Rogue Elements (5 page)

When eventually he spoke, his desiccated voice had a new hollowness to it. ‘I never dared him.’

‘You called him a coward, right? Heavy rains put the sports fields out of commission. Bored pupils. An audience. Big strong Stephen Gordon shows the world what a tough guy he is by swimming forty metres through an underground pipe. Fucking stupid stunt, but you made it. Good for you. Another bloody schoolboy hero. Except now you have to go and push your best friend into copying you. Dying for you.’

‘I didn’t call him a coward. I didn’t say anything.’

‘But you didn’t stop him.’

The prisoner looked down. His manacled hands hung lifeless between his legs.

‘You let him try to match you, even though you knew he wasn’t as strong.’

‘What business is it of yours?’ he growled.

‘What business of mine? Are you serious?’ She was shouting all of a sudden, standing over him. ‘A fucked-up British loose cannon roaming around Africa with French weaponry in his hands, invading a major trading partner and strategic ally of the United Kingdom? Are you absolutely serious, Stephen? You don’t see what business that is of mine? We’ve shot British subjects for less.’

‘Then go ahead. Shoot me.’

She watched him silently for a while. Taking her seat, she whispered, ‘Are you really this self-destructive? Or is it an act?’

‘I’ll take that water now.’

She gave no sign of hearing him. The bottle remained on the floor beside her chair. ‘Stephen, why are you giving your considerable talents to France? If your original sin was in Wiltshire, why pay Paris?’

He lunged forward and grabbed the bottle with his cuffed hands, ripped off the lid with his teeth and emptied it down his throat.

‘Whatever part you think you played in that boy’s drowning, you’re no use to me if you have a death wish.’

He blinked at her. ‘
Use to you
?’

‘What do you hope to achieve in the Legion, other than self-annihilation? I’ve seen your record: a hell of an achievement in an elite unit. Top of the class in close combat and survival. Top five in marksmanship, navigation, boat handling, covert infiltration, demolition and guerrilla tactics. The Djibouti trainers love you. They even rate your singing.’

‘Vehicles.’

‘Excuse me?’

A dull, lifeless voice now. ‘Vehicles. Your informer left that one out. Top five in off-road and urban driving.’

‘And all for what?’ Wraye leaned back in her chair and treated him to her most pitying stare. ‘You’ve got your corporal’s galons, but they’ll never make you a sous-officier. Did you know that? It’s in your file. Bold print. You’re not French, and you’re not considered loyal or stable enough to make up for that defect.’

‘That’s bullshit.’

‘Face it, Stephen, they still see you as a troubled teenager. “
Grandes lacunes
” in your moral and emotional development. Got to hand it to the French for linguistic style. We’d have just called them “gaps”.
Grandes lacunes
. Highly intelligent, devastatingly effective in the field, but simply not leadership material.’

‘So I should be a spook instead?’

She matched his stare. ‘You should.’

He laughed, the sound coming from his loosened throat richer and deeper for the water. ‘If I’d wanted to sit in an ivory tower and dream up theories about the resurgent Soviet threat, I’d have knocked on your door in London.’

‘Fighting neocolonial wars for France is more relevant?’

‘At least it’s real.’

‘The Firm has a new agenda. Global Tasks, we call it. Terrorism, organized crime, nuclear proliferation. That’s as real as it gets.’

‘The
Firm
?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Madeleine Wraye. I’m Chief of Station for the Secret Intelligence Service in Nigeria. MI6, if you like. In two months’ time I take up a new position as Deputy Chief in Washington. My career is accelerating and I intend to gather around me a small number of people loyal only to me. People who, in different ways, are . . . useful.’

‘You want a soldier in Washington? I don’t see it.’

‘I want an outsider. Someone the FBI doesn’t know about. Undeclared. Deniable. Officially we don’t spy on the Americans: we’re there to liaise and collaborate, not steal secrets. Unofficially, both sides collect whatever they can get. I need someone not afraid to take a few risks, get hurt, possibly face a couple of years in prison.’

‘Sounds appealing.’

