Present Danger

by Stella Rimington

  ‘The derringer is very appealing, but—’

  ‘But?’ asked Milraud with a knowing smile. ‘I can move on the price to fifteen thousand, but no more, I am afraid. One reaches a point …’ he gave a vague movement of his hands.

  They were in the back office again, and small talk had been kept to a minimum. Milraud wore a tie today, and a suitcase in the corner suggested he would leave for the airport immediately after seeing Dave.

  ‘I understand,’ Dave said. ‘The price is not the issue.’

  ‘Ah. Then if I may ask, what is your position? Do you wish to buy?’

  Dave hesitated. It crossed his mind that he should have found out more about the man before he embarked on a recruitment approach. But then ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’, he said to himself. Milraud hadn’t exactly thrown him out of the shop yesterday when he’d mentioned modern weapons. So he said, ‘Perhaps other things might be included too.’

  The Frenchman looked thoughtfully at him. He raised his eyebrows a fraction. ‘Well, of course, Mr Willis, I deal in a wide range of weapons. But what have you in mind? I assume we are no longer talking about derringers?’

  ‘No. Modern weapons as well.’

  Milraud seemed to consider this, clasping both hands, elbows on the desk in front of him. ‘It’s conceivable. What kinds of weapons?’

  ‘All kinds. Automatic weapons. Handguns and larger items. Possibly associated ordnance too. Grenades, mortars, RPGs.’

  Milraud narrowed his eyes, and his hand wandered beneath the edge of the desk top; Dave tensed. Then it re-emerged, apparently from the upper drawer of the desk. Milraud popped something in his mouth.

  ‘I assume, Mr Willis, that you are talking about legitimate weaponry? I don’t have many enquiries from amateurs for the sort of things you mention. Of course, what my clients want, I try to find, that is true. But I would need to know more about who they are, and their reasons for making such enquiries. Particularly, if I may say so, in this town.’

  Dave was beginning to feel uncomfortable. He had a suspicion that Milraud was playing with him. So he said, ‘To be more precise, what I’m interested in is information. And we may well be talking about sums greater than fifteen thousand pounds.’

  ‘I should think so, mon ami,’ said Milraud, staring levelly at Dave. ‘I should think so.’

  There was a tap on the door. When it opened Mrs Carson stood there. ‘Monsieur Milraud, I beg your pardon for interrupting. But could I see you for a moment please?’ She threw a small smile in Dave’s direction. ‘I’m so sorry. A rather awkward customer in the shop.’

  Dave waved an arm in understanding, relieved at the opportunity to gather his thoughts. As Milraud left the room, he wondered what to say next. Money seemed the object, pure and simple; he supposed in Milraud’s world loyalty was always a function of the highest price. He was pondering his next move when he heard the door behind him open. ‘Everything all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Could not be better, my friend,’ said a foreign-sounding voice. It didn’t belong to Milraud.

  27

  Liz opened the door of her basement flat in Kentish Town with a sinking feeling. After being away for several weeks she wondered what she would find. She remembered how she had left in a hurry without the rigorous clearing up and cleaning that she had intended to do. But apart from a musty smell, a layer of dust and a carton of milk in the fridge that had separated into curds and whey, all was well, though in contrast to the bright flat in Belfast, kept in sparkling order by Mrs Ryan, the place seemed dark and unwelcoming. With all its disadvantages, Liz loved this flat, the first property she had ever owned, but now she found herself wondering whether she would settle happily back here again.

  It was late and she was tired after the day in Paris and the flight home, but her answer phone was flashing demandingly. When she pressed the button to listen to her messages, it informed her that it was full, so telling herself that all the messages would be out of date, she deleted everything without bothering to listen. Then she went to bed.

  She slept uneasily and woke to a grey drizzle and nothing more than black instant coffee for breakfast. Something about being back in her home environment caused her to remember guiltily that she hadn’t phoned her mother for days.

