I took a chance and lowered my window a few inches, then gave the hazard warning lights a single flash, followed by a brief flick of my hand out of the window. The air felt hot and sticky and my mouth felt dry.
A few seconds went by as the 4×4 stayed on our tail. Then it dropped back with a flash of its lights before turning off down a side street and disappearing.
I breathed more easily. For now, we were OK.
Sweetman noticed the move and looked at me like he was impressed. ‘What did you just do? What happened?’
‘Not sure,’ I said. ‘I’m hoping it was kidnapper-speak for “I’m good, thanks, so back the fuck off”.’
As we arrived at the airport, I said, ‘One thing you need to remember.’
‘What’s that?’ He was looking a bit calmer, but it was probably short term.
‘Make it two things. First is, have a strong drink as soon as you can. Make it aguardiente, the local brandy — it’ll paralyse your vocal chords and settle your nerves. Second thing is, you know nothing about what happened. You saw nothing, you heard nothing, you left your room and went home. And you never come back here. Ever. Understood?’
He nodded. ‘I get it. Reprisals. What about you?’
‘Me? I was never here in the first place.’
Three
Secret Intelligence Service Officer Thomas Vale stared at the message on his monitor in the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross in London, and wondered what the hell was going on. It had just arrived on the internal Secure-X system, yet was timed over an hour ago.
From: C. Moresby (Operations Director 4)
To: List A
Subject: Extraordinary meeting of sub-committee AL/213/4(JIC)
On matters relating to Somali hostage negotiations and in accordance with guidelines laid down by ISC (Intelligence and Security Committee), this matter requires the presence of all List A personnel or their nominated delegates from Cabinet Office, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, MI5, GCHQ and MOD, and includes a special invitation to London head of CIA or his nominated deputy.
SIS personneclass="underline"
Operations Director 4
Controller Africa
Controller Middle East
Controller Europe
Chair: Operations Director 4
Time start: 10.30a.m. — room 2/15
Vale checked his watch. It was already 10.30. He’d be late, which he hated. He called immediately for a duty driver in the services section to meet him downstairs. Getting round to the Cabinet Office, room 2/15, where these cross-departmental meetings often took place, was going to take a few minutes.
‘Have you seen Mr Moresby, Joe?’ he asked the driver.
‘About twenty minutes ago, Mr Vale, on his way out of the building.’ Joe eyed him in the mirror with a raised eyebrow. They had known each other for four years now and got on well. ‘I didn’t think you were included.’ Joe always seemed to know a lot more than he should for his pay grade. Typical ex-army driver.
The devious little shit, Vale thought angrily, the thought aimed at Colin Moresby, Operations Director 4 and chair of the meeting. One of the new brand of directors appointed in the recent re-shuffles of the security community, Moresby had hit the ground running and seemed unconcerned by the need to make allies in the corridors of SIS unless they could further his career. He had a love of meetings, which he used as weapons to denigrate his enemies and as forums to suck up to those more important than himself. Sleek and confident, he was too fond of marketing-speak for Vale’s liking, which the older man saw as a means of obfuscation.
He thought about the note again, trying to decide whether the delay in receiving it and the lack of any earlier notification was carelessness or a deliberate move to freeze him out. A senior field officer for many years, he was approaching retirement. But with a shortage of skilled personnel undergoing training, he’d been offered a consultancy post within the organization and asked to stay on for the foreseeable future. His role was no longer in the field, but more of an oversight function on operations. As such, Moresby was obliged to include him in all aspects of field officers’ and agents’ work abroad. It was, Vale knew, little more than a box-ticking exercise to meet new monitoring standards, but still an essential footbrake function for those with less field experience.
People like Moresby.
The car eased to a stop near the Cabinet Office. He hopped out and told Joe he would walk back; he had a feeling he might need the fresh air. Passing through security, he made his way up to the second floor, room 15. He could hear the buzz of conversation from inside, and felt unaccountably like a pupil arriving late for a lesson.
The talking stopped as he opened the door, and a number of familiar faces turned towards him.
‘My apologies,’ he said easily, addressing nobody in particular. He noted Moresby, sitting at the head of the table. He looked as if he had swallowed a bug. ‘I didn’t get the note until a few minutes ago.’
‘Really?’ Moresby grunted. ‘You’d better take it up with IT. Probably a systems glitch.’
There were no gaps at the table, Vale noted. Significant or accidental? He grabbed a chair from against the wall beneath a dubious portrait of Gladstone, and dragged it to a spot between Bill Cousins, Controller Africa, and Peter Wilby, Controller Middle East. The two men shuffled sideways to let him in.
He nodded and sat down, noting that each person present had a folder on the table in front of them. There were no spares.
Bill Cousins moved his folder so that Vale could share.
‘As I was saying,’ Moresby resumed, his face stiff with disapproval, ‘this is an all-hands notification that we will be running a contact mission within the next two weeks, possibly sooner. The location is in east Africa, on the Somali/Kenyan border near the coast, and the precise timing is as yet unconfirmed, but will be reactive, depending on outside bodies.’ He glanced around the table, hovering just a moment on a man Vale knew as James Scheider, the deputy chief, CIA London station. He was an up-and-coming figure to watchers inside SIS, and Vale instantly recognized Moresby’s tactics: make powerful friends before they reach the top and they are likely to boost one’s own rise to prominence.
Moresby referred to the folders on the table and continued, ‘Two weeks ago our Nairobi liaison officer was approached by a known middleman named Ashkir Xasan. Xasan is thought to be of mixed Somali/Kenyan parentage, and has acted as a mediator several times over the past two years in the release of tourists and other hostages in the region, taken mostly by pirates but also other non-aligned groups. He secured the release of two cargo vessels taken by pirates further north, one in the Gulf of Aden, the other off the coast of Oman. Both vessels, one the Madras-flagged Oonyong, the other the Belladventure from Rotterdam, had been held for three months near Hobyo, Somalia. Their crews were released unharmed.’
Vale breathed easily and scanned the briefing notes passed to him by Bill Cousins. So far so mundane. He wondered where this was going. Moresby was perfectly entitled to run operations wherever his brief allowed, especially where there were intelligence implications. But Vale had the strongest feeling that his own name had been left off the list deliberately and he wasn’t sure why. But it couldn’t be good news. Moresby was making a power play of some kind and signalling that old-timers like Vale were no longer needed, oversight roles or not.