Mirage Read online

  But on this particular Monday morning it was McNail's own ponderous weight that was giving him problems as he slumped behind his desk and roundly cursed the embassy’s maintenance crews who were still having problems with the elevators. Gradually his heartbeat dropped to normal only to pick up slightly with an infusion of hot black coffee - the twenty cups of which he got through in a day were killing him with same certainty as the cigarettes he chain-smoked. Nevertheless the coffee and two cigarettes gave him the will to tackle the small mountain of papers that had accumulated in his tray over the weekend.

  It was mostly routine stuff: boring press releases; internal memos; magazines to be read and passed on, although how McNaill was expected to read magazines written in Arabic was not clear. Sometimes he wished that the messengers would drop the whole lot in his trash bin and so cut out the middleman. Halfway down the heap was a plain manilla envelope that bore his initials and room number. Handwritten address. Familiar handwriting. London SW1 postmark. McNaill gave a grunt of satisfaction. This was more like it. He slit the envelope open. No letter. No note or compliments slip. Just several sheets of close-printed tractor-feed fanfold paper that listed in alphabetical order the previous week’s arrivals and departures of UK visitors with either diplomatic accreditation or work permits. The regular deliveries were the fruit of many favours that McNaill accorded some influential contacts in the British Foreign Office. Mutual back-scratching, he reflected, was the lubricating oil of his intelligence machine. He liked thinking in mixed metaphors. Knowing who was leaving and entering the country was a useful barometer on which way the wind was blowing. (McNaill’s cerebral mixed metaphors were a force to be reckoned with.)

  His experienced eye scanned the lists. Quickly at first to get an overall picture of trends, and then more slowly to assimilate interesting details. As he read, he would occasionally treat his favourite chin to a thoughtful scratch. The Iraqis were importing three more journalists. Obviously they were serious about their intention of setting up an Arabic newspaper in London. The High Energy Research Laboratories were accommodating two Pakistani physicists under an exchange scheme. McNaill was no longer surprised by the willingness of the British to allow valuable research information to leak by such simple means. The last, and usually dullest pages covered the mundane coming and going of airline and travel agency personnel but McNaill read them anyway. A name caught his eye ... Kalen ... Daniel Kalen. Nationality: Israeli. Age: twenty-seven. Employer: El Al. Kalen ...? Kalen ...? Where had he heard that name before? He heaved his bulk across to a row of filing cabinets and spent thirty fruitless minutes rifling through their contents. Okay - start with the obvious. A call to the communications room established that there was no Kalen listed in any of the Israeli telephone directories although the Moshav Sabra, which was given as Daniel Kalen’s home address, was listed. McNaill pondered for a few moments and dialled an internal extension.

  ‘Mark. Ian. Can you spare me a few minutes?’

  Mark Zabraski was a tall, craggy man who should have retired the previous year but had agreed to stay on until a replacement for him could be found. He would be a hard man to replace. He was one of those rare individuals with a photographic memory coupled with razor-sharp intuitive judgement. Also he was one of the CIA’s most experienced desk officers. He propped himself casually against McNaill’s filing cabinets and flipped through the sheets of listing paper. ‘Kalen. Sure I’ve heard the name before. Emil Kalen was the guy who enlisted our help last year when the Israelis grabbed that Iraqi MiG-21.’

  McNaill remembered the report on the operation. The previous year, 1966, the Israeli secret service had pulled off an extraordinary coup when they had persuaded an Iraqi pilot to defect to Israel with a MiG-21 fighter.

  The two men returned to Zabraski’s office and soon had the full story. Early in 1966, a Major-General Emil Kalen, acting on behalf of the Israeli Chief of Staff, Yitzhak Rabin, had flown to Washington to obtain CIA help in a top secret operation. The Israelis had plans to fly a MiG out of Iraq and needed to use the CIA’s air base in Turkey to refuel the defecting aircraft before it flew on to Israel.

  ‘I didn’t meet this Kalen guy,’ said Zabraski, ‘but I’ve talked to a few guys that did. He gave the impression of being a regular sort. Jokes. Always smiling. Good at talking much and saying little. A smart operator. The general opinion was that he was more than a general headquarters envoy.’

