CHAPTER THREE
Herrick put down the
evening paper. It reported that Vice Admiral Norquist had not
recovered consciousness before expiring at 5.30 a.m. this morning,
May 15. He had died from heart failure during an operation to
remove the bullet that had lodged in his spine. The President of
the United States issued a statement saying that the assassination
of his friend and mentor was a deep personal blow to him and his
family, but more than this, it was another strike against America
and all good Americans should mourn his sacrifice.
Thinking that the
report was less than complete, Herrick turned to her desk and the
FBI watch list, a summary of essential information on every known
Muslim terrorist. She found this easier to use than the British
version because of its layout and concision. From left to right
appear the first names of the suspect or wanted felon, followed by
his aliases, date of birth, US social security number (if any),
place of birth, address, phone number and email. The far right
column gives a unique identity number for the suspect and, in the
middle of the page, there is a column headed Function. This column
is left blank in the version of the list circulated daily at 8.00
a.m. EST to banks and airlines, and copied into their computer
systems so that any transaction made by one of the individuals
triggers an alert. But in the thirty-four-page document lying in
front of her, the FBI logged trades against the names of some of
the 524 men - computer expert (trained engineer), weapons and
explosive expert, strategist /trainer, banker, facilitator and
communications specialist. Most were guesses and the addresses and
email accounts had long been abandoned, but the list fixed the last
known position of suspects and in one or two cases hinted that they
were anchored to a cover, like Youssef Rahe, although his name did
not appear.
She flipped through
the list once more, making notes and adding to a chart she’d begun
on a large sheet of drawing paper bought from a shop in Victoria
that afternoon. A series of names plus lines and arrows and several
brief sentences were written in her neat hand. She knew the diagram
didn’t add up to much, but she found it a useful way of working
through a problem, putting a thought down, discarding it and moving
on. On her desk were two packets of sandwiches, a piece of fruit
cake wrapped in cellophane, a bottle of water, a banana and a bar
of chocolate - not a feast considering the quantities of food she
put away during periods of concentration. She ate one of the
sandwiches distractedly and turned to the papers propped against
her computer screen and on the floor around her feet. These were
printouts of web pages showing the landing and take-off times for
planes that passed through Terminal Three the day before - a
timetable that varied considerably from the published schedules,
she noted.
She didn’t expect to
prove anything conclusively; it would be enough to show that Rahe’s
disappearance was important, though he clearly had no role in the
shooting of Norquist. She now knew for certain that he had not got
off KU102 in Kuwait. Half an hour before, a clear head-shot had
arrived of the man travelling on Rahe’s passport, taken in Kuwait
City airport before the individual flew on to the United Arab
Emirates. By this time he had disposed of Rahe’s clothes and
adopted the local white jellabah. However, the Kuwaiti Intelligence
service, al-Mukhabarat, were certain it was the
stand-in.
She emailed the
picture to Heathrow security and asked them to go through CCTV film
to see if he’d come from London or arrived on another flight. Her
belief was that he’d flown into Heathrow that morning, which was
why she was trying to match possible suspects’ names with
passengers who had ended up in Terminal Three, a forlorn task if
ever there was one. Still, she liked the solitary purpose of
working late and was buoyed by the idea that while the rest of the
Secret Intelligence Service was absorbed by muffled agony over the
killing of Norquist, she was at least making some positive steps to
unravel the events at the airport.
As she talked on the
phone to a security officer named George, she looked out of the
window and into the streams of traffic moving along the north bank
of the Thames. Her focus drew nearer, to her reflection in the
window, which she examined without reproof or anxiety. She looked
good for thirty-two, although the lights made her appear haggard
and - God - she had to get some new
clothes!
George still had
nothing for her. She put the phone down and went back to the watch
list, thinking that Manila was the perfect place for the stand-in
to embark. Just then she noticed a movement behind the glass panel
in the office wall and saw Richard Spelling, deputy head of MI6,
and his side-kick, Harry Cecil.
Before she had time
to compose herself or her desk, Spelling was inside the door. ‘Mr
Cecil here says you’ve got something good.’
