Dead Line

by Stella Rimington

  ‘You can say that again. Andy got caught with his pants down all right.’ Miles took a careful sip of his coffee, looking thoughtful. ‘The thing is, I’ve never understood what this threat to the conference is supposed to be about. These two men, Veshara and Marcham, don’t strike me as the types to do anything significant. A businessman and a journalist.’

  ‘Though both had connections with Mossad.’ Liz had briefed Miles already about Veshara’s admission that he had reported rocket positions to the Israelis. Now she explained Marcham’s links to Kollek - how she had only belatedly realised the Israeli in the surveillance photograph was the same man she’d seen scaling Marcham’s garden wall.

  ‘Okay, so they both gathered information for the Israelis,’ said Miles when she’d finished. ‘But I can’t picture either of them actually taking any action. And their Mossad links don’t explain why they’d be working to disrupt the peace conference. They wouldn’t be doing that on Israel’s behalf, surely. There’s no reason to think the Israelis want to disrupt the thing? Why should they? They’re part of it.’

  ‘Search me. I don’t see it, either,’ Liz admitted.

  ‘You know, when we were told about this threat we didn’t have any idea where this information was coming from. Fane wouldn’t tell us,’ he complained. ‘Is he always that buttoned up?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ said Liz. ‘Need to know, is written on his heart.’

  Bookhaven sighed. ‘That causes problems, believe me.’

  You can say that again, thought Liz, keenly aware of the drawbacks to Fane’s perpetual secretiveness. Something Brookhaven had just said was niggling her, but she wasn’t sure what it was. So she filed this part of the conversation away in the back of her mind, promising herself to come back to it when she was alone.

  ‘What do you know about Kollek?’ said Liz casually. She didn’t want to sound too interested in the man, or give any indication that he was still being watched by A4.

  ‘Not much. And there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of my ever meeting him.’

  ‘Bokus wants him to himself?’

  ‘Yes, though in fairness, that’s really because of Kollek - the secrecy has been at his insistence as much as ours. Not that I can blame him. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes if Mossad ever found out he was talking to us.’

  ‘I wonder about his motivation,’ said Liz, remembering what Bokus had said in their meeting with Oakes and Wetherby - that Kollek felt only America could make peace in the Middle East, and therefore needed to know what Israel was thinking. But it was hard to see how Kollek was doing that in practice. The dribs and drabs of intelligence she had spent the morning reviewing with Miles wouldn’t be of significant help to any country trying to find a solution to the Middle East crisis.

  Miles seemed to read her thoughts, for he said, ‘Maybe he’s just got an inflated sense of his own importance. God knows, nothing you or I read justifies all this hush-hush business. He could be just another egomaniac; there’re enough of them in this business.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘I’d better be going.’ They put their trays back and left the Tate by its side entrance.

  ‘How long will you be away?’ asked Liz as they reached the corner with the Embankment.

  ‘Ten days or so. But I’m not going until next week.’

  She nodded. ‘It might be a good idea to touch base before you go.’

  ‘Maybe you’d like to have dinner one night?’ he asked.

  Miles looked slightly awkward, more like a teenager than a rising star of the CIA. There was something boyish about him, thought Liz. It was attractive in some ways, enormously preferable to the man-of-the-world cockiness of Bruno Mackay. Yet once again Miles was mixing business and pleasure in a way Liz found discomfiting. She wished he wouldn’t.

  So she said, ‘I’m a bit tied up until after the conference.’ Miles could not contain a look of disappointment, so she added more brightly, ‘Let’s meet up when you’re back from Damascus. Give me a ring at home.’

  Liz turned and walked along the river towards Thames House, thinking about their conversation. It was the business side of it that held her attention. The Mossad involvement in all this continued to puzzle her: again and again that connection came back to one person, Danny Kollek.

  She wondered how to find out more about him. I’ll put Peggy Kinsolving onto it, she thought - she’ll rootle out whatever there is to find. And I should check again with Sophie Margolis, and see if Hannah’s been in touch with Kollek recently.

  All that seemed clear enough, but something was still bothering her. Then she stopped dead on the pavement. Of course, she saw what it was.

