Heartbreaker: Love, secrets and terror

by Nick Louth

  It was almost a week before Imogen began to sleep properly again. Chris had agreed to sleep at the house until she felt comfortable, but he was hardly a benign influence. His early departures for Today, hours sleeping late on other days, and general bad temper. They had endured a couple more rows, the worst of which was the most pointless.

  ‘Imogen,’ Wyrecliffe shouted. ‘Have you been buggering about with my laptop?’

  ‘Of course not. I wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘The bloody desktop has been reorganised. Some of the icons are in the wrong place, and it’s running slow.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me. Maybe it was Philip?’

  ‘He’s got his own bloody laptop, and an Xbox, and an iPad, for Christ’s sake. I’ll give him a piece of my mind.’

  But neither Imogen nor Wyrecliffe made the obvious connection. That the break-in with no apparent purpose, actually did have a purpose. And that the moment Wyrecliffe backed up his laptop onto a data stick and then copied it across to his main PC in the flat in Baron’s Court, he was furthering the ends of a mortal enemy. Someone who would now be monitoring his every move.

  Chapter Twelve

  Surrey, England

  October 2009

  ‘Look at that, magnificent creature, eh?’ Geoff Perry said, proudly offering Wyrecliffe a look through his birdwatching telescope. Wyrecliffe crouched down and squinted through the eyepiece. The buzzard, perched on the branch of a scots pine about a quarter of a mile away, was caught beautifully in the late afternoon sun, speckled under-wing plumage clear as it preened itself.

  ‘Marvellous,’ Wyrecliffe said.

  It was more than two years since he’d seen his old colleague. Geoff Perry, the ultimate unflappable old school British journalist had spent twenty years in Beirut. A gifted linguist and Arabic specialist, he’d joined Reuters in the 1960s, been posted to East Berlin and Moscow, married a famous Russian pianist and then been summarily divorced, before finally returning to the home of his beloved Arabic with a posting to Cairo in 1972. This was just in time to cover the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He was almost killed during the first few days when an Egyptian armoured personnel carrier took a wrong turning outside the telex office at Port Said. It had blindly reversed right into and then over the Reuters car in which he was sitting typing reports of the crossing of the Suez Canal. He survived by climbing out of the smashed back window which was then pointing skywards, lugging with him his precious 1943 Corona Sterling portable typewriter and the even-more precious scheduled story which he had almost finalised. Two years later, Reuters posted him to Beirut just as the civil war was getting under way.

  Wyrecliffe’s memory of meeting Perry was indelible. It was 1985. He had just arrived in Lebanon the day before, his first time in a war zone. Perry took him for an early lunch at Pesce du Liban, a famous fish restaurant just off the Corniche, and the main course had just arrived. They had noticed some distant gunfire, which the waiter dismissed with some tutting. A minute later there was a huge bang nearby and the sound of shattering glass. Three men armed to the teeth with AK47s and rocket propelled grenade launchers ran past the front window, shouting. A bullet whizzed and cracked neatly through the plate glass about three feet above Wyrecliffe’s head, and imbedded itself in a sherry cask opposite. He threw himself to the floor, and tried the impossible task of burrowing under his own chair. One of the gunmen then backed into the restaurant’s doorway, kneeled and let off a deafening round from his RPG in the other direction. The door flew open and hot soot from the back of the launcher gushed around tables at the far end of the dining salon.

  As Wyrecliffe gasped for breath, Perry’s diffident voice carried down to him. ‘At variance with received doctrine. Something, something T, something, R, something D and two blanks. Any ideas?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ah, got it. Heterodox. Are you alright down there?’ Perry asked.

  Wyrecliffe peered up, his heart racing. A white-jacketed waiter was standing over the table, delicately topping up Perry’s wine glass. The bottle, held in a basket, had a linen napkin neatly wrapped around its neck, which the waiter used to wipe away each and every droplet that escaped. As he moved away, Wyrecliffe could see the Reuters man delicately filleting his bream, while frowningly finishing the Beirut Times crossword.

  This was Wyrecliffe first experience of Beirut’s sectarian gun battles during the war of the camps in 1985 and, despite what Perry said, one didn’t get used to it.

