Close Call (22 page)

He sat up in the bed, so that his back was cushioned by the pillows that he’d propped against the headboard. He said softly, ‘
Chérie
, it is good to be with you.’

‘Yes, my darling,’ she said, but there was a hint of sadness in her voice and she didn’t turn round.

He said, ‘Martin is no fool, you know.’

Now she did turn round, and looked at him, her eyes filling with tears.

He went on, ‘He let me come to see you because he knew how much I wanted to. Enough to tell him what he wants, in the hope that he will let us stay together.’

‘Yes,’ acknowledged Annette. ‘But better this time together than no time at all.’ She had been surprised, sitting in the flat, reading an old paperback novel she had found on a shelf and trying to ignore the guard who was making tea in the kitchen, when Antoine had arrived. He told her that he had suddenly been told to grab his coat and go for a drive; he’d had no idea that he was being taken into Paris to see his wife. In a rare tactful act, the now-combined force of armed escorts had left them alone, though they were hovering nearby – in the hall outside the flat, on the ground floor with the concierge, and outside by the parked Mercedes that had chauffeured Antoine from Montreuil.

Milraud looked at his wife, still as attractive to him as she’d been when they’d first met some twenty years before. He tried not to think of what prison would do to her figure, and to her spirited approach to life. It would do the same to him, no doubt, but he had already resigned himself to a long spell behind bars.

‘Are there important things you haven’t told Martin?’ she asked.

Milraud raised his eyes towards the ceiling. He assumed the flat was bugged, especially if they’d let him see Annette here. She understood, and came back to the bed, stopping to turn on the radio on the bedside table. The station was playing Edith Piaf and they both laughed as they heard the song in mid-flow – ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’.

Annette lay down next to Antoine and whispered, ‘So are there?’

‘Of course. But why are you asking now? Has Seurat put you up to this?’ He only slightly lowered his voice; he didn’t care if the microphone picked this up over the radio; he was angry that they were being manipulated.

She didn’t waver, whispering right away, ‘He says the people you are supplying are much worse than you realise. They’re not rebels fighting in the Middle East. He said they’re al-Qaeda or their equivalent, and they’re planning a terrorist attack.’

Milraud shifted uneasily on the bed, moving an inch or two away from his wife. ‘How does he know?’ He realised he had not spent any time questioning the intentions of the young Arab he had first met in the Luxembourg Gardens. His initial introduction to the man had come from Minister Baakrime, whom he had dealt with often before. He had simply assumed that the Minister had either been bribed by Yemen’s insurgents to help them get arms, or was actually a secret sympathiser with the rebels.

He realised now that he had been naïve, but what did it matter? He had never made judgements about his clients, and he had helped arm revolutionaries across most of the world. There was no telling which side was right and which wrong, and if someone in his trade tried to make those sort of judgements they’d soon go mad or out of business. These affairs often ended in a place no one had foreseen. Look at Iraq now, or Libya, or Syria.

He was about to say as much to Annette, when she put a firm finger to his lips. ‘Listen to me, Antoine. Naturally, Martin wanted me to talk to you; of course he wants me to persuade you to tell him everything you know. I would never hide what he said from you. I don’t think we have any choice. If you know more about what’s going on, then you should tell me and I will tell Martin.’

‘But then I have nothing left to bargain with.’

‘We are in no position to bargain,
chéri
. But even if we were, I have to tell you that if Martin is telling the truth – and I think he is – then I don’t want you to help these people. They are killers; they kill children and their mothers. They have no just cause, only hate.’

Milraud lay back, his head against the pillow, and stared at the ceiling while he thought about this. Had Annette gone soft on him? It seemed improbable – if anything she had always been the tougher of the two of them, more businesslike, never very concerned about the morality of his trade. He knew she was scared of going to prison, but he also knew that she was very loyal to him – and her concern about what this young Yemeni, if that’s what he was, was going to do with the weapons he was supplying was genuine. And he had to admit it did alarm him too – the thought of this character and his followers or colleagues killing dozens of innocents in Western Europe was appalling.

