Dead Line (3 page)

‘That’s why I’m here. I must tell you in the utmost confidence that we have very recently received intelligence - highly classified intelligence - that an attempt will be made to abort the conference, possibly before it even begins. I can’t be more precise than that for the moment - the intelligence is vague, but highly reliable. Those agencies who have a need to know will be briefed in greater detail by our colleagues in MI6. I can assure you that the threat is real.
Nothing
must be allowed to derail the talks. Thank you for your time’. He stood up. ‘Now I have to get back next door.’

Later, when the meeting broke up, Liz looked out of the corner of her eye at Bruno, who was lounging back in his chair, looking immensely self-satisfied. It wasn’t hard to guess why. How typical, she thought, feeding intelligence in at the top for maximum dramatic impact, rather than briefing colleagues in the normal way.

Making her way downstairs, through the familiar glass security doors and out into Whitehall, Liz found herself in the company of the younger of the two CIA men, the Ivy Leaguer with the horn-rimmed glasses and the striped tie. It had been raining and there were puddles on the ground. He was wearing a Burberry raincoat that looked absurdly new.

Smiling, he held his hand out. ‘Miles Brookhaven,’ he said in a soft voice, his accent mid-Atlantic. The afternoon traffic was light and they had the wide pavement to themselves. ‘Going this way?’ he said, indicating the gates of the Horse Guards building, twenty yards up Whitehall.

She hadn’t intended to, but found herself reflecting that she could just as well get back to Thames House by walking across Horseguards Parade as by going down Whitehall and getting involved with the complicated crossings around Parliament. They turned into the gates together, passed the sentries in their boxes and emerged through the dark archway into the sunshine reflected off the red gravel of the parade ground.

‘Your Sir Nicholas,’ Brookhaven said appreciatively. ‘Is that what they mean by a mandarin?’

Liz laughed. ‘Strictly speaking, a mandarin is a civil servant. He was a mandarin once, but now he’s got himself a profile - these days he’s a politico.’

Brookhaven was walking quickly. A shade under six feet, he was lean and athletic-looking. He seemed to glide effortlessly over the pavement and though Liz was hardly a dawdler, she found it hard to keep up. Out of the corner of her eye, as they crossed the gravel, she saw Bruno Mackay climbing into the driving seat of a flashy-looking car. How on earth had he got one of the special passes that entitled him to park there? In fact, how had he got out there so quickly?

‘What do you make of what he said?’

‘Sir Nicholas?’ Liz shrugged. ‘Oh, I think we have to take him at his word, for the time being anyway. No doubt Six will pass on the intelligence when it’s been assessed. There’s nothing we or anyone can do until we know more.’

She changed the subject. ‘How long have you been stationed here?’

‘Just two months,’ he said, before adding quickly, ‘but I know England well. My school had an exchange programme with a school here. I had a lovely time and I’ve often been back.’

Lovely
- not usually a favourite word of the American male. Brookhaven was an Anglophile, thought Liz, and keen to show it. They were always quick to tell you that they knew the place.

‘Which school?’ she asked.

They had reached the corner of Birdcage Walk and Parliament Square. Brookhaven pointed almost directly ahead of them.

‘Right here. Westminster,’ he said. They stopped. ‘I’m off that way,’ he added, gesturing up Birdcage Walk.

‘Right. I’ll see more of you, no doubt.’

‘I hope so.’ He smiled quickly and walked off.

Liz had intended to skirt Queen Elizabeth Hall and then set off diagonally towards the far corner of the square, but on an impulse she continued straight ahead, passed the front of Westminster Abbey and walked through the arch into the great courtyard of Westminster School. On the green in front of her a group of uniformed fifteen-year-olds was casually throwing a ball around. To her mind there was something maddeningly upper-class about the scene, something that she knew she could never quite understand or like.

Feeling somehow out of place, out of time, she crossed the court, out through the tiny gate at the far end and into the sunlit maze of eighteenth-century houses that led her out opposite the House of Lords and the long, tapering wedge of a little park, convenient for peers of the realm and members of parliament to take the air. She remembered the fateful afternoon when she’d sat on one of its benches with Charles Wetherby, and tried calmly to relate to him her discovery that the thing he had feared most - a traitor working in their midst - was true. He’d taken the news with an outward show of calm, but she’d known how shaken he must have been.

