CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The seascapes by
Cavendish Morton, the photographs and the small bronze of a man
fly-fishing were back in the Chief’s office by lunchtime that
Monday. Also returned to his complete control was the British end
of RAPTOR, which took rather less time to effect than the hanging
of his pictures. As he moved round his office, trying new positions
for the canvasses, he dictated a memorandum that instructed RAPTOR
to focus its efforts on preparing the foreign agencies for the
arrest and charge of the suspects. The teams in the Bunker were
instructed to concentrate their resources on predicting the exact
location of every suspect over the next forty-eight hours, so that
decisions could be taken about a coordinated action across Europe.
At the same time, RAPTOR was tasked to provide evidence against the
helper cells, the men and women who had smoothed the way for the
suspects to merge into the life of cities all over Europe.
Preliminary estimates suggested that in each case at least ten
people might be arrested and charged with aiding and abetting a
terrorist plot, although there was some doubt as to whether the
evidence was strong enough to meet the requirements of more liberal
regimes in Scandinavia. All governments were to be urged to use the
Al Capone option: to seek convictions and custodial sentences for
ordinary criminal matters such as theft, fraud and forgery, rather
than for terrorism.
As British diplomats
began to sound out and brief governments, they insisted that a news
blackout was required until at least the end of the week, by which
time the date mentioned by Loz in the recording would have been
reached. In several conference calls, the Chief acknowledged that
there were likely to be check-in systems designed to alert a
central control figure of an arrest. The failure of one suspect to
make regular contact might be enough to tip off the entire network.
The reaction of most security services was still to press for
arrest at the earliest possible date. The Chief also told them
about Mohammed bin Khidir, the man apprehended in Stuttgart who had
died when he bit into a cyanide capsule. The other suspects were
likely to have been equipped with suicide pills in their teeth, so
drugging them, perhaps by dart, would be a necessity rather than an
option.
Herrick was present
for most of these conversations and noticed once or twice a
distinct lack of surprise in the voices of the various intelligence
chiefs, especially from the French and Italians. Between calls she
remarked as much to Teckman.
The Chief gave her an
injured look and said, ‘After the work you have done for us, you
can pretty much write your own ticket, Isis, but I do urge you not
to give voice to these unworthy suspicions.’
Of course, she
thought, the crafty old buzzard had found a way of keeping his main
European allies in the picture. For a moment she marvelled at the
ferocious will that lay beneath the Chief’s cheerful, gregarious
presence.
One thing that
remained held tightly to the chest of the British Secret
Intelligence Service was the identity of Sammi Loz and Youssef
Rahe, now in Teckman’s mind established as Yahya or The Poet. The
Chief considered issuing descriptions and backgrounds, but then
decided not to risk either of the men hearing that they were still
regarded as live threats. He saw to it that Sammi Loz’s name lost
the prominent place it had occupied on the FBI watch list for the
last few weeks. Agents monitoring the empty consulting rooms in the
Empire State withdrew.
In a gap between the
Chief’s calls and discussions, Herrick phoned Dolph on his
mobile.
‘Where are you,
Dolphy?’ she said.
‘In the sticks,
having coffee with Britain’s premier war photographer. He’s just
agreed to download his entire Bosnian archive into my
computer.’
‘You should be here.
Things are moving fast.’
‘Yeah. I heard from
Nathan Lyne. Look, I may have hit the jackpot with this stuff. I’m
bringing it back.’
‘Come to the office.
There have been changes.’
‘Yeah, Nathan told me
that, too.’
‘You don’t seem
surprised.’
‘I’m not. They
shouldn’t have messed with you. Though I have to say I didn’t fancy
your chances yesterday.’
‘You were right: they
fired me.’
‘Tossers. Now look,
I’m kind of busy here. Why don’t you call Hélène Guignal. She’s the
bird who was in Sarajevo. I think she’s good. Really, I’ve got a
feeling about her.’
She dialled Nato
headquarters in Brussels five times before getting through to a
colleague of Guignal’s in the Press Office who said Hélène was on
vacation. Pretending to be a spokesman from the Ministry of Defence
who needed Guignal urgently, Herrick managed to extract a mobile
number that would raise her on the island of Skiathos. She tried
this, but the phone was turned off.
She returned to the
Chief’s office. Teckman looked distracted for a second, then leapt
from his desk. ‘Come with me.’
