Marine I SBS Read online

  He wrapped a towel round his waist, removed the Mauser from the diplomatic bag, and took a look through the peep-hole. A blue-eyed blonde in a red dress stood there, looking like she hadn’t a care in the world. He let her in.

  She studied the room appreciatively, then walked across and laid an index finger on the top of the towel. ‘Shall we begin?’ she asked in English.

  ‘Why not?’ he replied in the same language.

  She carefully unwrapped the towel, let it fall, and sank down to her knees in front of him. With a few strokes of her tongue he began to harden, and once he had attained what seemed the maximum elevation, she stood up again and began to undo the buttons on the front of the red dress.

  He reached forward and tore at the fabric, scattering the buttons everywhere. She started to protest, but he slapped her across the face, drawing blood at the corner of her mouth, and pushed her back down on to the floor. He ripped off her knickers, plunged himself violently into her and began pumping, his eyes fixed on her face.

  ‘Open your eyes,’ he ordered, and she stared up at him with that mixture of fear and loathing which he loved.

  He had almost come when the idea struck him, and he laughed out loud, filling her eyes with fear. Slowing his pace, he went into spasm, finally collapsing on top of her like a dead weight. Then abruptly he clambered off her and got to his feet.

  She lay there, getting her breath back.

  ‘Get lost,’ he said, throwing the torn dress at her.

  ‘Who’ll pay for this?’ she asked.

  ‘See the man in 474,’ he told her, giving her Barzan’s room number.

  She put the dress on and, holding it across her body, walked to the door. ‘You bastard,’ she shouted over her shoulder.

  He grinned and reached for the phone as the door slammed behind her. ‘I want a number in Baghdad,’ he told the hotel switchboard.

  Ten minutes later, having passed on the relevant instructions to the Mukhabarat office in the Iraqi capital, he called Barzan on the cellular phone and explained just what he intended doing with Abas Naji.

  Looking out of his hotel window on the following morning, the Iraqi scientist found Istanbul enveloped in grey cloud. The last few days had been sunny, hinting at an early spring, but this seemed more like the weather he would need to grow used to in an English or American exile.

  At least it would not be as lonely as he had once expected. Taliha was walking towards the hotel, bringing back their breakfast from the café she had found in a nearby street. He watched her graceful stride, remembering the day, less than a month before, when he had risked everything by asking her to accompany him. They had not even been lovers then, but they had been in love, and she had agreed to give up her home, her family, everything she knew, for him.

  His eyes caught sight of the sealed envelope waiting on the table. If it hadn’t been for her, he would simply have sent everything he had to as many Western newspapers as he could afford. But in return for her loyalty he had felt honour-bound to use his information to buy them a new start in the West. She might have given up everything for him, but there was no reason she should get nothing back.

  She knocked three times on the door, and he let her in. She rubbed her hands to warm them up, pulled the flask of fresh coffee from her bag and collected the two cups she had bought the previous day in the souk. He took the custard pastries out of their wrapping, waited till she had finished pouring the coffee, and handed her one.

  For the next five minutes they abandoned themselves to the joys of breakfast.

  ‘I must go to the post office,’ he told her, once he had finished licking his fingers.

  She looked up. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No,’ he snapped. He didn’t see how they could have been traced, or at least not yet, but there was always a chance. And he knew he would feel more vulnerable if she was with him. Both of them would have a better chance of escape if he went alone.

  She didn’t argue, and a couple of minutes later he was venturing out on to the street, wishing that he had the cash to pay for a decent coat. He looked both ways, failed to see anyone loitering suspiciously, and started up the street, clutching the large manila envelope to his chest with both arms. The street was busy with both cars and pedestrians, which bolstered his confidence.

