Three Great Novels Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Critical acclaim for Henry Porter

  A SPY’S LIFE

  ‘Magnificent . . . [he has] learned the oldest lesson: that characterisation and narrative are all’

  Economist

  ‘As with his first thriller, Remembrance Day, Porter demonstrates great technical ingenuity . . . Yet this is embedded in a complex web of emotional relationships . . . Porter has proved that he is a torchbearer in a great tradition’

  Christopher Silvester, Sunday Express

  ‘At times [the hero] quietly reminded me of Sean Lemass, in John le Carré’s The Spy who Came in from the Cold. I cannot think of a higher compliment’

  Marcel Berlins, Sunday Times

  REMEMBRANCE DAY

  ‘The best book of its kind I’ve read since The Day of the Jackal. When thrillers get better than this, I’d like to read them’

  Jack Higgins

  ‘A captivating first novel . . . Pacy and well-researched and culminates in an explosive finale’

  Tatler

  ‘A fiendishly cunning plot . . . A tough ingenious thriller . . . As polished and professional a piece of work as you would expect from any veteran thriller writer’

  Literary Review

  Henry Porter has written for most national broadsheet newspapers. He was editor of the Atticus column on the Sunday Times, moving to set up the Sunday Correspondent magazine in 1988. He contributes commentary and reportage to the Guardian, Observer, Evening Standard and Sunday Telegraph. He won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Brandenburg in 2005. He is the British editor of the American magazine Vanity Fair and divides his time between New York and London.

  www.henry-porter.com

  Empire State

  HENRY PORTER

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Orion

  This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

  Copyright © Henry Porter 2003

  The moral right of Henry Porter to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious,

  and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 1 4091 2357 6

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  For Graydon Carter

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are due first to my agent, Georgina Capel, who showed great faith in this book from the start, and also to Jane Wood, my editor, who tirelessly made suggestions and gave me encouragement during its writing. She was helped by Sophie Hutton-Squire. It would be difficult to overestimate their contribution, or that of Puffer Merritt, who read and corrected the first draft with her usual enthusiasm and generosity.

  The idea for Empire State came to me on a fishing trip organised by Mark Clarfelt in June 2002. So I thank him for the happy accident that set off a train of thought, and also Stephen Lewis, Matthew Fort, Tom Fort, Jeremy Paxman and Padraic Fallon who unwittingly nurtured the plot during the course of a very idle afternoon by the river. My friend David Rose introduced me to Hadith literature, Roger Alton made many clever suggestions, Lucy Nichols helped with occasional research and Aimee Bell gave me the 1949 first edition of E.B. White’s hymn to New York, Here is New York, which contains some inspirational thoughts used here.

  During the research of a book of this nature there are many who help but cannot be thanked by name. I was particularly grateful to a man who, at some risk to himself, arranged a tour of the Egyptian prison system, and then found the island where part of this book is set. My contact in Albania was also invaluable. He shed light on his mysterious homeland and gave me insights into the history and workings of the intelligence service.

  Empire State is a work of fiction - no secrets are betrayed here - but there is some authentic detail which has been gathered from numerous sources. Without them I would flounder. In parts of the book I drew from actual incidents. There was an al-Qaeda cell in Albania. Five suspects were arrested in a CIA-backed operation and flown to Egypt where they were tortured before being tried. Two were subsequently executed. I have also used part of a story of a group of migrant workers who were gunned down by the Macedonian security forces on March 2, 2002. At the time, it was alleged they were terrorists, planning an attack on the US and UK embassies in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, a claim which the United States government was unusually forthright in rejecting.

  Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Liz Elliot. Throughout the writing of this book, as with the others, she has been the source of much support and good judgement.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The passenger known as Cazuto arrived in the Immigration Hall of Terminal Three, Heathrow, in the early afternoon, carrying a raincoat and a small shoulder bag. He joined one of the lines in the non-European Union section. Looking mildly about him, the American registered the two uniformed policemen with Heckler and Koch machine guns on the far side of the immigration desk, and then a group of men who were clearly searching the lines of travellers about to enter the United Kingdom on that stupefyingly cold day in May.

  Larry Cazuto, in reality Vice-Admiral Ralph Norquist, guessed they were looking for him and noted the urgency on their faces. This interested him because they could not have known which flight he was on. His schedule was kept secret even from his wife and secretary, who knew only that he would be in Europe for a time, not on what day he was travelling or that he would be seeing the British Prime Minister and his intelligence chiefs.

