Sleeper Cell Page 5

  ‘I’ll kill you for this…’

  ‘No one else needs to die. And if you cooperate, no one will.’

  ‘So what is this? Ransom?’

  ‘No. We need you to do one small job for us, then your daughter will be returned to you and all this can be forgotten. No one will ever know.’

  ‘What makes you think the security services don’t already know?’

  ‘Because we’ve watched you, Prime Minister. We’ve studied your methods. You were clever in setting up the talks between two old enemies who’ve sworn destruction on each other for decades. Even cleverer in ensuring neither side knew quite as much about what was going on as you yourself did. You work in secret, you like to be in control.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘There we have it, Prime Minister. Secrecy, sleight-of-

  hand. You’ve made promises, stacked the deck, while all the time hiding your own agenda. So I’m confident that our arrangement can be kept between us alone. You’ll see that it is the best way.’

  ‘So what do you want?’

  ‘You’ll address the House of Commons at 9am tomorrow. Liam Treadwell, your Head of Corporate Services will be waiting for you outside your office. He’s not part of our organisation, and knows nothing of us or our requirements. He’s acting only as a courier, and interrogating him will produce no useful intelligence and will endanger your daughter’s life. He’ll hand you a sealed envelope.’

  ‘Containing?’

  ‘A simple instruction. If you act on it, your daughter will not be harmed.’

  ‘And if I can’t?’

  ‘Then she dies.’

  ‘I’m watched everywhere I go, I have to account for every move I make!’

  ‘I hope that’s not panic I hear in your voice, Prime Minister. This is no time for rash decisions. You need to think clearly. If you bring anyone else into this matter, we will know; if you deviate from your normal behaviour in any way, we will know. Your instructions will be simple and clear. Follow them, and we’ll all come through this.’

  ‘Except the fourteen people you killed this morning!’

  ‘You must make sure it doesn’t become fifteen by tomorrow night. Or fifty, or five hundred. Do not doubt that we’re serious.’

  ‘How do I contact you?’

  ‘You don’t. This phone will be deactivated after this call. We’ll know whether you’ve complied with our instruction, so we will not need to speak again.’

  The line went dead.

  10

  The Volvo used in the bombing was a dead end. The engine and chassis numbers had been welded off and the registration plate led to an off-the-road model two hundred miles away. With over a hundred thousand third generation V70s in production, and nothing to identify this one, that avenue of enquiries was going nowhere. In time someone would arrive back from holiday to find their car had been stolen from airport parking, but even that would get them no closer to finding the thief.

  The car’s arrival at the hotel also drew a blank. CCTV caught the driver’s face as he turned off Kensington High Street and the hotel’s own internal cameras watched him enter the lobby, approach the reception desk and leave an envelope with the concierge. Later enquiries showed that he was a professional driver. A motorcycle courier had arrived at the offices of his employer, Fleet of Foot, with the cloned keys and instructions to collect the vehicle from long-stay parking at Gatwick airport and deliver it to the basement car park of the Park Hotel, paying cash and parking it as close to the entrance ramp as possible. He was to leave the keys at reception, addressed to a Mr Alec Kochov. Kochov was a ghost; a one-night booking had been made by phone the previous day, but no guest of that name ever arrived and he could not be traced. The motorcycle courier who had initiated the vehicle transfer could also not be traced, but it was likely that even if he proved to be genuine, the trail leading back beyond his involvement would be similarly opaque.

  It had been a clever and well planned operation. CTC knew the car had carried the bomb into position, but had no way of tracing where it had come from or who had booked the driver. Forensics had found nothing unique in the timer – it was nothing that could not be made from components bought on the internet for any number of innocent DIY projects. The explosives were C-4 plastic, usually associated with the US military, but chemically identical to that used in the USS Cole and Khobar Towers bombing carried out by al-Qa’ida. Given the vast quantity of military hardware the US had inadvertently donated to middle eastern terrorist groups in the last twenty years, this too yielded no useful information.

  The key lay in the only clue they had so far discovered that was not completely obscured by careful planning: the woman who had returned to the car moments before the bomb went off. And despite Commander Thorne’s doubts, DS Reid was the best person to trace her.

  Leila Reid was old-school. She had joined the Met’s Counter-Terrorism Command straight from a stint working for the Foreign Office, with placements in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. She was fluent in Levantine Arabic and could make herself understood pretty much anywhere in the Arab world. Twenty-first century counter-terrorism had seemed like a natural move.

  She knew the value of modern forensics and computer technology, but for her the greatest tool of all was not to be found in the microchip or the lab but in the human mind. Forensic clues told you what a person had done; an insight into their mind told you why, and that could lead to what they were planning to do next. The woman Leila was tracking was dead, but she had not been operating alone. She was just one part of a cell that would itself be part of a much larger organisation.

  With the CCTV footage loaded onto her iPad, she made her way along the now partially-reopened Kensington High Street to the Park Hotel. A group of about half a dozen young men ogled her as she passed. One wore a t-shirt emblazoned with ‘S52’ in a blue circle. Solidarity 52 – named in ‘honour’ of the fifty-two people killed in the July 7th terrorist attacks in London in 2005 – had been agitating for an excuse to take their grievances to the streets for months. Leila had no doubt there would be more coming out of the woodwork as night fell.

