Accidental Agent Read online

  ‘He’s quite right. Please thank him.’

  ‘She also asked whether Sarah would be happy to meet her and talk about Daniel in case anything looks like developing. Assuming Sarah knows him better than you do?’

  ‘She does, yes. I’m sure she would be happy to meet her.’

  ‘Thanks. Gareth Horley seems to be behaving himself, I’m happy to report.’

  There had been an episode some months before when Gareth’s exasperation with what he saw as MI5 foot-dragging over a joint terrorist case that moved regularly between Luton and Islamabad had led him to speak frankly, as he had put it. Personally abusive and bureaucratically hostile were the words used by MI5’s head of operations when she complained to Michael. There were two case officers, one from each service, with the agent under MI5 control in Luton, MI6 in Islamabad. Normally, such arrangements worked seamlessly, with the agent unaware of any distinction, but in this case he had complained to his MI6 case officer that the handler he met when in Luton seemed unresponsive to his requests and had apparently failed to act on some very specific intelligence about the meeting of a potential bombing team in a flat above a bookmakers’. That was half true, in that the date of the meeting passed while MI5 and the police were still discussing whether to intervene; but in fact the meeting hadn’t happened and it turned out that MI5 had another source who had said it wouldn’t. The section concerned, which did not know about the joint case, had not reported the non-event to MI6, nor had news of it reached the MI5 director of operations by the time Gareth rang her to complain.

  ‘I confess to intemperance,’ Gareth had said to Charles with a smile, ‘and perhaps a few expletives undeleted.’

  ‘But what really upset them was hearing what you’d said about them to GCHQ after you’d discovered that the meeting was cancelled.’

  ‘Okay, take your point. Though on that occasion I was complaining not so much about this incident itself as the fact that it fitted a pattern of sluggish reporting and acting.’

  ‘Because, it seems, they have other sources reporting in the same area, not all saying the same thing. They have reason to be cautious.’

  Gareth held up his hands. ‘Okay, okay, I shouldn’t have spoken in those terms. Point taken. Must learn to button it.’

  Now, when Michael mentioned the subject again, Charles was able to take a more relaxed view. ‘Glad to hear you’ve had no more problems. He seems to have become better behaved all round.’

  ‘Presumably he’s aware that if he wants to succeed you he needs more friends than enemies.’

  This was the first of several unprompted indications that others saw Gareth as Charles’s potential successor. Either Charles’s mind was easily read or Gareth’s record spoke for itself. ‘Could you work with him?’

  The response was not immediate. ‘Yes.’

  ‘With reservations?’

  ‘Allowances rather than reservations. Allowances for temperament and manner but respect for abilities and achievements and for his reputation for making waves and getting things done.’

  A reputation for making waves was not always desirable in Whitehall, despite ritual worship at the altar of change, but it was good enough for Charles. He was aware that during his own tenure he had ignored various structural and administrative issues that others thought were important. For him, they were secondary to delivering the goods and, so long as the Office delivered – in terms of intelligence produced – he preferred not to think about them. Whitehall, he suspected, thought it time for a new broom. Avoiding unpalatable tasks was one of his weaknesses, he knew.

  Now, at the reception, it was refreshing to find a friendly, if somewhat solemn, Daniel, not at all the potential extremist who worried MI5. ‘We had a lovely chat with Akela,’ said Sarah. ‘She’s charming.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m sure she will be a very good Muslim wife, thanks be to Allah, peace and blessings be upon him.’

  There was no trace of irony in his round freckled face. Hard though it was for the habitually secular to take religious avowals seriously, it was a welcome change from the sullen hostility of Daniel’s pre-conversion youth.

  ‘And we chatted to Anya, her sister, too,’ said Sarah. ‘She seemed very nice, quite a live wire.’

  Daniel nodded. ‘But less devout than Akela. You’ve seen I’ve changed my name. I have a Muslim name now.’ He relieved his solemnity with a smile. ‘I’m surprised – grateful – you could come. I didn’t think you would, given Charles’s job.’

  ‘No reason why not,’ said Charles. ‘None at all.’

  ‘You know I’m a carpenter now? Really enjoying it.’

