And that’s the lot.” Miles Brookhaven threw the file down onto Liz’s desk, and sighed wearily.
She was tired too. They’d spent all morning reviewing the reports of what Danny Kollek had passed on to Andy Bokus, and the experience had been unedifying. It was very low-grade stuff; little more than gossip. Even Markov, the Russian-Jewish oligarch now based in Lancashire near his newly acquired football team, had nothing to say about his fellow émigrés that MI5 didn’t know already.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” said Miles knowingly.
“Probably.” Liz pointed to the files. “There’s not a lot there.”
“Actually, I was thinking how hungry I am.” He laughed, adding, “How about you?”
“Yes, I could use some lunch. There’s a good sandwich shop round the corner. We could sit on a bench and watch the river go by.”
“Aren’t we near the Tate Gallery?”
“It’s just down the road. Why?” She’d noticed how Miles always seemed to be ready with irrelevant questions and tangential remarks.
“I haven’t been there in a long time. Couldn’t we get a sandwich there?”
Twenty minutes later, Liz and Miles were staring at a large oil by Francis Bacon, of a grotesque satyr-like male figure whose face was set in a rictus of agony.
“I don’t know about Bacon,” said Miles at last. “I know he’s very gifted and so on, and his pictures go for millions. But I can’t help wondering what he’s done that Hieronymus Bosch didn’t do centuries before.”
Downstairs they gave the formal restaurant a miss and bought sandwiches from the café, finding a place to perch on the line of stools against the corridor wall.
Liz, casually dressed in a skirt and blouse, was amused by Miles’s smart blazer and cream linen trousers. Did his taste for formal clothes hark back to his time at Westminster school? All he needs is a boater, she thought, and he’d fit in well at Henley regatta.
“Not long now till the conference,” said Miles as he cast a cautious eye at his smoked salmon sandwich.
“Two weeks.”
“I’m not going to be here for it, I’m afraid.”
“Really?” she asked, startled.
“I’ll be in the Middle East. It’s part of my job to stay up to date with things, and follow up any business I’ve come across here in London. I’ll be in Damascus. Anything I can do for you there?”
“I’d be interested in what you could find out about Marcham’s time there.”
“Oh,” he said, “I meant anything personal. Damask silk from the Old City, say.”
Liz gave an inward sigh. She liked Miles, but having tried to hustle information out of her on the Eye, was he now going to make romantic overtures? It was flattering, and she was not averse to his interest in her, but she wished he’d picked a better time.
“Besides, I could use a break from Andy Bokus.” He grimaced.
Liz looked at him, and he returned her gaze. “That bad?” she said lightly, intrigued but not wanting to press. Miles had never struck her as the complaining type.
He shrugged, then folded his paper napkin and put it on his plate. “One of the myths about America is that it’s a classless society. Bokus carries a hell of a chip on those big shoulders of his.”
“Really? What’s he chippy about?” She wasn’t going to pretend to understand the social intricacies of American society.
“Half the time it seems to be me. It’s not that I’m grand. I don’t mean that. It’s more to do with education. Bokus likes to call me Ivy.”
Ivy? thought Liz. She was surprised. Miles had none of the macho swagger of his boss, but there wasn’t anything effeminate about him. Had she missed a trick?
She must have looked puzzled because Miles explained. “As in Ivy League. He likes to think I must be some rarefied snob because I went to Yale—he went to a state university.”
“Isn’t that all a bit passé?”
“Of course it is. Though I suppose Bokus can remember the days when half the staff went to Yale. A bit like your services and Oxbridge, I suppose.”
“It changed here a long time ago,” said Liz. And a good thing too, she thought to herself.
“And Andy’s feeling especially touchy ever since Tyrus Oakes briefed me about Kollek.”
“He must be rather embarrassed that we caught him out. Though it was pure chance we were watching Kollek that day.”
“You can say that again. Andy got caught with his pants down all right.” Miles took a careful sip of his coffee, looking thoughtful. “The thing is, I’ve never understood what this threat to the conference is supposed to be about. These two men, Veshara and Marcham, don’t strike me as the types to do anything significant. A businessman and a journalist.”
“Though both had connections with Mossad.” Liz had briefed Miles already about Veshara’s admission that he had reported rocket positions to the Israelis. Now she explained Marcham’s links to Kollek—how she had only belatedly realised the Israeli in the surveillance photograph was the same man she’d seen scaling Marcham’s garden wall.
“Okay, so they both gathered information for the Israelis,” said Miles when she’d finished. “But I can’t picture either of them actually taking any action. And their Mossad links don’t explain why they’d be working to disrupt the peace conference. They wouldn’t be doing that on Israel’s behalf, surely. There’s no reason to think the Israelis want to disrupt the thing. Why should they? They’re part of it.”
