Free Three Great Novels by Henry Porter

be.’

    He finished the origami with the napkin and balanced it on his shoulder.

    ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

    ‘A parrot - so you won’t notice what I look like.’

CHAPTER SIX

    The silence ended with a single dramatic sentence. ‘Youssef Rahe was ours.’ Richard Spelling said it with studied understatement. ‘He was our man.’ He folded his arms and looked at her over a pair of slender reading glasses.

    Herrick was not totally surprised. She had been at the point of articulating Rahe’s double role for herself, but hadn’t gone the whole way because of the surveillance operation. Why had they put all that effort into watching a man who was already working for them?

    ‘Was?’ she said.

    ‘Yes. His body was found in the boot of a car near the Lebanese border with Syria. He had been very badly treated and finished off with a shot to the head which, without going into detail, made him practically unrecognisable. As well as this, the car had been set alight. However, we are absolutely certain it is Rahe.’

    ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Was he killed by the second man on the Beirut flight?’

    ‘We’re not sure. We suspect he had something to do with it but there were others involved.’

    She asked herself why they were telling her this. Not out of any sense of obligation, that was for sure. She had been summoned to the high table and was being told an intimate secret for a reason. She looked around the room and wondered what they wanted from her, apart from silence. The constituent parts of this late night gathering were altogether odd. Colin Guthrie, head of the joint MI5-MI6 Anti-Terrorism controllerate, well, you would expect him to be there, but not Skeoch Cummings and Keith Manners from the Joint Intelligence Committee. The JIC provided intelligence assessments for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet and wasn’t responsible for making or implementing policy, yet here they were, comfortably ensconced in the inner sanctum of the intelligence executive. And why Christine Selvey, the deputy director of Security and Public Affairs? What the fuck was she doing there, with her powdery skin and brittle, bouffant hair which Dolph had described as ‘South coast landlady with a passion for china dogs and young actresses’?

    There was one other man there and his presence baffled her most. As she entered he had risen, turned and offered her a soft, cool hand and asked after her father, a pleasantry which seemed out of place and was calculated, she thought, to wrong-foot her in some way. Walter Vigo, the former Head of Security and Public Affairs. Isis knew perfectly well that her father would have nothing to do with him. Why was Vigo there and not the Chief? What did Vigo’s presence mean six weeks before the handover from Sir Robin Teckman to Spelling? Vigo was the outcast, the defrocked prelate who’d been exposed by a former SIS man, Robert Harland, for his connections with a gun runner and war criminal named Lipnik. She’d got some of the story from her father, who had trained both Vigo and Harland at different times during the Intelligence Officers’ New Entry Course. Vigo had escaped prosecution because he was in a position to make life seriously unpleasant for the entire Service. Instead he had been declared a pariah, with Teckman forbidding all contact with him and the members of Mercator, the security consultancy he ran in tandem with an antique book dealing business called Incunabula Inc.

    There was silence. She was expected to ask a question. ‘If he was ours, why was he under surveillance?’

    ‘Our relationship was a very, very secret matter,’ Spelling replied. ‘We shared his product, but not his identity with anyone. Only four people knew that he worked for us. Those were his conditions when Walter Vigo came across him two years ago and we abided by them.’

    Vigo stirred to give Spelling a nod of gratitude.

    ‘The surveillance was to give him credibility?’ persisted Herrick.