Close Call (25 page)

Ted still liked to play an active part in the occasional, particularly interesting operation, and his eyes lit up when Peggy told him that she needed eavesdropping and cameras planted in four warehouses on the outskirts of Manchester, as part of an operation to prevent a group of jihadis taking delivery of guns and ammunition. By now one of the police officers from the Chief Constable’s inquiry team had sent down the map coordinates for the warehouses, and also a description and approximate dimensions, all of which they must have got from McManus. By the time Peggy left him, Ted had summoned a Planning Team for first thing the following morning and was contentedly poring over maps.

Peggy went back to her office just in time to pick up a call from Liz, who had returned from Manchester and was back in her flat.

‘How was it?’ Peggy asked. ‘It can’t have been easy.’

‘It wasn’t – at first. He tried to embarrass me by making it personal. But in the end I found it rather sad. It seems such a pity that he’s got himself into such a mess. And he really has. I don’t know all the details, but it looks as though he’s in pretty deep with some very unsavoury characters, and not just the one we’re interested in. He’s facing a long stretch in prison according to the Chief Constable. Whom I liked, by the way. He’s young and seems very straight.’

‘Thank goodness for that,’ said Peggy.

‘How have you got on?’ asked Liz.

‘I’ve alerted the Border Agency, Wally and Technical Ted. I got the coordinates through from Manchester, and Ted and his team are going up tomorrow.

‘I’ve warned Wally and Borders that it could come in at any south or east coast port. Borders mentioned the tunnel and I asked them to warn them as well, though it’s probably unlikely – they’re much more alert there because of all the illegal immigrants. I’ll get on to the French tomorrow to ask them to keep a lookout. It would be great if we could know when it’s boarding the ferry on their side. The ferries to Harwich come from the Hook of Holland, so I’ll get on to the Dutch as well tomorrow first thing.’ She suddenly stopped, breathless.

‘Go home, Peggy,’ said Liz. ‘You’ve done all you can for one day. You sound exhausted.’

So Peggy went home, but later that night she dreamed of lorryloads of guns arriving at darkened ports all round the coast – ports that she hadn’t thought of – and driving off unwatched into the night.

Chapter 43

Peggy was always early for appointments. She wished she wasn’t, because it often meant standing around for ages with cold feet, especially at railway stations where there were never any empty seats in the waiting areas. But she knew herself well enough to know that she would always be the same. She just seemed to have a chronic fear of being late. Today was no exception. She was waiting at Paddington Station for Jacques Thibault, the young computer wizard from the DGSE who was responsible for monitoring Antoine Milraud’s computer.

With access to Milraud’s computer and his password, Thibault had been able to follow current communications easily enough. He was also working hard to reconstruct the archive of Milraud’s previous exchanges with the Yemeni middleman who had first introduced him to the young Arab now known as Zara.

But it was taking time and the Yemeni middleman was no longer responding to emails, as Thibault had found out when he initiated messages purporting to come from Milraud.
Expand the net
– that had been Seurat’s instruction to Thibault, and Thibault had done his best. But efforts to work his way into Zara’s system had been balked by a sophisticated firewall that Thibault quickly realised would take months, possibly years to break. And there was no question of that; Seurat had made clear that he wanted results yesterday. He had instructed Thibault to seek the help of the British, who were in any case the senior partners in this operation. Peggy in turn had passed the problem to her colleagues in GCHQ.

The day before, her contact in GCHQ had rung to say that they had got something and asked Peggy and her French colleague to come urgently for a meeting. So Peggy, early as ever, was stamping her feet and waiting for ­Thibault, who had caught an early Eurostar from Paris, to turn up at Paddington so they could catch the 10.15 train to Cheltenham.