  The police were still gathering CCTV recordings from local shops in case the bomber had been caught scouting the route to the hotel in the previous few days. They had canvassed staff and shown them the best of the images they already had. No one remembered seeing her and Leila was not hopeful that she would appear on any of the security tapes. Their suspect had been too careful for that.

  The front of the hotel was now screened with temporary wooden boarding to a height of eight feet. She had no access to the parking garage, so she started her walk-through of the bomber’s known movements from corner of the building.

  The last camera to pick the suspect up was mounted high on the now-demolished wall of the hotel, pointing west. This had been at 11.57.45, a little over two minutes before the bomb exploded. If, as CTC suspected, the bomb had been timed to go off at noon, the mystery woman was already cutting it very close. She had avoided the number-plate recognition cameras, and another, inside the garage, went dead six seconds later without capturing her face.

  Leila began to walk west. She glanced down Palace Green towards the Embassy. Tall green screening had been placed around the front windows and six Israeli Defence Force soldiers stood just within the perimeter.

  She walked through the police cordons and on to the junction with Kensington Church Street seventy metres away. The bomber had moved into and out of shot of a traffic light camera on the junction. This was time-stamped at 11.56.16. The clocks were accurate, at least to a few seconds. The mystery woman was moving quickly, but calmly enough not to attract the attention of anyone around her.

  Then there was nothing until she was caught on the forward-facing camera of the N9 bus as it passed her going west at 11.49.44. The low-grade image was insufficient to show her face from a distance and by the time the bus was close, she had turned to look in the window of Marks and Sp
encer, just along the street from High Street Kensington tube station.

  This was puzzling. Marks and Spencer at 11.49.44, Church Street at 11.56.16. It had taken her over six minutes to walk one hundred and twenty-five metres, knowing that she was on a tight deadline. At seven in the evening with light foot traffic, Leila covered the distance in under two minutes. Even allowing for the pavements being busier at noon, the walk should not have taken much more than three.

  So where had she been for the missing three minutes?

  Leila stood by the same shop window and flicked between stills from the two cameras. In both the suspect wore a long white shirt-dress over pale trousers. A white headscarf was pushed back to reveal her face from hairline to chin. Her face had not been caught on camera not because she had made any attempt to cover it, because she had been extremely careful. Dressed like this, no one would have given her a second look.

  Crucially, in the bus image she was standing with her left side exposed to the approaching vehicle. In her hand she held a small package, probably a plastic carrier bag partly rolled down on its contents. Leila flicked back to the moving footage from the Church Street traffic camera. Their suspect ran a few steps, trying to make the lights before they changed. The bag in her hand flapped as she moved.

  Quickly she went back to the bus footage. The bag hung as if its contents were heavy. Back to the traffic cam: the bag waved in the breeze. It was empty.

  Between Marks and Spencers and the Church Street junction, the suspect had dumped the contents but kept the bag itself to maintain consistency on the CCTV feeds.

  Leila walked back along the south side of Kensington High Street from the tube station towards the traffic camera near the church. There she stopped and examined the images on her tablet again, trying to get inside the head of her quarry.

  The assumption had been that since this woman did not appear on any of the Underground CCTV images, she had changed her appearance somewhere between leaving the train and entering the street. And if that was the case, she would be carrying whatever garments she had been wearing on the train. These would not be traditional Muslim clothes; the disguise would have been something contrasting, typically western. And carrying a bag of western clothes would have been highly suspicious if she had been caught and searched in the underground car park.

  She had to lose whatever she was carrying before entering the garage.

  She would have stashed them somewhere where they would be hidden from casual view, but be easy enough to retrieve when she had to reverse the walk and re-emerge from the tube in her original guise. That meant a building easily accessible to the public where she could enter and exit without being noticed. Somewhere that might account for the missing three minutes of her journey.

  And Leila was standing right outside the perfect place – the exact place she herself would have chosen.

  She turned the iPad off and crossed the road. St Mary Abbot’s Church was still open.

  Leila had not set foot inside a church since 2007, and not for nearly twenty years prior to that. She had been an agnostic until her brother had been killed in Baghdad as part of a two-year covert operation that took out three and a half thousand enemy insurgents but lost a good number of their own people in the process. After that she had found true atheism.

  St Mary Abbot’s brought it all back in a wave so sudden and vivid that for a moment she stood at the edge of the nave with her eyes closed. Clive had never been officially listed among the dead. Even in the secretive world of the SAS, the so-called Task Force Black was shrouded in mystery. He had not even been given a funeral. Leila had last been in a church attending the funeral of one of his fellow regular army victims, the closest she could get to a formal goodbye to her brother. Now, ten years later, it was the smell that hit her most forcefully, that brought back the immediacy of those long-buried emotions: bees’ wax and turpentine, brass polish, dust, old paper and centuries of candles and oil lamps; smells that existed almost nowhere outside these houses of make-believe.

  She opened her eyes. Had their suspect been in here just a few hours earlier?