  ‘A senior Mossad officer?’

  Zabraski nodded slowly. ‘He agreed to letting us have unlimited access to the fighter. He agreed to that on the spot. No referring back to Jerusalem. So I’d say very senior.’

  ‘The top?’

  ‘Why not?’

  McNaill was not convinced. ‘You think the Israelis would risk blowing the cover of their top man by sending him to Washington?’ ‘My guess is that they weighed the risk very carefully and decided that it was worth it for a MiG-21. You know the Israeli paranoia about their air force and intelligence on the air forces of their enemies as well as I do, Ian. Not that it interferes with their sense of humour. They’ve painted the MiG up in air force markings and given it the designation double-oh seven.’

  ‘So what else do we know about Emil Kalen?’

  Zabraski consulted a sheaf of papers. ‘Not much. I’ll let you have a copy of this. He’s a very private man. Married. A son in the air force. Owns a fruit farm near Tel Aviv. Moshav Sabra.’

  ‘Which happens to be the home address of this Daniel Kalen.’ ‘That must be Kalen’s son,’ said Zabraski thoughtfully.

  ‘So why should the head of Mossad send his son to London?’ The older man considered before replying. ‘Don’t pay too much attention to it, Ian. It’s probably a genuine posting.’

  ‘I’m going to follow it up,’ said McNaill determinedly. ‘If the son of the Mossad chief is in London, then I aim to find out more.’ He refrained from adding that two of the CIA men killed in the Israeli air attack on the USS Liberty the previous month had been personal friends of his and that as far as he was concerned, sense of humour or no sense of humour, Israel was now an enemy of the United States.

  7

  To Daniel’s surprise, the routine at the El Al offices, which he was still adjusting to after a week in London, was not as dreary as he had expected. Much of his time was spent learning to juggle seats and bookings for diamond merchants whose flying requirements were as complex as their business dealings. As one of the pretty English counter girls jokingly remarked to him: ‘We could run a really smooth airline if we didn’t have to carry passengers.’

  But the real pleasure was the warm summer evenings which he spent walking around central London, carefully increasing his distance each day as the strength returned to his foot. His favourite route took him through Soho and ended at Dingle’s coffee bar in Carnaby Street which played Rolling Stones numbers at full blast, where he could rest his foot and watch girls tripping by in outrageous outfits while the trader opposite sold metre-long heat- stretched Coca-Cola bottles to the tourists.

  The erotic exposure of so many gorgeous legs was not good for a young man with money in his pocket. So moved was he by the plethora of thighs under short skirts and jiggling breasts under transparent blouses, that he was sorely tempted to sample the delights on offer by the girl in the flat above his. She looked far too pretty to be a serious prostitute, and the dazzling smile she treated Daniel to when they met could strip paint and damage the woodwork underneath. Her favourite trick when they passed on the stairs was to flatten her back against the wall, with her breasts thrust out like a mammary turnstile, and her eyes signalling: ‘put money in slot’. He discovered that her name was Susan. A not overly brilliant piece of deduction on his part because that was the name written on the postcard that she had pinned to the front entrance of the flats underneath the ‘Flat to Let’ notice.

  To take his mind off such temptations, on his eighth day in London he fulfilled an ambition by blowing a sizeable chunk of his IDF gratuity on a n
ew Mini-Cooper with a Downton 1275cc conversion. One hundred brake horsepower packed into a tiny metal box and it went like a rocket. It was the vehicular equivalent of the Mirage-5. The lack of sensation in his left foot when he had to de-clutch and brake hard at a zebra crossing brought home to him just how disadvantaged he would have been in the cockpit of a Mirage. Not even the smile and wave from the divine, long-legged creature who strode across the zebra were adequate compensation for his yearning to be flying again. On another occasion he got caught in a traffic snarl-up in Trafalgar Square and chanced to glance at the girls sitting on the steps of the National Gallery. There was no doubt that the sights of London were best seen from the low seat of a Mini.