  The President’s special counsel on security matters decided tha
t he would not at that moment make himself known. Instead he did what comes easily to a middle-aged man with a paunch and a slight academic stoop - he merged with the crowd and turned his benevolent gaze to the line forming behind him. He glanced upwards to the security cameras but none was trained on him and it was clear they weren’t sweeping the surge of travellers in the Immigration Hall. In front of him, a woman in her late forties - rich-looking and attractive in a brash way - was struggling to change her phone from an American to a European service while keeping hold of several pieces of hand luggage. He leaned into her vision to ask if he could be of assistance, and as she replied she dropped the open passport clamped in her teeth. He picked it up and returned it to her, noticing the semi-circular impression of lipstick on one of its pages. ‘You’ve given yourself a visa stamp,’ he said pleasantly.

  The woman smiled. As she took the passport, one of the bamboo handles of a large tapestry bag escaped her grip and the contents tumbled to the floor. He crouched down and helped her again. As she swept everything back into the bag with the speed of a croupier, he examined her and wondered whether he imagined the intent that pulsed briefly in her eye. She got up, thanking him profusely and they went together to the desk, where he made a point of looking over her shoulder to see if the name in her passport matched the initials on the silver cigarette lighter that he’d retrieved from the floor. This was second nature to him and it struck him as odd, and almost certainly significant, that they did not tally, not even the first name and initial.

  By now the men on the other side of the barrier had spotted him. Norquist recognised one of them; the knobbly faced Peter Chambers, a senior bureaucrat from MI5 whom he’d met eighteen months before.

  ‘I’m afraid we’ve got an emergency, Admiral,’ said Chambers. ‘We’re going to escort you into London.’ He gestured to a man who had come up behind him. ‘This is Sergeant Llewellyn from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. He will…’

  Before Chambers could say any more, Norquist held two fingers to his chest then jabbed them in the direction of the woman, who was now headed down the escalator to the Baggage Hall, her bags hooked over her shoulders and the little gold-coloured mobile raised to her ear. ‘Can you check her out? Her passport says her name is Raffaella Klein but she has the initials E.R. on her cigarette lighter. She seemed to be making a point by dropping everything. This may help,’ he said, slipping Chambers a chip of plastic the woman had failed to pick up and which he’d palmed as a matter of course. It was the SIM card for her US phone service and it would tell them everything they needed to know.

  ‘We’ll get right on to it,’ said Chambers. He beckoned to a lean, casually dressed man who had been hanging behind the two armed police officers and gave him the card. ‘Get Customs to search her and then keep her under observation.’ He turned back. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, sir, we’re in a bit of a hurry. Your luggage has been taken directly to the car. I’ll explain everything once we’re on our way. We really must go, sir.’

  ‘If you’ve got the baggage it means you know the name I was travelling under.’

  ‘That’s rather the point, sir. Your security has been compromised. ’

  They made for a door at the side of the hall, which opened from the inside as they approached, and passed along a corridor of mostly empty offices. Here two policemen in anoraks and fatigue trousers joined them, so a party of more than a dozen descended three flights of a metal stairway, causing it to vibrate with a dull ring. At the bottom the corridor turned right and led to a fire exit where a security officer was on hand with a swipe card. He signalled to a surveillance camera above and operated the lock, throwing both doors outwards. The fumes of aviation fuel and the noise of taxiing aircraft filled the corridor. Rain slanted through the door. Norquist began to put on his raincoat, but Llewellyn took it from him and passed it, together with Norquist’s bag, to one of the policemen behind. He waved the two uniformed police out to a line of four cars just visible off to the right.

  ‘We’re having to make this up as we go along,’ said Chambers. ‘We’ve had very little notice.’

  Norquist shrugged. ‘Right,’ he said.

  They waited a few more moments until a voice came over Llewellyn’s radio. The rest of the men bunched round Norquist and they spilled from the door in a security rush, holding his head down until he was in the back of a black Jaguar. Chambers climbed in beside him; Llewellyn got in the front. The rest of the men divided between a dark green Range Rover, a Ford saloon and a BMW which brought up the rear.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Norquist.

