spectacles made his eyes grow huge and froglike, attracting instant attention.
'My section,' he began, 'operates in a variety of ways, across a very broad remit. We rely particularly on the co-operation of intelligence agencies from other countries, or, as in this case, groupings. Some weeks ago, the director general received a warning from NATO intelligence officers that a group of four Albanians had left their own country and were moving through Europe, heading for Britain. These were people with known criminal backgrounds, but in Albania that doesn't exactly mark them out. You'll be aware that it was the last totalitarian communist state in Europe, and that for decades it operated a policy of total isolation, from everyone except the Chinese, who, in fact, didn't care for them at all, and since they were strategically useless found them more of an embarrassment than anything else.' He allowed himself a thin-lipped smile. 'Imagine, if you will, Osama bin Laden being revealed as an Arsenal supporter: he'd be greeted at Highbury with the same warmth that Beijing showed to Tirana.' Sewell paused, as if inviting laughter, but none came.
'The old Albanian regime,' he continued, 'was so brutal and repressive that there was no semblance of an opposition voice; not a political one, at any rate. So, when it imploded, in the aftermath anarchy ruled, criminality became the norm, and the place became a magnet for all sorts of dangerous activity. The people we were warned about are right in the thick of it. They ran protection rackets, controlled prostitution, regulated the drugs trade and supplied all sorts of illegal armaments to all sorts of people, including a significant number of those against whom the war on terror is being fought.'
'Sounds like a nice wee empire,' Skinner mused aloud. 'Why did they leave it all?'
'That's what our NATO source didn't know for sure, and it's what we've been tasked to find out.'
'So what do you know?'
'We know that they left the Albanian port of Durres, crossed the Adriatic and landed in Brindisi, on the heel of Italy. From there they travelled by road to Genoa, crossed into France by hiring a helicopter, and disappeared.'
'Completely?'
'For a while, until their scent was picked up in Rotterdam: they stopped there for long enough to pull off a bank robbery in Amsterdam.'
'Risky. Why would they do that?'
'We think they needed currency; at home they deal in US dollars, and we suspect that they didn't want to flash too many of them about. Significantly, while they took euros, they also took all the sterling that the bank held.'
'A pointer, I'll grant you.'
'Eventually, after some damned good detective work based on witness descriptions, the Dutch police traced them to an address, a great barn of a place in the Oosteinde of the city. They had been living there, under their own names, for over a month, but they had gone by the time the place was raided. Their hosts were Kosovar refugees, ethnic Albanians. They were arrested and interrogated, and of course they pleaded innocence, claiming that they had only been putting up fellow asylum-seekers, and that they had no idea where they had gone. However, further enquiries revealed that one of them had a sister who lived with a Dutch trucker. Under threat of the loss of his licence, he admitted that he had smuggled them across the North Sea on his lorry, sailing out of Zeebrugge to Rosyth, in Fife.'
'What was he carrying, apart from the Albanians?' asked Haggerty.
'Flowers. He's a regular traveller on that route, well known to the Customs people. They took a look at his truck, but not close enough, apparently. However…' Sewell paused, his great frog eyes sweeping round the table. '… he was also carrying four large rucksacks, which from his description were much bigger than anything an asylum-seeker would be likely to have. These were offloaded by the Albanians when they reached their destination in Edinburgh.'
'Oh, shit,' said Skinner, quietly.
'You guess what I'm going to tell you,' the MI5 operative exclaimed. 'Further interrogation of the Kosovars in Rotterdam revealed that, after the second robbery, the Albanians had a meeting in their hide-out with a man whose description matches that of a well-known Dutch arms-dealer. The dealer can't be traced, or hasn't been yet, but we would like very much to know what they were talking about.'
'You don't know for sure?'
'No, but when my Dutch opposite numbers raided his warehouse they found that while his inventory and his stock tallied some of the recorded buyers of items did not. For example, the police chief in Amsterdam did not buy silencers with the carbines he ordered, and he only received half the number of firearms that were shown on the order. Also, the small African nation which was shown to have purchased eighteen American anti-tank missiles for its defence force in fact only received fourteen.'
Skinner shook his head. 'I really do not like the sound of that,' he muttered.
'Neither did the Home Secretary; hence the pressure of his finger on the panic button.'
'Merry Christmas, Scotland. Where did the Dutch trucker drop his passengers and their load?'
'At a car park in a shopping mall to the east of the city.'
'Not in daylight, surely.'
'No. He made some deliveries during the day, with them hidden in the truck, then dropped them off at two in the morning. They were met by a fifth man, driving a Transit van.'
'When did this happen?'
'Just under four weeks ago.'
The big deputy chief constable gazed at Sewell for several long seconds. 'And you didn't think to tell us?' he asked quietly.
'We were ordered not to,' Amanda Dennis replied. 'When our sources gave us this information, we took it to the Home Secretary.'
'The English Home Secretary,' Skinner reminded her, acidly.
'I didn't take you for a rabid nationalist, Bob,' she retorted.
'I'm not, but we do have a devolved government here, although sometimes I wonder whether you people have noticed.'
'Be that as it may,' Sewell intervened, 'we were dealing with a perceived threat to the national security of the UK as whole, and when that happens the Home Secretary is the person we consult. He consulted the Defence Secretary, then gave us direct orders to carry out a covert operation to trace and detain these men, by whatever means we thought necessary. He stressed the word 'covert', and said that no other agencies were to be advised or involved, unless it was absolutely necessary.'
'Given all that, how did Jingle Bell and your man here become involved?'
'Amanda and I decided between us that Mr Bell was the necessary means.'
'He's one of my assets,' said Dennis. 'Or he's an agent of ours, if you prefer that term. He has been since the National Crime Squad caught him in Birmingham on the wrong side of a drugs operation in which we were also involved. Bob, it's our experience of these Albanian gangsters that they're incapable of behaving quietly. Wherever they go, they display an irresistible urge to muscle in on the local action. The problem is that, thanks to you and your colleagues, there isn't much local action in Edinburgh. So the DG decided that my section should create some, in the hope of flushing them out. We set Bell up to create a small drugs operation in your friend's club and in other sites around the city that he considered vulnerable. Sean, who is a member of my section, was his handling officer. The mistake the assistant DG and I made, for which we do apologise, was in interpreting the Home Secretary's order too strictly. We should have told you, or DCI McIlhenney, what was going on.'
Skinner stared at her. 'You're telling us that two of your guys were pushing hard drugs on our patch?'
'I'm afraid so.'
'Does your statutory remit cover that sort of activity?'
'That's grey, but it's another reason for our not involving you… to avoid compromising you, so to speak.' She sighed. 'The whole thing was a misjudgement. Again, all I can do is apologise.'
The DCC frowned. 'Apology accepted, as long as there's no blame attached to my people for doing their job properly.'
'None at all; in fact we compliment them on it.'
'Speak for yourself, Mandy,' Sean Green muttered, fingering the plaster on his nose, and breaking the tension with a grin. 'I'm sorry about the blade, by the way. At first I thought your guy might have been an Albanian, but I could tell by the look of him that he wasn't, so I didn't try to stick him, honest. If I had been trying…'
