Authors: Hector Macdonald
‘So whoever’s contracted Yadin wants to derail Think Again,’ nodded Arkell. ‘A cartel looking to keep prices high? A trafficking syndicate? A conservative or religious group even?’
‘All strong possibilities, but let’s not forget the countless government and commercial entities that owe their existence to Prohibition, particularly in the US. The DEA has 10,000 employees dependent for their livelihoods on drug laws that also keep an army of prosecutors, judges, attorneys and specialist law-enforcement units employed. There’s an entire industry constructing and servicing all those prisons that won’t be needed if drug offences disappear. A lot of interested parties must be getting very anxious right now about the way the world is going. Portugal decriminalized all drugs and cut abuse by fifty per cent, an outcome that has impressed a lot of people in Washington. Two American states have legalized marijuana, with more likely to follow. Beneficiaries of Prohibition can see the world’s biggest narcotics consumer teetering at the top of a very slippery slope indeed.’
‘Perhaps Andrade and Mayhew will take the hint and shut up.’
‘On the contrary, they’re scheduled to make a joint address to the European Parliament in eight days. Provisional title: “Why Europe Must Lead the Way in Drug Law Reform”.’
Arkell looked up sharply. ‘It’ll be cancelled, it has to be. Their protection units won’t allow it.’
Wraye sighed. ‘Much to the frustration of my Canadian clients and their Brazilian counterparts, both men are determined to go to Strasbourg. “In memory of Anneke van der Velde”.’
‘Eight days . . .
Eight days
? Are you serious? How am I supposed to find a professional assassin in eight days?’
‘You found Petrov when everyone said he was dead. You tracked down Deuterium Dmytro in the most godforsaken corner of Jizzakh province. Four of the most dangerous proliferators you bagged with no help from the Increment.’
‘They were civilians. Scientists. They made basic errors. Yadin isn’t going to leave the same traces. The only way to catch him in eight days is to put out an international alert.’
‘We do that, Yadin will see it instantly. At the moment he doesn’t realize we know who he is. That’s your one big advantage.’
‘I’m not taking the job.’
‘The contract is half a million dollars. Unlimited expenses.’
‘Doesn’t matter. It’s not feasible. Tell your clients to keep Mayhew in Canada.’
‘Gavriel Yadin can just as easily –’
‘No more about Yadin.’ Arkell held up a warning hand. ‘The bomber, Madeleine, the man who killed Emily. Who is he?’
Wraye spread her hands apologetically. ‘I can’t tell you.’
‘You promised me his name.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘No buts. I’ve fulfilled my side of the bargain. I heard you out,’ he thundered. ‘Tell me his name!’
She flinched minutely at his anger. ‘I can no longer discuss him.’
‘Why the hell not?’
‘Because you’ve just forbidden it.’
Arkell stared at her. Slowly, disbelievingly, he sank back into his chair.
‘Now you understand why it has to be you.’
‘Bullshit,’ he growled.
‘You never saw the Special Branch report on the bombing at 43 Dault Street. “All the hallmarks of an Al-Qaeda attack”. Right explosive chemical traces, right fragments. And of course you’d just rushed back from Yemen without authorization. The obvious conclusion was quickly drawn. Except that some of us never felt entirely comfortable with it, for the simple reason that Al-Qaeda doesn’t blow up private homes in the UK. So what should we conclude? That you were targeted by a highly skilled assassin who tailored his method to produce a specific but misleading impression.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘It’s the same man in both clips, Simon: the Dault Street corner shop CCTV and the Think Again conference footage. They’re on my server if you don’t believe me.’
He didn’t hesitate for a second. Seizing the laptop from the desk, he tapped in a password and thrust it at her.
‘You have wireless here?’
‘Show me!’
‘All right,’ she murmured, taking the machine.
The tracking programme that was initiated in a remote data centre when Wraye logged into her server was not especially complex, but it co-opted a far more sophisticated battery of code originally written by software engineers at the USA’s National Security Agency. This code swiftly chewed through a chain of anonymizing proxies to establish the Italian internet service provider from which the URL request had come, and then even more swiftly traced the relevant landline on the Ligurian coast. No record of the trace was left on the ISP’s own systems. The only evidence was an automated email arriving in the inbox of Edward Joyce.
