First Response

LAMBETH CENTRAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMAND CENTRE (12.34 p.m.)

‘We’ve identified four of them now,’ said Waterman. She tapped on her keyboard and four pictures flashed up on her screen. All bearded Asian men, all in their twenties or thirties, they could have been cousins, if not brothers. ‘Top left, Mohammed Malik. Top right, Ismail Hussain. We talked about them earlier. Bottom left, Rabeel Bhashir, bottom right, Mohammed Faisal Chaudhry. Rarely uses the Mohammed as a Christian name.’ She pulled a face. ‘Whoops. Can’t say that, obviously. Anyway, we’re reasonably sure that Bhashir is in the church in Brixton. Chaudhry is the bomber in the pub in Marylebone.’

‘What do you mean you’re reasonably sure about Bhashir?’

‘Facial recognition isn’t an exact science,’ said Waterman. ‘A lot depends on the material we’re working with. One of the hostages posted a picture of him on Twitter but it was a side-on view. But even so we’re looking at an accuracy prediction of eighty per cent. We’re more sure about Chaudhry.’

‘And are either of them known?’

‘They’re both known, both on our watch lists, but at a low level.’

‘Then how could this happen?’ asked Kamran. ‘If they were being watched, how did they get suicide vests?’

‘There’s a difference between being watched and being on a watch list. They were considered possible threats, not direct threats.’

‘I’d say this was a pretty direct threat, wouldn’t you?’ asked Kamran. Captain Murray joined them, holding a cup of black coffee.

Waterman held up her hands. ‘Please, Superintendent, don’t go shooting the messenger here. At any one time we have literally thousands of British Asians on our watch lists. Just visiting a relative in Pakistan is enough to get them red-flagged, or posting on a jihadist website or tweeting in support of ISIS. But we don’t have the resources to put every one of them under full-time surveillance.’

‘So they were known to be potential problems, but not considered a serious threat?’

‘That’s the situation, yes.’

‘So what can you tell me about the latest two? What are we dealing with?’

The MI5 officer gestured at the bottom left photograph. ‘Rabeel Bhashir. He’s the oldest of the group by far. Forty-six next month. He came to the UK with his wife and two young daughters about twelve years ago. They claimed to be Afghan refugees but they are almost certainly Pakistanis. Arrived on a BA flight having burned their passports on the plane and flushed the ashes down the toilet. They were granted refugee status and five years later they all became citizens.’

‘You mean we can’t even tell what country they’re from?’ asked Kamran.

‘The border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan is porous at best,’ said Waterman. ‘You get a family saying they’re Afghans fleeing the Taliban and it’s hard to prove otherwise. They’ve destroyed their passports so where do you send them back to?’

‘Presumably they showed their passports to get onto the plane,’ said Captain Murray. ‘If they showed Pakistani passports, ship them back to Pakistan.’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ said Waterman. ‘There’s a whole industry geared to getting asylum-seekers accepted and settled. Anyway, Mr Bhashir was in the news last year when his daughters ran off to become jihadi brides in Syria. One was sixteen, the other fifteen.’

‘I remember that,’ said Kamran. ‘He blamed MI5 and the cops for not tipping him off that his daughters were leaving the country. Blamed the school for not keeping track of them. Then it turned out he was at a few flag-burning protests with one of the men who murdered Lee Rigby. One was outside the Israeli embassy and there’s a video of Bhashir screaming that all Jews should be killed.’

‘Was he arrested for that?’ asked Murray.

‘Not that I recall,’ said Kamran.

‘There were a lot of protesters and it would have been seen as inflammatory to start making arrests,’ said Waterman.

‘And what was the Lee Rigby connection?’ asked Murray.

‘One of Rigby’s killers, Michael Adebowale, was at one of the demonstrations with Bhashir, as was Anjem Choudary, the hate preacher.’

‘And despite that he wasn’t considered a threat?’ asked Murray, in disbelief.

‘They were at the same demonstration, so it’s only guilt by association,’ said Waterman.

‘But the fact that his daughters went to join ISIS should have been a red flag, surely,’ said the SAS captain.

‘As I said, he played the injured father perfectly. Blaming everyone else but himself. It was several months later that he was identified in the flag-burning episodes. I think it was the Mail that broke the story.’ Waterman pointed at the final photograph. ‘Mohammed Faisal Chaudhry. British born. Spent three months in Pakistan in 2014, we think for Al-Qaeda training but unfortunately we have no evidence. He returned to London at the end of the year and has been quiet since. He was a minicab driver before he went to Pakistan but has been on benefits since he got back. Runs a fundamentalist website but he’s careful to stay within the law.’

Kamran folded his arms and stared at the four photographs. ‘So we’ve got four men, none of whom was considered a direct threat. On the same day they all decide to put on suicide vests and take hostages. Someone is running them, right? Someone is pulling their strings.’

‘No question of that,’ said Waterman. ‘But so far we haven’t found anything that connects them personally. They are all Muslim men, all physically fit, three of them youngish and one middle-aged, all under fifty anyway, but other than that and the fact they live in London there doesn’t seem to be anything that ties them together.’

‘Except they’re all wearing explosive vests and seem prepared to blow themselves to kingdom come,’ said Murray, sourly.