The Phoenix Series Box Set 1

by Ted Tayler

  CHAPTER 18

  On Wednesday evening, Khadim drove back to Downton. He was in a good mood. Everything was coming together. When he walked into the holiday cottage, the smells emanating from the kitchen were delicious. Shamila was ready to dish up dinner.

  There was just one week to go until Ramadan. A Sindhi biryani with mutton, basmati rice, naan bread and all the trimmings, was the perfect end to a perfect day. After they ate Khadim told Shamila that he had now attended his interviews; he had to wait to hear if either of them had been successful.

  On Thursday morning, Khadim asked Shamila if they could spend the day in the city.

  “Show me around,” he said, “let me see the places you discovered.”

  Shamila was excited to learn that she had Khadim to herself. She naively hoped that marriage was on the horizon. Khadim grew bored with the shops and museums and after lunch, they drove out into the country. The couple visited Old Sarum and the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge. As the early evening sun warmed them in the lee of the ancient stones, Khadim and Shamila took photos of one another, just like any normal tourists. They drove back to Downton and sat in the garden of their cottage, sipping tea until night fell. Shamila had never been more content.

  On Friday the thirteenth of July, Khadim took Shamila with him to Weymouth. He did not tell her how long he had already spent there, or why. They parked by the Radipole lake and nature reserve and took the short walk to the town centre.

  “It’s very busy,” said Shamila. “I never expected to see so many people.”

  Khadim told her of the arrival of the Olympic torch relay. The crowds lined the streets, right along the Esplanade. The torch was on its way from Lyme Regis and heading on to Bournemouth. An evening celebration was scheduled on the beach.

  Khadim and Shamila stood at the railings and looked over onto the huge stretch of sand, full of happy, smiling people. Shamila thought how lucky she was. She was having a terrific holiday with the man she loved. Khadim smiled too. Not because he was in love. Because now he didn’t need to imagine anymore how Weymouth beach might look with thousands of people on it.

  Meanwhile, in Wolverhampton Shamila’s parents had driven up from their home. They visited her flat and finding it unoccupied they then visited the police to say they hadn’t heard from her for several weeks. They wanted to report her missing. Reluctantly, the officer on duty logged the request on the computer.

  A photograph of Shamila was circulated to other areas and under normal circumstances that would have been that. Nothing would happen. It headed for the ‘twilight zone’; left to gather dust alongside many other reported incidents the police abandon as not worth pursuing. Young people leave home. They disappear for a while without telling their parents. Big deal. A boy racer pops into his local supermarket garage, fills up and shoots off without paying; another big deal. Modern policing is about far more important things.

  Not everyone turns a blind eye to people who break the law or fits the profile of someone who might. Only four months had passed since the Home Secretary split the old Border Agency in two. This followed revelations that hundreds of thousands of people entered the country without appropriate checks. The UK Border Force had become a separate law-enforcement body with its own distinctive ethos.

  A keen, young graduate had grasped the nettle. She was still filled with enough zeal after three months in post, to check out a few of the many faces logged after returning from known terrorist training areas.

  In the Central regional office, Daisy Rawlings had on her desk a grainy image of a Khadim Salah. He returned to Birmingham International from Faisalabad, via Karachi and Dubai six months ago. He had been in Punjab for several months. Salah was twenty-seven, had held a series of jobs, and graduated from a university in the summer of 2011.

  Daisy added Khadim Salah to a list of ‘people of interest’ that she intended to persuade her superiors to let her investigate further. Daisy was not the calibre of recruit the modern police service wanted. If she was allowed to ‘investigate further’ then she would follow the trail wherever it led.

  Daisy Rawlings was like a dog with a bone when she had a cause she believed in, she did not let it go.

  Back at Larcombe, Giles and his crew swept the internet for any scraps of intelligence that might help to narrow the field in the hunt for suspects.

  “Give me a break, please,” he muttered, as messages and photos passed across the screen in front of him.

  Something alerted him. Giles scrolled back to a photograph of a young woman.

  “This one’s a looker. I wouldn’t be letting her wander off without knowing where she went that’s for sure. Who do we have here, I wonder?”

  It was Shamila Javed. One of their frequent visits to the Police National Database had thrown up the picture her parents handed to the police when they reported her disappearance. Giles logged her details.

  Shamila Javed was a 20-year-old student. She had just completed her first year in Media Studies. The family originates from Punjab. Father is a GP. Mother is a classroom assistant. No known affiliation with any extreme groups (political or religious). Shamila has had no contact with her parents for several weeks.

  Giles contacted an agent in Solihull and asked him to visit the district where Shamila studied, lived, and possibly socialised. Who were her friends? Where might she have gone? An hour later, the agent stood outside her flat and beginning the search for clues.

