Close Call Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  To my brother, Brian Whitehouse

  1932–2013

  Chapter 1

  The sun was slanting through the high-vaulted roof of the souk, throwing down shafts of light in which dust motes and thin drifts of cigarette smoke swirled lazily. Miles Brookhaven began to relax as he walked down the long central avenue, breathing in smells of powdery piles of spices, reaching over to touch the shiny purple skins of aubergines, and exchanging a shouted greeting with the stallholder.

  He stopped at a food stall on the corner of one of the side aisles where the same old man who’d been there since God knows when had a juicing machine. As he usually did when he took this route, Miles stopped for a glass of fresh orange juice. Against the wall behind the counter a shawarma of meat the size of a tree trunk rotated on a long sharp pole. Miles propped one hip on a stool in the corner, from where he could look down the main aisle, the way he’d come, but his eye was drawn to the spit. There was something different. Usually, as he drank, he would watch a short balding man called Afiz, his apron stained by the spattering juices, wielding a long knife of incredible sharpness, peeling shavings of meat off the shawarma like strips of wallpaper.

  He and Afiz had established a friendly unspoken ritual – Afiz would turn and gesture to Miles with his knife, as if to ask You want some? Miles would shake his head and hold up his glass to show that was what he’d come for. Afiz would laugh and turn back to the shawarma.

  But it wasn’t Afiz who tended the spit today. Instead a young man held the long knife. He was tall with a prominent Adam’s apple and long black hair tied back into a knot, and he stared at Miles with dark indifferent eyes, then turned away to serve a customer. He had none of Afiz’s practised delicacy; instead he just hacked at the meat, which fell in chunks instead of paper-thin slices. That seemed odd, Miles thought as he sipped his juice. Holding the glass in one hand he reached into his pocket for some coins to pay, and it was then he sensed movement, looked up and saw the young man coming towards him, holding the knife in one hand, his eyes glazed and hostile.

  Not pausing to think, Miles tilted his glass of juice and hurled its contents straight into the eyes of his attacker. The long-haired youth was caught by surprise, blinking furiously, trying to get the juice out of his eyes. Miles took a step back, and as the young man lunged forward, swiping hard with the knife, he threw the empty glass at his face.

  It hit the youth square in the eye. He yelled in pain and dropped the knife, which fell onto the tiled floor of the stall and bounced from its point, erratically, before landing at last, like an offering, at Miles’s feet. As Miles bent down and grabbed it, the young man ran out of the far side of the stall.

  Miles stared at the fleeing figure and when he turned back he saw that the juice man had fled as well. The com­motion was drawing a crowd. Miles understood from the jabber of Arabic that they were wondering what this Westerner was doing, holding that knife. He put it down on the counter and without looking around strode quickly down the aisle towards the exit from the souk. The last thing he or his colleagues needed was the attention of the police.

  By the time he’d reached the modern end of the souk, no one in the crowd of shoppers seemed to be taking special notice of him. He slowed to a stroll, forced himself to breathe normally and began to review what had happened. Was the young man just another extremist who hated Westerners? He didn’t think so. The fact that he’d been working at the stall where Miles regularly stopped – and that the juice man had fled as well – made it seem more likely that he’d been targeted.

  Perhaps the group he’d been working with had been penetrated – but by whom? That was what made it hard to deal with the rebels. Too many conflicting interests; too many irons in the fire. Your enemy’s enemy wasn’t necessarily your friend. Whatever the explanation, he couldn’t go on using the same cover. It was time to move on.

  Outside in the bright sun, Miles realised that his hand felt sticky, raised it and found it covered in blood. More blood was running down the sleeve of his jacket, and moving his shoulder made him wince in pain. That swipe with the knife must have connected.

  He’d begun to feel faint; best get back to the office fast. He heard a gasp and looked up to see a young woman staring in horror at his jacket. Behind her a little man with a bushy black moustache was pointing at him. The blood was flowing fast down his arm now, dripping from the cuffs of his shirt and jacket onto the paving stones. His vision was blurring, and he’d started to sway as he walked. Seeing him stagger, the little man put his arm round him, waving with his other arm at a taxi. ‘Hospital, hospital,’ he shouted at the driver, and as he bundled him into the back of the car, Miles passed out.

  Chapter 2

  Liz Carlyle was sitting at her desk in Thames House, the London headquarters of Britain’s MI5, frowning at the pile of papers neatly stacked in the centre of her desk. She’d just got back from a three-week holiday walking in the Pyrenees and was wishing she’d stayed there. A spectacled head poked round the door, followed by the rest of Peggy Kinsolving, Liz’s longstanding research assistant and now her deputy in the Counter-Terrorist section that Liz ran.