  Susan Carlyle lived in Wiltshire in the gatehouse of a large estate, part of which was now a nursery garden which she managed. Liz’s father had been the estate manager and Liz had been brought up in the beautiful surroundings of Bowerbridge. But her father had died shortly after Liz had come to work in London, and ever since then she had felt responsible for her mother. She had dutifully made the slow, awkward drive from London down to Bowerbridge on Friday evenings at least one weekend a month.

  But in the last year her mother had acquired a boyfriend, or partner (Liz was never quite sure which was the correct term for their relationship), and in spite of Liz’s fears that Edward Treglown would be a pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed ex-military bore whom she would dislike on sight, he had turned out to be an excellent thing. Having been a Ghurkha officer for thirty years he was now director of a charity working to relieve blindness in developing countries – a charming and discreet man who seemed to be making her mother very happy. As well as liking him, Liz was grateful to him for that.

  There was no answer from the phone at the house, but Liz knew that at Edward’s insistence her mother had recently taken the (to her) daring step of acquiring a mobile phone, so she now dialled that.

  Susan Carlyle answered on the third ring. ‘Oh hello, dear.

  How is beautiful Belfast?’

  ‘I hope it’s a lot nicer than here. I’m in London.’

  ‘London? So am I. We came up last night. How long are you here for?’

  ‘I’ll have to fly back later today. I was actually on business in Paris but I’ve had to stop off here on my way back.’

  ‘What an exciting life you lead! Any chance of seeing you before you leave?’

  Liz hadn’t expected her mother to be in London. She thought about her day. ‘Well, I might be able to do a quick lunch. My flight’s not till six.’

  ‘Lunch it is then. I’ll bring Edward too, shall I?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Liz. ‘I’d love to see him,’ she added truthfully.

  At five foot eight inches Liz thought of herself as tall for a woman; even so she was used to having to look up at American men. But Daryl Sulkey was huge, probably a foot taller than Liz and far and away the tallest man she had ever encountered. She could see him waiting for her on the far side of the daunting security post at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. After her bag and jacket had gone through the X-ray machine and she had been patted down by an unsmiling uniformed female guard, she emerged on the other side to a warm welcome. Sulkey’s arms matched the length of the rest of him and ended in enormous hands, on one finger of which he wore a heavy gold ring, set with an appropriately large blue stone. Liz was thankful that the power of his grip, as his right hand engulfed hers, did not match the size of his hands, and she managed to escape with her fingers uncrushed.

  As she followed him to his office, she noticed that he moved his right leg awkwardly and that his right foot was crooked, and she wondered if his size and the length of his back and his legs had affected his movement. She was relieved when he finally sat down behind his desk and she was able to see his face on something like a level with hers for the first time. It was a thinner, more lined face than she had expected from his vast size and she wondered whether whatever caused his awkward walk also gave him pain.

  Liz had been in a number of senior FBI agents’ offices both in America and in London and she recognised the style. It was a very different feel from the set up in the CIA station, in another part of this massive embassy building, where the suspicious and distinctly unwelcoming Andy Bokus presided as head of station. Liz had recently encountered him in the course of another case and had got the impression that female MI5 officers were not his favourite form
of life.

  This office and its occupant had a much warmer feel. Behind the wooden desk crossed flags were draped and on the walls hung framed photographs of Sulkey with the director of the FBI, Sulkey shaking hands with a former president of the United States, and several of Sulkey sitting with a group of equally enormous men, obviously a basketball team.

  ‘I used to play ball,’ said Sulkey, seeing Liz eyeing the photographs, ‘until I got my injury.’

  Liz smiled sympathetically but thinking it more polite not to pursue the question of the injury, she broached the reason for her visit: Seamus Piggott, once known as James Purnell.

  ‘Your colleague Miss Peggy Kinsolving told me on the phone that Purnell is now in Northern Ireland and causing you guys some concern. I’ve only been in London for a few months and I’m afraid I haven’t got round to visiting Belfast yet. It seemed to me that with the peace process having removed the worst of the violence, it wasn’t one of my priorities. But if James Purnell is causing trouble over there then maybe I was wrong.’