A Jaguar with
outriders took them to Battersea Heliport, where Guthrie was
already waiting with Barbara Markham and her deputy. The helicopter
took less than ten minutes to touch down at Northolt, near to the
Bunker’s entrance.
‘Do you know, I’ve
never seen this operation,’ he murmured to Herrick as they
descended in the lift.
‘You didn’t need to,’
she said.
‘Perhaps if I had
come here I would have seen what made you so annoyed,’ he
smiled.
When they had reached
the Bunker, Teckman strode into the main space and nodded to the
people he recognised. Nathan Lyne rose from his desk and came over
to Herrick. ‘So, Isis. I see no Vigo. I see Richard Spelling
twisting slowly in the wind. And here you are with all the great
panjandrums of the British security establishment. What the hell
have you been up to?’
‘Not
much.’
He grinned. ‘Just in
case you’re feeling bad about Walter…’
‘I
wasn’t.’
‘He knew you were on
that island with those two men. Your communications traffic made
that clear.’
‘Did you know about
it, Nathan?’
‘Of course not. I had
no idea where you were. Even Andy Dolph wouldn’t tell me. But
you’re safe - that’s what matters - and your stock’s risen. Things
have turned out well for you.’
‘But we lost one of
the suspects. This wasn’t just any old suspect. He was really
important. And we don’t have much time.’ She noticed that the Chief
had sat down in front of one of the larger screens. ‘Come and talk
him through it all,’ she said. ‘He’s going to need you over the
next few days.’
The Chief shook his
hand without rising. ‘I’ve heard about you. I gather you were
responsible for sending Isis to Albania, Mr Lyne. That was a very
good decision. Now tell me what I’m looking at.’
Lyne pulled up a
chair and went through the screens devoted to the nine remaining
suspects. Most were live feeds from inside and around the
apartments where they were living. Ramzi Zaman, the Moroccan, could
be seen passing through the field of the camera, preparing a meal
in his little kitchen in Toulouse. Lasenne Hadaya, the edgy
Algerian, was seated on a couch, aimlessly throwing a ball into the
air and catching it. In Budapest, Hadi Dahhak, a diminutive Yemeni
with a hooked nose, was seen arguing with two men over a newspaper.
Lyne said that all they ever talked about was football. He ran a
piece of recent film which showed the Syrian suspect, Hafiz al
Bakr, strolling in a park with one of his helpers. The story was
the same with the Saudis in Rome and Sarajevo, the Pakistani in
Bradford, and the Egyptian in Stockholm. Each man was aimlessly
frittering away his days. There were no breaks in the routine, no
sense of imminent action, no sign of preparation. Lyne took the
Chief through some of the background research but Herrick could
tell he was losing interest, and he suddenly left Lyne’s side and
bounded up the stairs to the glass box where Spelling, Jim Collins
and Colonel Plume of the National Security Agency were talking. A
few minutes later he called for all the staff to assemble at the
bottom of the stairs.
‘We have a problem of
interpretation, ladies and gentlemen, and I need your help on it.
The men you have been watching over these last few weeks will in
all probability be under lock and key within a very short time. We
have other intelligence to indicate that there may be some kind of
action by the end of the week, so obviously we can’t allow these
characters to be on the loose any longer. Before this happens, I
want you to consider what their plan is. Why have they been put in
place with such elaborate care? What is the meaning of it? I don’t
want proof, I want your thoughts, the wildest ideas that may have
occurred to you over the last few weeks.’
Herrick looked around
and saw a number of anxious expressions. This was something new to
RAPTOR personnel.
‘We are pursuing
certain lines,’ continued the Chief, ‘which take the investigation
further, but I do think we should try to work out what this is all
about, don’t you?’
There was an
embarrassed silence and then Joe Lapping put up his
arm.
‘Yes, Mr Lapping,’
said the Chief.
‘Maybe it’s about
nothing,’ said Lapping. Collins and Spelling looked up into the
great black space above them.
‘Perhaps you’d care
to develop that idea,’ said the Chief.
‘I don’t mean to take
anything from Isis Herrick’s achievement in spotting what was going
on at Heathrow. I was there, and it was a really good piece of
work. But maybe - just maybe - we were meant to see it. After all,
we were led there by one of the suspects who hung around outside
Terminal Three in a most public fashion. It was almost as if he was
making sure we didn’t miss him.’
