Capital Crimes Read online

  “We met on a previous occasion,” Carpenter said.

  “Oh, good. Well, what this is about is Sealand.”

  Carpenter seemed to stifle a smile, while Sir Ewan just looked interested.

  “You both know about it?”

  They nodded.

  “Now I know it isn’t terribly important to us in any sort of strategic or even tactical sense—”

  “Might make a nice bombing practice range,” Sir Ewan said.

  “… but I’ve had a query about it from the American president.”

  “Why on earth would he be interested in Sealand?” Carpenter asked.

  “You know, I expect, that these Sealand people are offering Internet and cell phone services from the island.”

  Both nodded.

  “I expect you’ve heard, too, that there have been a series of murders of important conservative political figures in the U.S.?”

  They nodded again.

  “Well, there seems to be a connection. The fellow who’s committing these murders is running a personal website on one of Sealand’s servers, and President Lee and his security people would very much like to know who registered this site—his name and address, if possible, and anything else that might help them run him to ground.”

  “Well,” Sir Ewan said, smiling, “I think my people would enjoy putting on a little show to gather this information.”

  “And I think I’d enjoy going along,” Carpenter said.

  “We don’t want this all over the papers, if we can help it,” Ridgeway said. “Can we help it?”

  “Perhaps not,” Carpenter replied, “unless we can get in and out without causing a ruckus.”

  “Could your chaps do that, Ewan?”

  “I should think it’s highly likely, if I choose my people well. But still, if the people on the island twig, and they want it known, well…”

  “So there’s a risk of it becoming public?”

  “A not-unreasonable risk,” Southby-Tailyour replied.

  “If it should break, I would not like to see your names mentioned,” Ridgeway said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Carpenter replied. “I should think we could guarantee you that that will not happen.”

  “Quite,” the general said.

  “Well then, get back to me with something soon?” The PM stood up, and so did his guests. “Carpenter, could you stay for a moment?” he asked.

  “Of course, Prime Minister,” she replied.

  He waved her back to her chair and waited until the door had closed behind Sir Ewan. “Well, Felicity, how are things going at your firm?” he asked.

  “We’re making the adjustment,” she said. “I suppose we would adjust more quickly with the question of the appointment resolved.”

  “Ah, yes,” Ridgeway said. “Sir Edward’s replacement.” Sir Edward Fieldstone, the head of British Intelligence, had been murdered in the men’s room of the Four Seasons restaurant in New York some weeks before, while Carpenter had sat at dinner in the dining room with the director of the FBI. “I’m working on that.”

  “I’m sure you are, sir.”

  “You know, Felicity, were you a few years older, your name would be on the short list to succeed Sir Edward.”

  She appeared surprised. “Well, that’s very flattering, Prime Minister.”

  “I believe I could successfully appoint a woman,” he said, “perhaps even a beautiful woman.” He waited for the compliment to sink in. “But not a beautiful young woman.”

  “How nice to be referred to as young!” Carpenter replied, smiling, “and just when I was beginning to feel old.”

  “Your conduct in the operation in New York was much appreciated, and I think no one assigns any responsibility to you for the death of Sir Edward. Fortunately, we have been able to blame the FBI for that one.”

  “Quite.”

  “And of course, we are all very relieved to have that woman, La Biche, out of the picture. I must say, it took courage to do what you did.”

  “It was necessary,” she replied, gazing into her drink.

  “You are quite a remarkable woman, Felicity,” he said. “If I thought there were the slightest chance of success, I’d be inviting you for a quiet dinner for two this evening. My wife is at Chequers for a few days.”

  “You are kind, Prime Minister, but our positions make that impossible.”

  “Of course they do,” he replied, chuckling to cover his embarrassment at being rejected. “Well, back to our original subject. What do you think are the chances of pulling off this Sealand thing without making the papers?”

  “Well, there is always the Official Secrets Act,” she said, referring to the act of Parliament that made it possible to hide almost anything from the public. “But, of course, that doesn’t apply to the European media, and these days…”

  “Quite, quite.”

  “I think there are three possibilities for an outcome,” she said.

  “And they are?”

  “One, we go in, find what we want, and get out without being discovered. I think this is the least likely, but it could happen.”

  “Yes, that would be desirable.”

  “Two, we go in, and they discover that someone has been there, but they don’t know who. I think we have a better chance of that.”

  “And three?”

  “We go in, are discovered, and the Sealand people blab to the press. I think that, for planning purposes, we should think of that as the likely outcome.”

  “Mmmm,” the prime minister said, noncommittally.

  “I think in that case, we should take some pains for them not to know who we are, to make them think that our party is there for commercial purposes. I can do some work on that.”