Not for the first time she wondered why GCHQ had put itself in Cheltenham. It was such an awkward place to get to from London. It took at least two hours by train, and you had to change and get on an uncomfortable little local train for the last part of the journey. It was no better by car, she thought crossly as she looked at her watch again. It was still only five past ten, so there was nothing to worry about, she told herself, but she was still relieved to see the tall, slim figure of Jacques Thibault walking with long strides across the concourse towards her. She waved and he smiled back with a schoolboy grin that made Peggy feel quite motherly. With his longish, wavy hair, anorak and laptop bag over his shoulder, he looked about eighteen, though Peggy guessed he was probably more or less the same age as she was.

Thankfully for Peggy, whose French was not very advanced, Jacques Thibault had one English grandmother, which meant that he spoke fluent English, honed by annual visits as a boy to Granny Fairfax in her crumbling rectory in the Norfolk Broads. The train was crowded so they didn’t talk much in any case. Peggy read the
Guardian
on her iPad while Thibault opened his laptop, plugged earphones into his ears and tapped away on the keyboard.

After they had changed to the local train for the final part of the journey, Peggy explained that they would be met at the station by Charlie Simmons, who had been working on Zara’s communications. They would have a sandwich lunch in his office so not to waste any time. ‘He said he had something urgent for us,’ said Peggy. ‘And he particularly wanted you to be here.’

‘It’s about Zara,’ said Charlie as they sat down in his office, overlooking the walkway known as The Street, which ran round the GCHQ headquarters building, whose shape made it inevitable that it would be called ‘The Doughnut’. ‘We’ve been following his chat. There’s a lot of it – he seems to have contacts all over the globe.’

‘Yes,’ said Thibault non-committally, munching a sandwich, his long body slouched in his chair.

‘I can’t say we’ve got very far,’ Charlie Simmons went on. ‘Most of the messages are encrypted; a few are not. They’re pretty humdrum – Facebook messages to his friends, that sort of thing.’

‘And the encrypted ones?’ asked Thibault, in a voice without much hope. ‘I know that even with supercomputers, it can take a lot of time to crack the latest kinds of coding.’

But Simmons surprised them now. ‘Oh we’ve cracked that easily enough. Only Level Two. I’m about to send you the results, but I’m sure you’ll agree they’re disappointing. It’s just a lot of jihadi chat-room stuff – nothing firm. It’s as if they’re egging each other on, but in the most general ways.’

Peggy was familiar enough with these kinds of jihadi online discussions and she was sure that Thibault was too. Death to the West; death to the Jews; death to the Infidels. A kind of OCD with Death, but rarely much specific detail about how to bring these deaths about.

‘Could he have inserted more secret information in these emails?’ Thibault asked. ‘I’m thinking of the odd coordinates in the emails Zara sent to Milraud. I wondered if it was something a bit like those old codes, the book codes and the one-time pads that needed some sort of external reference to translate them.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Simmons said. He sounded cheerful, and Peggy wondered why, and why he had invited them urgently to come to Cheltenham. Maybe he was one of those oddballs who were happiest with bad news.

Thibault was obviously thinking the same thing. He asked bluntly, ‘So nothing to report then after all?’

‘On the contrary, I’ve got plenty to tell you. It just came as a bit of surprise. You see, it seems our Zara is something of a mother’s boy.’

‘So?’ said Thibault, his impatience now undisguised.

Charlie Simmons wasn’t going to be rushed. ‘He goes home practically every other weekend. All the way up to Manchester.’ He paused, then went on. ‘And while he’s home he’s often online – like most students these days. He takes his laptop home with him, and engages in the usual correspondence. But then something else happens, and here’s the funny thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘His mother goes online as well.’

‘His mother?’

‘So it seems. It’s a Gmail account in her name, and the recipients – on the surface at least – are other ladies who appear to be of Middle Eastern origin and of a certain age.’

‘I don’t get it.’  Thibault was sitting up now.

‘Neither did I. But then I had a closer look. The PC his mother apparently uses only comes to life when Zara’s at home. The rest of the time it’s in deep hibernation mode. I mean deep – I bet the old lady doesn’t even know how to turn it on. Not surprising; it would be odder if the old lady were actually internet-savvy. I think it’s pretty clear she’s not. Zara’s using her machine, and the people he’s talking to are doing the same thing – using some unlikely dummy as the supposed sender of the emails.’