Herrick realised he
could be right. It was unlikely that Lapping would have heard about
her testing Rahe’s DNA against the corpse in Lebanon, so he wasn’t
falling behind the latest theory.
‘But you are aware,’
said the Chief, ‘that the orthodox view on the events of that day
portrays the assassination attempt on Vice-Admiral Norquist as a
strategic diversion. What would be the point of such a strategy if
the suspects were all part of some kind of hoax?’
Lapping cleared his
throat. ‘I haven’t been involved much in the operations down here,
but always at the back of my mind it seemed that these men were
acting like the Stepford Wives. They just drink coffee, read the
papers, sleep, cook, do the shopping, watch TV, play soccer. They
don’t look as if they’re going to do anything.’
‘He may be right,
sir,’ Lyne chipped in. ‘A double deception to draw our attention
away from another action, or simply waste all our resources, is not
out of the question. Al-Qaeda has vast resources, by our estimates
three- to five-hundred-million-dollar revenues each year, mainly
from Saudi princes and businessmen. A tiny fraction of this goes
into terrorist actions. About ninety per cent is used in setting up
networks and infrastructure. They could afford to string us along
on an operation without having any material end in
sight.’
‘The Subtle Ruse,’ said Lapping.
‘And what’s that?’
asked the Chief. Every face turned to Lapping, who despite his
confidence in matters of scholarship, was unused to public
performance. Herrick saw his Adam’s apple move up and down before
he spoke.
‘A book written a
hundred years before Machiavelli by an anonymous Arab author -
probably an Egyptian living in the time of the Grand Emir Sa’d
al-Din Sunbul. It uses examples from Arab literature and seeks to
edify the reader with stories of ruses, stratagems, guile and
deceptions taken from different walks of life. In essence, it
instructs you how to outwit your opponent and in turn be alert to
his ploys.’
‘I see. You’re not
suggesting this was directly taken from the book,’ said the Chief,
‘ but you are saying…’
‘That a man who had
studied ancient Arab literature would know the book and have
learned some of its lessons.’
Herrick remembered
that Joe Lapping had been asked to research a man with a literary
background who might have fought for the Bosniaks in the civil war.
And Rahe, of course, spent most of his days in a bookshop.
Certainly it was a suggestion that stood up to examination, but the
more important idea was that Rahe had led them to Heathrow and hung
about in front of various security cameras. She was appalled that
she had not thought of it herself.
The Chief was
nodding. ‘That’s an interesting theory. Anyone have any other
ideas?’
There were a number
of tentative suggestions which he dismissed politely, then in his
most solicitous manner he told the assembled intelligence workers
they’d done a fine job which would undoubtedly make the arrest of
the men a lot simpler. When they began to disperse to their desks,
still looking mystified, he told Lapping he would be required at
Vauxhall Cross that afternoon and asked Lyne to be there on the
following day. ‘I’m sure you can be let off school this once,’ he
said with a wink to Lyne. ‘You do speak Arabic, don’t
you?’
Lyne said yes, he
did.
They arrived back at
SIS headquarters just past 2.00 p.m. Herrick went straight to her
desk and called the mobile number for Hélène Guignal. Mademoiselle
Guignal answered drowsily. In the background Herrick heard the
unmistakable sound of waves breaking and water running up a beach.
She explained what she wanted, but Guignal said she was inclined to
postpone the conversation until she was back at her desk in
Brussels.
‘Fine,’ said Herrick.
‘We can put a request through the Secretary-General of Nato for a
formal interview on these matters by Nato security personnel. This
is important and the United Kingdom does require your help.’
‘Who are
you?’
‘It’s enough that you
know I am investigating an international terrorist cell and that I
believe you hold information which may be useful, in fact, critical
to my inquiries.’
The woman suddenly
became cooperative.
‘One of my colleagues
says you knew some of the foreign Muslims who defended Sarajevo
during the siege?’
‘Yes, I lived with
one. How can I help?’
‘We’re interested in
two men, Sammi Loz and Karim Khan.’
‘Ah yes, I knew them
both, but not well. They were the medics, no? The ones that came
out with supplies then stayed. Those guys?’
‘Yes,’ said Herrick.
‘Would you mind telling me the name of the man who you lived
with?’
‘Hasan Simic. He was
of mixed parentage but was brought up as a Muslim. He liaised with
the foreign Muslims - the jihadistes.
