That morning, Dr. Terry Martin finished his lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies, a faculty of London University off Gower Street, shortly before noon and retired to the senior staff common room. Just outside the door, he ran into Mabel, the secretary he shared with two other senior lecturers in Arabic studies.
“Oh, Dr. Martin, there’s been a message for you.”
She fumbled in her attache case, propping it up on one tweed-skirted knee, and produced a slip of paper.
“This gentleman rang for you. He said it was rather urgent if you could call him back.
Inside the common room Martin dumped his lecture notes on the Abassid Caliphate and used a pay phone on the wall. The number answered on the second ring, and a bright female voice just repeated the number back. No company name, just the number.
“Is Mr. Stephen Laing there?” asked Martin.
“May I say who is calling?”
“Er—Dr. Martin. Terry Martin. He called me.”
“Ah, yes, Dr. Martin. Would you hold on?”
Martin frowned. She knew about the call, knew his name. For the life of him, he could not recall any Stephen Laing.
A man came on the phone. “Steve Laing here. Look, it’s
Laing, whoever he was, had adopted that mode of self-expression that is at once diffident and persuasive, hard to turn down.
“Today? Now?”
“Unless you have anything fixed. What had you in mind?”
“Sandwiches in the canteen,” said Martin.
“Couldn’t possibly offer you a decent sole meuniere at Scott’s, could I? You know it, of course. Mount Street.”
Martin knew of it, one of the best and most expensive fish restaurants in London. Twenty minutes away by cab. It was half-past twelve. And he loved fish. And Scott’s was way beyond his academic salary. Did Laing by any chance know these things?
“Are you actually with the ISS?” he asked.
“Explain over lunch, doctor. Say one o’clock. Looking forward to it.”
The phone went down.
When Martin entered the restaurant, the headwaiter came forward to greet him personally.
“Dr. Martin? Mr. Laing is at his table. Please follow me.”
It was a quiet table in a corner, very discreet. One could talk unoverheard. Laing, whom by now Martin was sure he had never met, rose to greet him, a bony man in dark suit and sober tie with thinning gray hair. He ushered his guest to a seat and gestured with a raised eyebrow to a bottle of fine chilled Meursault that sat in the ice bucket.
Martin nodded.
“You’re not with the Institute, are you, Mr. Laing?”
Laing was not in the least fazed. He watched the crisp cool liquid poured and the waiter move away, leaving them a menu each. He raised his glass to his guest.
“Century House, actually. Does that bother you?”
The British Secret Intelligence Service works out of Century House, a rather shabby building south of the Thames between the Elephant and Castle and the Old Kent Road. It is not a new building and not really up to the job it is supposed to do and so labyrinthine inside that visitors really do not need their security passes; within seconds, they get lost and end up screaming for mercy.
“No, just interested,” said Martin.
“Actually, it’s we who are interested. I’m quite a fan of yours. I try to keep abreast, but I’m not as clued up as you.”
“I find that hard to believe,” said Martin, but he was flattered. When an academic is told he is admired, it is pleasing.
“Quite true,” insisted Laing. “Sole for two? Excellent. I hope I have read all your papers delivered to the Institute, and the United Services people and Chatham. Plus, of course, those two articles in
Over the previous five years, despite his youth at only thirty-five, Dr.
Martin had become more and more in demand as a speaker presenting erudite papers to such establishments as the Institute for Strategic Studies, the United Services Institute, and that other body for the intensive study of foreign affairs, Chatham House.
Terry Martin’s interest for these people was not because of his scholastic excellence in medieval Mesopotamia, but for the second hat he wore. Quite as a private interest, he had begun years earlier to study the armed forces of the Middle East, attending defense exhibitions and cultivating friendships among manufacturers and their Arab clients, where his fluent Arabic had made him many contacts. After ten years he was a walking encyclopedia in his chosen pastime subject and was listened to with respect by the top professionals, much as the American novelist Tom Clancy is regarded as a world expert on the defense equipment of NATO and the former Warsaw Pact.
The two soles meuniere arrived, and they began to eat with appreciation.
Eight weeks earlier Laing, who was at that time Director of Operations for the Mid-East Division at Century House, had called up a pen portrait of Terry Martin from the Research people. He had been impressed with what he saw.
Born in Baghdad, raised in Iraq, then schooled in England, Martin had left Haileybury with three advanced levels, all with distinction, in English, history, and French. Haileybury had had him down as a brilliant scholar, destined for a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge.
But the boy, already a fluent Arab speaker, wanted to go on to Arabic studies, so he had applied as a graduate to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, attending the spring interview of 1973.
Accepted at once, he had joined in the autumn term of 1973, studying history of the Middle East.
He walked through a first-class degree in three years and then put in a further three years for his doctorate, specializing in Iraq of the eighth to fifteenth centuries, with particular reference to the Abassid Caliphate from A.D. 750 to 1258. He took his Ph.D. in 1979, then one year off for a sabbatical—he had been in Iraq in 1980 when Iraq invaded Iran, triggering the eight-year war, and this experience began his interest in Middle Eastern military forces.
On his return he was offered a lectureship at the age of only twenty-six, a signal honor at the SOAS, which happens to be one of the best and therefore one of the toughest schools of Arabic learning in the world. He was promoted to a readership in recognition of his excellence in original research, and he became a reader in Middle East history at the age of thirty-four, clearly earmarked for a professorship by the age of forty.
So much had Laing read in the written biography. What interested him even more was the second string, the compendium of knowledge about Middle Eastern arms arsenals. For years, it had been a peripheral subject, dwarfed by the cold war, but now ...
“It’s about this Kuwait business,” he said at last. The remains of the fish had been cleared away. Both men had declined a dessert. The Meursault had gone down very nicely, and Laing had deftly ensured that Martin had most of it. Now two vintage ports appeared as if unbidden.
“As you may imagine, there’s been a hell of a flapdoodle going on these past few days.”
Laing was understating the case. The Lady had returned from Colorado in what the mandarins referred to as
