Free Liz Carlyle - 06 - Rip Tide by Stella Rimington

strong sense of duty, of service to his country. He’d carried it through into civilian life from his days in the army, and it had rubbed off on her. That, she thought ruefully, was why she couldn’t just pack it all in and go off to live in Paris. Not yet anyway.
    ‘Tell me about your agent,’ she said. ‘Peggy says he’s in Birmingham.’
    ‘That’s right.’ And Liz listened carefully as K began to tell her about a young man in Birmingham called Salim Alavi, codename ‘Boatman’. He was the son of first-generation immigrants from Pakistan. His mother worked as a cleaner; his father was a mechanic in a local garage. Salim had done well at school, getting three good A-levels; he didn’t go to university but instead applied to join the West Midlands Police. His application had been unsuccessful: he’d passed his written tests with flying colours, but he’d failed the medical exam – there was some problem with his eyesight. Yet he was so obviously keen and bright that one of the recruiters had mentioned him to Special Branch and in time he’d been drawn to MI5’s attention.
    After his application was rejected, Salim took a job in a hardware store run by his uncle. He seemed to have become embittered by his experience with the police and, for the first time in his life, became extremely religious. He joined a small, recently founded mosque, the New Springfield, and went there daily to pray; he also spent his free time listening to clerics preach and began to participate in discussion groups. If you had asked him why he had previously wanted to become a policeman, Salim would have told you it had been a mistake, a youthful error committed when he hadn’t realised he would be doing the Infidel’s bidding by becoming a copper. He would not have told you about his monthly meetings with an officer of MI5.
    After almost two years of faithful attendance at the mosque, ‘Boatman’ was asked to join a small study group, under the tutelage of a cleric named Abdi Bakri who had recently arrived from Pakistan. He agreed at once. At first the sessions were merely versions of the larger discussion groups he still attended. Islam was always on the agenda, and the overriding theme of the talks was how to follow the faith while living in the secular and corrupt society of the West.
    But gradually the tenor of the cleric’s study sessions became more political – and Abdi Bakri shifted emphasis from adhering faithfully to Islam to defeating its enemies. This transition was noted by Boatman – and reported to his new MI5 controller, Kanaan Shah.
    ‘How did Boatman take your arrival on the scene?’ asked Liz. Agents usually hated any change to their controller – such relationships were of necessity close ones, and made closer by their clandestine nature.
    ‘I think he was a bit surprised. He was recruited by Dave Armstrong and I took him on when Dave was posted to Northern Ireland. I’m sure he was expecting another white man, and at first he was suspicious of me. But the fact we were both Asians helped – even though I’m Indian and a Hindu, not Muslim.’ He added with a little laugh, ‘Boatman was willing to overlook this flaw when he discovered that I hated cricket too.’
    Kanaan continued with his account. In this new elite group, Boatman slowly felt his way; it took him over a month even to learn the names of his fellow members. But his patience paid off, and one of them in particular, an old hand named Malik, seemed to trust him. It was from him that Boatman learned that there had been earlier incarnations of this little group, taught by another cleric now thought to be in Yemen, and that some of his disciples had travelled to Pakistan.
    ‘And what happened to them after that?’ asked Liz.
    ‘Most came back. I got three names from Boatman and they’re under surveillance. But the interesting thing is that at least two others don’t seem to have returned.’
    And now those in the present group were being