The station was deserted and the telephone box outside the small ticket hall was empty. He lifted the phone to hear that it was in working order, took the advertisement from his pocket and dialled the London number which it gave.
It didn’t answer. It didn’t even connect. He heard the unobtainable tone, tried twice more and got the same result.
He closed his eyes and laid his head against the thick glass of the side panel.
‘Damn,’ he whispered. ‘Why now?’
When he opened his eyes again he was surprised to find a face watching him, only inches from his own. Serious brown eyes in a large full-moon face peered through the glass at him; the face drew back as Knight straightened up, then came close again, like an inquisitive animal’s.
Billy Bowman was a child of six in a grown man’s body; he harmed no one and, thanks to the village, no one had ever harmed him.
Knight smiled at him and returned the phone to its cradle. The coins came clanging out. Billy nodded energetically and stuck up a broad thumb. He grinned and wandered off, pausing to wave before he rounded the corner.
The advertisement was still lying on the shelf by the phone. Knight returned it carefully to his pocket. He had another number to dial. He fed in the coins again.
This number was also in London; an efficient-sounding switchboard operator answered after two or three rings. A moment later the man he wanted to speak to came on the line.
‘Don’t say my name,’ Knight told him, and launched into the set of instructions that he’d worked out on the walk to the station.
34
He saw the distrust in the stationmaster’s gaze as he fumbled inside the mackintosh for his cash. It was clear that the man didn’t really expect him to be able to pay, considering his appearance. He spread some coins onto the revolving tray set in the window, scooped up his ticket, and arrived on the platform just in time to board the London train before it pulled off.
From Waterloo he went to Embankment station and waited on the eastbound Circle line platform until he saw Doug Riley appear. The journalist was carrying a McDonald’s takeaway bag. There was no automatic smile on his florid face as there had been in the pub on Shoe Lane.
‘It’s true then,’ he said, staring at Knight’s clothes.
‘What?’
‘I heard they were looking for you. I thought it was just talk.’
‘Stop staring.’
Riley turned away and began munching his burger. From the pocket of his city overcoat he took a handkerchief, with which he wiped his lips and fingers from time to time. Knight huddled into the mackintosh. Both of them remained silent as a man drew near and strolled past.
‘Something else I heard,’ Riley resumed. ‘Joss Franklyn. You were there the night he was shot. Oh yes, I know he was shot. You didn’t do it, did you? That’s not why you’ve gone to ground?’
Knight glared at him from beneath the tattered peak of his cap.
‘Just asking.’ Riley gazed along the platform. ‘Bill Clarke, Joss Franklyn, now you like this. Am I going to get a story out of this in the end?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
‘Looks like it’s all you can offer. You’re hardly in a position to come on heavy this time.’
A train drew in; it was thinly populated and Knight led the way into what he judged to be the emptiest carriage. They settled themselves in a corner, a seat away from each other. A black girl at the far end of the compartment watched them. Knight met her gaze and her eyes shied away.
Meanwhile Riley was staring at Knight’s feet.
‘The shoes,’ he said. ‘They’re wrong.’
Knight looked down. Unlike everything else he was wearing, the shoes were his own: black Oxfords. He saw what Riley meant. They weren’t new but they were hardly in keeping with the rest of his garb.
‘You fail the fieldcraft test,’ Riley said, and got back to the hamburger. Knight tucked his feet under the seat as the train gathered speed, and drew one of the newspaper clippings from his pocket. Riley was the man to give him the background on them: the real background. As much of it as could be known.
‘Saleem Ibn Abdul Aziz Al-Saud,’ Knight said, keeping his voice to what was only just audible over the train’s rattle. ‘Know much about him?’
Riley nodded while he finished swallowing. ‘A fortnight ago I didn’t. Half brother of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Prince of the royal blood. Held minor office in the Saudi Council of Ministers until his assassination while under what you people call twenty-four-hour protection. Your lot knew it was on the cards, didn’t you? That’s what all the search and interrogate activity was for the weekend before it happened. You really blew it this time.’
