Liz Carlyle - 06 - Rip Tide (11 page)

‘Help!’ she shouted, running round to the driver’s window. ‘I’ve been attacked by those two men. Call the police! Quick . . . before they get away.’

The Sikh held up both hands and his expression of concern turned to one of bafflement. ‘If you wish I will call, young lady. But what two men?’

And when Liz looked around, breathing hard, she saw that her attackers had disappeared. The alley was empty. At the end of it the green-painted door of a garage hung open, gently swinging.

Chapter 15

This Monday morning Arthur Goldsmith was looking forward to retiring. He could have gone several years earlier, with a decent pension too, but the last Head of Station, Danny Molyneux, had persuaded him to stay on. Arthur had liked Molyneux, a friendly chap who’d run a good station. He and his wife Annie had created a real family atmosphere. They’d organised swimming parties for the kids in their pool and picnics in the garden, and the station had run some excellent operations too. The whole station had been commended for the way they’d handled a Libyan diplomat who’d defected from the embassy. He’d been in their London embassy in the eighties and knew all about what had gone on when that policewoman was killed in St James’s Square. He knew quite a bit about Pan Am 103 too. They’d all got involved in that case, even the secretaries and some of the wives, though Arthur’s own wife had left by then. Gone off with a Greek lawyer. She still lived in Athens, though they never met.

But Danny Molyneux had gone back to London and now a new Head of Station had arrived and Arthur was not at all sure he was going to enjoy working with Bruno Mackay. He was an Arabist; he’d worked in Pakistan, and most recently been Deputy Head of Station in Paris. Mackay’s reputation had preceded him on the grapevine. He was an Old Harrovian and a bit of an arrogant shit, it was said, a protégé of Geoffrey Fane, who could be an arrogant shit too though he had many a brilliant operation under his belt. Mackay was still in his thirties, young for a Head of Station, but that was par for the course nowadays.

Arthur wasn’t public school and Oxbridge – not a graduate at all. He’d joined MI6 from the army; had come in to the General Service Branch, not Intelligence. Communications was his forte. He’d had a good career and done very well to get as far as he had: Deputy Head of Station in Athens was an important post. But it looked as though the station might be about to change, and probably not for the better.

His thoughts about his new colleague were rudely interrupted by the sharp buzz of his internal line. He picked up the phone. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. It was a point of principle with Arthur Goldsmith never to show his feelings at work. He reserved emotions for Tia, the only other resident of his small, comfortable flat near the Parthenon. People might wonder how anyone could care so much about a cat, but Goldsmith felt no need to explain the depth of his affection. Tia was special.

‘Arthur? It’s Bruno. Can you pop along for a minute?’

Goldsmith went along to Mackay’s office cautiously. You never knew what might be going on in there. Once he’d discovered the new Station Head showing a secretary (a pretty young thing called Veronica) a new fishing rod he’d had sent out from Hardy’s in Pall Mall. What would he find in progress now? he thought sourly. A practical tutorial on Greek cuisine? Or a troupe of belly dancers brought in from Egypt?

‘Ah, Arthur,’ said Mackay, who was for once sitting at a desk covered in papers. ‘I was hoping you could help me. Have a seat.’

Goldsmith grunted, then sat down in the chair opposite the desk. Mackay looked as though he’d had a good weekend. He was ridiculously handsome, with his deeply tanned face, sculpted nose and mouth and grey-blue eyes. No wonder all the girls were in a flutter. This morning he was wearing a dark red shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows revealing tanned arms downed with fine blond hair and a heavy, expensive-looking watch. It wouldn’t have been so annoying, Arthur thought, if Mackay hadn’t also been very clever.

‘There’s a job come in for us from Head Office. They’ve got a bit of a situation. The French have managed to catch some pirates trying to board a cargo ship in the Indian Ocean, off Somalia. It turns out the ship sailed from here; it was leased by a London-based charity with an office in Athens.’

‘UCSO,’ Goldsmith murmured.

