Empire State Part 31

'Alpha s.h.i.t,' she said matter-of-factly. 'Still, you pulled a rabbit out of your own hat, though it turns out to be a much smaller one than mine.' She smiled mischievously at him.

They were both aware that they were marking time, but Harland reckoned he had made one move and that it was now her turn. The music slipped into the night to entice the uncomprehending world of a London suburb, and they watched each other. Without warning, she moved from her chair to stand over him, then put her hands down to his jaw, cupped his face and bent down to kiss him.

'We don't have to go to bed,' she said. 'But I thought I'd let you know that we are synchronised.'

'Good,' he murmured as she kissed him again.

'But on the whole, I think I'd like to go to bed very soon - with you.'

'Yes,' said Harland. 'That seems a good idea.'

They left the table and went to her bedroom, which struck him as a remarkably private, perhaps even lonely, place. It was bare but comfortable, and on one side of the bed there was a stack of books and a picture of a small girl and a woman standing in the shade of a tamarisk tree. The woman looked remarkably like Isis, but he knew it must be her dead mother, and that the girl with her face creased with laughter was Isis. He suddenly felt the scale of her loss all those years ago and turned to her and held her, partly because of this flash of understanding, but also because he was desperate now to end his own long, morose isolation, and prove to himself that he could love and listen as well as the next man. She wriggled free to undress, which she did with little fuss, then stood before him without the slightest embarra.s.sment. Harland was aware of his inability to grasp the whole of her in his mind - to resolve the neat white figure in front of him with the turbulent, driven person he'd seen working in the field. She came to him, hung her arms round his neck and told him to take off his clothes. At length they fell to the bed and became lovers. Finally Isis grew silent and went to sleep in his arms. His eyes closed too, but less happily. In his mind were three words - victim, survivor, person; the three stages he had been told the torture victim must go through. Was he yet the person he had once been? Was this thing that had happened to him fourteen years ago in the cellar of the house in Prague still distorting him? He was now certain that was what his bad back had been all about; not Eva's disappearance, or the air crash.

As Sammi Loz had said, the body remembers. Old pain - that's what he had to ditch to become a person again. He looked down at Isis's face and remembered why he had first been drawn to her. It wasn't her looks, which in fact had taken him some time to get used to. It was her conviction that no matter what Khan had done or might be, his torture would be a crime.

Then he closed his eyes.

Some time later they were woken by the phone ringing. Harland heard her answer to the Chief. They were expected in the office at 6.30 a.m. the next day.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

Early next morning a group of about thirty people a.s.sembled at Thames House. Herrick and the key members of the SIS team arrived shortly before Vigo entered the building. The Chief had evidently spoken with him overnight and agreed that the man Vigo had identified in the Bosnian photographs as Jamil Rahe was the only hope of tracing Youssef Rahe and Sammi Loz. Vigo was once again the architect of a plan, but now he had the support of the entire security establishment and, though looking drawn, somehow managed to present a picture of righteous self-possession.

Jamil Rahe had been traced to a maisonette in a quiet street in Bristol, and a surveillance team was already in place. At 8.15 a.m. a uniformed policeman and a member of the local Special Branch, posing as an immigration official from the Home Office, approached the building and rang the doorbell. The exchange with Jamil Rahe was relayed to Thames House from a microphone in the Special Branch officer's briefcase, and it was agreed that their manner was striking precisely the right balance between suspicion and rea.s.surance. They explained that a form had been overlooked in the processing of Jamil Rahe's application for political asylum and that it must be completed that day to make everything legal. Across the street a cameraman, hidden in the back of a TV repair van, silently recorded the scene. The three men were still talking on the doorstep when the first images arrived through the secure internet server at Thames House. One glance showed that he was the man from the Bosnia photographs. These images were then forwarded by email to a laptop in the possession of Special Branch officers on the roof of Heathrow's Terminal Two.