  ‘Welcome back,’ said Peggy. ‘Did you have a good time? You must be fit as a flea. It’s never stopped raining here since you went away.’ She waved a hand at the pile of paper. ‘Don’t worry about that lot. I’ve read it all and it’s just background stuff. The top one is the only important one – I’ve summarised where we’ve got to in all the current investigations. You’ve got a meeting with the Home Secretary on Friday to bring her up to date. If you like I’ll come with you.’

  Peggy stopped to draw breath and Liz smiled fondly at her younger colleague. ‘It is actually great to be back, though I didn’t feel that when I woke up this morning. We had a wonderful time. Walked miles, ate too much, drank some great wine. Martin is fine, though he’s still wondering whether to leave the DGSE and go into private ­security work. He fancies getting out of Paris and living in the South – his family home was near Toulouse. But it’s a big step to leave government service and go private and there�
�s a lot of competition in the private security field – just like here. Anyway, how are you? And how’s Tim?’

  Tim was Peggy’s boyfriend, a lecturer in English at King’s College, London University, a very bright lad if a bit of a sensitive soul. Peggy said, ‘I’m fine, and so is Tim, thanks. He’s still doing the vegetarian cooking course – advanced level now. I hadn’t realised it could be so tasty. I’m quite converted.’ They both smiled and Peggy went on, ‘There’s one thing you won’t be too pleased about. We’ve been given an extra responsibility. I was only told about it on Friday. It’s a “watching brief” – whatever that is – for under-the-counter arms supplies to the Arab Spring rebels.’

  Liz knew all too well what a watching brief was. It meant extra responsibility with no additional resources. Then if anything bad happened you were to blame. She sighed. ‘Is there any intelligence that arms are going from dealers in this country to the rebels?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard. It’s not so much the rebels per se that anyone’s worried about; it’s the jihadis who’ve infiltrated them. The Foreign Secretary went to a meeting in Geneva last week and this was on the agenda. There’s a lot of concern about al-Qaeda-type groups leaking into the Arab Spring countries. There were some gruesome pictures on TV while you were away of what they were doing to their captives.’

  ‘I saw them on French TV. But I would have thought they could get arms quite easily from the countries who support them.’

  ‘I know that seems more likely. But the conference decided that each country should put measures in place to ensure that no undercover supplies from the EU countries get to these jihadis. It seems to be more of a matter for Eastern Europe than us, but DG told me on Friday that it’s been decided that we were to have the “watching brief”.’

  ‘Great. But what about Six? I wonder what they have on this.’

  ‘Quite a lot, I imagine. But guess who’s running their part of the show – your favourite officer, Bruno Mackay. Bruno rang me on Friday to welcome us on board. Said he’d like to come over to see you when you were back.’

  Liz put her head in her hands and groaned. ‘Did I just say I was glad to be back?’

  Peggy grinned. ‘Bruno told me something quite interesting. Do you remember Miles Brookhaven, who used to be in the CIA station here? Andy Bokus’s deputy?’ When Liz nodded she went on, ‘Apparently he was nearly killed a few months ago. He was under cover in an aid charity the Agency had set up in Syria, running a source in a rebel group, and he was attacked in the souk. They aren’t sure if his cover had been blown, or if it was just an opportunist attack, but from what Bruno said, it sounded planned to me. Miles needed a series of blood transfusions – they had to get him out of there pretty quickly.’

  ‘Poor Miles. He was a bit naïve when he was here. He tried to recruit me once – he took me on the London Eye in a private pod and plied me with champagne. It was fun, and I enjoyed watching him waste the Agency’s money. I wonder if he’s grown up.’

  ‘I hope so.’ Peggy got up to go. ‘I’ll leave you to catch up.’

  But as Peggy walked out of the door she bumped into someone coming in. ‘Whoops. Sorry, Geoffrey. I was just going. Liz will be delighted to see you!’

  The tall, heron-like figure of Geoffrey Fane, a senior MI6 officer, sauntered into the room. ‘Good morning Elizabeth. Delighted to see you looking so fit and well. Been on holiday I hear. I hope you had a wonderful time and that our friend Seurat is in good form.’

  One of Geoffrey Fane’s characteristics, which drove Liz mad, was his inquisitive interest in her private life and his delight in showing how much he knew about it. She would much have preferred him not to know that she was seeing Martin Seurat of the French Military Intelligence Service, the DGSE. But he did know, and she suspected that he had learned about it from Bruno Mackay, who had been the deputy head of MI6’s Paris Station when she’d first met Martin.