‘That’s right,’ said Mackay, looking up in surprise. ‘How’d you know that?’

‘It’s the only major international charity with a base in Greece.’

‘Do we have a contact in their office?’

‘Danny knew the boss, an American called Berger, but I’ve never met him. Danny didn’t hand him on when he left; I think he was more of a friend than an official station contact. You know the rules about not getting too close to charities.’

‘Yes. Well, Geoffrey Fane’s in touch with their boss in London and it seems they’ve been having a bit of a hijacking problem for some time. Not alone in that, of course, but this time the French Navy nabbed the pirates and one of them turns out to be a British citizen. Hails from Birmingham, would you believe?’ Mackay leaned back in his chair, stretched out his long legs and laughed.

‘Anyway, that’s one aspect. The other is that the UCSO people are worried that someone’s been leaking information about their shipments. The only ships hijacked have had especially valuable cargo – cash in particular. Those with just the routine stuff have been left alone.’

Arthur Goldsmith pondered this for a moment. ‘Don’t tell me Head Office believes that Somalian pirates have a source inside UCSO?’

Mackay grinned. ‘Who knows what Geoffrey believes or what he’s really up to? He plays his cards close to his chest. But he’s agreed with the London UCSO boss that we’ll put someone in at the Athens end to try and find out what’s going on. Berger’s in on it and we’re going to do it straight away.

‘Apparently there’s a vacancy for an assistant accountant at the moment, and Geoffrey wants us to find someone with the right credentials to apply. Then Berger will fix it for them to get the job and we’ll run them from here.

‘So what I’d like you to do, Arthur,’ said Mackay, standing up, ‘is to look through the station assets and see if we’ve got anyone on the books who fits the bill. It’ll be so much quicker if someone’s already recruited than starting from scratch. I gather there’s some urgency about this.’

Bloody Fane, thought Arthur to himself, as he walked back down the corridor, he must be short of things to do. Back in his office, he took out a dozen files from a combination-locked filing cabinet. After about half an hour he picked up three of them and walked back to Bruno’s room.

The door was open and Bruno, feet propped up on the desk and hands locked together behind his head, was listening to the radio. ‘Just polishing up my Greek,’ he said as Arthur walked in. ‘What have you dredged up?’

There were three candidates who had the necessary credentials.

George Arbuthnot had been on the books for ten years. His track record was sound if not inspiring; he was a chartered accountant who had retired to the island of Naxos. He’d worked as a civilian employee for the British Military delegation in Berlin during the Cold War, had married a German and stayed on after the Wall came down. He had been an occasional but useful source of information since then, as his auditing responsibilities had included some of the businesses set up in the former East Berlin by retired officers of the KGB and the Stasi. Then he’d retired, but after three months of Naxos narcolepsy, as he was fond of calling it, he’d moved to Athens, where he and his German wife found life more lively if more expensive. He still did occasional auditing when one of the big firms needed reinforcement; he found the money useful. Arthur had always found him very reliable.

Then there was Pappas. A Greek native but bilingual, or actually trilingual since his Arabic too was fluent after a decade spent in the Gulf working for a sheikh in the Emirates. It was there he had first come under MI6’s wing, passed on by the CIA during a time of co-operative swaps; he’d been recruited by Langley easily enough, since he loathed the corruption in the regime he worked for. Back in Greece, he’d set up his own accountancy firm, hiring and firing staff as the economy waxed and waned.

But there was a small problem with the Greek. He drank. Arthur remembered a catastrophic dinner he’d had with Pappas and Danny Molyneux; by the time the dessert had arrived, Pappas was stupefied with
ouzo
. They’d had difficulty persuading a taxi driver to take him home.

