Sleeper Cell (21 page)

She stood up, carefully uncricking her back, and walked through to the empty kitchen. Bones had not bothered to check whether there was any food. It was six am, so there was little chance he was out getting her croissants and coffee. Still, he had at least kept her safe. Hopefully he would still be doing the same for Phillip Shaw.

She drank three glasses of water from a chipped half-pint glass then poured three more over her head. There were no towels, but looking out of the kitchen window at the harsh sunlight that was already burning the open spaces between the blocks, she figured her hair would be dry in minutes anyway.

Outside Turnpike Lane station she picked up a bagel and an indifferent coffee then took the tube down to Ealing.

She heard Ibrahim Abulafia moving around in the flat for almost a minute after she knocked on his door.

‘Mr Abulafia?’ she said when he opened the door a couple of inches.

‘I don’t have time for visitors. I’m late for work.’

‘You need to make time,’ Leila said. ‘This won’t take long.’

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Leila Reid. I’m with the police.’

‘I’ve already spoken to the police. And I’ll tell you the same thing: I don’t know anything. Some thugs. I’ve had plenty worse.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Last night, some skinheads shove me around a bit, call me some names. I can deal with them. I can’t deal with you people coming out of the woodwork only when it’s politically expedient for you to do so.’

‘I’m…?’

‘Yes, I can use words like ‘expedient’. I haven’t always been the man who sweeps up your rubbish in the bowels of the earth. I had another life once. Now, if you’ll excuse me, go away.’

‘I think there’s some misunderstanding, Mr Abulafia. If uniformed officers have spoken to you about last night, that’s entirely coincidental. I’m here on a different matter. I just want to ask you a couple of questions, off the record, about Ghada.’

‘Ghada’s not here.’ He tried to close the door. Leila did not put her foot in it, but instead pushed back with her hand.

‘Can I just come in for a minute?’ she said. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

‘Then you can tell me here.’

‘Your daughter’s dead, Mr Abulafia.’

He did not reply at first. He just looked at her around the edge of the door. Then he released it and Leila gently pushed it open.

‘She was killed in the bomb on Wednesday,’ he said. It wasn’t a question. He knew.

Leila nodded and when the old man turned and walked back into the flat, she followed, closing the front door silently behind her.

Abulafia stood looking out of the window when she joined him in his sparse sitting room.

‘If you’re still here,’ he said, ‘maybe she wasn’t just another victim. You think she was involved somehow.’ Again, not a question.

‘How much do you know about what Ghada has been doing these last few years?’ Leila said.

‘Is this on the record now?’ he said.

‘Not if you don’t want it to be. There’s just some things I don’t understand. Some things that don’t fit. I’m hoping you’ll be able to fill in the gaps.’

‘You probably know as much as I do,’ he said, still with his back to her, watching her reflection in the glass.

‘Did Ghada ever discuss her political views with you?’ Leila said.

‘Political? No. We escaped from the West Bank when she was small. That was all behind us.’

‘How did you get asylum in Britain?’

‘I made a good case.’

‘I’m sure you did. And I’m thinking it has something to do with why SIS is being so tight-lipped about you. Am I getting warm?’

‘I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough anyway, now that… ah, what does any of it matter now?’

‘You were an informant.’

Abulafia nodded. ‘MI6, SIS as you call them now, ran me for four years. I fed them information – dead drops mostly – and they paid me well enough. But they had me inside one of the most paranoid organisations in the world. People got suspicious.’

‘Your cover was blown. They had to get you out.’

‘Eventually. But not before my wife was murdered.’ He studied her reflection in the glass for a moment. ‘She was snatched from the street outside our house on the way to market. They tortured her for two days, so I’m told. She couldn’t have told them a thing. She never knew. And when they’d finished with her they dumped her body at the Pool of Siloam like a sack of spoiled meat. I think it was a message. Isaiah 22:19 – ‘I will thrust thee from thy post’. You know it?’

Leila shook her head. She was never much for bible quotes.

‘It was a warning even my handlers couldn’t ignore,’ Abulafia said. ‘The British arranged to send us to England before the truth had a chance to come out and other informants were compromised. They gave us new identities.’

