Sleeper Cell (9 page)

He pulled the chair away from the desk and kicked his shoes off. With his feet on the desk he stared out of the window that looked out over St. James’s Park. The sky was dark and heavy, the night hot. They had made progress today: the intelligence services were directing all their efforts at finding the culprits and the general consensus was that this was an isolated event. Audacious, effective, but isolated. Of course, Richard knew that it was not entirely a one-off; Ruth’s kidnap had been somehow bound up with the plan, but even then there was no indication that further public atrocities would be coming. If the bombers wanted to kill more civilians, they didn’t need Ruth to do it.

So what the hell were they playing at? Had the bomb really been nothing more than a distraction to cover Ruth’s kidnap? Had it been a very public retribution for his support of airstrikes in Northern Iraq?

Or had it simply been to prove they could?

He read through the briefing he had been handed as he left the COBR meeting. London was volatile. Some rioting, a few disturbances. Reports were sketchy. He would receive another briefing in half an hour or so. In the meantime the departmental and service heads would deal with the situation on the ground.

He turned on the TV and, like millions of others throughout the country, wondered what was happening to his country. He got at least some of the answers by flicking between Sky News, the BBC’s rolling 24-hour coverage and al-Jazeera.

The disturbances had started peacefully enough. Crowds of protesters had gathered around the capital’s principal mosques; Tottenham, Stoke Newington, Kilburn, Paddington, Shepherd’s Bush. East Ham and Forest Gate inevitably attracted a lot of attention, as did the East London Mosque on the Whitechapel Road. The fact that the mosques being picketed covered the full spectrum of Islamic tradition, and as such targetting many of them would be like targetting a Jehovah’s Witness meeting to protest against the pope, was lost on those gathered together to make their point.

As the evening went on, the mob became more vociferous in their attempts to make that point, largely thanks to the convergence of two factors. The first was social media’s ability to spread a compellingly simplistic message widely and quickly. The second was the coverage given to one man – a man who could make all the tweets and Facebook nonsense somehow seem perfectly rational.

Among its coverage of today’s events, the London Evening Standard had run a quarter page op-ed by Professor Peter Lacey, a ‘terrorism expert’ from London University. His theories were nothing a reasonably well-educated member of the public could not have come up with, but the media loved him, largely because he was certain to provoke a heated debate.

Sky News and the BBC quickly co-opted Lacey into their news feeds. Just minutes after Richard had turned on the TV Sky re-ran an interview with Lacey that the anchor described as having been recorded ‘earlier’. What he said could not have been calculated to be more inflammatory.

‘Bombing incidents like the one we saw this morning are indicative of a new phase of Islamist terrorist activity,’ he said, speaking half to the interviewer, and half to the camera, emphasising his key points by directing them straight at the viewer. ‘And as our political institutions are paying lip-service to prevention, the real threat continues to rise. Since 7/7 counter-terrorism officer numbers have more than tripled, MI5 has doubled in size and the Prevent programme has ushered in a new fanaticism to find political subversion and rebrand it radicalization.’

‘The security forces have foiled dozens of plots in the last three years alone,’ the interviewer said off-camera. ‘Do you not consider that a success?’

‘Far from it. Like the McCarthyite pogroms in the US, they have utterly failed. The reason is simple: they are hide-bound by political correctness and bureaucracy and they have no understanding of the culture that underlies such political views. A quarter of British Muslims sympathise with the motives behind the Paris massacre and fully ten per cent state that the Charlie Hebdo staff deserved to be killed.’

‘But the same survey also found that ninety-five per cent feel loyal to Britain. How do you reconcile these incompatible statistics?’

‘I don’t see them as incompatible. And even if ninety-five per cent of British Muslims do feel loyal to Britain – a figure which I would dispute anyway – that still leaves five per cent – in excess of a hundred and thirty five thousand individuals – who are extremely corrosive to our national values.’

‘Stop now, you idiot,’ Richard whispered.

‘So what strategy should we be using to defeat this minority view?’