‘That would be a bit
premature of Mr Cecil,’ she said, smiling at Cecil without
affection.
‘Well, you must have
something if you’ve been asking favours of our friends in Kuwait
City.’
‘I was checking on
the man who took Rahe’s place on the Kuwait flight. As you know, I
told Thames House yesterday afternoon, but I think they’re rather
tied up at the moment and nobody has got back to me about it. So I
thought I’d do some ground work.’ This was weak. She knew she was
going way beyond her role of walk-on part in the surveillance of
Rahe.
Spelling sat down on
the other side of her desk and indicated to Cecil that he was
dismissed. ‘I’ll say the Security Services are tied up!’ he
said.
Herrick cautioned
herself not to say too much. She nodded.
‘It doesn’t get much
worse than the President’s special envoy being killed before his
meeting with the Prime Minister. I mean, how bad does that make us
look?’ He gave her a despairing look and then exhaled heavily,
which caused his lips to vibrate. She didn’t like Spelling, his
punchy name-dropping manner or the managerial style that someone
had described as exultant decisiveness. Around the building it was
said that his intelligence was sharp rather than deep and that he
had none of the incorruptibility, shrewdness or ease of the
outgoing Chief, Sir Robin Teckman. Spelling had won the appointment
as a moderniser. There was much talk of horizontal management
structures and the flow of ideas between different levels, but the
evidence pointed to the opposite leaning. He was a hierarchical
bureaucrat pretending to be a general.
‘What do you make of
it?’ he asked. ‘The shooting, I mean.’
‘Well, I’ve been
pretty busy today. I haven’t had time to catch up with the people I
was working with yesterday.’
‘Yes, yes, but you
have a view. You must wonder.’
‘Yes, I wonder why
Admiral Norquist was on a scheduled flight and there was no
security prepared and ready to meet him. It all seems a bit
slapdash.’
‘And further down the
time line…?’
Time line was a
typical Spelling phrase. ‘You mean later on - when the shooting
occurred?’ She put it as neutrally as possible. ‘It looks pretty
confused.’ ‘Yes, it was certainly that.’
She remained silent.
It was still his call.
‘And you don’t have
any theories about where that bullet came from?’
‘Nothing apart from
what I’ve read. I imagine they’ll know if they retrieved it from
his body.’
‘Oh, I don’t think
that will happen.’
‘So there
was an exit wound. I didn’t notice that
mentioned in the papers. They said it was lodged in his
spine.’
‘They tend not to
publish too much of that sort of thing - it’s distressing for the
family.’
‘I see,’ she said,
understanding that there would be no official revision of the
story. Norquist had been ‘assassinated’ in an operation involving a
pair of young men, traced by the registration of one of the vans to
the Pakistani communities in the Midlands, and the truck driver,
who was also believed to be of Asian origin. With the two men dead
and the driver still missing after an escape through the
undergrowth along the railway embankment, the British media happily
accepted the theory of a carefully coordinated plan. The enthusiasm
for this account had not been dampened by the fact that no
detonator had been found attached to the drums of petrol on the
lorry.
His eyes scanned her
desk. He reached forward and turned one of the Terminal Three
schedules towards him. ‘Now, tell me what you’re doing here,
Isis.’
‘I’m trying to see
what Rahe’s likely destination was yesterday. ’
‘Any ID on the man
who took his place?’
‘Not
yet.’
‘Could you write a
side of theory backed up by a few facts? The Chief’s very
interested in what happened out at Heathrow.’
She hesitated.‘You
want a report on this? It’s all very preliminary…’
‘By tomorrow then. If
you need help, Sarre and Dolph are around. Tell them this is for me
and the Chief.’ He made for the door, but before he reached it,
stopped. ‘And in your report, leave out all mention of the
shooting. Just focus on the contemporaneous events at Heathrow.
That’s what interests us.’