‘And I need brains. You were on track for Oxbridge, just like Thomas Parke. Your Guards application was as erudite as they come. I need someone smart enough to ask the right questions, push the right buttons with people a whole lot more dangerous than your Legion NCOs. The kind of man able to disappear under the noses of 400 Nigerian soldiers.’

The prisoner said nothing, but a flicker of a smile appeared in his eyes.

‘I also need social confidence. Even in here, you have it in spades. Perhaps that comes from your mother’s hotel career? Those five-star palaces where you spent the school holidays hanging out with staff and guests alike. Hong Kong. Rajasthan. Mayotte – that was where you first encountered the Legion, wasn’t it? Lombok. New York. Buenos Aires. Florence. How many languages is it now? With French?’

‘Four.’

‘Four languages,’ purred Wraye with real pleasure. ‘And you know how to hold a glass of wine.’

‘These days I prefer Corsican beer.’ The legionnaire glanced at the empty plastic bottle crumpled in his fist. ‘Thank you for the water and the books, but you’re wasting your time. Even if I wanted to sign up with the kind of outfit that scavenges for recruits in Nigerian prisons, a Legion contract is five years, no exceptions. I’ve served three.’

‘So desert.’

‘Obviously your informer hasn’t briefed you on what that means.’

‘You’ll be arrested if you ever set foot in France. Your name will be mud in the regiment. So what? Jonathan Reeves will no longer exist, and if you come with me to DC it certainly won’t be as Stephen Gordon. Who cares what the French think of you? They won’t have the first idea who or where you are.’

‘I happen to like the Legion.’

‘I happen to like Chekhov. Doesn’t mean I want to spend my best years watching nothing but Russian tragedy. Look, Stephen, you’ve proved yourself out here. You’ve atoned, closed the book on Thomas Parke. It’s time for you to move on. For what it’s worth, you’ll be reasonably paid. For what it’s worth, you’ll be directly advancing the interests of your country. But above all, you’ll be using everything you’ve got – not just the muscle, not just the stamina. Everything, Stephen. That’s what I want from you. Everything. Do you know how good it feels to give everything you have for something that matters?’

The prisoner was silent. He let the crushed plastic bottle drop to the floor.

‘What would I be called?’

‘Whatever you want. So long as it fits on a credit card and has no discernible connection to your previous life.’

He considered that. Reaching for the fallen book, he examined the cover.
An Illustrated Guide to the Birds of West Africa
. The author’s name was short, punchy. Had a certain ring. He showed it to her. ‘How about that?’

‘Fine,’ she smiled. ‘All right, Mr Arkell, let’s get out of here.’ She put the stress on the second syllable – to rhyme with hell. ‘A meal, a bath, the Official Secrets Act and a soft bed – in that order, OK?’

The newly christened ex-legionnaire insisted on doing one thing before giving himself over, body and soul, to Madeleine Wraye. He wanted to return his Legion rifle.

‘Deserting is bad enough,’ he explained. ‘Deserting with your weapon is a whole different level of sin.’

‘It’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,’ said Wraye. ‘They’ll lock you up the moment you show your face.’

But Simon Arkell was adamant, and so Wraye arranged for him to pick his Clarion out of the pile of confiscated arms in a small shed at the back of the Abuja cell block. She stripped him of his Legion combat fatigues, replacing them with the chinos and short-sleeved cotton shirt of an oil worker on holiday. She issued him a rented 4x4 with space under the back seat to conceal the gun, a new passport, and just enough nairas for fuel, food and border bribes. He was back three days later.

After the diplomatic dust had settled on its abortive and politically embarrassing adventure into north-east Nigeria, the French Foreign Legion recovered eleven of its twelve men but only one of their weapons. The serial number of the assault rifle found on the commandant’s desk at the Massakory field base identified it as that of Caporal Jonathan Reeves, previously known as Stephen Gordon, deserter.

Its return has since become a minor legend in the Legion.

He’d put a towel over her head for the short drive – excessive precaution, wise in this business – but she could talk without difficulty. ‘Am I allowed to know what you’ve been doing all this time? Why you disappeared? Don’t say amnesia.’

‘You start. Why did you leave the Firm?’

