Confessor (37 page)

Big Herbie immediately called Worboys, telling him what their first trawl had gleaned and asking for extra minders at the Warminster facility. He, of all people, knew that even though the electronic warning system had been beefed up, the huge grounds surrounding the main house, not to mention the Dower House, could still be dangerous. There were always gaps through which determined fanatics could penetrate.

Herbie’s constant nightmare returned to the time, only a few years ago, when he had been called back to deal with the inquisition of the world-famous orchestral conductor, Maestro Louis Passau. On that occasion there
had
been a breach of security, and people had been shot to death on the grounds. In London they still argued about the Warminster security.

Worboys was clear on the subject. He would have to get the nod from the CSIS before the manpower could be released.

“I’ll try and get someone to you before tomorrow,” he said, his voice sounding weary. “I feel like a prisoner here.”

“So you should.” Herb paused and then became almost Shakespearean: “Soft you, Tony. They’re running out of manpower, but they’ll still try to get you. Stay safe.”

“If they try my home, they’ll be in for a shock. The Old Man’s let me have some of the lads standing by there.”

Herbie also said he wanted the latest telephone logs, covering the past three days. “Is most important, Tony. We got a pigeon’s stool here, and I want to know if it’s Carole. There’s something not quite right about the widow Keene. She knows something we’re not privy to. Nothing surprises me anymore.”

“If the Iraqis didn’t blow Gus to pieces, who in hell did?” Worboys was musing aloud.

“Maybe the Irish. Maybe not. It’s always possible that it was done private, if you follow me.”

“The bloody bomb had these Vengeance people’s fingerprints all over it.”

“Handwriting, Tony, not fingerprints.”

“What’s in a name?”

The minders who had traveled with Kruger to and from London were
not
, as he had first thought, freelance old hands called back for temporary work.

He had felt the fear, tasted the bitter wormwood and gall of near death on the road to Warminster, just as Gus had tasted it for the last time. It had been so sudden that he had to sit quietly and reconstruct the events in his head. The two sudden flashes and detonations in the car that had overtaken them. The smell of explosives. The calm words of the man traveling shotgun in their car: “Get down. Right down in the back.” Then the flash of thigh as Bex’s skirt rode high, and the softness of her body, her hands grabbing him as they lay there. The roller-coaster feeling as the car squealed sideways. The stutter of the Heckler & Koch, then the view of the men from the chase car, plus the driver and shotgun, circling in the road. They had put their three charges first, not even going to see if they could assist the driver of the private car, which had borne the brunt of the explosions.

The ski masks and the soft, unhurried way in which the minders had closed ranks around the car carrying him, Bex and the Fat Boy had a recognizable deadly choreography. It was in the way they moved, the tension, the readiness. These were SAS officers, troopers and NCOs. Things had to be at a high-crisis level for the CSIS to get the okay to use the Special Air Service men as bodyguards.

Herbie was pulled from his daydream by a soft knock at the door. Bex Olesker came into the room looking shaken, her face still pallid from the experience earlier that evening. She had gone through the interview with Ramsi like the pro she was. Now, the fear had set in, and she looked terribly vulnerable.

“Sorry to bother you, Herb.” Her voice was soft and throaty.

“You never bother me, Bex.” He saw that she was trembling.

“Delayed shock, I think.” She sat down and rested her head against the back of the high chair, breathing out as though letting go a long sigh of relief. It was now that she told him she had felt no fear until she had seen the men with ski masks surrounding the car. “I thought we were finished. The first time in my career that I’ve felt real fear.”

She said that, up to then, she had done surveillance on known terrorists, and had even been at the sites of three terrorist actions within minutes of the bombs or guns doing their deadly work. “But this really had me terrified. I don’t honestly know if I should stay with SO 13.”

“You get use to it, Bex. Is like any other job that has danger at its heart. Hours of boredom punctuated by moments of fear. You think I wasn’t frightened?”

“You didn’t seem to be. Nor did Mr. Brook.”

