He parked on a wide street and walked, turning into a much narrower side street lined by squat government buildings, concrete blocks mostly, put up in the Sixties with US aid money. They were interspersed with a few more recent constructions built as Yemen began to develop its oil resources. Not that Yemen nowadays showed much sign of being oil-or gas-rich. On the streets, even here in the capital, poverty was rife, and as he walked along Miles reflected that if the Minister’s charity existed there was plenty for it to do.
Inside the Trade Ministry, a guard with a holstered pistol was sitting in a chair in one corner of the entrance hall reading a magazine. He raised his eyes lazily as Miles came in, then resumed reading. A young uniformed woman behind the front desk took his name, consulted a sheet of paper, then waved Miles to follow her. She led him up the stairs to the first floor, into a large open-plan office where a dozen men and women sat typing, and on into a long corridor with dark little offices on either side, occupied by men sitting behind desks covered with piles of papers.
At the end of the corridor she knocked on a large, closed door. A loud voice boomed out in Arabic and the woman opened the door and ushered Miles inside.
Baakrime’s office could have been in a different world. It was roughly forty feet long, lined by picture windows with fabulous views of the mountains. The floors were polished mahogany boards overlaid by a rich sprinkling of fine Persian carpets. Gaudy oil paintings hung on the walls, scenes from the Arabian Nights, featuring scantily draped female figures.
Baakrime came out from behind a large antique desk, his hand extended. He was a diminutive square-shouldered man, with short black hair brushed back in a lacquered wave, and a thick Groucho Marx moustache. ‘It is delightful to meet you, Mr Brookhaven. Your predecessor and I had an excellent relationship,’ he declared. ‘Come, let us make ourselves comfortable.’ He gestured towards a sitting area, where two sofas were adorned by soft cushions covered in coloured damask.
They sat down at right angles to each other. ‘Coffee is coming,’ Baakrime said hospitably. He wore a light grey suit and a white shirt with a canary-coloured tie. A triangle of paisley silk handkerchief peeked out from the breast pocket of his jacket.
‘It’s good of you to see me,’ said Miles. ‘I know you have a full schedule.’
‘Nonsense. I always have time for my friends,’ said Baakrime. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘And you know what they say – if you want to get something done, ask a busy man.’
They chatted for a few minutes inconsequentially. Miles was accustomed to the Arab insistence that all business, however pressing, was prefaced by small talk. The coffee arrived, brought in by a young woman, smartly dressed in Western clothes – a noticeably short skirt and a blouse unbuttoned at the top. Baakrime ogled her legs with unconcealed pleasure and, as she put the tray on the low table and bent down to pour out the coffee, his eyes moved to her cleavage.
When she had left, Baakrime continued chatting idly, asking after the welfare of Miles’s family. When Miles explained that he was unmarried, Baakrime asked after his parents. He moved on to describe the location, ambience and menu of a new restaurant that Miles must try, and recommended two holiday resorts on the Egyptian coast along the Red Sea.
When finally Baakrime paused to sip his coffee, Miles said, ‘I understand that your Department has a role in the import of arms to your country.’
Baakrime stopped sipping but continued to hold his cup to his mouth. He said nothing for a moment, then put the cup on the table, looking all the time at Miles. He said, ‘That is true. It is a trade that interests me greatly. We have, as you know, many threats to our country, both internal and external.’
‘Yes indeed,’ replied Miles. Then, with the instruction from Langley to ‘get on with it’ at the front of his mind, he said, ‘It is also a subject that greatly interests those who sent me to your country.’
Baakrime didn’t reply. Miles hoped that he had picked up the hint he had been offered about who Miles worked for. Then, his eyes slipping away from Miles, Baakrime remarked, ‘These affairs can be a little complicated, but I might be able to help you get started on your work.’
