Close Call (26 page)

The three cars pulled up on a square of tarmac outside a large metal warehouse which stood on its own, separated by at least fifty metres of grass and weeds from the next building on the narrow road. The wind was rattling the structure, making it reverberate like a drum. Dim lights on tall concrete lamp posts weakly illuminated the road and the front of the warehouse. One of the police officers came across to Ted’s car.

‘There’s resident security on this estate. They’ll be holed up in their hut on the other side. We’ve warned them we’re doing a search here and told them to keep away. If they come out, leave them to us.’

Ted nodded. ‘Suits us. We’ll be inside and we’ll stay there unless you alert us to get out.’

The policeman nodded, and as he did they both saw the lights of a car across the estate.

‘Looks as though they’re out of their box,’ said Ted. ‘Over to you.’ And as he turned away, one of the police cars drove off in the direction of the headlights.

By this time the small door to the side of the roller door was open and Ted’s two colleagues were inside. They had rigged up a couple of lights which showed that the interior of the warehouse was partitioned along one side, forming what seemed, judging by the doors, to be three separate rooms and leaving a large open space in which a lorry or several cars could be parked. It was not what Ted had been expecting. He opened one of the doors and found a room with four bunk beds in a row, very close to each other. The next room was a very small shower room with a lavatory and wash basin, and in the final room, which was a primitive kitchen, there was a pile of boxes, some open, some taped up, all of which seemed to be full of bedding – duvets, pillows and towels.

‘Looks like he’s expecting visitors,’ said Ted.

‘Or maybe he’s had visitors,’ replied Ted’s colleague Alfie, who had come in behind him, clutching a drill. ‘Some of this stuff has been used.’

‘We’re going to need six cameras to cover this lot,’ said Alfie, ‘so we’d better get going. We need to fit four mikes as well.’

‘OK. While you do that I’ll get onto the others and see how they’re getting on. This is going to take longer than we thought.’

The other team had just arrived at their second target, the warehouse on the industrial estate near Stockport, and reported back over a mobile phone. ‘Looks as though he uses this one as a store for his club. It feels quite used, as though people have been in recently. There’s restaurant-type tables and chairs, boxes of glasses and china and crates of wine and beer.’

‘Yeah. Well, that makes sense. It’s the one nearest his club. Stick in a couple of mikes and cameras and make sure you leave it as found. Then get out asap, just in case anyone turns up. We’ve got him under control but he must have staff who go there to get stuff, though probably not in the middle of the night – let’s hope not anyway. Then let me know when you’re finished, as it may be best for you to do the last one. This one’s a bit complicated and we’re going to be here some time.’

As he finished speaking, one of the policemen came in.

‘We’ve just had the alert that Jackson’s leaving the club. It’s about the time he usually leaves so I don’t think there’s anything to be worried about. We’ve got a static surveillance near his house and they’ll report in when he gets there. And we’ve got a team trailing him just in case he comes this way.’

‘Thanks. We’ll be at least another couple of hours, so let’s hope he goes comfortably to bed. Do the others know? They’re nearer him than we are.’

‘Yes. Everyone’s been warned.’

It was four thirty by the time Ted and his colleagues were ready to leave the warehouse near Eccles, having fixed and tested enough mikes and cameras to provide comprehensive coverage of all the rooms, including the bathroom and the open garage space. There had been no more interest from the security guards, who had been told firmly by the police officers that they would never work in the security business again if they spoke a word in the wrong place. Jackson had gone straight home and apparently gone to bed; his lights were out.

It was still pitch-dark and raining as the little convoy left the industrial estate. The other team had taken on the fourth target, the warehouse near Sale, but were finding it less straightforward than their other two and they were still there.

‘There’s something not right with this lock,’ they had reported when they’d arrived. ‘It’s wired up to something. Could be some sort of a remote alarm.’

‘Well, for God’s sake go carefully,’  Ted had replied. ‘Liz Carlyle and that little Peggy’ll kill us if we cock it up. Send us a photograph.’