It was a tough job. They always wanted to do what they wanted to
do. They kept themselves apart. They were not like the Bosnian
Muslims.’
‘Can I talk to Mr
Simic?’
‘He’s dead. He died
in ninety-five.’
‘I’m
sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise. He
was born to die young. A very beautiful man but un sauvage - you know? If he had not been killed,
he would have been taken to the Hague for war crimes.’
‘How much did you see
Khan and Loz?’
‘I met them about
four or five times. A few of the men used to come to our apartment
when there were breaks in the fighting. I had food, you see. Not
much, but more than they had. We made big pasta dinners. Karim was
a favourite of mine. Très charmant…
très sympathique.’
‘What about
Loz?’
‘Un peu plus masqué, comprenez vous?
Dissimulé.’
‘And you were working
for press agencies then?’
‘Oui, l’Agence France Presse.’
‘The other men - the
friends of Hassan. What were their names?’
There was a
pause.
‘Do you remember
Yahya?’ asked Herrick.
‘Yahya? No, I do not
remember this man. Who was Yahya? What did he look
like?’
‘He would have been
in his late twenties, early thirties. A short man, of Algerian
origin. We believe he was a very private man. Inconspicuous. He may
have been some kind of scholar before he went to Bosnia. Perhaps he
even studied in Sarajevo before the Islamic Institute was shelled.
We are not sure.’
‘And it is this man
you are really interested in?’
‘Yes, it is possible
that he used the name Youssef. Karim and Sammi used to call him The
Poet. That was their nickname for him before he became a friend of
theirs.’
‘Maybe… Ah oui, oui, oui! I know the man you mean, but his
name is not Yahya. The man I think of was called
Yaqub.’
‘Yaqub?’ said Herrick
doubtfully. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Oui, un autre
prophète.’
‘How do you
mean?’
‘So, we have three
names for this man and they are all the Arab names for prophets in
the Bible.’ Her tone was of someone being forced to talk to an
idiot. ‘Youssef - or Joseph, is the son of the Prophet Yaqub - or
Jacob! And you mentioned Yahya, who is the Prophet John, son of the
Prophet Zachariah. This is obvious. He is using nommes de guerre from the Bible. One day he must
use the name Zachariah. That is logical. No?’ Herrick made a rapid
note of this.
‘And you know he was
Algerian?’
‘Yes, he comes from
Oran. I know this because my father served in Algeria. I have been
to Oran.’
‘And this man was
bookish and withdrawn, somebody who kept to himself?’
‘He came to the
apartment once with Hassan - never the others. He was a mystery to
them. But he was polite and well-mannered. There is little else
that I remember about him.’
Herrick hung up,
thinking that it was a pity Hélène Guignal was not at her desk in
Brussels to receive an emailed file of one of the images of Rahe at
Heathrow. That way Herrick would be sure of an instant no or yes in
her attempt to tie Rahe with Yahya or Yaqub. She got a picture out
of the files nevertheless and put it in plain white envelope,
thinking it was bound to be useful over the next few days. Then,
with her notes of the Guignal conversation, she went to find Dolph,
who she heard had arrived back from Hertfordshire.
He was with Lapping
and Sarre in one of the conference rooms near the Chief’s office
with his laptop fixed to a projector. They were sprawled about the
room watching the photographer’s archive of the Bosnian civil war;
frame after frame of haggard faces staring from fox-holes and
ruined buildings. There were men pleading for mercy, women dashing
across the street, barefoot children wandering snowy craters and
Serb gunners coolly observing their targets below.
‘This is all stuff
from ninety-three and ninety-four,’ said Dolph, after he had given
Isis a brief kiss and welcomed her back. ‘He’s organised it by date
rather than subject. He spent the early winter of ninety-three on
one of two fronts manned by the Mujahideen Brigade. So we should be
nearly there.’
Herrick reminded
herself that none of them knew Rahe was now a prime suspect.
Lapping had got near the truth of the matter with his observations
about Rahe’s behaviour at the airport, but he hadn’t gone the extra
few yards to the logical conclusion. More important, they did not
know there was now some urgency to find Yahya and Loz. The Chief
had been most specific that she should not talk about
this.
After forty-five
minutes fruitlessly peering at all the group shots from the front,
they came to the end of the relevant part of the
archive.
‘This photographer,’
said Herrick, ‘did he remember anyone like Khan or
Loz?’
Dolph shook his
head.
‘Or anyone else
significant?’