At length, the big Algerian offered the two officers coffee while he filled in the form. They went in, and within a very short time the plain-clothes policeman had secreted a tiny transmitter in Rahe's home so that the sound coming to Thames House was of much better quality. Jamil said he was familiar with the form they'd brought and insisted that he had already filled in one like it. The officers apologised. While he sat at the table writing, they gently questioned him about the kind of welfare benefits he had been claiming, his prospects of work and his wife's attendance at a language course. Once or twice Rahe's replies seemed rather too considered, particularly when one of the officers mentioned that with his brother Youssef in London things would not be as difficult for him as it was for other new immigrants. The fifteen minutes of talk and coffee pa.s.sed off very amicably, yet by the time they left, saying that this would certainly be the last he saw of them, Jamil was plainly on his guard.

Five minutes later, the police at Heathrow contacted Thames House. Three plane-spotters had identified the Algerian definitely as the man who stood with them on the observation platform on May 14 and on several occasions before that. Jamil Rahe was now confirmed as a very significant element in the story, and not for the first time the Chief looked towards Herrick and winked his thanks. Now all they had to do was wait for Jamil to make contact with someone.

An hour pa.s.sed, during which the Chief and Barbara Markham, the Director General of the Security Services, discussed the raid on Youssef Rahe's bookshop in Bayswater. The Security Services wanted to move on the premises immediately, but the Chief argued that they should wait for as long as possible, although plainly it had to be done by the time the arrests started across Europe the following morning. Eventually they compromised on 5.00 p.m. that afternoon, with the agreement that the staff of the Secret Intelligence Service would have the run of the place once it had been secured. The Chief returned to Vauxhall Cross, leaving Dolph and Herrick to watch as a stream of visitors looked over the shots from Bosnia. Journalists, diplomats, army officers and even the odd aid worker had been contacted the previous evening and asked as a matter of urgency to Thames House. They were all on time for the unusual invitation to coffee and croissants, but as each of them pored over the photographs laid out on a table and consulted a map where the photographs had been shot, it became clear that the remaining men would not be so easily identified. 'Well,' said Dolph as the last one left, 'we've still got the Guignal gal. Maybe Lapping should fly out to Skiathos with a disk. He might even lose his virginity.'

'It would be quicker to get her to an internet cafe and send them by email,' she said.

'You're not worried about security?' he asked.

'd.a.m.n security, and anyway we do need to speak to her about Jamil Rahe. She may remember him. Why don't you do that?'

Dolph's eyes flared. 'All of a sudden I'm your runner, Isis. Why the f.u.c.k don't you do it?'

'Sorry,' she said. 'We'll both talk to her, okay? It will be better.'

Dolph still looked put out. 'You're tired. You need to rest.'

'Yes,' she said, managing a grin. 'I'm sorry.'

'You've had a rough few weeks and sooner or later it's going to tell.'

'Lecture over?'

'I mean it,' he said, looking down at the photographs.

She was tired, d.a.m.ned tired. She thought of Harland in her kitchen that morning, sitting as though drugged, over a cup of coffee. They said little, but she had tried to let him know that she didn't regret sleeping with him. He was affectionate but also slightly remote, as though mentally drawing back to grasp the scale of something. Fine, she had thought, she'd wait, and if this turned out to be a one-night stand, all well and good. It had been very pleasant.

'Don't worry,' she had said, brushing her knuckles across the top of his hand as the cab pulled up at Brown's Hotel. 'There're no strings. I'm not like that.'

'I'm not worried, just astonished that it happened. More than that, I'm moved and extraordinarily grateful that you would favour my old bones.'

'Grateful is not a word that should ever be used in the context of s.e.x.'

They smiled at each other and it was left at that, but as he reached for the handle of the cab door she noticed the haunted, puzzled look in his eyes. She clutched at his arm and immediately regretted it because it made her seem needy, when in fact she was just concerned for him.

'Are you okay?

He had replied with slight irritation, 'Yes, of course I'm okay.' Then he pulled free and got out of the cab.

It had been a very unsatisfactory parting and she wished she could put it right.

