CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Three hours later a
cab dropped her at the end of the one-way system on Gabriel Road,
which was now decked out in the full municipal splendour of almond
and cherry blossom. With her bag over her shoulder, she walked the
remaining hundred yards to her house, telling herself that once
she’d showered and had breakfast at the café round the corner she
wouldn’t feel so tired.
She reached her front
door and lowered the bag to the ground to search for her house
keys. As her hands moved from pocket to pocket, her eyes ran over
the house and came to rest on an upstairs window where the curtains
were drawn. She was sure they hadn’t been left that way because
when she was leaving for Tirana she had stood at the window
watching for the cab. She put the key in one of the two locks and
found it had already been turned; only the Yale lock was keeping
the door shut. She placed her ear to the letter-box. The cool air
from inside the house brushed her cheek like a breath. There was
something wrong - a smell of someone, a sense of
occupation.
She turned the Yale
lock and slipped inside. There was a sound coming from upstairs:
someone was moving about at leisure, unaware that she was in the
house. She stepped back into the garden and dialled the emergency
services on her mobile. The woman instructed her not to confront
the intruder but to wait at a distance from the house, which was
what she planned to do once she had retrieved a baseball bat she
kept in her umbrella stand. She darted inside again, but as she
seized the bat a dark shape appeared at the top of the stairs. She
dived from the house, conscious only of the need for room to swing
the bat. In almost no time at all, the man had rushed the stairs
and taken hold of her, and was trying to drag her inside. She
screamed and slipped from his grasp, then let the bat slide through
her hands until she felt the knob at the top of the handle. She
drew it back over her shoulder and brought it down against the side
of the man’s head, causing him to yell out. A second, much cleaner
shot concentrated all her energy into the fat end of the bat and
felled him, unconscious, into the path of another man who had come
down the stairs. The obstruction gave her a fraction of a second to
run through the gateway and dive behind the hedge, but in that
moment she registered that the man had pulled a gun from his
waistband. A bullet whistled through the hedge and tore into a car
parked in the road, setting off its alarm. She spun round and ran a
few yards down the street to shelter behind a van, hearing the
screech of a police patrol car in the road. Two officers tumbled
out just before bullets exploded in the bodywork and windscreen of
their vehicle. A stocky man in trainers and an oversized leather
blouson stepped into the road. The policemen had dropped behind the
patrol car, but instead of running off, the gunman kept moving
forward, taking aim and firing with cool deliberation. Herrick
popped up and saw his close-cropped head through the front
windscreen of the van and decided that unless she did something, he
would kill the officers.
Crouching low, she
hurtled along the gutter and rounded the front of the van. The man
was obscured from her, but from the sound of two further deafening
shots she judged he was only a matter of feet away. She moved a few
paces, saw his back then lunged at him, leading with her left foot
and bringing all her weight down with the blow. She connected
squarely with the back of his neck and knocked him forwards. But
the gun was still in his hand. She jumped to the right, knowing
that she had just one chance, and struck him with all her might
across the shoulder, aware of the tennis-serve grunt that escaped
her lungs. The man was still on his feet, but the gun had flown
from his hands and landed under the van. For a split second they
looked at each other, then he scrambled away, his feet slipping
momentarily on the snowfall of almond blossom, to flee down the
centre of the road with his arms working double time like a
character from a silent movie. Herrick crouched to retrieve the gun
and without straightening, swung round and fired at the retreating
figure. She missed, aimed again but didn’t pull the trigger because
one of the policemen yelled at her. ‘Hey, Stop that. Put the gun
down!’ She stood up and handed it to him, and both officers set off
after the man, but by now he was fifty yards away and opening a car
door. In one movement he slid behind the wheel and started the car
engine. Seconds later his car had vanished.
With a burst radiator
and a flat, the police car was hardly in a state to pursue him. The
officers radioed details of the fugitive and returned to examine
the injured man, who had come round but was still lying on the
ground in a daze. His head was bleeding copiously and Herrick went
to fetch a cloth from her kitchen to stem the flow. She told the
policemen that the incident should be regarded as a security matter
and that she would need to make a call. They stood looking a little
bemused as she phoned one of the Chief ’s assistants at Vauxhall
Cross and asked him to get in touch with the local
station.
The injured man
struggled to a sitting position and began to curse and wail in a
foreign language.
One of the officers
knelt down beside him. ‘What the hell’s he speaking?’
‘I think you’ll find
it’s Albanian,’ replied Herrick. She looked down at the stocky
little man with russet-coloured skin and slightly protruding ears.
