Abdul considered his reply for a while. Then he put his hands together in an attitude of prayer and began to walk along the track. David fell into step beside him.
‘I want you to learn to trust me, that is why I am keeping you with me,’ Abdul began. ‘I am having many problems now with my suppliers, my farmers. They are holding out on fixing a price.’
‘What has that got to do with me?’ David asked.
‘You will see. You remember the attack on the compound?’ He waited for David to say he did. ‘It was Janov’s doing. One of my farmers who is loyal to me has told me that Janov wants to cut me out.’
‘But you are doing business with Janov,’ David reminded him. ‘You met with him a few days ago.’
Abdul looked hard at David. ‘Janov is an ambitious man, an evil man.’ Abdul seemed to conveniently forget the kind of business he himself was in, the same as Janov. ‘But he is working for his cousin, Danvor. And his cousin works for the American CIA, and one day they will run this country. Soon, if I am not careful, the Americans will come and I will be taken out. That is why I keep moving and why I keep you with me, because I want to exchange you for something.’
David stopped. ‘Exchange me for what, Abdul?’
‘Your freedom and my freedom.’
There was a moment’s silence.
‘I don’t understand,’ David admitted.
Abdul put his hand on David’s shoulder. ‘Your freedom means you can go home and live your life without hindrance, am I right?’ David nodded. Abdul continued. ‘But for me I want something else. I want your country to give me political asylum so I can live my life free from the threat I face from the Americans.’
David was stunned to hear Abdul say that he wanted to get out of the lucrative and criminal business he was in, and that he expected the British to help him achieve that. He feared Abdul was in for a big disappointment.
‘Well you won’t get that in exchange for me, Abdul, I can assure you.’
Abdul smiled. ‘No, but I will if I offer to give them the names of those who are involved here in Afghanistan and in Britain.’
They found Grebo’s body. It had been dumped in a fairly quiet area beside the river. A man walking his dog came across it. The police could not identify the corpse so easily because the face wasn’t there. The bullet into the back of the head had taken Grebo’s face clean off. All the police could do was to cordon the area off and wait for the forensic boys to get to work.
There were no identifying documents on him so they had to rely on dental records, but there was no way of locating a dentist with those records. It was a chicken and egg argument: they had the teeth but no records, and whoever had the records would not know about the teeth. But eventually it was suggested that they check on all Americans living in the area because the dead man was wearing clothing that had probably been purchased in America. Then someone thought of the American Forces stationed in Britain, which widened the search.
This link brought them to the United States Air Force base at Lakenheath and it was there they found the dental records they were looking for and subsequently identified one Danvor Grebo, Chief Master Sergeant in the USAF as the dead man.
It was fairly obvious to the investigating officer that Grebo’s murder had the hallmarks of a gang style killing, and there were only two possibilities that rang alarm bells: one was drugs, the other was terrorism; the possible slaying of a member of the American Forces as a terrorist style revenge attack.
The connections were then being made and passed to various departments within the Metropolitan Police divisions which included the narcotics and terrorist departments of SOCA, Special Branch and eventually the desk of James Faulkner.
It also crossed the desk of Andrew Butler, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner who phoned Sir Giles Cavendish as a courtesy. And so the loop was completed, and all the interested parties made their own choices on how they were going to deal with this particular crime.
James Faulkner made his choice; he phoned Randy Hudson, the CIA Station chief and asked for an urgent meeting. The meeting took place at the same riverside pub as before, but this time they were being observed and filmed by a member of Sir Giles Cavendish’s department. Cavendish was taking no chances with Faulkner since their meeting with the Prime Minister. It was because of something the SOCA chief had said after Cavendish had told them about the drug smugglers, bringing in drugs and young girls, then smuggling arms out. Faulkner had declared that he believed all the poppy fields in Afghanistan had been destroyed.
It was a simple enough assumption to make, that the drugs were coming in from Afghanistan, but Cavendish hadn’t mentioned that country; the drugs could have been coming in from the Far East. It was a small error, but one that immediately raised the bar, and Cavendish decided to keep a discreet surveillance on the SOCA chief; hence the camera filming his meeting with Hudson from across the river.
‘I’ve got very little time,’ Hudson warned Faulkner. He looked at his watch and sat down opposite the SOCA chief. ‘I don’t know if I can give you anything new; the boys at Lakenheath are in a flat spin over this. Your English newspaper guys are already calling it ‘gunfight at the OK corral.’
Faulkner raised his eyebrows a notch. ‘Our headline writers have vivid imaginations.’
‘But they do at least stir things up and get the public interested. This has taken them away from their soap operas.’
‘Well hopefully, your country folk will give our Press something to feed on. But I want to know if you have any contingency plan?’
‘Milan Janov is flying in tomorrow,’ Hudson told Faulkner. ‘I contacted him through the usual channels to tell him of his cousin’s disappearance. He doesn’t know yet what’s happened.’
‘I’m more concerned about how we are going to replace Grebo,’ Faulkner said levelly. ‘At the moment we don’t have anybody in place.’
Hudson shook his head. ‘Don’t worry; I’ll fill that gap. And I’ll talk to Janov.’
‘What can he do?’
Hudson shrugged. ‘Nothing really, but I think he wants to ride in and flex his muscles.’
‘I won’t be able to do anything if Immigration stops him at Heathrow,’ Faulkner told him. ‘Probably better if they do stop him and send him home.’
Hudson laughed lightly. ‘Well, we’ll let him have his moment if he does get in. But I suspect there’s another reason for his visit.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Look, James, I really have to go. I’ll catch up with you later.’
Faulkner drained his glass and stood up. ‘OK Randy let me know if anything develops.’
Hudson stood up and shook Faulkner’s hand. ‘Deveraux has already had to close the operation down,’ he said, ‘For now anyway. It might mean I’ll have to make a trip back to the States for a while, but I’ll let you know.’
‘Thanks Randy, keep in touch.’
And with that the two men went their separate ways.
Cavendish had kept Marcus under virtual house arrest for a couple of days. He had taken him from Susan’s house and made sure there was no way he could disappear again. During that time he did his best to debrief Marcus and find out as much as he could about the events that had happened while Marcus had been operating unofficially.
Marcus had told Cavendish as much as he could, even to the extent that he believed the police would find the gun that killed Covington in the Mercedes he had dumped at the truck stop.
He also told Cavendish about the killer’s house and, most painfully of all, the fact that he now believed Maggot was a hit man for the organisation that were smuggling drugs into Britain.
What Cavendish told Marcus was that there was a growing conviction that the CIA were running the organisation and smuggling arms out to Afghanistan to keep the insurgent war lords happy and to maintain a constant supply of heroin into the West. He told Marcus that the heroin trade world-wide was worth in the region of 120 billion dollars a year, and that a great deal of money was going into the pockets of people in very senior positions of authority.
‘And remember this, Marcus,’ Cavendish added at the end of one of his short lectures. ‘They have killed a Cabinet minister, a high flying lawyer and one of their own, key men in order to maintain a very lucrative business. And they would have killed me if you hadn’t intervened.’
