Illegal Action by Stella Rimington Page A

herself with the ease with which she killed—stuck the knife in or pulled tight the garrotte—and they had noticed too, the instructors, those hard-eyed, expressionless men whose job it was to turn out graduates of their courses who could survive in the most extreme situations. So she was chosen for assignments where violence was likely, though she had not expected to have to use it so early in this job, and not on the streets of London.
    But, as she sat in her latest apartment off Victoria Street, it was not the possibility of violence that was causing her concern. It was something completely unexpected—the intrusion on the scene of British Intelligence. What, she wondered, had brought them buzzing around Brunovsky like flies? There must have been a leak, or why else would they have suddenly turned up? And why had he encouraged them? How much did they know and how best to deal with the situation?
    Unzipping the computer bags, she took out the laptop and its small black companion, that would, she hoped, provide her with the answers, and laid them out on the dining table. Half an hour later, she leant back in her chair with a satisfied grunt and, looking out of the window at Westminster Cathedral, glowing pink in the setting sun, she imagined her message bouncing around the world, disguising itself as it moved from server to server, on its way to its eventual destination, a desk in a Moscow office building. A government office building.

18
    H e knew it was crucial to show you were in charge from the start. On the training course they had taught him that if you began with an iron fist you could lighten up later on, but that it never worked the other way around.
    Michael Fane ignored the butterflies fluttering in his stomach. This was his chance to show what he could do. He looked out of the thin window at the trees above Berkeley Square. The weather had reverted: after a glorious early morning, a sepia trail of cloud moved in with the easterly wind like ominous writing in the sky.
    He sat down but found he couldn’t sit still. The people here at the agency had given him their interviewing room, which was small and square, down the hall from Brigadier Cartwright’s spacious office. When Liz Carlyle announced she’d be away for a week and asked him to do the interview in her place, he was thrilled. You had to belly up to the bar sometime, he told himself, using the cowboy lingo of the westerns he loved. His father had been contemptuous of those movies, implying that he knew about the real thing. He probably did, Michael thought crossly, and doubtless this forthcoming interview would be beneath him. Geoffrey must have recruited countless agents in his time—in much more difficult circumstances. What else could he have been doing all those years abroad? Even the teenage Michael Fane had known enough to understand his father wasn’t really a cultural attaché.
    Not that he’d seen much of him. There was the occasional outing—a day at Lord’s, watching the Australians in the Test; lunch at the Traveller’s Club when Michael turned sixteen—as if his father, suddenly remembering he had a son, had dutifully decided to try and “bond.” When his mother at last grew fed up with Geoffrey’s absences, always excused as a matter of work, and her patience had finally snapped, Michael didn’t blame her. Now she lived in Paris, remarried to Arnaud, an international lawyer—the kind of stable
haut bourgeois
she should have married in the first place.
    Michael had applied to join MI5 wanting to outplay his father at his own game—but from the safe distance of a rival service. He had had a letter from him, suggesting lunch, just two weeks before he joined. At first Michael had accepted, then, when the day came, he’d left a message that he was ill. There’d been no communication since, which, thought Michael, suited him just fine.
    He looked at the dossier Peggy Kinsolving had helped him put together. He’d spent the last