  Daniel was undecided as to whether or not he was enjoying his stay in the Swinging City. At the back of his mind was a niggle of guilt that he was enjoying himself at the expense of his beleaguered homeland. The newspapers were carrying almost daily reports on how the Soviets were re-equipping the devastated air forces of Egypt, Syria and Iraq with the very latest MiG fighters and SAM batteries. A television news report even showed the new SAM missile batteries being set up around the Egyptian air force base at Luxor - the huge bomber complex that Daniel’s squadron had attacked in the second wave of their pre-emptive strikes against the Egyptian Air Force on the first day of the Six Day War. The distance that the Mirages had to fly in their penetration of Egyptian air space had meant that they could not carry a payload of bombs and rockets. All the Tupolev bombers on the ground had been destroyed by cannon fire which meant that the Mirages had to go in slowly - flaps down for accuracy. Daniel had even lowered his main gear on his runs so that he could pump rounds with deadly precision into the bombers’ fuel tanks. Such tactics would be impossible to repeat now that Egypt was being supplied with low-level SAM missiles.

  Daniel’s niggle of guilt became a torturing obsession that seemed to get worse each night when he turned on the television to watch the news. There had to be something he could do. But what? Every morning when he rose and tested his weight on his feet, the pain reminded him that there was nothing. He was a useless cripple.

  That was the real torment.

  8

  The medallion-festooned stewards of the House of Lords never took chances. The only occasions when the majority of the British aristocracy ventured into the neo-Gothic splendour of the Palace of Westminster were to hear the Queen’s speeches or debate the return of hanging for murder; nevertheless it was safer for the stewards to address everyone they encountered as ‘milord’ or ‘milady’ according to gender. As many of them had discovered, mode of dress and length of hair in these strange times were no reliable indication of sex, therefore the hybrid ‘miload’ had been developed. But the steward who approached Raquel Gibbons in the House of Lords library had no cause to doubt her sex and still less her sexuality.

  ‘Telephone call for you, milady. Number six.’

  Raquel looked up from the leather-covered desk she was working at and thanked the steward. An octogenarian peer of the realm followed her graceful progress across the Axminster carpeting and wondered why there hadn’t been girls like her at the turn of the century. Maybe it was something they put in the water now? As a vociferous member of the pro-fluoride lobby, the peer hoped so.

  Raquel found a receiver off the hook in one of the panelled telephone booths in the corridor outside the library.

  ‘Hi, Raquel,’ said an unwelcome voice. ‘Guess who.’

  ‘Mister McNaill - just hearing your voice has dealt a body blow to my enjoyment of this lovely day.’

  McNaill sounded crestfallen. ‘And to think that I thought a lunchtime chat with me would make your day.’

  ‘Where and when?’

  ‘The bench nearest Horse Guards and George Street. One o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll be there, Mister McNaill,’ Raquel promised, adding snootily before she hung up: ‘Under protest.’

  McNaill sat on the bench in St James’s Park, flicking bits of an unsavoury hotdog at a greedy, darting dabble of ducks. Their noisy enthusiasm for the unsavoury dyed meat suggested that they had never sampled a real hotdog. He looked at his watch and decided to give Raquel another ten minutes. He was about to leave when he saw her pedalling towards him on her Moulton mini-bike. The strands of her gleaming black hair lashing her shoulders like bull-whips spurring her on as she drove down on the pedals with the easy grace of a trained model. A bulging, leather-tasselled shoulderbag swinging from her shoulder like a dead cowboy. Jeans looking as if they had been sprayed on in contrast to her grubby, sleeveless T-shirt that was a size too large and was cut dangerously low under the arms. McNaill always found her demeanour of arrogant self- assurance sexually provocative and it made him wish he were a hundred and twenty months younger and as many pounds lighter. He knew a lot about Raquel which was probably at the root of her dislike for him.