‘We didn’t know who the target was. Only that a hit might be imminent.’
‘Who tipped you off?’
‘No one I can tell you about.’
Riley sighed. Mansion House passed.
‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Get on with whatever you wanted to ask.’
‘This Prince Ibn. The press described him as an Islamic fundamentalist. That’s unusual in a member of the Saudi hierarchy. Even his name is a giveaway. Ibn – it’s what the world called his and Fahd’s father: Ibn Saud. He founded the country and called it after himself. So this prince was harking back to his country’s origins in choosing Ibn as his short name. A nationalistic gesture.’
Riley grunted his agreement. ‘When he was younger he sympathised openly with nationalist and fundamentalist groups. In recent years he stopped being open about it. I guess he had to, given his position. Now it looks like the old sympathies were still there under the surface.’
‘Do you believe they were enough to explain these links between him and Gadaffi?’
‘Anything’s possible with the Arabs.’
Liverpool Street. The black girl stood up to get out. A Chinese couple got on. Knight waited until they settled themselves at the other end of the carriage.
‘So tell me about Ibn and Gadaffi.’
Riley shoved a handful of french fries into his mouth. ‘After Ibn’s death there was confusion. We knew nothing then about the Gadaffi connection. The Saudis were screaming blue murder because one of their VIPs had been knocked off. The other Arab nations were kicking up a fuss too, Libya most of all. As for the conference – well, that was the end of that, before it had even properly begun.’
‘The Saudis were talking about breaking off diplomatic relations.’
‘Of course. And Gadaffi and some others were urging exactly that, saying that Ibn’s death was proof the West couldn’t be trusted. Special Branch and your people were hanging their heads in shame.’
The compartment filled up a little more at Euston Square. Most people who saw Knight sat well away from them, but a teenager came within a few seats. As the train moved off, Knight noticed the lightweight earphones that he was wearing and heard the thin scratch of music coursing through them.
‘What did Gadaffi mean about the West not being trusted?’
‘His first claims were only about Ibn being privately critical of Fahd and Yamani for failing to get the oil price up. It angered Ibn that doubling output was playing into the West’s hands.’
‘How did we know Gadaffi wasn’t lying?’
‘From the number of red Saudi faces. The crunch came when he announced outright that the West had eliminated Ibn with the specific purpose of shutting him up. That’s what he’d meant about not trusting the West.’
‘“The West”,’ echoed Knight, ‘or Britain?’
‘Don’t know. He never got beyond the usual Gadaffi-speak about rabid imperialist dogs. He alleged Fahd was in on the assassination. He himself – Gadaffi – might be next, he said. He called all the foreign correspondents into that tent of his for a pow-wow and ranted on about Ibn’s death proving beyond doubt that Fahd and Yamani were working with the West to keep the oil price down. Proof at last that they were the Western puppets he’d been accusing them of being for years.’
‘Of course not. But he was putting Fahd in a tight spot: on the one hand Fahd was furious with us for a catastrophic security failure. He wanted to slate us – not just because we deserved it, but also to show that he wasn’t the Western lapdog that Gadaffi said. But at the same time he didn’t want to be seen siding too tightly with Gadaffi. Fahd was torn between Arab solidarity and his wish to stay friends with us for the sake of the fighter planes or arms or whatever it is he’s always after.’
They had come as far as Notting Hill Gate. The Chinese couple got off. A bag lady got on.
‘Then,’ Knight said as the train pulled away again, ‘lo and behold – one dead Libyan assassin surfaced. Right?’
Riley nodded. ‘Ibraham Abukhder. In fact, he surfaced the day after Ibn’s death but it took a while to tie him in for sure – while Gadaffi was laying the blame on the West.’
Knight consulted another clipping.
‘Thanks to Abukhder,’ he said, ‘the tables were turned. Abukhder was the evidence that Gadaffi himself was behind Ibn’s killing. And then there was this information that Gadaffi had been backing some lunatic plot of Ibn’s to get rid of Fahd. Right?’
