Secret Asset (2 page)

2

L
iz hailed a taxi at the bottom of Primrose Hill, and directed the driver to the Atrium restaurant on Millbank. From there it was a short walk to Thames House, the massive heavy-set building on the north bank of the Thames, which was the headquarters of MI5. It was a good moment to drive through the West End. The rush hour was over. The theatre crowds were all inside. The pubs glowed with light and warmth that in the ordinary way would have attracted her. Within twenty minutes of leaving Marzipan she was back at her desk.

There was much to do before she could get back to Sohail Din. The video had to be copied, the arrangements for the safe house confirmed, a fresh A4 team conjured up to replace Wally Woods's, now going off duty.

Then Liz sat down to think. Was there an immediate threat? If so she would need to contact Charles Wetherby—dining as it happened with his MI6 opposite number, Geoffrey Fane. If Marzipan was right there was a threat, but not an immediate one. She decided to defer the decision until she had seen him again, and then reached for the telephone and dialled Counter-Terrorist Investigations. Judith Spratt, on night duty, answered.

Judith was an old friend. The two had joined the Service on the same day over a decade before, and both had worked in the counter-terrorism branch now for six years. But while Liz's talents had taken her in the direction of agent running, Judith's sharp analytical skills and attention to detail had turned her into an expert investigator. With almost obsessive tenacity, she and her team of colleagues followed up all the pieces of information that came into the counter-terrorism branch in addition to what the agent runners produced. They were constantly in touch with colleagues overseas, sharing leads, producing identifications, making connections. Investigations Section was the sheet anchor of the whole counter-terrorist effort of Thames House, taking unassessed information and making sense of it.

So it was to Judith that Liz now went for the portfolio of British Asians suspected of some kind of involvement in terrorism. Liz gave her a quick précis of what Marzipan had said, but none of it connected with anything Judith and her team were currently working on. Clutching the large leather portfolio Judith gave her, zipped tight and locked, she took the lift down to the basement garage and collected one of the anonymous fleet vehicles housed there. With three-quarters of an hour still to spare she drove back north, up Regent Street through Oxford Circus, eventually turning into the quiet streets of once-grand eighteenth-century houses, now the consulting rooms of doctors, dentists, psychiatrists, and other specialists serving London's wealthier residents and visitors. Finally, she turned under an arch and into a dark, faintly lit mews of small houses, the former stables of the grand houses. A garage door swung up when she pressed the bleeper in the car, and she drove straight into a small, lit garage.

Above the garage was a warm, cheerful sitting room, furnished with a couple of well-used sofas, covered in what the agent runners all referred to as “Ministry of Works chintz.” A square dining-room table with several chairs of an unidentifiable wood, a battered coffee table and a framed print completed the furnishings. Safe houses were one of civilisation's dead ends. Strictly utilitarian, they were kept in readiness for use, the kitchen stocked with the essentials for making coffee and tea but never any food. A quarter of an hour later, as Liz was still unpacking the portfolio's collection of photographs onto the dining-room table, the phone rang.

“Ninety seconds,” said a voice at the other end. “All clear.”

She opened the door immediately when the bell rang and led Marzipan up the stairs.

“Would you like something to drink—tea, perhaps, or coffee?”

Sohail shook his head, slowly, seriously, saying nothing but taking in his surroundings. “Did you get something to eat?” she asked, hoping he had.

“I don't need anything now,” he said.

“All right, then let's get started. I want you to take your time looking at these, but don't think too hard about it. Usually your first instinct is accurate.”

The pictures were from a variety of sources. The best were copies of those supplied with applications for passports and driving licences. The rest mostly came from surveillance—taken from a distance with hidden cameras—and were poorer. Sohail took his time, examining each photograph carefully before regretfully shaking his head. By eleven when they were only halfway through, it occurred to Liz that Sohail's parents would start to worry if he were unusually late. “I think we should call it a day,” she announced. “Could you look at the rest tomorrow?”

He nodded, and she said, “Then let's meet up here again. Shall we say seven-thirty? Come just the same way as you did tonight.” She looked at Sohail. He seemed very tired. “You should take a cab home. I'll call one.”