‘OK,’ he said at last, though he didn’t look at his wife, but kept his eyes on the ceiling, as if addressing a deity or, he was pretty certain, the listening ears of his former colleagues in the DGSE. ‘I’ll tell him what I know. But it’s not much.’

‘I expect anything will help,’ said Annette lightly.

Milraud turned on the bed and looked at her at last. ‘The originator of the contact in Paris was a Yemeni minister. That’s why I thought this was legit.’
Legit
struck him as a funny way to describe the transaction, but he knew Annette would understand what he meant – he had thought he was simply supplying one side of the innumerable civil wars that seemed to be proliferating all over the region.

‘I understand. But now?’

‘What Martin has told you could make sense. I haven’t told him everything I know. I haven’t told him exactly where the shipment is being assembled, though he knows the country. He doesn’t know anything about the onward shipping arrangements. He knows there’s a British person involved but he doesn’t know that the order is now to be delivered to England. And he doesn’t know that originally it was to go somewhere else.’

‘Where?’

‘Here,’ he said simply. ‘Paris.’

Annette looked shocked. ‘So what changed?’

Milraud shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But if Martin’s right about these people, it means the target’s changed. Now it must be in Britain.’

Chapter 39

This time they were to meet in Fane’s office in the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross. As she walked across Vauxhall Bridge from Thames House, leaning into the gusty wind that was blowing off the river, Liz recalled the email exchanges between Grosvenor Square and Vauxhall that had preceded this meeting. Their tone suggested that the encounter between Fane and Bokus was going to be as rough as the weather, and she was not looking forward to playing the role of peacemaker.

Fane’s office was a spacious room, high up in one of the semicircular protuberances at the front of the building. Its two large windows had a commanding view of the Thames – to the right Parliament and the MI5 building on the north bank, and to the left across to Kensington and ­Chelsea and upriver to Hammersmith. Somehow Fane had managed to acquire the sort of antique official furniture usually only to be found in the Foreign Office, and he had added some oriental rugs and a table that he had inherited from his grandmother. The whole effect was of a country gentleman’s study, and about as far as you could get from the bleak, functional office that Bokus inhabited in the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

Liz knew that Bokus never felt comfortable in Fane’s office, and when she arrived he was standing by the windows, looking stiff and awkward. Fane’s secretary, Daisy, followed her into the room with a pot of coffee on a silver tray with china cups and saucers. Bokus waved her away when she offered him a cup and sat down heavily in one of the chairs round the table.

‘Let’s get on with it,’ he said as soon as Daisy had left the room.

Fane took the chair at the head of the table and gestured to Liz to sit down opposite Bokus. He took his time sipping his coffee before saying, ‘Thank you for the email, Andy; I think we are all sorry to learn that your source
Donation
has left Yemen. And very surprised to learn that he has gone to Moscow. I for one was not aware that he was in touch with the Russians. Were you, Elizabeth?’

Liz did not reply, and Bokus broke in, ‘Not Moscow. Our latest information is that he’s gone to Dagestan. We don’t know why. He may have arms-dealing contacts there, or maybe the Russians have shipped him off there to get him out of Russia. But it seems that somehow he’s got himself mixed up with jihadis – and got on their bad side; I told you his son was murdered. This is a man used to playing both sides from the middle, only suddenly he was squeezed from either end. The Yemeni government was growing fed up with him; now the jihadis have as well. So he’s done a runner. But instead of running our way, as he would have done if you’d been a bit quicker on your feet, he’s gone in the other direction.’

Fane shook his head and said, ‘You were handling
Donation
– we weren’t. If
you’d
been prepared to take a risk and be a little more generous, then maybe we would have got something back. Instead, the bird’s flown the coop and taken his information and his money with him.’

Liz was about to intervene, but as she drew in her breath to speak, Bokus snapped, ‘You can blame us all you like, but it isn’t the United States that’s at risk from this arms deal he was telling us about. It’s you, and you weren’t willing to do anything to keep him sweet and find out what he knew.’ Bokus looked angry enough to spit. ‘As always, you expect us to bail you out, and if we don’t, you scream bloody murder and say it’s all our fault. But you can’t pin this one on the Agency.’

