Sleeper Cell (6 page)

What had been written made his blood run cold.

There was a mobile phone number and two words: ‘Call Bunny.’

Bunny was what they had called their daughter between the ages of about two and two and a half, when she had been inseparable from her pink rabbit romper suit. No one outside of the family knew. No one had uttered the word in years. Only someone with direct access to her, and the leverage to extract such specific information, could know that name.

Ruth wasn’t at the Palace. And wherever she was, she was in serious trouble.

Richard Morgan dialled the number.

It was answered almost before it had rung at the other end.

‘Prime Minister,’ a voice said. Richard tried to pinpoint the accent but came up blank. Well-bred English, standard received Eton perhaps, or maybe just someone who had decided that was about the easiest one to fake. The voice had none of the inflection of the Middle East or South Asia, but that meant nothing. Over a fifth of US Islamist terrorists were white and American-born. Britain was catching up fast in its ability to radicalise its own.

‘Let me speak to my daughter,’ he said.

‘In time, Prime Minister. We have something to discuss first.’

‘The police are tracing this call,’ he said.

‘No, they are not. You’re calling on your personal cell, which you have not declared to your security team. I too am using an unregistered pay as you go cell. Geolocation would yield nothing of use, and not in the time you have. Don’t play games, Prime Minister. Time is short.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Your cooperation in a simple matter.’

‘Go on.’

‘The exact details will be revealed to you tomorrow.’

‘Why not now? If the matter’s that simple, it can be sorted out tonight and I can get my daughter back.’

‘Tomorrow’s better for us.’

‘Have you planted more bombs?’

‘We’ve already proved we can strike wherever and whenever we choose. Bombing’s not our mission. It was merely a way of focussing your attention, showing you that we’re serious and capable.’

‘More so than kidnapping my daughter? You people are animals!’

‘Everything has a purpose, Prime Minister. Now that we have your full attention, our purpose will become clear.’

‘I want to know that Ruth is still alive.’

‘Should we mail something to you? Something warm?’

‘I’ll kill you for this…’

‘No one else needs to die. And if you cooperate, no one will.’

‘So what is this? Ransom?’

‘No. We need you to do one small job for us, then your daughter will be returned to you and all this can be forgotten. No one will ever know.’

‘What makes you think the security services don’t already know?’

‘Because we’ve watched you, Prime Minister. We’ve studied your methods. You were clever in setting up the talks between two old enemies who’ve sworn destruction on each other for decades. Even cleverer in ensuring neither side knew quite as much about what was going on as you yourself did. You work in secret, you like to be in control.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘There we have it, Prime Minister. Secrecy, sleight-of-

hand. You’ve made promises, stacked the deck, while all the time hiding your own agenda. So I’m confident that our arrangement can be kept between us alone. You’ll see that it is the best way.’

‘So what do you want?’

‘You’ll address the House of Commons at 9am tomorrow. Liam Treadwell, your Head of Corporate Services will be waiting for you outside your office. He’s not part of our organisation, and knows nothing of us or our requirements. He’s acting only as a courier, and interrogating him will produce no useful intelligence and will endanger your daughter’s life. He’ll hand you a sealed envelope.’

‘Containing?’

‘A simple instruction. If you act on it, your daughter will not be harmed.’

‘And if I can’t?’

‘Then she dies.’

‘I’m watched everywhere I go, I have to account for every move I make!’

‘I hope that’s not panic I hear in your voice, Prime Minister. This is no time for rash decisions. You need to think clearly. If you bring anyone else into this matter, we will know; if you deviate from your normal behaviour in any way, we will know. Your instructions will be simple and clear. Follow them, and we’ll all come through this.’

‘Except the fourteen people you killed this morning!’

‘You must make sure it doesn’t become fifteen by tomorrow night. Or fifty, or five hundred. Do not doubt that we’re serious.’

‘How do I contact you?’

‘You don’t. This phone will be deactivated after this call. We’ll know whether you’ve complied with our instruction, so we will not need to speak again.’

