Under the terms of RAPTOR, any of the suspects confirmed to have been involved in international terrorism had to be killed or taken off the street – as Lyne put it, ‘stiffed or lifted’. The former seemed a great deal easier, but they knew that a professional killing would act like a bird scarer for the other ten suspects. So a plan was developed, in which bin Khidir would be kidnapped from his apartment in the Turkish district of Stuttgart, and taken to an airfield nearby.
Herrick and Lyne went to their desks and hooked up to the live feed from Stuttgart. There was a commentary of sorts from a van parked near bin Khidir’s apartment and they caught the clipped sentences of the armed members of the snatch squad.
Lyne sat tensely. ‘If this fucking thing goes wrong…’ he said.
‘I don’t see why they’re taking him,’ Herrick said. ‘We know they’re all terrorists. Why’s he any different?’
‘They’re the rules we’re playing by.’
‘I’m not sure there should be any rules,’ she said.
‘That’s not a very smart thing to say.’
Her gaze drifted to the glass box, where the operation was being run. Everyone was there – Spelling, Vigo, Collins and the nameless head of the Special Collection Agency who had flown in from Washington DC in order to escort bin Khidir from Northolt back to an unknown destination outside the United States for interrogation.
They listened as the team gained entry into bin Khidir’s apartment without difficulty. Bin Khidir and his flatmate were drugged before they even woke and he was bundled into an airline services truck and driven to a plane waiting at the airfield twenty miles away. The plane took off for Northolt, but over Luxembourg the pilot reported that bin Khidir had come round and was proving difficult to restrain, even though his hands were tied behind his back. He was lashing out with his feet and throwing himself around the fuselage.
Herrick picked up the summaries of Southern Group activity from that day and went to the control box. As she entered, Vigo nodded to her from the table where he sat watching Jim Collins.
‘Tell them to give him another shot,’ said Collins.
There was silence until the pilot said that ‘the horse’ – the plane was normally used for transporting racehorses – had gone to sleep of its own accord. Vigo looked straight at Herrick.
‘I expect you understand what’s happened, Isis.’ Then, without waiting for her to answer, he turned back to Collins. ‘You’d better tell them to turn the plane around.’
‘Why, for chrissake?’ Collins demanded.
‘I think you’ll find the horse has swallowed a cyanide capsule concealed in its teeth.’
Confirmation came in a matter of minutes. The crew had found a dribble of foam on bin Khidir’s chin.
‘I don’t imagine there’ll be many takers for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,’ said Vigo, without mirth. ‘Tell me, Isis, what would you do now?’ Spelling and the rest of them turned to her.
‘I’d get him back to his own bed, if possible.’
‘Which is exactly what we should do, gentlemen, though quite how they’re going to get the body off the plane is another matter. The transport arrangements only worked into the airport. We have not allowed for the return journey.’
Herrick went to call up satellite maps of the airport on her screen, printed them off and returned to Vigo and Collins with her idea. Twenty-five minutes later the plane landed at the airport, the pilot having complained to the German air traffic control of two un-commanded aileron movements. As the de Havilland Dash taxied through the first light of dawn towards the end of the runway, a hatch in the belly of the aircraft opened and four members of the Special Collection Service, who had cut their way through the perimeter fence, sprang from the darkness to receive the body. Forty-five minutes later, they reported back to say bin Khidir was in bed and the other man was still out cold. Everything was as it should be in the apartment, and bin Khidir’s helpers would assume that he had bitten through the capsule in his sleep. RAPTOR was safe.
‘It will be interesting,’ mused Vigo, ‘to see if they report this to the authorities and risk the pathologist discovering the cause of death. My bet is they’ll dispose of the body and get in touch with the man running things. That provides us with an unusual opportunity.’
Isis watched the glitter of Vigo’s eyes fade as he became absorbed in his thoughts. Then his head turned slowly to the men from GCHQ and the National Security Agency. ‘We should pay great attention to phone calls from Stuttgart over the next few hours, for we know they must deliver a message that their man is dead.’