He could be the Albanian interrogator’s brother.
‘With the way you
must have hit him, miss, he’s lucky to be alive.’ He pressed the
cloth to the gash on the side of the man’s head. ‘But by heck, I’m
glad you dropped the other fellow. He meant business.’
The other officer
looked at the gun and read the inscription on the side of the
barrel. ‘Desert Eagle fifty AE pistol - Israel Military Industries
Limited.’ He paused. ‘You only have to see what it’s done to the
car to know you don’t want to be in the way of that
thing.’
People began to
gather in the street and soon afterwards an ambulance and three
other squad cars arrived. The man was taken away for treatment
under guard while Herrick went inside with one of the two
constables to find the house turned upside down. The policeman
observed that burglars normally made a pile of the things they
intended to steal, but in this case the obvious items of value -
the TV set, jewellery, CD player, and odd bits of antique silver -
had been left untouched.
‘What would two
Albanian villains be wanting to search your house
for?’
‘Your guess is as
good as mine,’ she said.
She made a statement,
which he took down at laborious speed in his notebook, contriving
to extend two or three minutes’ action into a forty-minute feature.
Herrick tidied and filled the drawers and cupboards while he
spoke.
‘What do you do for a
living, Miss Herrick?’ asked the constable finally.
‘I’m civil service,’
she replied. ‘And I have a very important meeting in an
hour.’
‘We could give you a
lift into town and I can fill the gaps in your statement while my
colleague drives.’
‘Fine, but I have to
shower and eat and clear up a bit.’ She thought for second. ‘It
would make my life a lot easier if you would get me two bacon and
egg sandwiches and a cup of coffee from the café on Rosetti Road,
just round the corner.’
‘Two!’
‘Yes, two, unless you
both want something, in which case I’ll treat you.’ She proffered a
twenty-pound note. ‘Really, it would be a big help.’
He examined her. ‘Are
you sure you’re all right? Not suffering from shock or
anything?’
‘As a matter of fact,
I’m feeling pretty damned good. It’s not every day you get the
chance to knock out a man with baseball bat.’
He took the money and
went to the door, just as the bell rang. Herrick looked round from
the kitchen to see him open it to a man in a chauffeur’s
uniform.
‘Yes?’ she called
out.
‘Miss Herrick? A
package from the Nabil Commercial Bank. You are expecting me. I
have it for you, here.’
It was only when she
took the fat brown envelope from him and recognised the handwriting
on the address label that she realised this was the package Sally
Cawdor had promised her.
It occurred to her
that the contents of the package were the only thing that anyone
could want from her. But why were two Albanian thugs looking for
it? Some twenty minutes later as she sat at her kitchen table,
working her way through the crusty bread bacon sandwiches, she
began to put a theory together.
‘Cunning is the dark
sanctuary of incapacity,’ said the Chief quietly. ‘Are you familiar
with that aphorism, Isis? It comes from the Earl of Chesterfield,
who knew that cunning is a substitute for talent and originality.
In this particular situation someone is being very cunning indeed,
so perhaps it is simply a matter of looking around us and settling
on the least talented.’ She knew he was referring to Richard
Spelling and Walter Vigo.
‘Despite everything,
I wonder if the business at my house is really a side issue, Sir
Robin,’ said Herrick, wanting to get off the subject of what the
men were looking for and why they might have been sent by
Vigo.
‘If you really think
that is the case,’ he said, ‘I am happy to leave it, at least for
the moment.’ He turned to the window with his glasses lodged in the
corner of his mouth. ‘Do you know how many people are under
surveillance by the Security Services, Special Branch and us,
Isis?’ he asked suddenly.
‘No.’
‘About five hundred
and fifty require close attention. And that’s in this country
alone. Outside, the number reaches into the thousands.’ He paused
and turned from the view. ‘Yet the preponderance of our effort is
deployed watching nine people.’
‘I feel rather
responsible for that. I’m—’
‘You did your job. It
is the reaction to the discoveries you made at Heathrow that is
flawed, and I am more than responsible for that.’
‘But the Prime
Minister only has to say the word and we bring all the foreign
intelligence services into the operation and immediately diminish
the commitment as well as the exposure.’
He nodded slowly. He
couldn’t say it, but she understood that Spelling and Vigo had
monopolised the advice going to the Prime Minister. ‘Who knew that
you would not be sleeping at the Bunker after your shift? You had
your bag with you, so it was a fair assumption that you would be
staying there.’
