not the qualities.’
‘What are you getting at?’ Brenda Walker wanted to know. She had been eyeing Isabel with suspicion ever since their arrival.
‘It’s simple. Maybe they don’t know who Sarah is. In which case we have to be damn careful not to let them find out.’
‘They must know,’ Elizabeth Ogley said, ‘or why would they have hijacked us?’
‘That would be a coincidence,’ Alice Jennings agreed.
‘They happen,’ Isabel said. ‘They may have hijacked us for no more reason than that we’re British. Most of us, anyway.’
‘But what difference will it make whether they know or not?’ Elizabeth Ogley asked.
‘Their demands will be higher if they think they have someone important,’ Isabel said. ‘And the lower they stay the better our chances of getting out of this.’
‘You seem to know a lot about this type of thing,’ Brenda Walker interjected.
Isabel was about to say that her husband had a lot of experience in these situations, but stopped herself in time. There didn’t seem any point in letting Docherty’s SAS background out of the bag. ‘I do have some experience of this kind of thing,’ she said. ‘From the other side.’
‘You don’t mean you were a hijacker?’ Alice Jennings asked with a laugh.
‘I was involved in two kidnappings, nearly twenty years ago now, in Argentina. In England you had protest demonstrations, in Argentina things got a little more serious,’ she added, trying to make light of it. The other women all looked dumbstruck, with the notable exception of Brenda Walker.
She already knew, Isabel realized. Hence the suspicion. Ms Walker must have some secrets of her own.
In fact, Brenda Walker had spent the last five minutes wondering whether to come clean about her own role, and deciding that she had no option. As a social worker her advice in this situation would be ignored; as an intelligence agent it would not.
‘I also have a confession to make,’ she began.
‘My God,’ Alice Jennings gasped. ‘Is no one who they seem to be on this trip?’
‘I am,’ Sharon Copley said, with a noise that sounded half laugh, half sob.
They all laughed, and then there was a moment of silence as they realized what they had done.
‘I work for the government,’ Brenda Walker said quietly. ‘My job was, well, it was to make sure Sarah didn’t cause the government any embarrassment while she was abroad.’ She looked across at Sarah. ‘I’ve enjoyed your company,’ she said simply.
‘Christ!’ was all Sarah could say.
‘She was just doing her job,’ Isabel said. It looked as if imbuing this group with a sense of solidarity was going to be an uphill task.
But Sarah sighed and gave Brenda a rueful smile. ‘I’ve been enjoying your company too,’ she said.
Sir Christopher Hanson, the head of MI6, poured himself a small glass of port and sipped at it, allowing the sweetness to smooth away his sense of irritation. Another twelve hours and he would have been on his way to Heathrow to begin a fortnight’s holiday in St Lucia. At any moment now his wife would be receiving the news that he wouldn’t be coming, and he was half expecting her cry of rage to be audible above the ten miles of rush-hour snarl-ups which separated them.
But one of his men – or woman on loan, to be precise – was apparently in a life-threatening situation, and he would not have felt happy deserting the helm at such a moment. Brenda Walker’s file was supposedly on its way from MI5 Records, though it seemed a long time arriving. He was about to make further enquiries when an apologetic courier appeared in his open doorway.
Hanson took the discs and went to turn on his computer terminal, feeling, as usual, nostalgic for the bulging file of mostly illegible reports which had once served the same purpose. There was something real about paper and ink, something substantial.
Still, the new system was ten times as efficient, not to mention a damn sight easier to store. He accessed Brenda Walker’s file and skimmed through it. The computerized portrait told him she had short dark hair and a face, which wasn’t very much. Even in this brave new world there had to be a photograph somewhere, surely.
Hanson smiled, remembering one subordinate’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they rename MI6 Rent-a-Bond.
Brenda Walker’s personal details contained no surprises, unless you counted her working-class background and comprehensive education, but these days that was almost par for the course among MI5’s foot-soldiers. She had done a lot of escort work with the royals, had a short stint with the embassy in Australia, and had then taken a specialist training course in immigration law. She had been working in that area for only a few weeks when given the job ‘minding’ the Holcroft girl, apparently because the previous candidate had abruptly fallen ill.
Was that suspicious? Hanson doubted it.
He printed out the file and then switched discs. The new one contained not only the ‘paperwork’ from her current assignment, but also the preliminary vetting reports on the tour group concerned and the other members of the party.
He went through the latter, his mouth opening with surprise when he read the information on Jamie Docherty and his wife Isabel. An SAS veteran and an ex-terrorist! Put them together with Brenda Walker, and that made three of the fourteen tourists who had first-hand experience of dealing, from one side or the other, with such volatile situations. If the party had indeed been hijacked, then that had to be some sort of record.
Assuming for the moment that they had been, one big question remained: whether or not the hijackers were aware of the fact that they had netted the Foreign Minister’s daughter.
Isabel lay on the bunk, considering the irony of her situation. She wondered how many people in the world had personally experienced a hijack and kidnapping as both perpetrator and victim. She might well be the first.
Her thoughts went back to Córdoba in 1974, and the beginning of the war she and her comrades had been crazy enough to launch against the Argentinian military. The first man they had kidnapped had been a local glass manufacturer notorious both for his high living and for the low wages he paid his employees. They had kept him for three days in an apartment not two hundred metres from the city’s central police station, blindfolded but otherwise not ill-treated. His family had paid the requested ransom – $60,000 worth of food and clothing for the city’s poor. They had watched the man’s wife hand out the packages on TV, and then let him go.
Two weeks later they had done it again. This time the victim was a member of the family which had ruled over the city for most of the century, their wealth amassed through land ownership, banking and several manufacturing businesses. The ransom demanded had been correspondingly higher – $1,000,000 in gift packages for poor schoolchildren, plus the reinstatement of 250 workers who had recently been locked out of the family’s construction business.
The ransom
