Secret Asset (5 page)

9

D
ennis Rudge was sitting at the wheel of a taxi parked at a rank in the middle of Capel Street. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a copy of the
Sun
propped on the dashboard. His radio, tuned to Magic FM, was quietly playing soft pop, with occasional voice interruptions, which sounded to passersby like traffic updates. From where he sat he had a clear view of the bookshop and of Doris's shop front across the road. He was in eye contact with Maureen Hayes and Lebert Johnson, sitting at a table outside the Red Lion pub further down the street. Lebert, who had a glass of something brown in front of him, was doing the
Daily Mail
crossword. Maureen was drinking mineral water, knitting and listening through headphones apparently to her iPod. In the other direction Alpha 4 and Alpha 5 were sitting in a dirty Peugeot 307, bickering noisily whenever anyone came past. Further members of A4 were parked up strategically in side roads, and a couple more cars were circling around the area.

In Doris Feldman's sitting room, above her ironmonger's shop, sat Wally Woods, comfortably ensconced in Doris's armchair, with Esther the ancient cat sharing his knee with a powerful pair of binoculars.

Doris's telephone call to the police five days before at three in the morning had turned out to be a blessing in disguise. As always with A2's surreptitious entries, Special Branch had been told in advance about the operation. Hearing from uniform of Doris's 999 call, they had promptly rung in to discuss the options with A2 control. The priority was clearly to reassure the caller, and one option was simply to explain that the “burglary” she'd seen was entirely innocent: the fuses had blown and the owner had sent in friends to replace them—something like that. The Special Branch men were adept at making up plausible stories. But if in the normal course of a day she mentioned the events of the weekend to the bookshop owner, it would be disastrous.

So they had decided to take a risk with the old woman, and at half-past three on Saturday morning, the officer from Special Branch sat in Doris Feldman's sitting room drinking tea and explaining, in the vaguest possible terms, that there were strange happenings going on across the street, which he and his colleagues were trying to find out about. A mention of 9/11 here, a reference to Islamic fundamentalism there, and Doris had readily agreed not to say a word. More important, she happily allowed the use of the flat, which was ideally situated as a static surveillance point. That was how Wally Woods came to be sitting in her armchair, with his colleague at her dining-room table manning the communications. He sat like a spider at the centre of her web, liaising with the people on the street, and with a perfect view of the bookshop.

         

Coordinating the whole operation was Reggie Purvis in Thames House. He and a couple of colleagues were controlling the A4 teams and all the communications from the Operations Room, at the same time ignoring Dave Armstrong, who sat waiting impatiently beside them. Behind him, Tom Dartmouth paced back and forth, and from time to time, Wetherby came into the room to check progress.

In Doris's flat, Wally Woods sat on, patiently waiting. Just before three o'clock a minicab pulled up in front of the bookshop. The driver, a young Middle Eastern man, got out on the street side and walked around to open the passenger door. After a moment, a much older man got out of the car. He was dressed in a white smock and wore on his head a white cap, with lines of gold thread. As he walked slowly towards the bookshop, the young man ran ahead and held the door open for him.

“Fox One has arrived and is now inside,” said Wally and the man at the table immediately spoke into the microphone. “All teams alert,” said Reggie Purvis in Thames House. “Fox One is in. Repeat Fox One is in.”

Nothing obvious changed in the immediate vicinity of the shop, though Dennis Rudge drained his coffee and Maureen put away her knitting. A4 were ready for whatever might happen, which only added to the tension since there was nothing to do but wait.

In Thames House, Judith Spratt arrived in the Operations Room. A tall woman, she had fine features and always looked effortlessly elegant whatever the circumstances.

“There's been a phone call,” she announced to Dave and Tom Dartmouth. “To the bookshop. It didn't last very long.”

“Who was it?” Tom Dartmouth demanded.

“Hard to say. The owner of the bookshop answered, and the caller asked if Rashid was there. He asked in English.”

