He ignored Fane and looked at Liz. ‘Couldn’t the leaker here in London be Russian too?’
‘Well, anything’s possible at this stage,’ she conceded.
‘Very unlikely, I’d say,’ said Fane, avoiding Liz’s astonished gaze. After all, he’d made the same suggestion himself only an hour or so ago in his office.
Bokus sighed. ‘Geoffrey, however cosy we are with Moscow these days, I don’t think we’d let them join us on a top-secret project. If they found out about it, they might well have an interest in infiltrating it. I was thinking actually of an illegal – somebody the Russians planted here long ago. If your guy Bravado is telling the truth, and the leaker’s foreign, then he could be posing as a national friendly to the West. Christ, he could be Canadian, for all I know. He could be anything, but his real identity would be Russian.’
Liz intervened. ‘Our source was pretty clear on this. It’s not a Russian operation; according to him, the mole is working for some other country. But Bravado doesn’t know which one.’
Bokus didn’t buy this. ‘I think it’s far more likely that it’s the Russians who have somebody in place. And your guy is looking for some pay-off for the information.’
‘That would be the obvious way of looking at it,’ Fane said. He gave a deprecating sniff.
Bokus snorted back at him. ‘In my experience, the obvious wins nine times out of ten. Sure, you can always start navel-gazing, but this looks to me like a no-brainer. The Russians have infiltrated an agent into this Clarity programme. Simultaneously, and for whatever reason, one of their intelligence officers wants to turn – but he knows he’s got to bring something with him. So this is the dowry.’
When Fane and Liz Carlyle looked unconvinced, Bokus felt exasperated. Why did these Brits always want to make everything so complicated? He said, ‘Come on, if it’s not a Russian planted in the MOD, then how the hell did this source of yours find out about it?’
Fane looked to Liz, who said, ‘He says he only learned by accident.’
Bokus made a sarcastic tut with his tongue, but Liz shook her head impatiently. She said, ‘Don’t you see, that’s exactly why it rings true? Bravado didn’t claim to be in the know about everything; he didn’t bring us secret files all neatly wrapped in a box with a pink bow.’
Bokus replied, ‘He’s not giving us anything very concrete. He can’t think we’d pay much for something so vague. What’s his motivation?’
‘Funnily enough, he thinks he’s being patriotic. He’s only telling us because his superiors decided not to. They don’t want us to know: they’re happy for this third party to infiltrate the programme, and give themselves the capacity to control it – either to screw it up or turn it back against us or use it themselves. There’s no end to what you could do if you could get through the encryption and manipulate the software. But Bravado thinks his side is making a mistake in not telling us what they know. He thinks that if the system is sabotaged we might well blame the Russians, the Russians will blame the Chinese, the Chinese will blame us… et cetera. And eventually, all hell could break loose.’
Maybe, thought Bokus. But it still seemed overly elaborate to believe this Russian Bravado was betraying his own side because they knew about a third-country threat to this Clarity programme.
Liz said gently, ‘I know it all looks very strange at this stage, Andy. But it’s early days. I have to believe Bravado until something proves I’m wrong, and that’s the starting point. We can’t ignore the information.’
Bokus noticed that Fane was staying quiet, which suggested he had another agenda. Bokus knew better than to ask what it was: Fane would never tell. Bokus looked at Liz, and decided there wasn’t any point arguing with her; besides, he had to admit her argument made sense. He nodded but also let a slight sigh escape, to show his agreement was reluctant. ‘Okay, so what do you want me to do?’
‘Alert your people. I suppose the Bureau will need to be told as well.’ It was clear she’d come knowing what she wanted out of this meeting. ‘Tell them we’re on the case over here but I’m sure they’ll want to look at your part of Clarity, though Bravado was clear it was the British end that had been penetrated. I need to know I can get help from you over here if I need it.’
‘Count on me,’ Bokus said. And he meant it, for the time being.
Chapter 13
Early on Saturday morning, Liz drove down to Wiltshire, to the Bowerbridge Estate where she had grown up in the gatehouse. When her father died, just after Liz finished university, her mother Susan had gone on living in the house and had eventually been allowed to buy it. She now managed the garden centre, which occupied the old kitchen garden. For many years she had hoped that Liz would give up what she thought of as her dangerous job in London and come back to live in the house and marry a local man. But she had abandoned that ambition a few years ago, realising that, though Liz loved to visit her old home, her heart lay in her work, and that the last thing that would make her happy was rusticating in Wiltshire.
Susan had been helped to come to terms with reality by Edward Treglown, whom she had met at a friend’s house and to whom she was now very close. Liz and Edward got on well and, just as importantly for Liz, Edward and Martin Seurat got on well too. Both had been in the military, and they had discovered contacts in common from when they had served in Kosovo in the eighties.
As she stop-started in the traffic on the M4, Liz thought about her meeting with Sorsky and wondered whether Fane and Bokus were right in their suspicion that there was something more behind Sorsky’s offer of information. It was not as if she could really assess the man. Despite the Russian’s easy familiarity with her in the Parc des Bastions, she hadn’t seen him before that for almost twenty years, and even then had barely known him at all.
Yet it was hard to see his approach as anything other than what he claimed it to be. In particular, his lack of specifics seemed convincing to her. If for whatever reason he wanted to seduce her into believing something that wasn’t true, surely he would have had more information on offer.
As she neared the Newbury exit, she felt herself gradually starting to relax. Martin was in Paris this weekend, helping his daughter move apartments, and though she’d rather be spending the time with him, his absence might make it easier to take her mind off work. She was looking forward to the weekend, to walking in the Wiltshire countryside, and seeing the hyacinths and the late tulips that would be colouring her mother’s cottage garden.
When she arrived, Susan seemed unusually preoccupied. Normally she would have come out into the yard as Liz was parking her car and there would have been a freshly baked cake on the kitchen table. But Liz found her standing in the sitting room, listening tensely to a conversation Edward was having on the telephone.
Liz frowned. ‘What’s wrong?’ she whispered. Judging by the anxious tone of Edward’s voice, something was clearly upsetting him.
Her mother sighed. ‘Come into the kitchen.’
As she put the kettle on Susan explained: ‘Poor Edward. His daughter Cathy’s come back to live in England, but it’s all proving rather… difficult.’
Liz’s mother was old school, trained to take troubles on the chin and just get on with it. So ‘difficult’ meant things were serious. Liz knew Edward’s daughter had been living in France; by all accounts she was a kind of latter-day hippie – Liz vaguely imagined her playing the guitar with flowers in her hair. She had a little boy, whom Edward adored but rarely got to see.