The line went dead.

The Volvo used in the bombing was a dead end. The engine and chassis numbers had been welded off and the registration plate led to an off-the-road model two hundred miles away. With over a hundred thousand third generation V70s in production, and nothing to identify this one, that avenue of enquiries was going nowhere. In time someone would arrive back from holiday to find their car had been stolen from airport parking, but even that would get them no closer to finding the thief.

The car’s arrival at the hotel also drew a blank. CCTV caught the driver’s face as he turned off Kensington High Street and the hotel’s own internal cameras watched him enter the lobby, approach the reception desk and leave an envelope with the concierge. Later enquiries showed that he was a professional driver. A motorcycle courier had arrived at the offices of his employer, Fleet of Foot, with the cloned keys and instructions to collect the vehicle from long-stay parking at Gatwick airport and deliver it to the basement car park of the Park Hotel, paying cash and parking it as close to the entrance ramp as possible. He was to leave the keys at reception, addressed to a Mr Alec Kochov. Kochov was a ghost; a one-night booking had been made by phone the previous day, but no guest of that name ever arrived and he could not be traced. The motorcycle courier who had initiated the vehicle transfer could also not be traced, but it was likely that even if he proved to be genuine, the trail leading back beyond his involvement would be similarly opaque.

It had been a clever and well planned operation. CTC knew the car had carried the bomb into position, but had no way of tracing where it had come from or who had booked the driver. Forensics had found nothing unique in the timer – it was nothing that could not be made from components bought on the internet for any number of innocent DIY projects. The explosives were C-4 plastic, usually associated with the US military, but chemically identical to that used in the USS Cole and Khobar Towers bombing carried out by al-Qa’ida. Given the vast quantity of military hardware the US had inadvertently donated to middle eastern terrorist groups in the last twenty years, this too yielded no useful information.

The key lay in the only clue they had so far discovered that was not completely obscured by careful planning: the woman who had returned to the car moments before the bomb went off. And despite Commander Thorne’s doubts, DS Reid was the best person to trace her.

Leila Reid was old-school. She had joined the Met’s Counter-Terrorism Command straight from a stint working for the Foreign Office, with placements in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. She was fluent in Levantine Arabic and could make herself understood pretty much anywhere in the Arab world. Twenty-first century counter-terrorism had seemed like a natural move.

She knew the value of modern forensics and computer technology, but for her the greatest tool of all was not to be found in the microchip or the lab but in the human mind. Forensic clues told you what a person had done; an insight into their mind told you why, and that could lead to what they were planning to do next. The woman Leila was tracking was dead, but she had not been operating alone. She was just one part of a cell that would itself be part of a much larger organisation.

With the CCTV footage loaded onto her iPad, she made her way along the now partially-reopened Kensington High Street to the Park Hotel. A group of about half a dozen young men ogled her as she passed. One wore a t-shirt emblazoned with ‘S52’ in a blue circle. Solidarity 52 – named in ‘honour’ of the fifty-two people killed in the July 7th terrorist attacks in London in 2005 – had been agitating for an excuse to take their grievances to the streets for months. Leila had no doubt there would be more coming out of the woodwork as night fell.

The police were still gathering CCTV recordings from local shops in case the bomber had been caught scouting the route to the hotel in the previous few days. They had canvassed staff and shown them the best of the images they already had. No one remembered seeing her and Leila was not hopeful that she would appear on any of the security tapes. Their suspect had been too careful for that.

The front of the hotel was now screened with temporary wooden boarding to a height of eight feet. She had no access to the parking garage, so she started her walk-through of the bomber’s known movements from corner of the building.

The last camera to pick the suspect up was mounted high on the now-demolished wall of the hotel, pointing west. This had been at 11.57.45, a little over two minutes before the bomb exploded. If, as CTC suspected, the bomb had been timed to go off at noon, the mystery woman was already cutting it very close. She had avoided the number-plate recognition cameras, and another, inside the garage, went dead six seconds later without capturing her face.