“Who the hell is Rashid?” asked Dave.

Judith shrugged, as if to say “you tell me.” “The owner said there was no one by that name in the shop. Then the caller hung up.”

Tom asked, “Do we know who made the call? Anything come up on the eavesdropping?”

“Nothing from the mikes. No sound of Fox One at all. Just casual chat and cups of coffee from others in there. But the trace just came through. It's an Amsterdam number. I'll get on to it now. Give me ten minutes.” She picked up the phone.

         

In the AIVD office in Amsterdam, Pieter Abbink was reaching for the phone when it rang. Picking it up quickly, he said tersely, “Abbink.”

“Pieter, it's Judith Spratt. From London.”

Abbink laughed out loud. “I had my hand on the telephone to call you when it rang.”

“Why was that?”

“We have a surveillance on a house here in Amsterdam. Not so good people. We've had a lot of chatter lately coming out of there. Internet, and some telephone. Somebody in the house just called a London number, and I was about to dial and ask if you could find out where it was.”

“It's an Islamic bookshop in North London. And also a meeting place for some people we'd like to locate. They were meant to show up today, but they're late.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“No, and that's the problem. They've been sighted once by one of ours, but we don't have any names. Though your caller asked for Rashid.”

Abbink chuckled. “That is a very big help—it's like asking for Jan here in Holland.”

“I know. But it looks like there is some connection with Holland.”

“We'll check the database, don't worry. But why don't I send you the photo bank?”

“You read my mind, Pieter. That's why I was calling you.”

         

By three-thirty, Wally Woods had told Thames House three times that the men hadn't shown, and by four o'clock, Reggie Purvis was focused on keeping his teams alert. He sent Maureen and Lebert Johnson off in Dennis Rudge's taxi and directed the arguing couple to drive round the neighbourhood, keeping close by. When at last the Imam left the bookshop, his departure was greeted with relief by the A4 teams as they slotted in neatly behind him.

But the departure of the Imam meant the three young men were not going to show. Purvis kept his people deployed nonetheless, waiting forlornly until six o'clock when the staff went home and the shop closed. Wally Woods left his armchair to his colleague—a substitute would take over at eight that night—and went back to Thames House. The only lead lay with the Imam. Please God, thought Dave, still in the Operations Room, let him take us to them.

         

One hour later Charles Wetherby, having joined Tom Dartmouth and Dave Armstrong in the Operations Room, was dismayed (but not entirely surprised) to learn that Abu Sayed had been driven straight to Heathrow Airport, where he had checked in for a flight to Frankfurt on the first leg of his journey to Lahore.

To his seeming indifference, Abu Sayed had been upgraded to club class. At security no apparent attention was paid to his carry-on bag, and he positively sailed through passport control.

His one piece of checked luggage, an ancient but sturdy Samsonite case, received greater scrutiny. Deftly plucked from the conveyor belt in the outgoing luggage shed, it was inspected with a fine-tooth comb by no less than two veteran customs officers and an attending officer from Special Branch, looking for anything that might indicate the identity and whereabouts of the three young men who had failed to show up at the bookshop that afternoon.

They found nothing. Indeed, the only evidence at all that the Imam had even been in England lay in a neat stack at the very bottom of his suitcase. Whatever else Mahmood Abu Sayed had got up to during his stay, he had managed to find time to buy six new pairs of boxer shorts from the Marble Arch branch of Marks Spencer.

10

T
he city of dreaming spires looked wide awake to Liz. The sky was a rich enamel blue, and the temperature was moving into an almost summery seventy degrees as she and a half-breathless Peggy Kinsolving mounted the wooden staircase of the Sheldonian. It was hard to believe graduation ceremonies took place in the small area of this strange old building. Built by Christopher Wren, according to Peggy, when he was only thirty-one years old.