“Martin? Martin’s a Confessor, an inquisitor. Trained by Gus. You notice he didn’t show any sign of wanting to be with us when we talked to Ramsi? My guess is that he was too busy throwing up.”

“You really do get used to it, Herb?”

“Matter of having to get into the swing of things.” He gave a laugh that sounded like broken glass, then moved softly across the room, stood behind her chair and put his fat arms around her, his forearms resting on her breasts and his big rugged lived-in face buried in her short black hair. Her hair smelled of sunshine. It was the only analogy Herb could draw from the scent.

“Thanks, Herb,” she choked. “I’m still bloody frightened.”

“You got me, babe,” he crooned, remembering, through the smoke in his brain, some 1960s pop song: back in the days when Cher was Sonny and Cher and not an actress with a picture in the attic.

“I’ve got you, babe,” she said softly. “That’s a voice from the past.”

“For me, most things are voices from the past.” Big Herbie Kruger closed his eyes and breathed in the sunshine.

At the house known as The Hall in Harrow Weald on the outskirts of the Metropolis, three two-man teams from the SAS headquarters at Stirling Lines, outside Hereford, lay in wait. Two watched the rear of the property, two lay in cover that gave them excellent views across the drive and the gardens leading up to the house. The last pair was actually in the house.

They had set up portable sensors in a ring some hundred yards from the place, plus a small infrared TV camera that they controlled with a joystick, watching the images of the night as they swept it in a 180-degree arc. They lay unmoving, almost quiet, except for one of the men softly humming “Music of the Night,” as they watched and listened.

Hisham, against his better judgment, had sent Ahmad and Dinah out to Harrow Weald before the news of Samira’s botched attempt had come through. Now, at two in the morning, Ahmad lay in thick grass next to Dinah, well inside the grounds of The Hall, watching and waiting for some sign of life.

They knew that the target’s car was there. Not even in the garage. The Range Rover was parked in the turning circle right in front of the house, and had been there since they had crawled into position. They had watched the lights go on and off in various parts of the building, and now only one bulb was burning in what they took to be a bathroom on the first floor.

All this, of course, was courtesy of the SAS team inside the house. Now, one of the troopers inside had quietly climbed the stairs and switched off the light in the master bathroom. Waited for a minute so that his eyes could adjust, then returned to his partner in what was normally Worboys’s study at the front of the house. The curtains were drawn over the two windows facing the drive, so that the tiny diffused light from the TV monitor would not be visible from outside.

It was just on two-thirty when one of the men beside the monitor heard two distinct clicks in his radio earpiece. One of their comrades on the grounds had spotted movement, so they slowly traversed the camera over its full 180 degrees. They picked up the first figure, crouched by a line of rhododendron bushes near the end of the drive, almost at the edge of the turning circle right in front of the main door.

The clicks on the radios, they hoped, indicated that their people outside were tracking whoever had penetrated the grounds. They moved the camera very slowly so as not to alert the intruders. There were two of them, black shapes carrying what looked to be automatic weapons, and they came quietly towards the front of the house, one on each side of the drive. Then, one of the shapes detached itself from the bushes and moved towards the Range Rover, knelt down and unslung a satchel, placing it by the front offside wheel. The figure had moved like a woman, and her companion joined her for a moment, whispering softly and then making his way to the back of the car, covering her, looking in the direction of the house as she carefully turned onto her back and slid under the vehicle.

Did they think they could get away with a car bomb in these days of red alert? Every possible target would examine the underside of his personal vehicle before getting into the driver’s seat. So pondered the officer in charge of the detail as he lay, unmoving, less than fifty yards away.

This was the moment, he decided. As long as there were only two of them. With one occupied under the Range Rover and the other watching the front of the house, they might even bring the pair in unharmed. His thumb came down on the
SEND
button of his Pace Landmaster transceiver. He gave a series of rapid clicks, and before he had even stopped sending, the portable floods came on.