  ‘Well,’ said Liz, ‘we’re not entirely sure what he’s up to yet. On the face of it he’s running a perfectly legitimate business, but we’ve had some information from a source recently that Purnell is leading a breakaway group of ex-IRA people who are out to kill police and intelligence officers in Northern Ireland. Our files show that you were the special agent in charge of the investigation in Boston, and when I heard that you were here, it seemed a good opportunity to pick up some background on him – and to ask if you think that our source’s information sounds likely to be true.’

  Wrapping his long fingers around his coffee cup, Sulkey stared down thoughtfully at the dregs and said quietly, ‘Nothing he’d do would surprise me. Let me tell you a bit about him.’

  At first, there was little in what he said that Liz hadn’t already read in Peggy’s memo – the super-bright young Irish-American, specialising in academic subjects that ultimately made him an expert in missile technology. It was an expertise that for a long time was employed in the service of the US government.

  ‘I gather you first came across him through investigating his brother,’ Liz interjected, trying to move things on.

  ‘That’s right. And they couldn’t have been more different.’ Sulkey gave a wry smile. ‘They say America is a melting pot, but sometimes people don’t melt. As my colleague Tommy Birmingham likes to say, part of the Irish community in America has never really left Ireland. They call South Boston ‘Southey’. It’s New England’s Dublin. If you go into some of the bars there – and with your accent I wouldn’t advise it – you’d think the Easter Uprising of 1916 was still being fought.

  ‘Edwin Purnell was James’s younger brother by eight years. Their parents died when Edwin was still quite young and James looked after him. Edwin was an okay student but he dropped out of college and got in with the hard core of the Boston-Irish crowd. Only his brother’s financial support kept his head above water and after a series of dead-end jobs he ended up working for James when James formed his own company.’

  ‘Were they brought up to support the IRA?’

  ‘Not really – that’s the funny thing. Neither of their parents was political but the local Irish culture was political all right, and that’s where Edwin seemed to pick it up. He grew more and more pro-IRA as the years went by.’

  ‘But James was a bit of a firebrand too, I gather,’ said Liz, recalling the file’s account of his anti-Vietnam War activism.

  ‘He was, when he was young,’ said Sulkey, shifting uncomfortably in his seat and stretching out his long legs, ‘but not especially about Ireland. He only got drawn in when Edwin was asked to help smuggle arms for the IRA. By then James’s company was heavily into developing missiles – hand-held, surface-to-air. It was a legitimate business – but it was also just what the IRA was looking for in those days. I don’t think James got involved out of nationalist conviction, so much as for the money and trying to keep his brother from getting caught. If James was the genius, Edwin was the dumbo. James clearly felt the need to look after him.’

  ‘But they got caught.’

  ‘They did, but not because of anything James did – or Edwin for that matter. Somebody in Northern Ireland talked to you guys in MI5. There was enough detail in the information that we knew what was going to be smuggled out – RPGs and SAM missiles – and where it was going from: Gloucester, a fishing town thirty miles north of Boston. We didn’t know the exact timing, but we staked out the harbour and two months later we caught them red-handed.’

  ‘But not James?’

  ‘Nope,’ he shook his head emphatically. ‘He was the obvious source of the stuff, but we couldn’t get evidence that would hold up in court. And in those days, long before 9/11, some of the judges were pretty sympathetic to that kind of activity. If you ask me, he would have taken the fall for his brother if he’d had to – he was that devoted to him – but it was too late: we had Edwin dead to rights. From James’s point of view, there was no point going to prison if it wasn’t going to keep his brother out.’

  Liz said, ‘And then Edwin didn’t come out.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He pursed his lips, musing. ‘It was a freak thing. A kidney infection that was mistreated – I don’t know about standards of medical care in Her Majesty’s prisons, but in a Federal Penitentiary you’re not usually looked after by Dr Kildare.’

  ‘And James?’

