At Risk by Stella Rimington

authorities. A senior ITS player, perhaps. A contact of Dawood al Safa, whose job in a Peshawar auto repair shop was a cover for terrorist activities. Someone who, whatever the state of his documentation, couldn’t risk passing a customs point.
    Every instinct that Liz possessed—every sensibility that she had fine-tuned in a decade of security intelligence work—whispered to her of threat. Pressed, she would have had difficulty in defining these feelings, which related to the way that particles of information combined and took shape in her subconscious. She had, however, learned to trust them. Learned that certain configurations—however fractured, however dimly seen—were invariably malign.
    Beneath the words Mansoor. UK citizen? she wrote, Still working at auto shop?
    A methodical search of the north Norfolk coastline yielded a number of possible headlands. The most westward of these, Garton Head, jutted several hundred yards into the sea from the Stiffkey Marshes, while an unnamed but similarly sized projection nosed into Holkham Bay a dozen miles to the west. Both looked like navigable landfalls. A third possibility was a tiny finger of land reaching out into Brancaster Bay. The property was on the edge of a village named Marsh Creake, a couple of miles east of Brancaster.
    She examined the three headlands again, and tried to look at the map with a smuggler’s eye. They were remarkably similar, in that each was a spit of land surrounded by mudflats. The Brancaster Bay headland, with its proximity to the village of Marsh Creake, was probably the least likely, as it appeared to have a large house on it. The sort of person who owned a property of that size was unlikely to allow it to be used for criminal activity. Unless, perhaps, the owner, or owners, were absentees. Impossible to tell by looking at a few inches of map on a flatscreen monitor. She’d have to check out the place on the ground.
    Five minutes later she was sitting in Wetherby’s office and Wetherby was smiling his uneven smile. If you didn’t know him, she thought, you might think him a faintly donnish figure. A brogues and bicycle clips sort of man, more at home in some cloistered quadrangle than at the head of a high-tech counter-terrorism initiative. Facing him, but invisible to Liz, were two photographs in leather-look frames.
    “What exactly do you think you would establish by going up there?” he asked her.
    “At the very least I’d like to eliminate the possibility that there’s a terrorism angle,” said Liz. “The calibre of the weapon worries me, as it obviously does the Norfolk Special Branch, given that they’ve got a man sitting in on the investigation. My gut instinct, bearing in mind Zander’s call, is that Eastman’s had his organisation hijacked in some way.”
    Wetherby rolled a dark green pencil thoughtfully between his fingers.
    “Do the Special Branch know about Zander’s call?”
    “I passed the information on to Bob Morrison in Essex—that’s Zander’s current handler—but there’s a good chance he’s going to sit on it.”
    Wetherby nodded. “From our point of view, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing,” he said finally. “Not a bad thing at all. I think you should go up there, have a quiet word with the local Special Branch man—what’s his name?”
    “Goss.”
    “Have a quiet word with Goss, and see what’s what. Give the impression that you’re interested in the organised crime component, perhaps, and I’ll wait on your word. If you’re not happy I’ll speak to Fane and we’ll move on it straight away. If there isn’t anything there for us, on the other hand . . . well, it’ll give us something to talk about at the Monday morning meeting. You’re sure Zander isn’t just making the whole thing up?”
    “No,” said Liz truthfully. “I’m not sure. He’s the attention-seeking type, and according to Bob Morrison is now gambling, so almost certainly has financial problems. He’s an