‘I’m not sure I’d go that far,’ said Charles mildly. ‘But I’m glad you like it. We do have some help,’ he admitted.
‘I should think so,’ said Liz, thinking her mother would appreciate this garden. She stood still and listened. ‘What’s that noise?’
He stopped too, and listened. ‘Just a boat. The river’s on the other side of the garden. We don’t quite make it to the water, I’m afraid. There’s a public footpath over there. Still, it means we have access.’
He led her to a stone bench under a towering tree and they sat down. ‘So,’ he said, putting an ankle across his knee. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘We’ve had this Israeli, Kollek, under surveillance, as you know. Nothing untoward has come up, though on a couple of occasions he has gone to great lengths to lose A4. Wally said it was clear he knew what he was doing. I’m certain now he’s Mossad.’
Charles’s jaw set in anger. ‘We’ll have to make a protest about this.’
‘I’m afraid that’s not all. Two days ago Wally and his team followed him to the Oval.’
Charles smiled. ‘New Zealand. We slaughtered them.’ Across the garden, a blackbird was singing, somewhere in the upper branches of a hornbeam tree.
Liz handed him the manila envelope she had brought with her from London. Charles took his time, looking at the stills. Then he put them down on the bench between them. ‘I take it you know who that is?’
‘He was at the Gleneagles meeting in Downing Street.’
‘So you said.’ Charles leaned back and breathed out noisily. Hector the cat had appeared, and was moving slowly towards the hornbeam, where the blackbird continued to trill. ‘This opens up such a can of worms.’
‘I can see that,’ said Liz.
‘We’ve been looking at Brookhaven while you were away. Our assumption was there’d been a leak about the Syrian threat – we couldn’t see any other reason for someone to try and run you down. Brookhaven looked up to his neck in potential conflicts: Arabic speaker, time in Syria, and one of only two at the Grosvenor station who knew about the threat.’ He shook his head wearily. ‘It just goes to show you mustn’t jump to conclusions.’
Liz looked thoughtful.
‘Is there something else?’ asked Charles.
‘The Syrians are supposed to be at the heart of all this but I’m beginning to think that it’s actually the Israelis. There’s what Sami Veshara told you and now we see an undeclared Mossad officer meeting a CIA officer.’ The thought that the problem might include the Americans lay unspoken between them.
Charles said nothing. Hector had arrived at the base of the tree, and was looking up. The blackbird was a good thirty feet above his head, and the cat seemed to recognise the futility of his hunt, for he lumbered off towards the ring of roses. Charles laughed. ‘Look at him. He’s too old to catch anything, but still likes to pretend he can.’
He turned towards Liz, serious again. ‘The first thing I’d better do is ring DG – this is too important to wait. I think it’s fairly safe to predict he’ll want me to talk to Langley. It will have to be in person, given the circumstances.’
He pointed at the photograph, and Liz looked at it once again. It showed Kollek with his head down in the stands at the Oval, listening to his neighbour. When Wally Woods had first shown her the photo, she knew she had seen the neighbour’s face before, but for a moment hadn’t been able to place it. Then she had remembered, and an image had entered her head – of a middle-aged man, balding, and heavy-set, leaning across a conference table in Downing Street and announcing in the nasal tones of America’s Midwest, ‘To date we have received no specific negative information relative to the conference.’
Liz turned now to Charles. ‘You’ll have to go to Washington?’ she asked, suddenly mindful of Joanne. It didn’t seem a good time for her to be alone.
‘I don’t see I have much choice.’ He gave her a wry smile. ‘I can’t really talk to the CIA’s head of station here about whether he’s working for Israel.’
Charles got up from the bench. ‘Why don’t I show you the river? Then we can go inside. Joanne wants you to stay for lunch.’
THIRTY-THREE
Wetherby had decided to keep his visit to Washington very low-key so, unusually, no one met him at the airport. After the usual lengthy wait, Immigration accepted him for who he said he was: Edward Albright, a London businessman in town for a couple of meetings, staying just the one night.
He’d picked a hotel in Virginia, on the airport side of the city, not far from Langley, where he was due first thing in the morning. With any luck he’d catch the early-evening flight back to London the following day.
His hotel, one of a vast American chain, was comfortable, clean and entirely soulless. He phoned home and spoke to Joanne who, five hours later, was getting ready for bed. Then he ate an early dinner in the hotel restaurant – an overcooked steak and a glass of California cabernet. Back in his room, he lay down for a while on one of his room’s two large double beds and clicked idly through what seemed to be several thousand television channels.
He thought with amusement how he could have squeezed the entire Wetherby family into this ample room. When the boys were small, they’d often stayed in more cramped quarters on their trekking holidays in Europe. They’d made walkers of the boys early on, and he remembered fondly how the then-healthy Joanne had put them all to shame when it came to stamina in the Tuscan hills or Pyrenees, where they’d go for two weeks in August. Now, he thought sadly, she ran out of puff after twenty minutes in their garden.
In the morning he made the short drive to Langley, stopped at the security sentry post, then parked his hired car where he was directed near the headquarters building. The CIA’s director of counter intelligence was Tyrus Oakes, a long-time Agency veteran, lacking any public profile but famous within the halls of Langley. He had many quirks, most notably a habit of taking voluminous notes throughout even the most pedestrian meeting, all collected on the yellow legal pads that American attorneys in pre-computer days had used to compose their briefs.
Physically, too, he was unusual – a small, slight man with a razor-edged nose and big ears that protruded from each side of his head like satellite dishes. To his friends, mainly fellow senior officers, he was known as Ty; to those who knew him only by repute, he was The Bird.
Wetherby had come to realise over the years that the different reactions he sometimes received from Oakes had nothing to do with Wetherby’s position as an intelligence officer of a foreign country, but only with the extent to which he shared Oakes’s views about the matter under discussion. This gave Wetherby slight forebodings about his forthcoming conversation, since he couldn’t believe Oakes was going to be very happy with what he had to say.
‘Charles, it’s real good to see you.’ Oakes came out from behind the desk.
‘And you, Ty.’
‘Take a seat,’ said Oakes, pointing to a chair in front of his desk, while he retreated behind it. He said, ‘This must be kind of important for you to fly over.’
‘It is. I think we may have a serious problem.’
Wetherby outlined the sequence of events as succinctly as he could. As he spoke, Oakes rapidly discarded his yellow pad, fishing out of his pocket a small spiral-bound notebook, in which he wrote quickly in tiny writing, lifting his head occasionally to look at Wetherby.
At least he’s not moved to a laptop, thought Wetherby, as he continued his account of Fane’s relayed message from Jaghir, that two rogue elements were acting against Syrian interests in London, and were threatening to sabotage the impending peace conference.
Oakes’s eyes widened at this, then widened further still when Wetherby recounted the attempt to run down one of his female officers with a car. He stopped writing momentarily, then resumed, head down, scribbling furiously, though when Wetherby explained that Jaghir had been killed the week before in Cyprus, Oakes stopped writing altogether. This time he even put his pen down.
Wetherby said, ‘Here’s where the difficulty starts. All this information about a threat was held very tightly. In MI5, fewer than half a dozen officers were indoctrinated and Geoffrey Fane has said that in his service it was strictly “need to know”. But the attack on my officer, and now the murder of Jaghir, makes it look as if there’s been