  ‘He was devastated. Well, as much as he was capable of feeling emotion. You see, this is a guy who was known as a loner, who has never married, and has no record of close relationships with anybody – male or female. Except his brother. Once his brother was gone, there was nothing to care about except avenging him.’

  Liz said, ‘It makes sense in a strange kind of way.’

  Sulkey nodded and gave a small smile. ‘Yeah. And whether it was in memory of his brother, or because it would give him a better chance to avenge him, James suddenly goes all Irish. He becomes Seamus, moves to Belfast, and from what you tell me, starts to act like a classic IRA hood. I’ve spoken to a lot of people about Purnell over the years and the words they’ve used to describe him were “single-minded”, “ruthless” and “cold-hearted”.’

  Liz suddenly felt a chill run down her spine.

  ‘So if he’s decided to kill a police officer or one of us, he’s going to keep going till he succeeds,’ she said quietly. ‘Or till we catch him,’ she added, ‘and you make that sound difficult.’

  Sulkey gave a grim nod. ‘Let’s just say I never succeeded.’

  Liz looked up at Sulkey’s lined face. ‘Thank you, I think I understand what’s driving him much better now.’

  They stood up together and as they shook hands again Liz said, ‘There’s just one more thing I was wondering about.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Didn’t Purnell also nurse a grudge against the FBI? After all, it’s you who put his brother in the prison where he died. I’d have thought he’d have tried to get his revenge on you chaps first.’

  Sulkey gave a short laugh. ‘Funny you should ask. I think it’s fair to say he had a try.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He tried to kill the officer in charge of the investigation.’

  ‘Was that your colleague Birmingham?’

  Sulkey looked at Liz. ‘No, it was me. Someone tampered with the wheels of my car – I reckon it was Purnell, not that I can prove it. Two of my tyres blew out when I was doing seventy on Interstate Ninety-five.’ He shook his head and looked down at his leg. ‘I was lucky to survive. All I got left with was this limp.’

  28

  It was still raining when Liz came out of the embassy into Grosvenor Square, so she hailed a passing taxi and asked for Vauxhall Bridge. Nowadays pictures of Thames House, MI5’s headquarters on Millbank, appeared on TV every time there was a terrorism story, so she never gave it as her destination. She felt it was uncomfortable if not downright insecure to link herself so closely to th
e intelligence world. It was a sensible precaution she liked to take.

  As the taxi negotiated the morning traffic, she thought over what Daryl Sulkey had said about Piggott. It was a chilling story, and she decided to get Peggy Kinsolving to ring Judith and Dave to let them know that the threat was serious, and that the tipoff that Brown Fox had given them was likely to be true.

  But when she walked into the open-plan office where Peggy had her desk there was no Peggy, just a note waiting for her.

  Sorry to miss you. Got to go out. Hope Sulkey was helpful. Let me know if I can do any more. Lunch next time?

  So Liz walked down the corridor to Charles Wetherby’s room, with a mounting feeling of pleasurable anticipation. In the outer office Wetherby’s secretary greeted her warmly. ‘I didn’t know you were in town.’

  ‘I didn’t know I was coming myself until yesterday. Is Charles in?’

  ‘Yes, he is. Let me just check if he’s free; I know he’d like to see you.’

  She went into Charles’s office, then a moment later came out, leaving the door open. ‘Go on in.’

  Liz went in eagerly but with slight apprehension, too. She hadn’t seen him since Joanne’s funeral. How would he be holding up?

  ‘Liz. It’s good to see you,’ said Charles, coming out from behind his desk. He looked spruce in a dark suit and cheerful red tie. There was a bounce to his step, and his face had colour in it again.

  He gave her a peck on both cheeks and motioned her to sit down. ‘I didn’t know you were coming over. What brings you here?’

  ‘I had to see the FBI legat first thing. We’ve got an interesting case – an Irish-American who’s moved to Belfast. He’s set up a dodgy-looking business and surrounded himself with ex-IRA hardliners. At first we thought he was simply running a criminal racket but now it looks as though he’s planning some serious attacks.’