Arriving at the top, Liz and Peggy stood in a painted wooden cupola and looked out at a very different view of Oxford from the dense, almost claustrophobic world seen at ground level. Here church spires and college towers jutted like projectiles to form a jagged historical skyline.

Looking down, Liz watched the groups of tourists thronging the pavements of Broad Street—or the Broad as Peggy called it. Cars were parked in a neat line in the wide belly of the street, and a few others moved gingerly along, more in hope than expectation of a space, eventually coming full circle since the street was blocked at the far end by heavy bollards.

She looked across at Blackwell's bookshop, where she and Peggy had browsed for a few minutes. It was nice to have this brief interlude, thought Liz. They had driven down together in Liz's car, after she had collected Peggy from the flat she shared with two old college friends on the less salubrious side of Kilburn. Going against the London-bound traffic they made good time, then fought their way through a maddening one-way system and parked in a vast open car park on the western side of Oxford city centre. They walked up past the old prison, now finding new life as a luxury hotel, and into a shopping street indistinguishable in its frontage of chain stores from any other in England. But then they turned into a dark, narrow street of Dickensian houses, complete with overhanging shadows and protruding beams. A further turn and they were at Pembroke College, their first stop.

It was a seventeenth-century foundation with medieval bits, according to Peggy, who had swotted up diligently the day before. More obscure than its namesake in Cambridge, it nonetheless numbered among its distinguished alumni the writer Thomas Browne, Samuel Johnson, and more recently Michael Heseltine.

They were directed by a porter through an old quad, with a small square of tended lawn. On the far wall, window boxes were filled with early geraniums. They walked on into another quad and there against the wall of the older part of the College sat a small statue of a woman, hands folded in prayer or lament. Not a good omen, thought Liz, thinking of the impending interview. She was not conventionally religious, and wondered a little nervously what role theology was going to play in the conversation.

Chaplain Hickson turned out to be an enormous man, with a vast beer belly and a thick curly beard, more Friar Tuck than the ascetic theologian Liz had expected. A Northerner, he was jolly and startlingly impious, greeting Liz and Peggy effusively before offering them coffee or—“since the sun is over the yardarm in France”—a glass of sherry.

Both Liz and Peggy opted for coffee, and perching on a pair of uncomfortable chairs, held stained mugs of Nescafé while the chaplain hunted high and low for some biscuits. Only when he found them, after several minutes' searching, did their interview begin. He sat down with a happy thump on the sofa, putting a plateful of chocolate digestives within easy reach. By this time Liz had formed the distinct impression that for Chaplain Hickson, material sustenance was more important than prayer.

Liz began by explaining their visit was strictly a formality, to update the original vetting. She had worried, back in London, whether a man of the cloth would be willing to speak freely about a former student's personal life, particularly as it was the morally dubious aspects of that life she most needed to know about. But the chaplain was happy to talk about the young Patrick Dobson.

“He took things very seriously and he worked extremely hard. Nothing wrong with that,” he added with a rolling laugh that suggested there was. “But it did distance him a bit from some of the others. There was something almost middle-aged about the boy.”

“Nothing wild about him then?” said Liz with a faint smile.

“Certainly not. On every count, he was a model citizen.” He grabbed a biscuit from the plate. “He joined the Young Conservatives, ate all his suppers in Hall, and avoided temptation. There were no women in his life—not, I should add, because of disinclination on his part. It's just that he was hardly irresistible to the fairer sex. Funny how that seems to happen, isn't it?”

“How did you come to know him so well?” Liz asked, a little taken aback by this very personal portrait.

“He came to chapel a lot. Every week, sometimes on Wednesday.” He grimaced slightly. “It may sound odd coming from me, but I found him a little
too
religious, if you know what I mean. Pretty uncommon among lads that age, especially at Oxford.”

“Did he confide in you?”

For the first time the chaplain looked startled. “
Me
? Oh no. You see, there was something of a class divide between us.”