‘Only Andy Dolph, I
think.’
‘So anyone else might
imagine your house was free to be searched at leisure
today?’
‘I suppose
so.’
‘And you say they
were definitely Albanians?’
‘The second man
wasn’t apprehended, but the one in hospital is certainly
Albanian.’
‘Interesting,’ said
the Chief. ‘But as you say, this is beside the point. I think we
should move on to Karim Khan.’
He pressed a button
on his desk and got up. ‘I have made a lot of calls on your energy
and I’m going to ask that you give a little more over the coming
week. I hope that will be in order.’
He showed her to the
door at the side of his office and they made their way to a room
sealed off from the outside world, reputedly armoured and protected
from every known surveillance device. They sat down at the table
and the Chief looked expectantly at the door. After a few seconds
it opened and Colin Guthrie, the head of the joint MI5-MI6
anti-terrorist controllerate and his main aide, Gregor Laughland,
came in. They were followed by Charles Harrison, head of Security
and Public Affairs, his deputy Christine Selvey, Philip Sarre and
three men she had not seen before. The group had a marked
conspiratorial air about it and Herrick was intrigued that both
Guthrie and Selvey were in attendance, since they had originally
been supporters of RAPTOR. Perhaps they’d thrown their lot in with
the Chief knowing they’d be thrown out under the new regime. More
likely the Chief had encouraged them to attach themselves to RAPTOR
to find out what was going on and report back to him.
The Chief began
speaking in a quiet, uncertain tone that gave the impression he did
not know quite what he was going to say. ‘Time is short and I
believe we have only a matter of days to act.’ He gestured to the
three strangers. ‘These gentlemen are from a security firm that
specialises in hostage negotiation. In a moment I will ask the
firm’s head of operations, whom I will call Colonel B, to speak
about the plan he has been putting together for us in the
twenty-four hours since we heard that Karim Khan had been flown for
interrogation to Cairo. Colonel B’s team will remain anonymous to
all but myself and Colin Guthrie. It is Colonel B’s condition that
their involvement in this matter will not be referred to outside
this room and so I stress to you all that the need for secrecy has
never been more imperative.’
He stopped and looked
round his staff, seeking a sign of consent in each person. Herrick
understood that it was not simply for the consultant’s peace of
mind. The Chief was going beyond his powers as specified by the
Foreign Office and Parliament. Despite the studied calm and
modulation of his voice, this was a desperate last move and might
very well also be Herrick’s last work for the Service.
‘Over the next few
days,’ he continued, ‘we plan to remove Karim Khan from the custody
of the local intelligence service and question him in the proper
manner. It is my belief that this man possesses crucial information
about future terrorist attacks in the West. In particular he can
identify two, maybe even three, terrorist leaders who have so far
escaped our attention. The first problem is that Mr Khan is being
questioned simply as an operative who may, or may not, be involved
in a particular attack. Mr Khan’s knowledge is, I am certain, of a
much more general and historic nature. He knows much, but is not in
a position to appreciate what he knows, or how valuable it could
be.
‘The second problem
is that our American friends are convinced Mr Khan knows things
that are of immediate worth. They are therefore content to allow
the Egyptians to torture him until he talks. Previously the
Egyptians have been constrained by the requirement to produce
foreign suspects in court, which entails exposure of their methods.
But there will be no court case for Mr Khan because he is being
held as Jasur Faisal and a sentence has already been passed on him,
in his absence. So the Egyptians will have a free hand. Hence our
need to move quickly.
‘Now, we already have
good information about where he is being held. Up until 6.00 a.m.
today he was in a holding cell in police headquarters in central
Cairo. At some stage he will be removed to a facility attached to a
very secure prison on the southern outskirts of the city, at which
point we may give up all hope of freeing him. According to our
people, there are no signs of that yet. We have pulled out all the
stops on this one and the sources of information are proving fast
and responsive to our requests, so I am confident that at least in
this regard we’re not working in the dark.
‘Before Colonel B
outlines his thoughts, I want to say what happens after we have got
Khan. The immediate aim will be to restore him to a condition where
he is able to talk about what he knows. This will not be a simple
matter. He is likely to be quite badly injured, to say nothing of
the psychological trauma of torture. What I have in mind is this:
we do not attempt to exfiltrate Khan immediately, but keep him in
Egypt at the safe location being prepared at the moment by some
unusual associates of ours. It is important that Khan sees some
friendly faces - people he knows he can trust.
