Rogue Elements (8 page)

He turned his violent gaze on her, and in his eyes Wraye saw the memory of a savagely obliterated love.

‘Of course I’m going to bloody kill him.’

By the time the wine was finished the clock on the electric cooker read 01:49. Collecting a pillow and a blanket, Arkell escorted Wraye past the tight little staircase, through a back door and out into the moonless night. ‘What’s this?’ she said suspiciously, as he opened the weather-beaten oak door of a windowless annexe.

‘There’s a mattress at the back. It’s comfortable enough.’

‘Jesus, Simon! I thought we just made a deal. You still don’t trust me?’

With a firm arm, he steered her into the annexe. ‘Until I have proof you never got that Porthos message,’ he said, tossing her the blanket and pillow, ‘yours is the sixth name on the list.’

Wraye did not sleep well. She strongly suspected the annexe had been used, for much of its rustic history, to keep livestock, but beyond testing the door to confirm it was bolted on the outside, she didn’t try to get out. The lumpy mattress was murder on her back. Her head swarming with memories, she dozed fitfully, half-recalling, half-dreaming.

Reconstructing.

‘Is this, in reality, a discussion about our officers’ security?’ Martin de Vries speaking. That dust-dry voice, not a speck of concession to human feeling. ‘Or is it a pre-emptive assault on Five in the matter of how this outrage is to be spun for the newspapers?’ The only emotion was machine-like anger. Outrage, a word all the more potent for the Afrikaner emphasis on the first syllable.

‘Five want to know, as well they might, why this happened and whether it is about to happen again.’ The Chief, magisterial but always softly spoken. ‘I want to know. Can anyone tell me? George? Tony? Some data would be very nice just now. Is it UBL? Are all our officers at risk in their own beds? Or should we open our skirts and let Five establish for us what we seem unable to determine ourselves?’

She had had to fight her way, almost literally, into the room. Straight off the plane from Bishkek, worn out by a sleepless transit in Istanbul, she was in no mood for Jane Saddle’s pettifogging ways. Clutching a sheaf of documents tight to her chest, as if afraid Wraye might catch a glimpse of their contents, the ageless personal secretary to the Chief was at her meticulous worst.

‘It’s not a question of rank, Madeleine, but of relevance. No one is challenging your place at the top table. This is not a meeting of the top table. It’s a side table, with a specialist menu, to which certain members of the top table have something to contribute. Counter-Proliferation does not fall into that category. This was not a WMD event.’

‘I hired him,’ growled Wraye, physically forcing her way past H/SECT. ‘I trained him. I put him in harm’s way.’

‘You shouldn’t blame yourself, Madeleine . . .’ It was a standard technique of Saddle’s to lurch, when she felt in danger of losing a point, into false sympathy. She liked to play the motherly figure. It worked better with the men.

‘Rest assured, the last person I blame is myself.’ Gaining access at last to the conference room, she had laid eyes immediately on George Vine, on Jeremy Elphinstone, on Tony Watchman. ‘I’m here, Jane, to find out who I should blame.’

Elphinstone and Watchman both saw her arrive but pretended otherwise. Vine, naturally, was quick to play the part the others had spurned, hurrying across to her and taking both her hands in his plump fingers. ‘Madeleine. My heart is broken for you. Truly. If I could only convince you that I share your pain. You saw his talent before any of us. You built the bond long before I had the honour of knowing him. But I can honestly say, notwithstanding the limited time we worked together, he was like a son to me.’

‘Thank you, George.’

It was almost true. George Vine had taken the trouble to brief Arkell personally for the Yemen posting, inviting him to his opulent home in Isfahan and commenting afterwards to Wraye, ‘He is rather gorgeous, isn’t he? A dash of Lawrence about the man. I do wonder, though, if he ever plans to mellow, to settle down. He’s like an oversized Peter Pan, don’t you think?’

An apt comparison, Wraye had felt at the time: boyishly high spirited, yet lethal. Simon Arkell would leap at the chance to try something new, learn another skill, explore the unknown. But those mental lacunae identified by the Foreign Legion were still there. However much he developed as an intelligence officer, his moral and emotional instincts remained fixed at the level of a gifted seventeen-year-old. Not that he was immature – just stuck, somehow, in a youthful frame of mind. It was as if a protective curtain had come down over part of his brain when his best friend drowned, preserving for ever a remnant of his teenage psyche: an impatience with planning and reflection; a tendency to leap to judgement; a bravery that bordered on recklessness; a blindness around women.

