‘It was you, Taher,’ Holm whispered to himself. ‘I know it was.’
As soon as he’d spoken he looked up to check nobody had overheard. The mere mention of Taher’s name would have Huxtable frothing at the mouth. For her, Taher was a sign of Holm’s failings. The single-mindedness that had served him well when he’d been in Special Branch was frowned upon here. Phrases like the bigger picture, a connected world, and – Holm’s favourite meaningless platitude – one bullet doesn’t end a war, went down well. Holm’s old-fashioned ideas did not. You didn’t wear out shoe leather these days and you didn’t cultivate informants in smoky back-room bars. You didn’t chase after a man the security services were beginning to think was a myth deliberately propagated by the terrorists to confound their enemies.
Holm had to admit there wasn’t much to go on. The first time the intelligence services had come across Taher had been in text messages found on a number of mobile phones that had been discovered in the UK, France and Belgium. Local ISIS operatives mentioned a free agent who was revered as some kind of emerging jihadi superhero. For a number of years he’d been rumoured to have been involved in almost every atrocity that had taken place in Europe. If he wasn’t actually there, then he was the one doing the planning and supplying the means and the money. However, recently the leads had dried up, leaving behind nothing but speculation. Even Holm’s most trusted informant had changed his tune.
‘You want to believe, then you believe,’ he’d said. ‘But I’ve come to the conclusion Taher is no more than a straw man you’ve created to justify your failures.’
It was true that almost everything about Taher was unsubstantiated: his age, background, country of origin. Was he a refugee or home grown? British, French, German, Belgian? Did he wear his beliefs on his sleeve or was he in some form of deep cover? Was he in a relationship? Did he have a job? Where did he get his money from? Was he, in fact, a composite of more than one individual?
For a couple of years Huxtable had tolerated Holm’s obsession because he was her spin of the roulette wheel, the couple of quid bunged on the lottery, a tenner on a long-odds outsider at the Grand National. Besides, what else could Holm usefully do? He was regularly sidelined on operations because he was too long in the tooth. He was passed over for younger men and women, graduates who had multiple languages and high-level computer skills. Holm spoke decent French and, in his pursuit of Taher, had picked up a smattering of Arabic. His German was limited to ordering beer and his Russian and Chinese non-existent. He could just about use a computer but when his colleagues began to talk of IP addresses and proxy servers and the dark web his eyes began to glaze over. Was tradecraft dead, he wondered. Didn’t anybody follow a hunch any more?
Holm shook himself and concentrated on his screen. The hour had slipped by and there were no more bullet points. He logged off from the terminal and rose from the chair.
The man the security services knew as Taher sat in the back seat of a minibus bouncing along a rough track some fifty miles to the south-west of Tunis. After two hours of driving the stifling air was getting to him. The vehicle’s air con was broken and the windows were jammed shut against the dust. In the next row of seats were two of his foot soldiers, Mohid Latif and Anwan Saabiq. Saabiq reached up and slid a finger under his shemagh to scratch his neck. The skin was slick with sweat. A laugh came from the driver’s seat up front, hardened eyes flicking up to the rear-view mirror.
‘Bloody Europeans,’ the man said, his English heavily accented. ‘If you can’t stand the heat, that’s what you say, no?’
Taher met the man’s eyes but remained silent. The driver – Kadri – was Tunisian, nothing more than a hired thug, and he wasn’t there to ask questions. Taher had seen the way the man had caressed the assault rifle he’d used in the attack. It was as if the gun was a pet or a woman. Kadri was ex-military, knew how to handle himself, but the way he’d held the weapon suggested he derived pleasure from killing. For Taher the use of guns and explosives was only a means to an end; for Kadri it was something approaching a fetish. Still, Kadri had been employed because they needed a local guide for the mission. Taher and the others didn’t speak the language and, once you were away from the tourist areas, foreigners stuck out a mile. Kadri could mutter a few words, thrust out a handful of dinar or raise a fist, and trouble faded away. They’d never have been able to navigate the heaving streets of Tunis without him, never have found the route which had taken them south from the city into desolate, rolling hills populated with scrawny pine trees and little else. In short, the mission could not have succeeded had Taher been naive enough to believe he had all the answers.
Rely on others. Depend on no one.
His uncle had taught him the wisdom of the little phrase that made no sense, and Taher had always thought the sentiment it encapsulated was appropriate to his situation. Surrounded by those who venerated him and would die for him, he was nevertheless alone in the world. Aside from his uncle nobody knew the real Taher. He was a mystery, his name an alias. Perhaps, more correctly, a cipher. A jumble of letters that represented a man but had come to stand for something much more. His followers whispered