  The attack on Liz, and the murder of Fane’s Syrian source in Cyprus, must mean that someone had leaked the fact that the British knew of the threat to the conference. Who knew about the threat? Only a few people in MI5 and MI6 and Miles and Bokus. At first she had thought that they were prime suspects - particularly Bokus, once A4 had photographed him meeting Kollek.

  And even when Tyrus Oakes had admitted that Bokus was running Kollek, rather than, as they had first suspected, the other way round, Charles had continued to suspect that the CIA man might have unintentionally revealed more than he should have done to Danny Kollek.

  But there was a problem with this scenario, Liz suddenly realised. Even if Bokus had talked too freely, that couldn’t explain the Syrians’ discovery of a double agent in their midst. Geoffrey Fane had disguised the source of the original information - from everybody. And as Miles had just said, neither he nor Bokus had had any idea where the intelligence came from. It could have been any one of a number of countries or - Liz thought of Hamas and Hezbollah -political organisations. If Bokus had told Kollek about the threat to the peace conference, then even if Mossad had wanted to leak it back to its originating source, they wouldn’t have known who to leak it to. They couldn’t have spilt the beans when they didn’t even know whose beans they would be spilling.

  So how on earth had the Syrians learned about the double agent in Cyprus?

  She saw Thames House ahead of her, its stone pale in the midday sun. The questions of this case were starting to seem maddeningly circular; Liz had an sense that ultimately there would be something simple - a person, she was sure of that - linking them all together. Yet each time she peered into the mystery she saw only a hall of mirrors, reflecting something so far unrecognisable.

  FORTY-ONE

  Dougal had been warned by the hotel manager that Israelis could be rude. But the three he was showing around Gleneagles that morning were perfectly polite - if uncommunicative. They spoke to each other in Hebrew, and to Dougal barely at all.

  The three Israelis were not staying in the hotel; they had taken one of the Glenmor timeshare houses, where their country’s delegation would also be staying during the peace conference. Normally the manager himself would have been escorting them, but he had even bigger fish to fry: the Secret Service had arrived the night before, and were already combing the hotel, where the American President would be staying.

  The timeshares were pleasant, high-gabled houses, laid out in a meandering line around a pond and little stream just across a road behind the hotel grounds. When Dougal had collected the three visitors first thing that morning, they had no complaints about the accommodation.

  The woman in this trio, Naomi, was about forty, a little haggard-looking, and perpetually talking on her mobile phone. She seemed to be consulting her superiors in London or Tel Aviv about every detail, from the way each room should be arranged to the food and kitchen utensils required to make two dozen kosher breakfasts. The younger of the two men, Oskar, seemed to be her assistant; he deferred to Naomi in any discussion, and agreed with everything she said.

  It was the other man whom Dougal found unsettling. He kept himself aloof, and spoke to Dougal only when he had a question. He didn’t say much to Naomi or Oskar either, and Dougal had the distinct impression that the other two were a little nervous of the
man. They called him Danny.

  During the morning they focused on finalising domestic arrangements, inspecting each of the houses assigned to the Israeli delegation, the catering arrangements for those who might want to cook for themselves, and a tour of the hotel - Dougal showing them the restaurants, the pool and the small arcade of shops.

  Dougal left them to themselves as they lunched, claiming he had to check in with the office - it wasn’t true, but he needed a break, especially from the dark-haired Danny, whose blank eyes Dougal found unnerving.

  When they reconvened after lunch, on the gravel drive by the hotel entrance, Dougal sensed that something had been decided. Naomi was no longer on the phone, and she hung back as Danny stepped forward.

  The Israeli said, ‘On the evening before the conference begins, we are planning to give a dinner for one of the delegations. We think the golf club restaurant would make a nice venue.’

  Dougal nodded. ‘That can be arranged. The view of the hills is grand. Would you be wanting to go down there now and look at it?’

  ‘Later,’ said Danny, a little curtly. Dougal wondered if he’d been in the military, but then, hadn’t all Israelis? ‘We also want to provide some entertainment for our guests. Something local to this region that they might enjoy.’