“Really?” asked Liz. If she remembered rightly, Dobson's background was anything but patrician. Or was Hickson suggesting his own was? Looking at this biscuit-loving mountain of a man, she found it hard to believe.

“You see, young Patrick came from a working-class family. By dint of his admittedly healthy-sized brain he managed to win a scholarship to an independent school. There, he developed not only his mind, but”—the chaplain waved a finger, and Liz could see he was starting to enjoy himself—“a precocious sense of social advancement.”

“I see,” said Liz, masking her amusement.

“At Oxford these aspirations continued. He liked to wear a
jumper
most days,” Hickson continued, almost joyfully stressing the word's initial “j,” “and sometimes even sported his old school tie. On Sundays, you would see him wearing a checked tweed suit which, he once told someone, was of the sort worn by ‘gentlemen in the country.'” Hickson looked at Liz with a twinkle in his eye. “You can imagine how much his fellow students loved that.”

“Was that the class difference you mentioned?” asked Peggy, who had stayed silent until now. She looked puzzled.

“Oh, there was no difference to begin with. We were both common as muck,” the chaplain said with a generous grin. “The thing is, I still am. I'm amazed they have me here. I suppose it's a form of political correctness.” And this time he gave such a laugh that it shook the sofa.

Leaving a few minutes later, after declining another offer of sherry, Liz wondered whether the chaplain's mocking portrait of Dobson provided real grounds for concern. Clearly Dobson had been an earnest, slightly geeky undergraduate, so intent on erasing the traces of his humble origins that, paradoxically, it made him stand out rather than fit in. Liz was uneasy about someone who had invented a persona for himself—checked tweed suit indeed—since if they could base their life on a lie, what would keep them from basing it on more than one?

At the same time, Liz found herself almost sorry for someone so obviously unsure of himself, amused as she had been by the chaplain's satirical account. After all, she thought, remembering the unhappiness of her teenage years, if being a social misfit in late adolescence was grounds for suspicion, Liz would be a prime suspect in her own investigation.

         

They'd moved on to Somerville College, where they found Judith Spratt's old tutor, an elegant bluestocking named Isabella Prideaux, who must have been near retirement age. In her ground-floor room, with French doors overlooking the enormous quad, Isabella gave a brief and laudatory account of Judith's time as an undergraduate. She seemed to know where her ex-pupil had ended up. “She keeps in touch,” she said, adding proudly, “but then, most of my students do.”

They had met at twelve-thirty. After half an hour the ground had been covered, and Liz started to make her excuses, thinking that she and Peggy would go and find a sandwich somewhere. So it came as a small embarrassment when it became clear they were expected to stay for lunch. Peggy looked quizzically at Liz, but there seemed no polite way out, and they trooped to a small dining room near the larger hall.

Here conversation about Judith Spratt was not on the menu, since they sat surrounded by Fellows of the College. Most of them seemed to be men—somewhat to Liz's surprise, since her view of Somerville had been formed by Dorothy Sayers's
Gaudy Night
. After a lengthy disquisition from a Physics lecturer seated next to her about the beauty of quarks, Liz was glad to escape with her host and Peggy for coffee to the Fellows' Common Room, where they managed to occupy a quiet corner by themselves. “I'm sorry about Professor Burrell,” Miss Prideaux said to Liz, who realised she must mean her lunch partner. “When I listen to him he might as well be speaking in Urdu.”

They chatted on for a while, then, just as Liz and Peggy were about to go, Miss Prideaux suddenly said out of the blue, “I was awfully sorry to hear about Ravi.”

Liz's ears pricked up now. “Yes?” she said.

“I know it sounds old-fashioned, but I do think these inter-racial alliances are always more fragile.” When Liz didn't say anything, Miss Prideaux flushed slightly, perhaps worried that she sounded racist or indiscreet, or both. She made a show of looking at her watch. “Goodness me, here I am gossiping, and I've got a finalist in hysterics about her Anglo-Saxon paper waiting for me.”

