Two hours later Khan was shaken awake. He saw the bread, cheese and water that had been set in front of him while he slept. He snatched at it but managed to eat only a little before being taken from the room. Outside the police station quite a crowd was waiting, in the middle of which was a TV crew. Khan stood in the glare of the lights, feeling shrunken and exposed. Nemim was enjoying the moment, although he did not seem to know whether to present his captive as the heroic survivor of Macedonian brutality or a dangerous terrorist, and allowed for both options in his manner.
The media opportunity ended, but instead of being taken back into the police station, Khan was placed in a van and borne off into the night.
CHAPTER NINE
At 7.00 a.m. Isis Herrick arrived with her bag at the gentrified mews house – French shutters, geraniums, carriage lamps – not far from the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The door was opened by an American carrying a machine pistol. He explained – a little apologetically – that the house was part of the embassy and she was now on US soil. Then he showed her to a room where two men stood listening to Walter Vigo, installed in a revolving leather chair with a cup of coffee and the Wall Street Journal draped like a napkin over his lap. Vigo was in his element – the nexus of the ‘special relationship’.
‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, tipping the paper to the floor. ‘Here’s the brains responsible for RAPTOR.’ He introduced her to the two men. ‘This is Jim Collins and Nathan Lyne from the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. Both these gentlemen were with the Directorate of Operations and have experience in the field so they know the problems and pitfalls of an operation as complicated and wide-ranging as this. Jim is one of the people in charge of things out at Northolt and Nathan is running your desk.’ He stopped for the Americans to murmur hello and give Isis firm handshakes.
‘Northolt?’ she said.
‘Yes, we’ve moved the operation out there. I think you’ll be very impressed with what you’re going to see. We expect you to spend a week or two there before a transfer to the field but, as you’ll appreciate, things are and will remain very fluid. I hope, by the way, you won’t mind the accommodation, but it seems simpler and more secure if we’re not all being ferried to and from the Bunker in minibuses.’
‘The Bunker,’ she said, surprised. ‘Are we confined to barracks? ’
‘No,’ interjected Collins, a stout man with a pinkish complexion and a brush of fine blond hair. ‘But we’re trying to keep this as tight as possible, at least for the time being. There are not too many great restaurants in the area, but you’re welcome to leave for R amp;R when you need. It’s more a question of not having large numbers of American spook-types filling up the trattoria in Mayfair. Besides, the facility under Northolt has a great deal of space and there’s plenty of room for solitude. There’s even a restaurant and a gym.’
Collins nodded to Nathan Lyne, who rose and moved to sit on the sofa beside her. Tall, with a slow, understated manner, Nathan Lyne haemorrhaged high caste Yankee confidence, which she later learned was the result of Harvard law school and a short period with a Washington law firm.
‘You’re the only person we’ve brought on the team who doesn’t need the introduction so I’ll cut to the chase,’ he said. ‘We now have eleven suspects under surveillance. All of them passed through Heathrow on May fourteen and as far as we know at the present time, they are all lilywhites. No record of any misdemeanour and only tenuous Islamist affiliations. Certainly no training in Afghanistan. We’re making some progress on who they are and we have names for some of them.’
‘We’ve split the suspects into three groupings – Parana, Northern and Southern. The Parana group has a homogeneity of its own and it’s the one we’ve had most success with. Your work at the airport allowed us to trace three of the eleven suspects to the Shi’ite community in the tri-border region of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. The river that flows through the area is named the Parana. There’s a strong Lebanese contingent in the area that has links to the Hizbollah organisation and its many business interests in Lebanon. The three men appeared to have been sheltered rather than trained in the towns and ranches, sitting out the worldwide hunt for terrorists and establishing unblemished credentials for themselves. A successful operation to penetrate the community by us put names to the stills from the Heathrow security film. These guys had the smell of North Africa about them, though no one was certain about their exact nationalities. Anyway, eventually the trail led to a man named Lasenne Hadaya, a former officer in the Algerian security forces who was reported to have undergone a religious conversion after seeing a sign written in a desert rock.