  ‘Would you like live music?’ He could rustle up some pipers in kilts to give an ‘authentic’ Scottish flavour to the entertainment.

  But Danny shook his head. ‘No, no music. We’d like something before the dinner. Something outside.’

  ‘Outside? The weather can be up and down, you know, especially now it’s autumn.’ And chilly, thought Dougal.

  ‘We’ll take the chance. Let’s go to the falconry centre,’ Danny said. The preoccupied man of the morning had given way to the leader, somebody who knew what he wanted. It was clear now that Danny was in charge of this curious trio.

  ‘They say all Arabs like birds of prey,’ Naomi said.

  ‘Is it Arabs you’ll be entertaining?’ asked Dougal as they stood waiting for Danny to finish his conversation with the head of the falconry centre. They had been there for over an hour; Dougal had had to struggle to look interested as Danny asked the falconry man another of his countless questions. How much did the birds weigh? Did their transmitter bother them? Would they mind being handled by strangers? This assuming the guests of the Israelis would want to have a go themselves.

  ‘Actually, I’m not supposed to say,’ said Naomi, looking guiltily towards Danny, who fortunately was listening intently to the falcon man. But Dougal noted that she had already nodded.

  At last Danny was finished. He spoke sharply to Naomi and Oskar in Hebrew. Turning to Dougal, he said, ‘Now we need to look at the golf club restaurant. But on the way, let’s stop at the gun dog school.’

  Danny strode confidently towards the school, and Dougal followed with Naomi and Oskar. He was beginning to feel like a spare part. You’d think he knew this place better than I do, thought Dougal crossly.

  They stood outside a large fenced compound as a dozen black Labradors, cooped up inside the fence, jumped around friskily. The handler, a smiling woman with a mop of blond curly hair, came out to meet them. Danny took her to one side, talking earnestly to her, and Dougal could hear only snatches of their conversation. A retrieval display… duck decoys… no problem.

  Gradually it dawned on Dougal that the Israeli wanted the dogs to be part of the entertainment he was planning for the evening before the conference began. He was surprised. In his experience, Arabs didn’t like dogs, regarding them as barely a step up from vermin.

  The handler led one of the Labradors out of the pen on a lead, and walked to the kennel building, where she left the dog tied to a post and went inside, emerging a minute later carrying a couple of decoys and a large rag. Behind her another dog followed obediently, without a lead. It was bigger than the Labradors, and short-haired, with a rich chocolate coat and a white-and-brown speckled face.

  ‘This is Kreuzer,’ the handler said, walking towards the edge of the adjacent lawn, a wide grassy square of several acres, dotted by the small greens and sand bunkers of the pitch and putt golf course. ‘He’s a German pointer. Give him one smell of something and he’ll find it half a mile away.’

  She stopped and called the pointer to her. Kreuzer came up and sat obediently, his keen face looking up awaiting his orders. The handler took the rag she held in one hand and passed it once, then twice, in front of Kreuzer’s nose. She stood back, then handed the rag to Oskar, Naomi’s sidekick. ‘If you go across the field I’ll distract the dog.’ She pointed towards the distant trees across the expanse of lawn. ‘Hide it wherever you like.’

  As Oskar set out, she turned around and faced the kennel building in the opposite direction. Kreuzer obediently did the same. Danny stood beside her and they talked for a minute, while Dougal wondered what was going on. He looked across to the trees and saw Oskar go round a clump of rhododendrons then emerge again, no longer holding the rag.

  The handler turned around as Oskar rejoined them. ‘Now watch this,’ she said, and gave a sharp high whistle. At once the German pointer began moving agitatedly in circles, its nose held high in the air as it sniffed carefully. Suddenly it turned and raced at high speed across the grass, heading straight for the shrubs where Oskar had been. The dog charged right into the middle of the dark foliage and was lost from sight; when it came out seconds later, it had the rag in its mouth.

  ‘Bravo!’ shouted Naomi, as the dog trotted back with its find.

  The handler nodded with satisfaction. ‘Good enough?’ she asked Danny, who was watching the dog intently.