‘These radical groups,’ Lacey went on, ‘represent the biggest threat to liberal democracy that we have seen in modern times, precisely because they have a belief structure perpetuated by their leaders that liberal democracy is incompatible with their faith. And faith can not be tackled from outside. It can only be tackled from within. The cause of, and the means to prevent, attacks such as the one we saw this morning lie squarely within the communities themselves. As long as mainstream Muslims do not stand up and denounce what they claim is an unrepresentative minority, the situation…’

Richard changed channel.

By now, al-Jazeera had pieced together a cohesive narrative of events at the East London Mosque and were showing it like a mini-movie. Compressed in time, the events took on a terrifying inevitability.

Early in the evening a small group of protesters had gathered on Whitechapel Road, but did nothing more than talk to the worshippers coming and going from the mosque, sometimes handing out leaflets, sometimes walking a few steps with a chosen individual. No violence, no real attempt at intimidation.

As dusk had begun to fall, a coincidence of events quickly turned the mood ugly.

Feeling particularly under the accusing gaze of the world’s media, the worshippers gathered in greater than usual numbers for Maghrib prayers at sunset. By then, most of the UK’s TV coverage was interspersing footage of the bombing with interviews held with Imams distancing themselves from the event. But no one listened to the words, they just saw the juxtaposition of images: bomb/mosque. And Peter Lacey was there to make sure no one missed the point.

And into this mix came one final element that made riots all but inevitable.

Amateur footage taken from high up in a building almost opposite the East London Mosque at around 9.30 showed two uniformed officers pushing their way through the growing crowds. Within minutes of their entering the building and corralling the worshippers back inside for their own protection, battle lines had been drawn. If the police were protecting the terrorists, they were, once again, fair game. Petrol bombs began to fly.

The situation changed so rapidly and on so many fronts that the professional news crews were ousted from the screens by amateur video, which was being uploaded to Youtube and the like at a rate of almost two hours of coverage a second. The news channels regurgitated the feeds verbatim while the reporters tried to run a meaningful commentary on the events. As with the Mark Duggan riots in 2011, unedited rolling TV coverage was showing what fun the riots could be. Soon reports were coming in of looting and violence in areas with no Muslim population at all.

In January 2015 Paris had come together; now, London was tearing itself apart.

There was a knock at the door and Jane Marks, his night-shift aide, peered into the dimly lit room.

‘Prime Minister,’ she said quietly, ‘the eleven o’clock report has been collated. You need to see this.’

He motioned her in and she handed over a sheaf of papers.

Richard’s heart sank.

‘Jane,’ he said, ‘do something about Lacey.’

‘The Home Secretary put out a rebuttal half an hour ago, but the news agencies are not interested right now.’

‘Have him shot then. Or hung. Or something. We need the treason statute back on the books. He’s a bloody liability.’

He waved her away. As she closed the door he began to flick through the reports sent in from the police, fire and ambulance services.

Thunder rumbled overhead and the first big raindrops of the gathering storm pattered against the window. Richard glanced at the clock on the desk. 11:34.

The emergency services’ reports confirmed what was already clear from the TV: London was pandemonium. Major fires were being fought in Hackney, Southwark, Islington, Ealing and Tower Hamlets. Large crowds had surrounded an appliance in Gresham Road in Brixton, preventing the crew reaching a fire at a shop a few doors away from the mosque. Mounted police charged the area but were driven back by fireworks, bottles and bricks. The fire engine was commandeered by rioters and driven into a wall outside the mosque.

In Kilburn an Indian shopkeeper (Sikh, Richard noted) had been dragged from his shop and beaten unconscious while his shop was looted and torched. Ambulance crews came under attack as they tried to rescue him. Six Pakistani youths had been hospitalised in Forest Gate after a car drove into them near a shop owned by one of the men’s uncles. A taxi driver and his passenger had been assaulted in Tottenham, just fifty yards from where another man had been beaten almost to death with a length of scaffolding pole. There had even been reports of gunshots fired.

