Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (4 page)

The lift pinged open at Luke’s floor and Springer nodded a
goodbye. ‘Hang on,’ said Luke, in turn holding open the lift door. ‘What do you mean, telling his family? What’s happened to Benton?’

Springer’s face showed that he knew he had said too much, even within those secure walls. ‘Oh, right,’ he said. ‘Well, you’ll know soon enough.’ Then the lift door closed on him.

For a minute Luke stood on the landing, people rushing past him. He was shocked. He had never met Benton but they had spoken many times on the phone and Luke had seen his reports, always carefully nuanced and caveated. Now he had become a casualty and Luke had no idea how MI6 would handle a man killed in the course of duty. What would they put on his tombstone? ‘Benton. Career spook. Useful squash player. RIP.’ Maybe not.

‘Coffee’s on the sideboard. Grab a cup. You’ve got a few minutes to prep before we go in to see the Chief.’ Angela Scott was a woman of few words. Petite and short, her auburn hair was tied back, her clothes neat, stylish but simple, a tiny gold crucifix just visible on her pale, freckled chest. As line managers go, Luke reckoned he could do a lot worse than Angela.

A former station chief in Mexico City, she had been at the sharp end of agent running. Yet from the first day he had been assigned to her team in the Latin America division she had taken him under her wing, never once patronizing. She had recognized that he needed time to adjust to his new life after twelve years in the Forces, but in the few months they had been working together he had shown her that he was a fast learner. And his Spanish was better than hers. Way better. Angela had done six months at a cosy language institute for British students in Guatemala, while Luke had spent his early childhood in Colombia and returned often, absorbing the language, perfecting his slang.

‘All I can tell you for now,’ she said, ‘is that we’ve lost our station chief in Bogotá. Of course, you knew Jerry Benton from his reports. He’s been killed on a deniable op, which we hadn’t even told the Colombians about. And we’ve lost contact with Synapse.’

‘Synapse?’ said Luke. ‘Christ. He was Benton’s primary agent. The intel he was feeding us was pure gold.’

‘Yes. It’s bad.’ Angela let out a small sigh. ‘The Colombians are seriously peeved. Our ambassador will have to go into the Foreign Ministry to explain what the hell our man was doing in a coke-infested jungle six hundred and fifty kilometres from the capital. Benton was declared and it’s supposed to be a friendly nation.’ She glanced down at her watch and frowned. ‘Look, here’s the thing. C’s called us up to his office. He wants to be put fully in the picture before he addresses the whole staff.’

‘C’ was the first abbreviation Luke had learned on his induction. It was what they called the Chief of SIS. It was not an abbreviation for ‘Chief’ but the first letter of ‘Cumming’, from the founder of the Service in 1909, Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming, a monocled and medalled character in cocked hat and braid. He had always signed his letters ‘C’ and somehow the tradition had stuck, one of the few that had.

‘Director of Ops will be there,’ continued Angela.

‘Don’t you mean controller of Ops?’ replied Luke.

‘That’s a sore point for some people here. No, Sir John Sawers changed that title when he was Chief. Part of his drive to bring us more into line with the rest of Whitehall. We don’t have controllers any more, we have directors. Anyway, you’re about to meet most of them: Operations, Counter-terrorism, the Americas, Legal Affairs. Basically, the big guns. Luke, you grew up in Colombia and you’ve spent the last three months on the Latin America counter-narcotics file, so I’m expecting you to deliver a situational brief. Do you need more time?’

‘Ideally.’

‘Well, I’m afraid you haven’t got it. See you upstairs at half past.’ She glanced at his trainers and sweat-soaked tracksuit. ‘Oh, and you’d better get changed. There’s a locker down the end of the corridor. Lorimer from our Brussels station keeps a shirt and suit in it for whenever he pops over.’ She appraised him. ‘You’re about the same size. Best put it on. He’ll get over it.’

In the space of twenty-eight minutes Luke found the locker, changed into the suit – a little tight in places but it would do – splashed some water over his face, then cast a last-minute eye over his recent case notes. Not much he could do about the shoes. It would just have to be trainers and a suit.