Herrick went back to
the airline schedules. Out of seventy-two flights to land between
5.55 a.m. and 1.45 p.m., fifty-one had come from the United States
or Canada, which she excluded for the moment because of the
heightened airport security and emigration watches in North
America. The remaining twenty-one flights came from places such as
Abu Dhabi, Dhaka, Johannesburg, Beirut and Tehran, cities where
controls were far less stringent. She guessed that most of the
aircraft were wide-bodied jets, carrying an average of two hundred
passengers, which meant that around four thousand people had landed
at Heathrow that morning. It would be an enormous task to search
all the flights for a man matching the picture, and to establish
what had happened to Rahe.
She founded Philip
Sarre in the library, leafing through some material on Uzbekistan,
which he informed her was now his speciality. ‘If you go to
Langley, you find whole rooms of Uzbek specialists; here it’s me in
my coffee break.’
Sarre always
maintained that he had been brainwashed by MI6 and was actually
meant to be in Cambridge watching particle acceleration
experiments. His friend Andy Dolph was equally improbable. The son
of an independent bookie, he had come to MI6 via the City of London
and a banking job in the Gulf States where he had allowed himself
to be recruited to relieve the boredom. Sarre reported that Dolph
was across the river in a pub waiting for him and an Africa
specialist named Joe Lapping. Sarre said he’d extract both men and
bring them to Heathrow.
An hour later Herrick
and the three men were crowded into the security room at Terminal
Three having arranged for two of the technical people to stay as
long as they were needed. Their first break came after 1.00 a.m.
Dolph had been going over the film from the gates of two flights
that landed consecutively from Bangkok at 9.15 and 9.40 a.m. when
he saw the man who had taken Rahe’s place walk off the second
flight. Wearing a dark red jacket, a bright tie with hibiscus
motif, grey trousers and black shoes, he was among the last
passengers to leave the plane. This told them that he had probably
been seated at the back of the Thai International Airways 747. The
airline’s records showed that one of the rearmost seats had been
occupied by an Indonesian national named Nabil Hamzi, who they
later found was travelling on to Copenhagen at 11.40 a.m. from
Terminal Three.
Herrick gasped. ‘Rahe
didn’t check in until past midday,’ she said.
‘So?’ said
Sarre.
‘Don’t be a fucking
idiot,’ said Dolph. ‘It means that Rahe couldn’t have made the
Copenhagen flight. And that means there wasn’t a straight swap
between Rahe and Hamzi.’
‘There had to be a
third man, at least,’ said Sarre.
‘By George, he’s got
it,’ said Dolph, pinching Sarre’s cheek.
‘And the third man
must have arrived in the airport before eleven to give him time to
change clothes, tickets and passports with Hamzi and get himself to
the Copenhagen departure gate.’
They crowded round a
screen to watch film of flight SK 502 to Copenhagen boarding and
with little surprise saw a man in a red jacket, hibiscus tie and
grey trousers waiting to present his boarding card and passport. It
was neither Rahe nor Hamzi but another individual who was the same
height and build and who was also in his mid-to-late thirties.
After a couple of hours they found this man on footage from one of
the long corridors leading to the departure gates. Then, working
back through recordings made by a series of cameras, they traced
him to a flight from Vancouver. This worried Herrick - it had
implications for the other North American airlines. Still, there
was no way of pairing the face with a seat number and therefore a
name, because they couldn’t work out at what stage he’d left the
aircraft. However, Dolph realised that there was probably a
pattern.
‘Look,’ he said.
‘These guys aren’t going to be travelling with baggage in the hold.
And they are all likely to be booked on connecting flights out of
Heathrow on the afternoon of the fourteenth. So all we have to do
is go through the manifest of the Vancouver flight and match the
two criteria.’
This produced the
name Manis Subhi, who was travelling on a Philippine passport and
had left London for Beirut four hours after landing.
Herrick wondered out
loud whether she should let Spelling know the provisional
results.
‘No, let’s tie this
thing up, darling,’ said Dolph. ‘Present them with a fucking bunch
of roses in the morning. Let’s follow the trail until it
ends.’
Sarre reminded them
that they hadn’t yet discovered the eventual destination of
Rahe.
