Empire State

by Henry Porter

  ‘And because his plane was late, it worked even better than they had planned,’ she said.

  Harland leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. ‘That means Sammi Loz is the planner, or at least one of the planners. It’s odd that Teckman hadn’t sussed all this by now.’

  ‘He couldn’t, because he didn’t know of the corrupt relationship between Admiral Norquist and Sammi Loz. Only we knew this.’

  ‘Right, but he suspected something, because he asked me to watch Loz.’ He paused. ‘That’s who I have been with.’

  ‘With Loz!’ She was shocked. ‘Our people are looking for him all over. Where is he? You must tell me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You have to.’

  ‘I can’t, because you will wade in and others may be killed.’

  ‘But he’s in British hands?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I will have to tell my people that immediately. For God’s sake, why didn’t you say this before?’

  ‘Operational security,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘I needn’t have told you at all, Eva.’

  ‘But don’t you see, we are working on this together now. There are things that only we can put together.’

  ‘Naturally that idea pleases me, but forgive me if I have a jaundiced view of your motives, Eva. I know where your loyalties lie - with your mother and Mossad. I come pretty well down the list after those two.’

  She lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke. ‘I can’t deny you’re right. But this isn’t a question of loyalty. This is about collaboration for a mutual benefit.’

  ‘That sounds like a phrase from the communist era. Anyway, I’m out of this. I will tell Teckman what I’ve learned from you, but then I’m going to join the Secretary-General and go back to my work.’

  ‘Talking to Hamas?’

  ‘No, acting as a special adviser to Jaidi.’

  ‘Who is another patient of Dr Loz’s,’ she said tartly. ‘Does he receive home visits like Norquist did?’

  ‘You are well informed,’ said Harland. Then he told her about his own back problem and Sammi Loz’s skills, neither of which seemed to interest her much.

  ‘Will he be tried in Britain?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘But there is information that he has been arrested. Do the Americans know? They are looking for him too.’

  ‘That’s a rather sensitive point. I don’t think anyone knows we’ve got him.’

  She looked puzzled. ‘How come?’

  ‘He’s not under formal arrest.’

  ‘You mean you don’t have him?’

  ‘I’m not completely up to speed with the situation,’ said Harland.

  She pulled a cell phone from her shoulder bag and got up. ‘I have to report on this. I am sorry, it is too important to wait.’

  She went a little distance off into the sand and made her call. Harland’s eyes flicked between her back and two men who had sat down in the shadows between the pool and the rear of the hotel’s lobby. As he watched her he decided he still loved her, or rather needed her, but outweighing this was her propensity to hurt him, cut him out of her life. She had done it twice before and even if she came back when her mother passed on, there was no question in his mind that she would do it again. She was pathologically elusive.

  When she returned he said, ‘Were they pleased? Was it worth the trip?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Thank you for this, Bobby.’

  ‘Well, at least you didn’t have to sleep with me to get the information.’

  ‘That’s beneath you.’

  Harland felt a guilty satisfaction that he could still hurt her. ‘That’s the old game, isn’t it? That’s what you were doing when we first met in Rome. The beautiful swallow from the East ensnaring all those tired officials and politicians.’

  She gazed at him with the familiar look of defiance. ‘Fuck you, Bobby.’

  ‘Okay, okay. I’m sorry. But you should know how much I’ve missed you. Really, you should know that. I realise it’s over but you bloody well could have told me why you were leaving, helped me understand.’

  She lowered her eyes and drew a circle in the sand with her shoe. ‘You’re right. It was cruel of me. But I thought it was the best way.’

  He glanced back to the hotel. ‘You see we have company here. I saw them at the airport - Syrian or Lebanese footpads.’

  ‘No, they’re with me.’

  ‘You travel with a bodyguard?’

  ‘In Lebanon, yes. It’s still a dangerous place. People go missing.’

  ‘So you’re not staying here?’

  ‘No, I have to return. It is not easy to travel from here to Israel. I want to be back as early as I can for my mother’s sake.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, getting up. ‘So it’s goodbye?’

  ‘Yes.’ She handed him a card. ‘You may need to call me. This number will reach me wherever I am. I think we will need to be talking about this again.’ Her flawless English was suddenly tinged with the Czech accent he once loved to hear.

  ‘I’m not working that beat any more. I’m out of this business. ’

  ‘If you say so.’ She held out her hand.

  He took it, drew her to him and kissed her on the cheek. ‘That’s it then,’ he said.

  ‘We will talk. Sooner than you think.’

  He let her go and she walked away towards the three men.

  Harland took out his own cell phone and dialled the number on the card she had just given him. He saw her answer. ‘You didn’t take my mobile number,’ he said, and gave it to her.