  At the first corner he was turning right when he heard a car stop behind him, and footsteps hurrying in his direction. He turned to see two men almost on top of him, and before he could even think of running they each had one of his arms in a vice-like grip. One of the free hands reached down to recover the fallen envelope, and then he was being half dragged, half carried towards an anonymous-looking black saloon. He squirmed in his captors’ grasp and shouted for help, first in Iraqi and then in English. As he was bundled into the car he had one fleeting glimpse of faces staring his way – curious faces, anxious faces, even sympathetic faces – but no one raised a voice in protest at his abduction, far less came to his defence. And as the car moved away he felt a knot of fear tighten in his stomach.

  In the front seat Uday carefully opened the envelope, took out the two sheets of paper and read through what they contained. There was nothing of great importance, though perhaps the reference to a ‘new and highly secret location’ would energize the Western intelligence services for a week or two.

  He looked up to see they were crossing the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn, and turned to take a look at Abas Naji. The scientist seemed to be in shock – either that or he had acquired a stoicism beyond the reach of most men. Uday’s money was on shock.

  They were driving along beside the Bosphorus now, following the European shore north toward the Black Sea. Earlier that morning Barzan had rented a yali – a house by the water – in Tarabya, some fifteen kilometres outside the city, and he was waiting for them there. But first they had another port of call. Five kilometres short of Tarabya the driver turned the car inland, and ten minutes later they were deep in the Belgrad Forest.

  They drove slowly down several deserted tracks before Uday decided to call a halt, and then he strode off into the trees, leaving the other two Mukhabarat men to drag Abas Naji along in his wake. The scientist was recovering from the shock of capture, but it was like a dentist’s anaesthetic wearing off – pain replacing numbness. He knew he would tell his captors everything, but there was no knowing whether they would believe him. Maybe, he thought, if he was strong enough, he could use what they needed to know to buy Taliha’s freedom.

  Uday was also thinking about interrogation, though from rather a different standpoint. He had brought the traitor here to question him, but now that the moment had arrived he realized there was nothing he needed to know. It was unfortunate but true. Lighting a slow fire between the man’s legs – a Red Indian trick he had picked up from a Western and honed on several Shiite rebels – might offer a satisfying revenge for the man’s treason, but would otherwise be futile.

  And there was always the woman for entertainment.

  Uday walked forward and pushed the barrel of the Mauser into Abas Naji’s mouth, angled it upwards, took a lingering look at the man’s terrified eyes, and pulled the trigger.

  Birds fluttered out of the surrounding trees, screeching violently.

  ‘Take him back to the car and put him in the boot,’ he told his men. ‘And put a plastic bag over his head – we don’t want all those high-powered scientific brains dribbling out.’

  They drove back to the coast road and on up to the yali.

  Shortly before dawn the following day Uday’s local helpers took the villa’s boat out into the middle of the moonlit Bosphorus and dumped the weighted corpses of both Abas Naji and Taliha over the side. Their boss had joked that it wasn’t every couple who got the chance to decompose in both Europe and Asia.

  3

  Woken by the telephone, Martin Sommersby groaned, rolled over on to his back and waited for someone to leave a message. ‘It’s Jen,’ the familiar voice said. ‘That package you as
ked me to look out for . . .’

  He picked up the phone. ‘Hi, Jen. Has it arrived?’

  ‘That’s why I’m ringing. Shall I send it over?’

  Sommersby rubbed his eyes. ‘Er . . .’ Through the open bedroom door he could see empty heat-and-serve cartons precariously balanced on each arm of the sofa and two empty wine bottles standing sentry on the TV set. Why did he let things get like this when she was away on tour?

  On the other side of the curtains the sun seemed to be shining. ‘I’m coming in,’ he decided.

  ‘See you soon,’ she said cheerfully, and hung up.

  He dressed, cursed the lack of milk, and walked out into the cold air. Across the street the night’s frost was still glimmering on the grass of Victoria Park, but his ten-year-old Volvo proved its usual reliable self. Sommersby drove south towards Wapping with feelings of expectation, for once hardly noticing Canary Wharf’s beacon of ugliness looming through the skyline, and picked up the envelope from a smiling Jen in reception. Upstairs, in the small space left by the computer monitor which had colonized his desk, he eagerly opened the envelope and read through the two typed pages which it contained.