‘That sounds clever,’ said Peggy.

‘And simple,’ added Thibault.

‘Yes. So simple I almost overlooked it. We could have wasted half the firepower of GCHQ on this and got absolutely nowhere, when the answer was staring us in the face. Though if you read the emails you’d be none the wiser. A recipe for tabbouleh. A discussion of how best to cook lamb shanks, with an awful lot of talk about whether it should be four and a half hours or three days. Food is the usual topic, which means numbers – one hundred and fifty grams of couscous, ninety minutes simmering etc.’

‘So have you broken this food code?’ Peggy was awestruck by the almost basic ingenuity of this. A circle of middle-aged Middle Eastern women, babbling about cooking techniques and recipes and food shops – perfect cover for what she assumed were in fact lethal instructions and commands.

‘Pretty much. I’ll spare you the details, but basically, every time numbers get used they have to be prefixed by something to indicate what they’re referring to – is it time, or quantities or the geographical coordinates of a place?’

‘Can’t the prefix be in the numbers themselves?’ asked Thibault, leaning forward, his elbows on the table, his hands supporting his chin.

‘They could be, but then too often they would be the same. The repetition would be suspicious. Anyway, I’ve made enough progress to want to let you know.’

Oh gosh, thought Peggy. Simmons has made a breakthrough, but it’s still only conceptual. He’s brought us all the way here to tell us that he’s cracked the code, but he doesn’t know what the decoded material actually means. It was the classic folly of cryptanalysts the world over – fantastic excitement when they cracked a code, as if that were the be-all and end-all. If code breakers had run Bletchley rather than worked in it, the Germans would have won the War.

‘I congratulate you,’ Thibault said gravely. ‘You have done remarkable work. Please keep me posted with any results that come from it.’ He reached for his coat. ‘I need to be getting back now.’

‘What?’ Simmons suddenly was almost shouting. ‘It’s the results I’ve brought you here about. Don’t you want to know them? You should. There are five conspirators heading for Paris – they’re going to meet up with an associate of Zara’s called Michel Ramdani. He lives in Paris. He’s going to send the five men on to England – it’s not clear how they’ll be travelling but he’s responsible for the arrangements.’

‘When are they due to arrive in Paris?’ asked Peggy, reaching for her notebook.

‘The day after tomorrow. I’d better tell you Ramdani’s address. It seems that’s where this little conclave is supposed to meet.’

Chapter 44

It was half past eleven, dark, windy and pouring with rain, when a small convoy set off from Greater Manchester police headquarters. There were six black Range Rovers with tinted windows. In one was Technical Ted and two colleagues, in a second, three more from Thames House. Both of their vehicles had an assortment of oddly shaped bags and holdalls in the back. In the other four were eight police officers, two in each vehicle, but only one of each pair was recognisable from the word ‘POLICE’ on the front and back of his black pullover. All the other men wore anonymous dark clothes.

The cars stayed in convoy as they joined the southbound M60, Manchester’s ring road. Some miles on, at a junction marked Denton, one of the Thames House cars and two of the police cars peeled off, while the other three kept on the M60, circling the south of Manchester until they reached the turning for Eccles, where they too left the motorway and at a small roundabout headed into an industrial estate, led by one of the police cars. Ted, who was in the passenger seat of the Thames House vehicle, was talking to one of his colleagues in the other convoy.

‘All’s going fine here,’ he was hearing. ‘No problem with the alarm. It’s just the usual Chubb as we’d been told. The whole place is quiet as the grave. There’s nothing in here but empty wine crates and cardboard cartons, doesn’t look as though it’s been used for ages. We’ve put in three mikes and we’re doing two cameras; Frankie’s just working on the first one now. Then we’ll be testing it back to the Ops Room and we should be off to the next place in less than an hour.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Ted. ‘We’ve just arrived at our first stop, so let’s hope it’s as easy.’