‘I expect anything will help,’ said Annette lightly.
Milraud turned on the bed and looked at her at last. ‘The originator of the contact in Paris was a Yemeni minister. That’s why I thought this was legit.’ Legit struck him as a funny way to describe the transaction, but he knew Annette would understand what he meant – he had thought he was simply supplying one side of the innumerable civil wars that seemed to be proliferating all over the region.
‘I understand. But now?’
‘What Martin has told you could make sense. I haven’t told him everything I know. I haven’t told him exactly where the shipment is being assembled, though he knows the country. He doesn’t know anything about the onward shipping arrangements. He knows there’s a British person involved but he doesn’t know that the order is now to be delivered to England. And he doesn’t know that originally it was to go somewhere else.’
‘Where?’
‘Here,’ he said simply. ‘Paris.’
Annette looked shocked. ‘So what changed?’
Milraud shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But if Martin’s right about these people, it means the target’s changed. Now it must be in Britain.’
Chapter 39
This time they were to meet in Fane’s office in the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross. As she walked across Vauxhall Bridge from Thames House, leaning into the gusty wind that was blowing off the river, Liz recalled the email exchanges between Grosvenor Square and Vauxhall that had preceded this meeting. Their tone suggested that the encounter between Fane and Bokus was going to be as rough as the weather, and she was not looking forward to playing the role of peacemaker.
Fane’s office was a spacious room, high up in one of the semicircular protuberances at the front of the building. Its two large windows had a commanding view of the Thames – to the right Parliament and the MI5 building on the north bank, and to the left across to Kensington and Chelsea and upriver to Hammersmith. Somehow Fane had managed to acquire the sort of antique official furniture usually only to be found in the Foreign Office, and he had added some oriental rugs and a table that he had inherited from his grandmother. The whole effect was of a country gentleman’s study, and about as far as you could get from the bleak, functional office that Bokus inhabited in the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
Liz knew that Bokus never felt comfortable in Fane’s office, and when she arrived he was standing by the windows, looking stiff and awkward. Fane’s secretary, Daisy, followed her into the room with a pot of coffee on a silver tray with china cups and saucers. Bokus waved her away when she offered him a cup and sat down heavily in one of the chairs round the table.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ he said as soon as Daisy had left the room.
Fane took the chair at the head of the table and gestured to Liz to sit down opposite Bokus. He took his time sipping his coffee before saying, ‘Thank you for the email, Andy; I think we are all sorry to learn that your source Donation has left Yemen. And very surprised to learn that he has gone to Moscow. I for one was not aware that he was in touch with the Russians. Were you, Elizabeth?’
Liz did not reply, and Bokus broke in, ‘Not Moscow. Our latest information is that he’s gone to Dagestan. We don’t know why. He may have arms-dealing contacts there, or maybe the Russians have shipped him off there to get him out of Russia. But it seems that somehow he’s got himself mixed up with jihadis – and got on their bad side; I told you his son was murdered. This is a man used to playing both sides from the middle, only suddenly he was squeezed from either end. The Yemeni government was growing fed up with him; now the jihadis have as well. So he’s done a runner. But instead of running our way, as he would have done if you’d been a bit quicker on your feet, he’s gone in the other direction.’
Fane shook his head and said, ‘You were handling Donation – we weren’t. If you’d been prepared to take a risk and be a little more generous, then maybe we would have got something back. Instead, the bird’s flown the coop and taken his information and his money with him.’
Liz was about to intervene, but as she drew in her breath to speak, Bokus snapped, ‘You can blame us all you like, but it isn’t the United States that’s at risk from this arms deal he was telling us about. It’s you, and you weren’t willing to do anything to keep him sweet and find out what he knew.’ Bokus looked angry enough to spit. ‘As always, you expect us to bail you out, and if we don’t, you scream bloody murder and say it’s all our fault. But you can’t pin this one on the Agency.’
Bokus sat back in his chair, his face red and his arms crossed over his stomach. Liz could see that Fane was taken aback by the American’s aggression. She had long suspected that Bokus’s usual front was a pose. The bluff, rough Yank who spoke in monosyllables was, she had always been pretty sure, put on for Fane’s benefit – a kind of defence mechanism against the smooth English gentleman. A tirade like this from Bokus was unprecedented, and unique for its articulate delivery, which meant that it came from the heart and what they were seeing was the real Bokus behind the taciturn façade.
Since Fane looked as if he was gathering himself for a counter-offensive, Liz decided to intervene before things got totally out of hand. She said calmly, ‘I think we need to move on. Donation’s gone, and we won’t get any more from him, wherever he is. We need to focus now on what we’ve learned.’
‘OK,’ said Bokus. ‘Donation was only the middleman. The coalface is this guy Atiyah. He’s the one you’ve got to worry about, and he’s been operating right under your noses. He’s a Brit, and you didn’t know anything about him.’
‘For God’s sake,’ broke in Fane, ‘how is that supposed to be helpful? We’ve got a British citizen gone bad – is that a unique situation? You want to tell me how the American Somalis slipped through your nets? Or the Boston bombers? Two can play at that blame game, you know.’
Liz broke in, ‘Or we can accept that we both face the same difficulties and work together to sort them out.’
Fane was silent and Bokus gave her a long stare, but her words seemed to have a calming effect. Bokus threw both hands up in a parody of surrender. ‘OK. But I didn’t start this.’
‘Oh no?’ Fane said, ready to dive in again, until Liz gave him a look that could freeze stone. She continued quickly, ‘Why don’t we start with what we know?’ Before either man could say anything at all, she added, ‘Antoine Milraud the French arms dealer has decided to be a little more forthcoming. I’m not sure he’s telling us everything he knows, but it’s more than he was telling us before.’
‘How’d you manage that?’ asked Bokus. ‘Feminine charm?’ Liz was relieved to see him grin.
‘It was the French, actually, who got him to talk.’
‘Monsieur Seurat?’ asked Fane.
Give it a rest, Geoffrey, thought Liz, doing her best to ignore him. ‘The man Milraud met in Berlin, the black man in the museum, will be receiving a delivery of guns and ammunition in the next ten days or so, somewhere here in the UK. Originally the delivery was going to be in Paris.’
‘So what’s changed?’ asked Bokus. Liz rather liked the way he was always happy to ask the obvious questions – whereas Fane would hold back, unwilling to admit there were things he didn’t understand.
She said, ‘It’s looking increasingly likely that the arms aren’t for use in the Middle East – why bring them all the way to France or Britain if they were? We don’t know why at first it was Paris, but I’m now afraid they’re intended for a terrorist attack and that it’s going to take place here in Britain.’ She noticed that both Bokus and Fane’s eyes widened at this.