Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (23 page)

‘You’ll have to remind me which report that was,’ said Angela. ‘I’ve been rather focused on whether or not he’d survive getting kidnapped.’

‘The transcript’s right here,’ replied Khan, picking up a thin file from his desk and passing it to her. ‘Have a look on page two. Carlton transcribed the exact words the agent told him. We’ve marked it up in bold.’

Angela opened the file and read:

The colour had drained from Angela’s face. ‘I hadn’t seen this,’ she said.

‘Well, you have now,’ Khan replied. ‘I’d best be getting to COBRA.’

AT THREE IN
the afternoon, as Luke’s flight descended on its final approach to Heathrow, Sid Khan sat at the head of a rectangular table in a windowless wood-panelled room. He was not alone. Of the twenty-two seats around the table, nearly all were occupied today, many by people he knew, with whom he had had dealings in the twenty months since he had taken up the reins as director of Counter-terrorism at MI6. As the room settled down to business, Khan nodded as he recognized them. There was Andrew Crowthorn, his opposite number at MI5, the domestic Security Service; next to him was a senior policeman, Andy Grimshaw, who ran SO15, the Met’s Counter-terrorism Command; then some suit from the Home Office, whose name he could never remember. He spotted Maria Stanikowski, the CIA representative from the US Embassy, dressed in a dark suit and crisp white shirt, and they exchanged rather exaggerated bows. Khan liked her: she always spoke her mind and got straight to the point. There were also a few military types he didn’t know, so he glanced quickly at his list, the crib sheet of attendees printed up and handed to him by the Cabinet Office just minutes earlier. Royal Navy . . . more Royal Navy . . . Special Forces . . . He read down the list, pausing to look at ‘the exotics’, as he thought of them, the science brains from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at
Aldermaston in Berkshire, then the Defence Science and Technology people from Porton Down in Wiltshire.

They were in a basement beneath the pavements of Whitehall and Khan was about to preside over a session of COBRA, the acronym coined by the media for Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms, where a committee meets whenever the government is facing a national emergency. Ebola, hostage situations in Nairobi and Algeria, and a host of other threats to Britain’s security had all triggered COBRA meetings in their time. But this was different. Those had been known threats that had triggered a clear, calibrated response. Here they were dealing with something unquantifiable, so a whole range of frightening scenarios had to be planned for.

‘Right.’ Khan stood up. ‘Thank you for being here promptly. Before we start, can I just check we’ve got the live feed from Bogotá station?’

‘Coming online now,’ replied one of the tech operators, from just behind Khan’s chair.

At the other end of the table a large TV screen took up the whole of the wall, divided up into eight separate images. Some were blank, some were maps, but in the top left-hand corner a man’s face flickered into view. It was Clements, acting head of MI6’s Bogotá station since Benton’s death. His pale, pinched face was rather too close to the camera and he was wearing a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles that gave him an owlish, professorial air.

‘Good,’ said Khan. ‘Now, I’m going to be brutally honest and tell you exactly what we know and what we don’t.’ Every head in the room was turned towards him.

‘We have a high level of confidence that an organized criminal network in South America is trying to smuggle an unconventional weapon into this country by sea.’ It did not escape anyone’s notice that he avoided using the toxic term ‘WMD’. It had taken ten years and two chiefs for MI6 to move on from the fiasco of those shaky intelligence assessments about Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction.

‘We have some handle,’ continued Khan, ‘on who is behind this and why they are doing it. It’s one of the Colombian drug cartels. But . . .’ he looked around the table ‘. . . we do not, as yet, know what this weapon is, where they are planning to bring it ashore or what the intended target is.’

‘Bloody brilliant,’ sneered Andy Grimshaw, under his breath.

‘If I could ask you all to look at the screen,’ he went on, ‘I’m going to get our man in Bogotá to update us on what we know about this particular cartel.’

Clements’s face suddenly filled the entire wall. One or two people round the table flinched as his bookish features jumped out towards them. His lips were moving but no sound was coming out.

‘Tech?’ called Khan.

‘Sorry, sir. We seem to be having a problem with the audio but we’re working on it.’