Riley nodded. ‘The coup. If it had succeeded, Gadaffi would be running Saudi Arabia.’
‘And the largest oil reserves in the free world.’ Somewhere here, Knight knew, was the heart of the matter.
‘The disclosure of the coup,’ he said. ‘As far as I could see, it wasn’t attributed, beyond the usual “reliable sources inform us”. Where did it come from?’
Riley cast him a cynical glance. ‘Where do you think?’
‘It was a leak?’
‘Not all of it, of course. To begin with, there was Abukhder. No secret that he was the man who killed Ibn. Plenty of people saw him either actually plant the bomb or flee the scene. No secret either that he was Libyan. It went from there. Whoever heard of a Libyan working alone – one isolated maniac with no line to the chief maniac? But at that stage we could only speculate. I reckon your people thought if they announced openly that they had firm evidence that Abukhder was Gadaffi’s man, it might look like they were trying to deflect attention from their own cock-up. The same would apply to information about the coup. So they leaked both instead. Television and radio had it by last Tuesday lunchtime, the press ran it that evening or the next morning. When the media had given it a good airing, the government could legitimately say that it had no choice but to admit the story was soundly based. Which it did late on Friday – in time for yesterday’s editions and the morning news bulletins.’
‘And it ends up sounding a lot more convincing than if the Foreign Office had announced it from the start. Nice work.’
‘So now it’s Gadaffi who’s the villain, not the West. There’s still the question of why he bumped off his fellow conspirator. Maybe they had some kind of falling-out. Or maybe it was simply mistaken identity – Abukhder blowing up Ibn’s car when he meant to get Fahd. They were both attending a meeting at Yamani’s Surrey estate. Ibn was first to arrive. Fahd was following about half an hour behind him.’
‘Who knew about that meeting? It was unscheduled.’
‘Was it?’ Riley turned to look at him. ‘The implication so far has been that it was in the schedule.’
Knight shook his head. ‘As late as the day before the assassination, which was the last time I saw a schedule, the meeting didn’t exist.’
Riley scribbled a note on a corner of the now-empty takeaway bag and tore it off. ‘I’ll follow up on that.’
They had gone full circle and the train was pulling into Embankment again. Knight rose and went to the nearest door. Riley scrunched up the empty bag and went out through the other door to catch up with him on the platform.
‘Hold on, Edmund. Is that it?’
The teenager and the bag lady passed them.
‘Is what it?’
‘You’ve pumped me. All I get is a meeting that wasn’t scheduled. Do me a favour, Edmund.’
‘Thanks for your help, Doug.’
‘You owe me now, Edmund. You owe me plenty.’
Knight pulled an apologetic face. ‘That reminds me. The other favour I asked on the phone.’
He thought that Riley was simply going to walk off. Then the big man’s hands produced his wallet and peeled off a sheaf of notes. He pushed them into Knight’s pocket.
Knight waited until he was out of sight, then made his way through the tunnels of the station to the Bakerloo southbound platform to get back to Waterloo.
On the last train home, except home was the one place it couldn’t take him, he turned over in his mind what Riley had told him.
The fragments still refused to fit together. But he was certain that they all originated in a single pattern; ultimately they must reveal it.
The scenario that had been so neatly planted in the world media made no mention of the Spetznaz unit. There were several ways to account for that. If the unit was still being searched for, it couldn’t be mentioned. Equally, if it had been apprehended, that was all the more reason to suppress the information; unlike the Americans, the Foreign Office would prefer to use something like that for private diplomatic leverage rather than for publicly raising the international temperature.
But the scenario remained inadequate and he was no more convinced of its completeness than he sensed was Riley. It was riddled with inconsistencies as glaring as his shoes.