Dolph and Herrick had returned to Vauxhall Cross by 11.00 a.m. but it was not until 1.10 p.m. that they were told that Jamil Rahe had left his house with a sports bag over his shoulder and walked to the end of his road to catch a bus. A feed from Thames House was hooked up and they were able to hear Jamil's progress. The bus took him to the centre of Bristol, where he moved unhurriedly from store to store buying odd items - a pair of socks, a packet of soap and a school exercise book. At length he came to an electronics shop where he browsed through the display and then, as though on impulse, bought a pay-as-you-go cell phone. The phone stayed in the box and the watchers were fairly certain he wouldn't be able to use it straight away because it would require a period of charging. Rahe then whiled away time in a park, briefly visited a library and considered the programme of movies at a multiplex cinema. The consensus was that he had activated a pre-planned routine to make sure he wasn't being followed. Several times he went through 'dry cleaning' channels - an escalator in a shopping mall, an underpa.s.s and an alley, each of which allowed him to observe at leisure the people in his wake. The police response was briefly to implement a procedure known as cascade surveillance, which involved filling his path with watchers, like water falling over a boulder. But Rahe moved so slowly through the city centre that it soon became necessary to revert to traditional methods and just hang a little further back.

Herrick realised time was getting on. Even though the raid on the Pan Arab Library had now been put back to 6.00 p.m. she would need to leave Vauxhall Cross by 5.15 and it was now 3.30. She went and found Dolph and they tried for a fifth time to raise Helene Guignal. She answered on the first ring, and in response to Herrick's question, told them that she had her laptop with her and could pick up her email. The Bosnia photographs were sent to her.

Ten minutes later she called them. Dolph put her on speaker.

'These pictures are etonnant - how do you say? Amazing. The whole group is here.'

'Which group? Do you remember their names?'

'The one standing in profile is Hasan, my boyfriend. And you have seen Yaqub and Sammi, yes?'

'That's Youssef Rahe, ' Herrick said to Dolph.

'Who else do you see?' he asked impatiently.

'Larry.'

'Larry? Which is Larry?'

'The man in the foreground. He is the American - a convert to Islam. J'oublie son nomme islamique, mais Les Freres - the Brothers - they called him Larry.'

'This group referred to themselves as the Brothers?' asked Dolph.

'Yes.'

'Right, the tall man by the tree. This man we now believe to be Algerian, like Yaqub. He is pa.s.sing himself off as Yaqub's brother?'

'Please, I don't understand.'

'He is pretending to be Yaqub's brother?'

'Non! He is not his brother! But he is Algerien, yes.'

'His name?'

She hesitated. 'Rafik... no, Rasim. That is it - Rasim.'

Dolph was scribbling a note to Herrick.

'Any other name for him?'

'No.'

'Do you know anyone else?'

'These are the only names. Some of the others I recognise but I did not know them well. I do not know their names.'

Dolph pa.s.sed Herrick a note which said, 'THEY WERE ALL IN THE HAJ SWITCH.'

She wound up the conversation, saying that she or someone else would call that evening and that Guignal should keep her phone on. She also said Nato headquarters would be made aware of her help in this matter, a way of underlining what she had already told Guignal about not showing the pictures to anyone or speaking about them.

'We'll have to get someone to Guignal,' she said. 'We need to know everything she can remember about the Brothers.'

'There are so many f.u.c.king names in this thing,' said Dolph. 'As soon as we've nailed one group, up pops another with a fresh load of backgrounds and connections.'

'But we're peeling the onion.'

'Yeah, and I'm f.u.c.king sure that every one of them went to the Haj. Nathan Lyne wanted to keep on it, but Collins and the rest of them said we should focus on the suspects we knew about in Europe. They were going to come back to it. A bad mistake.'

'So what you're saying is that you agree with Lapping's theory about the Heathrow Group being a set of cardboard cut-outs. The Bosnia Group - the Brothers - are the core of the operation?'

'f.u.c.k, I don't know. I guess we'll see tomorrow when they begin questioning the nine suspects. But think about it. Every year people are trampled to death on the pilgrimage. Twelve years ago 1,400 people were crushed in a pedestrian tunnel. The main problem was identifying the bodies because everyone is dressed the same and bits of ID get lost.'

A few minutes later, they went to report the conversation with Guignal to the Chief, and the information was relayed to the Joint Intelligence Committee. Sarre, not Lapping, was dispatched to Greece to interview Guignal and if necessary persuade her to return with him to London. The Chief was extremely keen that the pictures should not fall into the hands of the French DGSE, so the local MI6 in the Athens Emba.s.sy was sent on ahead to babysit her until Sarre arrived. Then Nathan Lyne was asked to focus all the resources he could muster at the Bunker on the Haj switch. There would be a joint CIA-SIS meeting at Vauxhall Cross that evening, at a time to be determined later.

