Free Rogue Elements by Hector Macdonald Page B

everything to have me released. I was expelled from Saudi Arabia. I came to our relatives . . .’ He cast an arm around Al-Gadhi’s majlis. ‘It is well known Ali has American friends. But I cannot stay here. The jihadis have long arms. So do the British. I have to go to America.’
    With gentle but effective force, using only forefinger and thumb, Arkell broke the man’s grip. ‘That’s not gonna happen, Saeed.’
    ‘Please! Consult your superiors. Tell them what I have said. I will be here three more days.’
    ‘Sure, Saeed. I’ll tell them what you said.’ He opened the door. Al-Gadhi was waiting to escort him out.
    ‘Mr Bayley!’ cried Saeed.
    Arkell glanced back, impatient to be gone.
    ‘I lost everything.’ He looked pitifully alone in the centre of the majlis, his crushed nose distorting his whole face. ‘I tried to help your country, and I lost everything.’
    Back in Sana’a, something about that final moment bugged Arkell as he sat on his terrace in Sana’a’s historic Old City the following morning, eating fresh date rolls washed down with thick, bitter coffee. It was the sheer guilelessness of the man. The helpless honesty of a lost soul pinning everything on one last bet. For a fabricator, he was disturbingly convincing.
    And yet not for one moment did Arkell believe him.
    He was willing to accept, at a stretch, that Saeed might have overheard something and gone to the embassy to report it. That was as far as Arkell’s credulity would go. The overworked junior diplomat who heard Saeed out – whether or not he was a Friend – would likely have paid little attention to yet another vague, alarmist terror alert. As for the claim that SIS had orchestrated Saeed’s detention, Arkell smiled at the idea. If only the Firm really did have that kind of influence with the Saudis. No, Saeed had got careless in some way: maybe he’d filched the Sheikh’s cash; maybe he’d leered too long at his daughter. It was nothing new for the trusted lieutenant of a powerful man to find himself peremptorily flung into the gutter. Nor was it a surprise that after twenty-one months’ incarceration, Saeed had managed to concoct a story blaming the Firm for all his woes.
    He certainly wasn’t the only conspiracy theorist with SIS in his sights.
    By 11 a.m. Arkell had found an excuse to drop into the embassy and place a call on the encrypted line to London. The desk officer with responsibility for the Arabian peninsula was a caustic old soldier who did not respond well to idle chatter, and Arkell had fabricated an operational query of sufficient substance to justify the call. He had a possible asset in Hudaydah, he said, an Iranian engineer who claimed first-hand knowledge of a biological weapons programme. But the man was asking for resettlement in Britain and fifty thousand a year.
    ‘Twenty,’ came the terse response. ‘And only if he delivers a concrete WMD lead.’
    ‘Twenty it is,’ agreed Arkell. ‘By the way, do we have anyone in Riyadh using the name “Colville”?’
    ‘Not any more.’
    ‘Meaning?’
    ‘That was Rupert Ellington’s cover.’
    Next, he called Personnel Department. ‘File check, please,’ he said, trying to keep the agitation out of his voice. ‘Rupert Ellington.’
    A pause. ‘That file is closed.’
    ‘I just need the date of death.’
    When the answer came, after a long bureaucratic silence, it seemed to him that the whole world stopped breathing.
    He drove directly from the embassy to Al Mahwit governorate, not pausing to get a new travel permit from the police. At the road blocks, he flashed the previous day’s tasriih and referenced the British Ambassador until they let him through. On the way, he made one more call, this time to a mobile in Damascus. ‘Dermott, it’s Martin Bayley in Yemen,’ he said in a chipper voice. ‘How’s the aubergine salad?’
    The man in Damascus had only been called Dermott for nine weeks. Prior to that, he was Rollo, a shipping