  ‘Good religious precedent.’ Charles regretted his flippancy as soon as he said it.

  Daniel had to think. ‘Of course, the prophet Jesus. He’s only a prophet in Islam. But an important one.’

  ‘As in Judaism.’

  Daniel’s smile had gone now. ‘The Jews – they’re another matter. Them and the Americans.’ He looked down, shaking his head.

  ‘Your new family, your in-laws, seem very friendly and sociable,’ said Sarah.

  ‘They’re not as observant as Akela but that’s all right, we can cope. We will lead the simple lives of good Muslims.’

  Charles’s phone vibrated again. ‘Excuse me a moment. Work. I’m on call.’ He walked back across the lawn towards the rhododendrons. The call was one he had been expecting, from Gareth Horley. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Couldn’t be better. The crown jewels.’ Gareth spoke slowly and quietly, unusually for him. It emphasised both his Welsh accent and his excitement. ‘We’ve got them, the crown jewels. One of them, anyway.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘About to leave Heathrow. Should be at Hyde Park in about half an hour. Are you coming?’

  ‘Yes. You’ll be there first but I should make it in time.’ Hyde Park was the code name for the alternative Head Office outside Reading, a fully equipped emergency headquarters maintained in case a bomb or other event rendered the normal Westminster headquarters unusable. It was fully manned for that weekend.

  ‘I’ll draft a summary for you, headlines and bullet points only. We need to discuss Whitehall circulation. Number Ten, of course, but who else? Need to know and all that but in spades this time. If it got out it could scupper the Brexit negotiations. The big story is the red line, the one we were talking about on Thursday, the one you said was—’

  ‘Save it till I get there.’

  Chapter Two

  The iron gates opened and one of the barriers was raised for Charles’s ancient Bristol without his having to slow down more than enough to wave at the guards. They should have stopped and searched the car, of course, but they took pride in recognising the Bristol from a distance and he connived in their rule-breaking. Guarding anything was boring, relieved only by small pleasures. In his operational days he had broken rules and taken chances, albeit calculated, but as chief the opportunities were so limited as to make the occasional flouting, no matter how trivial, refreshing. It made him feel younger, which in turn made him feel it really was time to go.

  The building codenamed Hyde Park had begun life as the nineteenth-century Palladian centrepiece of a country estate but successive incarnations as a school, a wartime military hospital, a mental asylum, a secret communications outpost during another war, a country club and a short-lived conversion to a semi-rural business centre had all but obliterated its architectural virtues. It was now converted into modern office suites with a communications centre in the cellars and an invisible array of oddly shaped aerials hidden in the attic. The gracious pillared entrance was cluttered by bulletproof glass and revolving doors. Locals assumed it was part of the nearby BBC monitoring service establishment at Caversham.

  The car park, set for security reasons some distance from the house, was unusually full. At the far end were a coach, two army lorries and three police vehicles with people milling around them. But Charles took no notice as he docked the Bristol and hurried
up the steps to the lawn that fronted the house. At the security doors he swiped in with his pass and took the lift to the third floor. His office was at the front of the building overlooking the main entrance and the pebbled drive to the distant gates. It was the only private office in the building, the rest being open-plan with meeting areas and glassed smaller offices for temporary use. Normally there would have been only a skeleton staff, plus the odd training course, but for that weekend it was fully manned with virtually every screen live and every desk occupied. Notwithstanding which, the atmosphere was relaxed and chatty. The level of chatter subsided like the trough of a wave as he passed each row of desks, but people smiled and looked up expectantly.

  After checking his screen and not finding Gareth’s promised summary, he told Jenny, his secretary, that he would be down with Gareth and set off for the first floor, using the stairs this time. There, he found Gareth’s desk was occupied not by Gareth but by Sonia, head of assessments.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not trying to take over operations,’ she said. ‘Just leaving Gareth a note.’

  ‘Makes a change to see anyone doing anything with pen and paper.’

  ‘Quicker than screens but no one realises it.’