She went and made the call. When she returned she said, “Leave here in ten minutes. Walk out of the mews, turn left, and a taxi will come along the street. As it approaches it will put on its light. The driver will drop you off a few streets from home.”

She looked at the young man, and suddenly felt a concern, a tenderness towards him that was almost maternal. It was a pity he had yet to identify any of the three suspects. But she was not downhearted. She had long ago learned that success in her line of business took time and patience and often came suddenly, and unexpectedly.

3

M
addie came back to Belfast when her mother Molly telephoned to tell her the doctor's news. There was nothing to be done except manage the pain. Sean Keaney would die at home.

So she returned to the small brick house where her father and mother had lived for over forty years, just off the Falls Road in Belfast, a house as minimal and drab as any of its neighbours in the row. Only the most careful observer would notice the extraordinary thickness of the front door, or how the painted shutters of the windows were steel-reinforced.

Learning that death was imminent, the family gathered like a wagon train drawing up in a circle for defence. Though it was a sparse circle, thought Maddie. One daughter had died of breast cancer two years before, and the one son—apple of his father's eye—had been shot dead fifteen years before trying to evade a British Army roadblock. Now only she and her older sister, Kate, remained.

Maddie had come only because her mother had asked her to. As a little girl, her dislike for her father had been matched by the intensity of love she'd felt for her mother, though as she grew up even this was corroded by her frustration at her mother's passivity in the face of her husband's domineering ways. Maddie simply couldn't fathom her mother's willingness to subordinate her own striking qualities—the musicality, the love of books, the Galway-bred country sense of humour—to the demand of her husband Sean that the Struggle should always come first.

Maddie had known that her father's dedication to Irish nationalism brought him admiration of a kind. But this had only increased her dislike of him, her anger at his callous treatment of the family. Yet she was never sure which she felt more contemptible—the man or the movement. She had got away from both as soon as she could—leaving at eighteen to study Law at University College Dublin, then staying on to work there.

There was also the violence—Maddie had been fleeing that as well, of course. She had never bothered to count the number of people she'd known who had been injured or killed. Then there were the others, just ordinary people many of them, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She came to believe that the counting would never stop. Her father had been obsessively secretive about his “professional life,” yet as the Keaney family listened to the news of each IRA “operation”—that euphemism for bombings, shootings and death—the hush that settled over them all was knowing, not innocent. No hush could still the impact of the deaths that studded Maddie's childhood like a grotesquely crowded dartboard. Especially that of her brother, born and bred a Republican, killed before he had any idea that life might give him other choices.

Now she sat with her mother and sister for hours on end, drinking countless cups of tea in the small sitting room downstairs, while in his bed on the floor above them her father lay, heavily sedated. Word went out, through the vast network of comrades, associates and friends, that Sean Keaney would be glad to have final visits from those who had served with him since the Troubles flared in the late sixties. There was never any question of a priest being called, for although Keaney had been born a Catholic, the only faith he held was a rock-solid allegiance to the Irish Republican Army.

The visitors were all known to the family. Kieran O'Doyle, Jimmy Garrison, Seamus Ryan, even Martin McGuinness made an appearance late one night, coming under cover of darkness so his visit would not be noticed—the list was a roll call of the Republican movement. To a man they were long-term veterans of the armed struggle.

Many had served prison terms for their part in assassinations or bombings, and were free now only because of the amnesty provisions of the Good Friday Agreement. During his long paramilitary career, Keaney had managed to avoid any criminal conviction, but along with most of his visitors, he had been interned in the seventies for over a year in the cell blocks of the Maze Prison.

The men were shown upstairs by Maddie, since her mother found the constant up and down exhausting. Standing by the bedside, they tried to make small talk with the man they had known as the Commander. But Maddie could see that Keaney's condition shocked them—once a barrel of a man, he had been reduced in his terminal illness to a small shrunken figure. Sensing his fatigue, most of his old associates kept their visits short, ending them with awkward but heartfelt final farewells. Downstairs, they stopped to talk briefly with Molly and Maddie's sister, Kate; sometimes, if they had been especially close to Keaney, they drank a small whiskey.

Maddie could see how much even these brief visits drained her father's dwindling energy, and she was relieved when there was no one left on the visitors' list they had drawn up. Which made her father's subsequent request, uttered after a night of such pain she thought he would not see the dawn break, all the more astonishing.

