Sleeper Cell (7 page)

She opened her eyes. Had their suspect been in here just a few hours earlier?

Maybe.

In most churches in England a Muslim would have been noticed, but in the centre of London she would have passed easily as a tourist.

The church was huge and rather shabby. There should be a lot of places to hide a small bundle of clothes, and yet, as Leila stood staring at the altar, she realised that there would really be very few. Nowhere that had free public access would be suitable. The risk of its being discovered – possibly only moments after it had been planted given the state of vigilance against left packages – was too high. Yet the bomber would be highly unlikely to have access to any staff-only areas. The cell might have been able to infiltrate the church’s staff or builders working on the renovations, but doing so would be far too high a risk for such a minor pay-off.

So that ruled out almost the entire body of the church, any open chapels and any rooms behind routinely locked doors.

Which left what? The kitchen was too busy, likewise the toilets next to it; the vestry would be locked; the south transept, sanctuary, and meditation area offered no hiding places. Nor did St Paul’s chapel, directly opposite where Leila stood… but what was on the left of the chapel would have been prefect.

Work was under way to remove the old organ and an organ loft gives a small and very secret area where visibility of the church is good, but where almost no one ever looks. Here, with renovations under way, the organ loft was disused but intact. It would be the ideal hiding place for a small package for the few minutes the bomber needed.

Leila stepped quickly across the nave. There was builders’ tape across the entrance to the steps up to the organ, tape which she ducked under as easily as she imagined their suspect had done in the missing three minutes of her journey to the hotel car park. The organ manuals were still in place, though by now they were not connected to anything. A pile of music still lay on the floor, along with a bag of tools and a workman’s fluorescent jacket. Leila glanced down into the church; no one had noticed her ducking the tape, and no one was aware she was there.

She crouched by the pedal board and lifted the yellow jacket. Beneath it was a tightly rolled blue t-shirt. She slipped on a pair of latex gloves from her back pocket and gently unfolded the roll. Inside the t-shirt was a pair of light summer jeans. She had found the bomber’s original identity.

She ran back down to the nave and along the pews to the gift shop. It was about to close and was busy with people buying last minute souvenirs – not only of the church, but of what had happened along the road from it that morning. She pushed past a young Chinese couple standing by the till.

‘I’m with the police,’ she said to the elderly woman behind the counter. ‘I need a plastic bag, please, quickly.’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘I just need a bag. And get onto whoever’s in charge here, make sure no one enters the organ loft.’

The woman handed a St Mary Abbot’s carrier bag over the counter and was about to say something else when Leila raised her hand.

‘There’s no immediate danger, but no one must go beyond the tape by the organ. Uniformed officers will explain everything when they arrive in a few minutes.’

She quickly retraced her steps – again completely unremarked by the few people still in the church – and retrieved the clothes from beside the organ. As two church officials jogged towards the builders’ tape, Leila walked out into the hot evening, one crucial step closer to understanding her quarry.

She handed the bag to a uniformed officer at the hotel cordon with instructions to take it to Scotland Yard and get a forensics team to the organ loft. She then walked back to her car and sat for a minute watching workmen in hi-vis jackets sweeping out the last of the debris from the hotel’s main reception.

By now, it was possible that forensics would have found a DNA or fingerprint match for the bomber, but Leila doubted it. This was a meticulously planned operation, and the cell would have used clean skins for it. No one can remain untraceable for ever, but someone with no police record would slow the search down and buy some very useful time.

The clothes would enable the police to make up a likeness to canvas points back from the tube station, so there was no point in Leila trying to go further back than she already had. It had been a significant breakthrough.

One thing puzzled her though.

This was clearly not a suicide mission. That the bomber had left clothes in an easily accessible place meant she had intended to retrace her route back out of Kensington to wherever she had come from. That she had been able to avoid being picked up in a recognisable way on any of the CCTV cameras implied careful planning and a desire for living anonymity beyond this one operation.

Something else occurred to her as she watched the heavy crane trundling into position to start the bulk clearance of the wreckage.