And with advice from Ted, sitting on the edge of one of the bunk beds and working from a greatly enlarged photograph on his laptop screen, they had managed to disable what was indeed a remote alarm that would have triggered an alert somewhere, possibly in Jackson’s bedroom, if they hadn’t noticed it. Once safely inside they had found that this building too had been partitioned down one side, to make what was in fact a set of offices. The three rooms contained desks and chairs and carpets and heaters and a number of large locked filing cabinets.

‘Do you want us to open them?’

‘No.’  Ted made the decision without consulting anyone. ‘Leave them alone. We can look at them another time when we’ve got someone with us who can make sense of what’s in them. Just do the mikes and cameras and then get the hell out. It’s getting late.’

Chapter 45

‘You look tired.’ Liz was watching Martin Seurat closely as they sat in the restaurant.

He started to deny it but then smiled, ‘I am a bit,’ he acknowledged.

‘Small wonder,’ she said, and signalled to the waiter to come and take their order.

It had been a long day, especially for Martin – he would have got up in the dark to catch the first Eurostar from Paris, arriving at St Pancras as most people were on their way to work. He’d taken the tube to Westminster and joined the hordes of civil servants heading for their desks in the government offices around Whitehall. Liz had given him coffee in the Thames House canteen, then they’d gone upstairs for the first of the day’s meetings, a catch-up with Peggy. The three of them had sat in Liz’s office while Peggy pulled together the different strands of the investigation so far. She described what had been found at Jackson’s four lockup warehouses the previous night.

‘It looks as though he’s been using one of them to store his most confidential papers,’ she said. ‘That was the one with the tamper alarm on the lock and all the locked filing cabinets. The police are going to want to have a look at them when this bit of the operation is over. The only other interesting one is the one near Eccles. That looked as though it had been used for sleeping in, presumably for some of the girls he brings in. But there is space in any of them for a lorry to be parked, so if the guns are coming in concealed in one of his deliveries, they could arrive at any of the four warehouses. We’ve fitted them all with mikes and cameras so we should be able to see and hear what’s going on. We just have to hope that we get enough warning to be able to do something about it.’

‘What about the lorry that’s supposed to be coming soon from Dagestan?’ asked Seurat. ‘Any more news on that?’

‘Well, we’ve got the description from McManus of the type of lorry we’re looking for, its colour and the name on the side. So if it’s the same as usual, we should get warning from the port when it arrives. I’m hoping we might hear from across the Channel – I’ve alerted all the likely ports in Holland, Belgium and France.’

‘It’s possible we may hear something on Jackson’s phone, but it’s been very quiet,’ Liz added. ‘They’re too cunning to risk phone chatter.’

‘You seem to have that side of things pretty well covered,’ said Martin. ‘Well done.’

Peggy smiled, looking pleased.

Then they’d moved on to what Thibault and GCHQ had discovered about the jihadis. Martin said, ‘It seems fairly clear that a group of Yemeni-based, English-born terrorists are heading towards England, stopping in Paris to rendezvous.’ He explained that the flat of the Parisian radical Ramdani, which was going to be the meeting place, was already under surveillance by Isabelle Florian’s people.

Martin went on to say that they hadn’t been able to get eavesdropping inside the flat because it was in a tenement building occupied by a mixture of immigrant families and old people who had been there for years. No one was going to be able to enter or leave the flat without being observed.

At this point he paused and looked at Liz. ‘We need to settle the key issue.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Liz.

‘Are we going to arrest these people when they arrive at this flat in Paris, or are we going to keep them under surveillance and let them come on to you?’

‘I’ve discussed this with DG and he’s talked it through with the Home Secretary and the Chief Constable in Manchester. The Home Secretary wanted us to ask your colleagues to make arrests. She said that we couldn’t take the risk of allowing a gang of jihadis into the country when we might not be able to keep them under our control. But DG pointed out that there may be nothing for your colleagues to hold them on, particularly if they carry no weapons. They may well have perfectly valid documents. So she’s agreed that you should just follow and watch and hand them on to us. We need to know what they’re planning to do before we act.’