Bokus sat back in his chair, his face red and his arms crossed over his stomach. Liz could see that Fane was taken aback by the American’s aggression. She had long suspected that Bokus’s usual front was a pose. The bluff, rough Yank who spoke in monosyllables was, she had always been pretty sure, put on for Fane’s benefit – a kind of defence mechanism against the smooth English gentleman. A tirade like this from Bokus was unprecedented, and unique for its articulate delivery, which meant that it came from the heart and what they were seeing was the real Bokus behind the taciturn façade.

Since Fane looked as if he was gathering himself for a counter-offensive, Liz decided to intervene before things got totally out of hand. She said calmly, ‘I think we need to move on.
Donation
’s gone, and we won’t get any more from him, wherever he is. We need to focus now on what we’ve learned.’

‘OK,’ said Bokus. ‘
Donation
was only the middleman. The coalface is this guy Atiyah. He’s the one you’ve got to worry about, and he’s been operating right under your noses. He’s a Brit, and you didn’t know anything about him.’

‘For God’s sake,’ broke in Fane, ‘how is that supposed to be helpful? We’ve got a British citizen gone bad – is that a unique situation? You want to tell me how the American Somalis slipped through your nets? Or the Boston bombers? Two can play at that blame game, you know.’

Liz broke in, ‘Or we can accept that we both face the same difficulties and work together to sort them out.’

Fane was silent and Bokus gave her a long stare, but her words seemed to have a calming effect. Bokus threw both hands up in a parody of surrender. ‘OK. But I didn’t start this.’

‘Oh no?’ Fane said, ready to dive in again, until Liz gave him a look that could freeze stone. She continued quickly, ‘Why don’t we start with what we know?’ Before either man could say anything at all, she added, ‘Antoine Milraud the French arms dealer has decided to be a little more forthcoming. I’m not sure he’s telling us everything he knows, but it’s more than he was telling us before.’

‘How’d you manage that?’ asked Bokus. ‘Feminine charm?’ Liz was relieved to see him grin.

‘It was the French, actually, who got him to talk.’

‘Monsieur Seurat?’ asked Fane.

Give it a rest, Geoffrey, thought Liz, doing her best to ignore him. ‘The man Milraud met in Berlin, the black man in the museum, will be receiving a delivery of guns and ammunition in the next ten days or so, somewhere here in the UK. Originally the delivery was going to be in Paris.’

‘So what’s changed?’ asked Bokus. Liz rather liked the way he was always happy to ask the obvious questions – whereas Fane would hold back, unwilling to admit there were things he didn’t understand.

She said, ‘It’s looking increasingly likely that the arms aren’t for use in the Middle East – why bring them all the way to France or Britain if they were? We don’t know why at first it was Paris, but I’m now afraid they’re intended for a terrorist attack and that it’s going to take place here in Britain.’ She noticed that both Bokus and Fane’s eyes widened at this.

Fane said, ‘You say “all the way to France or Britain” – where do we think these arms are coming from?’

‘Milraud says it’s Dagestan.’

‘Where our friend
Donation
– Baakrime – is right now,’ said Bokus.

Liz nodded. ‘I doubt it’s a coincidence.’

Bokus said, ‘But he’s unreachable there – for us and for you. Neither of us has any permanent post in Dagestan and we’d never get anyone in there in time to find out anything useful. If we’re going to crack this open it’s not going to be through Dagestan or Baakrime.’

‘That’s right,’ Liz said firmly, determined that the ­question of who was to blame for Baakrime’s flight from Yemen should not be reopened. ‘But we still need Miles Brookhaven in Yemen on the case. If he can find out the identities of the British youths who went out to Yemen – the ones Baakrime said were planning on returning home for some purpose – then we can keep tabs on them if and when they come back into Europe.’ Liz didn’t really think Miles would be able to find out anything useful, but she felt it was important to keep the Americans on board. Which meant providing at least a pretence of a job for Miles Brookhaven to do in Yemen.