  At least he never did. On particularly bad days, when the telephones were down, or the BBC office – not much more than a carbuncle of a basement underneath the office the Associated Press used – was cloaked in dust, it was in Perry’s large house in the hilly east Beirut suburbs that he found sanctuary. During one Israeli air raid, Wyrecliffe watched from Perry’s balcony, safely in the Maronite Christian quarter, as the Dassault Mirages screamed in. Like silvery needles, they scudded over the west of the city, rocketing refugee camps and the PLO fighters within. Perry and Wyrecliffe mapped as best they could each distant pop of an impact and puff of smoke, while imbibing from Perry’s personal cellar of magnificent Bekaa Valley wine and eating stewed aubergines with yoghurt, tabouleh and pitta bread. Perry had taught Wyrecliffe almost everything he knew about being a war correspondent, from negotiating your way through roadblocks, to retrieving essential equipment from a bureau when it is under mortar fire. So Wyrecliffe was absolutely staggered by what he heard during a bibulous Fleet Street lunch in 2007 to mark the old hand’s retirement. Perry’s one-time Reuter boss, a grizzled wall-eyed Scot called Colin Slaughter leaned across to Wyrecliffe during the speech of appreciation, and asked: ‘I wonder if it was vetted by MI6.’

  ‘What?’ Wyrecliffe said, turning to stare into the one bloodshot eye that seemed to be looking at him.

  ‘A spy! For thirty fucking years. Can you believe it?’ Slaughter slurred. ‘I was his boss for a decade, and I didn’t know until last week. You’d have thought that the least the bastards would chip in on his salary and expenses.’

  Months later, Wyrecliffe had taken up an invitation to join Perry for a spot of birdwatching and had asked him flat out about MI6. Perry, who was watching a siskin chasing insects through a hawthorn bush, lowered his binoculars and replied: ‘I suppose everybody knows now.’ He wouldn’t tell Wyrecliffe how he’d found time to compile reports while working flat out for Reuters in a war zone, or how he sent them.

  ‘So how much is a spook’s pension?’ Wyrecliffe eventually asked.

  ‘I’ll let you know when they put me out to grass,’ he smiled. ‘I’m still operational.’

  Apart from this nugget, Perry remained infuriatingly vague, rarely responding to any of Wyrecliffe’s questions about SIS, the real organisation popularly and falsely known as MI6.

  ‘I really don’t want to be buttonholed for the Today programme. We all remember what happened to Dr Kelly, don’t we? I don’t want to comment on any dodgy dossiers, Al Qaeda operations and so forth.’

  Wyrecliffe had always reassured Perry that he was asking out of curiosity. It was true, though he’d had to concede that Frank Gardner, the BBC Security Correspondent had once noted their friendship, and asked whether Perry would be willing to talk to him. He wasn’t. But just occasionally, Perry would volunteer something, sometimes something extraordinary. So it was when Wyrecliffe had his eye on the buzzard, just stretching its wings to take off, that Perry said: ‘Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is going to cause the West some very real trouble in the next year or two.’

  Wyrecliffe watch the bird lever itself into the air, and arc out of view in a few magnificent wing beats. ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘It’s quite unlike Bin Laden’s set-up. They’re technologically very savvy, run by a US-born cleric. Did you know that? And I believe they will soon be taking suicide bombings into places they never been before.’

  ‘Into the US you mean?’

  ‘No, I mean into the human body.’

  ‘Explosives inside the body?�
��

  ‘It’s the logical next step, isn’t it? Bombs have been getting smaller and smaller, borne along by progress in both explosive power and in detonators. Car bombs, then motorcycle bombs, explosive belts and so on. We’ve had Richard Reid the shoe bomber, bombs in turbans in Afghanistan. You may also recall the assassination of the Lion of Panjshir, Ahmad Shah Massoud in Afghanistan in 2001.’

  ‘Was that the one where the attackers posed as journalists?’

  ‘Two Tunisians, travelling on Belgian passports, with a small but highly effective bomb inside a TV camera. This was pioneering stuff, actually. Massoud wasn’t easy to get to. He was a military commander, and a former minister of defence, but by posing as journalists the attackers got close enough to him. It’s largely a forgotten story, because it happened just two days before the September 11 attacks, but it was way ahead of its time.’

  ‘How will they get explosives inside people?’

  ‘Well, the obvious ways are in body orifices.’