The third candidate was new to Goldsmith. Maria Galanos had been passed on from Head Office and signed up by one of the more junior members of the station. Greek father, English mother. Educated at a girls’ boarding school in England; economics degree from Manchester, followed by an MBA at INSEAD. A job with Price Waterhouse in London, where she was first contacted by MI6, was followed by a post in a Saudi bank in Frankfurt; the file didn’t make clear if that was at the Service’s instigation. But whether it was or not, she’d helped the Service and their German counterparts expose an Al Qaeda money-laundering scheme. She’d come to live in Athens six months earlier, for ‘personal reasons’ the file said, and was not currently working. The photograph in the file showed a dark, attractive young woman with a pleasant smile.

Mackay read the summaries that Arthur had prepared and flicked through the files. ‘So tell me your thoughts, Arthur. Who’s it going to be?’

Goldsmith made a show of thinking about it; there was no point in offering an immediate opinion – he’d already formed the view that Mackay was the sort who would always plump for the opposite.

Mackay said, ‘What do you think of Pappas?’

Goldsmith made a drinking motion.

‘I see. Well, we all have our failings, but I don’t think we can live with that one in this instance. What about young Maria then?’ He glanced down at her photograph. ‘Pretty girl, don’t you think?’ When Goldsmith said nothing, Mackay shrugged. ‘Perhaps not. But what’s your view?’

‘Excellent credentials.’ Best to begin with the positive, then move in for the kill. ‘But awfully young. If you think about it, she’s only really had the one mission in Frankfurt.’

Mackay nodded. ‘So you think Arbuthnot’s our man for the job?’

‘I think so. Sound pair of hands.’

Mackay nodded. Arthur was surprised. Perhaps this was going to be easier than he’d expected.

Mackay went on nodding in an absent-minded sort of way. But then he said firmly, ‘Can’t see Arbuthnot myself. Too conventional in my view, and he’s just not going to have the radar for office gossip that we need. My vote’s for Maria – her credentials are just as good, and she’s shown initiative in the past. Yes. I think Maria’s the one for this job.’

Chapter 16

The old Sikh had driven Liz all the way to Birmingham International Station, though he obviously suspected she was a hysterical woman who had overreacted to some harmless game played by a pair of boys. She had decided not to call the police, as her attackers were long gone into the maze of streets around the Khans’ house and she did not want to draw the attention of the local constabulary to her interest in the family. She would tell Fontana about it in the morning. He might know the boys – they obviously knew him – and be able to find out what their connection was with Amir Khan, and why they had attacked her.

The train from Birmingham to King’s Cross had been packed and with no seat reservation she’d had to stand all the way, which had not helped her to calm down. So when she got inside her Kentish Town flat, Liz headed straight for the fridge and poured herself a glass of Sauvignon Blanc from the half-full bottle there.

She had moved into this flat six months ago, after she’d got back from the operation where she had first met Martin. The flat was on the ground floor of a large Victorian house; she’d previously owned the basement flat in the same building. When she first bought that, it had been dark and gloomy, but it was all she could afford at the time and, as the first property she had ever owned, she had loved it. Gradually, over several years, she had brightened it up and improved it. The whole place had been painted white, and the wallpaper, which had hung off the wall in a strip over the bath where the steam had detached it, had been removed and the bathroom tiled. She’d bought a new washing machine to replace the one she’d inherited when she moved in, which had had a habit of stopping in the middle of its cycle, leaving her underwear in a puddle of grey scummy water.

But when she’d returned from her posting in Belfast, the flat, even in its improved state, had no longer seemed so welcoming. It had been empty while she’d been away and she seemed to have grown out of it. So when the flat above had come up for sale she’d gone to look at it, even though she knew she couldn’t afford it, and as soon as she saw the high airy living room with its corniced ceiling and Victorian fireplace, and the big sash windows overlooking the garden, she fell in love all over again. Her mother’s close friend Edward had lent her some money, and that, together with a breathtakingly huge mortgage and the surprisingly large profit she’d made selling the basement, had been enough to secure the flat.

She took her glass of wine into the bedroom, still feeling rattled by her experiences in Birmingham. She looked at the phone, hesitating, then picked up and dialled.

Martin answered at once.

‘Hello. It’s Liz.’

He laughed. ‘I was sitting here, thinking about you. I was just about to ring you.’