  “I like that,” Ridgeway said. He stood up. “Well, get back to me when you and Sir Ewan have a plan.”

  She stood up and set down her drink. “Thank you, Prime Minister. We’ll try to be quick.”

  “More important to be thorough,” he said. He watched her exit the room, regretting that he had not been more persuasive.

  31

  Kate arrived at her office in Langley at her usual time. She had a regular weekly briefing scheduled from her deputy director for intelligence, who ran the Agency’s analysts, and her deputy director for operations, who ran its spies.

  They appeared in her office on schedule, Morton Koppel, the DDI, and Hugh English, the DDO, and she listened to their reports and discussed many items at length. Their deputies and assistants took notes as did the deputy director for central intelligence, her number two, Creighton Adams.

  Two hours later, when the briefing was concluded, Kate dismissed everyone but her DDI, DDO, and DDCI. She offered them a short break, and after everyone had been to the john and poured another cup of coffee, she plunged ahead.

  “There’s something I want to discuss with you,” she said. “This is entirely informal: no notes are being taken and no recordings made. I simply want your opinion on something.”

  Everybody looked interested.

  “Ed Rawls is ill,” she said. “He’s been in prison for sixteen years, and he had heart surgery last summer. His doctor has told me that his prognosis is guarded, at best, and that he could, in fact, die at any time.” She paused.

  Nobody said anything, but Hugh English, the DDO, looked annoyed.

  “Ed did a despicable thing,” she said, “and I, for one, will never forgive him far it, but I’m considering a recommendation to the president mat his sentence be commuted to time served, on compassionate grounds. He was sentenced to life without parole, so parole is not an option. I want to hear the views of each of you on the subject,” She turned to her DDCI. “Creighton?”

  “How quietly could this be done?” he asked. “And what would the reaction of Congress be? Would such a commutation reflect badly on the Agency?” Creighton Adams was the most cautious of men and the most highly attuned to political considerations.

  “It would have to be made public, of co
urse, and I’m sure the Post and the Times would spend a day recapping Ed’s crime and trial. As for the Congress, pardons and commutations are the president’s prerogative, and he would have to take any heat generated. There would be less heat, of course, if the Agency’s top management acquiesced.”

  Adams nodded. “I’m not opposed, in principle. I’d like to think a bit more about the consequences.”

  Kate turned to her DDL “Mort?”

  “I didn’t know Rawls as well as the rest of you, so there’s no personal consideration involved. Ordinarily, I’d want him to die in prison but…” He shrugged. “If he gets out I hope to God I won’t bump into him at cocktail parties in Virginia and D.C.”

  “Yes,” Adams said, “that would be awkward.”

  “Ed still owns a house on an island in Maine, Islesboro. He says he wants to go there to die. It’s a long way from Washington.”

  “You’ve spoken with Ed?” Adams asked.

  She shook her head. “No. He’s written to me a couple of times.”

  She looked at her DDO, who was staring into his coffee cup. “Hugh?”

  English raised his head and looked at her. “If there were a way to have him tortured, I’d vote for that. I will never, ever acquiesce in having him pardoned.”

  “That’s pretty vociferous, Hugh,” Koppel said. “What are your reasons?”

  Kate was glad he had asked, because she didn’t want to.

  “Well, let’s see,” English said, and began ticking things off on his fingers. “He’s betrayed his country and this agency, and he did it for money. He’s humiliated all of us. And he’s directly responsible for the deaths of two of our best people in the Stockholm embassy, and they were my friends. Is that enough?”

  “Just to set the record straight,” Adams interjected, “he was blackmailed by the Soviets. It was sex, not money, that was his downfall, and as bad as that was, I knew Ed well, and I don’t think he would have ever knowingly done anything that would have caused the deaths of Lewis and Barbara Moore. They were his friends, too, and Ed had a gift for friendship.”

  “You’re in denial, Creighton,” English said. “You’re unable to see the facts clearly.”

  Koppel spoke up, and there was an edge in his voice. “Nobody is ever able to see the facts as clearly as you do, Hugh.”

  English stood up. “That’s it for me. You asked for my opinion, Kate, and I’ve given it to you. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” He walked out of the room and closed the door behind him.

  “I suppose I should have expected that,” Kate said.

  “I didn’t expect it,” Adams replied. “I’ve never heard Hugh mention Ed’s name in any context whatever. Kate, will you go to the president with the support of three of the four of us?”

  “Three out of four ain’t bad,” Koppel said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it would be easier for the president if he could say that the management of the Agency unanimously supported him.”

  “He can still say that a majority—a large majority of management supports him,” Adams said.

  “Then you’re on board, Creighton?”

  “On reflection, I am.”

  “Mort?”