“Search me. I don’t see it, either,” Liz admitted.
“You know, when we were told about this threat we didn’t have any idea where this information was coming from. Fane wouldn’t tell us,” he complained. “Is he always that buttoned up?”
“Pretty much,” said Liz. “Need to know, is written on his heart.”
Bookhaven sighed. “That causes problems, believe me.”
You can say that again, thought Liz, keenly aware of the drawbacks to Fane’s perpetual secretiveness. Something Brookhaven had just said was niggling her, but she wasn’t sure what it was. So she filed this part of the conversation away in the back of her mind, promising herself to come back to it when she was alone.
“What do you know about Kollek?” said Liz casually. She didn’t want to sound too interested in the man, or give any indication that he was still being watched by A4.
“Not much. And there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of my ever meeting him.”
“Bokus wants him to himself?”
“Yes, though in fairness, that’s really because of Kollek—the secrecy has been at his insistence as much as ours. Not that I can blame him. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes if Mossad ever found out he was talking to us.”
“I wonder about his motivation,” said Liz, remembering what Bokus had said in their meeting with Oakes and Wetherby—that Kollek felt only America could make peace in the Middle East, and therefore needed to know what Israel was thinking. But it was hard to see how Kollek was doing that in practice. The dribs and drabs of intelligence she had spent the morning reviewing with Miles wouldn’t be of significant help to any country trying to find a solution to the Middle East crisis.
Miles seemed to read her thoughts, for he said, “Maybe he’s just got an inflated sense of his own importance. God knows, nothing you or I read justifies all this hush-hush business. He could be just another egomaniac; there’re enough of them in this business.”
He looked at his watch. “I’d better be going.” They put their trays back and left the Tate by its side entrance.
“How long will you be away?” asked Liz as they reached the corner with the Embankment.
“Ten days or so. But I’m not going until next week.”
She nodded. “It might be a good idea to touch base before you go.”
“Maybe you’d like to have dinner one night?” he asked.
Miles looked slightly awkward, more like a teenager than a rising star of the CIA. There was something boyish about him, thought Liz. It was attractive in some ways, enormously preferable to the man-of-the-world cockiness of Bruno Mackay. Yet once again Miles was mixing business and pleasure in a way Liz found discomfiting. She wished he wouldn’t.
So she said, “I’m a bit tied up until after the conference.” Miles could not contain a look of disappointment, so she added more brightly, “Let’s meet up when you’re back from Damascus. Give me a ring at home.”
Liz turned and walked along the river towards Thames House, thinking about their conversation. It was the business side of it that held her attention. The Mossad involvement in all this continued to puzzle her: again and again that connection came back to one person, Danny Kollek.
She wondered how to find out more about him. I’ll put Peggy Kinsolving onto it, she thought—she’ll rootle out whatever there is to find. And I should check again with Sophie Margolis, and see if Hannah’s been in touch with Kollek recently.
All that seemed clear enough, but something was still bothering her. Then she stopped dead on the pavement. Of course, she saw what it was.
The attack on Liz, and the murder of Fane’s Syrian source in Cyprus, must mean that someone had leaked the fact that the British knew of the threat to the conference. Who knew about the threat? Only a few people in MI5 and MI6 and Miles and Bokus. At first she had thought that they were prime suspects—particularly Bokus, once A4 had photographed him meeting Kollek.
And even when Tyrus Oakes had admitted that Bokus was running Kollek, rather than, as they had first suspected, the other way round, Charles had continued to suspect that the CIA man might have unintentionally revealed more than he should have done to Danny Kollek.
But there was a problem with this scenario, Liz suddenly realised. Even if Bokus had talked too freely, that couldn’t explain the Syrians’ discovery of a double agent in their midst. Geoffrey Fane had disguised the source of the original information—from everybody. And as Miles had just said, neither he nor Bokus had had any idea where the intelligence came from. It could have been any one of a number of countries or—Liz thought of Hamas and Hezbollah—political organisations. If Bokus had told Kollek about the threat to the peace conference, then even if Mossad had wanted to leak it back to its originating source, they wouldn’t have known who to leak it to. They couldn’t have spilt the beans when they didn’t even know whose beans they would be spilling.
So how on earth had the Syrians learned about the double agent in Cyprus?
She saw Thames House ahead of her, its stone pale in the midday sun. The questions of this case were starting to seem maddeningly circular; Liz had a sense that ultimately there would be something simple—a person, she was sure of that—linking them all together. Yet each time she peered into the mystery she saw only a hall of mirrors, reflecting something so far unrecognisable.