According to the reports, Ibraham Abukhder had a history of only low-grade terrorist connections: he had acted as an occasional courier and message drop. Why would the Libyans choose such an inexperienced person for a major action? Linking him with the Spetznaz unit didn’t fit either; what Spetznaz commander would allow one of his crack units to be endangered by association with such a man?
Next, there was something too convenient about his corpse turning up the way it had: the perfect thing to swing Arab opinion against Gadaffi. Would the Libyan leader have made his allegations against the West before knowing for certain that his man was home safe? Gadaffi was a maniac but he was no fool. And if he had been conspiring with the Saudi prince to overthrow Fahd, why kill him? Mistaken identity, maybe, since Abukhder was a novice. But that was as over-convenient as Abukhder’s corpse. What about the suggestion that they had fallen out? Thieves fell out, so could conspirators. But it was difficult to see what Gadaffi stood to gain from Ibn’s death.
The meeting in Surrey that wasn’t scheduled: someone had kept Abukhder and/or the Spetznaz unit very well informed. Someone in the Saudi delegation? Or one of the other groups? The problem was that he, Knight, was now in no position to find out how widespread had been the knowledge of the meeting.
The most vexing question, however, concerned the information about the coup itself. Riley’s assertion that a deliberate plant had occurred made sense. Obviously, the information had come from the intelligence services. That wasn’t the puzzle. It was how the information had reached them in the first place that was the real mystery. When and to whom had it come? There’d been no inkling of it at the start of the previous week, when it would surely have been brought to Knight’s attention. It was impossible that intelligence of such a crucial nature could come in and be cross-checked beyond reasonable doubt between then and last Thursday or Friday, when it was leaked. Libya was almost impenetrable to the Western intelligence services; even Mossad had virtually given up. Obtaining such intelligence was one chance in a million; verifying it would have taken weeks of painstaking work.
Knight ran a hand across his forehead and shook his head. He had hoped that Riley could help clarify some things; instead the opposite had happened. He turned to the question of Bill Clarke’s death and his own near miss. Further dead ends. Why should anyone want him, Knight, out of the way? Gaunt wanted his head on a trophy board with full details writ large underneath, not silent on a platter; he’d want him wrung through the PsyOps mangle of interminable cross-exa
mination until he was dry and flat, not buried with full honours.
He slumped further into the corner of the seat as the train rushed through the darkness and past the lights of empty country stations. He considered his fragments of fact but they were like the drifting spots of colour behind his closed eyelids: they floated away when he tried to look at them directly and he ended up with only the darkness.
35
From the outside Knight’s house had changed in only one respect: net curtains had now been fitted to the front windows on the ground floor.
Inside, the reason for the curtains became clear; the place had been gutted. Half of the furniture and other contents had been taken away for examination. The remainder had been torn apart on the spot, picked through with a degree of care that missed not so much as a tack or a button, and piled up afterwards in corners; or it was to be found in the mobile laboratories and offices that were parked in the back garden. Every carpet had been rolled back. The ground floor was found to be concrete and had been scrutinised for false sections, then left alone; but upstairs the floorboards had been stripped to the joists. The attic, garages and garden workshop had been emptied. Men had pored over every inch of the lawns and shrub beds with metal detectors. Carelessly filled holes indicated where their readings had told them to dig; the occasional fence nail or tangle of wire beside the holes suggested that their labours had been less rewarding than they might have hoped.
Gaunt surveyed the mess without satisfaction as he stood on the steps of one of the mobile laboratories. It had rained all morning and the place was becoming a quagmire. The diggings were filled with water and the most heavily trodden routes between the house and the mobile laboratories were turning into muddy tracks.
‘Get some walkways laid,’ he told Sumner, who was standing behind him. ‘Those aluminium or rubber things you see at outdoor events.’
He drew his gloves on over his long hands and tucked his scarf inside his topcoat, then dashed up to the house, zigzagging around the puddles and the worst of the mud. Sumner followed. In the kitchen they found a still-warm pot of tea. Sumner poured a cup for each of them while Gaunt peeled his gloves off and scraped his shoes on the kitchen floor.
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