She was thinking of that now when a car pulled up abruptly on the street right next to her. It was the Mercedes 450 cabriolet - a low-slung sports model, silver with an amazingly loud ketchup-coloured top - that she’d seen Bruno Mackay getting into on Horseguards Parade.

Her heart sank as she watched the front passenger window slide down. The driver leaned over.

‘Want a lift?’ he shouted out.

‘No thanks,’ she said, as cheerily as she could. The only way to deal with the man, she had learned before, was to make it clear that nothing he said mattered at all.

‘Come on, Liz, lighten up. I’m going right by your building.’

‘I’m going to walk, Bruno,’ she said firmly, as a van started to hoot its horn in protest at the hold-up. ‘You go on. If you stay there much longer you’ll get arrested.’

He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. But don’t think I didn’t see you back there consorting with the enemy.’ He said this with the mock-reproof of a headmaster.

‘Nonsense,’ said Liz, tempted to use a stronger word. ‘Miles Brookhaven isn’t the enemy. He and I have a “special relationship”.’ And she walked on, certain that for once she had left Bruno at a loss for words.

THREE

That morning the Reverend Thomas Willoughby hoped for rain. Earlier in the year, during the flooding in May, he had wanted never to see rain again. But now in late summer the grass had curled and died, yellowed from the heat and drought, and the gnarled old apple tree in the front of the churchyard looked pained, its carpet of wizened windfall fruit picked at by hovering wasps.

When he had first moved from his Norfolk village parish to St Barnabas, on the edge of the City of London, Willoughby had feared the worst - endless traffic and noise, vagrants, a secular culture that would have no time for his religion. Yet St Barnabas had been a surprise. It had turned out to be a refuge from the fast-paced urban world. Built by an anonymous student of Hawksmoor, the church had the baroque grace of the master, and a characteristic towering spire. It was just a stone’s throw from the bustle of the old Smithfield meat market and the thrusting steel and glass of the world’s greatest financial marketplace.

But the church figured on no tourist map and was visited only by the occasional
aficionados
, working their way through a weighty architectural guidebook. It was almost wilfully obscure, tucked away at the end of a small side street of eighteenth-century terraced houses, not yet gentrified. ‘Bit of a backwater, really,’ the previous incumbent had said on Willoughby’s first visit, then pointed at the small graveyard in one corner of the churchyard. ‘It’s been full up since Victorian times. That’s one service you won’t have to conduct.’

Like any city church, St Barnabas was locked overnight. Approaching the vestry door, the Reverend Willoughby was just reaching for his keys when he noticed that the door was already open. Not again, he thought, his heart sinking. The church had been burgled the autumn before - the collection box stolen, along with a silver jug that had been left in the vestry. Worse, though, had been the vandalism: two brass rubbings that hung on the chancel wall had been hurled to the floor, their frames smashed to smithereens; one of the ornate family memorial plaques had been badly chipped by a hammer blow; and - he shuddered at the indignity of it - human excrement deposited on a pew.

He entered the vestry apprehensively, confident the intruders would be long gone but worried about the destruction they might have left behind. So he was surprised to find the room untouched - the collection box (kept empty now) in its proper place, the cassocks hanging on their hooks; even the Communion articles sat on the dresser apparently unmolested.

Still anxious, he went cautiously through into the choir, dreading what he might find. But no, the altar stood unharmed, its white marble shining in a shaft of sunlight, and the delicately carved wooden pulpit seemed undamaged. He looked up and saw to his relief that the stained glass window in the chancel still had all its panes. Willoughby looked around, mystified, searching for signs of an intruder. There were none.

Yet there was a smell in the air, faint at first, then stronger as he moved down the centre aisle to the front of the church. Something pungent. Fish? No, more like meat. But Smithfield’s days as a meat market were over. It was being converted into smart apartments. And this was meat gone off. Ugh. The odour intensified as he examined the pews on either side of the aisle, all pristine, the kneelers neatly hanging on the backs of the wooden benches, hymnals in the low racks on every row.

