Geoffrey Fane was not a generous man and he did not waste his time doing favours. But in his long career in MI6 he had developed a nose for what could be important. And when, the previous day, a call had come into his office from an old colleague who wanted some informal advice, that nose had twitched. Instead of finding some excuse, he had agreed to meet the caller. Now he was sitting in a taxi, crawling along Oxford Street in mid-morning traffic, on his way to his old colleague’s office.
The caller was David Blakey, twenty years in MI6, rising to be Head of Station in Hong Kong at the time the colony was handed over to China. After Hong Kong, he had retired from MI6 and since then his and Fane’s paths only rarely crossed – an occasional sighting in the bar of the Travellers Club, once bumping into each other in the Burlington Arcade. When Blakey had called, Fane had remembered that after leaving MI6 his old colleague had taken a job as director of a large international charity. In fact, it was when Blakey had mentioned the charity’s name, UCSO, that he had sparked Fane’s interest. It was just a week since that name had come to his attention. A young man with British documentation had been arrested by the French Navy in the Indian Ocean. He was apparently one of a group of pirates trying to hijack a Greek cargo ship, which had been chartered by the charity UCSO to carry aid supplies to Mombasa.
The case had been handed to MI5 to pursue; Elizabeth Carlyle – or Liz as she preferred to call herself, thought Fane with a grimace – had gone to Paris to interview the prisoner. And now the head of that same charity had suddenly popped up, asking for advice and refusing to say on the telephone what it was that concerned him.
Although they had lost touch in recent years, Fane had once known Blakey well. They had been at the same Oxford college before going their separate ways. Blakey had spent a year or so doing research for a thesis he never finished, while Fane had worked as a trainee on the Middle East desk of an investment bank. Then, to their mutual surprise, they had met up again on the initial MI6 training course. Together they had filled and emptied dead letter boxes, practised brush contacts and covert agent meetings all over Hampshire; they’d been arrested by the local police, and had survived rough interrogations by the SAS. They had dozed through lectures by retired officers reliving the glories of their Cold War agent-running triumphs, and at the end of it all, both had passed with honours and been marked out as high fliers.
Their careers had run in parallel for a while, then gradually Fane had pulled away and by the time Blakey had retired, his old college friend was several ranks above him. But Fane had always respected Blakey and knew that he would not have rung unless there was something important to talk about.
Fane had called up the file on UCSO but had found it pretty uninformative. He was interested in all large international charities; they operated in trouble spots all over the world – places from which he needed information, but from which information was difficult to obtain. But most charities kept intelligence services at arm’s length; if they supped with them at all, they supped with a very long spoon, since they couldn’t afford to have their people suspected of being spies. So the file on UCSO was very thin. From what he could gather, it was mainly a co-ordinating and shipping organisation, not one with teams of aid workers in the field, so not on the face of it of particular interest to Fane. But if Blakey had something to say about the hijacking attempt, some information about the gangs of pirates operating out of Somalia, then Fane wanted to hear it.
Somalia was a worry. It wasn’t a country any more, not in any real sense. Rebel groups proliferated, fighting with each other or with any new government that emerged. The native population kept its head down amidst the warring factions, and scraped a living by subsistence farming. Or fishing, though Somalia’s inability to patrol its own waters meant foreign fishing fleets had depleted the fish stocks to the point of disappearance. With no legitimate living to be made, small wonder many fishermen had turned to piracy.
All of which was worrying enough, but Fane knew that such chaos created just the sort of situation that attracted people even more sinister than pirates. Al Qaeda, under pressure in Pakistan and Afghanistan, was looking for safer bases from which to launch their attacks against the West. Yemen was already on their list – was Somalia following? Fane thought of the young boy sitting in a Paris jail cell, arrested helping hijack UCSO’s ship and carrying a British driving licence.
He paid off the taxi, still stuck in traffic, and walked north, leaving the hubbub of Oxford Street for the quieter byways of Fitzrovia. He passed the crumbling brick pile of the former Middlesex Hospital. Further along, dark brick mansion blocks lined the narrow street. It was not a part of the city he often visited. It was too full of students drinking on the pavements outside the pubs, and media and fashion types in their bright, flashy clothes. Fane, in his dark suit and polished leather shoes, didn’t fit in here; he felt uncomfortable.
There had been a time when he had been able to blend into surroundings many times more exotic than these. He had spent several years in Delhi where he’d met his agents in the bazaars around the Red Fort with barely a second thought, and he’d served in Moscow in the Cold War with the KGB hot on his heels every time he left the Embassy. He certainly hadn’t worn a three-piece suit in those days.
But this was London, and nowadays his heron-like figure was invariably clothed in a well-cut suit, and he was most at ease in Whitehall or walking through St James’s Square and turning left along Pall Mall for the Travellers Club.
To his surprise the address Blakey had given turned out to be a handsome modern building, six storeys of glass and steel set beyond a courtyard leading off the street. A directory on the wall behind the security desk showed the names of a dozen enterprises. One of these was UCSO.