‘That won’t see us past the first traffic light. Politics. Always politics. Male egos conspiring for the top jobs. Same tired old story.’

‘And now?’

‘I bring people together. I facilitate. I work across organizational boundaries in a way that was impossible in SIS. So when, to pick a relevant example, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service needs a dangerous man identified, they come to me. And when they decide they want that man terminated in a way that won’t come back on them, they ask me to find the right candidate for the job.’

‘That’s what this is? You want me to kill someone?’

‘You’ve killed before. Chad and Somalia for the Legion. Pakistan for us. God knows where else since you disappeared.’

‘I don’t do that kind of thing any more.’

‘Oh? And why is that?’ When he didn’t answer, she said, ‘If Emily’s death taught us anything, it should be that there are bad people out there – bad enough to need eliminating.’

‘And there are plenty of other independents who’ll do it,’ he said roughly. ‘I’ll give you some names if you like.’

Wraye took a breath. Slow down. The towel against her face was making her clumsy. ‘So you don’t kill any more. What
do
you still do? Blackmail? Eavesdrop? Steal secrets? Or are those sins also off the table?’

‘I do whatever my clients need done. Within reason.’

‘You still fight with a stick?’ She said it with a smile in her voice – half admiring, half mocking.

‘Not much reason to fight these days.’

The smile disappeared. ‘You’ve gone soft,’ she accused.

He didn’t reply.

Simon Arkell had learned fast in Washington. On his own, below the radar, he had succeeded in penetrating parts of the US defence and political establishment from which Wraye, as a declared SIS officer, was politely but resolutely barred. Befriending Treasury lawyers on the racquetball court, flirting with congressional staffers in Adams Morgan bars, and offering hard cash to Pentagon janitors – all with a nonchalant innocence that only a young and charming English newspaperman could get away with – Arkell had harvested intelligence of the first water. Revelations about the back-room deals done by the outgoing Clinton administration. A list of wealthy donors still channelling funds to the IRA. American military spending projections. Insight into the questionable intelligence sources on which the State Department was basing its Mideast policies.

And he was not even officially employed by SIS. Wraye had chosen from the outset to keep him off the books for as long as she could, unregistered with SIS and therefore unknowable to CIA eyes within the Firm. The job at
The Times
had been organized through a civilian friend who owed her a debt of gratitude for the safe recovery of a kidnapped foreign correspondent. Arkell filed many a story under the name Andrew Tiller, as he was known in Washington. One or two were even quite valuable scoops. But the best stuff he kept for Wraye. And on their return from America, when it came time to recruit Arkell formally into the Firm, she was meticulous in crediting him with every scrap of intelligence collected.

‘Tell me the truth, Simon,’ she said now. ‘Are you doing anything more with this new life of yours than escorting rich men’s children to school and rescuing their iPods from the playground bully?’

‘You know I can’t discuss operations.’

‘
Operations!
At best, you’re planting bugs in the offices of the Count’s business rivals. Admit it: you’re pissing your life away using one fiftieth of the skill set I gave you. Wouldn’t you rather draw on everything you have, Simon, to do something truly important?’

‘That line isn’t going to work on me a second time.’

‘It’s still valid. Even more so. Then, you were a soldier, tough as nails but directionless and unformed. Now . . . I couldn’t even say that for you.’

‘Then find someone else,’ he said simply.

The cottage was isolated, surrounded by woodland, dark. The end of the track. Arkell parked facing the way they’d come. With a torch, he checked three tell-tales around the oak front door – a fleck of silver paper in the lock, a scattering of sawdust on the door mat, the end of a vine trapped against the jamb.

Her first impression, once inside: he didn’t live here; it was a loan from the Count, temporary digs for the hired help. Kicking off his black oxfords, Arkell padded across worn stone tiles to the fridge. ‘Chianti or Verdicchio?’

‘Some choice,’ she said. ‘Can’t get your Corsican ditchwater here?’

He took the Verdicchio and two plain tumblers into the next room – empty but for a desk and a couple of armchairs. The fireplace had been used recently, despite the season. Pieces of half-burnt kindling outlined the ashy hearth. ‘I remember you loathed it.’