  What she didn’t like to acknowledge, though everyone else knew it, was that Geoffrey Fane himself would have liked to be in Martin Seurat’s shoes. He was divorced, a lonely man and evidently deeply attracted to Liz, who though she admired and respected his professional skill, couldn’t disguise the fact that on a personal level she found him pompous and patronising. What she couldn’t – or wouldn’t let herself see – was that much of his manner towards her was a cover for his feelings. So he went on calling her ‘Elizabeth’, though he knew that she preferred to be called ‘Liz’, and she went on grinding her teeth at the sight of him while everyone marvelled that they seemed to have such a successful working relationship.

  Now Fane folded himself elegantly into the chair that Peggy had just left and crossed one long, tailored leg over the other, showing a length of subtly striped sock and a highly polished black brogue. ‘I was delighted to learn we’ll be working together on the arms supply front,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I’ve just heard about it from Peggy. I gather we’ve been given a watching brief and no extra resources, so I don’t suppose we’ll be doing much active investigation. Anyway, Peggy told me that there’s no specific intelligence about any UK arms dealers being involved, and we certainly haven’t the time to go looking.’

  Fane leant forward in his chair. ‘That might have been true last week, but things are moving on. I had a call from Andy Bokus over the weekend. They’ve just posted a new man into Yemen. An old friend of yours if I’m not mistaken. Miles Brookhaven. I’m sure you remember him from when he was here at Grosvenor with Bokus. I gather he was quite smitten.’

  Liz gazed at the languid figure in the chair, clenched her jaw and said nothing. Fane smiled slightly and went on, ‘He had a bit of a rough time on his previous posting but he’s recovered now. The Agency have sent him to Sana’a to pick up a rather promising contact of the Embassy. Bokus seems to think there may be something interesting to come out for us as well as for the Agency.’

  Chapter 3

  Miles Brookhaven’s shoulder still ached at night if he turned over awkwardly in bed, and now driving the heavy SUV he felt a twinge of pain whenever the car bounced over a rut in the road or he had to turn the wheel suddenly to avoid a pothole. The long knife had slashed the tendons at the top of his arm and the doctors at the military hospital in Germany to which he had been evacuated had told him that they would never properly heal. But, under pressure from CIA headquarters in Langley, the doctors had finally authorised his posting. There was a shortage of experienced case officers with fluent Arabic, and as the Arab Spring spread and jihadis joined the rebels in one country after another, the need for intelligence both from the front line of the fighting and from the countries on the periphery had become urgent.

  From NSA at Fort Meade and CIA at Langley to GCHQ in Cheltenham, the eyes and ears of the West were focused on the movement of weapons around the world, and in particular to the countries where rebel groups were fighting governments. It was clear that supplies of some of the most sophisticated weapons were getting through to jihadis.

  Yemen was a special focus of attention. Overhead surveillance had shown piles of what appeared to be ­weapons crates stacked on the dockside at Aden. The photographs had landed on the desk of an analyst in Langley at the same time as a report from the Commercial Counsellor at the US Embassy in Sana’a. The diplomat’s report described his meetings with the Minister of Trade, one of his main contacts. The Minister seemed uninterested in developing trade with the US except in one area – weapons. The Minister explained this as the need for his government to be able to protect both its own citizens and foreigners against increasingly aggressive jihadi groups. But the Embassy report pointed out that the same message was coming from the Interior and Defence Ministers – departments where issues of weapons supply seemed a more natural fit.

  The other notable feature of the diplomat’s meetings with the Minister of Trade was the frequency of his ­references to ‘his’ Foundation, set up he said to help the homeless and in desperate need of funds. But research by the Embassy ha
d thrown up no sign of such a charity. It was this last point that had brought the diplomatic cable onto the desk in Langley and which had resulted a few months later in the diplomat being moved to a senior post in another country and Miles Brookhaven turning up in the Sana’a Embassy as the new Commercial Counsellor. He had one brief – to recruit the Minister of Trade.

  As he drove, Miles could see the mountains in the west, ranged in a rough semicircle around the city. His health not fully restored, it had taken him a few days to get used to the thin air of Sana’a. This was to be his first meeting with Jamaal Baakrime, the Trade Minister, his recruitment target, and he was feeling rather nervous. In normal circumstances he would have taken months to get to know a target, to assess weaknesses and vulnerabilities before he made his pitch, but he had been told not to hang about with this one but to go straight in and offer him cash for information. If the approach failed he would be quickly withdrawn and posted somewhere else where he could be useful.