Danger Close (19 page)

36

The van jounced along the A275 just north of Offham and I checked the satnav. Nothing. No trucks, no vehicles. Fuck this. I swore and pulled into a layby in a shower of gravel. I needed a leak.

‘Bollocks!’

Bang-Bang opened the side door and pointed at a TV screen she’d got going inside. ‘Babe. You’d better come and see this.’

I climbed into the compartment and watched the screens. There were two. The left-hand one was showing the Police Superintendent’s Association conference, the one we’d been aiming to hit. Keith Hatchett, the president, was at the podium. He was speaking. ‘We cannot close our eyes to the predicament facing us, and the consequent loss of goodwill… the same goodwill where police officers work long, thankless hours without…’

He tailed off. His eyes flew as wide as drawn curtains and he shouted ‘Spiders!’ and slumped over the podium. Then the camera panned round to show a pandemonium of shrieking fools. A uniformed Chief Superintendent was trying to claw his eyes out of his head. Someone seemed to stagger into the camera and it fell to the ground. That feed went out.

The right-hand screen showed a retread of London Tonight. Nina Hossein had her concerned face on as she outlined how the conference had gone horribly wrong, ambulances had been called, and the visiting ACPO lead on terrorism and other matters had later been found floating dead in the Thames. The conference’s lead on Diversity had been found down the road impersonating a fire engine.

I shouldn’t have, but right then I burst out laughing.

Bang-Bang gave me a knowing look. ‘That would HAVE to have been Sags. No-one would notice a Somali girl doing the catering. We fixed ‘em good, babes.’

‘LSD tabs in the catering?’

She nodded. ‘Looks that way.’

‘Brilliant. Teacher and Sags did the business and we certainly have. The Colonel will be happy.’

37

I drove us back into London feeling depressed and deflated. The enemy had the edge on us and Zero Day was nearly here. I pulled the van into the entrance of Knightsbridge barracks, KTS’s temporary base and home of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment. It was 11pm. The lights were blazing, and the drill square was full of all kinds of vehicles. Dinger rapped on the bodywork and grinned.

‘It’s the Afghan Two!’

I laughed. ‘Hello Dinger, they got you pulling gate duties?’

‘They sure have Riz. We just had the chief of the Met down here in a rage demanding to know what we’d done to his staff at the ACPO conference. He had a warrant and all sorts. We had to train some guns on him to get him to piss off.’

‘Oh boy. Things really are coming unstuck.’

Dinger nodded at some cars in the drill square. ‘See them? That’s the gang from Northumberland Avenue. The old man spent most of the day with them crossing the t’s.’

That was good. He was referring to the unit from the Treasury Solicitors, real hardass legal people who cleared up after the MOD and their indiscretions.

We parked up after our van had been checked outside and in with mirrors, and our Ministry Of Defence passes were scrutinised by torchlight. A sniffer dog team was brought up to search the van but was soon pulled off when Bang-Bang smothered the dog with the “who’s the lovely doggie” routine and scared the dog so badly it hid between its handler’s legs. I was surprised they hadn’t cottoned onto that by now. All you had to do was ruffle the search-dog’s ears. Bang-Bang came back grinning and I gave her my “you’re not helping” look.

A corporal waved our van into a parking space. We were shown through the side entrance and into a converted KTS/MOD command centre. It was alive with activity and radio noise. As we watched, some NCOs hung up some enormous blown-up overhead photos of Birmingham next to the wall screens. This would serve as backup in case any of the online systems went down.

Bang-Bang went off to check that the canteen was lively. Ten minutes later she came back with a tray of teas and plates of stew and plonked them down with a wry look. ‘Slop jockeys are on form tonight - Frappe Mystique a la Horse Guards, or stew to you and me.’

I started on the stew with the standard plastic spoon. To be fair I felt happy to be back in the warm embrace of the UK military establishment. At least you knew where you stood.

A signals operator stood and called out ‘Feeds are up. COBR is live. Paris is live.’ The wallscreens came to life and split into various areas. Colonel Mahoney, Toots and some Army top brass were near the front of the room. He was speaking. ‘The marches begin the day after tomorrow, no matter what. Newcastle, Liverpool, Bradford, Reading, and Birmingham. The problem is that although the Home Secretary and powers-that-be can put banning orders on marches, they can’t ban static demos. And how does one go en-masse to a static demo? That’s right, they walk… march, down the road. We’re trying to get emergency powers activated through civil contingency planning regulations, but that might not kick in in time. That’s the bad news. The good news is we’re activating every camera system we have including Project Champion.