  He and Sonia went back a long way. She was about five years younger than him and had started out as a secretary, in the days when secretaries were plentiful. Through working together as she rose through the ranks he had learned to trust her judgement and discretion; later she had been instrumental in securing his reinstatement in the Office after expulsion and arrest. He was responsible for her recent promotion to a senior position. Although publicly respectful of his status, familiarity meant she was not awed and could be trusted to speak her mind, which was one of the reasons he had pressured the reluctant HR director into promoting her.

  ‘You’ll probably find him in the control room,’ she said. ‘He was ringing them every two minutes to check on something.’

  ‘Has he told you anything of his trip?’

  ‘No but I’ve seen a summary in draft.’

  ‘He hasn’t sent it to me yet.’

  ‘He hasn’t sent it to anyone but he left it on his screen when he shouldn’t have. So of course I closed it for him.’ She smiled. ‘After reading.’

  ‘Seems very good, from what he told me.’

  ‘So it seems.’ She ceased smiling. ‘We should talk about it.’

  They looked at each other for a moment. Charles nodded.

  The control room was on the first floor, off the balcony overlooking the entrance hall. It had about a dozen screens monitoring entrances and vulnerable points of the building, all switching angles every few seconds. The security staff, who were not uniformed, followed them in silence, occasionally intervening to change angle or revert to a previous shot. A telephone rang and was answered in a hushed tone. The silence, Charles suspected, was partly because Gareth Horley was standing just inside the door, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking on. He usually wore jeans on his Brussels trips, along with slim brown shoes from Tricker’s of Jermyn Street – a fact he had twice mentioned to Charles – a white T-shirt and an expensive brown leather jacket. With his tanned regular features emphasising the blue of his eyes and his dark hair edged with grey, he looked every inch a confident, successful man of middle age travelling for a mixture of business and pleasure, which was the impression intended. He smiled as Charles approached and made way for him.

  ‘Good trip, then?’ said Charles.

  ‘Fantastic trip. He told me their bottom line. Agreed at the EU Commission meeting on Thursday. Naturally, they’re not going to reveal it to us in the negotiations but they would settle for it if they can’t get us to up our public offer to theirs.’

  ‘Sure it’s the real thing?’

  ‘Everything else he’s said has checked out.’

  They spoke in lowered voices. Charles patted Gareth on the shoulder. ‘Well done.’

  ‘It’s so sensitive, this, more than anything else he’s told us. We’ve got to be very careful with distribution. Number Ten might not want even the negotiating team to know in case by their manner or what they say or don’t say they give it away. Remember that Ames and Hansen business.’

  Aldrich Ames was a CIA officer who had spied for the Russians. In conducting the damage assessment for MI6, Charles had long sessions with the FBI team doing the same for the Americans. The nature of their questions, their keen interest in some areas and their unaccountable lack of it in others had led him to conclude that they believed they had another spy, but didn’t want to admit to it and didn’t yet know who or where. The spy turned out to be Hansen, an FBI officer as damaging as Ames. ‘Let me see it before you talk to the Foreign Office.’

  ‘I’ll finish it off later this afternoon. Just thought I ought to show my face here as I’m in.’

  ‘No sign yet?’

  ‘Any time now, should be.’ As Gareth spoke one of the screen-watchers called the supervisor over. She said something to the others, who switched their monitors to one of the rear approaches to the building, a gravelled track that led to high locked gates on the far side of the park bordering a public lane and a wood. Two men were climbing the gates. Charles and Gareth moved farther into the room to get a better view of the screens.

  Then came the sound of smashing glass, followed by a shout from the security guard by the cubicles in the entrance hall and then two shots in rapid succession, very loud. Everyone in the control room turned away from the screens to look. The security guard was spreadeagled on the floor and a man wearing a grey suit and carrying a pistol was pressing buttons on the entrance control desk. Another man wearing a raincoat and carrying a sledgehammer ran towards the screened-off office where visitors’ passes were issued, raising his hammer. The woman behind the screen tried to get off her chair but slipped beneath the counter onto the floor a second before the man swung his sledgehammer with both hands at the glass door to the side of her office, smashing it. Some control room staff got up from their desks, others sat staring. The supervisor ran to her own desk and pressed the alarm, a harsh jangling that rang throughout the building. Outside, two Land Rovers accelerated abreast of each other from the car park towards the broad steps leading up to the entrance. They slowed as they reached the steps but continued up them, jolting and bouncing, then accelerated again across the terrace and into the entrance. A number of black-clad, hooded men carrying sub-machine guns jumped out of each and ran in through the glass cubicles, which were all now open.