In Bristol, Jamil Rahe was still aimlessly traipsing round the city centre. He certainly appeared cool, but a clue to his actual state of mind came when he called into a chemist and bought antacid tablets and a pack of double strength painkillers. Then he went to a coffee bar, took some of these with an espresso and settled by the window to watch the street. It was now believed that he was waiting for a check-in time or the right moment to use a dead-letter drop to make a contact somewhere in Bristol city centre.

By now it was 4.30 p.m. Herrick, Dolph and Lapping separately left Vauxhall Cross to go to Bayswater. Herrick had made an appointment in the hairdressing salon across the street from the Pan Arab Library, while Dolph and Lapping planned to install themselves in a betting shop fifty yards away. She had been told that Harland would also be there. On the way, he called her mobile to say he was already in position at a cafe named Paolo's down the street.

As she sat waiting for the hairdresser to finish his previous appointment, Herrick glanced up from her magazine. Everything was as normal. Rahe's disagreeable wife was sitting at the desk serving customers and working at the computer. The a.s.sistant whom Herrick had spoken to once could be seen darting between the shelves and a pile of books that had clearly just been delivered. The street itself was relatively free of traffic, though there were quite a few pedestrians about and a gas repair team was examining a hole in the pavement about thirty yards from the bookshop.

She received a hair wash then a head ma.s.sage, which made her suddenly feel so drowsy that she had to ask the stylist for coffee. While a couple of centimetres were taken off her hair she watched the shop in the mirror. At about 5.30 she noticed the bookshop filling with an unusual number of customers. If these were members of the public it meant the raid might have to be delayed, but then it occurred to her that the book buyers were from the police and MI5. It wasn't beyond either to raid the place early and take any evidence for themselves. Moreover, the Secret Intelligence Service had no rights in this domestic matter and agreements between chiefs tended to be ignored or bypa.s.sed by officers on the ground. She sent a text message to Dolph, asking him to have a look at the shop. A reply came. 'Just had 5-1 winner at Windsor.' A minute later she saw him pa.s.s the Pan Arab Library with Lapping in tow. Another text arrived - 'Nothing doing yet'. They headed back to the betting shop.

A few people left the bookshop, but one or two remained.

At 5.47 Herrick left the salon and took a stroll up to the cafe, where she spotted Harland with his head buried in the Financial Times. He did not look up, but signalled to her by waggling the fingers at the edge of his newspaper. It was 5.52. She walked back and noticed the gas workers ahead of her replace the manhole cover, pack away their gear into the back of the van and make a beeline for the shop. Then three unmarked police cars pulled up just before the shop. The raid was on.

She phoned Harland and hurried towards the entrance of the bookshop. Dolph and Lapping were already there and pressing their case to be admitted behind the police officers, apparently without success. When Herrick arrived, slightly out of breath, she was told by a thick-set Special Branch officer that he knew of no agreement that would allow SIS people to search the premises before it had been secured.

'Of course it's been secured,' said Herrick, pulling out her phone again. 'There're only a couple of women.' She used the speed-dial to call the Chief's office and walked a few paces away to explain the situation to his a.s.sistant. He told her to keep the line open while the problem was sorted out. Herrick went back to the policeman and said, 'Look, you do realise we're working for the Prime Minister's office? It's imperative that we have access to this building now.'

'I don't give a toss who you're working for,' replied the policeman.

Harland was behind her now and also began to argue with him. But at this moment one of the men inside the shop appeared to have been contacted and the policeman barring the door was told to stand aside.

Herrick's first thought on entering was that there were too many people there. Men were already rummaging around the shop, randomly picking books from shelves and searching the drawers of the desk. Rahe's wife and the shop a.s.sistant were seated on two chairs at the end of a run of bookshelves. Lamia Rahe, as they now knew her name to be, was looking at the ground, holding her head in her hands. The a.s.sistant's eyes oscillated wildly. No one seemed to have any idea what to do with them, and even Herrick didn't know whether they had an arrest warrant for Mrs Rahe. She went up to the officer in charge and was about to suggest clearing the shop when she realised that she was still holding an open line to Vauxhall Cross. She placed the phone to her ear. 'Christ, I'm sorry. Are you still there?'

