‘Goodbye, Alexander, à bientôt,’ she said, and she watched him as he strode off towards the university buildings.
Liz gave him three minutes, then rose to her feet and walked towards Place Neuve. Dusk was falling, and the oversized chessmen had been returned to the board’s back rows – the game was over. Cars in the Place had their lights on, and the pavements around the square were full of couples bustling off to restaurants or the theatre.
How, among the flurry of movement, Liz managed to spot the man who half an hour before had been buying a newspaper at the kiosk across the crazy confluence of streets, she didn’t know. But she was certain it was the same man – he still wore a yellow sweater – and she was troubled by what she didn’t believe was a coincidence. She was even more troubled when she saw another man on the steps of the Grand Théâtre across the street. The overcoat was missing, and so was the jacket he’d worn in the Place du Bourg-de-Four. But the width of his shoulders and the stocky build were still the same.
Chapter 10
Liz flew out early the next morning. She had stayed the night in a small, elegant hotel near the Embassy, though she had barely had enough time to appreciate her room’s décor before falling asleep, utterly exhausted. After leaving Sorsky she had gone back to the Embassy to brief Russell White and Terry Castle, and by the time they had gone over every detail and sent off a message to Vauxhall Cross, it was midnight.
One thing had continued to trouble her. At the end of the session, she had tackled White about it. ‘I asked for no surveillance of the meeting, but I’m pretty sure there were people around. Was it your lot?’
White looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry. Orders from Vauxhall Cross, I’m afraid – they insisted we keep an eye on you. But I am very surprised you saw him. He was convinced he hadn’t been spotted.’
Liz shook her head. She was cross, but not with White. He had only been following orders; orders from Geoffrey Fane himself, she was pretty sure. The man couldn’t keep his fingers out of the action, she thought wearily. But something still nagged at her. ‘I saw your man first in the street and then again in the Bourg-de-Four – before I went into the park. Then I saw him again afterwards. And there was a guy in a yellow sweater, which I thought was pretty unprofessional since it made him stand out a mile.’
White looked at Castle; it must have been the younger man who’d set things up. Castle shook his head, and White said, ‘That wasn’t us. We had someone in the university buildings. He watched while you were talking to Sorsky. He didn’t see any other surveillance.’
‘I didn’t see anyone in the park. Just in the street and the square outside. Sorsky said he didn’t think I had been followed so perhaps I was imagining things.’
But Liz didn’t think so. As she looked out of the aeroplane window and down at Mont Blanc, its snowy cap glistening in the sun, she knew that the thick-set man could have had a perfectly innocent reason for his stop-start walk around Place du Bourg-de-Four. But why had he come back and hung around Place Neuve? And why did he change his coat? Not to mention the ‘coincidence’ of her twice spotting a man in a yellow jersey. And if it wasn’t the MI6 Station, who were these people working for? Sorsky had been at pains to make it clear that his own people had no reason to suspect him of anything. The only conclusion she could draw was that these people were not interested in Sorsky or the meeting; they were watching her.
Chapter 11
‘It’s a great story, Elizabeth. But is it true? Or is something else going on here?’
‘Good question, Geoffrey, but I can’t answer it. I just don’t know.’
They were sitting in Geoffrey Fane’s office in MI6’s headquarters building in Vauxhall Cross. The wide greenish-tinted windows looked down on the sweep of the Thames as it flowed by, past the long MI5 building with its shining copper roof, towards Parliament. Today a sharp breeze was whipping up little waves on the river and the tourist boats were rocking in the swell as they turned underneath the bridge to return to their starting point.
On Fane’s desk was the message that Liz and Russell White had composed in Geneva the previous evening. He picked it up and stabbed his finger at it.
‘What do we know about this friend of yours anyway? He says he’s a patriot not a traitor. Wasn’t that exactly what all defectors used to say in the Cold War? It was difficult enough to believe it then – and most of them turned out in the end to be pretty self-seeking – but it’s even more difficult to believe it now.’
‘Look, Geoffrey. I agree with everything you say…’
‘Well, that’s unusual for a start,’ he broke in.
Liz smiled. ‘It’s true. We don’t know anything about Sorsky. Or what his motives really are. Asking for me by name was certainly a weird way of making contact. But it worked. Whatever he is, he’s not a fool. And even if he is the front man in some complicated deception operation, what could it be about? Designed to set us against a third country perhaps or cover up something real that the Russians are doing? Who knows? But we can’t afford to ignore what he says. We are going to have to look into this Operation Clarity, if it exists.’
She sighed. She had some experience of searching for infiltrators – moles – and it was a hard, messy business. Any mole as well placed as this one must have covered his tracks very cleverly, which meant that innocent people would become suspects, and distrust and disruption would be rife.
Geoffrey Fane stood up and walked over to the window. He turned his back to the view, leaned on the window ledge and surveyed the room – and Liz in particular. She looked tired today, he thought, not surprisingly. She’d done a good job in Geneva. Russell White had told him that she thought someone had had her under surveillance as she went to the meet. White thought she’d been imagining it, but he didn’t know her. Fane did know this girl and if she’d suspected surveillance, it was very probably there. They would need to look after her – though she was very difficult to look after. He wished she were more malleable. Together they could be a great team. But now she seemed to spend all her spare time in Paris. He sighed and Liz looked up, her grey-green eyes reflecting the light from the window.
‘Even though it may be a bluff, we’ll have to tell the Americans,’ she said.
Fane eyed her. ‘Why don’t you leave Bokus to me? I think I’ve got his measure by now ’
Andy Bokus was the CIA Station Head in London. He was a big, blunt Midwesterner, an ex-American football player, who enjoyed pretending he was stupid when in fact he was very shrewd. Liz wasn’t at all sure that Fane had got his measure – he tended to respond to Bokus’s pretence of stupidity with his own ‘English gentleman’ act, which meant that they both got embroiled in role-playing and ended up merely annoying each other. Liz would have much rather gone home at this point in the day, but she thought she’d better go with Fane and try to hold the ring. She said, ‘I’d prefer to be there.’
‘Suit yourself,’ he replied sourly. ‘Let me try and get Bokus on the blower now.’
Chapter 12
Andy Bokus was in a bad mood. He didn’t much like London, and after four years he wasn’t about to develop a sudden affection for the place. But his hopes for reassignment had just been dashed – his boss at Langley, Tyrus Oakes, had told him the previous afternoon, ‘Sorry, Andy. You’re there for another year.’
The weather didn’t help. He couldn’t get used to the dispiriting greyness of England: its overcast sky in winter, the enervating drizzle in spring, summer’s inevitable failure to materialise, and the lack of sugar maple trees to give colour to the fall.