Miles’s heart gave a lurch. Baakrime had recognised the bait. It was time to see if he would swallow it. He said, ‘That would be very much appreciated by my government. You know, data is freely available these days – we in the West with all our computers are positively awash with information. But knowledge is scarce, and can be expensive to find. Don’t you agree?’
Baakrime smiled and nodded. ‘How true that is, my friend.’
Miles ploughed on. ‘My colleague also told me that another interest of yours is the Foundation you have set up to help the homeless in your country. That is such an excellent cause that I am authorised to offer you substantial and regular contributions to help in its work. In fact,’ he said, reaching into his pocket, ‘not knowing what the bank account details for the Foundation are, I have brought our first contribution of ten thousand dollars with me.’ And he put a thick white envelope on the table, thinking that if Langley had got this wrong he was going to look awfully stupid.
But Baakrime rapidly swept up the envelope and stuffed it into his pocket. ‘That is so very kind and much appreciated. The Foundation is helping many people, I am glad to say. But the recent upheavals in my country mean more people are suffering than ever before, and we cannot keep up. We find it is better not to operate through the banks. They are not so reliable always. This’ – he patted his pocket – ‘would be the best way to make your contribution in future. I will ensure the cash gets to where it can best be used.’
You bet, thought Miles, but he merely smiled and nodded.
Baakrime said, ‘In return for your generosity to my Foundation, you must tell me how I can best help you.’
Miles decided to strike while the iron was hot. ‘We know that Yemen is one of the countries through which weapons are reaching rebel groups. And not just legitimate rebels – but others fighting with them, outsiders. Jihadis, extremists, al-Qaeda supporters.’
Baakrime smiled and shrugged but said nothing.
‘What we want to know is the sources of those weapons and in particular any sources in Europe or the United States.’
Baakrime’s manner changed from the wily to the businesslike. ‘These young men. They think they are all Osama Bin Ladens. They are crude and cruel and defame the name of Islam. They are indeed a threat to us all. I will do what I can to help you, my friend. Come back in one week and I will see what I can find out.’
Chapter 4
A raw day. Viewed from the window of Liz’s office, the Thames looked battleship-grey, sprinkled with the frothy white lines of waves stirred up by the October wind. To Liz, her skin still brown from her holiday in the Pyrenees, the sun was a faraway memory.
She turned back to the pile of forms on her desk. The Service was blessedly free of much of the bureaucracy that affected the Civil Service, but it strongly believed in annual appraisals of staff, and now that Liz was responsible for managing a team of people, she had to write their performance assessments. She took the task seriously, knowing how important it was to the careers of her team, as well as to the Service itself as a tool for getting the right people in the right jobs. But it was not her favourite pastime. Even though she was now a manager, Liz was still an operational officer at heart. Too much time spent sitting behind her desk made her restless and irritable.
‘That looks like fun.’ Peggy Kinsolving was standing in the doorway.
Liz looked up. ‘I thought you were at the conference.’
‘I am. It’s the lunch break, so I nipped back to check how that surveillance operation is going on.’ Peggy was running an investigation into a group of young men in Camden Town who had just come back from Pakistan.
‘Anything happening?’
‘No. No movement at all so far. I think they’re all still in bed.’
Liz nodded. Peggy had transferred to MI5 from MI6 several years
ago. She had been a diffident, shy girl but a genius at research. She would follow a lead like a bloodhound but if you’d asked her to go out and interview someone she would have panicked and frozen with nerves. But over the years, under Liz’s guidance, she had grown in confidence and now she was running her own operations, and directing a small team. Peggy had become a skilled interviewer, and had discovered a talent for finding out what made people tick, getting underneath their reserves and breaking down their defences.
But though her personality had developed, her appearance had hardly changed from her days as a librarian. She was a little short of medium height, with long brown hair she tied back in a wispy ponytail. Her spectacles, round and brown, seemed to be too big for her face and were forever slipping down her nose. The sight of Peggy pushing back her spectacles was often the preface to a remark that would begin the unravelling of some knotty problem.
