Liz Carlyle - 07 - The Geneva Trap Read Free

blast from the past. It’s just like the old Cold War days, huh?’
    White gave him a look. Terry Castle was less than ten years his junior, but he liked to pretend that Russell White was a dinosaur from the pre- Glasnost era. White said pointedly, ‘I wouldn’t know. The Cold War was before my time. Anyway, that identifies our mysterious stranger. I’d better get on to Vauxhall pronto.’
    ‘What about this person he said he wanted to talk to? Are you sure you got the name right? Lees something, wasn’t it?’
    ‘Yes. Lees Carlisle, it sounded like.’ White shook his head. ‘I’ve checked the Service Directory, but there’s nothing that looks at all like it. There’s Lees Armstrong in Bangkok, but he definitely said “her” and it certainly sounded like “Carlisle”. I don’t know who the hell he’s talking about.’

Chapter 3
    Geoffrey Fane knew exactly who Liz Carlyle was, and sitting in his third-floor office in Vauxhall Cross, he could look out of his window across the river to the building where she worked. Thames House, headquarters of MI5.
    Elizabeth Carlyle – what a pity she insisted on being called ‘Liz’. He had known her for almost ten years and had worked with her on many operations. She was intelligent, incisive, direct – and also, Fane acknowledged, very attractive. He respected her, admired her, and might have felt even more warmly towards her if she had shown any sign of admiring him.
    But then women were inscrutable to Fane, and right now deeply annoying. Just that morning a letter had arrived at his flat in Fulham from the solicitors of his ex-wife, Adele. It seemed they wanted to reopen the financial settlement that had already drained his coffers irreparably. In particular, they were making noises about his family house in the Dorset countryside, the house which he and his brother had inherited. Its value, the lawyers were arguing, was appreciably higher than that declared by Fane during the divorce negotiations. It seemed Adele felt she had been cheated.
    Bloody women, thought Fane. They always wanted to have it both ways. Some insisted on having careers – Vauxhall Cross now positively swarmed with women, many alarmingly competent, and some nearly as senior as Fane himself. They wanted equal pay and equal consideration, even if half the time they were off on maternity leave. They wanted to be part of things but on their own terms: if you tried to treat them as one of the chaps, they laughed at you. If you treated them like ladies, in the way he’d been brought up to do, complimenting them on their appearance, their clothes or their hair, you risked being accused of sexual harassment.
    Not that Adele was like that. In fact, Fane wished she were more of a modern woman with a career of her own. Instead, Adele enjoyed playing the role of a high-born lady in a nineteenth-century novel, content to lie on a chaise-longue all day, nibbling chocolates at someone else’s expense. Fane’s expense for years, until a rich French banker had come along to take her off his hands. After the divorce, Fane thought the problem had gone away for good. But now here she was again, Oliver Twist-like, sayin g I want some more.
    As if that weren’t enough for one day, now there was another woman disturbing his life. Fane looked with irritation at the communication from Geneva that had arrived on his desk a few minutes earlier. It seemed mildly amusing that a woman he knew so well was unknown to the Geneva Station. But he was not amused at all to read that the Russian who had approached Russell White had said he would talk only to her. Fane was always reluctant to hand over a potentially interesting case to the people across the river, but the Russian’s request had been unequivocal – he would only speak to Liz Carlyle. And not even Fane could pretend that Liz Carlyle didn’t know what she was doing.
    But why was this Sorsky approaching the British now, and in such a covert way? How did he know