The Network - Jason Elliot [65]
‘Go and see your kids,’ says Seethrough, ‘and in your spare time you can have a chat with the ops chap from CTC, who’ll brief you on the set-up from their point of view and show you how to find the serial number on a Stinger. Your flight’s tonight.’ He hands me my travel documents and a hotel reservation in Washington. ‘They want you there at night for some reason,’ he says. Then he hands the rolled-up photographs and maps to H.
‘Want to look those over while I have a word?’ He gestures to another table. H obliges by moving across the room and Seethrough retrieves a file with multicoloured tabs poking out of it and opens it in front of me.
‘Recognise anybody?’ he asks.
It’s a shock because I had thought him dead. He looks much older in the photograph but I do recognise him. It’s Gemayel, grey-haired now but unmistakable.
‘He’s become a big fish since you last saw him,’ says Seethrough. ‘Must have cut a deal and agreed to act as a source.’ That, he explains, is how these things work. Since I last saw him, nearly ten years earlier, Gemayel has become the chief financial officer of a Middle Eastern organisation with a wide popular influence. The Americans call it a terrorist organisation, but in the British government nobody can decide whether it’s got anything to do with terrorists or not, so we maintain contact. Gemayel is now in charge of its global funding network, and has kept open a channel back to the Firm, making him ‘onside’ in Seethrough’s parlance. He’s evidently been living in South America, where for some reason most of the organisation’s funds are funnelled and then redistributed. A few years ago he resurfaced in Beirut at the highest level of the organisation’s architecture, and since then has survived two assassination attempts by the Israeli intelligence service.
‘Still with me?’ asks Seethrough.
I nod, though it’s all getting stranger by the minute.
‘Most of the chatter we’re getting about Stinger purchases is coming out of the Sudan. Gemayel has an area-wide network based in the capital Khartoum. We on the other hand have precisely one operational officer, whose identity is already declared. What we need is for Gemayel to ask his people to listen out for noises about the Stingers. That way we can at least do some eliminating. He may be onside, but we can’t do a face-to-face with one of our known people without Mossad breathing down our necks. So when you’re back from America I thought you could talk to him and rekindle the spark. You’ve got the perfect excuse of wanting to catch up after all these years.’
‘I can remind him of our happy days together.’
‘Precisely,’ says Seethrough, taking me up on the irony.
‘Let’s say he agrees. What does he get out of it?’
‘He gets to keep his head,’ says Seethrough soberly, and turns the pages in the file to an immediate-level CX report from Lebanon station. It bears the secret router indicator actor, indicating that no one outside the Firm is allowed to see it. It’s addressed to the head of the Global CT controllerate, which is Seethrough, and the security caveat reads: UK T O P S E C R E T /DELICATE SOURCE. But it’s the subject title that shocks: proposed assassination of Elias Rashid Gemayel by israeli security services.
I scan down the page. The Israelis, if the report is to be believed, are planning to kill Gemayel with an explosive charge in his mobile phone placed by one of his own security staff. They’ve managed to buy one of Gemayel’s own bodyguards, and the plan is to be carried out later this month, when Gemayel returns from Rome to Beirut and will receive a new mobile phone. In exchange for this deadly snippet of information, Seethrough is hoping that Gemayel will pass on whatever his people can find out about the Stinger purchases.
‘Fair trade, don’t you think?’ says Seethrough, pursing his lips and raising his eyebrows in his signature gesture of enquiry.
‘The Israelis won’t be too happy when you give away their plan,’ I say.
‘You win some, you lose some. Par for the course. They know that. Though