‘What’s going on at the conference? Any good?’ Liz asked. It was a Home Office-run conference aimed mainly at regional police forces, and designed to draw their attention to a nationwide growth in gun crime. Little of the agenda had much direct connection with the work of Liz’s team, but she had thought it worthwhile to send someone to register an interest and demonstrate that they were taking their watching brief seriously.
Peggy said, ‘Actually it’s not been too bad. This afternoon might be quite interesting.’
‘Really? What’s happening?’
Peggy seemed to be struggling not to laugh. ‘Well, it was meant to be a keynote address from the Foreign Office. You remember Henry Pennington?’
Liz groaned. She’d crossed swords with Henry Pennington several times over the years. A long lean man with a large nose that dominated his thin face, he was a panicker. Any indication that something might be going wrong caused him to begin rubbing his hands together in a washing motion and breathing heavily. At such times he was liable to make sudden decisions, which on one or two occasions had landed Liz in difficult situations. She never forgot the time he had volunteered her services as an undercover protection officer for a Russian oligarch, almost succeeding in getting her killed in the process.
‘But sadly,’ Peggy went on, ‘Henry’s indisposed. So they’ve put together a panel instead. Some senior officers from the North and the Midlands are going to be talking about their experience of the arms trade. I thought you might be interested.’
Liz thought about this. Her interest was in illegal arms shipments abroad, but there might be something worth hearing and the alternative was the pile of assessment forms on her desk. ‘I think I’ll come along.’
When they arrived at the conference room in the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in Parliament Square the session had already started. The room was three-quarters full and they slipped into seats at one side of a back row. There were three people on the stage, sitting in a semicircle so that Liz could only see two of them clearly. They were discussing the impact of Britain’s gun laws, and Liz recognised one of the speakers – a senior policewoman from Derbyshire, notorious for her impatience with junior officers. The man next to her, who was obviously from the Home Office, was praising the government’s tough stance on firearms as if one of his political masters were in the audience. He contrasted the UK’s ban on handguns with America, where more often than not there didn’t seem to be any gun laws at all. The policewoman from Derbyshire agreed with him that the total ban on handguns in the UK was a great thing.
Suddenly the third member of the panel, who Liz couldn’t see properly, interrupted. ‘Make no mistake, this country has a gun culture too – it’s just invisible to most of us. All the government has really managed to do is drive gun sales further underground. We only hear about them when some drug dealer gets shot in Merseyside. Things have got worse in the last ten years, not better. We need to remember that when we congratulate ourselves on not being like the Americans.’
The bluntness of his remarks would have seemed out of place if the delivery had not been so self-assured, and as it was there was a murmur of assent round the room. The Home Office man looked uncomfortable. Liz sat up and leaned over to try to catch a glimpse of the man’s face. There was something in the voice that was familiar.
Peggy noticed. ‘What is it?’ But Liz put a finger to her lips. The man she couldn’t see properly was still talking.
It couldn’t be, Liz told herself. She could see that the man was dressed in a suit, not a uniform, and from what she could see of him he looked pretty smart for a policeman. The man she was thinking of had always been a bit of a clothes horse.
Then he shifted in his chair and she could see his profile. She recognised the sharp nose and rugged chin. The hair now was thinner than before, but well cut, with only a few flecks of grey. He was still good-looking; whatever you thought of him you had to give him that.
‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ whispered Peggy.
Liz sighed, leaning back in her chair as the Derbyshire woman started up again. ‘It’s not a ghost,’ she said at last. ‘Just somebody I used to know. Though it was a long time ago.’
Chapter 5
Liz had been in MI5 just eighteen months. She had applied on the spur of the moment, in her last year at Bristol University. She had been thinking vaguely and without much enthusiasm that she might stay on at the university to do research when the chance remark of a visiting lecturer had coincided with an intriguing newspaper advertisement for logical, level-headed and decisive people to do important work in the national interest. She had sent in her cv, such as it was, without much hope of any response, and had been amazed to be called for an interview. After that the recruitment process had ground slowly on until, at the end of it all, she’d found herself a member of MI5, Britain’s Security Service.