Simon Arkell had turned the colour of death. ‘Yes,’ he muttered.
Wraye frowned as, for perhaps the thousandth time, she watched Yadin take those few critical steps in front of a Tobago camera. ‘You haven’t seen the Dault Street clip yet.’
‘I don’t need to. That’s him.’ His voice was empty, robotic. ‘I saw him.’
Now it was Wraye’s turn for surprise. ‘You saw Yadin? When?’
Arkell closed his eyes. ‘Outside my house. That’s why I’m alive.’
‘You recognized him? You
knew
him?’
‘I’d never seen him before.’
‘Then why . . . ?’
Arkell held up a hand, brow creased in memory. ‘We were about to have dinner in the kitchen – Emily, Saeed and I. But the phone rang, the Firm for the hundredth time, and Emily was sick of telling them I wasn’t there. So I went upstairs to our bedroom to take the call. It was George Vine. I told him I was coming in first thing in the morning. Full report, everything explained. I was still hoping I’d be able to reach you before then.’
‘Reach
me
?’
‘You were in Kyrgyzstan. I had to know your answer before I took Saeed to Head Office.’
‘My answer? To what?’
‘The Porthos message I sent from Yemen. About Ellington. About the GRIEVANCE warning.’
‘
GRIEVANCE?
This was two years later, Simon. What
warning
? I never got any message about GRIEVANCE from you.’
Arkell was silent for a while, trying to read her. ‘I
sent
you . . .’ He stopped himself, as if suddenly wearied beyond measure.
‘I went up to our bedroom,’ he resumed quietly. ‘Emily’s jeans were on the floor. I remember that. While George was delicately meandering around the subject, all I could think was how strange it was to have Emily’s jeans lying crumpled in front of me after three months in Yemen. Then something made me look out the window. George was going on in that gentle, disappointed way of his about chain of command and respect for the rules, and I noticed an NTL van parked across the street. And there was a man in the driving seat, like he was on a job.’
‘So? He was on a job, so what?’
‘At 8 p.m.? In a street with no cable?’ Arkell closed his eyes. ‘There was an extra aerial. And the bodywork wasn’t quite right. Looked like SNUFFBOX,’ he added, using the Firm’s old codename for the Security Service. ‘I guessed they’d found out about Saeed, and it seemed best just to have a quiet word with them. I didn’t want to scare them off by marching out the front door, so I went through the garden and looped round the block. Left George pontificating on the line. There was no one around except the guy in the van. He was watching our house so intently he didn’t see me approach. And with the engine running, he didn’t hear me. Another three seconds, I’d have been knocking on his window. But that was when it . . .’
Gently, Wraye helped him: ‘When it went off.’
‘When it went off,’ he echoed monotonically. His hands had become fists, crushed against his thighs. The rigid muscles in his neck were shivering.
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘He never saw me. The moment it detonated I hit the ground, like it was Chad or Pakistan. I didn’t understand it was my house. My wife. Not right away. A second maybe. Two seconds. Before I realized. By then the van was driving off, the bomber right there, hurtling past me, never seeing that he’d missed his target.’ Arkell’s voice cracked. ‘That pavement. I was lying on that pavement, watching the flames, the smoke, everything gone, knowing Emily was dead and . . .’ He swallowed to loosen his constricted throat. ‘And knowing you must have ordered it.’
He looked up at last, and she saw that from nowhere he had produced a thin rope and that it was looped around both his fists, a noose ready for her neck. ‘Did you?’ he asked. ‘Was it you?’
Madeleine Wraye kept her unwavering gaze on him while she reached for the tumbler and took her first sip of wine. ‘Simon, who was Saeed?’
The emergency posting followed directly from the endless catastrophe that was Iraq. With those elusive weapons of mass destruction to find, an insurgency to crush and, later, terrifying sectarian violence to contain, it was inevitable that Baghdad would fill with CIA and SIS spooks. They had to come from somewhere. So it was that Arabic-speaking staff were pulled from stations all over the region. And in their place, officers with no experience of Middle Eastern politics, culture or language were drafted in to mind their assets and keep alive the hunt for Usama bin Laden.