  When she had disappeared into the hotel he made his own call - to Sir Robin Teckman.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Herrick arrived back in London from Africa with Philip Sarre and Joe Lapping three days after the attack. On the night the missiles struck, Sarre and Lapping took her to a desert airstrip about seventy miles from the island. Five hours later they were picked up by a Cessna Titan and flown to Khartoum, where Herrick was treated for her cuts and bruises. They remained there for nearly three days while their passports were equipped with registration stamps and visas to make it seem that they had been in Sudan for over a week. Then they took a flight to Frankfurt and finally one to Heathrow, landing at midday on Sunday. Herrick was never so pleased to see the orderly patchwork of Surrey and Kent appear through the plane window.

  At home she listened to her messages, then took a pile of newspapers into the tiny south-facing garden with a jug of lime juice and returned calls to her father, Harland and Dolph. Munroe was overjoyed to hear she was back. He knew better than to ask what had happened after he left Cairo, and instead pressed her to make plans for a trip to the west of Scotland in late July. Neither Dolph nor Harland answered their phones. There was one other call, from a Dr Leonard Jay. She didn’t recognise his name or the number he’d left, but called the cell phone anyway and left a message.

  She browsed through the Sundays, trying to keep a sense of failure and deflation at bay. It was difficult. Karim Khan was dead. Sarre had seen a body in the burning ruins of the villa which was almost certainly Khan’s. The body was quite cold and rigor mortis had already set in, which made them suspect that he had not been killed by the missile but had been dead for some time before the strike. There was only one conclusion. Sammi Loz had ended the life of his friend, either by suffocation or with an injection of a lethal combination of drugs from the medical kit.

  Khan’s death shocked Herrick, because she had calculated that one thing she could rely on was Loz’s love for Khan. However vain and ruthless he appeared to her, this had seemed to be a constant in his life. But plainly he had decided to leave the island, and knew that he could neither take Khan with him nor risk leaving him to be questioned further.

  But had Loz died after killing Khan? Sarre and Lapping spent as long as they dared in the ruins of the bath-house trying to see if anyone was st
ill trapped below the rubble. Sarre emerged and offered the theory that only the rock-solid bath had saved Isis, and unless Loz had been in it with her he would certainly have perished beneath the tons of rubble. Herrick could not remember the slightest sound or movement to indicate that he had survived.

  And the attack, coming out of the night with such demonic force. Why? The motives still baffled her, although she knew after receiving an oblique call from the Chief on Sarre’s cell phone in Khartoum, that it had probably been her fault. The satellite phone she’d left plugged into the computer up in the turret had for some reason kept dialling out, dropping the connection and then dialling again. It seemed likely that the Americans, already monitoring the communications coming from the island, had picked up the endlessly repeated signal and used it as a homing device for the first missile. This meant the CIA was aware that Khan and Loz were on the island, which in turn meant that they had been decoding the traffic both ways. They must also have known that a British intelligence officer was responsible for sending those signals, but that consideration had been overridden by the need to eliminate Khan and maybe Loz too. At the back of her mind she wondered if the CIA station in Djibouti, which would have controlled the Predator, was in possession of entirely accurate information.

  She lay dozing in the sun, running through it all and trying to focus on what was left in the ruins of the attack. Khan was gone. Loz was probably dead. However, she was still certain that a third person existed, a man whom both Khan and Loz had met in Bosnia and then subsequently in Afghanistan.

  She picked up her cell phone and called Dolph again, who answered on the first ring.

  ‘Welcome back, Isis,’ he said, on hearing her voice. ‘By Christ, we were all relieved when we heard you were okay.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Look, I need to ask you something. A couple of weeks back you mentioned some photographs from Bosnia. You had an idea that there was a photographer on the front line where Loz and Khan were serving. Am I imagining it or did you actually say that? I was half-expecting you to send me some material by email.’

  ‘That’s right, but I never got hold of him.’

  ‘Can you trace him and see if he is willing to empty his archives for us? Photographers keep everything, and he might just have what I’m looking for.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And there was a French journalist who covered the siege of Sarajevo - I think you said she now works for Nato. Can you get hold of her too? It’s important.’

  ‘I thought you were retired from this inquiry.’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard.’

  ‘Yeh, I can’t imagine that Vigo and Spelling missed out on the full story of what happened. I mean, it doesn’t look good for the people who went on the pyramids package tour.’

  ‘Thanks for the encouragement. I was acting on the Chief ’s orders throughout. You know that.’