The list went on, and Richard had no doubt that another would be growing faster than he was reading this one. Uniformed crews of all services were immediately targetted wherever they went. Police especially were taunted and provoked into action that was then filmed and uploaded, acting as a further call-to-arms.

The city was spiralling out of control.

Richard would have to address the House tomorrow. His own Backbenchers would call for troops to be deployed; the opposition would call for mediation and tolerance. Investigations would begin, plans to prevent the situation spreading nation-wide, reports and meetings, demands for extra funds, the whole circus of crisis management. And all the while Richard would be trying to keep the peace talks on course and the delegates sheltered from what was happening all around them.

He turned the TV off and placed his glasses on the desk beside him.

Amongst all the film, the talking heads, the editorial commentary being rushed out for tomorrow’s papers, among the need to protect one side without infringing the rights of another, one person had been lost. Ruth was out there somewhere, made to disappear into the chaos.

And right now Richard would do just about anything to get her back.

Leila arrived at the Vallance Road crime scene at ten minutes past midnight, two hours after the shooting. Although forensics had been through the place, she still needed to see it for herself before any major clear-up took place. Context was everything. She had been in the office when the reports of a triple shooting and fire had come in. Lawrence considered it irrelevant, but Leila was intrigued. The crime was unusual.

Armed Met officers stood at the cordon around the building. A few onlookers braved the rain and stood watching, but with the cloudburst over this part of south London at eleven thirty, most of the rioters had melted away. That had been the police’s first lucky break. Their second had been that fire crews were already on their way to the area when the flat went up in flames, so most of the evidence had been preserved.

Leila examined the front door as she passed. It was a simple blunt-force job, probably a boot to the flimsy woodwork. The ground floor was a disused shop that had not yet been investigated. Above it was the flat of the building’s owner, one Martin Thomas. He had been taken to the hospital for checks and a little gentle interrogation. The last Leila had heard before going to the scene was that he was less than cooperative.

On the stairs up to the second floor, the scene of the shooting, she was passed by three forensic investigators carrying plastic boxes of evidence. Water trickled down the bare stair treads from the dead fire above. A single bloody footprint remained amongst the ash and dirt.

She stopped on the landing and looked around. There was another flight of stairs to an attic, which had not yet been investigated.

So this was nothing to do with the riots. This was one house in a row of houses; three flats. The first floor flat had been ignored, the top floor likewise. The middle flat had been specifically targetted. It was possible it was drugs, but unlikely. This wasn’t a big drug area, and it would have been unusual for hired hit men from that world to do their calling during a full-scale riot.

She slipped on a pair of latex gloves and shoe covers and entered the second floor flat.

‘What have we got?’ she asked. There were four officers in the flat, and the question was directed at whichever of them was senior enough to consider himself qualified to answer it.

‘And you are?’ a bearded man in civilian clothing turned to her.

‘DS Reid, CTC.’

‘The big guns! You think this is terrorism?’

‘You tell me. You are?’

‘Inspector Colin Davis. As you can see, I’m not officially on duty, but Major Crime’s spread thin. This is being handled as a firearms incident.’

‘It’s a start. You’ve got three dead, yes? Shot; attempt at burning the scene. Robbery?’

‘You think there’s anything worth stealing here?’

Leila smiled. ‘Fair comment. So fill me in.’

‘Three woman. Late thirties, early forties, Middle Eastern appearance. Each shot twice in the chest and once in the head. Hollowpoint, fragmenting bullets. Ballistics guesses…’

‘Don’t guess. It matters.’

‘Ballistics says they were almost certainly 9mm. They won’t know until the autopsy, but right now they’re stumped. They’ve never seen ammunition that can do this much damage at close range without leaving an exit wound.’

‘They’ll be custom made or adapted from hydra-shoks.’

‘Terrorists don’t make their own bullets.’

‘No they don’t,’ Leila said. ‘Keep that in mind. Do we have identities?’

‘Getting there. We’ve collected all the physical evidence, we’re now beginning to trawl through what’s left. Why’s CTC involved?’