Although she was still on probation and in the training period, Liz felt settled and comfortable in the Service. Each morning when she left the flat in Holloway that she shared with four other Bristol graduates to take the underground to Thames House, she looked forward to the day.
Even though she’d been at university in a city, she wasn’t really a city girl. She had grown up in the Wiltshire countryside where her father had been the land agent for a large estate. He was dead now and the estate had been broken up after the death of the last owner without an heir, but her mother still lived in the octagonal Gatehouse where Liz had been brought up. Susan Carlyle managed the flourishing garden centre that now occupied the old kitchen gardens of the estate.
Liz was enjoying living in London and felt guilty that she didn’t go down to Wiltshire more often, as she knew her mother was lonely. Susan Carlyle didn’t disguise the fact that she would like Liz to abandon what she thought of as a ‘dangerous job’ and marry a nice young man, a solicitor or a doctor or something safe. Liz couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do less.
Between them Liz and her flatmates had a fairly wide circle of friends. There was a faint shadow over Liz’s social life in that she couldn’t join in enthusiastically when everyone else was talking about their work, but she had taken those she lived with into her confidence and told them that she worked for one of the intelligence agencies, so they protected her and didn’t question it when they heard her telling casual acquaintances that she worked for a PR agency.
The secondment to Merseyside police came as a considerable jolt. Liz knew that at some stage, as part of the training programme, she would be sent off on attachment to learn how a provincial police force and its Special Branch worked, but she wasn’t expecting it so soon. And Liverpool was alien territory to her – she had never been further north than Nottingham.
It was the period before the Peace Process had taken hold in Northern Ireland and she was one of a team collating intelligence on the threat from the Provisional IRA. Liverpool had an established community of Irish expats, many with nationalist sympathies and a few with actual links with the Provos. The Special Branch had some sources that from time to time provided useful intelligence, so sh
e’d already had some dealings with Merseyside Special Branch officers and she had not much liked them. As she’d travelled up on the train to Liverpool that gloomy, showery day she was feeling nervous.
As it turned out she had good reason to be, but not because of the IRA. In the police headquarters’ rectangular red office block near the docks, a gloomy middle-aged sergeant with a pencil behind his ear had sent her upstairs with a grunt and a jerk of his thumb. One floor up she found a large open-plan room with a dozen or so desks in untidy rows, about half of them occupied by men, some young, some middle-aged, some in shirtsleeves, some in leather jackets, some typing, some talking on the phone. Cigarette smoke hung in the air in a blue uncirculating haze.
Every man looked up as Liz came into the room. She asked where Detective Inspector Avery could be found, and one of them pointed to the back of the room where a small office had been partitioned off with opaque glass. As Liz walked through the rows of desks, someone gave a low wolf whistle. Liz tried not to react, but she felt herself blush.
She knocked on the door, and a gruff voice said, Come in. Opening the door, she found a wide-shouldered man in shirtsleeves, with a tie pulled down an inch or two from his collar. He looked close to retirement age, and had greying hair cut very short, though he had let his sideboards grow in some misguided youthful impulse.
Avery looked annoyed by her interruption. ‘What can I do for you, miss?’
‘DI Avery?’ The man nodded. ‘I’m here from Box 500,’ said Liz, using the acronym by which the police referred to MI5. ‘My name’s Liz Carlyle.’
He stared at her. ‘You’re Carlyle?’ He sounded astonished. ‘I was expecting a George Carlyle, or a John Carlyle, or even a Seamus Carlyle. But nobody said anything about a Liz Carlyle.’ He was looking at her with distaste; Liz didn’t know what to say. Avery suddenly added, ‘I suppose you’re a graduate.’
‘Yes.’ Never had she felt less proud of it.
Close Call Page 2
