Malik looked at Chaudhry, then back at Shepherd. ‘What happens to us? We get the reward, right? Do we get new identities? Witness protection?’
‘Have you two been discussing this?’ asked Shepherd.
‘We were wondering what you’d got planned,’ said Chaudhry.
‘What do you want to happen, Raj?’
‘Other than the reward, you mean?’ Chaudhry smiled. ‘I’m joking. I just want this to be over, John. I want be a doctor; I want to help people.’
‘You should think about joining MI5,’ said Shepherd. ‘Or the police. Once this is over you could write your own ticket.’
‘Be a professional liar? Because that’s what I’ve been doing for the last twelve months. I’m sick of it. Sick of the lies, sick of playing a part. I want my life back.’ He grinned. ‘And the reward, of course.’
‘You’ll get your life back, I can promise you that,’ said Shepherd. ‘But that’s why we have to keep you both deep undercover at the moment. Once the operation’s over we pull you out, you move on and do whatever you want to do. But no one must ever know.’
‘That’s for sure,’ said Malik. ‘If anyone at the mosque knew about us they’d hack off our heads with a blunt knife.’
‘That’s not going to happen, Harvey,’ said Shepherd. ‘And most of the guys at your mosque would be as appalled as anyone about what’s being planned.’
‘Yeah, but they’d see us as traitors for spying on our own.’
Shepherd didn’t like the way the conversation was going. It was vital that the two men concentrated on what they were doing and not on what the possible repercussions were. The more they considered the downside, the more likely it was that they would become nervous and make mistakes. ‘Guys, you’re doing a great job and we’re on the home stretch. What you’re doing is going to save a lot of people.’
‘But no one can ever know, right?’ said Malik.
‘The people who matter will know,’ said Shepherd. ‘And afterwards, doors are going to be opened for you. Like I said, you’ll be able to write your own ticket. If you want a job within the security services I doubt that’d be a problem. They’d bite your hand off.’
‘I don’t wanna be no spy,’ said Malik.
‘Brother, you’ve already crossed that bridge,’ said Chaudhry. He laughed and squeezed his shoulder. ‘That’s what we’ve been doing for the last year. But go on, tell John what it is you want out of life.’
Malik shook his hand away. ‘Stop taking the piss.’
‘Harvey wants his own restaurant.’
‘Seriously?’ said Shepherd.
Malik nodded enthusiastically. ‘Japanese. I love sushi, the whole raw-fish thing. I was telling Raj that if we get the reward for Bin Laden I’m going to open one up. Fly in the best chefs from Japan, really go upmarket. You like sushi, John?’
‘It’s okay. I prefer my food cooked, though. I like that thing the Japanese do, cooking the stuff in front of you with the flashing knives. Food and theatre combined.’
‘Teppanyaki,’ said Malik. ‘Yeah, I thought I’d do that too, concentrating on seafood. Lobster, prawns.’
‘You’ve given a lot of thought to it,’ said Shepherd.
‘My plan was to get my master’s then try to get a job with one of the big restaurant groups, but now I’m thinking about my own restaurant. That would be something, right?’
‘It’d be great,’ agreed Shepherd. A white Transit van pulled up close by and parked with its engine running. Shepherd sat back and looked over at the driver. He was shaven-headed with a mobile phone pressed to his ear and as Shepherd watched he pulled out a copy of the
‘In the mosque?’ said Chaudhry. ‘Mostly they thought it was a lie. They don’t believe anything the Americans say these days. I kept hearing that it was all bullshit and that Bin Laden’s been dead for years.’
‘What?’
‘I shit you not. The Americans have been caught out lying too many times. And, to be honest, until I met the man I thought he was a myth too. I figured that he’d died in the caves in Afghanistan years ago. But it’s not like I can tell the brothers in the mosque that, is it? So they reckon that the Americans had been using Bin Laden as an excuse to invade Muslim countries and now that they’re pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan they don’t need the myth any more. So they tell the world that he’s dead and that they buried the body at sea.’
‘It’s a nice story,’ said Shepherd. ‘Most conspiracy theories are.’
‘The same brothers don’t believe that Bin Laden was behind Nine-Eleven either,’ said Malik. ‘They say it was all an American-Zionist plot.’
‘There’re plenty of Americans who believe that too,’ said Shepherd. ‘But why would the Americans kill their own people?’
‘For oil,’ said Malik. ‘You think they care about their own people? How many of their soldiers have died in Iraq? Five thousand or so, right? Plus how many Iraqis? A million? You think with numbers like that they’d worry about how many were in the Twin Towers? And you know that at first Bin Laden denied having anything to do with Nine-Eleven, right?’
‘There was a lot of confusion in the early days,’ said Shepherd. ‘But I don’t think there’s much doubt now. You should have asked the man himself when you had the chance.’
Malik snorted. ‘We weren’t allowed to ask anything,’ he said. ‘They were very clear on that before they took us in to see him. No questions, no speaking unless he spoke to us, minimum eye contact, never contradict him.’
‘He knows that, Harvey,’ said Chaudhry. ‘He debriefed us, remember?’ He turned round to look at Shepherd. ‘There are those who don’t believe that Bin Laden died in that raid, but there are others who see it as yet another American attack on Islam. And the Pakistani brothers are the most fired up because of the way they flew in without telling anybody. Some of them are talking about it as if it was an invasion.’
‘Which it bloody well was,’ said Malik.
‘But you can see why it had to be done that way,’ said Chaudhry, turning back in his seat. ‘If they’d told the Pakistanis then someone would have tipped off Bin Laden.’
‘But if they’d done an air strike or something it wouldn’t have looked so bad,’ said Malik. ‘Flying in troops was like invading the country, wasn’t it?’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘Do you know why they didn’t do an air strike, John?’
Shepherd laughed. ‘Mate, that’s well above my pay grade,’ he said.
‘Yeah, but you must have an opinion. Why would they piss around with helicopters and guns and that? Why not use one of them Predator things?’
‘Maybe they wanted to make sure,’ said Shepherd. It was something he’d asked Charlotte Button when she’d first told him that he would be going on the mission as an observer. Usually the Americans preferred to strike from the sky using the unmanned drones that were piloted from the other side of the world. Malik had referred to the Predator but the American military’s death-dealer of choice was now the Reaper, bigger and faster than the Predator and able to stay in the air for more than twelve hours before firing its fourteen Hellfire missiles. Button had explained that the Americans wanted to collect DNA evidence to make absolutely sure that they had the right man, but that hadn’t made sense to Shepherd, especially when the Seals had gone and buried the body at sea. A body was proof of death, a DNA sample wasn’t. ‘Also they’re saying that there were women and children in buildings nearby.’
‘That’s never worried them before, has it?’ said Malik.
‘You know, the Americans are a law unto themselves,’ said Shepherd. ‘The important thing is that he’s dead. And the fact that he’s dead makes it much more likely that they’ll do something with you guys, sooner rather than later.’
‘You think?’ asked Chaudhry.
‘Al-Qaeda will want revenge, there’s no question of that,’ said Shepherd. ‘And you guys are in place.’
‘At what point do you arrest them?’ asked Chaudhry.
‘That’s above my pay grade too,’ said Shepherd.