“He wants to see James Maguire!” she announced as her sister and mother gathered for breakfast in the small kitchen downstairs.

“You can't be serious,” Kate said incredulously. Even under the umbrella of Irish nationalism, James Maguire and Sean Keaney had at best coexisted edgily, their mutual antipathy held in check only by their devotion to the cause.

“I thought it was morphine talk, but he's asked twice now. I didn't know what to say. We can't turn down a request from our dying father, now can we?”

Her sister looked at her grimly. “I'll go upstairs and have a word. He must be confused.” But when she came down again, her face was sterner still. “He absolutely insists. I asked why he wanted to see Maguire, and he said, ‘Never you mind. Just get him here for me.'”

And later that day, about an hour before the Keaneys had their tea, there was a knock on the door. A tall, lean man came into the house, and although he was much the same age as the dying man upstairs, there was nothing frail about him. He displayed none of the modesty shown by the other former associates of Sean Keaney, nor did he shake hands with any members of the family. When Kate took him upstairs, she later told Maddie, she found their father asleep—perhaps the bizarre meeting with a long-time enemy would not take place after all. But as she turned back to the visitor, the man said evenly, “Hello, Keaney.”

“Come in, Maguire,” the weaker voice commanded, and Kate saw that her father's eyes had opened. He raised a bony hand to dismiss her, which he had not done with his other visitors.

Downstairs Maddie waited in the front parlour with her mother and sister, torn between curiosity and disbelief as the clock ticked and they could hear the low bass murmur of the voices upstairs for five, then ten, then fifteen minutes. Finally after half an hour they heard the bedroom door open, footsteps come down the staircase, and, without stopping for even the curtest farewell, Maguire walked out of the house.

Afterwards, Maddie found her father so exhausted that she could not bring herself to ask about the visitor, and left him to sleep. Her sister, less patiently, waited only until after tea to go upstairs, determined to discover the reason for her father's summoning Maguire. Yet she returned downstairs both dissatisfied and distraught. For sometime during tea their father, Sean Keaney, had died in his sleep.

4

C
harles Wetherby, Director of Counter-Terrorism, had been in the office since seven-thirty. Liz had briefed him by phone about her meetings with Marzipan the previous evening, as soon as he had got home from his dinner with Geoffrey Fane of MI6. Wetherby had called a 9:00 a.m. emergency meeting of the Counter-Terrorist Committee, the joint committee of MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office. It had been set up immediately after the Twin Towers atrocity of 11 September 2001 at the Prime Minister's insistence, to ensure that all government agencies and departments involved in countering the terrorist threat to the UK should cooperate without any inter-service rivalries impeding the national effort. The CTC had accepted that on the information available, there was a possible threat of an extreme kind, which needed urgent follow-up. It had agreed that MI5 should move forward to investigate Marzipan's information, using joint resources as necessary and keeping everyone informed.

Now at eleven o'clock Wetherby was chairing an operations meeting of the MI5 sections involved. The operations briefing room was in the centre of Thames House. It overlooked the internal atrium but had no windows to the outside world. It was spacious with several rows of chairs around a long table and at one end a screen and other technical equipment. Despite its size the room was crowded and Liz found herself squashed between Judith Spratt and Reggie Purvis, the dour Yorkshire-man who headed A4, the surveillance section whose teams had been out providing counter-surveillance for Liz and Marzipan the night before.

Also present was a small army of tough-looking characters in shirt sleeves, mostly ex-military. These were members of A2, the section responsible for “bugging and burgling”—installing covert listening devices and cameras—nowadays done strictly under warrant. Liz knew them to be experts in the skills required for their risky, nerve stretching business. Filling the remaining seats were colleagues of Judith Spratt from Counter-Terrorist Investigations, “Technical Ted” Poyser, the chief consultant on all computer matters, Patrick Dobson from the Director General's office, responsible for liaison with the Home Office, and Dave Armstrong, just back from Leeds. Even at a distance Liz could see that he needed a shave, a clean shirt and a good night's sleep.