Clements was in full flow now, apparently speaking with passion, but not a word could be heard in London. Khan motioned to the techie at the console and at the click of a button Clements’s face was demoted back to its place at the top left of the screen.

‘OK, moving on,’ said Khan. ‘As you would expect, my Service has been working closely with Counter-proliferation at the FCO and we’re pooling our efforts with Aldermaston and Porton Down. We’ve also made discreet enquiries with the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency. Our assessment is that the cartel does not possess a thermonuclear device.’

Several pairs of shoulders around the table visibly relaxed.

‘But that still leaves the chemical, biological, radiological and explosives strands of the whole CBRNE piece,’ continued Khan. ‘Until we know what we’re dealing with, my Service has briefed the Prime Minister that we need to prepare for every eventuality. Our American friends,’ he gestured towards the woman from the CIA, ‘have been very helpful with extra satellite coverage over the Atlantic, while both Cheltenham and Fort Meade are hoovering up anything they can catch in the cybersphere. But so
far there’s not a great deal to go on. These people in Colombia appear to have gone to some lengths not to leave a digital trail.’

Khan rested his hands on the surface of the polished table. ‘Now, I mentioned at the start that we think this weapon is coming in by sea. That’s from a single, trusted source, but we have to be open to the possibility they could change their plans at short notice. Right now this makes it a maritime problem. So I’m going to ask . . .’ Khan stopped to look down at his list of attendees ‘. . . I’m going to ask Rear Admiral Paul Maddox from the Royal Navy to give us his assessment. Over to you, Admiral.’ Khan sat down heavily, took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead as the naval officer walked briskly to the far end of the briefing room and stood by the screen.

A tall man with jet-black hair, Maddox was in uniform, his two-star rank displayed by the thick gold braid around his cuffs and a further thin one with a curl insignia. He picked up the remote control, and a map of the Atlantic filled the screen. He turned to address the room.

‘Right, ladies and gents. This will take about ten minutes of your time so bear with me. I’m going to cover routes, means of delivery and counter-measures.’ Maddox took what looked like a black fountain pen from his jacket pocket and flicked a switch, directing a thin green laser beam at the map. ‘Colombia is down here on the bottom left of the screen. There are three container sea ports that could act as a point of departure, here, here and here.’ He pointed the laser pen at the cities of Barranquilla, Santa Marta and Buenaventura. ‘Anything leaving from the Pacific coast would have to transit the Panama Canal, which takes several days longer and incurs additional searches, so we think that’s less likely.’

‘Excuse my interrupting,’ said a voice from the other end of the room. It was Maria Stanikowski. Maddox did not look like the sort of person used to being cut off in mid-flow but he let her speak. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘go ahead.’

‘How do we know they’re transporting it by container?’ she asked. ‘The DEA have all those terminals under surveillance. Wouldn’t they think of something a little more subtle?’

If Maddox was irritated by her interruption, he took care not to show it. ‘You are absolutely correct,’ he replied. ‘I was coming to that. There are smaller vessels leaving a number of other ports every day, not all of them capable of making the Atlantic crossing. And then there are the mini-subs – the miniature submarines the drug cartels use to ferry their product up the coast to Mexico and the Caribbean. They’re an integral part of their smuggling operations and they can launch from pretty much anywhere along the coast that’s hidden by undergrowth. But let’s be clear here. These are basic jerry-built sardine cans. They don’t have the range or the stability to cross the Atlantic.’

‘Which means?’ It was the CIA woman once again.

‘Which means,’ continued Maddox patiently, ‘that we are most likely searching for a small to medium-sized cargo vessel coming in from the south-west. Its destination need not necessarily be a UK port. It could be Antwerp, Rotterdam, Le Havre. We have to keep an open mind here. But the bottom line is, we must assume that whatever device is onboard that vessel, it’s on its way to us right at this moment.’ He let that sink in.

Khan cleared his throat. ‘Thanks for that, Admiral. If you would be so good as to tell us what measures we can have in place to intercept it?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Maddox, putting down the laser pen and walking back to the table. ‘In an ideal world we would set up a naval screen on the hundred-fathom line just west of the English Channel to stop and search every vessel coming into our waters. But that’s just not practical. There are tens of thousands of ships making the Atlantic crossing every year, hundreds at any one time. Even if we had the means to do it, the effect on trade would be catastrophic. So this has to be intelligence-led. We’ll go with everything the agencies can give us.’ He looked pointedly at Khan. ‘We’re after deadweight, cargo, port of origin, anything that narrows it down.’

