Liz had been back in London less than a day when a call came in to her office from Isabelle Florian. A gang of pirates had been seized by the French Navy in the Indian Ocean, attempting to hijack a Greek merchant ship. One of them was carrying a British driving licence and, though he had said virtually nothing to his captors, did appear to be British. He had been taken to Djibouti by a French patrol boat and was being flown back to France. He should be arriving at La Santé prison in Paris within the hour. Isabelle enquired if Liz had an interest in questioning the prisoner? The details of his driving licence were being sent across by secure means as she spoke.
By the time Liz had walked along the corridor to the open-plan office, Peggy Kinsolving, the desk oficer who worked with her, was already receiving from France a copy of a British driving licence issued to an Amir Khan, aged twenty-two, at a Birmingham address.
Liz smiled at her young researcher. ‘Dogged’ just about summed up Peggy’s way of working. A librarian by training after her Oxford degree, she had an insatiable appetite for facts, however obscure, and could trace connections between them that other people couldn’t see. She stuck to the scent of a promising trail like a bloodhound, and sooner or later always came up with the goods.
‘Do you think the French have really caught a Brit among a gang of African pirates?’ said Peggy, pushing her glasses higher on her nose as she gazed at her computer screen. ‘I bet it’s just a stolen licence that’s found its way out there and that the guy turns out to be another Somali.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Liz. ‘Apparently the French Captain reported there was something odd about him – he wasn’t really one of the gang. He looked different, and the others didn’t talk to him. He seems to understand English, though he’s hardly said anything. Get on to the police in Birmingham and the Border Agency and see what you can find out.’
And overnight Peggy had managed to assemble a few facts about Amir Khan. He was a British citizen, whose parents were first-generation Pakistani immigrants. This much the Border Agency had been able to report before their computer system went down, a not uncommon occurrence ever since it had been ‘upgraded’. But from the police Peggy had learned that Khan had attended various local authority schools in Birmingham, then Birmingham University – where he had been a student of engineering until he’d left for unexplained reasons in the middle of his third year. He had no criminal record and had never before come to the police’s attention; there was no previous trace of him in MI5’s files.
So Liz was trying to keep an open mind, though she was curious about what mixture of motives, inducements, or grievances might have led young Khan, if indeed it was he, to the Indian Ocean, to enter the hijacking business that she had previously believed to be the preserve of Somalis. Some people talked about ‘globalisation’ in approving tones these days, but for Liz it was making her work infinitely more complex, and the challenges she faced were magnified by a world of instant communication and fast travel across international borders.
When she had first joined MI5, over a decade before, most of her work had been done in Britain. She’d started in the counter-terrorist branch where she’d had her first real success, helping to prevent an attack in East Anglia. She’d been lucky to escape serious injury in that operation and afterwards had been moved to counter-espionage where events moved rather more slowly. Of course it hadn’t turned out to be a soft posting – there were no soft postings in today’s MI5.
For the intelligence world 9/11 had changed everything. There was much more public focus now on ‘security’ of all kinds; much more government involvement; more media attention and criticism – particularly after Britain went to war in Iraq. Some of those who had joined at the same time as Liz had, now spent all their time dealing with media enquiries, writing briefs for the Director General for meetings with Ministers, or poring over spreadsheets and arguing with the Treasury. That wasn’t what she wanted to do. The occasional international security conference was enough for her.
But she knew that if she were going to win serious promotion she would have to move away from the front line sooner or later; for now, though, she wanted to stay at the sharp end of things. It was the excitement of operational work that she loved; that was what got her out of bed in the morning and kept her going during the day and often far into the night. It was also, if she was honest, what had messed up her private life.
Was that in danger of happening again? she wondered, thinking of Martin and what he had said when she was staying with him at the weekend. Anyway, she thought, as she picked up her overnight bag and headed off to St Pancras International to catch a train back to Paris, there was no immediate prospect of her being put on to ‘admin’ work – nor of moving in with Martin permanently, she added to herself.