Liz knew and liked most of her colleagues, even Reggie Purvis who, taciturn and stubborn as he might be, was expert at his job. The sole exception arrived late for the meeting and sat down with a thud in the one remaining seat. Michael Binding had returned the year before from a longer than usual posting in Northern Ireland and was now head of A2, the bugger and burglar in chief. Binding treated all his female colleagues with an infuriating mix of gallantry and condescension that Liz could deal with only by the most iron self-control.

For this morning at least, Liz and Marzipan's video were the star turn. Much of the content of the video had been seen at one time or another by most members of her audience, in excerpts on television or on extremist Web sites on the Internet. What shocked, as the video played, was the sheer malevolent concentration on brutal image, the persistence of the message, penetrating all barriers of language and culture, that it is the duty of some to hate and destroy others, for reasons beyond the control of either side.

In all the clutter of blood and violence, the knives drawn across throats, the cries, the fear, the explosions and the dust, nothing in the video was more sinister, more coldly cruel than the image of a man in a white robe with a black beard, seated on a mat, his voice rising and falling like a siren, as he spoke in a language few in the room could understand. His message of hatred, didactic, unwavering, was only too clear. From the fact that his image recurred between the different scenes of violence, it was evident that his message was intended to illustrate different points of doctrine or method—all to the same end, death. Finally, with a prolonged flickering the video stopped.

Wetherby ended the stunned silence. “The man in the white robe is the Imam whom our agent Marzipan saw yesterday in a bookshop in Haringey. We'll have a full transcription in an hour or so, but the gist of what he was saying seemed clear enough. Judith?”

Judith had been briefed by one of the transcribers who listened in on intercepted conversations in Urdu. She glanced at her notes.

“He was issuing a call to arms—all true followers to take up the sword and so forth—the Satan America—her evil allies—death should be embraced by those who fight and they will be blessed in another world. That was the concluding sentence. But the interesting thing is that it wasn't just the usual diatribe. The way it was arranged was as a kind of lesson, I thought, with the points being illustrated by the different scenes of violence. A sort of argument, almost.”

“A kind of training video, you mean?” asked Dave Armstrong.

“Yes. Something like that. Not just a sermon anyway.”

“That would chime with Marzipan's account,” Liz commented.

“As would the fact that there was an audience of three,” said Judith. “That's an ideal team number. It's the number for maximum security and where each team member can watch the others simultaneously.”

“What were the video clips?” someone asked.

Wetherby answered: “The throat-cutting scene was certainly the murder of Daniel Pearl, the American reporter. The others could have been anywhere, most likely in Iraq. The text will probably help, if we need to know.”

He turned to someone at the end of the table whom Liz did not recognise. He was a broad-shouldered man, smartly dressed in a well-cut suit and scarlet tie with a face that was friendly and a little craggy. Just short of outright handsome, she observed to herself.

“Tom,” said Wetherby. “What about the Imam? Do we know who he is?”

The man called Tom replied in a soft voice—speaking, Liz wryly thought, in what used to be known as received pronunciation, “proper English” as her mother would have called it. “His name is Mahmood Abu Sayed. He's the head of a madrasa in Lahore. And yes he is a teacher, as Judith suggested. But his madrasa is known as one of the radical hotbeds. Abu Sayed himself comes from near the Afghan border. His family has strong Taliban connections. Even as radicals go, he's a hardliner.” He paused for a moment. “We'll check with Immigration but he probably came in under another name. I'm willing to bet he's never been in Britain before. English students have always travelled out to him in Lahore. If he's come here then I'd guess there's something pretty important in the wind.”

There was silence for a moment, then Michael Binding, red-faced in his heavy tweed jacket, leaned forward in his chair and waved his pencil to catch Wetherby's eye. “Look, Charles, I sense we are running ahead rather fast. Resources are pretty tight in A2 just now. This Imam may be a firebrand but in his world he's presumably a distinguished kind of fellow. Is it really so remarkable that Muslim youngsters want to hear him speak or that he should get a few budding disciples together? They may just want to sit at his feet. In Northern Ireland—”

Liz interrupted, trying not to sound too impatient. “That was not Marzipan's impression and to date his instincts have proved at least ninety per cent right. That video wasn't exactly theological. Marzipan thought that these people were preparing for a mission, and I'd back his opinion.”