Splashing wine into both glasses, he passed one to her and downed the other without appearing to taste it. No cheers, no clinking of glasses. He’d never been this cold before. His upbeat attitude, his boundless energy had once been a source of great comfort and inspiration to Wraye. Her duties in Washington had included liaison with Defense Intelligence Agency weapons-proliferation experts, and at times her growing comprehension of the rogue nuclear threat had come close to sinking her. Simon Arkell’s youthful optimism had helped her overcome the gnawing despair and step up to the tremendous responsibilities she had worked so hard to acquire.

She remembered his wedding as a moment of rare humanity in her fraught world. The speech: most of it directed straight to Emily; all of it from the heart. The first dance, with the two of them entwined like honeysuckle. Enough emotion in the air to carry Wraye back to her own short-lived marriage. Enough to wet her cheeks for the first time in years. She was one of just three SIS colleagues to be invited, and the only one he thanked in his speech, however obliquely. And Emily, who by then knew who she was and what she did, came over to her and hugged her with real warmth while whispering fervently, ‘Keep him alive for me, will you? Please?’

That was two weeks before Wraye was made Director of Counter-Proliferation. It was an appointment that took her – and Arkell with her – all through the East European and Central Asian states that had previously, as constituent parts of the Soviet Union, been her enemy. Counter-Proliferation was one of the few spheres of SIS activity in which pure intelligence-gathering needed, on occasion, to be supplemented by covert action. In that, Simon Arkell excelled.

He refilled his glass, stripped off his tie and sat in the chair by the desk. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

Setting her wine untouched on the floor, Wraye took the other chair. She glanced at the desk: a laptop and a pile of hardback books on the history of Liguria. Somewhere deep in the night, an owl uttered a low cry. ‘His name is Gavriel Yadin,’ she began. ‘He is a former Mossad officer, a member of the Kidon unit – an assassin. He is the man who killed Prime Minister Anneke van der Velde at the Think Again conference.’

This time, Arkell merely sipped his drink. ‘It was a heart attack. We’ve all seen the clip.’

‘It was hydrogen cyanide, delivered via a soluble dart.’

He hesitated. ‘Not a single news report –’

‘Who’s going to admit a prime minister was murdered in front of three security services and a global television audience?’

‘You said this was for the Canadians.’

‘They reckon their man may be next.’

‘As part of Think Again?’

‘The theory – and it is only a theory – is that someone has hired Yadin to take out the three pro-legalization premiers,
pour encourager les autres
.’

‘Then why not kill them all at once?’

‘Perhaps to give the others a chance to recant? Or perhaps it’s just more terrifying one by one.’

‘There could be a thousand other reasons why van der Velde was targeted. Her clampdown on organized crime. Her immigration stance. The military cuts . . .’

‘Nevertheless, the Canadians are nervous. They want the killer found and neutralized. You know what CSIS are like – friendly folk who identify themselves to the public and collect most of their intelligence within their own borders. They aren’t set up to do this themselves.’

‘How did you identify Yadin?’

‘There was DNA from a set of abandoned hiking clothes, but the profile wasn’t known to any police database. And Yadin managed to avoid showing his face to a single one of the CCTV units at the Tobago venue. But by chance a technician running a test on a reserve studio camera caught him on video for 1.8 seconds. CSIS couldn’t make a match. Nor could the CIA or NSA or any European service. This guy is a ghost as far as the intelligence community is concerned. So they came to me. In the end, one of my contacts in the South African Secret Service nailed it from an old NIS–Mossad partnership archive.’

‘Can I see the video?’

‘It was on a memory stick your assistant confiscated in Milan. She’s very beautiful, by the way. Are you . . . ?’

Arkell replenished his glass. ‘I’ll have it brought here tomorrow.’

‘The same data package is on my secure server. If you have broadband in this fleapit, I’ll show you now.’

‘It can wait.’

Wraye gazed at him, trying to gauge whether he recognized the trap he had just sidestepped. Computers were never his strong point, but in nine years that could have changed. Certainly, his simple online presence was well-conceived: the social network profile carried no photo or contact details – just a mailbox through which bidders for his services could register their interest, if they were well enough connected to acquire his username.