  ‘Let’s try the decoys,’ Danny said, pointing with one arm in the direction of the small lake near the entrance drive.

  ‘Okay,’ said the handler. ‘I’ll just get the Labrador.’ As she walked off, Danny looked at Dougal. ‘There is no need for you to stay with us,’ he declared.

  ‘Oh,’ said Dougal, taken aback. ‘I’ll be getting back then. You know how to find me if you need me.’

  Danny started towards the lake before he could even shake his hand. Graceless kind of bloke, thought Dougal, as he walked back to the hotel and his office. I don’t mind if I never see him again.

  But he did, that very evening, as Dougal drove home to the small grace and favour cottage he lived in on a neighbouring estate. He had just left the hotel grounds and was passing the equestrian centre when he saw the Israeli, under the cover of some trees. He was talking urgently to a girl - a pretty girl with strawberry blond hair who was certainly not haggard-looking Naomi from the delegation. There was something about the look on the Israeli’s face that made it obvious he knew this girl; he wasn’t just casually saying hello. As he drove past, Dougal saw the girl’s face in his headlights, only fleetingly, but enough to recognise her at once - it was one of the waitresses in the hotel’s Italian restaurant. A foreign girl, very attractive. Janice? Something like that. Danny, you sly bastard, thought Dougal, not without a note of envy.

  FORTY-TWO

  She had been a forward kind of girl ever since she was small. Her father had died when she was four, and after that it had been her mother and little Jana all on their own. Her mother had told her you get nowhere by being shy, and from an early age she had been comfortable with adults - especially men, for it was men she mainly met. She’d started helping in the Moravian tavern where her mother worked almost as soon as she could read; taking her cue from her mother, she would talk easily with the customers, tease them when they wanted to be teased, play coquette when they wanted her to be a Shirley Temple. She’d even imitate the saucy way her mother spoke to Karl, the tavern owner, though it wasn’t until she was nearly twelve that she realised her mother’s duties included more than being a barmaid.

  Moravia and her home town seemed a million miles away now. Her mother had been bitter when she’d told her that she was off to work in the West. ‘You can take the girl out of Ostrava,’ she’d warned, ‘but never Ost
rava out of the girl. You will be back.’

  Fat chance, thought Jana now, comparing the opulent surroundings of Gleneagles with her all-too-vivid memories of the smoke-filled, sour beer-soaked confines of the tavern that had been home. She worked hard in the restaurant here, but no harder than she had at home, and the pay was a fortune by Moravian standards; she’d even sent some money to her mother. She was fed well, and she got every seventh day off. Other waitresses complained about the quarters in the staff hostel behind the hotel, but to Jana they seemed positively luxurious.

  True, the social life was a bit limited: the pubs in nearby Auchterarder were not exactly lively or even particularly friendly, especially when the locals heard her foreign accent. The other staff at the hotel were perfectly nice, but she didn’t have much in common with the girls, many of them Poles, and the boys were too young for her taste.

  Not that she was looking for a serious romance. ‘You think you will find a knight in shining armour to sweep you away?’ her mother had demanded. ‘You think that’s what happens to waitresses and chambermaids?’

  Of course she didn’t think that, though funnily enough the knight had appeared. He hadn’t exactly said he was going to sweep her away - but Sammy was a good lover, and he had said they’d see each other again.

  And sure enough, he had texted her that he was coming back. But she was still surprised when she had glimpsed him, walking across the lawn towards the tennis courts that afternoon. She’d been tempted to call out to him, but didn’t when she saw that he was with some others -including young Dougal, who had tried to chat her up that night at the staff’s darts evening. He was sweet and not bad looking, but much too young for her.

  There was a woman with Sammy, but she felt no need to be jealous. She was a real old frump.

  Jana kept her mobile phone on while she served lunch and at three, while she was still clearing up after the late customers, there had been a text message. 6 pm by the equestrian centre. S.

  There was no sign of him on the road outside the equestrian centre and she waited impatiently. Then from a clump of dark fir trees at one side of the building came a low whistle. She moved cautiously towards the trees until she could make out a lean figure standing underneath a branch. Her heart lifted as she realised it was Sammy.