Puzzled, he walked down to the front door of the church. Lifting the heavy iron bar that secured the massive oak door from inside, he swung it open, letting light flood into the nave. It was as he turned away, blinking from the sudden harsh sunlight, that he saw something odd. It was next to the large wooden box (a vestment chest originally, he’d always supposed) in which the extra hymn books were stored. Two or three times a year - at Christmas, or for the memorial service of a local dignitary - the church was filled to capacity, and then these spare books were pressed into service. But now they lay in a higgledy-piggledy heap on the ash-coloured paving stones.

He walked cautiously over to the pile, wrinkling his nose at the smell, which was almost overpowering now. In front of the box he hesitated; for the first time cold fingers of fear touched his spine.
Trust in the Lord
he told himself, as with both hands he slowly lifted the heavy oak lid.

He found himself looking at a young man’s face - a white face, an English face perhaps, in its twenties, with thinnish blond hair combed straight back. It would have been a conventional, perfectly usual sort of face, except that the eyes bulged like a gruesome parrot’s, and the mouth was set in a rictus of agony, lips stretched wide and tight over the teeth. The tendons of the throat strained against the skin of the neck like tautened cords. There was no question: he was dead.

As Willoughby stepped back, horrified and frightened, he saw that the man’s legs had been bent at the knee, presumably to cram him into the chest. The knees were pressed together, drawn up almost to the chin, held by a cat’s cradle of rope that encircled his throat, then passed down his back and around his legs again. The man had been trussed like a chicken, though since both his hands were gripping one end of the rope, it looked as if he had trussed himself. If that were so, who had put him in the box?

FOUR

In her fourth-floor office at Thames House, in the counter espionage branch, Liz was telling Peggy Kinsolving about yesterday’s experiences at the Old Bailey.

‘Gosh, thank goodness it was you, not me,’ said Peggy, shuddering. Peggy had also played a key role in the investigation that had brought Neil Armitage into court.

It had been over a year since the young desk officer had transferred from MI6 to MI5. After leaving Oxford with a good 2:1 in English and vague scholarly ambitions, Peggy had taken a job in a private library in Manchester. There, with few visitors using the library, she had been free to pursue her own researches, which was what she had thought she wanted to do. But the solitary days and evenings soon began to pall and when, quite by chance, she had learned of a job as a researcher in a specialised government department in London, she had applied. At the age of twenty-four, still with the round spectacles and freckles that had made her family call her Bobbity Bookworm, Peggy had found herself working for MI6.

Peggy was a girl who thought for herself. She had seen enough of life to take no one at face value. But for Liz she felt something like… she had to admit it to herself something like hero-worship. Or was it heroine-worship? No, that didn’t sound quite right. Liz was something Peggy would have liked to be. Whatever happened, she always seemed to know what to do. Liz didn’t have to keep pushing her spectacles back up her nose whenever she got excited; she didn’t wear spectacles. Liz was cool. But Peggy knew that Liz needed her, relied on her - and that was enough.

Peggy had applied to transfer to MI5 after working with Liz on a particularly sensitive case - a mole in the intelligence services - and though MI6 were not best pleased, MI5 had welcomed her with open arms. Studying her junior’s eager face, Liz realised that Peggy now felt completely at ease in Thames House. She’s one of us, she thought.

‘When will we hear the verdict?’ asked Peggy.

Liz looked at her watch. ‘Any moment now, I should think.’

As if on cue, Charles Wetherby poked his head through the open door. Smiling at Peggy, he said to Liz, ‘Armitage has got twelve years.’

‘Quite right, too,’ said Peggy with conviction.

‘I suppose he’ll serve about half, won’t he?’ asked Liz.

‘Yes. He’ll be retirement age by the time he gets out. How did it go in the Cabinet Office yesterday?’

‘I was just writing it up. We had a guest appearance by Sir Nicholas Pomfret. Apparently there’s something hot off the press from Six.’

Wetherby nodded. ‘So I gather. I’ve just had a call from Geoffrey Fane. He’s coming across in half an hour. I’d like you there.’

Liz raised an eyebrow. Fane was one of Wetherby’s counterparts at MI6, a complicated, intelligent and tricky man, primarily a Middle East specialist, but with a wideranging brief covering MI6’s operations in the UK. She’d worked with him before and had come to realise that it was safest either not to sup with Geoffrey Fane at all or to do so with a long spoon.