The car had been collected from Gatwick airport at 6am, with the timer set for, they still presumed, a noon detonation. Some time after 10am the cell discovered that there was a better opportunity with the PM’s change of schedule that would bring him to the area close to the bomb at 1pm. That meant there was a maximum two-hour period for the timer to be intercepted and changed. This would not have been enough for the mystery woman to scout a route from the station to the hotel and plan the change of appearance. But it
had
all been planned.

So there must always have been a contingency plan for the bomb to be intercepted after it had been driven into place.

And that made no sense at all.

Even if the bomb had been intended to detonate
earlier
than noon, and the woman was just going to check why it had not gone off, the same logical black hole still existed. There would have been no reason for the cell to plan for such a failure.

There was something she wasn’t seeing. This bomb was big, it had got the attention of the country, it had performed the role that terrorist attacks were designed to perform, but it was not enough. This event had been important enough to build in a very elaborate fail-safe. Had it been parked under the Israeli Embassy itself, that would have been understandable. Entry to such a target would be incredibly difficult, and they would get only one chance to make it work. But this bomb was under the hotel. Fail today, they could just try again.

It confirmed her hunch that this bomb was not the end. It was either a signal to other cells that they were to commence further strands of the plan, or it was a smoke-screen for something far larger: focus attention on this while they got on with the main event.

The problem was, nothing she had discovered so far got her any closer to knowing just what that main event might be. She needed to trace their one known suspect back to her source, before the next stage of the operation could begin.

When Leila got back to Scotland Yard there was already a stack of papers on her old desk and a slew of memos reporting tip-offs that had come in from the public. She didn’t read the latest police reports, preferring to get all her information direct from DCI Lawrence. She scanned the tip-offs but quickly dismissed them. It had been a mistake to publish CTC’s phone number online. The sorts of people who look up the phone numbers of Special Operations organisations on the internet were generally the sorts of people such organisations could do without.

There were a dozen CTC officers in the briefing room when Leila took a seat near the back. More arrived over the next couple of minutes. Even this late in the evening, very few of the core staff had gone home. Mark Ross sat at the side of the room, flicking through images on his iPad. DCI Lawrence arrived on the dot of nine o’clock, still in hushed conversation with Keith Butler.

Leila opened the meeting with her report of how she had come by the bomber’s primary identity. It was the only significant breakthrough so far. The department was drowning in false leads and back-checks on historic intelligence, none of which were going anywhere. When she had finished, Mark Ross sent a series of images of the t-shirt and jeans to the screen on the wall at the head of the table.

‘The clothes yielded nothing useful,’ Lawrence said. ‘They were all western, low-grade garments that could have been bought anywhere. Forensics are going through them for secondary trace but they’re not hopeful. Both items were brand new. She probably put them on moments before leaving her primary location.’

‘What about the body? Leila said.

‘We’ve only got fragments, mostly badly degraded by fire. We know from the CCTV that she was wearing a simple thob and a headscarf, nothing that would stand out in London. Cloth was cotton. Again, could have been bought anywhere. As for the body, forensics are looking at what we’ve got, but it’s not much. The only unique identification found on the body was this ring.’ Another image appeared on the screen.

‘It was on the middle finger of her right hand,’ Keith Butler said. ‘We got lucky: the finger was embedded in the driver’s seat. The bone stopped the ring being flattened. However, we’re not sure exactly what it is.’

‘It’s an old-fashioned key,’ Leila said. She walked to the front of the room and peered closely at the screen. ‘See how it’s been looped around so that the shaft forms the body of the ring and the bitting and bow meet at the upper side of the finger. It’s probably home-made. My guess is that it was fashioned out of an older piece of jewellery. I doubt it was ever a real key.’

‘You’ve seen this before?’

‘Similar. This points to her being a native Palestinian, or a close sympathiser. The key symbolises return from exile, literally opening the doors that were locked to them in 1948. I spent time in the camps of southern Lebanon. Keys were quite popular.’

‘That doesn’t fit with the ISIS angle,’ Lawrence said.