‘Oh. More bad news. There’s also been an influx from the European mainland in the last two weeks, spiking in the last few days. A mix of Blood and Honour supporters, gig-goers, NDL, you name it. We can only speculate.’

He turned to Bang-Bang and I.

‘By the way, well done, you two. Tchéky was just on. One of those prints you lifted made a 73 percent match on the French Armée De La Terre database. They’re checking it manually now, but it looks like one Paul-Pierre Jesko, just got back from Afghanistan and dropped off the radar.’

A photo of a cropped-haired, tough-looking guy came up along with a French Ministry of Defence docket.

‘That’s going into Project Champion and TrapWire, if it or we see him, you’ll know.’

I raised a hand. ‘I thought Champion had been scrapped?’

He smiled. ‘Not all of it. We still have some of it active, and we’re running TrapWire on it.’

Project Champion had been a rather ill-advised programme where cameras had been erected all around Muslim areas in Birmingham. After some outcry it had been publically shelved. Or maybe not. TrapWire was cutting-edge, a predictive software system that analysed surveillance video for attack patterns and indicators of what we called “hostile reconnaissance”. The system could be placed on any camera network, be it traffic, police, a private firm. It was then just a case of letting it run and do its thing.

I was on my own again. The staff went about their business, phones rang and the screens flicked as they updated with no kind of good news. Bang-Bang had gone upstairs into the tower block to scout out an empty room for us. Hopefully someone would be on leave or in Afghanistan and we could crash and get a few hours kip.

The Colonel called out again. ‘OK. Troops. The planes are refuelling now and going up again. Everything. We’ve got about 48 hours tops. The Conservative conference in the city is now… off, due to the threat level and they’re not happy about holding up and relocating.’

I shrugged. Stuff ‘em. Personally I didn’t care if they held it in a Nissen hut in Reading.

A tall black man I didn’t recognise came into the room, escorted by an NCO. He was carrying a large archive storage box and Toots greeted him warmly. She brought him over. ‘This is Lennie. DCI Lennie George.’

He shook my hand. ‘I’m with you lot now. And this…’ he placed the archive box on a desk, ‘is everything the CPS has on Colonel Mahoney and you guys. All yours.’

I had to thank him. ‘Perfect, Lennie. Thankyou. We can make this, disappear.’

He smiled. ‘That’s what I thought.’ He and Toots went to look at the wall screens and confer on something. I decided to keep digging into the stew. Bang-Bang walked over to the little conflab of the boss, our new copper friend and Toots, and began drawing things on a piece of printer paper. I could see the Colonel’s face cycling through shades of bemusement, concern, then anger and finally, amusement. He started explaining something. I knew what she was doing. She was sketching FlameLite’s new capabilities.

I was halfway through the stew when my BlackBerry buzzed with an unknown number. I answered. ‘War Office, wanna fight?’

A spiky laugh. ‘Tommy Robinson here. You wanna speak with me?’

‘Yes, ASAP as in first thing tomorrow morning. Me and Bang-Bang will drive up.’

‘OK, I’ve heard of you two. You know where I live?’

‘Don’t be daft mate, you’re on our database.’

‘Fair one. See ya tomorrow.’ The line went dead. Bang-Bang traipsed back over and picked up her stew. ‘Who was that doll?’

‘Tommy, Holly. We’re round his first thing tomorrow.’

‘Ah good. I suppose you’re going to ask about the Colonel’s face when I explained what FlameLite and my army of infomorphs did and how they could help take out any Met police threats or evidence. That Lennie bloke looked a bit stunned, too.’

‘I saw it all babe. What did the Colonel say?’

‘After much muttering, he agreed but said under NO circumstances should I turn it on until he’s got “higher approval”. After all, it destroyed an airbase.’

‘I think he’s right. I think anyone normal would be a bit concerned after being shown the future of information warfare. Did you get a room?’

She grinned. ‘Yep. View of the park, an’ all.’