         

Now, as they stood admiring the view from the top of the Sheldonian, Peggy asked Liz, “What did Miss Prideaux mean when she said she was sorry about Ravi?”

Liz shrugged. “I'm not sure. Ravi is Judith Spratt's husband. His name is Ravi Singh; Judith uses her maiden name at work.”

“I gathered that,” said Peggy. “What does he do?”

“He's a businessman, from India originally. They've been married a long time—I think they met at Oxford. He's charming.”

“Oh, so you know him?”

“A bit. I've been to dinner there a few times.”

Peggy nodded. “It's difficult, isn't it? There's nothing in Judith's file that says her marital status has changed.”

Liz sighed. She supposed this was the inevitable downside of investigating your colleagues. “We'd better find out for sure then. Hopefully it's nothing.” But mentally she made a note to talk to B Branch the following day.

         

Their last interview was in Merton College, which they approached down a narrow alleyway running off the High. The change in tempo from the bustle of a main street to a backwater of almost medieval calm was sudden. As they turned onto the wobbly cobblestones of Merton Street, Liz saw a small churchyard, with a path lined by several magnificent cherry trees. She imagined that this view would not have changed for five hundred years.

His name was Hilary Watts.
Professor
Watts to me, thought Liz, since he seemed to expect that kind of deference. He was an old-school Arabist with, inevitably, strong Foreign Office connections—he had taught summer school at MECAS, the famous Centre for Arabic Studies in the hills above Beirut, and tutored the more obscure relatives of Jordan's King Hussein when they came for a final polishing stint to Oxford.

And he had played a long-time role, in the age before open recruitment, as a talent spotter for MI6. He had taught Tom Dartmouth for his postgraduate degree, and been asked for a reference by MI5 when his ex-pupil had applied. The reference, reeking of a past era of old boys' network and public-school prose, had been three lines long, written on the back of a postcard from the Accademia in Venice:
Sound chap. Good languages. More than clever enough for the domestic service.

“Domestic service”—once the prevalent Six view of MI5. Small surprise that Watts had not risen when she and Peggy had knocked on his door, but merely called out a peremptory “Come in.”

Entering, the two women found themselves in a dark room with high ceilings and one vast mullioned window at the far wall, which let very little light in since the curtains—thick velvet but badly in need of cleaning—were half drawn across. The Professor sat in an ancient wing chair, its covers faded to a dull sage. He faced the small slit of undraped window, through which he gazed out at the lush grass of a playing field in Christ Church Meadow.

“Do sit down,” he said, pointing to a long settee that ran at right angles to his chair. Obeying him, they positioned themselves carefully, and Liz examined the man, who continued to look out at the meadow. It was an aged but distinguished face, with a long aquiline nose that was sprinkled with veins, high concave cheekbones, and small darting eyes of vivid blue. He tilted his head onto one shoulder and took them both in. “Ladies,” he said shortly. “How can I be of assistance to you?”

Liz noticed that his hand was holding a pipe, and he lifted it now and made a show of knocking out the bowl. Bits of ash scattered over his thick trousers, and he brushed them away irritably while Liz explained they were there to ask him about Tom Dartmouth.

“Oh Tom,” he said. “Gifted fellow. Came to me for the lingo, though he was already good at it.”

At this he nodded and puffed leisurely at his pipe. Liz asked gently, “Had you known him as an undergraduate?”

Watts detached the stem with palpable reluctance from his lips. “I don't teach undergraduates,” he said with a shake of his head. “But Mason at Balliol said young Dartmouth took the best First in PPE that year.”

“Was there anything distinctive about Tom? Anything you remember as unusual?”

“All my students are unusual,” he said matter-of-factly.

Peggy looked sideways at Liz. Liz had to admire the self-confidence of this dinosaur; it was so pronounced that it did not even sound boastful.