Simon Arkell was in the Transdniestrian region of Moldova, on the trail of a Latvian arms dealer with pretensions to nuclear grandeur, when he was recalled to London and reassigned to Sana’a. His cover was British Council. As Martin Bayley, he brushed up on his classics, attended the drab little British Club with rare enthusiasm, and diligently sought out members of the Yemeni artistic community for tiny cups of sweet, strong coffee and earnest chats about the decline of Western morals. The Yemeni culture took some getting used to – niqab-shrouded women and AK-47-toting men who chewed qat all afternoon, their cheeks bulging like hamsters with the macerated drug. But Arkell was quick to acclimatize, and soon he was quietly making contact with his predecessor’s assets: a cleric in Hadramawt, a shipping agent in Aden, two civil servants in Sana’a and a Hamdan tribal elder in Al Mahwit governorate named Ali Al-Gadhi. It was this last who introduced him to Saeed Bin Abdullah Al-Khaneen.
Al-Gadhi lived in a small mountain-top town, four hours’ drive from Sana’a. His towering square house, a crumbling relic of grander times, was intricately decorated with geometric white patterns and built precipitously on the very edge of a cliff. Wild fig trees clung with trunk-thick roots to the sheer black rock face below, and eagles drifted in the currents above the flat roof. For miles around there was nothing but abandoned terraces cut, during a more productive agricultural age, into the parched mountainsides.
Arkell and his translator were welcomed at the courtyard gate by Al-Gadhi’s three wives. They ushered him out of his desert boots, up ancient stone steps and into the majlis. Nine men sat on mats against the walls, their legs covered in blankets against the mountain cold, their cheeks bulging with qat. Above each man was a rifle, suspended from a heavy iron hook – AK-47s, old Lee-Enfields, one Chinese Type 56. Two of the men shifted a fraction, and Arkell was invited to sit beside the host.
For some time, very little was said. The translator coaxed Arkell through the usual greetings. Tea and qat were offered and accepted. A gift of an English leather wallet was presented in return. Arkell knew enough of Yemeni culture by now to understand that many hours might pass before they reached the real substance. The polythene bag of qat leaves was passed to him repeatedly, and soon a mildly euphoric mood came over him. Draped in a blanket the colour of mulberries he smiled endlessly at the hardened mountain men, but he kept his contributions – both translated and in halting Arabic – to a minimum.
Then, suddenly, it was time. The men around them rose as one, took down their rifles and filed out of the room. Al-Gadhi muttered something to Arkell’s translator, who, without reference to his employer, also left. Perhaps it should have worried Arkell, at that point, to see a stranger walk through the door. But the qat had done its work and his only substantive feeling was one of mild curiosity.
The newcomer offered thanks to Allah and took up position on the mat opposite Arkell. His creased suit trousers bore a trace of mountain dust, but otherwise looked as new as the crisp ivory shirt and the silver butterfly cufflinks. A barber had very recently drawn razor-sharp lines on the man’s nape and sideburns. The only thing out of place was the savagely crushed nose. It had healed some time ago, but the new tissue had done nothing to disguise the damage.
‘This . . .’ muttered Al-Gadhi, speaking English for the first and only time, ‘is Saeed.’ Abruptly, he rose and walked out.
Arkell took one look at the desperation in the man’s eyes and spat the wad of qat into his tea cup. ‘Hello,’ he said, offering his hand.
If the man saw it, he didn’t respond to the gesture. Instead he began talking, fast. ‘Are you who they say you are? Do you have credentials? I will feel more comfortable after you show me your credentials. Ali says you are CIA?’
Arkell wasn’t surprised. It was not unusual for assets to confuse SIS with the better known agency, and sometimes little distinction was drawn between American and British officers. Also quite possible that his predecessor had passed himself off as CIA when recruiting Al-Gadhi. And so Arkell nodded, thinking nothing of it, curious to understand what this highly strung city creature was doing in the mountains of Yemen.
‘Thanks be to God. I was afraid you are British MI6. Your face seems British. Do you have credentials, please?’
After two years in Washington, Arkell could summon up a solid Ivy League accent with no difficulty. ‘What’s wrong with the Brits?’
‘They betrayed me,’ said the man gravely. ‘They did this to me,’ he added, touching his wrecked nose.