Dolph shook his head.
‘I could do with a pint. What do you say we treat ourselves over
the river, lads?’
Herrick asked if they
had seen any groups of soldiers before she came into the
room.
‘A few.’
‘I’d like to go back
over those pictures.’
‘Why?’ asked Dolph a
little truculently.
‘Because you don’t know what we’re looking
for.’
‘We’re looking for
Khan and this guy Sammi Loz.’
‘But none of you has
seen them in the flesh and there may be someone else important in
the photographs. This man was taking pictures throughout the
crucial period.’
Dolph peered into his
screen to locate the relevant files while Lapping went to get them
all coffee.
At length Dolph found
the photographs from mid-November 1993 showing a group of about a
dozen men moving a burnt-out truck. The ground was covered with a
light dusting of snow and the sky above was bright. Ice sparkled in
the trees. Their faces were turned to the ground and in profile as
they put their weight behind the truck. With the shadows playing
across the snow, the energy expressed in the men’s bodies and the
interesting form of the wrecked vehicle, it was easy to see why the
photographer’s eye had been attracted to the scene, and why he’d
kept his finger on the shutter button through eight frames. Dolph
sped through the images, almost animating the sequence. At
Herrick’s insistence they went back over them again slowly. At the
fourth image, she shouted. ‘Stop there.’ She went to the wall and
pointed to a man’s head which had lifted into the light and faced
the camera. ‘Can you enlarge it? Here, the area at the front of the
car.’
Dolph highlighted the
area with his mouse and made a couple of keystrokes. ‘Who the fuck
is that?’ he asked as the picture sprang onto the
wall.
‘That,’ she said,
withdrawing the photograph from her envelope and slapping it
against the wall, ‘is Youssef Rahe, otherwise known as Yahya or
Yaqub. Take a look for yourselves. ’
Dolph got up and
peered at the two pictures. It took him a few seconds to understand
the significance of the match. ‘Isis, you’re a bloody marvel. He’s
the main man.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Everything that’s happened
this morning with Spelling and Vigo is because you knew that
already. You were expecting to find Rahe here - or at least you
were looking for him.’
She
nodded.
‘Fuck my Aunt Ethel’s
goat.’
They all approached
the wall and made comparisons between the two pictures. ‘And look
here,’ she said. ‘The scrawny one with the beard. I’m pretty sure
that’s Sammi Loz.’
‘If you say so,’ said
Dolph. ‘ Is Khan there too?’
She examined each
face in turn. ‘No.’
Dolph’s shrewd eyes
sought hers again. ‘How did you find out about Rahe?’
‘The bookstore,’ said
Sarre. ‘You got something that night, didn’t you?’
‘Christ, you’re a
piece of work.’ said Dolph. ‘How long have you known?’
‘Since this morning
we have known that Rahe was not killed in Lebanon. The body
belonged to someone else.’ She explained about the samples she’d
sent to the laboratory and the recording of Sammi Loz talking to
Khan which gave her the name of Yahya.
‘So all the crucial
connections took place in Bosnia,’ said Lapping.
‘Yes, which is why we
need to work out who these people are.’ She jabbed her finger on
the faces of the other men. ‘We should get all the shots blown up,
each face digitally enhanced.’
‘But I can tell you
now,’ said Sarre, ‘that none of these men came through Heathrow
that day. I know their faces off by heart.’
‘And that is rather
the point,’ said Lapping.
‘Behold, ladies and
gentleman,’ said Dolph, ‘the viscous matter that passes for Joe
Lapping’s brain is at last on stream.’
‘But you didn’t get
there Dolphy,’ returned Lapping. ‘Isis left you in a cloud of
dust.’
‘Fuck you Joe, just
because every hooker in Sarajevo tried on Mummy’s Christmas
pyjamas.’
‘I hate to be a
dampener,’ said Herrick, unable to laugh, ‘but we don’t have time
for this. We have to find out who these people are. If necessary,
bring the photographer to London and fly that woman Guignal from
Skiathos. We need all the help we can get. Anyone who was there -
journalists, aid workers, soldiers. Get the Security Services to
pull them in and give them a slide show. And we will need to
compare these men with all the photographs we have on
file.’
‘What’s the ticking
clock?’ asked Dolph.
‘We don’t know,’ she
said.
The three men
exchanged looks, unnerved by the urgency in her voice and the
undisguised command in her manner.