‘So you’d ensured Ghada was ripe for subversion from the cradle.’

‘What I did, I did for the good of our people and we paid a high price for it. I can take only anonymous jobs now; Ghada could scarcely even do that.’

‘So you did know she was into something?’

Ibrahim looked out of the window for a long moment. He took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it.

‘Ghada became secretive over the last few years,’ he said. ‘She would disappear for weeks, months on end. She said she was staying with friends, and sometimes she was. But there were other times it was as if she didn’t exist at all. Her phone was dead, her emails went unread, nothing.’

‘We have reason to believe she was out of the country,’ Leila said. ‘What I have difficulty with, is why.’

‘I can’t tell you what I don’t know.’

‘She never hinted at any involvement with extremist groups? No mention of radicalised beliefs, a hatred of Britain or the West?’

‘Britain gave us shelter. Ghada loved her country and its people.’

He fell into reflective silence. Leila looked around the room.

‘The photograph of the Dome of the Rock on your wall,’ she said. ‘What does that mean to you?’

‘The Dome of the Rock?’ He turned to the framed magazine picture above the TV. He pointed to the pale brown scrub land in the distance. ‘The Mount of Olives, Temple Mount, the site of the City of David.’

‘Jewish sites.’

‘
Palestinian
sites, Miss Reid.’

‘Sacred to the Jews. Ghada was Muslim.’

He laughed. ‘Was she? Because she had brown skin, because she came from Palestine? No, Ghada was not Muslim. We are the people who fall through the cracks in your simplified view of the middle east. My family are old Palestinian Jews. I was an MI6 mole in Shin Bet,
Israeli
secret intelligence, not Fatah. And Ghada, my dear, was – is – Jewish.’

‘I don’t understand. She was working with an organisation called Harakat al Sahm; the Movement of the Arrow. Everything points to them being a radical Islamist group.’

‘If you call a cat a dog, will it bark? You see what you want to see. Ghada loved this country, that’s all I can tell you.’

‘She wore a ring, didn’t she? A key, folded round into a ring. The key’s the symbol of return from exile for the Palestinians.’

‘Miss Reid, religion isn’t nationality. My neighbour here, Mr Abdul, he flies the Union flag, he sings God Save the Queen. He is British, and he is Muslim. Ghada and I are proud Palestinians, nationalists if you want to say that. Being Jewish does not mean we feel the pain of the situation any less acutely. Now, please…’

‘You don’t seem particularly upset that your daughter’s dead, Mr Abulafia.’

‘Is that a question?’

‘No, just an observation.’

‘We all mourn in our own way, Miss Reid.’

‘Sure, but she was killed planting a bomb to murder innocent people. That must mean something to you.’

‘All you have told me is that she was killed
by
the bomb, not that she planted it. I choose to believe my daughter died an innocent woman until you can show me proof of the other.’

‘I’ll get to the truth, I can assure you of that.’

‘Or are you trying to frame her?’

‘No, I’m not. I’d rather have no attribution at all than a wrong one.’

‘Then you are unusual.’

‘This whole scenario is unusual. I’m convinced there’s something none of us is seeing, something else.’

‘Another attack?’

‘I’m sure of it.’ She turned to go then stopped.

‘Tell me one more thing, Mr Abulafia. Does the name Black Eagle mean anything to you?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’ There was no pause, no tell. If Black Eagle was real and Ghada had been a part of it, she had never confided in her father.

‘OK. Thank you.’

‘Miss Reid,’ he said. ‘If you are to stop whatever is coming next, change your direction. You must open your eyes and run at it head on. Don’t stop until you see the truth.’

Raha Golzar had also started the day in very different circumstances to those she had grown accustomed to.

At eleven thirty the previous night she had been cuffed and shackled and processed out of Low Newton’s custody. The Governor took her to a loading dock at the rear of the prison. Three vans waited, their doors open but with no drivers or guards in sight. Golzar was put into a cage in the middle van. All three vehicles were then secured and she heard voices outside. Fifteen minutes later all three moved off. All would take different routes to London and no one on board would have any idea whether they were carrying the real prisoner or not. Until they arrived at Holloway, the only person who knew where Golzar was would be the Governor of Low Newton. Any rescue was impossible.