Arkell was intrigued. An Iraqi perhaps? Had he crossed paths with the wrong British army patrol in Basra? ‘Doesn’t sound like them,’ he shrugged. ‘Polite bunch, what I’ve seen.’
‘Because of them, I was arrested in Riyadh.’ His eyes were a flickering chestnut. ‘I gave critical information to the British embassy. The same day, the Mabahith came for me. Less than twelve hours after I warned Mr Colville. You think this was coincidence? Locked in a cell underground for twenty-one months. No trial. Just beatings. I should have gone to the American embassy. It was a foolish mistake. I thought I knew the British. I studied at London Queen Mary. I read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. It was a matter of familiarity, you see?’
‘You said you gave this Colville some kind of warning?’
‘Which he ignored,’ said Saeed hotly.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Because two weeks later hundreds of innocent people were murdered in Chicago, and no one did anything to stop it!’
Arkell felt suddenly weary. He had driven four hours to meet an asset who had nothing for him but the ravings of yet another GRIEVANCE fabricator. New as he was to the Middle East, Arkell had already had plenty of would-be sources offer to sell him the inside story on the sarin attack on O’Hare’s Terminal 3. With the qat euphoria wearing off, he could barely be bothered to keep up the American accent.
‘So you knew about the plot before it happened, huh? What does that make you?’
‘I was secretary to Sheikh Salih Abdallah Ibrahim. He liked my handwriting. I have a fine penmanship for English, and my Arabic script has won prizes.’ He glanced down at his right hand, and Arkell noticed it was shaking. ‘It’s not so good now.’
‘Who is Sheikh whatisname?’
‘You don’t know?’ Saeed was astonished. ‘Doesn’t the CIA have extensive –?’
‘Over in Intelligence, sure. I’m just a humble Operations grunt.’
‘The Sheikh is a very powerful man in Saudi Arabia. In fact worldwide. He has business interests on all continents. He is a supporter of many Salafi fundamentalists.’
‘That’s nothing unusual in Saudi.’
‘An extremely generous supporter. You could say he bankrolled the airport attack.’
‘Is that right?’ said Arkell. ‘And you just happened to stumble across the plans on his breakfast table . . .’
Saeed recognized the tone. Visibly hurt, he persevered: ‘I was working late. I remained usually in the Sheikh’s offices, but this time I went to the kitchens for a glass of milk. You understand?’
‘I’m just about keeping up.’
‘I heard them! Talking in the majlis, agreeing the –’
‘Who? Who was talking?’
‘I don’t know. Three, perhaps four men. I couldn’t go in. But I heard such things!’ His eyes rose to the heavens as he recounted a cascade of telling details: the ingenious pressurized canisters, disguised as Coke bottles; the decision to target the landside area of the terminal so the devices wouldn’t have to pass through scanners; the IT systems attack which caused long queues to build up at Check-in, and the staged disruption at Security that resulted in a similar logjam there; the rigorous training of the poisoners, preparing them to perform their suicidal role calmly and discreetly, invisible in the restless crowds of their victims.
GRIEVANCE in the raw, when it was still just a horrific idea. ‘They didn’t say a date, but it was enough, yes? To catch the terrorists and save all those people. It should have been
enough
.’
When it became clear that the man had finished speaking, Arkell said, ‘What exactly is it I can do for you, Mr Saeed?’
‘You don’t think this is important information?’
‘To be honest, it’s a little late.’
‘About Mr Colville of the British embassy! Don’t you understand the significance?’
Arkell sighed. ‘Why don’t you tell me the significance?’
‘I gave the British MI6 full warning of the sarin attack on your country and they did not stop it!’
‘If I hear you right, you spun a diplomat a wild story without evidence. Frankly, I’m not surprised the poor guy did nothing. He was probably in charge of passports or tea parties or whatever.’
‘Then why was I arrested?’ hissed Saeed. ‘That same day, seized off the street by the Mabahith. I did not say Mr Colville did nothing. He did exactly what a spy would do if he is in league with the jihadists. Do you not understand what I am telling you? Your allies, the British, let the attack happen. Perhaps they even arranged it!’
