Secret Asset

9

Dennis Rudge was sitting at the wheel of a taxi parked at a rank in the middle of Capel Street. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a copy of the Sun propped on the dashboard. His radio, tuned to Magic FM, was quietly playing soft pop, with occasional voice interruptions, which sounded to passersby like traffic updates. From where he sat he had a clear view of the bookshop and of Doris’s shop front across the road. He was in eye contact with Maureen Hayes and Lebert Johnson, sitting at a table outside the Red Lion pub further down the street. Lebert, who had a glass of something brown in front of him, was doing the Daily Mail crossword. Maureen was drinking mineral water, knitting and listening through headphones apparently to her iPod. In the other direction Alpha 4 and Alpha 5 were sitting in a dirty Peugeot 307, bickering noisily whenever anyone came past. Further members of A4 were parked up strategically in side roads, and a couple more cars were circling around the area.

In Doris Feldman’s sitting room, above her ironmonger’s shop, sat Wally Woods, comfortably ensconced in Doris’s armchair, with Esther the ancient cat sharing his knee with a powerful pair of binoculars.

Doris’s telephone call to the police five days before at three in the morning had turned out to be a blessing in disguise. As always with A2’s surreptitious entries, Special Branch had been told in advance about the operation. Hearing from uniform of Doris’s 999 call, they had promptly rung in to discuss the options with A2 control. The priority was clearly to reassure the caller, and one option was simply to explain that the “burglary” she’d seen was entirely innocent: the fuses had blown and the owner had sent in friends to replace them—something like that. The Special Branch men were adept at making up plausible stories. But if in the normal course of a day she mentioned the events of the weekend to the bookshop owner, it would be disastrous.

So they had decided to take a risk with the old woman, and at half-past three on Saturday morning, the officer from Special Branch sat in Doris Feldman’s sitting room drinking tea and explaining, in the vaguest possible terms, that there were strange happenings going on across the street, which he and his colleagues were trying to find out about. A mention of 9/11 here, a reference to Islamic fundamentalism there, and Doris had readily agreed not to say a word. More important, she happily allowed the use of the flat, which was ideally situated as a static surveillance point. That was how Wally Woods came to be sitting in her armchair, with his colleague at her dining-room table manning the communications. He sat like a spider at the centre of her web, liaising with the people on the street, and with a perfect view of the bookshop.

Coordinating the whole operation was Reggie Purvis in Thames House. He and a couple of colleagues were controlling the A4 teams and all the communications from the Operations Room, at the same time ignoring Dave Armstrong, who sat waiting impatiently beside them. Behind him, Tom Dartmouth paced back and forth, and from time to time, Wetherby came into the room to check progress.

In Doris’s flat, Wally Woods sat on, patiently waiting. Just before three o’clock a minicab pulled up in front of the bookshop. The driver, a young Middle Eastern man, got out on the street side and walked around to open the passenger door. After a moment, a much older man got out of the car. He was dressed in a white smock and wore on his head a white cap, with lines of gold thread. As he walked slowly towards the bookshop, the young man ran ahead and held the door open for him.

“Fox One has arrived and is now inside,” said Wally and the man at the table immediately spoke into the microphone. “All teams alert,” said Reggie Purvis in Thames House. “Fox One is in. Repeat Fox One is in.”

Nothing obvious changed in the immediate vicinity of the shop, though Dennis Rudge drained his coffee and Maureen put away her knitting. A4 were ready for whatever might happen, which only added to the tension since there was nothing to do but wait.

In Thames House, Judith Spratt arrived in the Operations Room. A tall woman, she had fine features and always looked effortlessly elegant whatever the circumstances.

“There’s been a phone call,” she announced to Dave and Tom Dartmouth. “To the bookshop. It didn’t last very long.”

“Who was it?” Tom Dartmouth demanded.

“Hard to say. The owner of the bookshop answered, and the caller asked if Rashid was there. He asked in English.”

“Who the hell is Rashid?” asked Dave.

Judith shrugged, as if to say “you tell me.” “The owner said there was no one by that name in the shop. Then the caller hung up.”

Tom asked, “Do we know who made the call? Anything come up on the eavesdropping?”

“Nothing from the mikes. No sound of Fox One at all. Just casual chat and cups of coffee from others in there. But the trace just came through. It’s an Amsterdam number. I’ll get on to it now. Give me ten minutes.” She picked up the phone.

In the AIVD office in Amsterdam, Pieter Abbink was reaching for the phone when it rang. Picking it up quickly, he said tersely, “Abbink.”

“Pieter, it’s Judith Spratt. From London.”

Abbink laughed out loud. “I had my hand on the telephone to call you when it rang.”

“Why was that?”

“We have a surveillance on a house here in Amsterdam. Not so good people. We’ve had a lot of chatter lately coming out of there. Internet, and some telephone. Somebody in the house just called a London number, and I was about to dial and ask if you could find out where it was.”

“It’s an Islamic bookshop in North London. And also a meeting place for some people we’d like to locate. They were meant to show up today, but they’re late.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“No, and that’s the problem. They’ve been sighted once by one of ours, but we don’t have any names. Though your caller asked for Rashid.”

Abbink chuckled. “That is a very big help—it’s like asking for Jan here in Holland.”

“I know. But it looks like there is some connection with Holland.”

“We’ll check the database, don’t worry. But why don’t I send you the photo bank?”

“You read my mind, Pieter. That’s why I was calling you.”

By three-thirty, Wally Woods had told Thames House three times that the men hadn’t shown, and by four o’clock, Reggie Purvis was focused on keeping his teams alert. He sent Maureen and Lebert Johnson off in Dennis Rudge’s taxi and directed the arguing couple to drive round the neighbourhood, keeping close by. When at last the Imam left the bookshop, his departure was greeted with relief by the A4 teams as they slotted in neatly behind him.

But the departure of the Imam meant the three young men were not going to show. Purvis kept his people deployed nonetheless, waiting forlornly until six o’clock when the staff went home and the shop closed. Wally Woods left his armchair to his colleague—a substitute would take over at eight that night—and went back to Thames House. The only lead lay with the Imam. Please God, thought Dave, still in the Operations Room, let him take us to them.

One hour later Charles Wetherby, having joined Tom Dartmouth and Dave Armstrong in the Operations Room, was dismayed (but not entirely surprised) to learn that Abu Sayed had been driven straight to Heathrow Airport, where he had checked in for a flight to Frankfurt on the first leg of his journey to Lahore.

To his seeming indifference, Abu Sayed had been upgraded to club class. At security no apparent attention was paid to his carry-on bag, and he positively sailed through passport control.

His one piece of checked luggage, an ancient but sturdy Samsonite case, received greater scrutiny. Deftly plucked from the conveyor belt in the outgoing luggage shed, it was inspected with a fine-tooth comb by no less than two veteran customs officers and an attending officer from Special Branch, looking for anything that might indicate the identity and whereabouts of the three young men who had failed to show up at the bookshop that afternoon.

They found nothing. Indeed, the only evidence at all that the Imam had even been in England lay in a neat stack at the very bottom of his suitcase. Whatever else Mahmood Abu Sayed had got up to during his stay, he had managed to find time to buy six new pairs of boxer shorts from the Marble Arch branch of Marks Spencer.