38

October 6
th

7.50am the next morning. Luton, L-Town, here we go. I rang the bell of Tommy Robinson’s house. As we waited by the door, a car full of Asian lads idled past, glaring at us. Me and Bang-Bang gave them the thousand-yard stare back and she swept her jacket back to reveal the CZ85 tucked into the top of her daisy dukes. They left sharpish.

The door opened on the chain. Tommy. A short, nervy guy wearing a Lacoste polo shirt. ‘Well if it ain’t the Pakistani Bodie and Doyle. You’d better come in.’

He unchained the door. We went through to a living room knocked-through to a conservatory. I dispensed with the preamble. ‘Tommy, as you know, we’re from KTS, Holly here is also from the Hur al-Ayn, we haven’t got time to fuck around, OK, first thing I’m going to ask you to call off the march…’

‘To which I will say no.’

I nodded. ‘Thought as much. But I had to ask. Second thing, Tommy, we want to know who might take advantage of it. C18, Infidels, Blood and Honour. Sikhs Versus Shariah.’

Tommy regarded us both for a second and sniffed. Then he spoke. ‘Bit early for a beer, so, tea? By the way, Holly – great shoot.’

‘Tea’d be lovely, please luv, white no sugar’ said Holly and he was off into the kitchen. I looked at her. She mouthed ‘what?’

‘I’d love to know.’

‘He’s talking about my Bizarre magazine shoot. July? Remember? Ostrich feathers? Don’t look at me like that Rizwan Sabir, you have a copy in your flat.’

I shrugged and went to look at the framed photos on the wall. Bang-Bang joined me and we spent a few minutes looking at pictures from demos and EDL memorabilia and arguing sotto voce about who was who.

Presently Tommy returned with a tray and got busy pouring. And then he fixed me with a long stare, and fished some photos from inside his jacket pocket and laid them on the table.

‘Riz. These do
not
leave this house. That’s all I’m going to say. What you’re looking at is the 2009 London meeting of the Justiciar Knights, The Order 777, and the hidden history of the counter-jihad. Your third man on the right is the one you want to be looking for - the hidden imam, so to speak.’

He grinned. We weren’t smiling.

‘The other lot that are worrying me are Sikhs Versus Shariah, proper nutjobs that lot.’

I had half an ear on what he was saying but I was concentrating on the face of the third man on the right, sitting right next to Anders Behring Breivik. A large man with a shaved head and celtic rune tattoos glared out from the photo. The missing link. The hidden imam.

‘This him?’

‘That’s him. “Richard Lionheart”. Breivik’s real commander on earth. His real name is Chris Fletcher. Ever heard that name?’

We hadn’t, and we both shook our heads.

‘He has no mobile, no computer, only uses payphones. Never been arrested so his prints and DNA aren’t on file. If he wants to communicate he just writes a letter on an old manual typewriter and then the people under him post the communiqué via Tor. Like those messages on behalf of Breivik. Chris here holds Bosnian and Liberian passports, has no National Insurance number, nothing. He’s never even been on a YouTube video. He’s a ghost.’

People like this were extremely rare, and a waking nightmare for security services. Nowadays, if you had no electronic footprint, it was almost impossible to be traced. I sipped my tea, and then got out my BlackBerry and took some shots and emailed them to the Colonel with an attached text. ‘
Boss
.
This
is
Chris
Fletcher
-
Lionheart
.
Get
these
into
the
system
for
facial
recognition
?’

I spoke. ‘Tommy. Are you dead set on doing this march?’

He sat back. ‘I am. I can’t not. I can’t walk away from something I believe in, and I’m not going to apologise for it. You know what Edward Abbey said? “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”’

‘He did,’ I replied. ‘He also said “Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.”’

Tommy studied me for a moment to see if I was baiting him. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t.

He continued. ‘On the other hand, Riz, I don’t want MY march hijacked by Nazis or Sikh lunatics, so, stay in touch on the day. We’ve got each others’ numbers.’

I nodded. ‘OK. Do you know Duckie?’

He grinned. ‘We all know about Duckie. Top bird.’

We finished our tea and stood. Holly spoke. ‘Maybe see you on the day. Be careful Tommy. Look out for the faces.’ He smiled. ‘I will, Holly. I’ll be looking out for them.’