‘Sorry to butt in, but can I just get something straight?’ This time it was a senior Army officer, Major General ‘Chip’ Cutler, the director of Special Forces. Unlike Maddox, he was in civilian
dress, wearing a well-cut suit and silk tie from Jermyn Street. ‘If the vessel is IDed at sea, we’re going for a maritime interdiction, right?’

Maddox was already nodding, but Khan answered the question. ‘As you know, General, that would be a decision for the PM or the Secretary of State to make on the day. But that would be the most likely scenario, yes.’

‘Sounds like Groundhog Day, then,’ said Cutler drily.

‘Excuse me?’ said Khan.

‘Groundhog Day. History repeating itself. Remember the MV
Nisha
back in 2001?’

There were a few murmurs of recognition from the older people around the table, but Khan was silent. In 2001, as an applied mathematician at GCHQ in Cheltenham, he had been so knee-deep in codes and algorithms that he must have missed that moment.

‘The MV
Nisha
,’ explained the director of Special Forces, ‘was a freighter coming from Mauritius and heading for these shores. There was an intelligence tip-off that she might be carrying terrorist material hidden inside her cargo. So there was an interdiction at sea, off the Sussex coast, I believe. SF teams assaulted from RIBs – rigid inflatable boats – and fast-roped down from helicopters. They found nothing. But all the protocols are in place to do it again if we need to.’

‘I have a question.’ This time it was Andy Grimshaw. Khan noticed to his surprise that he appeared to be chewing gum. ‘We want to stop this thing out at sea before it gets here, right? How many planes have we got to do the search sweeps off the coast?’

Khan narrowed his eyes a fraction. He could not be sure if Grimshaw was being mischievous or genuinely curious. Either way, there was a short, embarrassed silence before Rear Admiral Maddox, still standing, gave an abrupt answer. ‘None. The UK scrapped its maritime patrol aircraft, the
Nimrod
, some years ago.’

‘Genius,’ muttered the policeman.

‘There are other options,’ replied Maddox sternly. ‘There are helicopters out of the naval air station at Culdrose in Cornwall
with horizon-scanning radar, as well as sonar, and they can fly eight-hour sorties at a time. Weather permitting, of course. And we have ScanEagle drones that can fly off one of our frigates in the Channel.’

‘So when does all this get started?’ asked a woman from Number 10. To Khan, who was far from being the oldest person in the room, she looked impossibly young. Her auburn hair was scraped back into a ponytail, a pink blouse showing beneath a tweed jacket of muted green. ‘And when do we tell the public?’ she added.

‘The answer to your first question,’ replied Maddox, ‘is that it’s already begun. The first Sea Kings took off on patrol from Cornwall this morning.’

‘And I can address your other question,’ said Khan, standing up and reasserting his role as chairman. ‘We’re not telling the public anything,’ he said. ‘At least, not yet. The last thing we want is some tabloid-generated panic when we don’t even know what we’re dealing with. Once we’ve got a better grip on the situation we can consider putting out an official line through the Cabinet Office. But until then, can I remind everyone present that what we have just discussed is classified Strap Two-level secret. Absolutely nothing you have heard today is to leave this room.’

‘
IT’S CALLED BELLE
de Provence,’ whispered Elise. ‘It’s lavender oil from the South of France.’ Luke, his upper body propped on pillows, his legs extended along the bed, found himself caught between pleasure and pain. After all he had been through in Colombia, Elise’s touch was soothing as her hands worked gently on his legs, massaging the scented oil into his muscular calves, her eyes never leaving his. But when she turned her attention to his injured foot he winced with pain. It was still too raw to touch. There was a vivid purple mark, like a bullseye, on the upper arch of his right foot where García’s thugs had taken the electric drill to him. He had given them the passcode to his mobile phone pretty quickly after that, especially when they had threatened to start on his hands.