Dead Line

being said hit him.

‘It’s my business to know.’ Then, sarcastically, ‘It’s not as if I can expect your people to protect me.’

‘How do you know the leak comes from Syria?’

Suddenly, Aleppo’s eyes turned hot and angry, fixed thunder on the man across the table. His voice was biting. ‘Where else could it come from? Unless your Damascus masters are in the habit of sharing secrets with their enemies.’

Ben Ahmad was trying to think, though panic was slowing his brain. He must reassure and pacify Aleppo. ‘I will report this at once,’ he declared. ‘I give you my word, we will root out the traitor.’

Aleppo was unappeased. ‘You’d better, or this is the last you’ll see of me. And why has no action been taken against these two people yet? I took great risks to get that information. I assumed you would see its importance. But the two are still operating. Against you, I need hardly say.’

‘I appreciate that. But my superiors are cautious.’

‘Why? Do they doubt my information?’

He said this challengingly, and Ahmad’s palms sweated as he felt the situation running out of his control. It was a cardinal rule for an agent runner to stay in charge, to make it clear that he, not the agent, was running the show. But with this man, Ahmad found it impossible. He was not just prickly and quick to take offence, but there was something dangerously unpredictable about him, an air of menace that Ahmad feared. Had his superiors not valued Aleppo so much, Ahmad would have been happy to break the contact. But he knew that if he lost Aleppo, his career would be finished.

‘Not at all,’ he said reassuringly. ‘No one doubts the truth of what you say. But it has been hard for us to know what these people could do that would damage our interests in any substantial way.’ And, he decided not to add, that would justify the risks of moving against them on foreign territory.

‘So they’d rather take their chances, your masters? Fools.’

‘I didn’t say that. In fact, you can expect action to be taken soon.’ Ahmad thought this was likely, though in truth he didn’t know what would happen or when, and he daren’t give a hostage to fortune by promising the man a timescale. Soon would have to do for now.

Aleppo was clearly unimpressed. ‘Make sure it does.’ He got up from his chair, moving towards the door. ‘Now this has been leaked to the West, I am in danger. I have little confidence that you can plug this leak, which makes it all the more urgent that these people are dealt with right away. Otherwise, you may find it is too late. Tell your superiors that, from me.’ And he went out, banging the door so hard that the flimsy walls of the Portakabin shook.

Was that a threat? Ahmad wondered. Not quite, he decided, and he wouldn’t pass it on to his superiors in Damascus – they might try to insist again on meeting the source, even try and take him over, and then Ahmad would return home without any of the credit he knew he had earned. But he would have to tell them about the leak.

After waiting ten minutes to make sure he would not trip over Aleppo on his way home, Ahmad left the Portakabin and walked through the shop, along the dingy side street and back towards Park Royal station.

He was alarmed by what Aleppo had said. It was desperately worrying if his own service had been penetrated by the West – worrying but not inconceivable. The British were good and Mossad also had infiltrated all its enemies at one time or another. At the station, he bought another copy of the Standard, his attention caught by a late, lurid headline. As he waited for the next train, he read the story, half-fascinated, half- repelled by its details. Auto-asphyxiation – why would anyone want to play at that? And in a church, no less. These English, he thought as he saw the amber beam of the approaching train fill the distant tunnel, they were beyond bizarre.

TWELVE

At least she knew where she was, not that it helped. Seventy feet below ground, thirty seconds out of Chalk Farm station, stuck in a tunnel with no sense they would be moving any time soon.

Across from her a morose-looking woman in a brown cardigan stared at the floor apathetically, while next to her a builder in dust-covered boots noisily turned the pages of the Sun. The headline read ‘Man in Box Mystery’. How ghoulish, thought Liz, then she remembered how an ex-boyfriend, a journalist on the Guardian, had claimed that such headlines were reassuring. ‘If I land at Heathrow and the headline on the Evening Standard reads, “Nurse Found Strangled,” then I know all’s right with the world. No terrorist bomb has gone off, no threat of impending nuclear war. Just a humdrum sex murder to titillate commuters.’

Looking at her watch, Liz saw they had been motionless for over ten minutes. Thank God she wasn’t claustrophobic; Peggy would be climbing the walls by now. Thinking of Peggy, she pondered the girl’s mix of shyness and delight as she’d described Tim. Liz could imagine their first dates, all in suitably intellectual places (the National Gallery, the Soane Museum). They’d have chatted earnestly over flapjacks and mugs of tea, discussing the comparative merits of the Metaphysical Poets, or the late Beethoven string quartets.

It was easy to be patronising, but Liz had to admire Peggy’s initiative – going to talks, meeting new people. Meeting men. There was no point in being stuffy about it, thought Liz, not if it worked for Peggy. And it had. And look at her own mother. Sixty-plus, a widow with a lovely house, an interesting job – even she had found company.

For years after her father had died Liz had felt responsible for her mother. Not enough for her to agree to give up what her mother regarded as her ‘dangerous’ job to go back home to Wiltshire to share the running of the garden centre her mother managed. But enough for her to make the tedious journey every month and keep in touch regularly by phone. Then earlier this year, out of the blue, her mother had acquired a boyfriend, Edward, and now she seemed contented and less dependent on her daughter.

Liz knew she should be pleased for her mother, but when she thought of all those weekends she had forced herself to drive down to Wiltshire when she would much rather have stayed in London, the anxiety when her mother had had a cancer scare just as Liz was in the middle of a complex and worrying case, she felt a flash of resentment. It was irrational, she knew it was, but she felt it just the same.

Liz tried to picture this new boyfriend of her mother’s, whom she’d never met but knew she would not like. He’d wear tweeds and be ex-army, a major perhaps, or even a colonel. He’d go on and on about the Aden campaign or wherever. God, how boring, thought Liz, and possibly venal – she was sure part of her mother’s appeal to Edward must be the creature comforts she could provide for him in her cosy house in Bowerbridge. Still, she thought grudgingly, her mother seemed to be enjoying this late romance of hers.

Whereas I’m just stuck in a rut, Liz brooded, watching as the woman in the cardigan yawned and closed her eyes. The only men she met were at work, and yet at work she found her emotions already engaged. By Charles, a man she only saw in the office and who was unavailable anyway.

It suddenly seemed ridiculous. I can’t go on this way, thought Liz, surprised at how obvious this realisation was. She couldn’t blame anyone but herself – it wasn’t as if Charles had ever encouraged her, or asked her to wait for him. She supposed he’d made his feelings clear, in his discreet and dignified way, but equally, he’d never pretended he could do anything about them.

All right then, thought Liz, cut your losses, and move on. Time’s a-flying, however young I feel. There must be men I can meet. The image of Geoffrey Fane flitted briefly through her head. There was something undeniably attractive about him – he was good-looking in an arrogant way, clever, quick-witted, amusing when he wanted to be. And best of all, Fane was no longer married.

But it wasn’t for nothing he was known in MI5 as the Prince of Darkness, and she knew she could never altogether trust him. No, like Peggy, she needed to meet someone outside the service, and she cheered up briefly at the prospect. There was just the small matter of how to meet this new someone.

A hissing noise of escaping air came from the tunnel, and the train slid forward as if on ice. The builder looked up from his sports page and briefly met Liz’s eyes. Across the carriage the older woman was sound asleep, her hands clasped in her lap.