Authors: Chris Ryan
Slowly, a little uncomfortably, Slater nodded.
'As I said, Neil, you are an intelligent man, and intelligent men ask searching questions. I would expect no less of you.'
Standing, Slater returned the photograph of the cricket team to its place beside the fire.
'I know that there are questions that I haven't answered,' said Ridley. 'Might I suggest that I do so while we enjoy the last of this sunshine?'
The rain, Slater saw, had stopped.
The landscape shone.
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'Wellingtons, if you need them, by the front door,' said Ridley.
'Maxwell and I met from time to time over the years,' he continued, as they crossed the field to the river, leaving dark tracks behind them in the wet grass. 'Lunch at the Travellers' Club, the odd Foreign Office dinner, that sort of thing. There were small favours I was able to do for him and for his newspapers, and vice-versa. We were both, in different ways, aliens at the heart of the British establishment, and the fact amused us.
'By the end of the eighties, however, we had more ; or less lost contact. I had officially retired, while he had I been swallowed up with the day-to-day concerns of [ the Mirror Group. I was aware, however - as most of I us in the intelligence community were - that things f were not well in his world, and by 1991 it was obvious I that his empire was unravelling in front of his eyes. In I October of that year he played one last desperate card. I He contacted an associate of his whom he knew the
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'service did business with -- an arms-dealer and general |fixer named Antoine FanonKhayat.
'A Serbian pressure group, he said, had contacted piim with a view to publicising Ustashe atrocities committed during World War Two. They had photographs showing murders of civilians and )rthodox priests and scenes from Jasenovac, Stara iradiska, Jadovna and other sites. He had viewed the aterial and noted that half a dozen of the photographs
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showed the man whom he had helped to become a British citizen, namely myself.
'In the first instance, I think, his motives in buying up the pictures were purely those of hiding his own part in my rebirth. If it was discovered that he had facilitated the integration of an ex-Nazi into the British civil service his rivals would have slaughtered him. But buy them up he did - every print, every negative. It probably cost the Mirror Group a hundred thousand pounds, for which I'm sure Serbia was duly grateful.
'I honestly believe that it was only when he was really on the skids that he decided to try and blackmail MI6 into bailing him out, and by then his judgement was all over the place. He basically paid FanonKhayat to broker the deal. In return for the pictures incriminating me and tarring MI6 with the Nazi brush, he wanted to be paid tens of millions of dollars in cash, bonds and bullion. Really crazy stuff.
'Fanon-Khayat, at that time very much MI6's man, presented Maxwell's case to Manderson, who handled him at the time, and then immediately disassociated himself from it. He claimed he merely wanted to warn the service of the existence of the pictures, and handed over the photocopies, which Manderson destroyed.
'So what still existed, Manderson asked? What did Fanon-Khayat still have?
'One set of prints, said Fanon-Khayat. The negatives had long since disappeared. The prints travelled with Maxwell, from safe to safe.
'Well, Manderson thanked Fanon-Khayat, paid him
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for his trouble, and called me and a couple of other people in. It was clear that Maxwell was a very loose cannon indeed. We could raid his safe and take the pictures, but that would probably just force his hand. We had to go all the way.'
'The SBS guys,' whispered Slater, amazed. 'You mounted a hit using the SBS guys. My predecessor what was his name, Bernie -- was one of the pair who took out Robert Maxwell. That's unbelievable.'
'Believable or not, we did it. We eliminated Maxwell, removed the material from the safe, and covered our tracks. A classic Cadre operation.'
'And let me guess,' said Slater. Tanon-Khayat made a copy. A few years later he's in trouble and decides to throw in his hand with the RDB. Doesn't hand the pictures over, just tells them he's got them, suggests they can use them to negotiate with MI6 .. .'
'Exactly,' said Ridley. 'And the rest you know. I'm sorry we used y6ur loyalty to the SAS to persuade you into action, but at that stage you were still. . .' He smiled. 'Let's just say that at that stage we didn't know you as well as we know you now.'
Slater shook his head, trying to absorb all that he had been told. They had reached a stile between two of the rain-sodden fields, and he came to a halt. 'There's something I still don't understand.'
'Go on,' said Ridley.
'Four years ago, or was it five,, you sent Ellis out to investigate Fanon-Khayat and she reported that he was clean, that things weren't going so well for him but he
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was still our man. So why did Fanon-Khayat have Ellis killed? And how was Ellis -- a highly switched-on agent, by all accounts - lured into a car-park and whacked by a bunch of hired Parisian thugs? What happened?'
There was silence. Ridley glanced at Eve.
Slater looked from one to the other of them -- from the visibly frail figure of Ridley to Eve, who was staring regretfully and without focus over the brimming river -- and a cold certainty gripped his heart. 'You set her up, didn't you? She thought she was coming to that car-park to meet a friend - to make a report or to be pulled out -- and instead. . . No wonder they got the jump on her. And no wonder her killers were all taken out afterwards.'
Slater's head swam, and he reached for the wet timbers of the stile. 'I'm right, aren't I?' he said. 'You had Ellis killed.'
Eve said nothing.
Ridley frowned. 'Fanon-Khayat told Ellis about my former life -- trying to impress her, I suppose - and she just couldn't deal with it. She met Manderson in Paris and told him she wanted to leave, that it had all become too much for her. She could no longer handle life in the Cadre, she said, and she intended to go public with the reasons why. In many ways, for all her professionalism, she was a very naive woman.'
Slater stared at him, incredulous. 'Just where do you people draw the line, for fuck's sake? Ellis was a Cadre member. She was one of your own.'
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'Oh, please!' said Eve irritably, forcing her hands into the cartridge-pockets of her Barbour coat. 'Let's get real. We had no choice in the matter. We were at war. We are at war, and anyone who threatens our survival is the enemy.'
'Manderson will be retiring shortly,' Ridley continued, 'and Eve will be taking over the Cadre.' He placed a hand lightly on her shoulder. 'I suspect she would be very glad to have you at her side.'
'I would,' she said.
'You killed Ellis,' said Slater quietly. 'When would you kill me?'
'Neil,' she said gently. 'You are one of us -- a soldier and a true believer. You made your choice long ago -- long before I met you - and you confirmed that choice the night you rang me. "I am what I am", you told me.'
Neil Slater looked around him. Swallows dipped and swooped at the flies that danced over the river's surface. A faint vapour hung over the rain-heavy fields. Beyond them, he knew, waited only the Darklands and the crowding ghosts of the men he had killed. Was that Joey Delaney there, with his child's eyes and half his head shot away?
He was who he was.
'Let's talk about replacing Andreas,' he began.
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