‘Maybe it’s not so
important,’ said Herrick. ‘Perhaps he was just one element in a
serial identity switch involving many people.’
‘A daisy chain,’ said
Dolph.
‘Yes, just because we
spotted that Rahe didn’t get on the right plane, it doesn’t mean
he’s the crucial figure. He unwittingly let us in on the secret -
that’s all.’
‘He loaned out his
identity?’ said Dolph.
‘Could be. The whole
point must be to shuffle a lot of key figures at once, and they can
do that here in Terminal Three.’
‘Because it’s like
the General Assembly of the United Nations,’ said
Dolph.
‘No, because
departing and arriving passengers mingle on their way to and from
the gates. Also, passports are barely inspected when passengers are
boarding - the airline just matches the name on the passport with
the name on the boarding card.’
They watched film of
the Middle Eastern airlines flight to Beirut, recorded by a camera
close to the desk, and duly noted that Manis Subhi had been
replaced by another, obviously taller man who, other than wearing
the red jacket, hardly bothered to impersonate him. He also carried
a bag that Subhi had not had with him. Then by chance, when the
technician made an error and fast-forwarded the film instead of
rewinding it, they spotted Rahe in a dark suit carrying a camera
bag. This meant that Rahe had left for Beirut with another man
involved in the operation.
It was now 5.00 a.m.
and Herrick had seen all she needed. She asked the technicians to
splice together the film of each man onto a single videotape. Then
she borrowed a security pass and a radio and walked into the
terminal building. There was a surprising amount of activity in the
public areas - maintenance men fiddling with cable ducts, gangs of
cleaners moving slowly with their machines like ruminants, and one
or two passengers waiting for the first flights out. After half an
hour, having tramped the best part of a couple of miles, she found
what she was looking for.
Discreetly tucked
into a bend was a men’s lavatory, the entrance completely hidden
from CCTV cameras. She went in and found a cleaner wiping down the
basins. The name on his identity tag read Omar Ahsanullah and by
the look of him she guessed he was Bangladeshi. The washroom was
relatively small and consisted of six cubicles, a row of urinals,
four basins and a locked storeroom.
She nodded to the
man, then went out and radioed Dolph in the security room. She
wanted him to watch as she walked down the corridor so that he’d
see the exact moment she disappeared from view on the cameras. They
found there was a blind spot of about fifty feet either side of the
entrance. Although they were unable to watch the washroom’s
entrance, she realised they would be able to go back over the film
for the two nearest cameras and get all they needed: anyone making
their way to the men’s toilet would have to pass under them. Dolph
said he would try to verify her theory by checking the film for
these two cameras from 12.30 until 2.00 p.m. to see if Rahe
showed.
The sight of the
cleaners reminded her that there must have been a man on duty in
the lavatory when the men were swapping their clothes and
possessions. She went back in. The cleaner explained that there
were two shifts, one that started at 5.30 a.m. and finished at 2.30
p.m., another that ended at 11.30 p.m. It was possible to do a
double shift, and those with many relatives back home often needed
the extra money. As he spoke, she suddenly saw the drudgery and
fatigue in his eyes and she remarked that it must be a hard
life.
He stopped polishing
the mirror and replied that yes, it was tiring, but he was in the
West and his children would get a good education. He was lucky. He
paused, then told her if he was looking unduly sad that day it was
because a friend, a fellow Bangladeshi, had died in a fire. His
wife, two children and his mother had also died. Herrick remembered
hearing about the blaze in Heston on the radio news the day before.
It was being investigated as a hate crime. She said how sorry she
was.
The man continued to
talk about his friend in a distracted way and then as an
after-thought mentioned that he had been a cleaner at Heathrow too.
He had been working there on the day he died, the
fourteenth.
‘Here?’ asked
Herrick, now very alert. ‘In this washroom?’
The man said that he
was on this floor on Tuesday because they had both worked double
shifts that day. But he couldn’t be sure that he was working in
this exact toilet.
‘I am sorry about
your loss,’ she said. ‘Is it possible for you to give me his
name?’