‘His oldest friend,
Sammi Loz, will be on hand. Loz is an excellent doctor and I am
hoping we can rely on him to treat Khan. Also at this location will
be Robert Harland who has been shadowing Loz, and Isis Herrick who
saw Khan in custody in Tirana a couple of days ago. It will be
Isis’s job to question him, and since she has already attempted to
intervene to prevent him being hurt, I believe he will be inclined
to trust her. There will be backup but we will keep them out of
sight. Once Khan has given us what we need, we will bring him to
this country and provide safe asylum. Any questions?’
The only question in
Herrick’s mind was why the Chief believed Khan knew enough to risk
mounting the operation, but no one asked a question and she decided
to keep quiet. It was clear the members of SIS in the room had
decided to pay him the supreme compliment of taking him on
trust.
‘I should point out
that if any of you are caught in Egypt,’ continued Teckman after a
brief pause, ‘Her Majesty’s Government will deny all knowledge of
you. However, I am satisfied that we stand a very good chance of
success, and that even if we do not get Khan out, all of you will
be able to disperse and leave the country without difficulty. The
one problem is that our friends at the CIA will be in evidence. We
should of course make every effort to avoid injuring these people.
They may be misguided, but they are still our allies, and in the
end I believe they will come to see the error of their ways in this
matter.’
He handed over to
Colonel B, a compact man in his mid-forties with sandy hair, a
freckled tan and pale crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. The
colonel stood and opened a laptop which sent a series of maps,
diagrams and satellite photographs to a large screen at the end of
the table. Over the next hour and a half, he roughed out several
plans, each of which required intensive surveillance of the route
between the police headquarters and the prison. Meeting places,
covers and arrangements for communication between members of SIS
and the snatch team were then settled.
After two hours,
including a break for coffee and sandwiches, the colonel closed his
laptop and looked around the room. ‘Generally, I find in these
operations that we have to be very light on our feet and willing to
adapt to new circumstances. Everything we have sketched out may
fall apart. Success will come, but only
if we are prepared to change our plans at a moment’s notice.’ He
shook the Chief’s hand with military firmness and made for the door
with his two silent lieutenants.
Before leaving,
Teckman drew Herrick aside. ‘A lot of this operation relies on your
ability to gain the trust of Khan and Sammi Loz, but you will have
to watch Loz like a hawk. Harland will be with you, armed. He is on
his way to Egypt with Loz now.’
He reached over to a
dark blue plastic box the size of a computer case. ‘This is the
medical equipment which Loz will need to treat Khan after his
ordeal. It contains all the usual drugs - antibiotics, vitamins,
anti-inflammatory drugs, painkillers, sleeping pills - and some
unusual ones, together with bandages and syringes. Our people have
tried to allow for the sorts of injuries Khan will have sustained
at the hands of The Doctor. Loz will know what to do with them. If
not, there are instructions for each. In the unlikely event of your
being questioned by Egyptian customs, you will say this is the
emergency pack for the elderly patient you and Christine Selvey are
accompanying.’
‘Which elderly
patient?’ she asked.
A flicker of a smile
escaped the mouth that had been set in grim purpose for the past
two hours. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely open with you, Isis,
but there has been very little time. Your father has agreed to take
part in the operation.’
‘What! You can’t be
serious. He’s in his eighties.’
‘It’s only a very
minor capacity and I still have the highest regard for his
abilities.’ He put up a hand to silence her objection. ‘Besides,
what would be better cover than you and his devoted nurse
travelling to see the Pyramids at Giza and Saqqara?’
‘But it is such a
liability. I can’t think of a worse way of going about an
operation.’
‘Nonsense. The moment
Khan is in our hands, your father will travel home with Christine
Selvey, with whom, by the way, he gets on splendidly.’
‘With Christine
Selvey!’
‘Security and Public
Affairs are not all she knows. She gave up field-work a dozen years
ago because there was no one to look after her ailing mother in the
evening. She was an excellent operative. Quite
superb.’
Herrick shook her
head in disbelief. ‘It’s so bloody unorthodox, sending two related
people on the same job.’
‘The whole thing is
bloody unorthodox, Isis.’ He didn’t smile. ‘Now, all you have to
concentrate on is getting Khan to a point where he can tell you
what he knows. I believe you are right about Bosnia and I’m sure
that line of inquiry will prove fruitful. In the meantime I will
tell Spelling that you’re doing some work for me.’
She wondered
fleetingly whether to tell him about the package from Beirut that
she had forwarded to the address in Oxford before getting to the
office, then decided that there wouldn’t be any point until she had
got the results.