  Wyrecliffe laughed. ‘You can’t exactly get a lot in like that, surely.’

  ‘You might be surprised. I was in a briefing last week. Reports from the prison service suggest that prisoners conceal some, we might say, quite challenging objects in their rectums. Not just ordinary mobile phones, but Blackberries…’

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘Ouch indeed. But true.’

  ‘What a strange subject to get briefed on.’

  ‘Not at all. Remember last August? There was a suicide bombing attempt on the life of Prince Muhammed bin Nayef.’

  Wyrecliffe recalled the news item. A suicide bomber had somehow penetrated intense security to reach the head of Saudi security. The bomb killed the assailant, but only lightly wounded the target.

  ‘Now what I’m about to tell you is classified. The assailant, a known Al Qaeda member, was supposedly planning to repent,’ Perry said. ‘Prince Nayef had agreed to meet him during Ramadan, which is the traditional time for atonement. The assailant said he represented other AQAP members who were ready to quit, and was sufficiently persuasive that that the prince allowed him to come to his own private residence in Jeddah. Of course, knowing Al Qaeda as he does, he took no chances. The man was kept for thirty hours by Saudi security agent before he was allowed to meet the prince. That was enough time to pass anything he had swallowed. He was searched by hand, and taken through airport-style security scanners at the detention centre, at least twice. Nothing was found.’ Perry stopped for a moment as he focused binoculars. ‘Oh look, a female linnet. There, on the third fence post. Quite lovely,’ Perry said, then resumed: ‘So how do you imagine that he got the device right into the room with the prince?’

  ‘Search me,’ Wyrecliffe shrugged.

  ‘I’m sure they would,’ Perry laughed. ‘Awfully thoroughly. No, there are two things that are really worrying our boys and girls in Vauxhall Cross. One, how did he conceal that bomb. Was it truly in a body cavity? Second, how was it triggered at precisely the right time after such a lengthy period.’

  ‘Not by the bomber himself?’

  ‘Extremely unlikely. There would have to have been an electronic trigger. The only item that the bomber had with him, a mobile telephone, was actually in the hands of the Saudi prince when the bomb blew. Perhaps that was the trigger, but damnably clever if so.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘We’ve certainly not heard that last of this kind of thing, that’s for certain,’ Perry said. ‘And they will inevitably get better and better at it.’

  ‘I wish that could be said of me,’ Wyrecliffe said. I’ve been making more mistakes.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Perry said absent mindedly, scanning the fields with binoculars.

  Wyrecliffe described what had happened a week ago. He’d slipped his cue to introduce a French academic expert on Algeria. Then a few minutes later he'd been a little curt in interrupting a member of the British UFO & Alien Search Society, a harmless eccentric, whose interview overran before Thought for the Day. Small slips, barely noticeable by the average listener, but they had earned a raised eyebrow from his co-presenter Jim Naughtie, whose own infringements of style were confined to excessively verbose questions. As broadcasts went, it wasn’t so bad. It was what went on afterwards that rankled. Crispin Doddeswell, one of the youthful human resources managers who now seemed to infest the skirting boards of the BBC like woodlice in an old house, had dropped a broad hint that they wanted Wyrecliffe to move from Today.

  ‘Where to?’ Perry said. ‘If it was Antiques Roadshow, then you’d know your career was buggered.’

  ‘No. It was The Moral Maze.’

  ‘Well, not so bad. It requires real gravitas and authority, and it’s still on the Home Service,’ Perry said, using the pre-1967 name for Radio Four as a badge of his crusty rebelliousness.

  ‘But Geoff, I’m a journalist. I’m already fed up with yah-boo Westminster political debate, the latest survey on NHS waiting times, and whether bloody oily fish is good for you or not. It’s parochial claptrap. There are real issues out there, in Africa, in the Middle East, and they’re not being covered.’

  ‘Is this a long-delayed mid-life crisis?’ Perry asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ Wyrecliffe laughed.

  ‘Still, best cure is to get out in the field. Go back to the Middle East.’

  ‘Fat chance. They’d say I was too old, subtext: too bloody bolshie.’

