Liz Carlyle - 06 - Rip Tide by Stella Rimington

over his shoulder at the guards by the gate. ‘One . . . you.’ And he’d pointed at Luckhurst.
    ‘One like me? White?’ asked Luckhurst, pointing at his own face and hands.
    Taban had shaken his head. ‘No white. English.’
    An Englishman? But not white. Someone speaking English, perhaps. Could it be another hostage? But if so, why wasn’t he in the pen?
    Over the next few evenings, intrigued by the idea of another Englishman living so close to him, Luckhurst had tried to learn more, but Taban was not forthcoming. Then, a week ago, when he’d brought the supper: ‘Men gone. English gone,’ he’d said, waving an arm towards the sea.
    Now Luckhurst heard the clink of keys, and the sound of the door of the pen swinging open on its creaking hinges. Supper, he thought, visualising the guards letting Taban in with the food bowls. He wanted to learn more about the men who had gone to sea and not come back.
    ‘OK, Taban?’ asked Luckhurst now as the boy handed him his bowl of stew. Taban nodded but he looked scared.
    Suddenly Khalid appeared behind him with a holstered pistol on his hip. This was new; Luckhurst hoped it didn’t mean things had taken a turn for the worse. But the man was grinning as he strode up to the Captain.
    ‘I have some news for you, Commander. Good news.’
    ‘Yes?’ This announcement had been made before, and had turned out merely to be that there was fruit with their dinner of stew.
    ‘Your owners have seen sense at last – the ransom has been paid. You are clearly worth a lot to them.’
    Luckhurst knew better – it was the ship the owners wanted back, not the crew, but there was no point in telling Khalid that. ‘What happens next?’ he asked cautiously.
    ‘Next? We drive you to a collection point outside Mogadishu. A representative of your company will be there to collect you.’
    It took only minutes for the Captain and his crew to get ready. They had nothing to pack. As they walked towards the dusty lorry, Luckhurst looked for Taban to say goodbye, but there was no sign of him. In the excitement of his release the Captain soon forgot about the boy.

Chapter 9
    Geoffrey Fane was not a generous man and he did not waste his time doing favours. But in his long career in MI6 he had developed a nose for what could be important. And when, the previous day, a call had come into his office from an old colleague who wanted some informal advice, that nose had twitched. Instead of finding some excuse, he had agreed to meet the caller. Now he was sitting in a taxi, crawling along Oxford Street in mid-morning traffic, on his way to his old colleague’s office.
    The caller was David Blakey, twenty years in MI6, rising to be Head of Station in Hong Kong at the time the colony was handed over to China. After Hong Kong, he had retired from MI6 and since then his and Fane’s paths only rarely crossed – an occasional sighting in the bar of the Travellers Club, once bumping into each other in the Burlington Arcade. When Blakey had called, Fane had remembered that after leaving MI6 his old colleague had taken a job as director of a large international charity. In fact, it was when Blakey had mentioned the charity’s name, UCSO, that he had sparked Fane’s interest. It was just a week since that name had come to his attention. A young man with British documentation had been arrested by the French Navy in the Indian Ocean. He was apparently one of a group of pirates trying to hijack a Greek cargo ship, which had been chartered by the charity UCSO to carry aid supplies to Mombasa.
    The case had been handed to MI5 to pursue; Elizabeth Carlyle – or Liz as she preferred to call herself, thought Fane with a grimace – had gone to Paris to interview the prisoner. And now the head of that same charity had suddenly popped up, asking for advice and refusing to say on the telephone what it was that concerned him.
    Although they had lost touch in recent years, Fane had once known Blakey well. They had been