‘Hadaya led to a man named Furquan, with whom he had had contact in Rome. Finally we nailed the identity of the third man, a Moroccan engineer and part-time college professor named Ramzi Zaman. By the way, we had help with all this from the North African intell’ services but they have no idea exactly what we’re doing. Anyway, these three guys vanished in the late nineties, having lived quietly in Italy’s large North African community and worked in various menial jobs that were way below each man’s capabilities.’
Without asking Herrick, Collins placed a cup of coffee in her hand. She nodded gratefully.
‘So, these men wind up in Western Europe. Hadaya is in Paris, Furquan in Stuttgart and the Moroccan, Zaman, is in Toulouse. Each was received by a bunch of North African helpers, who prepared for their arrival by arranging work, accommodation, cars and all kinds of local permits and passes.’
Lyne continued for another half hour talking without pause. The Northern group consisted of five men, two in Copenhagen, one in Stockholm and two who had come to rest in Britain after flitting around Europe on May 14 and 15. They were working on the suspects in Scandinavia and were now sure that they included an Indonesian national called Badi’al Hamzi who had once been a science teacher in Jakarta. The Syrian in Denmark and the Egyptian in Sweden were unknown quantities. The two suspects in Britain were a Pakistani and a Turk. Lyne said neither of these gentlemen could break wind without MI5 and Special Branch watchers knowing about it.
‘In fact they had an astonishing piece of good fortune yesterday. The Turkish fellow, Mafouz Esmet, was taken ill on the street, outside a tube station in East London. One of the female officers with the Security Services called for help and then went with the guy to hospital. He was suffering from appendicitis and had an operation last evening. She’s going to visit with him tomorrow, and you know what, this could be a very important break for us.’
‘Okay, so now we come to my specialty – the Southern group. These three men landed in Rome, Sarajevo and Budapest. For a time we lost one of the guys in Budapest but then we got another lucky break. An agent with the FBI’s outfit in Budapest, which is mostly devoted to the Russian Maf ia’s activities, was travelling on a bus and just happened to see the very man whose picture he was carrying in his breast pocket. He trailed him to a poor part of town where the guy is living with a couple of Yemenis. This rang bells and again we had all three members of the Southern group checked out against descriptions of men who served in Afghanistan. But Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence couldn’t find a match for any of them. Besides, these men don’t really look the part. They’re out of condition and spend a lot of time eating, drinking and smoking. They’re not clean-living Muslims, that’s for sure.’ Lyne put his hands together and turned to look at her with radiant American purpose. ‘So, basically, your job will be to chase up everything you can on these three guys. You speak Arabic, I hear. There’s going to be a lot of reading to be done. You’ll live and breathe these men for as long as you’re with us.’
‘Questions, Isis?’ said Vigo, in a tone that implied he didn’t expect any.
‘Yes, do we have any idea about their plans? I know it’s early. But are there any suspicious shipments being made? Have they been observed looking at potential targets? Do we have any communications intercepts?’
‘As yet we don’t have the vaguest notion what they plan,’ said Collins. ‘They haven’t been talking to each other and there’s no movement of anything like your WAYFARER. Chemicals and stuff – nothing like that. There’s a general feeling among the surveillance teams that the suspects are in a period of stasis, a kind of hibernation.’
‘Aestivation,’ said Herrick.
‘Come again?’ said Lyne.
‘The summer equivalent of hibernation,’ said Vigo, not disguising his irritation.
‘Perhaps I should say something about how RAPTOR is set up,’ said Collins. ‘We’ve split the operation between surveillance and investigation. The surveillance teams on the ground – there are about thirty officers in each team – report to a desk dedicated to each suspect, which is manned twenty-four seven. Once the subject is moving, his route is plotted on an electronic map so everyone knows where he is. The field officer in charge of each
