She sipped her coffee and winced. ‘You made the right decision,’ she said, but Milraud’s smile was perfunctory. He was clearly impatient for the debrief to begin.
‘So how did it go?’ asked Liz, sitting down at last.
Milraud shrugged. ‘Much as expected.’
‘Was he concerned about security? I mean, since your Paris meeting was aborted because of the surveillance.’
Milraud sat up. ‘Yes. He was worried that I might have been followed and he checked me out for a microphone. I assured him he need not worry; that I was once an intelligence officer and I know about these things.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘I explained that I had gone to Paris and Berlin under different passports and I was at least twelve hours ahead of anyone hunting me.’ He grimaced; they both knew Milraud had thought this himself.
‘Do you think he suspects you?’
‘In his position I certainly would – I never trust my customers, so why should they trust me? But when he pressed me about being spotted in Paris, I told him I had as much right to worry about him as he had about me. That shut him up.’
‘So after that, what did you discuss? He called the meeting, didn’t he? What did he want to say to you?’
‘He wanted to add to his order. That was for firearms, as you know.’
‘What else does he want?’
‘It’s a bit surprising. He wants grenades – two dozen of them.’
‘Really?’ Liz was astonished. The whole business seemed surprising, as it was generally assumed that the jihadi groups fighting in the Arab Spring countries had no difficulty acquiring weapons from their supporters, but this requirement was even more unexpected.
‘That’s right. And then the oddest thing of all – he wants more ammunition for the weapons he’d ordered. Not more weapons; just more ammunition. Twenty thousand rounds.’
‘Twenty thousand?’ Liz could not contain her astonishment. It sounded as if Zara was equipping an infantry battalion. And why so much ammunition for only twenty weapons?
‘I agree it doesn’t make sense, unless he already has a lot of weapons at his disposal. But I didn’t have that impression from our first meeting. It’s quite peculiar.’
Milraud looked uneasy; Liz sensed there was something on his mind. She waited, but he said no more. Eventually she asked, ‘Let’s come back again to this black man you met in Berlin. What did he want?’
‘I was asked to meet him. I was told he wanted to see who was involved in the deal. I was told he has not done this type of business before.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Almost nothing. He just asked about my business – how long I’d been supplying, what parts of the world I supplied, that sort of thing.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Very little, but it seemed to satisfy him. Then he rushed off. He was very jumpy.’
He still looked uncomfortable. Then he shrugged and returned to the subject of the meeting with Zara. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t sure how you wanted me to play it today. So I told him that I would check if I could get the goods he wanted in time and get back to him. He pressed me, so I had to promise to let him know tomorrow.’
‘How are you to do that?’
‘By email.’
She knew from Seurat that the French were in control of the email traffic.
Milraud asked, ‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Can you supply the extra things he wants in time?’
‘Yes. I only have to email my supplier.’
‘Where is he?’
‘In Bulgaria.’
Liz didn’t hesitate. ‘Do it then and tell him you can fulfil the supplementary order. But also tell him you need to know precisely where and how it should be delivered. Press him for details.’
She looked at Milraud intently. He might have been surprised by Zara’s request, but she was certain he was holding something back. It didn’t make sense that he knew nothing about Jackson. Milraud was acting as if Jackson was Zara’s contact and he had nothing to do with him, but she was sure that wasn’t the case. Maybe if young Thibault over in Paris could hack into their back email exchanges the full truth would emerge – and a lot sooner than if she waited for Milraud to come clean.
Chapter 30
It was almost eight when Liz left the hotel. Milraud would be spending the night there in the other pair of interconnecting rooms, under the watchful eye of Dicky Soames and his colleagues, before returning to Paris with them as close escorts. There was no way Liz was going to be responsible for losing the man whom Martin Seurat had spent so many years hunting.
In the dark, Thames House looked like a lit-up half-filled egg box: unoccupied offices were dark, but enough officers worked late hours to dot the heavy masonry façade with the lights of their midnight oil. In her office Liz found a handwritten slip from Peggy: Halliday rang. Said call him any time. He has news.
When she reached Halliday there was the background noise of a raucous party going on. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he shouted. Gradually the noise subsided, until she could hear only traffic whizzing past in the background, tyres wet from rain. Halliday must have stepped outside from whatever club he was visiting. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said.
‘It’s Liz Carlyle; I got a message to ring you. But I don’t want to interrupt the party.’
‘I’m working, believe it or not. I’m drinking vodka and tonic without the vodka, and waiting for the barman to offer to sell me three grams of coke. I thought I’d better take your call outside. I’ve got some news for you. Not good, I’m afraid.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘We raided Slim’s with Immigration – that’s the club owned by Lester Jackson. We arrested half a dozen girls working upstairs – they were “hostesses” but they were doing more than serving drinks. All from somewhere in Eastern Europe most likely but they didn’t have a set of papers between them.
‘Normally that would have been enough to close the place down, and maybe let me squeeze our high-flying friend Mr Jackson a bit. But he wasn’t there and he didn’t seem to care, and I now know why. He had a leading brief go to the lock-up by breakfast time, and bob’s your uncle, it turned out all the girls had proper papers and valid passports – the solicitor claimed he’d been holding them on the girls’ behalf.’
