The detective sergeant had fingered wet-weather coats while the target had selected then paid cash for a sleeping-bag, heavy-soled walking-boots, wool boot socks, camouflage trousers and tunic that were ex-military stock. He might have been old, near to retirement, but the detective sergeant still registered his target's height and the size of the boots, which were at least two sizes too small for the target's feet.
All the university cities in the country had a pair of Branch men attached to the local police station. Used to be Irish work, not any longer. It was the Islamic thing that preoccupied the detective sergeant and his partner, Iranian students studying engineering, physics, chemistry, metallurgy, and the zealots who recruited among the campus kids. It was work for a dozen men in this city alone, not for two poor bastards. The Security Service provided the names and addresses, and bugger all else, leaving the detective sergeant to tramp the streets and type the bloody reports.
The target was careful and had twice ducked into shop doorways and let him come past. His shoes, new, hurt his feet, and he was bursting for a leak. The detective sergeant was trained in surveillance, but it was damn difficult to make the tail when it was down to one man. They had ended in a bookshop. He'd eyed the paperback thrillers while the target had been searching, very specific, on shelves across the shop.
He had not had this man before. There were usually so many targets that they came round on a rota every four weeks or so. It was only three months since the young fellow, wet behind the ears and up from London, had given the sparse detail of the Security Service interest in Yusuf Khan, Muslim convert, formerly Winston Summers. One of many, the tall, wide-shouldered Afro-Caribbean was under surveillance around one day in thirty, nine in the morning to seven in the evening. He did not know why this thirty-year-old cleaner at the university was on the list for sporadic surveillance… His was not to reason why, his but to do and bloody die and bugger all glory for his pinched feet and aching bladder.
The target had taken a book, gone quickly to a vacant cash desk, and paid in notes and loose change before heading out into the street. The detective sergeant was good at his work and conscientious. He checked the shelves where the target had searched: UK Travel and Guides. The man was out on the street now. A woman was at the cash desk, with a child in tow, choosing a gift-token card. He'd lost half a minute before he'd used his shoulder, shown his warrant card, and demanded of the assistant what book her previous customer had purchased. The dumb girl had forgotten, had to check back in the point-of-sale computer.
He stood on the pavement outside the shop and cursed.
He could not see his target and narrow arcades led off both sides of the main street.
He swore.
He quartered the arcades and the precinct, checked the bus stops and the precinct, but could not find the bobbing head he sought, or the bright-coloured shopping-bags. As his son would say, when his birthday came round, when the detective sergeant had to dig in his wallet to pay for the amplifier or the tuner, 'Pay peanuts, Dad, and you get monkeys.' They paid for one man to do a surveillance once every thirty days and by eleven o'clock in the morning the monkey had lost its target.
He would find a place to leak, then walk back to the dismal street of little terraced houses to sit in his car, fashion the excuses, compose his report, and have not an idea why Yusuf Khan, formerly Winston Summers, had purchased boots, camouflage trousers and tunic too small for him, heavy wool socks, a sleeping-bag, and a guidebook to the coastal area of north Suffolk. What the policeman knew of that area from a wet, cold and miserable caravan holiday twenty-two years back was endless grey seas and marshes. But it would go in his report for want of something better.
'Were you followed?'
Yusuf Khan did not think so.
'Have you done anything to create suspicion?'
Yusuf Khan knew of nothing.
The intelligence officer was a man of sophistication and poise. He came from a childhood spent after the revolution in a villa of quality set in the foothills of the Albourz. The previous owner had fled in 1980 and his cleric father had been awarded the property, which looked down on to Tehran's smoggy sprawl. He w~s fluent in German, Italian, Arabic and English, and could pass in casual London society for Palestinian, Lebanese, Saudi or Egyptian. To the unaware he might be from the deep south of Italy, perhaps Calabrian or Sicilian. He had been three years in London and believed he understood the heartbeat of the British psyche… and that understanding had led him to recruit Yusuf Khan, formerly Winston Summers, Muslim convert. He was a religious man himself, prayed at the given hours when it was possible, and the obsession of the converts to the Faith was something he found ridiculous but useful. He preyed on the converts, trawled for them in the mosques of the splinter communities who set themselves aside from the traditions of the Sunni and Shi'a teaching. He searched for them in the universities. The best he found, those who displayed a fervent adoration of the Imam Khomeini, he recruited.
Yusuf Khan had been subject to police investigation in Bristol, following a knife attack on an Arab businessman who had kissed a white woman on the street outside a nightclub. Unemployed, embittered and alienated, living in the East Midlands city of Nottingham, attending the mosque of Sheik Amir Muhammad, Yusuf Khan had been identified three years earlier for the intelligence officer. Twenty-three months before, with the trust already built in their relationship, the intelligence officer had told Yusuf
Khan how he might best serve the memory of the Imam. It had been a long evening of persuasion. The following day, Yusuf Khan had walked away from the Faith, taken a job as a cleaner at the university. He monitored the attitudes, friendships, conversations of Iranian students in the engineering faculty. He found and befriended a girl who was now converted to the Faith, and was useful. The trust grew.
The intelligence officer met his man in the car-park of a restaurant by the river. There were too many high cameras in the streets of the city and at the entrances to the multi-storey car-parks. The engine ran, the interior heated, the windows misted. They were unseen and alone.
'You will not be missed from work?'
His friend, the girl, had telephoned the university and reported his head cold.
'You are certain that you have not created suspicion?'
Yusuf Khan was certain.
He was told that he should not go home again until after his part in the matter was finished, to where he should take a train, where he should hire a car, the grade of car, and where he should sleep before the given time. His list was checked, the clothing, the boots, the sleeping-bag, the rucksack of khaki canvas he had bought the day before and collected from left-luggage at the bus station. Everything was checked, the book, the maps, the photographs, and he was passed another tight-rolled bundle of banknotes. He was told of the affection for him of men in high places, far away, whose names he would never know, of their gratitude for what he did, and of how they spoke of him with love. The intelligence officer watched the swell of Yusuf Khan's pride and smelt the chilli on the man's breath. He reached into the back of the car, unzipped a big sausage bag, and revealed the contents. He saw the bright excitement in Yusuf Khan's face. He showed him the launcher wrapped in a tablecloth, the shells, the automatic rifle with the folded stock and the loaded magazines. He opened the canvas rucksack beside the bag, revealed the grenades. He held the man's hand, squeezed it to give him reassurance, and drove him to the railway station.
He said that, in the Farsi language, the Imam was known as Batl Al-Mustadafin, and that was the Champion of the Disinherited, and therefore he was the champion of Yusuf Khan. He said that
Yusuf Khan would deserve the love of all those who followed the word of the Imam Khomeini. The intelligence officer did not tell him that the cornerstone of his work in London was 'deniability'.
When they reached the forecourt of the railway station, he told Yusuf Khan what the Ayatollah Fazl-Allah Mahalati had said. He spoke with fervour.
'A believer who sees Islam trampled underfoot and does nothing to stop it will end up in the seventh layer of Hell. But he who takes up a gun, a dagger, a kitchen knife or even a pebble with which to harm and kill the enemies of the Faith has his place assured in Heaven…'
He watched Khan into the station, carrying the rucksack and the sausage bag, which sagged under the weight of the weapons. On the way back to London he would call in at a small mosque in the town of Bedford, to a cultural association for which his embassy's support was well known, for a meeting that would help create the necessary factor of 'deniability'.
'Don't mind me saying it, Frank, you look bloody awful had the tax man round? You look like I feel when he pushes his bloody nose in!'