They had placed the floods while there was still plenty of light. Twelve portable high-intensity floodlights, secured at intervals in a crescent around the front and side of the building. The sergeant who controlled this battery of lights had switched them on the moment the rapid clicks had started to come through his earpiece.

“Stand still! Police! Do not move!” the officer in command shouted in vain.

Dazzled by the sudden brilliant light, Ahmad had reflexed, turned in his crouching position and let go two bursts of automatic fire from the Uzi tucked into his hip. He died instantly, an SAS man rushing from the bushes and putting four bullets into him from a 9mm Browning.

Dinah pushed her heels into the gravel and shot her body backwards from under the Range Rover. As she moved, she grabbed for the mini-Uzi lying beside the satchel. She brought the weapon up in one hand and fired three short bursts, turning between each burst, then getting to her feet, realizing that her only chance would be to blow out the searing, blinding lights.

She got no farther than two steps from the car when the same SAS NCO took her out with two fast pairs of shots.

They heard her go down onto the gravel, but waited for a minute in case any other trespassers had not broken cover. After a minute the officer in charge had shouted a command for those in hiding to come out or be shot down. There was no response, so after another minute the SAS team rose and went about clearing up the mess.

An officer, trained in bomb disposal eased himself under the Range Rover and examined it with a small torch held between his teeth.

“Bloody clever,” he muttered to himself. The limpet bomb secured magnetically to the underside of the chassis had been shaped like a small pipe, with ends at right angles, and covered in dirt, oil and grease. It had been placed carefully next to the crosswise bump in the underside of the chassis, covering the front axle. A cursory check would reveal nothing.

As he began to prize the magnetically attached pipe from the car, he moved too quickly. The mercury switch within the pipe slid down and made the connection to the batteries. A stab of power hit the electronic primer and nine pounds of explosive became unstable and blew a funnel of flame and destruction upwards. The officer died instantly and the whole forward section of the vehicle was destroyed.

As the echoes died, police and ambulance sirens could be heard as they raced to the scene of a reported series of shots, called in on 999 by a neighbor.

Hisham watched the News at Ten, and so got the first indication of Samira’s attempt going wrong. The account was terse, an outline confirming earlier reports of a terrorist incident in Wiltshire. There were pictures of a wrecked car and a form covered by a tarp by the side of the road, while police and forensic experts worked nearby.

The anchor took a feed from a local news team at the site. The reporter was a woman trying her best to appear as a tough, unfazed media person.

“The police are being very tight-lipped over this,” she said, looking a shade shifty herself. “But it has been confirmed that there was an attempt to kill two senior intelligence officers and an anti-terrorist policeman who were traveling from London. The car that took the brunt of the explosion in fact belonged to a well-known local doctor, whose name is being withheld for the moment until all relatives have been informed.

“The VIP intelligence and police officers escaped unharmed, and the one terrorist was shot dead by security forces. It is of interest that this happened very near to the spot where a former retired intelligence officer was killed—it is thought by a terrorist bomb—some three weeks ago. Police will not confirm if there is any connection between the two incidents, but this latest atrocity comes at a time when the security forces on mainland Britain, on the Continent and in the United States have been on a high state of alert following several bombings and shootings. Informed sources tell us that a Middle Eastern terrorist group has been responsible for the acts of violence both in Europe and the United States.”

Hisham left the television switched on and pondered his position. He now had only Ahmad and Dinah at his disposal for the final push—not that he had as yet decided to let the horror they called
Magic Lightning
go ahead. His immediate problem was what to do. He would have to report to
Yussif
, which, in turn, would be in instant contact with the
Biwãba
. What would he, Hisham, do if he were in the
Biwãba
’s shoes?

It depended on how many trustworthy people he had at his disposal. It was possible that he would send in a new team and—should he decide on that option—Hisham might be told to continue with the operation. The
Biwãba
was a great strategist, he was also a realist. In all probability he would have Hisham recalled, and that would mean only one thing. He would be immediately handed over to the truly dreaded Secret Police—Amn-al-Amm, known by a frightened people as the AMAM—and so would disappear.