  Maybe.

  In most churches in England a Muslim would have been noticed, but in the centre of London she would have passed easily as a tourist.

  The church was huge and rather shabby. There should be a lot of places to hide a small bundle of clothes, and yet, as Leila stood staring at the altar, she realised that there would really be very few. Nowhere that had free public access would be suitable. The risk of its being discovered – possibly only moments after it had been planted given the state of vigilance against left packages – was too high. Yet the bomber would be highly unlikely to have access to any staff-only areas. The cell might have been able to infiltrate the church’s staff or builders working on the renovations, but doing so would be far too high a risk for such a minor pay-off.

  So that ruled out almost the entire body of the church, any open chapels and any rooms behind routinely locked doors.

  Which left what? The kitchen was too busy, likewise the toilets next to it; the vestry would be locked; the south transept, sanctuary, and meditation area offered no hiding places. Nor did St Paul’s chapel, directly opposite where Leila stood… but what was on the left of the chapel would have been prefect.

  Work was under way to remove the old organ and an organ loft gives a small and very secret area where visibility of the church is good, but where almost no one ever looks. Here, with renovations under way, the organ loft was disused but intact. It would be the ideal hiding place for a small package for the few minutes the bomber needed.

  Leila stepped quickly across the nave. There was builders’ tape across the entrance to the steps up to the organ, tape which she ducked under as easily as she imagined their suspect had done in the missing three minutes of her journey to the hotel car park. The organ manuals were still in place, though by now they were not connected to anything. A pile of music still lay on the floor, along with a bag of tools and a workman’s fluorescent jacket. Leila glanced down into the church; no one had noticed her ducking the tape, and no one was aware she was there.

  She crouched by the pedal board and lifted the yellow jacket. Beneath it was a tightly rolled blue t-shirt. She slipped on a pair of latex gloves from her back pocket and gently unfolded the roll. Inside the t-shirt was a pair of light summer jeans. She had found the bomber’s original identity.

  She ran back down to the nave and along the pews to the gift shop. It was about to close and was busy with people buying last minute souvenirs – not only of the church, but of what had happened along the road from it that morning. She pushed past a young Chinese couple standing by the till.

  ‘I’m with the police,’ she said to the elderly woman behind the counter. ‘I need a plastic bag, please, quickly.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘I just need a bag. And get onto whoever’s in charge here, make sure no one enters the organ loft.’

  The woman handed a St Mary Abbot’s carrier bag over the counter and was about to say something else when Leila raised her hand.

  ‘There’s no immediate danger, but no one must go beyond the tape by the organ. Uniformed officers will explain everything when they arrive in a few minutes.’

  She quickly retraced her steps – again completely unremarked by the few people still in the church – and retrieved the clothes from beside the organ. As two church officials jogged towards the builders’ tape, Leila walked out into the hot evening, one crucial step closer to understanding her quarry.

  She handed the bag to a uniformed officer at the hotel cordon with instructions to take it to Scotland Yard and get a forensics team to the organ loft. She then walked back to her car and sat for a minute watching workmen in hi-vis jackets sweeping out the last of the debris from the hotel’s main reception.

  By now, it was possible that forensics would have found a DNA or fingerprint match for the bomber, but Leila doubted it. This was a meticulously planned operat
ion, and the cell would have used clean skins for it. No one can remain untraceable for ever, but someone with no police record would slow the search down and buy some very useful time.

  The clothes would enable the police to make up a likeness to canvas points back from the tube station, so there was no point in Leila trying to go further back than she already had. It had been a significant breakthrough.

  One thing puzzled her though.

  This was clearly not a suicide mission. That the bomber had left clothes in an easily accessible place meant she had intended to retrace her route back out of Kensington to wherever she had come from. That she had been able to avoid being picked up in a recognisable way on any of the CCTV cameras implied careful planning and a desire for living anonymity beyond this one operation.

  Something else occurred to her as she watched the heavy crane trundling into position to start the bulk clearance of the wreckage.

  The car had been collected from Gatwick airport at 6am, with the timer set for, they still presumed, a noon detonation. Some time after 10am the cell discovered that there was a better opportunity with the PM’s change of schedule that would bring him to the area close to the bomb at 1pm. That meant there was a maximum two-hour period for the timer to be intercepted and changed. This would not have been enough for the mystery woman to scout a route from the station to the hotel and plan the change of appearance. But it had all been planned.

  So there must always have been a contingency plan for the bomb to be intercepted after it had been driven into place.

  And that made no sense at all.

  Even if the bomb had been intended to detonate earlier than noon, and the woman was just going to check why it had not gone off, the same logical black hole still existed. There would have been no reason for the cell to plan for such a failure.

  There was something she wasn’t seeing. This bomb was big, it had got the attention of the country, it had performed the role that terrorist attacks were designed to perform, but it was not enough. This event had been important enough to build in a very elaborate fail-safe. Had it been parked under the Israeli Embassy itself, that would have been understandable. Entry to such a target would be incredibly difficult, and they would get only one chance to make it work. But this bomb was under the hotel. Fail today, they could just try again.