When everyone had arrived for work Peggy told them all that Martin had been killed in Paris in the course of the operation they were working on; that Liz had gone to Paris and would be getting a full briefing but at present she could not tell them exactly what had happened. DG had asked her, she explained, to stand in for Liz until she was back. She was going to move into Liz’s office for the time being and she’d asked for her calls to be put through to Liz’s extension. If anything relevant came through to any of them they were to come in and tell her immediately. She might well be going up to Manchester very soon. Then she went into Liz’s office, closed the door and set about trying to get to grips with what was going on.
An hour later she felt like a salesman who’d made the rounds but come back with an empty order book. She had begun by calling Charlie Simmons at GCHQ. He’d had the news of Seurat’s death by now, and sounded very subdued. There had been no further email traffic to or from Zara since the email had come in announcing that the meeting in Paris had been cancelled. He explained again that the reason why it had taken so long to unzip that message was that it seemed to have been sent by someone who was not familiar with the code. ‘This may mean that those who usually send the messages are not there,’ he said.
‘That makes sense,’ said Peggy. ‘Presumably the messages are usually sent by the people who are on their way here. But they must be communicating somehow or how are they going to meet up with Zara?’
‘However they are doing it, we’re not onto it. Perhaps they made all the arrangements in advance and don’t need to communicate.’
‘Maybe so,’ said Peggy, but she was sceptical. The silence seemed ominous.
Next she checked in with A4 and was told that Zara was acting like a model student, attending lectures, working in the library. ‘Completely normal,’ said the Duty Controller. Too normal, thought Peggy, sceptical again.
Finally she checked with her contact at the Border Agency. He was in constant contact with their counterparts on the Continent and no vehicle of the description she had given him had been reported crossing the Channel or the North Sea. Peggy asked, ‘What if the vehicle were coming in a roundabout way?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Say from much further away than the usual Channel ports. Like Scandinavia – ferries from Norway come here, don’t they?’
‘Sure, though that wouldn’t help them escape detection. There isn’t a port within five hundred miles east of here that hasn’t been given the details of the vehicle we’re looking for. And just to be safe, we circulated them to Ireland too. In fact, unless this lorry’s coming from Brazil you don’t have anything to worry about. If it sails, we’ll know.’
‘All right,’ said Peggy, tempted to ask him to cover Brazil as well, but even she could see that was absurd. ‘Thank you,’ she added, realising that perhaps she had been a bit rude. She was getting very tense. It wasn’t just the aftermath of Seurat’s death and the absence of sleep, it was the absence of developments. No news was usually good news, but right now Peggy wanted something to happen.
Chapter 51
It had been a really tedious few days. Maureen Hayes had wanted to take the week as holiday because her son was home on leave from Afghanistan, but she’d been told she had to work. Wally Woods, her A4 controller, had said that they needed all the resource they could muster to cover what was thought to be a developing terrorist plot.
But so far nothing had happened. The target Maureen and her team were covering, Zara, had gone reliably as clockwork every day of the week from his hostel, Dinwiddy House, to SOAS, where he had attended lectures, sat working in the library and drunk coffee in the snack bar with other students. He did not seem to have any close friends whom he met regularly but he chatted in a friendly enough way to whoever was around. She and her team had been unable to get near enough to overhear any of his conversations but everything looked perfectly natural. Then at about five or six in the evening, he had left the university area and gone back to Dinwiddy House, where, according to her overnight shift colleagues, he had stayed until the following morning. If he was plotting a terrorist outrage, thought Maureen, he must be doing it from his room, as there were no outward signs of a conspiracy.
Today was Friday, and at the early morning briefing before they took over the surveillance, she and her team had been told to be extra-vigilant. Something that had happened the previous day in Paris had led the desk officers to think that a group of possibly up to six people would be arriving in Britain, if they were not already here, and Zara would be meeting up with them. They were thought to be intending to carry out some form of terrorist attack, but what, where and when was not known. It was vital, they had been told, that if Zara broke his routine or met a group of people who had not been seen before, they reported at once; and above all that they did not lose him.
So Maureen and her team were very alert this morning, and rather disappointed when Zara came out at the usual time and headed off to SOAS just the same as on all the previous days. Marcus Washington went into the building and reported that Zara was in a lecture. After the lecture he went to the library, where he was reported by Marcus, by then sitting two places away from him, to be concentrating on a large book from which he was taking notes. Just before twelve noon, he looked at his watch, packed up his things, returned the book to the desk and came out of the library.
‘On the move,’ said Marcus quietly into his microphone as Zara left the library to be picked up by Maureen and her partner, Duff Wells, as he came down the steps.
‘Having an early lunch,’ reported Maureen to the Control Room. But instead of heading off to the snack bar where he usually went at lunchtime, Zara walked quickly out into Tottenham Court Road, ran straight across, narrowly avoiding being run over by a bus, and headed fast towards Goodge Street underground station.
‘He’s doing anti-surveillance,’ reported Maureen as Wells, who had anticipated the move and was already on the other side of the road, went into the station ahead of Zara. Maureen caught up, arriving at the station as Zara and Wells with a small group of passengers were waiting for the lift to take them to the platforms. Maureen, Wells and Zara, with about fifteen other people, piled into the ancient lift, which creaked its way down and juddered to a halt at platform level. Zara was first out, hurrying along the tunnel to the southbound platform.
‘Doesn’t look as though he’s going to see his mum,’ reported Maureen. ‘Euston is north.’
Then began a short tour of the underground system as Zara, with Maureen and Wells accompanying him, went south on the Northern Line to Tottenham Court Road, west on the Central Line to Oxford Circus and finally back north on the Victoria Line to Euston, where he took the exit for the mainline station. Each time he changed trains he hung back and tried to be the last onto the train, but Maureen and Duff Wells knew all about that anti-surveillance ploy and, helped by the crowded platforms, one or other of them managed to board the train after him without drawing attention to themselves.