‘What sort of passports?’
‘Bulgarian – every one. And now that it’s in the EU that means they can work here, come and go as they please. Not that I believe for a minute their papers were kosher. None of those girls speaks Bulgarian.’
‘How do you know? Do you speak it?’
Halliday laughed. ‘No. But one of the cleaners at the police station is from Sofia. She said the girls couldn’t understand a word she said.’
‘But you had to let them go anyway?’
‘Yes. No choice. They’re all living in Manchester, so it’s not up to me. I would have tried to work the prostitution angle, but Manchester SB couldn’t be bothered. These days it’s hard to convict unless you show the girls involved are either under duress or illegal immigrants. None of the girls would make a complaint so we couldn’t do either.’
‘Too bad,’ said Liz, though she wasn’t very surprised. Jackson seemed unlikely to jeopardise his club by laying himself open to a single police raid.
Halliday paused and Liz heard the sound of a bus passing. As it died down Halliday went on, ‘That isn’t good news, but there’s worse to come. I had a source in the club – an older woman who functioned as a kind of “mother” to the working girls. Name of Katya.’
‘You “had” a source?’
‘Katya was found strangled in the kitchen of her digs two mornings ago. The uniform thought it was a burglary gone wrong but it doesn’t ring true to me. There was no sign of forced entry, nothing taken. One of her flatmates found her when she came home from work.’
‘Do you see a connection with the club?’
‘Yes I do, not that I can prove it.’ He hesitated, then finally
said, ‘The thing is, when we arrested the girls we took Katya in, too. But she was released hours before the others were. I don’t know why – she was the only one sprung early. It would have looked peculiar. I didn’t ask for her to be let go, that’s for sure.’
Liz sensed he was very upset by this. She said encouragingly, ‘Maybe Forensics will find something.’
‘I don’t think so. The killer was very careful. Her place was in the Greater Manchester area and the CID guys there have made it a low priority.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Either because they reckon it’s a one-off and won’t lead anywhere, or because they know where it leads and have been warned off.’
‘What does that mean?’ She didn’t like the sound of it at all.
‘Ask your friend in Manchester Special Branch.’
He’s not my friend, thought Liz, but there was no point in saying this. She asked, ‘This woman Katya, did she have a Bulgarian passport too?’
‘I don’t know what passport she had, but I know she wasn’t from Bulgaria.’
‘Then where was she from?’
‘One of those funny ex-Soviet countries – the ones that end in “stan”. Hers was called Dagestan. At least that’s what she told me. Never heard of it myself. Have you?’
‘Yes,’ said Liz flatly. She had heard of it quite recently. ‘Listen, I wonder if you can help me with something.’
‘Just say the word,’ said Halliday so breezily that Liz wondered whether perhaps there had been some vodka in his tonic after all.
‘You remember I told you that we’d learned that Jackson was connected to an arms dealer.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well, we’ve now had confirmation that he’s involved.’ She hesitated, then decided she had to trust him – so far at least, he had been completely straight with her, unlike her old friend McManus. ‘I think there might be a connection between his role in this arms deal we’re investigating and his usual business at the club – bringing in the women, I mean.’
‘What kind of connection?’
‘Not sure yet.’ Liz was working largely on intuition now; she couldn’t give Halliday any specifics because she didn’t have any. She went on, ‘That’s where you could be of help. Can you keep an even closer eye than usual on what goes on at Slim’s?’
‘Yeah, I can do that. But what am I looking for?’
‘I know it sounds rather pathetic but I can’t actually tell you. Anything that looks stranger than usual. It’s about bringing stuff into the country. Importing stuff that could be arms but it probably wouldn’t look like that.’
‘If you seriously think he’s into weaponry, it would probably be wise to run it by Manchester SB, just to be diplomatic.’
‘Do you have to? I thought you said Slim’s was on your patch?’
There was a pause, then Halliday said, ‘No, I don’t have to if you’re not going to.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘I see you don’t trust McManus either.’
The overnight team outside Dinwiddy House had had a busier time than expected. At twenty past seven in the evening Zara had emerged, dressed now in a black hoody and jeans and carrying a small backpack. He had walked to Euston Station and after collecting a ticket from a pre-paid ticket machine, boarded a train for Manchester Piccadilly. Two of the team had accompanied him, while the Ops Room had dispatched another team to Manchester to be ready to meet the train, in case he stayed on all the way to Manchester.
Which he did. At Manchester the original team handed him over to the new team, which went with him, first on the metro to Manchester Victoria station and then on a local train, from which he got off at Eccles.
By this time it was past eleven o’clock and Liz in bed was on a conference call link to the Ops Room in Thames House. ‘Eccles,’ she said. ‘What on earth can he be going there for? Does anyone know anything about Eccles?’
Peggy, in her flat in Muswell Hill, a few miles further north from Liz, was in on the call and also searching the internet. ‘Eccles is part of Salford, about four miles from Manchester. The interesting thing is that it has quite a large Yemeni community. There have been Yemenis in Eccles since the 1940s,’ she read out from a website. ‘Large numbers came in in the 1950s. There’s a Yemeni Community Association. Perhaps he has friends there.’