Leila began to walk west. She glanced down Palace Green towards the Embassy. Tall green screening had been placed around the front windows and six Israeli Defence Force soldiers stood just within the perimeter.

She walked through the police cordons and on to the junction with Kensington Church Street seventy metres away. The bomber had moved into and out of shot of a traffic light camera on the junction. This was time-stamped at 11.56.16. The clocks were accurate, at least to a few seconds. The mystery woman was moving quickly, but calmly enough not to attract the attention of anyone around her.

Then there was nothing until she was caught on the forward-facing camera of the N9 bus as it passed her going west at 11.49.44. The low-grade image was insufficient to show her face from a distance and by the time the bus was close, she had turned to look in the window of Marks and Spencer, just along the street from High Street Kensington tube station.

This was puzzling. Marks and Spencer at 11.49.44, Church Street at 11.56.16. It had taken her over six minutes to walk one hundred and twenty-five metres, knowing that she was on a tight deadline. At seven in the evening with light foot traffic, Leila covered the distance in under two minutes. Even allowing for the pavements being busier at noon, the walk should not have taken much more than three.

So where had she been for the
missing
three minutes?

Leila stood by the same shop window and flicked between stills from the two cameras. In both the suspect wore a long white shirt-dress over pale trousers. A white headscarf was pushed back to reveal her face from hairline to chin. Her face had not been caught on camera not because she had made any attempt to cover it, because she had been extremely careful. Dressed like this, no one would have given her a second look.

Crucially, in the bus image she was standing with her left side exposed to the approaching vehicle. In her hand she held a small package, probably a plastic carrier bag partly rolled down on its contents. Leila flicked back to the moving footage from the Church Street traffic camera. Their suspect ran a few steps, trying to make the lights before they changed. The bag in her hand flapped as she moved.

Quickly she went back to the bus footage. The bag hung as if its contents were heavy. Back to the traffic cam: the bag waved in the breeze. It was empty.

Between Marks and Spencers and the Church Street junction, the suspect had dumped the contents but kept the bag itself to maintain consistency on the CCTV feeds.

Leila walked back along the south side of Kensington High Street from the tube station towards the traffic camera near the church. There she stopped and examined the images on her tablet again, trying to get inside the head of her quarry.

The assumption had been that since this woman did not appear on any of the Underground CCTV images, she had changed her appearance somewhere between leaving the train and entering the street. And if that was the case, she would be carrying whatever garments she had been wearing on the train. These would not be traditional Muslim clothes; the disguise would have been something contrasting, typically western. And carrying a bag of western clothes would have been highly suspicious if she had been caught and searched in the underground car park.

She had to lose whatever she was carrying before entering the garage.

She would have stashed them somewhere where they would be hidden from casual view, but be easy enough to retrieve when she had to reverse the walk and re-emerge from the tube in her original guise. That meant a building easily accessible to the public where she could enter and exit without being noticed. Somewhere that might account for the missing three minutes of her journey.

And Leila was standing right outside the perfect place – the exact place she herself would have chosen.

She turned the iPad off and crossed the road. St Mary Abbot’s Church was still open.

Leila had not set foot inside a church since 2007, and not for nearly twenty years prior to that. She had been an agnostic until her brother had been killed in Baghdad as part of a two-year covert operation that took out three and a half thousand enemy insurgents but lost a good number of their own people in the process. After that she had found true atheism.

St Mary Abbot’s brought it all back in a wave so sudden and vivid that for a moment she stood at the edge of the nave with her eyes closed. Clive had never been officially listed among the dead. Even in the secretive world of the SAS, the so-called Task Force Black was shrouded in mystery. He had not even been given a funeral. Leila had last been in a church attending the funeral of one of his fellow regular army victims, the closest she could get to a formal goodbye to her brother. Now, ten years later, it was the smell that hit her most forcefully, that brought back the immediacy of those long-buried emotions: bees’ wax and turpentine, brass polish, dust, old paper and centuries of candles and oil lamps; smells that existed almost nowhere outside these houses of make-believe.