur’s suit. Simmons. He looked confused.

  “Here he is,” announced the brigadier to Michael. “Shout if you need me.” He and the woman went out, shutting the door firmly behind them.

  “Sit down, Mr. Simmons,” Michael said, pointing to the chair he’d placed in front of the desk. “My name is Magnusson,” he added mechanically, as if he’d said this countless times before.

  Simmons sat down and hunched forward, his legs apart, arms hanging down between his knees. He clasped his hands loosely together and looked at Michael, his face an open anxious book.

  “Can I see your passport please?” Michael asked crisply, holding out his hand.

  Simmons hesitated, then slowly passed it across the desk. He had been instructed to bring it with him. “What’s all this about?”

  Ignoring the question, Michael leafed through the pages. There weren’t many stamps, but passports were no real guide nowadays—Morocco, and Cyprus twice. Holiday locations. “Have you ever been to Russia?”

  “Russia?” Simmons seemed caught off guard. “No. Never. Why?”

  Michael shrugged and made a show of examining the passport some more. He flipped it down on to the desktop, where it spun briefly then stopped, well short of Simmons’s reach. “Have you ever known any Russians?”

  “Well I don’t know about ‘known,’” said Jerry. “When I worked at the Dorchester loads of foreigners stayed there and some of them were Russians. And I work for a Russian now, you must know that, and he’s got lots of Russian friends. What’s all this about?”

  “I work in the Security Service. We’ve had reason to mount a surveillance operation recently, on a member of the Russian Embassy. We followed him to a number of meetings with people, some open and public, some clandestine. One of them was with you.”

  “You must be confusing me with someone else,” said Jerry. But there was colour in his cheeks, and he was clasping his hands tightly now.

  “Possibly,” Michael said, “though they say the camera never lies.”
He opened his dossier, lifted out two of the prints and slid them across the desk.

  Jerry made a show of carefully inspecting them. “When were these taken?” he asked, as if they might be snaps from a holiday so long ago he couldn’t remember it.

  “Recently,” said Michael.

  “I talk to a lot of people,” said Jerry. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Of course there isn’t.” Michael smiled fleetingly, though now there was a cutting edge to his voice. “But what are we supposed to think when we find you meeting a Russian intelligence officer? Old friends talking about old times? I don’t think so.”

  “I work for a Russian, for Christ’s sakes. I know a lot of Russians. I told you that.”

  “I bet you do, and we’re going to talk about every one of them. But it’s this Russian”—and he stabbed his finger at the photo—“I’m interested in now.”

  “Does the brigadier know why you’re talking to me?” Simmons asked. He looked to be flailing, like someone pushed out of a boat, trying to determine how deep the water was and whether there was any chance of swimming to shore.

  Michael regarded Simmons knowingly. “What do you think?”

  Simmons groaned, then put his head in his hands.

  “However,” Michael announced, “he might overlook it. If we asked him.”

  There was resignation rather than hope in Simmons’s eyes as he lifted his head. “If?” he said.

  “Excuse me?” asked Fane.

  “I said if. There’s always an ‘if.’ You’ll get Cartwright to keep me on if I do what you say.”

  “Sure.”

  “And when you’re through with me, what happens then? Do I keep my job?”

  “That’s between you and the brigadier. Now why don’t you tell me when you first met Rykov?”

  “Who’s Rykov?” asked Simmons, and Michael realised his bafflement was genuine. Damn, he thought, annoyed with himself for letting the name slip out. He pointed at the photo.