Meanwhile the team in Manchester was reporting that they had followed Zara to a small terraced house, No. 31 Ashby Road. The door had been opened by a lady, probably in her late sixties, in traditional Muslim dress, who had kissed Zara and welcomed him into the house. They hoped Liz did not require overnight watch on the house, as it was a very quiet neighbourhood and therefore it would be difficult to remain unobserved. Liz had agreed that they could stand down for the night; it seemed most unlikely that anything was imminent. She and Peggy would meet in Thames House at seven in the morning and decide what to do next about Zara.
Chapter 31
Miles woke up slightly hungover, the after-effect of a long evening at the French Embassy, and discovered that his mobile phone was ringing. ‘Hello,’ he said tentatively; the screen read ‘number unknown’.
‘Ah, the croaky voice of a man who’s had a good night out.’
It was Bruno Mackay. At the best of times, Miles felt a mild antipathy towards his British Intelligence counterpart, and right now there was a jauntiness about the man he could do without.
‘What can I do for you, Bruno?’ he said shortly.
‘I’ve had a communiqué from London. It seems there’s been some progress. Better if we talk face to face, old man? I’ll see you at Sharim’s café in an hour.’
Miles made it in fifty minutes, feeling slightly revived after a long shower and a shave. He drove cautiously into the old city, keeping an eye on his rear-view mirror; after their experience on the road from Donation’s farm, he felt that his car might be a marked vehicle. Parking in a Diplomatic parking bay, under the eye of a policeman, he walked along the pavement until he saw the wide awning of Sharim’s – and Bruno, in a white cotton jacket and pink tie, sitting at an outside table.
Miles joined him. Bruno gave a commanding wave and a waiter scurried over with a fresh pot of coffee and a cup for Miles, who watched while the man poured out the syrupy local brew. Miles added two sugar cubes from the little clay pot on the table. As he stirred them in with a tiny wooden spoon, he said to Bruno, ‘So what’s the news?’
‘London’s identified the guy they sent the photographs of. The one at the meet in the Luxembourg Gardens that we were going to ask Donation about. His name is Samara and he’s Yemeni. He’s doing a Master’s degree at London University, the School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS we call it. On the surface he looks perfectly legit. Only quite obviously he’s not. I’ve been asked to check out his credentials here, and I thought you might be able to help me.’
Why? wondered Miles, but then Bruno said, ‘You’re a bit better placed to ask, I think. If you get my drift.’
And Miles now understood. Official Yemeni–American relations were blossoming. A cynic might say that the United States was propping up a weak local government to further its own interests, but for whatever reason, a request for help from the American Embassy was likely to get a quicker, more favourable reaction than if the Brits had asked.
‘It may take me a little while,’ Miles said.
‘Not a problem, old boy. We’ve got a couple of hours on London as it is. They’ll still be fast asleep.’
Miles’s contact was a middle-level officer in the Yemeni Intelligence Service called Arack, who had been a graduate student at the University of Southern California. It was never entirely clear what he had studied there, and he seemed to know the beaches north of Santa Monica rather better than the classrooms of USC. But he was a useful contact, since the Yemeni bureaucracy was both legendarily cumbersome and unreceptive to foreign approaches, and Arack was always willing to help the Americans, provided the request was relatively easy to fulfil and his reward readily forthcom
ing. He was known to Miles and his colleagues, semi-derisorily, as ‘Sweet Tooth’ because of his love of sugary cakes and desserts, which made payment for his services unusually easy.
Miles and Arack met now for coffee and a baklava-like concoction in a café near the Yemeni Ministry of Defence. Arack listened sympathetically while Miles explained what he was looking for. ‘We just want confirmation that the personal details we have for this student are correct and that he is known to your authorities and is in London legitimately.’
‘Is there any reason to think he is not?’ asked Arack mildly.
‘No,’ said Miles, though it didn’t take a genius to realise there had to be a question about the ‘student’, or else Miles wouldn’t be checking him out. ‘It’s just a formality.’
Arack nodded, happy to hear that this was not something he would have to call to the attention of his superiors. ‘Naturally births and deaths are registered here, as they are in the United States, and there is a department for that purpose. But you might find its office difficult to navigate. Let me make a few calls and get back to you. Give me the details please, and I would be grateful if you could ask the waiter to come over.’
Arack rang Miles just before dinner. There was a shortage of eligible Western women in Sana’a and Miles was about to have dinner with one of them – a new shapely secretary called, appropriately, Marilyn, who had come out to work in the Embassy the month before. He waited impatiently as Arack went through the standard Middle Eastern formalities, applied rigorously even to a phone call. How was Miles? As if they hadn’t met five hours before. Was not the weather good this day, and would it not be fine throughout the evening? At last Arack came to the point, though even then he spoke elliptically. ‘I am afraid I have surprising news for you, my friend.’
‘Really?’
‘We have no record of this man, you see.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just what I have said. There is no birth certificate, no record of an education and no passport.’
‘Could the name be spelled differently?’
Close Call Page 13