‘OK, I think that’s plenty,’ said Arkell, rising to his feet. ‘Thank you for your information, Mr Saeed. I’ll be sure to pass it on to the relevant department.’
‘You don’t believe me,’ said the other man dully.
‘Not my job to believe. I’m just a humble field grunt. Up to Intelligence to assess your testimony.’
Saeed gripped his arm, a last desperate appeal. ‘I need help. My family spent everything to have me released. I was expelled from Saudi Arabia. I came to our relatives . . .’ He cast an arm around Al-Gadhi’s majlis. ‘It is well known Ali has American friends. But I cannot stay here. The jihadis have long arms. So do the British. I have to go to America.’
With gentle but effective force, using only forefinger and thumb, Arkell broke the man’s grip. ‘That’s not gonna happen, Saeed.’
‘Please! Consult your superiors. Tell them what I have said. I will be here three more days.’
‘Sure, Saeed. I’ll tell them what you said.’ He opened the door. Al-Gadhi was waiting to escort him out.
‘Mr Bayley!’ cried Saeed.
Arkell glanced back, impatient to be gone.
‘I lost everything.’ He looked pitifully alone in the centre of the majlis, his crushed nose distorting his whole face. ‘I tried to help your country, and I lost everything.’
Back in Sana’a, something about that final moment bugged Arkell as he sat on his terrace in Sana’a’s historic Old City the following morning, eating fresh date rolls washed down with thick, bitter coffee. It was the sheer guilelessness of the man. The helpless honesty of a lost soul pinning everything on one last bet. For a fabricator, he was disturbingly convincing.
And yet not for one moment did Arkell believe him.
He was willing to accept, at a stretch, that Saeed might have overheard something and gone to the embassy to report it. That was as far as Arkell’s credulity would go. The overworked junior diplomat who heard Saeed out – whether or not he was a Friend – would likely have paid little attention to yet another vague, alarmist terror alert. As for the claim that SIS had orchestrated Saeed’s detention, Arkell smiled at the idea. If only the Firm really did have that kind of influence with the Saudis. No, Saeed had got careless in some way: maybe he’d filched the Sheikh’s cash; maybe he’d leered too long at his daughter. It was nothing new for the trusted lieutenant of a powerful man to find himself peremptorily flung into the gutter. Nor was it a surprise that after twenty-one months’ incarceration, Saeed had managed to concoct a story blaming the Firm for all his woes.
He certainly wasn’t the only conspiracy theorist with SIS in his sights.
By 11 a.m. Arkell had found an excuse to drop into the embassy and place a call on the encrypted line to London. The desk officer with responsibility for the Arabian peninsula was a caustic old soldier who did not respond well to idle chatter, and Arkell had fabricated an operational query of sufficient substance to justify the call. He had a possible asset in Hudaydah, he said, an Iranian engineer who claimed first-hand knowledge of a biological weapons programme. But the man was asking for resettlement in Britain and fifty thousand a year.
‘Twenty,’ came the terse response. ‘And only if he delivers a concrete WMD lead.’
‘Twenty it is,’ agreed Arkell. ‘By the way, do we have anyone in Riyadh using the name “Colville”?’
‘Not any more.’
‘Meaning?’
‘That was Rupert Ellington’s cover.’
Next, he called Personnel Department. ‘File check, please,’ he said, trying to keep the agitation out of his voice. ‘Rupert Ellington.’
A pause. ‘That file is closed.’
‘I just need the date of death.’
When the answer came, after a long bureaucratic silence, it seemed to him that the whole world stopped breathing.
He drove directly from the embassy to Al Mahwit governorate, not pausing to get a new travel permit from the police. At the road blocks, he flashed the previous day’s
tasriih
and referenced the British Ambassador until they let him through. On the way, he made one more call, this time to a mobile in Damascus. ‘Dermott, it’s Martin Bayley in Yemen,’ he said in a chipper voice. ‘How’s the aubergine salad?’
The man in Damascus had only been called Dermott for nine weeks. Prior to that, he was Rollo, a shipping consultant in Singapore. Prior to that he was any number of people, among them Charlie Pearman, his real name. ‘Aubergine salad’ had become a running joke during a rushed Arabic language course the two re-tasked officers had shared in London.