Binding leaned back in his chair, looking cross, scratching his nose with his pencil. Wetherby smiled grimly. “CTC have accepted that in the light of these events there may well be a specific threat,” he said. “And I think so too. Our working assumption has to be that these three young men are preparing an atrocity of some sort under guidance and what we have seen is the conditioning, the stiffening up if you like, designed to make sure they stay the course to the end. With no information to the contrary we must assume that what is in preparation is an attack in this country.” He paused. “Of an extreme kind,” he added.

A small chill seemed to enter the room. A suicide bomber, unless detected before his mission can begin, is virtually impossible to stop. Three suicide bombers could make it three times more difficult. One would be bound to get through. Exactly what was intended was still unclear but, Liz reflected, Marzipan had at least given them a chance.

Wetherby was speaking again. “The operation will be run by Investigations and led by Tom Dartmouth. The code word is FOXHUNT. Dave, you will continue running Marzipan—you should be the one who sees him this evening.”

Liz's stomach turned suddenly to lead. She felt her face redden with disappointment. Dave Armstrong was looking sympathetically at her but all she could conjure up was a wan smile. Her time off work hadn't been his fault. He had inherited Marzipan on fair terms, before the agent had become a “star.” It was logical that he should continue with him. Beyond the feeling of disappointment, she found it difficult to analyse her own feelings. It was something about Marzipan—his vulnerability, his helplessness, almost his
principles
. He was in so many respects alien, a member of a different culture to hers, from a totally different background and yet his principles were identical to hers. Did he fully understand the risks he was running? She couldn't say. There was something almost naïve about the way—yes, the way he yielded to them. She bit her lip, said nothing. Wetherby was speaking again. She almost hated the matter-of-fact manner, the steady confident tone of his voice.

“The aim for the moment is to find out more,” he was saying. “There is no obvious advantage to us in moving in just yet. The video proves nothing. We have nothing to hold anyone on. Our first step must be surveillance on the shop. I'd like eavesdropping and covert cameras too as soon as we can get them in. Patrick, can you see to the warrant?”

Patrick Dobson nodded. “I'll get on to the Home Secretary's office. He's in London, I know, so it should be quick. Hopefully by six. I'll need a written application within the hour.”

Tom nodded. “Judith, will you take that on please?”

Wetherby turned to Binding. “Sorry, Michael. That's it. If we get the warrant I want your chaps to go in tomorrow night. Can you do that?”

Binding nodded slowly. “We can probably do it if Marzipan can sketch a plan of the inside of the building. We'll need prior A4 surveillance of course, who the key people are, what time they leave, where they live, who has keys. We don't want to risk being disturbed. I'll talk to Special Branch as well. Tom, I'll need to know from you how much we can tell them.”

Tom nodded. “We'll talk about it straight after this.”

Reggie Purvis looked at Liz. “We'll be briefing the A4 teams at four. I hope both you and Dave can come to the meeting. We'll need to know whatever background on the area and the people you've got from Marzipan.”

Liz looked at Dave and nodded. Wetherby gathered up his papers. “We'll reconvene tomorrow in my room. I'll want situation reports from one representative of each section. And, Judith, an action note, please, through Tom and circulated.”

As the meeting began to break up, Wetherby called Liz over. “Can I see you in my office, say at noon? I need to make a quick call first.”

As Liz left the room Dave Armstrong came up and walked with her to the stairs. “Thanks for standing in for me last night,” he said.

“Any time,” she said. “How did it go up north?”

Dave shook his head. “A lot of fuss about nothing,” he said, rubbing his bristly chin. “I've come straight down. Haven't even been home yet. But at least this one sounds real.”

They came out of the stairwell onto the fourth floor. “Tell me,” said Liz, “who is that man Tom? I've never seen him before. Is he new?”

“Tom Dartmouth,” said Dave. “And no, he's not new. He's been in Pakistan—got seconded to MI6 there after 9/11, poor bugger. He's an Arabic speaker. I should have introduced you but I didn't realise you didn't know him. I suppose he came back while you were off sick. You'll like him; he's a nice bloke. Knows his onions.”

He looked at Liz for a moment, then slowly a smile came over his face. He poked her playfully with an elbow. “Don't get excited now. I'm told there's a Mrs. Dartmouth.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” said Liz. “You've got a one-track mind.”