Next morning, Herrick went back to her house. The isolation of the Bunker and its eerily regulated conditions – the fact that it was neither hot nor cold, humid nor dry, light nor dark – were getting to her. She and Lyne were getting on each other’s nerves, which had as much to do with her bad temper as his unwavering faith in RAPTOR. She was still sure that RAPTOR was missing something in the flood of information, yet when challenged by Lyne found it difficult to be precise. At that point, he gave her a twenty-four-hour break. ‘Take off, go to a hair stylist, see a movie, get laid,’ he had said, without looking up from his screen.
Just one of those would be enough, she thought. She booked an appointment at the hair salon opposite Rahe’s bookshop and submitted to the pleasure of a hair wash and head massage. As she had done a couple of weeks before, she moved to the seat that enabled her to watch the bookshop as her hair was being cut. This was how it started, she thought: an average-looking bloke, a bit on the chubby side, bustling from his bookstore to meet a cab and then a plane. She stared at the shop front, imagining him there in his ludicrous green jacket; Vigo’s man rushing to a terrible death in his Sunday best.
She left the hairdresser and walked up and down the street, noticing a couple of bureaux de change, a printing shop and a Lebanese restaurant. Then she went into the Pan Arab Library – despite Rahe’s absence, the bookstore was still open and doing a reasonable trade. She stopped at the cash desk, smiled pleasantly at the young woman, and asked if the store had a book called The Balance of Power in the Jordanian Islamist Movements by Al-Gharaibeh, a title she remembered seeing on one of the Wallflowers’ desks. The woman explained she was new and wasn’t sure which section the book would be found in: she’d check the computer stock list. As her varnished nails skittered across the keyboard, Herrick’s gaze came to rest on the smears of grime on the return key and space bar – grime accumulated in tens of thousands of keystrokes by Youssef Rahe. She realised suddenly that she had found what she was looking for.
‘That’s a Dell computer, isn’t it?’ said Herrick. ‘I’ve had the exact same one for three years and it’s never caused me any trouble.’
The woman looked at her oddly. ‘Yes, it seems to be very reliable.’
‘Can I look?’ asked Herrick, leaning over and memorising the model number. The woman was still trying to find the book on the stock list. ‘I can always come back later,’ said Herrick. ‘I’ve quite a number of purchases to make. Perhaps it would help if I brought a list this afternoon.’
The woman seemed relieved. Herrick left the shop and caught a cab to Notting Hill Gate where she began to search the second-hand shops. Very soon, she found a Dell for sale, slightly newer than the one in the bookstore, but with an identical keyboard. She examined the socket at the back of the computer and practised pressing the plug home. Then she negotiated with the youth behind the counter to buy the keyboard separately. Clutching her prize in an old supermarket bag, she walked a few doors along the street and entered a large bookshop. The back of a recently published book in the politics section called Jihad had an excellent bibliography, from which she took the titles of half a dozen obscure-sounding books on the Middle East.
This done, she returned to Rahe’s bookshop with the list and the keyboard, but the obliging young assistant at the desk had been replaced by a rather stout and ill-tempered woman wearing a hijab to cover her hair and neck, who must have been Rahe’s wife. She told Herrick to leave the list overnight and return to collect the books next day, then picked up the phone and began speaking. Herrick placed the list on her desk and moved to the door, taking from her pocket another piece of paper now nicely compressed into an oval pellet. As she reached the door, she again checked for an alarm, then wedged the pellet into the metal opening of the lock and slipped into the street.
She made her way to Westbourne Grove and took lunch in a brasserie – sea bass with half a bottle of Mersault – and read the Guardian, which had a detailed analysis of the Norquist shooting and raised the possibility of a stray police bullet. She was interrupted by a man who said she reminded him of an American film actress, whose name he couldn’t quite recall. She tolerated him for a little while, admitting to herself that being complimented wasn’t such a bad experience after nearly a fortnight in the Bunker. But at length, she made her