  It was not what he had expected. In their last conversation the Iraqi had talked about a new location, but the information here concerned the reopening of an old installation in the desert about a hundred miles west of Baghdad.

  Perhaps he had misunderstood Abas Naji, Sommersby thought. Perhaps the Iraqi’s English had let him down, and he had mixed up new with renew, or something like that.

  It didn’t really matter. This was still a good story, and the first solid evidence for some time that Saddam hadn’t given up the idea of providing himself with a nuclear arsenal. So much for the pious hopes of the UN inspection team, who kept reiterating their belief that Iraq’s nuclear programme had been comprehensively halted in its tracks.

  He got himself a cup of coffee and read through the material again. It all seemed straightforward enough, but, just in case, he called up the paper’s regular consultant on nuclear issues, explained the situation and faxed him copies of Abas Naji’s two pages. Ten minutes later the man called back to say everything was as it seemed.

  The managing editor hadn’t yet arrived, so a decision on the Iraqi’s fee would have to wait. Sommersby sat down at his monitor and began sketching out the structure of a possible piece for the next day. His preferred course of action would have been to wait for the bulk of the Iraqi’s manuscript and carry the whole story the following week, but there was always the chance the paper’s legal experts would insist on the government’s immediate right to know, and once the information was loose in Whitehall any chance of a real exclusive would vanish out of the Wapping windows.

  He was still on the first paragraph when his phone rang.

  ‘A call from Istanbul,’ the switchboard operator told him. ‘A woman who says she will only talk to you.’

  ‘Put her through,’ Sommersby said, turning on the attached recording device.

  ‘Mr Sommersby?’ the woman asked in a Middle Eastern accent.

  ‘I am Martin Sommersby. Who are you?’

  ‘I am Shura, the wife of Abas Naji. You are the man my husband send papers?’

  ‘Yes, that’s me.’ The woman sounded very upset.

  ‘My husband disappear. I think he is kidnapped by Saddam Hussein.’

  There was a moment’s silence while Sommersby waited in vain for her to say more. ‘When did this happen?’ he asked. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘It happen yesterday, in the afternoon. I go out to buy food for our dinner, yes, and when I come back he is gone. And the papers are gone. I am frightened.’

  ‘Have you been to the police?’ Sommersby asked.

  ‘They say my husband just leave me, but I know he will not do this. I am frightened,’ she repeated.

  Sommersby thought for a moment. ‘If you will go to the British Embassy,’ he told her, ‘I will telephone someone there and get them to help you.’

  There was a pause. ‘Where is your British Embassy?’ she asked.

  ‘Hold on, I’ll find out for you.’ He accessed the appropriate programme, and pulled the address on to the screen. ‘Hello?’ he said, but there was no reply. The line was dead.

  In the villa by the Bosphorus the English-speaking secretary from the local Iraqi Embassy was looking nervously at Uday al-Dulaini.

  ‘You did well,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Now Barzan will drive you back to the city. And do not speak of this to anyone,’ he added, realizing as he did so that there was no need. The girl had played her part well enough, but she had no idea what it was all about.

  He watched her walk to the car, regretting once more that she was a distant cousin of Saddam’s and therefore off limits. Such timidity was a real turn-on . . .

  ‘Start packing,’ he told his men. Their work in Istanbul was done.

  Ten days later David Constantine boarded the 8.30 train for King’s Cross at Cambridge, managed to find a window seat in the first-class section, and started work on The Times crossword. By Royston he was only two words short, but these kept him busy until Stevenage, when the final inspiration struck.

  Having done his duty, Constantine glanced through the rest of the paper. The royal family, the Conservative Party and English cricket were still in decline, but there appeared to be no new developments in the Iraqi story. He supposed he would find out that morning whether that was really the case, or whether the security lid had been lowered.