  Charles and Gareth flattened themselves against the wall as the control room staff disintegrated in panic. The supervisor shouted into the microphone on her desk, ‘There is an incident in the building. Stay where you are! All staff stay where you are!’ Before she had finished one of her team, a man, shouted into another microphone, ‘Building under attack! Intruders in the building! Evacuate the building! Evacuate now!’ Several of the staff ran out of the control room onto the balcony, where they stopped as if suddenly frozen as the intruders split into two groups and ran up the curving stairs on either side. A couple of the control room staff stayed at their desks looking to the supervisor, who was shouting ‘They must stay where they are!’ at the man with the other microphone, who, oblivious to her, was shouting into it again, ‘Do not use the lifts! Lifts not working! Evacuate! Evacuate!’ There were more shots.

  ‘We’d better get out of the way, leave them to it,’ said Charles. He and Gareth slipped out into the corridor away from the balcony. The first office on the left was unlocked and empty. From the window they could look across to the two Land Rovers parked outside the entrance, their doors open but no one visible.

  Gareth locked the door. ‘Presumably you’re a prime target, if they recognise you.’

  ‘Just as well I’m not in my office.’

  ‘Would they know which it is?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  The alarm stopped clanging, though in the silence that followed seemed to go on ringing. There
was what sounded like heavy breathing in the microphone. A woman’s voice said, ‘Intruders . . . intruders . . . intruders on first floor east wing. Staff in east wing must . . . all other staff must evacuate by staircase number one west.’ The alarm resumed, then stopped again. A man’s voice said, ‘Response team due in three minutes repeat three minutes. Remain in your offices and lock your doors. Repeat remain—’ His voice became strangulated and the microphone made a noise as if it had been banged against something. In the park outside four Range Rovers raced up the drive from the main gate. Like the Land Rovers, they bumped up the steps and disgorged armed men, also in black but helmeted and wearing flak jackets signifying that they were police. There was more shooting.

  Charles was looking out of the window. ‘One of them’s fallen over. That was his gun going off.’

  Gareth leaned against the desk, smiling, his arms folded. ‘Great. Boys in blue doing their usual stuff. And the control room helpfully broadcasting to the attackers where they are, where everyone else is going and when the cavalry’s coming. Worth doing, don’t you think? Confirms what we suspected: bloody chaos.’

  ‘Lessons learned?’

  ‘Apart from all that, no adequate defences against unauthorised vehicles getting close, possibly packed with explosive. Security booth reinforced glass easily broken. No adequate second barrier once they’re through it. Control room all over the place, as we saw, despite being warned to expect it. And that’s just what we witnessed. Another twenty minutes till final whistle, so there’ll be plenty more.’

  ‘You were right about doing it.’ Charles was still looking out of the window. The security guard who had supposedly been shot was smoking a cigarette and chatting to the policeman who had fallen over. The policeman was pointing out where his bullets would have gone had his gun not been loaded with blanks. The exercise had been Gareth’s idea, to test how Head Office might respond to a marauding attack. No one had tried it before; there had been hostage exercises, aircraft hijack exercises, tube train exercises, even ship seizure exercises, but no one had staged a marauding attack against an undefended government office. The head of security had opposed it, partly on the grounds that security staff were not trained or equipped to deal with such an event and partly, perhaps, because Gareth had proposed it. Charles had been in two minds but agreed when soundings indicated that there would be no shortage of volunteers to staff the reserve office on a Saturday and be part of the fun, as they saw it; partly, also, because anyone planning such an attack on an MI6 building was unlikely to wait for it to prepare itself. The head of security, MI5’s head of physical security, people from the Home Office, senior police officers and the Special Forces liaison officer were all observing in different parts of the building. ‘Wash-up at six?’ Charles asked. ‘Time for a quick chat about your report afterwards or would you rather do it in Head Office tomorrow?’