'Who do you work for?' Jerry Esterhausen asked. 'SAS? The American Delta Force? I know! The CIA!'
'Believe it or not, I'm a relatively low-level clerk,' Carolyn Howorth told him. If he wanted to jump to the conclusion that she was CIA, that was fine with her. 'I just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.'
'Or the right place, right time,' he said with feeling. They were seated at the desk in Esterhausen's stateroom. Late last night, he'd brought her down here, and she'd slept here. Only slept; Esterhausen had gallantly let her have the queen-sized bed while he took the double-wide love-seat sofa. It was, Howorth was forced to admit, infinitely better than blankets and life jackets in a lifeboat outside.
She'd been up early, however, sending more reports back to GCHQ and NSA Headquarters and also trying to raise Mohamed Ghailiani.
He was alive. She was fairly certain of that, now. According to GCHQ, which was closely monitoring every transmission in and out of the Atlantis Queen, another JPEG photo of Ghailiani's wife and daughter had been transmitted to his e-mail account on Tuesday, again on Wednesday, and then yet again that morning. The images weren't piling up in his in-box, either, but were being opened each morning. With Ghailiani's e-mail account password, she could check that. If he had been killed, there would have been no reason to keep Nouzha and Zahra Ghailiani alive, no need to keep e-mailing photographs of them with a fresh copy of the Guardian each morning. Both women would have been dead within hours of Mohamed Ghailiani's death.
The question was whether or not she could develop the guy as an agent-in-place. He'd been co-opted by the terrorists through threats to his family; perhaps he could be turned if those threats could be eliminated. However, he'd been so terrified the other day, so broken, that she wasn't sure he would be of any use even if she could elicit his cooperation.
Early that morning, she'd finished typing out an exploratory e-mail, addressed it to Ghailiani's account, and clicked send. The slow packet transmission rate meant that it would take a while to get there, and she had no idea when he would again be checking his shipboard account.
But right now she had nothing but time. Her fingers clattered over the keyboard and, suddenly, a mail icon popped up. She clicked on it.
Who are you?
She stared at the three words for a long moment. The e should be from Ghailiani himself, but there was always the possibility that someone else, one of the terrorists, was reading his e-mail for him. It was possible that they didn't trust him to access his e-mail without someone reading over his shoulder. So Who are you? might be from Ghailiani, or it might be from a tango.
A friend, she typed back. You know me. I can help you. She pressed send.
It would take a while for Jerry's computer to send the message at its deliberate electronic snail's pace. She waited.
They'd been watching them all day.
MI5 had found the flat two days before, on Tuesday afternoon. A policeman had called in the black sedan with its license registration of Y9WE83K, parked on Waterhouse Lane in front of a line of two-story brown-stone row houses in an aging section of town. The neighborhood was just three miles across town from the Ghailiani residence, an easy drive out the A3057.
MI5 agents had questioned neighbors, learning from them that two men, foreign-looking and secretive, had moved into the vacant flat only two weeks earlier. The two apparently kept to themselves — and that of itself was enough to attract attention and elicit comment in a clannish and close-knit community such as Millbrook.
MI5 had talked to the people living next door, a newly married Indian couple named Rajeesh. The two had been temporarily evicted on Tuesday, moved to a hotel in Southampton for the duration, and with the promise that the government would take care of any damages. MI5 had moved in, entering the flat from the rear two at a time in order to try to avoid alerting the residents at Number 1240 next door. Lia DeFrancesca and Ilya Akulinin had arrived on Wednesday, setting up a satellite radio link with both MI5 and GCHQ.
Early on Thursday morning, while it was still dark in the hours before dawn, the SAS had arrived as well. The takedown, code-named Imperial, was a go.
The upstairs of the Rajeesh apartment had been transformed into a military command post, the furniture moved downstairs, the carpets rolled up, and folding chairs and tables brought in for the banks of computers and monitors being used by the HRT personnel. Two technicians had used silenced electrical saws to cut through the south wall, which, according to architectural plans from the local planning-board office, should back up against the north wall of the suspect's bedroom. Working with extreme and methodical care in absolute silence, they brought down a seven-foot-high, nine-foot-wide section of lath and plaster wall, exposing the back side of the suspect's wall and the nine-inch gap between the two.
A hand drill was used to very, very slowly bore into this final barrier, a sheet of aging lath and plaster half an inch thick. The resultant hole was scarcely wider than a finishing nail, but it accepted the stiff end of a horoscope probe, connected by a fiber-optic cable to a TV monitor on a folding table several feet away.
The horoscope's fish-eye lens revealed nearly all of the room next door, and it provided the final proof that MI5 had found the right place. Two women could be seen tied on the bed. Two and sometimes three men came and went. Sensitive microphones placed against the wall's interior side let the HRT team hear everything that happened, every word that was spoken. A couple of Arabic-speaking translators were brought in, who sat and listened to everything as the recorders rolled.
But Imperial couldn't go in immediately. Clearance needed to be won from higher levels of the bureaucracy, and unless the two victims were in immediate danger, an entry warrant needed to be approved by the local magistrate. The watchers at first couldn't see either of the women's faces, and there was at least a small chance that MI5 was peeking in on a kinky sex scene rather than an actual kidnapping.
So they watched, and they recorded. Both women were positively identified when their captors temporarily released them to let them use the toilet or to allow them to eat. The warrant didn't come through until late Thursday, however. The government was still stinging from allegations of abridged citizens' rights and illegal surveillance issues, and magistrates were being a lot more cautious now to safeguard citizens' rights to privacy.
And so MI5, the SAS HRT, and the two American liaisons had watched and listened as, early Thursday morning, one of the men photographed the women in the bed with a folded newspaper, then downloaded the image onto a laptop computer and sent it off. They watched in helpless and steadily building fury as the captors talked among themselves or described to the two helpless women in gruesome detail just what they were going to do with them when they were no longer needed.
Captain Burns, in charge of the HRT, was ready to go in without a warrant on the assumption that the women were in imminent danger. He was convinced to wait by Ronald Harriman, the senior MI5 officer on the scene. If the HRT went through that wall and things went badly, if the tangos on the other side of that wall were able to get word to the terrorists at sea, Mohamed Ghailiani might become a liability and die… and that might mean repercussions that would result in SAS casualties on the Atlantis Queen as well. In the wake of the abortive helicopter attack on Tuesday, everyone was being super-cautious and playing it strictly by the book.
And so they waited.
The warrant and final approval for the assault came through by mid-afternoon on Thursday. Burns and Harriman both agreed that they would wait a few hours more. The tangos seemed to have established a routine; each evening, one of their number would leave the flat and buy take-out food. On Wednesday night, they had watched the terrorists gather in a group, all three of them standing together around a table on the far side of the bedroom from the captives. If they followed the same pattern on Thursday, that was when the hostage rescue team would go in.
At around six-thirty, one of the tangos left to get dinner. By this time, the SAS troopers had placed a large loop of yellow det cord against the interior of the lath and plaster wall, with extra lumps of C-4 placed as cutting charges against the exposed studs. Detonators were placed at several points along the det cord and in every C-4 charge, with all of them carefully woven together by wires to the firing box in the middle of the room. The HRT unit prepared for the assault, each man wearing black battle dress, combat harness, balaclava, and gas mask and carrying H&K MP5 submachine guns.