Martin nodded. ‘I was hoping you’d say that. That is the view of Isabelle and the Interior Ministry, and my own Service agrees. But we do have to remember that there’s always the chance, however good the surveillance, that they could give us the slip between Paris and Britain.’

‘We just have to take that chance. If we detain them now, we have nothing to charge them with – even in France, they’ll be out within days. Besides, there’s every chance that others are joining them in the UK – not just Zara. If we grab this bunch the others may find out, and then we’ll never locate them.’

Martin was smiling now. ‘Clear, as ever. Let’s hope the others think so too.’

‘Frankly,’ said Liz, ‘it doesn’t much matter if they don’t, now we have the Home Secretary’s agreement.’

‘The others’ had been Geoffrey Fane and the CIA Head of Station Andy Bokus. Bokus was already in Fane’s office when Liz and Seurat arrived, and judging from the chilly silence they were not enjoying each other’s company.

When Liz introduced Seurat, Bokus merely grunted and looked grumpily out of the window, as if he wished he were somewhere else.

‘Cheer up, Andy,’ said Fane. ‘You’ll find life south of the river isn’t all that bad’ – a reference to the impending move of the US Embassy from Grosvenor Square to a new, more isolated but thought to be safer, location in Wandsworth.

Liz noticed that the CIA man was losing weight, though not much – his suit was a little looser at the shoulders than it once would have been, but his buttoned-up jacket did his bulging midriff no favours.

They’d all sat down and waited awkwardly while Daisy brought in a tray of coffee.

‘Don’t bother, Daisy,’ said Liz. ‘I’ll pour it out.’ As she reached forward to pour out the coffee, she’d noticed that Bokus was already drumming his thumbs on the arms of his chair impatiently.

When the coffee was poured, Fane said, ‘Elizabeth, why don’t you bring us all up to date?’

Liz had been startled by how rude the two men were being to Martin. Bokus hadn’t even acknowledged his presence when she’d introduced him and now Fane was behaving as if he wasn’t there. But she made no comment and proceeded to summarise the situation. When she finished there was a heavy silence.

Bokus said gruffly, ‘You mean to tell me, you got five bad guys – I mean
really
bad guys – right within your sights, and you want to let them come on here to do God knows what?’ He was staring at Liz and sounded incredulous.

‘We don’t have any intention of letting them do anything. Nor do the French.’

‘No. We certainly do not,’ said Martin Seurat.

Bokus ignored him – it was Liz he was going for. He said in the folksy voice Liz had always been wary of, ‘Listen, I’m just a country boy from Ohio. Sometimes I get a little lost if anything gets too complicated. But we used to say back home that a bird in the hand beats two birds in the bush any old day.’

‘Did you really say that?’ Seurat asked with feigned innocence, and Liz just managed not to laugh. She noted that Fane was staying quiet.

For a brief moment Bokus’s eyes flashed, but he stuck to his Huck Finn persona. ‘We sure did,’ he said, still looking only at Liz. ‘And I’m thinking it applies here pretty well. Why risk losing these guys if we can pick ’em up easier than a bird dog grabs a grouse?’

‘Why indeed?’ muttered Fane.

Liz was about to reply when Seurat broke in. He said simply, ‘Here is why.’ He looked at Bokus with a steeliness Liz had never seen before. ‘The initial information in this case came from you, the Americans. Believe me, we are all grateful for that. And then, the focus shifted to here in the United Kingdom – this man Jackson appeared, and we learned that these British Yemenis are on their way to this country, almost certainly to commit an atrocity.

‘But the fact remains, they are meeting first in Paris. And we believe they were originally considering Paris as the target of their operation – whatever this operation is.’

‘Not any more—’ Bokus started to say. Seurat held up a hand and the American stopped.