He was met on the sixth floor and escorted through to the outer office, past framed photographs of David Cameron, Prince Charles and other pillars of the Establishment, past and present. The carpet up there was thicker, he noticed. Then it was into the boardroom, which looked to Luke like any other boardroom he had ever seen in countless films. Long, polished table, expensive finish, a row of framed abstracts on the wall and around fifteen or so seats all filling fast. He recognized most of the faces from his induction briefing, though he doubted any of their owners would know who he was. Quiet, ordinary-looking men and women, they might have been partners in a City law firm or a West End residential estate agency, not spymasters in Britain’s most secret of secret agencies.

Luke took almost the last free seat, settling himself with some difficulty beside an overweight man in a cherry-pink polo shirt who offered him a broad smile. Had they met before? Luke didn’t think so.

‘Sid,’ said the man, holding out a fleshy, slightly damp hand in greeting. ‘Sid Khan. It’s really Syed Khan, but everyone calls me Sid.’ Luke took in the gold pendant and the curly chest hair poking out of the neck of the polo shirt: not exactly what he was expecting in an MI6 boardroom. Who was this guy?

‘Are you on the tech side?’ asked Luke, then kicked himself for making assumptions.

‘Used to be. Transferred from Cheltenham. Started out here in Science and Technology. You know, working with all the gizmos and gadgets. Just the place for a bloke from Bradford with a knack for computers.’

‘Right,’ said Luke, still none the wiser as to what the man was doing in MI6’s boardroom at a moment of crisis. ‘What do you do now?’

The room went quiet as the Chief walked in. Khan leaned over hurriedly to whisper in Luke’s ear: ‘I run Counter-terrorism.’

Now he remembered. Of course. Sid was a legend. A first-class degree from Manchester in . . . What was it? Human/computer interaction or something. Fluent in Urdu. Rapid progression up through GCHQ, transfer to SIS, then postings to Dhaka, Islamabad and Riyadh. Apparently he’d thrown a lot of people off-balance in those countries. In a good way. They would have been expecting some clean-cut Oxbridge type in a Jermyn Street suit. Instead they’d got Sid, who ate
roti
and
naan
with his fingers, and disarmed his hosts with his easy charm. Word was that after David Cameron had upset Pakistan with that speech he’d made to Indian business leaders in Bangalore in 2010, saying they couldn’t look both ways on terrorism, it was Sid who had salvaged the relationship between the two countries’ intelligence agencies. Islamabad had been ready to shut down cooperation and withhold information until Khan had won them round.

The Chief took his place at the head of the table. The room tensed in expectation and Luke found himself involuntarily stiffening in his chair, as if he were back on the parade square at Lympstone. The Chief was now his commanding officer and he’d better make a good impression.

Like Angela, Sir Adam Keeling, the new Chief of MI6, was a man of few words, and many had questioned whether he had the patience to put up with all the process and protocol of Whitehall machinery. He was a career intelligence officer, a veteran of Cold War postings behind the Iron Curtain, some unorthodox assignments in central Asia, then back and forth to the Middle East. He was widely credited within the Service for getting Colonel Gaddafi’s entire arsenal of poison gas dismantled.

‘OK.’ He faced the two lines of sombre faces, then paused while a female Royal Navy rating entered noiselessly through a side door, deposited a fresh pot of coffee in front of him and left the room. ‘To state the obvious, this is a tragic day for the Service, for all of us here, and for Britain. Benton was a first-class intelligence officer and I don’t wish to hear of another such death on
my watch. The PM’s already sent condolences to his family, Foreign Secretary’s going to see them today. Sid, what have we got on the perps? Who was behind this?’

Khan locked the fingers of both hands together and cracked his knuckles, causing a few people to wince, then stood up and made his way to the opposite end of the table from the Chief. Luke realized that the director of CT probably had his detractors in the building; probably in this room, in fact. It was a steep pyramid at the top of SIS. One chief, three director-generals and a raft of directors below that, nearly all with an eye on the top job. If they weren’t in the running by the time they reached fifty, he’d heard, then a fair few people tended to walk out of the door to seek their fortune in the well-paid world of commercial intelligence. But Sid Khan was younger, unorthodox and, Luke bet, had probably ruffled a few feathers.

‘Our initial assessment,’ said Khan, ‘is that the Colombian coke barons were behind this. The drug traffickers, the
narcotraficantes
or, as everyone calls them, the narcos. Most likely one of the clans. Someone like the Usugas. They’ve got the hump with what we’re doing to their shipments. Twenty per cent chance it could also be dissident rebels from the FARC movement, miffed at the peace talks with the government.’

