And so the chief superintendent held his breath as the plane came to a halt, the steps were put in place, and finally the door of the Airbus was opened. He felt his heart pound as the white-robed figure stepped out and made his way down the staircase and on to the red carpet, then knelt to kiss the ground, rising with great agility for a man of his age. Mackie looked around, almost frantically, as the Pope made his way along the receiving line, checking the snipers again, picking out the uniformed officers and those in plain clothes, with the tell-tale gold badges glinting on their lapels, his eyes searching all the time for anyone or anything that should not have been there.
It seemed to take an age, although only two minutes elapsed between the emergence of His Holiness from the aircraft and his entering the familiar vehicle with its canopy of bullet-proof glass and its ton and a half of armour plating, hidden and unsuspected under the gleaming white coachwork.
As the convoy, led and tailed by two police vehicles and flanked by eight motorcycle outriders, headed off for the City Chambers, Brian Mackie allowed himself a very small sigh of relief.
79
There were no smiles around the table in the room that normally seated dinner parties in Bute House, the First Minister’s residence. Bob Skinner knew it well enough, having been there on several occasions during his term of office as security adviser to the secretary of state for Scotland, the official occupant of the fine Georgian terrace before his eviction by the creation of the Scottish parliament, but for the other six it was a first-time visit.
Brian Mackie had come straight from the airport, with Giovanni Rossi, Jack Russell, the Prime Minister’s senior protection officer, and Adam Arrow, who had flown north with him. Skinner himself, Neil McIlhenney, and Special Agent Merle Gower had headed there from Fettes. The DCC had chosen the venue for its discretion, since there were no watching eyes or wagging tongues in Charlotte Square.
‘Thanks for coming, Adam,’ he said, after he had explained the day’s developments, ‘and thanks for not asking why I wanted you here.’
‘No problem.’ The little major’s accent was the one he reserved for serious business, not his customary Derbyshire twang.
‘Now that you’re all up to speed on this new situation, let’s try to analyse the threat. Why are Alsina and Middlemass here? What’s their mission? I don’t think there’s any coincidence about it. I do not believe that two international terrorists would park themselves in Scotland, with almost foolproof and effective new identities, just to be out of the way. I believe they are here to pull something, and until I’m proved wrong, I’m going to assume that it’s connected with this visit.’
‘Why so sure?’ asked Russell. ‘Couldn’t one of the naval bases, Faslane or Rosyth, be a target?’
‘Rosyth’s a dockyard,’ said Adam Arrow. ‘I don’t see them attacking an empty vessel. As for Faslane, it’s a nuclear bunker. It’s the most secure facility in this country.’
‘What about one of the nuclear power stations? Hunterston or Torness?’
‘That would have to be another September Eleven,’ McIlhenney told him. ‘And even then, it wouldn’t work. They’re built to withstand aircraft impact.’
‘Something from within, then. He’s a chemist, isn’t he?’
‘That’s right; and not a nuclear physicist. Anyway, they’re also built to withstand earthquakes and they have all sorts of emergency shut-down mechanisms.’
‘What about a gas attack?’ asked Brian Mackie.
‘Gas is non-specific,’ Merle Gower pointed out, ‘a random weapon. These two people have been here for eighteen months. If that’s what they were here to do they’d have done it already.’
‘I have thought about it, though, Brian,’ said Skinner. ‘In the five or so hours since I found out about this, I’ve had people crawling all over their home, and over Alsina’s work areas at Heriot-Watt looking for traces of anything that might relate to the manufacture of ricin, or sarin, or XV. There’s absolutely nothing in their house, and a facility for producing a nerve agent in a university would attract attention, I reckon.’
He pointed at Russell. ‘To answer your original point, Jack, it’s the timeline that makes me think their presence is related to this visit. I’m going to make some assumptions here; one of them is that these two people were in Dubai for the specific purpose of taking out an American intelligence operative, a counter-strike in the war on terror. Would you go with that, Merle?’
Special Agent Gower nodded. ‘Yeah, we know that they both arrived and left there at the same time.’
‘During the period they were there, Pope John the Twenty-fourth died, and Gilbert White, Cardinal Archbishop of Edinburgh, was elected as his successor. We’re in an era of non-Italian popes now; the last one was French. What do they do, invariably, within the first couple of years of their reign?’
‘They go home,’ Arrow said ‘to let their own people see them in their new exalted state.’
‘Exactly. I believe that the people running Middlemass and Alsina, or Polly Price and Anwar Baradi, or whoever, anticipated this, and sent them here to settle down, find work that would fit their experience, keeping them as far away from potential surveillance as possible. . a South African banker and a Spanish doctorate student are pretty good cover, we have to admit. . and wait for the moment; this moment. That’s what I see so far. The bits I can’t see yet are why they ran or what they’re planning to do, but does anyone disagree with my assessment so far?’
Nobody contradicted him.
‘So what do we do about it?’ asked Russell. ‘Call the Murrayfield rally off?’
‘If that’s what the Pope wants, yes. Gio?’
‘What’s the risk to the public?’
‘There’s no evidence of a potential gas attack. The place is completely swept for explosives on a daily basis. We’ve even searched inside the scaffolding poles that make up the platform on the pitch. If there’s a threat, it’s likely to be personal.’
‘Then there’s not a chance he’ll pull out.’
‘What about the mass this evening?’
‘Admission is by ticket only; had to be, because of the numbers.’
‘I want officers at all entrances to the cathedral all the same, with mugshots of the pair. We’ve done some alternative images from the Kabul photo.’
‘Then go ahead and station them.’
‘Thanks,’ Skinner acknowledged. ‘The Royal Infirmary visit tomorrow’s easy: we can lock that up tight. That leaves the rally as our real problem, our point of potential weakness. What do we do about it? We catch them if we can. But if we can’t, then at the very least we try to guess what they’re planning and make sure they can’t carry it out. For example, nobody gets near the Pope who shouldn’t be there.’
He looked at Gower. ‘We’ve all got our part to play in this. Merle, forget which agency pays your salary. I want the CIA to put its resources into finding out who this woman really is, and to create some potential attack scenarios for us, based on what’s happened elsewhere.’
‘That’s already happening, Bob.’
‘Good.’ He turned to Arrow. ‘Adam, do we need more soldiers?’
‘We could use them to set up a wider security perimeter around the ground and let no vehicles through. That would prevent a mortar attack. I can do that.’
‘Do it.’
‘Where do the public’s cars go?’ asked McIlhenney.
‘Saughtonhall sports fields,’ said Mackie. ‘We divert them there. The buses can go on the back pitches, as planned.’
‘Anything else we need do?’
‘There’s already a no-fly zone in place, Bob,’ Arrow replied. ‘Any light aircraft heading anywhere near Murrayfield will be seen off.’
Skinner looked back across the table at Russell. ‘Jack, I’d be happier if there was only one potential high-tariff target on that platform. Could you persuade him to pull out?’
‘That would run counter to the basic principle of not letting terror be seen to gain the smallest victory,’ said the protection officer. ‘Sometimes I reckon that “martyr” is the word, above all others, that my man would like carved on his tombstone.’