‘Well, I’d better be going now,’ he said, getting up. Liz stood up too and they faced each other awkwardly for a second or two, then he reached out and took her hand. ‘You know, I’m really glad you met Joanne, Liz. She liked you so much.’
‘I’m glad too,’ she said, looking up at him. He turned and left the room.
When he’d gone, she sat down again at her desk, put her head on her arms and cried.
It wasn’t until she was back at home in Kentish Town and considering what to eat for supper that Reggie Purves rang. Kollek had got off the Underground at Heathrow. He’d gone to the El Al desk in Terminal One. He must have had a ticket or shown some kind of pass because he was let through airside. By the time A4 had got hold of Special Branch at the terminal to get them through airside too, he was nowhere to be seen. They’d searched all the shops and the restaurants and the open lounges. Wally’s partner Maureen Hayes and a Special Branch officer had been into the El Al lounge too but there was no sign of him there either and no one admitted to having seen him. No El Al flight for Israel had departed yet, so he’d either left the airport or gone on some other flight.
‘We’ll wait until the EL Al flight leaves. Boarding’s at 21.05 and we can see if he turns up at the gate. But then either we’ll have to withdraw or I’ll need to allocate some fresh teams. That might be a problem as we’ve got a lot on for counter terrorism tonight.’
‘Thanks,’ said Liz. ‘Watch till boarding’s complete and if he doesn’t turn up withdraw and we’ll just have to assume we’ve lost him.’
‘OK,’ replied Reggie.
Liz put the phone down and poured herself a glass of wine. She knew with a sinking feeling that Kollek had slipped through their fingers. He wasn’t going to turn up for that flight and now they had no idea where he was or what he was doing.
At 9.30 the phone rang. She was right. Kollek had not boarded. Damn.
FORTY-FIVE
Andy Bokus was fed up. The last thing he wanted was another visitation from the Brits, and if Ty Oakes hadn’t been in town and looking over his shoulder he would have fobbed them off. Hadn’t they already had their pound of Bokus flesh?
He felt he’d been made to look stupid. He kicked himself for being picked up by the MI5 surveillance of Danny Kollek. But he’d had no reason to think they’d be watching the Israeli. Kollek was undeclared, after all, and his operations were discreet enough not to have attracted MI5’s attention. Or at least, that’s what he’d told Bokus.
Now Bokus had to wonder. He kept asking himself what had put MI5 onto Kollek in the first place. Maybe he could learn that today; there had to be something useful he could get out of this meeting.
He looked without appetite at the slab of Danish pastry on his plate, and took a careless slug from his coffee, cursing as he burned his tongue. He was sitting in the embassy restaurant, practically deserted at mid-morning. He’d been in his office before eight, but he’d been too agitated to eat breakfast.
He wondered what the Brits had made of the material Kollek had supplied. Not much, he guessed. It was low- grade stuff. He knew that, but that wasn’t the point. You had to take a long-term view, and by that standard Kollek was potentially one of the most important agents the CIA had ever had. The idea of jeopardising all this because the Brits were panicked about a peace conference that no one thought for a minute was going to get anywhere, was ridiculous.
At least Miles Brookhaven was away, so he didn’t have to put up with meeting the Brits with that preppy jerk in tow. He remembered how self-satisfied the Ivy Leaguer had looked when Ty Oakes had briefed him about the Kollek debacle. Concerned and superior at the same time. Bokus had never been a fan of Miles Brookhaven, but now he actively disliked him. He had managed to get rid of him temporarily by accelerating the junior officer’s annual trip to Syria. Bokus had claimed it might be useful, given the imminent peace conference, though that was just an excuse to get him out of his hair.
Now Fane and that Carlyle woman had asked for this meeting and he was worried in case they’d found out something else to his discredit. His reputation at Langley was high, ever since the Madrid bombings, when he’d done so well. He wasn’t used to being caught out embarrassingly by his host country.
He felt on edge as he looked at his watch – the Brits were due any minute. Fane he could just about stomach: all that British upper-class stuff grated on him and he was pretty sure Fane considered himself both his intellectual and social superior. It was irritating, too, when Fane played the gifted amateur, whose work in intelligence was just one of many hobbies, like fly fishing or collecting rare books. But beneath that smooth, cynical facade, Bokus knew Fane was a pro – which meant he was a guy you could do business with.
That woman Carlyle, on the other hand, was harder to read. She had none of Fane’s snootiness or affectation, and on the surface she seemed much more straightforward and direct. Yet it was hard to know what was going on with her – what she was really thinking. And there was something relentless too, a sort of tenacity that Bokus found uncomfortable, particularly when he was its target. She needed watching, as he’d told Miles Brookhaven.
Oh hell, give me a break, thought Bokus, sighing wearily, as he stood up to go to the meeting. If he had taken just a bit more care, as he would have done anywhere else, the Brits would never have found out about him and Kollek. Hopefully, they were coming today to talk about Gleneagles, not yet again about that bloody Israeli.
As a teenager, Liz had been told by her grandmother to beware of the kind of boy who ‘wasn’t safe in taxis’. Geoffrey Fane would once perfectly have fitted the mould. But this morning, as she saw him sitting gloomy and slightly hunched in the corner of the black cab that picked her up outside Thames House, he looked far too depressed to be much of a threat. He barely replied when Liz raised the subject of their forthcoming meeting in Grosvenor Square, grunting his assent when she outlined the approach she wanted to take.
As they moved up the Mall past Buckingham Palace, he gave a loud sigh. ‘Pity Miles Brookhaven won’t be there. I gather he’s abroad.’
‘Yes. He’s in Syria.’
‘Such a clever, handsome youth, isn’t he?’ said Fane caustically. When Liz did not respond he looked dismally out of the window.
Twenty minutes later, as their meeting began, Liz was relieved to see that Fane had emerged from his sulk. That was the redeeming feature of the man: you could grow infuriated by his overdone secrecy, his manipulative ways, his arrogance, but there was never any doubting his professional commitment. Or his competence.
She had explained Charles Wetherby’s absence to the two Americans, promised to pass on their messages of sympathy and endured the chit-chat about the persisting warm weather, as they proceeded to the safe room. Inside, the air conditioning, humming loudly, had turned the insulated bubble into an ice box.
Fane kicked off, crossing a leg languidly and saying, ‘Sorry to trouble you, gentlemen, but we thought a quick meeting before the Gleneagles conference began might be useful.’ He added pointedly, ‘Especially since I gather Miles Brookhaven is in the Middle East.’
Bokus replied. ‘Sure. I sent him off to see if there was anything useful to be picked up out there.’
‘Well, it’s more what’s going on here that’s concerning us at present,’ said Fane mildly. ‘Elizabeth?’
Liz leaned forward, concerned to make her points unambiguously. ‘We’ve grown very concerned about Danny Kollek. Yes, we appreciate the sensitivity of this, but the fact is that the two people we were told were working against the Syrians were actually working
Bokus gave a weary shrug of his shoulders. ‘Yeah, I know. But it didn’t mean much to me. I never had much faith in the idea that the two guys were working against the Syrians. It looked like a classic piece of disinformation to me.’
‘Perhaps,’ Liz conceded. ‘But whose disinformation? The list you gave us of Kollek’s contacts in the UK didn’t include Marcham. And earlier, when Geoffrey told you the two names we’d received, you said you hadn’t heard of either of them.’
‘I hadn’t,’ said Bokus aggressively. ‘Otherwise, I would have said so when Geoffrey came and told us they were