The Chief said nothing so Khan continued, ‘Some of these people are diehard Marxists, still wearing the old Che Guevara T-shirts, still dreaming about a great People’s Bolivarian Republic stretching all the way from the Caribbean to Chile. We know there’s a crossover, a nexus, between the drug barons and the guerrillas. They’re into all sorts of other stuff too over there, illegal mining, extortion, you name it. Looks like Jerry might have got himself a bit too close to one of their deals.’

The Chief made a low humming sound. Those who knew him recognized it as a danger signal. It meant he was far from satisfied. He rubbed his temples with the fingertips of both hands, causing his silvery grey hair to rise and fall before he spoke.

‘Right, let’s be clear on this,’ he said. ‘I need two things and I need them fast. I want to know who killed my station chief and,
most importantly, I want the full low-down on whatever he was on to. Who’s this “third party” he referred to in his last report? What were they cooking up? Are we talking narcotics, terrorism or proliferation? Or all three? We’re a national bloody intelligence agency with nearly a billion-pound budget, not a guessing shop. I want to know a lot more than this. What are the Met doing?’

‘Counter-terrorism Command are sending two detectives,’ said Sid. ‘We’ve requested Spanish speakers but apparently no one’s available. They’re all in Spain on that trawler from Liverpool.’

‘Fabulous,’ said the Chief, without a hint of mirth. No one smiled. He turned to Greg Sanderson, the head of Latin America Division, the only person in the room Luke actually knew. ‘What have the Latins come up with?’

Sanderson pushed his glasses back to the bridge of his nose. They seemed to Luke to be rather too big for his face. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘the Colombians have already opened their own investigation, as we’d expect. ANIC – their national intelligence agency – are the lead on this. But that’s serious bandit country where Jerry was operating and it’s really more of a local police operation. I believe their man in charge on the ground is . . .’ he glanced at a handwritten note ‘. . . Major Humberto Elerzon. Don’t know him, as yet.’

‘OK. Anyone else? Yes, Angela?’

‘C, you should hear what Luke Carlton on my team has to say. With respect to everyone else in the room, he’s our in-house Colombia expert.’

‘Carlton . . . No relation, I suppose, to Matthew Carlton?’

‘My uncle, sir.’

The Chief relaxed briefly. ‘No need for the “sir”,’ he told Luke. ‘Casual professionalism is our hallmark here. I remember your uncle. A good man.’

Luke felt a double twinge of satisfaction. He was pleased that his uncle had not been forgotten but, more importantly, a nod from the Chief in a room like this could do him no harm. As a newcomer in their ranks, it gave Luke a certain pedigree.

‘So,’ continued the Chief, ‘you’ve obviously seen the prelim
report put together by Night Duty. Let’s hear you put some flesh on the bones.’ With that, he settled back in his chair and folded his arms.

As one, all eyes turned to focus on Luke as he got to his feet and strode, self-conscious in his borrowed suit, to the end of the table to take Khan’s place. The director of CT gave him a slap on the back as the two men passed each other. For good luck? Did Khan know that Luke had not seen the report? Angela shot him an apologetic look but said nothing. Luke was on his own and he was all too aware that his reputation would be built or destroyed by what he said in the next ten minutes.

‘Right,’ he began. ‘The current situation is that most processed Colombian coke leaves the country by container ship. They call it rip-on, rip-off. At the last minute, just before the container is sealed, someone paid off down at the port chucks in a bunch of holdalls weighing three hundred to four hundred kilograms in all. When it docks in Europe, at Antwerp or Valencia or wherever, someone collects it. Thanks to Jerry Benton and his people, we’ve had some pretty good interceptions lately.’

Almost everyone had flinched at his mention of the murdered intelligence officer.

‘Then there are the light aircraft,’ continued Luke. ‘They’re flying two to three hundred kilos a time up to Honduras or Mexico. There are also the fast boats heading up both sides of Central America, and finally the mini-subs.’

‘I’m sorry – the what?’ interrupted the Chief.

‘Miniature submarines,’ replied Luke. ‘They’ve become quite a phenomenon down there. The narcos build the subs themselves to stash drugs and smuggle them up the coast. They tend to be launched out of the swamps south of Buenaventura, then sail just below the surface all the way up to Panama and beyond. But the Colombian Navy’s getting good at catching them too. Their chief of Naval Ops says they’ve caught over a hundred mini-subs to date.’