‘I’m just telling you what I see.’ She took her seat at the back of the room again.

‘OK. Preliminary DNA tests have not given us an identity. We’ll run comparisons with known Palestinian samples and we might get something. Forensics are doing isotope analysis of bone fragments, see if they can find out where she spent the last few years.’

He nodded to Mark Ross, who sent another image to the screen. This one was a hastily updated spider diagram showing the latest intelligence on Islamist groups active in the West.

‘The wider issue,’ Lawrence went on, ‘is one of attribution. It’s nine hours now, and we’ve not had any claim of responsibility.’

‘Nothing?’ Leila said.

‘We’ve had Animal Liberation, Occupy, Combat 18, some guy with a Birmingham accent who said he was al-Koran. Nothing remotely plausible. Do you have any thoughts?’

‘With the Palestinian link, I’m still open to this being about the peace talks.’ She nodded at the diagram on the screen. ‘Your ISIS evidence is circumstantial at best.’

‘Harakat al Sahm is real enough. GCHQ’s intel amounts to something too solid to be just someone playing the fool.’

‘Is there any third-party corroboration on the online forums?’

‘No.’

‘And surveillance threw nothing up in the last few weeks?’

‘No. What’s your point?’

‘My point is that al Sahm’s only link to Islamic State is what they themselves claim. Has al-Baghdadi ever even formally accepted their bayah?’

‘The claim of allegiance? No, but that doesn’t mean they’re not acting as agents of IS.’

‘Except that without al-Baghdadi’s consent, they wouldn’t have access to IS weaponry or support. And they’re clearly being supported by someone. I agree, everything about this points to a sleeper cell of a major organisation. I’m just not convinced we’ve got the right organisation.’

‘We’ll find the link.’ Lawrence drew breath to move on.

‘I don’t think you can ignore the possibility that this whole IS thing could be a smokescreen,’ Leila said.

‘For who?’

‘Someone who has reason to put us onto the wrong path. Look at it: we’re chasing shadows inside one of the most complex affiliations of insurgents and terrorists the world has ever seen. It’s like looking for a piece of mud in a swimming pool full of shit. We’re wallowing around in there while they have a run at the main event. Which I think is the peace talks.’

‘Then get me evidence.’ He turned his attention back to the room in general. ‘Whether this is about the peace talks or not, it’s all about how it looks, and right now, that’s not good. There’s a formal welcoming dinner for the delegates at seven on Friday evening, which means we’ve got less than forty-eight hours to get on top of this. The PM is adamant that this should not be used as unfair leverage by either side.’

‘There is one more thing,’ one of the uniformed officers said. ‘Things are starting to kick off on the streets. Response officers are reporting a higher-than-usual number of 999 calls-outs.’

‘GCHQ have told us there’s an abnormally large number of emails and tweets inciting retributive action,’ Ross said. ‘Trouble’s brewing in all the major cities, especially here.’

‘Solidarity 52 were out near the bomb site,’ Leila said.

‘Territorial Support are deployed,’ Lawrence said. ‘I think we can keep a lid on this. There’s never been serious unrest following a terrorist incident before. But we need to be seen to be making progress. What counts is perception. I’ll brief Commander Thorne and see if we can get the PM to do something in time for the morning papers even without a concrete attribution. The rest of you, you know your duties. Let’s get this thing contained, and quickly.’

Lawrence left. Leila caught him up as he was about to enter Commander Thorne’s office.

‘Can I say something?’ she said.

‘I’m sure you’re going to anyway,’ he said.

‘You’ve got to stop trying to make this fit an extant pattern. If you spend time chasing after an organisation as diffuse as Islamic State, you’re going to get nowhere.’

‘COBR concluded that the ISIS angle should be the main focus. That’s not CTC, it’s all the intelligence agencies. The PM backs them.’

‘Because he wants to believe this is a one-off, a new skirmish in his ridiculous war on terror. We find the culprits, shoot some people, it all goes away again. Or maybe we could just shoot some people anyway. Brazilians have funny-coloured skin.’