  ‘We understand they are going to make an attempt in or around the terminal. I’m afraid this arrangement is far from ideal. We’d have preferred to use a helicopter to get you into town. We may yet have you picked up on the way, but the main thing is to get you away from public areas of the airport now.’

  Norquist nodded patiently as if being told of some further minor delay in his schedule. The plane had already stopped for two hours at Reykjavik with a computer fault.

  ‘We think it’s a big operation. No details though,’ continued Chambers, giving him a significant look which was to say that he couldn’t talk in front of the driver and Llewellyn.

  The cars moved off, weaving under the piers of Terminal Three. They had to slow for aircraft manoeuvring in and out of the gates and occasional service vehicles that blocked the route across the concrete apron. The squall that had blown in from the south-west didn’t help their progress either, and several times the Jaguar hesitated, either from poor visibility or disorientation in the sprawling tentacles of the airport. After a few minutes they cleared Terminal Two and set off at speed over the open ground between the take-off and landing runways, towards the vast hangars on the east side of the airport. They were held up once by a yellow airport car to allow a 747 to be towed across their path from the service hangars. Instead of taking the exit by the British Midland hangar off to their right, they moved towards the head of the runway a few hundred yards away, close to the eight aircraft waiting to take off. Rain and exhaust from the engines blurred the landscape and they had to slow to look for the exit. Someone spotted a policeman on a motorbike waving in the distance.

  Llewellyn yelled into his radio over the noise of the engines. ‘Route Three. Is that understood? Route Three.’ He sat back as the cars started forward and said under his breath, ‘Let’s hope this works.’

  A little over a mile away a man held a Bresse Optic telescope to his right eye and scrutinised the procession of vehicles with twenty times magnification. The few plane spotters that had remained with him through the rain and poor light on the observation terrace of Terminal Two also trained their binoculars and telescopes to the head of the southern runway - or, as they referred to it, Runway 27 right. But when the four cars veered off through the grass margins of the airfield towards the emergency gate in the perimeter fence, their interest returned to the line of Boeings, followed by two Russian-made aircraft - a Tupolev Tu-154 and a Yakovlev Yak-42 - which by chance landed seventy seconds apart on the northern runway - or 27 left.

  The men on the observation terrace mostly carried telephones. Some even held hand-radios with which they chatted to fellow enthusiasts around the airport. So it was perfectly natural for the man with the Bresse Optic to turn away from the noise of a taxiing Tunisair flight, to gaze across Heathrow’s roofscape of air-conditioning ducts and radio masts and dial a pre-set number on his phone. Muffled in their anorak hoods, absorbed in the comings and goings of the jets, fiddling with their Thermos flasks and packets of sandwiches, the plane spotters paid scant attention to what he said about the cars leaving the airport and turning right towards the A30.

  A surveillance operation of an entirely different kind had just ended in the Terminal Three Departure Lounge when a mixed team consisting of an Arabic speaker from MI6 named Isis Herrick, three officers from MI5 and four members of the police Special Branch were pulled off the observation of Youssef Rah
e, an Arab bookseller. They were told by New Scotland Yard and MI5 headquarters at Thames House that an important American had just arrived in the terminal and that the highest possible priority was being accorded to moving him from the airport to Whitehall. The Prime Minister’s armoured Jaguar, being driven back from Cardiff to London without its usual passenger, had been diverted to Heathrow. Through her earpiece Herrick then heard that the four undercover policemen with her were being summarily removed from the mixed surveillance team and would be armed with handguns in a room near the Immigration Hall.

  Herrick and her three slightly dour colleagues from MI5 - Campbell, Beck and Fisher - went off to have coffee, Beck caustically remarking that the Special Branch officers had taken with them the keys and parking receipts for two of the three cars. As they sat, they were informed that the few Special Branch officers permanently stationed at Heathrow had also reported to the Immigration Hall. She realised this meant that Youssef Rahe would leave Britain unobserved, except by the security cameras. It was no great disaster. As an anonymous voice pointed out from MI5 headquarters, Rahe, a minor intellectual figure in London’s North African Community, represented no threat to the aircraft whatsoever. He and his baggage had already been thoroughly searched and he was, after all, travelling on an Arab airline to an Arab country. Once he got to Kuwait, the cooperative members of the local intelligence service, al-Mukhabarat, would watch him and log any contacts he made.