  Raquel Gibbons was one of the fifty or so American research students working at the Houses of Parliament. She was an intelligent and resourceful, streetwise twenty-five-year-old from New York with wits as quick as her temper. Following the death of her mother when she was seventeen, she had been forced to live by those wits. Her mother’s death had come at a crucial time when Raquel, needing money in a hurry, could have easily turned to prostitution. It would have solved all her short-term problems. Instead, by sheer guts and determination, she had completed her high school education by working as an evening manager of a bar near New York’s Battery Park. Following her first degree, she had obtained a research grant from the Anglo-American Historical Fellowship in Washington that enabled her to work in the United Kingdom for her research degree. Her reactions when she had learned during a lunch with Ian McNaill that her AAHF grant was financed by the US Government had been both spectacular and messy. She had reacted to his veiled suggestion that she was required to ‘gather snippets of information’ by tipping a plate of spaghetti over his head. It was the prospect of losing the grant that forced her reluctantly to change her attitude.

  Like many American researchers working in the Palace of Westminster, Raquel also acted as an unpaid secretary to a Member of Parliament. In her case, Walter Reed - a prominent Labour backbencher and vice-chairman of the left-wing Fabian Society. She was one of six American girls he employed to run his errands, check facts, answer letters, and even write his speeches. The backbencher was running virtually the equivalent of a US senate office within the Palace of Westminster and had a bigger private staff than the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. In return he kept the Home Office happy with fulsome assurances that the girls were unpaid, doing valuable work, and were behaving themselves. Working for him proved a valuable lesson for a girl who had arrived in England with only a vague idea of the difference between socialism and communism.

  Raquel was not happy having to feed titbits of gossip to McNaill in her weekly reports, but reporting on how the MP was going to vote and what campaigns he was fighting or planning could hardly be called spying. Also, it didn’t interfere with her real work - a 50,000 word thesis for her doctorate on the influence of Frances Stevenson on David Lloyd George: a project that involved her sifting through the 136 boxes of David Lloyd George’s papers in the House of Lords library - papers that had been so lovingly catalogued and filed by Frances Stevenson during the many years when she had been the great statesman’s private secretary and mistress. The trouble was that Raquel’s work on the thesis was stagnating. A friend advised her to take a break from it. Advice that she ignored.

  A squeal of brakes followed by a well-aimed swing with her shoulderbag at McNaill’s lap produced a satisfying gasp of pain. ‘Hallo, Mister McNaill. Still having problems with the diet, I see.’ She always injected a slight hiss into the ‘mister’ to give it an insulting edge.

  ‘You could injure someone with that bag, young lady. You’re late.’

  Raquel dismounted from her Moulton and stood menacingly in front of McNaill. Hands on hips. Legs apart. Her black almond- shaped eyes wary with suspici
on: the threatening body language of a cat confronting an overweight wolfhound. ‘Okay. So what do you want with me?’

  McNaill patted the bench beside him. ‘Please, honey.’

  ‘Please, Raquel - nothing. Say what you have to, Mister McNaill, and I’ll be on my way.’

  ‘Something I’ve always wondered. Have you got Apache blood in your veins?’

  ‘Maybe. Just be thankful that I haven’t got an Apache tomahawk in my hands.’ Having felt that she had scored a point, Raquel flipped down the Moulton’s stand, flopped beside McNaill and toed off her sandals. ‘Okay. So what do you want now, O Fat One?’

  ‘I need your help, Raquel.’

  ‘Forget it. I do enough for you as it is.’

  ‘You’ve been in England four months now. Two to go.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Do you miss home?’

  ‘Not really. Look, Mister McNaill, stop mentally undressing me and tell me what’s cookin’ in that lecherous, one-track mind of yours.’

  McNaill was unmoved by the gibes. ‘I was merely wondering if you’d like a six-month extension on your research grant.’

  Raquel had opened her mouth to scorch McNaill with another squirt of verbal paraquat. She closed it suddenly. McNaill chuckled. ‘Thought that might interest you, honey.’

  ‘I could do with another six months,’ Raquel admitted. She looked suspiciously at McNaill. ‘Could you fix that?’

  ‘Sure. No problem.’

  ‘But there’s a catch. Right?’

  ‘Sure there’s a catch, sweetheart. But not much of one. There’s a guy just flown into London that I’d like you to get to know. Find out what he’s up to. His background. That sort of thing.’