  “Count me in.”

  “Thank you both. We’ll see where this leads.”

  She watched them leave and reflected that even though she couldn’t bring Hugh English on board, at least he had had the effect of strengthening the resolve of Koppel and Adams.

  Her secretary buzzed. “Ms. Rule, do you have anything on your calendar for dinner the day after tomorrow? There’s something at the British embassy, and we haven’t responded.”

  Kate looked at her calendar. “Yes, we have the new Russian president for dinner that night,” she said.

  “I’ll send regrets, then.”

  Kate regretted it, too. She liked the British crowd and enjoyed their dinners. Still, she’d have an opportunity to get to know Georgi Majorov. He was ex-KGB, and that made him very interesting to her.

  32

  Carpenter gathered with the small group of Royal Marines in a sterile conference room at a training establishment far down the Thames Estuary. They were all dressed in jeans or foul-weather gear and with a variety of headgear— baseball caps, woolen watch caps, and navy blue yachting caps with yacht club insignia. They looked like the crew of a world-class racing yacht—young, fit, and eager—as long as one didn’t know how quickly and quietly they could kill.

  General Sir Ewan Southby-Tailyour stood at the foot of the conference table, manipulating transparencies on a projector. His first was taken from an admiralty nautical chart. “Now, you see here the position of the island in relation to the coast and the Thames Estuary,” he said. “We’ll have about a six-hour sail with the wind giving us a nice close reach, and in bright sunshine for most of the afternoon. The met office tells us conditions will deteriorate rapidly after sunset: the wind will back to the southwest and increase to around force seven, giving us a cross-swell and a very dark night, which should suit our purposes admirably.” He switched to a satellite photograph in which Sealand filled the entire frame.

  “Now you see the landing, just here.” He pointed on the transparency with a pencil. “It’s certainly not what one would call a harbor, but it has some shelter from the southwesterlies, so we shouldn’t have much more than a light chop inside the point. There’s a dock, here.

  “Now the buildings: There are six Portocabins, all identical from the outside, and I am indebted to Carpenter and her people for supplying us with some intelligence about the interiors. The southernmost is sleeping quarters and bathrooms; the next up the line is a mess hall and lounge for the inhabitants. These accommodations should be quite comfortable for them, since the island has a standing population of eight to ten. Provisions and mail are brought over from an East Anglian port twice a week, but never at night, which suits us.

  “The third building in line is the computer installation and some offices, and the fourth houses the cellular telephone equipment and offices. The other two are purely for utility—storage, tools, et cetera. It is the third building, here, that interests us, but we will place guards on buildings one, two, and four as well, so that our workers are not disturbed.

  “Carpenter’s intelligence tells us that there is one man each on duty in the computer and telephone buildings, so they should be easy to deal with. Sergeant Simpson, please show us how we will deal with them.”

  A thick-set man in his early thirties stood up and placed one end of a yard-long tube in his mouth, pointing it at a dartboard at the other end of the room. His cheeks puffed out, there was a whfft! noise and a dart struck the board at dead center. Carpenter was impressed.

  “Very good,” Sir Ewan said, walking to the board and extracting the dart. He held it up for the group to see. “Since our orders are not to damage any of the inhabitants, this will be our means of subduing any who require subduing. It is, in fact, a syringe, as well as a dart, and it will hold up to two cc’s of whatever we care to put into it. In this case, Carpenter’s people have supplied a liquid which they call ‘Sleepytime Down South’ or just ‘Sleepytime,” for short.

  “The injection of this fluid causes nearly immediate unconsciousness for a period of two to four hours, depending on how much is administered, but the really sweet thing about this drug is that, when the subject awakes, he has no memory of what occurred up to an hour before he received the dose. He will believe that he simply fell asleep.”

  Sir Ewan held up a shorter tube. “This is a compressed-air version of the sergeant’s blowpipe; each of you will carry one and two doses of the drug. Two of our team will carry sawn-off shotguns with beanbag loads that are the equivalent of a strong punch. In the event that it becomes necessary to use these, the preferred target is the abdomen. You are not to aim at the heads of these people because of the risk of breaking their necks.

  “I must stress most strongly that no team member is to carry any other weapon,
not a knife or even a truncheon, and should you have to counteract violence, you will use only those means prescribed and you will employ restraint. It is not our task to cause the death or significant injury of anyone. I know that goes against your training, but there it is.

  “Your task is to land on the island unseen, enter building three unheard, let Carpenter and her bloke do their work undetected, clean up after yourselves, and depart the island unremembered.

  “Because a higher authority has ordered me not to land on the island, I will stand offshore with the yacht, with one crew to aid me, and will receive the dinghy on its return to the yacht.”