‘Ahmad Ahktar,’ said
the man.
She said goodbye. As
she was about to leave the washroom she noticed a sign propped
under the basins. She bent down and turned it, almost knowing that
it would read ‘Out of service’.
By the time she got
back to the control room, they had found Rahe on the film taken
near the lavatory. More important, they had got him in both sets of
clothing and were able to see which man he had changed with. Dolph
and Lapping had started cross-referencing the information they had
gathered with names on the FBI and British watch lists. It was an
inexact process but they had seven faces to play with. Dolph made
an impressive case that two of them belonged to an Indonesian cell.
He told them he’d lay odds on it.
Herrick had other
things on her mind. It was obvious that the timing of this
operation was subject to flights arriving late or being diverted.
They must have built flexibility into the schedule so that if one
man was delayed, there was still someone for him to switch
identities with. That probably meant there were one or two
floaters, men who at the beginning of the day were prepared to be
sent anywhere. These would have to be European citizens with clean
passports who could board a plane bound for Barcelona or Copenhagen
and enter the country without raising suspicion. She thought of
Rahe, a British citizen, sitting in the Garden of Remembrance.
Although they hadn’t seen him use his phone, he must have received
a text message or phone call to tell him when he was due to
swap.
Some of the detail
could wait, but they were getting a picture of an impressive
operation. To put as many as a dozen people into Heathrow from all
over the world, with passports that were stamped with the correct
visas, and then to achieve what was in effect a relay switch,
required miraculous scheduling skills. Whoever was controlling the
switches would need to speak to each man the moment he arrived,
which was why, she now realised, three suspects had been filmed
talking on their mobiles just after disembarkation. The controller
would also have to ensure that the men didn’t all arrive in the
washroom at the same time. An early flight might leave a man
loitering in the corridors, drawing attention to himself, so a
premature arrival would have to be taken out of circulation,
perhaps hidden in the locked storage cupboard, until the moment his
pair arrived and he could be sent on his way.
There was one more
question she needed to answer before returning to London and
writing the report for Spelling, which she now rather
relished.
She went down to
Arrivals, bought a cup of coffee and stationed herself under the
flight displays. Heathrow was now open for business. Four flights
were expected in the next quarter of an hour and already the
roped-off exit from Customs was fringed with small welcoming
parties.
She noticed that the
chauffeurs and company drivers seemed to know instinctively when
planes had landed and the passengers would start to clear Customs.
Often the drivers appeared from the car park exit with just a few
seconds to spare. She asked a lugubrious man clutching a sign and
sipping coffee how they managed it. ‘Trick of the trade,’ he said,
blowing across the cup. ‘The top deck of the car park for this
terminal has the best view of the airport. When you see your
aircraft landing you drive down to the lower floor and then you
know you’ve got another half hour or so to wait. It makes a
difference if you’re doing this three times a week.’
‘What about when it’s
busy?’ she asked.
‘At peak you’ve got
about forty to fifty minutes,’ he replied.
Herrick could have
gone back to the control room, satisfied that she’d tied up all the
loose ends of the operation, but the obsessive part of her nature
told her there was always more to be had by seeing something for
yourself. A few minutes later she was standing in the open on the
top level of the car park with a little huddle of plane spotters.
She watched for a while, briefly marvelling that men stirred so
early in the day to jot down the details of very ordinary-looking
Jumbo jets, then caught the eye of a man with an untidy growth of
beard and asked him if this was always the best place to see the
aircraft.
‘Not always,’ he
replied without removing his eyes from a jet taxiing in to the
terminal. ‘They change the runways at three in the afternoon on the
dot. Whichever one is being used for take-off becomes the landing
runway. Then we go across to Terminal Two and watch from the proper
viewing terrace.’
She was about to ask
him whether he had seen anyone acting unusually the day before
last, but thought better of it. That was a detail. Special Branch
could deal with it later.
She walked out of
earshot of the plane spotters towards the centre of the near-empty
car park and dialled the duty officer at Vauxhall
Cross.
It was 6. 45 a.m.
Isis noticed she was very hungry.