At 4am she had been rearrested (or, more accurately, arrested properly for the first time) in the service bay of Holloway jail. The arresting officer cited Section 41 of the Terrorism Act but did not elaborate. All this meant was that she could be detained for up to twenty eight days without ever being told why. It was not a hopeful start to the day.

At a little after nine o’clock, she had been taken from her cell to a meeting room where Donald Aquila, the same sharp-suited man who had met her in the activities room of F Wing, was waiting.

She sat down opposite him and he took a thick sheaf of papers from a leather attache case.

‘Please leave us alone,’ he said to the guard hovering in the doorway. ‘I have not been issued with written instructions that this is to be a Paragraph 9 interview and as such, as Miss Golzar’s legal counsel, this conversation is subject to litigation privilege. Anything said in this room in this meeting will be inadmissible in any future legal proceedings.’

The guard did not move.

‘That means fuck off, sonny,’ Aquila said.

The guard consulted the two police officers outside the room then closed the door. It was locked behind him and Golzar and her lawyer were alone. A few seconds later the red light on the video camera went off.

‘What was that?’ Golzar said.

‘Insurance. They know all that; I know all that. But if you do get caught up in the English courts, even under some obscure Terrorism Act charge, that little speech will slow them down a bit. They can only use anything said in here against you if they can prove Paragraph 9 was in place before I entered the room. They’re probably running around like headless chickens right now trying to get a judge to sign off on the order. If and until they do, it’s just us.’

He took out a micro digital recorder and placed it on the table between them.

‘So why are you here?’ Golzar said. ‘I think I deserve the truth this time.’

‘Yes, you do. I’m here to get you out.’

‘Out of here?’

‘Out of the country. Your friends have been trying to locate you since you disappeared from Jerusalem. We suspected you were alive, but beyond that, we could prove nothing. The British did a good job. Clever to hide you among the lunatics.’

‘You’re not working for British Secret Intelligence then.’

Aquila smiled. ‘No, I’m not. You know who I work for.’

‘Then why the elaborate ruse? Black Eagle had emergency extraction protocols back in Israel.’

‘No one was sure who you were working for. Your mission was never sanctioned and you do have a history of defection, don’t you? Black Eagle were watching you, but by the time they knew your true intentions, they were not the only people interested. Half a dozen governments wanted you out of there, and as usual it fell to the CIA to do the clean-up.’

‘Who sold me out?’

‘Hassan Hawadi.’

Golzar nodded.

‘Your lover…’ Aquila said.

‘He was a mole. Paid by the CIA to work inside Fatah. He checked out fine.’

‘Because he
was
working for the CIA, but he was also loyal to the cause of the PLO. He knew you’d set up a meeting with someone high up in Mossad and told his PLO handler. They couldn’t act in West Jerusalem without causing a major international incident, but they could bring the Russian FIS in. And they did.’

‘How ironic. You’re telling me Russian secret service were ready to talk?’

‘Oh yes. Moscow wanted you back. That’s why the CIA had to take you out of play as quickly as possible.’

‘So why didn’t they just pick me up?’

‘Because they had to keep their hands clean. They risked exposing Hawadi if they acted directly and he was still a valuable asset. British SIS were asked to arrange an apparent assassination and render you through Britain to the US. They got half of it right.’

‘The bit where they shot me with a tranc dart.’

‘They needed it to look convincing. The whole thing was staged.’

‘So Hawadi never arranged the meeting at the Pinkhas Rosen apartment?’

‘He did. His PLO paymasters asked him to lure you to the safe house. They would supply the FIS agent and you would be back in Moscow before anyone knew you were missing. Unfortunately for you, the CIA pay better and Hawadi follows the money. The meeting was brought forward twenty-four hours so they could get you out of Jerusalem – and out of play permanently as far as the Russians were concerned.

‘They needed you in a public place, but not too public. No tourists, just a few locals. Hawadi had told them you always travelled by bus, so they knew you’d have to get off at Tsvi Krokh and walk fifty yards along an open street. You were shot by an SIS man in a sixth floor apartment in Holyland Tower 1. It was witnessed and an ambulance picked up your corpse before anyone could get too close.’