At Risk by Stella Rimington Read Free Book Online Page B

anguished, and she did it alone.
    But why not? At the very least it would be an opportunity to examine Mackay at close quarters. For all the supposed new spirit of cooperation, Five and Six would never be serene bedfellows. The better she knew her opposite number, the less likely he was to outmanoeuvre her.
    She called the number he had left her and he picked up on the first ring.
    “Liz!” he said, before she had opened her mouth. “Tell me you can come.”
    “All right.”
    “Fantastic! I’ll come and pick you up.”
    “It’s OK. I can easily—”
    His words cut airily across her. “Can you be on Lambeth Bridge, your end, at twelve forty-five? I’ll see you there.”
    “OK.”
    She hung up. This could be very interesting, but she was going to have to stay on her toes. Swivelling round to her computer screen, she turned her thoughts to Faraj Mansoor. Fane’s anxiety, she supposed, sprung from his uncertainty as to whether the buyer of the fake driving licence in Bremerhaven was the same person as the al Safa contact in Peshawar. He’d probably have someone in Pakistan checking the auto repair shop right now. If they turned out to be different people, and there was still a Faraj Mansoor repairing jeeps on the Kabul Road, then the ball was fairly and squarely in Five’s court.
    Odds were that they were two different people, and that the Mansoor in Bremerhaven was an economic migrant who had paid for passage to Europe—probably some hellish odyssey in a container—and was now looking to make his way across the Channel. There was probably a cousin in one of the British cities keeping a minicab driver’s position open for him. Odds were the whole thing was an Immigration issue, not an Intelligence one. She posted it to the back of her mind.
    By 12:30 she was feeling a curious anticipation. As luck would have it—or maybe not—she was smartly dressed. With all her work clothes either damp from the washing machine or languishing in the dry-cleaning pile, she had been forced back to the Ronit Zilkha dress she had bought for a wedding. It had cost a fortune, even in the sale, and looked wildly inappropriate for a day’s intelligence-gathering. To make matters more extreme, the only shoes that went with the dress were ribbed silk. Wetherby’s reaction to her appearance had been a just-detectable widening of the eyes, but he had made no comment.
    At twenty to the hour a call came to her desk which, she suspected, had already bounced several times around the building. A group of photographers describing themselves as plane-spotters had been intercepted by police in an area adjacent to the US base at Lakenheath, and USAF Security were insisting that they all be checked out before release. It took Liz a couple of minutes to pass the buck to the investigation section, but she managed it, and hurried out of the office with the Zilkha dress partly covered by her coat.
     
    Lambeth Bridge, she discovered, was not an ideal rendezvous in December. After a fine morning the sky had darkened. A fretful east wind now whipped down the river, dragging at her hair and sending the litter dancing around her silk shoes. The bridge was, furthermore, a no-stopping zone.
    She had been standing there for five minutes, her eyes streaming, when a silver BMW came to an abrupt stop at the kerb and the passenger door swung open. To the blaring of car horns she bustled herself into the seat, and Mackay, who was wearing sunglasses, pulled back out into the traffic stream. Inside the car a CD was playing, and the sounds of tabla, sitar and other instruments filled the BMW’s high-specification interior.
    “Fateh Nusrat Ali Khan,” said Mackay, as they swung round the Millbank roundabout. “Huge star on the subcontinent. Know his stuff?”
    Liz shook her head and tried to finger-comb her windblown hair into some sort of order. She smiled to herself. The man was just too good to be true—a perfect specimen of the Vauxhall Cross genus. They