Free At Risk by Stella Rimington

for Bob Morrison. Minutes later he called her back from a motorway payphone.
    “Did Ferris say why he called you?” the Special Branch officer asked her, his voice echoing indistinctly in her earpiece.
    “No, he didn’t,” said Liz. “But he was adamant he wasn’t talking to you.”
    There was a brief silence. Reception was poor, and amongst the static Liz could hear the whine of car horns.
    “As a source,” said Morrison, “Frankie Ferris is a total write-off. Ninety per cent of the money Eastman pays him goes straight over the betting shop counter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s using, too. He’s probably made the whole thing up.”
    “That’s possible,” said Liz carefully.
    There was a long moment of crackle.
    “. . . going to get anything useful while Eastman’s putting money his way.”
    “And if he isn’t any more?” asked Liz.
    “If he isn’t, I wouldn’t give much for his . . .”
    “You think Eastman would get rid of him?”
    “I think he’d consider it. Frankie knows enough to bury him. But I don’t think it would come to that. Melvin Eastman’s a businessman. Easier to see him as a business overhead, throw a bit of cash . . .”
    More car horns. “You’re . . .”
    “. . . useful work out of him. They’re joined at the waist, basically.”
    “OK. Do you want me to send you what Frankie told me?”
    “Yeah, why not?”
    They rang off. Liz had covered herself; as for the information being acted on, that was something else.
    Once again she stared at the fragmentary phrases. A drop-off of what? Drugs? Weapons? People? A drop-off from Germany? Where would that have originated? If it was a sea landing, and the word “headland” suggested that it was, then perhaps she should have a look at the northern ports.
    Just to be on the safe side—and it could be hours before Morrison got back to his office—she decided to have a word with a contact in Customs and Excise. Where was the nearest UK landfall from the German ports? Had to be East Anglia, which was Eastman’s patch. No small craft bringing dodgy cargo from the northeast was going to run the gauntlet of the Channel; they’d go for the hundred-odd miles of unguarded coastline between Felixstowe and the Wash.

 

    T he Susanne Hanke was a twenty-two-metre Krabbenkutter stern-trawler, and after more than thirty hours at sea Faraj Mansoor loathed every rust-streaked inch of her. He was a proud man, but he did not look like one as he crouched in the vomit-slicked fish-hold with his twenty fellow passengers. Most of these, like Faraj, were Afghans, but there were also Pakistanis, Iranians, a couple of Iraqi Kurds and a mute, suffering Somali.
    All were identically dressed in used blue mechanics’ overalls. In a warehouse near the Bremerhaven docks they had been stripped of the rancid garments in which they had travelled from their various countries of origin, permitted to shave and shower, and fitted out with second-hand jeans, sweaters and windcheaters from the city’s charity shops. They were also handed the overalls, and by the time the twenty-one of them were gathered around the bonfire of their old clothing they looked, to the casual eye, like a team of guest workers. Before embarking on the sea crossing they had been given bread rolls, coffee, and individual servings of hot mutton stew in foil cartons—a meal which, over the course of the eighteen months that the Caravan had been up and running, had proved acceptable to the bulk of its clients.
    The Caravan had been set up to provide what its organisers described as “Grade 1 covert trans-shipment” of economic migrants from Asia to Northern Europe and the United Kingdom. The passage was not luxurious, but a concerted attempt had been made to provide a humane and functional service. For twenty thousand US dollars, customers were promised safe travel, appropriate EU documentation (including passports), and twenty-four hours of hostel accommodation on arrival.
    This