  Perry laughed. ‘Then spread your wings. There’s no end of exciting new satellite channels with a decent journalistic reputation out there that would welcome a man of your experience with open arms. Al Jazeera’s stuffed with ex-Beeb people like you, and there’s Al Arabiya and goodness knows how many others with English language channels. And just think of the reach, the audience, two hundred and eighty million people from Morocco to Muscat, and a well-educated well-off diaspora of another ten million, all hungry for truth.’

  ‘Geoff, you are an inspiration.’

  ‘You’d never regret it, Chris,’ said Perry. ‘You only get one life.’

  * * *

  London

  October 2009

  It was pouring with rain as Wyrecliffe emerged from the train. Hunched under his umbrella as he climbed the leaf-mulched stairs from the platform he cursed the BBC bean counters who had decided a month ago that he and the other Today presenters were no longer worth the cost of a car to get home. ‘Train services’ the HR letter had stated, ‘are actually quicker at that time of day than a taxi, and less crowded than during peak times. The Trust has decided as part of its licence fee rationalisation strategy that such high profile expenditure is no longer justified.’ The finance manager for news had made it plain over a miserable canteen lunch with the Today team that after the revelations about expense fiddling by MPs and the fees the BBC pays for luminaries such as Jonathan Ross, that no such hostages to the Daily Mail would be available. Definitely time to move on to pastures new, Wyrecliffe decided.

  It was a good fifteen-minute walk home from the station, so Wyrecliffe poked his nose into the smoke-filled office of ABC Cabs. Soon he was squeezing himself into the velour-covered seats of an aged Nissan whose dangling pine-scented air freshener was no match for the ingrained fug of cigarettes and sweat.

  ‘Hello Mr Chris. Home is it?’ asked Safraz, the Iraqi-born driver who had become Wyrecliffe’s defacto confidante for the last few weeks. ‘Heard you on the radio this morning. Always giving trouble to ministers!’

  ‘Yes, well they do ask for it,’ Wyrecliffe said absentmindedly as he checked his iPhone for e-mails. There was an e-mail from Taseena.

  Hello Chris,

  Long time no see. Hope you are well and life is treating you kindly. Delighted to get your message. That really came out of the blue! I am in London for a few days and before I fly out on Friday I’d like to buy the famous radio presenter a lunch. I’ll ring you and we can fix a time.

  Kisses

  Tas

  He read and re-read the e-mail, his heart thumping. The last
time they had been in contact was nearly two decades ago, and she had brusquely shrugged off his attempt to meet her again. This time he had an excuse in his initial e-mail of looking for a job with Arab Satellite Broadcasting, where she was recently appointed head of news.

  The cab had already arrived outside his house, but he asked Safraz to wait a moment. Wyrecliffe carefully tapped out an affirmative but business-like reply, re-reading it twice to remove any signs of excessive enthusiasm. ‘Kisses, Tas’ she had written. He remembered Taseena’s kisses all too well, but reminded himself that she signed off with kisses to everyone from her aunts to her hairdresser. Now, of course, she was long married. A wealthy businessman called Nicolas Christodopoulos who reputedly had a yacht as big as a car ferry, with its own helipad.

  ‘Good news, yes?’ Safraz asked.

  Wyrecliffe grinned. ‘You could say that!’

  He barely noticed the rain as he sauntered into the house.

  * * *

  London

  October 2009

  Black leather gloves resting on the window ledge of the apartment, he stared out at the London morning rain. The window, closed against the cold that he couldn’t stand, held rivulets which bumped, halted, combined and then sped again, working their way down the cool glass. If this rain wasn’t so cold, he would love to be out, in the green of the park and to feel its life-giving stream on his skin. Until he came to this country, Rifat had never experienced such frequent rain, nor the grumblings that it brought to the peculiar British people. No one back in Medina would ever complain about rain. Down in Curzon Street the traffic was jammed again. The apartment, backing on to the Saudi Embassy and one of the perks of his father being a diplomat there, had provided the perfect base for what he had to do in London. Now, after six months of hard investigative work, Rifat had got the results he wanted. Information that confirmed what he had long suspected. Still, before he took final vengeance, there were other things he wanted to check.

  He returned to the dining table and the laptop. The trojan software he had installed on Wyrecliffe’s laptop had just sent him its daily update. The illicit software, invisible to the victim, had stored the keystrokes that the BBC journalist made, and monitoring which programs he was using Rifat had already found the passwords into the BBC’s secure internal messaging system.