  He had read Martin Sommersby’s ‘exclusives’ on the previous two Sundays, and had to admit that he felt intrigued by the mystery of the two disappearances. He supposed that knowing Abas Naji helped, though their acquaintance had been both brief and almost twenty years in the past. But he could remember liking the man, and in his mind’s eye he could still see the Iraqi sitting on the edge of his barstool during the conference lunch breaks, earnestly discussing whatever it was that had fired his imagination that morning. And though they had never discussed politics as such, Constantine could well believe that Abas Naji had not relished the role of a missile scientist in the service of Saddam Hussein.

  After all, he thought, as the train surged into the first Hadley Wood tunnel, who in their right mind would?

  From King’s Cross he took a taxi to Whitehall, but the traffic was worse than ever, and after passing through the usual security checks, he arrived at Conference Room B to find only one empty chair at the large, polished table. Martin Clarke, a Junior Minister at the Foreign Office with whom he had not had any previous dealings, immediately did the round of introductions. The gaunt-faced man with the crew cut sitting opposite Constantine was Manny Salewicz from the American Embassy, the balding man with the thin moustache beside him Derek Lindquist, an MoD official whom he vaguely remembered from a meeting several years before. The young man beside him, whose name he missed, was from the Foreign Office Gulf Desk. More significantly, the grey-haired man at the end of the table was Sir Christopher Hanson, who was introduced as Chair of the Joint Intelligence Staff, but was better known to Constantine as the Director of MI6.

  It was Hanson who opened the proceedings, with some news.

  ‘It now seems unlikely that the missing woman was Abas Naji’s wife,’ he said. ‘The Iraqis have produced a woman whom they claim is the real wife, and she swears that Abas Naji had an affair with his secretary and then ran off with her. As far as our people can tell, she’s speaking the truth.’ He paused. ‘However, the man has disappeared, and his choice of companion – who has also vanished – doesn’t tell us anything about the reliability of the information he gave the Sunday Times. There was a nuclear research installation at Falluja, and it may have been reopened . . .’

  ‘And as of this morning the Iraqis are still refusing access,’ Salewicz interjected.

  ‘David,’ Clarke said, turning to Constantine, ‘perhaps you could put the whole business into some sort of context for us laymen. How far have the Iraqis come? Sho
uld we be worrying about a single research centre in the desert?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Constantine said wryly. Already he could tell that Clarke wanted grounds to dismiss, and Salewicz more evidence for the prosecution. ‘At the simplest level,’ he began, ‘there are three components of a nuclear military capability. You need the material, you need a detonation assembly and you need a delivery system. None of which are easy for a country like Iraq to obtain.

  ‘Having said that, we now know that on the eve of the Gulf War Saddam was not that far away from having all three. Since the Israelis destroyed their reactor at Osirak in 1977, the Iraqis had managed to buy both a significant amount of unenriched uranium ore – yellowcake, it’s called – and the centrifuges necessary for turning it into fissionable material. Their scientists were apparently twelve to eighteen months away from a crude detonation device, and two to three years from working out how to mount a warhead on one of their Scud missiles.

  ‘Of course, once the war was over every effort was made on our part to put a stop to this programme, and every effort was made on the Iraqi side to conceal and continue it. And it’s my belief that only Saddam,’ he said, looking round the table, ‘knows how successful we and they have been.’

  He looked at his notes for the first time. ‘In September 1992 the UN Weapons Inspection team announced that Iraq’s nuclear programme was, quote, “harmless”. In November 1993 the International Atomic Energy Agency told the UN that the programme was, quote, “either destroyed or neutralized”, though they did have the sense to admit that their knowledge was incomplete.’

  ‘But the Iraqis have hardly behaved like innocents. In ’92, when the UN demanded the demolition of the Al-Athier facility, Saddam procrastinated for months and then suddenly backed down, which led quite a few people to suggest that the interval had been used to transfer the industrial plant. And then there were the centrifuges they bought from Germany for the enrichment process – several thousand of them. First the Iraqis denied their existence, then said they had been destroyed. The inspection team has never found any trace of them.’