Now, like Peter Pan, he would never grow up.

‘I feel desperate,’ Vine was saying. ‘You entrusted him to me and I’ve let you down.’

‘I didn’t entrust him to anyone. I don’t remember being consulted in the matter of his reallocation.’ Her gaze returned to Elphinstone, who had his broad, Firm-bearing back to her. She didn’t begrudge his high-handed approach to resourcing; manpower was always stretched in SIS, and someone had to make the difficult decisions. She just wished Elphinstone would make better decisions. ‘Nuclear simply isn’t the priority at the moment,’ he had told her over the secure line from London, while Arkell packed next door and echoed the elementary Arabic phrases coming from his minidisc player. Not the priority! Wait till a device is detonated in Piccadilly, Jeremy my dear, and then tell me nuclear’s not the priority.

But in a way he had been proven right, hadn’t he? It wasn’t an atomic bomb, after all, but your basic terrorist’s plastic explosive that had ripped up a stretch of Dault Street. And Tony Watchman’s star had crept another few inches higher with this further validation of his section’s relevance.

A question of relevance, Madeleine. Relevance.

Was she in danger of becoming irrelevant?

‘Five will need to answer some questions of their own,’ Watchman was saying in that blasé tone which, evidently, he saw no need to curb for the sake of a dead officer. ‘How did the explosives enter the country? Who planted them? Was there any warning chatter they failed to pass on to us? We should push hard for answers. It’s our man down, after all.’

‘Hear hear,’ murmured Elphinstone, making a note on a yellow schedule sheet. His mind was elsewhere, realized Wraye. The support he was giving Watchman was automatic, unthinking, and that worried her. Those two together, if they really were together in the sense she now feared, could be formidable. It was a bad time for Linus Marshall to be away.

‘Then no one can tell me anything useful?’ mourned the Chief. ‘I must go to the Foreign Secretary empty-handed and advise him to look to the Home Office for information? We don’t even know what Arkell was doing back here, George?’

‘
Mea culpa
, sir.’ Vine did actually wring his hands, a piece of theatre they had all expected and all saw through. ‘I should know and I don’t. I have no doubt there was an excellent reason. He was an unimpeachable officer. One of the best. And I did talk to him, I did. But the reason why was not forthcoming, not on that occasion, though I was confident he would explain all as soon as he was able. His wife died as well, of course. We should – we
must
– spare a thought for her.’

Somehow, Madeleine Wraye managed three hours’ sleep despite the discomfort of the mattress and the distraction of rodent activity somewhere nearby. When she awoke, narrow strips of sunlight marked the floor. From outside came a muted pounding.

She could only guess at the time. Where the hell was Joyce? Stiff and cold, she put her eye to the gap between door and jamb and caught a glimpse of Arkell hurtling past. A moment later it happened again.

Exercising. The bastard was exercising.

She tried a different crack, and watched her former officer work effortlessly through one hundred straight burpees. In the sunlight he looked as young and vital as the day she had recruited him. A little bulkier around the chest, but his shoulders and legs had lost none of the definition drilled into them by the Legion’s NCOs. She remembered him doing one-arm press-ups in the Swat Valley, his feet hooked over the bull bar of their Land Cruiser; some images never fade. With no pause to rest after the burpees, he swung a rucksack on his back – filled with rocks from the look of it – and disappeared.

No, he certainly hadn’t gone soft.

When, later, he unlocked the door, sweating and dusty but wearing a clean grey T-shirt, he looked irritatingly refreshed on so little sleep. ‘Good morning,’ he offered, in cheerful defiance of her glare. Outside stood a weather-roughened pine table on which were laid the rudiments of breakfast. A pot of coffee. A melon, a pile of toast and an unlabelled pot of some dark berry conserve.

‘Living well on your corporate wages,’ observed Wraye. But she could not maintain the sarcasm, because beyond the unimpressive table was the most wonderful view. They were standing, she realized now, on a high cliff top. Spread out below them, the Mediterranean. A couple of yachts, a liner in the distance. Sea birds flocking and whirling overhead.

She glanced back at the house. Only a few metres separated it from the cliff. ‘Didn’t I teach you always to keep an escape route open? How would you get clear if someone came down that track?’