  ‘The former Chief ’s orders. He’s been airbrushed from the official history. He left on Friday, although he’s not actually due to leave until Wednesday of this week.’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘But I’ll stand by you all the way.’

  ‘Somehow that doesn’t reassure me in the way it’s meant to.’

  ‘Seriously, Isis, you have my support, if it counts for anything. Look, I’d better go before you give me something else to do. We’ll speak tomorrow when I know about the photographer and the French hackette.’

  ‘Thanks Dolph, you’re a good friend.’

  The moment she hung up her phone rang again, and she answered to Harland, who asked, ‘Can you do dinner tomorrow? I’ll be at Brown’s Hotel, Albermarle Street. We’ll speak then.’

  She managed to say yes before he hung up.

  Monday morning came early with a summons from Vauxhall Cross. Spelling wanted to see her in the Chief ’s office no later than eight-thirty.

  She took a cab into London. It was again a beautiful day, and as they drove through Kensington Gardens she suddenly felt a calm resignation about what was going to happen. If she was to be expelled from the Service under a cloud, so what? A summer in Scotland beckoned and then she’d find a job in the autumn and begin to lead a normal life, without having to allow for the possibility that every call she made was being listened to. There was nothing Vigo or Spelling or any of the other whey-faced bureaucrats could do to her, and she felt good about that.

  As the taxi crept through the rush-hour traffic down Vauxhall Bridge Road towards SIS headquarters, her phone rang again.

  ‘Hello, it’s Leonard Jay.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘Dr Jay from Oxford!’

  ‘Oh yes. Do you have any results for me?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m ringing about,’ he said huffily. ‘I was concerned to get them to you as soon as possible since you did sign up for the priority service and we have already received payment. I would have sent them by post, but you specifically instructed us to convey the results of the analysis to you personally by phone.’

  ‘Absolutely right. What are the results?’

  ‘Well, it was difficult with the first sample because while there was a preponderance of material from one individual - ninety per cent of the scales of skin and the hairs came from that person - there were traces of other people too. So we made the assumption that it was this person who interested you and obtained a clear picture of his genetic profile.’ He drew breath. ‘Now the second sample, which reached us about ten days ago, was from one person. There was no contamination to contend with and we had—’

  ‘And?’ she said impatiently.

  ‘To answer the question in your letter, these two samples are from different people.’

  ‘Are you certain about that?’

  ‘As certain as I can be about anything. We do a lot of forensic work, Ms Herrick, and we applied the same rigorous standards to your samples as we do to evidence for a criminal case. These are two different people. I am absolutely sure of it. I had a slight worry that sample B, that is the second one you sent me, might be matched against some of the minority material in the first sample. But we found B did not match any of the traces in A. There is no doubt about this.’

  Herrick pressed a finger in her ear as the cab roared forward to make the lights on Vauxhall Bridge, and asked if the results could be couriered to London.

  Dr Jay said that would be no problem.

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell from either sample?’ she asked.

  ‘As a matter of fact there is. Both are male and both come from Mediterranean stock.’

  ‘You can say that for certain?’

  ‘Yes, recent advances mean we can show that on the Y chromosome of both men there is a common mutation present that originally appeared in the peoples of the Middle East. Indeed this marker has been very useful in the study of ancient migration patterns. There is still a distinction to be found in the character of the Y chromosome between the men of northern and southern Europe.’

  ‘So you can assert that neither sample comes from, say Anglo-Saxon or Indian men.’

  ‘Well, not categorically, but you might conclude that the two were from roughly similar genetic stock.’

  ‘You might be able to say they were Arabs, for instance?’

  ‘Yes, you could certainly argue that.’

  The cab pulled up a little distance from the main entrance of SIS and Herrick asked the cab driver to wait while she finished her conversation.

  ‘But to be sure,’ she said, ‘you would have to do the test again with new samples, is that right?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s much point. As long as you are not proposing to take this to a court of law, I think we’re on pretty safe ground.’

  She gave him an address in central London used by SIS as a letter-box and then hung up.

  The Chief ’s office had clearly suffered an unceremonious exorcism. Propped against the wall outside were Sir Robin Teckman’s library of books about the Soviet Union and th
e Middle East, his family photographs and his collection of landscapes by Cavendish Morton. On the other side of the entrance was some rugby memorabilia that she recognised from Spelling’s office, and a new widescreen TV.

  After a few minutes in the corridor, Spelling’s assistant told her to go in. Vigo and Spelling were sitting on one side of the maple veneer conference table that had also migrated from Spelling’s office over the weekend. Vigo indicated that she should take a chair opposite them. Spelling did not look her way, but it was already plain to her that the battlefield general was glorying in his new power and the bold decisiveness that was expected of him.