'I gather you got in,' said the Chief's a.s.sistant. 'But while you're on, you might as well know that the man in Bristol appears to be about to make contact. He's just switched the SIM cards from the new phone to one he had in his pocket. We heard a few moments ago.'

Herrick hung up, and was about to ask the officer to stop the search, but at this moment she became aware of an insistent noise coming from the apartment above the shop. She noticed Lamia Rahe's head rise at the sound, but no one else seemed to have noticed. She found herself calling out to the room. 'Can everyone shut up for a moment.' She held up her hands and clapped rapidly. 'Please! Can you shut up!' The shop went silent and they all heard the sound of a mobile phone. Then it went dead.

'Have you searched upstairs yet?' she asked the policeman.

'There's no one there. We've checked.'

'No children?'

He shook his head.

'I'm certain that phone was silenced by someone. Didn't you hear the slight noise before it stopped ringing? And anyway, where the h.e.l.l are the children? School finished at least two hours ago.'

Of course. There weren't any children. Suddenly she understood that they had been part of a cover.

Herrick was aware of Lamia Rahe's gaze coming to rest on her with an oddly thoughtful expression and knew she had recognised her from the night of the break-in.

She looked away. 'I think you should see who stopped it ringing.'

Then Lamia Rahe erupted from her chair, gesticulating and muttering in Arabic.

'Sit that woman down,' said the officer. But before anyone could take hold of her, she had produced a gun from her shirts and, still screaming, took aim in Herrick's direction. Herrick went blank, then at the precise moment the gun went off, something hit her like a train from behind. Next she was sprawling across a length of rope matting by the desk. Five or six shots were loosed off into the melee of men at the front of the shop. One of the policemen pulled a gun and fired a single round. Lamia Rahe sank to the ground, dead.

Herrick whipped her head round. Immediately in front of her was Harland, who had been hit in the back by a bullet meant for her. Beyond him lay Joe Lapping, who was writhing on the floor, clutching his right thigh, and Andy Dolph was on his back with blood all over his chest. For a moment she simply could not absorb what she was seeing. She scrambled over to them. Dolph was white but he grimaced a kind of smile and whispered an oath.

'Get help,' she shouted. 'Get an ambulance here.'

She cast around. The confusion was total. The shop a.s.sistant had dropped to the side of her dead boss and was shrieking and hammering on the floorboards with her fists. Two policemen were shouting into their radios and another three had taken off to the back of the shop to climb the stairs to the flat. There was a noise from above, something being moved across the floor, then a sash-cord window being flung upwards, but Herrick was unable to interpret these in any meaningful way. There were more shots, so rapid that it seemed like a machine gun was being fired. Something fell above them.

Somehow she got a grip on herself and, dimly remembering the first aid course she once attended during IONEC training, she began to conduct a hurried triage. Of the three, Harland was the best off. The bullet had sliced across his back like a sword stroke, giving him a gash of six to seven inches long on the left side. Dolph had been hit just below his collar-bone and there was a nasty exit wound in the middle of his shoulder blade. When she saw the ma.s.sive amount of blood pouring from just below Lapping's groin on his right thigh, she knew she had to act.

'We can't wait,' she shouted. 'Let's get all of them to St Mary's right now. It's only minutes away.' The commanding officer agreed. St Mary's was alerted and two of the unmarked police cars moved to the front of the shop. Dolph was placed in the back seat of the first car, which tore off towards Paddington with a single blue light clamped haphazardly to its roof and a siren wailing. Lapping went in the second car, Harland having elected to wait for the ambulance. To show that he was going to be okay, he insisted on getting to his feet and then bent over so that a policeman could press a field dressing to the wound.

By now, the men who had gone up to the flat were spilling down the stairs. None was hurt, but they were evidently very shocked and couldn't answer Herrick's questions. She got up and physically accosted one of the men.

'What the h.e.l.l happened?'