‘BASE jump,’ said Arkell. ‘I have a rig inside and a dinghy moored below. The best escape routes are the ones no one can follow you down. Melon?’

The toast was made from stale bread, and the jam was too sweet. But the melon was fresh and flavoursome, and the coffee was superb. It took the edge off Wraye’s irritation.

‘I’m curious about one thing,’ she said. ‘The Dault Street investigators didn’t find very much of . . . Saeed, I suppose, to put in your coffin. But there was enough to do a DNA check. It matched your profile. How did you manage that?’

‘Bribery,’ he shrugged between mouthfuls of toast. ‘I followed one of the forensic investigators home, gave her five thousand pounds and a few millilitres of my blood. Would have added the usual threat to nearest and dearest, but she was actually quite sympathetic: she could see that if someone with access to plastic explosive was trying to kill me I would be better off dead.’

‘And then you disappeared off the face of the earth. How?’

‘Why don’t we concentrate on Yadin?’

As he said the name, she noted the tightening of the muscles in his face. But it wasn’t the paralysing fury of the night before. He had moved past that. This was anticipation. A trace of excitement. Inwardly, she cheered: a decade on, the fire-starting spirit that made him so good at this work was still there.

‘I can only suggest one lead,’ she said. ‘Mossad won’t talk to you, but I have a contact at the Shabak who owes me a few favours. Avraham Boim – as tough a nut as Israel has got. Old school, file on everyone, endlessly suspicious. He won’t like you any more than he likes anyone else. On the other hand there’s no love lost between Mossad and Shabak officers. Usual story: the Shabak does all the hard work, protecting the Knesset, hunting down suicide bombers, while Mossad agents strut about the world getting all the glory. He’ll have something on Yadin . . . How are you for passports?’

‘Fine, thank you.’

‘What nationalities?’

He smiled without responding.

‘Simon, we have eight days. Not trusting me isn’t an option.’ When he didn’t react, she asked, ‘You can travel to Israel today?’

‘Sure.’

‘Equipment? Weapons?’

‘I’m just going to talk to the guy.’

‘I mean for later.’

‘I have a few suppliers.’

‘This is ridiculous. I could get you official documentation from twelve countries, special forces weaponry, NSA surveillance kit, whatever you want.’

‘I’ll contact you if I need something. Let’s leave it at that.’

She leaned back in the creaking chair to hide her annoyance. She also wanted to cover the very faint sound of an engine she thought she might have heard. ‘I suppose it’d be foolish to ask if you need cash?’

Arkell stood up. ‘I’ll keep a note of expenses,’ he offered, walking to the house.

‘Where are you going?’ she called, anxious that he too might have heard the engine.

‘Shower,’ he replied over his shoulder. ‘I have a plane to catch.’

Wraye was at the front of the house four seconds after the water began flowing upstairs. He’d removed the laptop, phone and car keys, she noticed.

She peered into the trees beyond the parked car. No movement. Nothing. She raised one arm and waved.

There, hidden in the shadows of an oak, the flicker of a moving arm.

This time, Wraye made an even clearer signal: with both arms, she beckoned the unseen watchers in.

The shower had stopped. Wraye hurried back to the living room. Only one cupboard large enough to hide a parachute rig. She eased it open, tense against the imagined creak of old hinges. Nothing inside but Ligurian tourist brochures, long untouched. Where, then? Near the back door, an old armchair with a newish spread draped over it to hide the stains. And to hide the space beneath?

Wraye dropped to her knees and pulled back the printed cotton. Under the chair was a nylon pack: harness straps, bulging contents. And loosely fastened to the top, a small bundle of silky material. The pilot chute.

Quickly unfastening it, she tied the pilot chute around a heavy iron lampstand as Arkell’s footsteps sounded on the stairs. By the time he came into view, she was leaning against the opposite wall with an old magazine in her hands.

He was dressed in jeans and a clean white shirt, and carrying a backpack. On his feet were a pair of the old desert combat boots she remembered trying to wean him off in DC. Those desert boots were a longstanding favourite. He’d worn similar models all over central Asia and the Balkans, even into luxury hotels and embassy receptions. A good-luck charm to him, they’d seemed to carry the sands of Djibouti and Chad into the chilliest reaches of the former Soviet Union.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’ll drop you off in town. Your people can arrange transport from there.’