For a long time, Wraye had remained entirely unaware of his survival. Then, a whisper of a rumour: a particularly effective freelance spy operating in the corporate market, who happened to have a background in the French military and British Intelligence. She was astounded, then hopeful, then tormented. But she did not look for him. If Simon Arkell really was alive, she reasoned, he had chosen to remain dead to his former SIS colleagues. She would respect that choice.

Until CSIS came calling. For the Yadin commission, there was simply no one else in the same league. It was a German industrialist, an old contact from her Counter-Proliferation days, who steered her to Arkell’s webpage.
Remember Abuja?
was all she wrote. It was enough to elicit a response from beyond the grave.

‘You’ve tried Mossad.’

‘
Address unknown
,’ she smiled. ‘Yadin was kicked out twelve years ago. The charges were serious: rogue behaviour, ungovernable attitude, even a suggestion – unproven – that he took money from Hamas in exchange for advance notice of assassination targets. The Mossad claim they’ve lost track of him. It’s unlikely, but there’s no way they’ll give up one of their own to a foreign service, even a blacklisted liability like Yadin. I stamped my foot with the DG, who still owes me from our A. Q. Khan collaboration, and he allowed me a glimpse of Yadin’s personnel file. He also let slip that Yadin has been working for the same master ever since he left Israeli government service. That’s as much help as we’re going to get from them.’

‘What’s his story?’

Wraye nodded towards the laptop. ‘May I? All my notes are on the server.’

Arkell didn’t take the bait. ‘Give me the headlines.’

‘His mother was a PT instructor for the army, a sabra with a sharp tongue and undying loyalty to the state. Father quite the opposite: a mild-mannered university lecturer from Berne with a passion for model trains. The psychs speculated that little Gavriel reacted against what he perceived to be a gender imbalance between his parents. He became single-minded, occasionally vicious. There was an unfortunate incident involving his younger brother and a razor blade. You’ll have to read the notes . . .’

‘Go on.’

‘Not that he’s a sociopath. The Mossad steer clear of the mad and the bad. If he made it through selection, we can assume he’s reasonably well balanced. But remember what we’re dealing with here. There are fewer than fifty Kidon combatants in service at any one time, and their training is superb. Sophisticated killing techniques, weaponry, tradecraft, the psychology of fear. They want their enemies to feel vulnerable wherever they are, and utter ruthlessness is a crucial weapon in that psychological war.

‘I saw an example of their work in Abuja. Israel used to buy most of its oil from Nigeria, for obvious reasons. A couple of Hezbollah strategists got it into their heads to bribe the relevant ministers into cutting off the supply. We had the Petroleum Corporation wired, and we picked up a lot of chatter about these two Lebanese gentlemen. I passed on the gist to Shabtai Shavit. Within twelve hours a Kidon team had flown in. They didn’t just kill the Hezbollah men; they took them down to the delta and fed them, alive, to crocodiles. I was given a copy of the video tape as a . . . courtesy. Hezbollah got the other copy as a warning.’

‘From the van der Velde killing, I’d say Yadin’s more subtle than that.’

‘It’s not a question of subtlety. Yadin understands the importance of the message behind a kill. His file lists a dozen hits in Arab capitals that were blatant, broad-daylight shootings, guttings and sliced throats, where the objective was to discourage Syria, Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf states from offering Palestinian terrorists safe haven. The mess and mayhem were the point. On the other hand, Yadin also assassinated two Swiss bankers, one French weapons scientist, one British solicitor and two American lobbyists, all allegedly working on behalf of Israel’s enemies. Three were declared to be natural deaths, one a road accident and one a suicide.’

‘He’s versatile. Comfortable with gore, but also adept at hiding his tracks.’

‘His methods are tailored to the ultimate objective, and that gives us our first clue about the Think Again murder. A straightforward shooting would have made Anneke van der Velde a martyr to the drug-legalization cause. A premature natural death, on the other hand, makes her look unhealthy in body and, perhaps, in mind. If you were religiously inclined you might even conclude that God had taken a view on her politics.’