  Lightning rarely strikes twice. Giles went back to the screens and picked up the latest information one of his crew had collected from a source within MI5. Last autumn a man had travelled to Pakistan from Birmingham International. The officer who talked to him had written a brief note to record that the visit was part of a gap year. An opportunity to meet with family members in Punjab.

  When the man returned two months later, the same officer had by chance been on duty. It was nothing tangible; just a niggle that made him suspicious. The matter had been highlighted for his superiors to pursue. Now it was July, and no action had been taken, but a memo from a new face in Border Force stirred the sleeping giant into action at last.

  Giles read the memo, noted the Punjabi and Midlands connection and waited for the man from Solihull to join up the dots. This could be what they sought.

  Two hours later, Giles got the call. The agent had talked to Shamila Javed’s near neighbours. They confirmed that she had been absent for a while. Although none of them could be sure of the last time they saw her.

  “Shamila was out early, you know, for the bus in term time; she studied at the Uni.”

  “She was always smartly dressed, but she didn’t wear the veil. Shamila was a pretty girl too, it’s such a shame.”

  “I saw her in town a few times shopping and that, she always had a smile and a hello, you know, I hope nothing’s happened to her.”

  “Reckon she’s gone, mate. One of them arranged marriages. Away in Pakistan married to a seventy-five-year-old doctor her Dad found, I bet.”

  “I saw her with a handsome man a few times. They were up there by the café on the corner. He was older than her, but they seemed happy together.”

  A visit to the coffee shop confirmed that Shamila Javed had an older male companion. A customer told the agent they had been in a few times. She said they looked happy together. The girl behind the counter described the man to the agent.

  Giles examined the grainy photo that Daisy Rawlings had circulated to her colleagues. He was convinced it was their man. Khadim Salah and Shamila Javed were an item. Salah had caused the border control officer to wonder why he spent two months in Pakistan. The authorities might take a while to put two and two together. Giles alerted Henry Case. Erebus and the others needed to hear this today, not at tomorrow’s meeting. Salah needed to be found and fast.

  Khadim Salah was ahead of the game. After he and Shamila had returned from Weymouth, he phoned the company from whom he rented the cottage.

  “Do you have something similar out in
the country? My partner and I wish to get away from things for a while.”

  “There’s a place available in Piddlehinton, sir, at forty pounds per night.”

  Khadim checked where the little village lay and booked it straight away. It meant they were only twenty minutes from Weymouth and remote enough for him to get things ready for the big day, without nosy neighbours prying into his business.

  Shamila was surprised to learn they were moving. She enjoyed Downton and her daily jaunts into Salisbury. She wanted to know why they were going so far away from the shops. Khadim ignored her whining and reflected on what clues they left behind if any. Shamila sulked from Downton to Piddlehinton.

  Khadim had been comfortable with Shamila being seen strolling around the old city streets. He had only taken one risk, that one morning, when they had been seen together and that was only for an hour or two. The afternoon and early evening, driving around the countryside looking at old stones had been boring. But it didn’t leave too many people with a lasting impression of them.

  The cottage in Downton had been on a quiet street. Khadim thought a handful of locals would have seen him, and none of them saw him up close. No, there weren’t too many clues there. The agent at the rental company might say the gentleman who called was an Indian because he would believe we all sound alike from the sub-continent. The employee could not describe him in detail. Any dealings he had with the company were by email and phone. As Khadim pulled up in front of the little cottage, he thought he had covered their tracks well.

  Shamila was happier once she saw the new cottage. It was pretty, with roses around the door and a thatched roof.

  “With luck, I will hear from one or more of my job interviews,” said Khadim “I need to check out properties in the region. One-bedroom flats for me to stay in during the week. Just looking at this brochure here that the company has provided, you can catch a bus from the War Memorial mid-morning. You can hit the shops in Weymouth inside an hour.”

  Shamila was content. Shopping was a passion. To learn Khadim was hunting for a bachelor pad was not such good news, but she would make sure he wanted to keep visiting Wolverhampton on the weekends. The harsh truth was that Khadim wanted her out of the way for a few hours. He didn’t plan to go back to the Midlands on the weekends; he wasn’t planning any further ahead than Friday 3rd August.

  Khadim waved Shamila off to the bus stop at just after a quarter past ten in the morning. He collected a case from the boot of the hire car and took it into his bedroom; then he laid it gently on the bed and opened it. He removed a collection of items and put into practice the skills he had learned in Pakistan. Khadim was careful to keep the vital components apart until he needed them. But there might not be many opportunities to assemble the bomb with Shamila constantly standing in his shadow.

  The explosive belt was made up of several cylinders filled with explosive. The explosive was surrounded by a fragmentation jacket that produced the shrapnel responsible for most of the bomb's deadliness. This had the effect of turning the jacket into a crude, body-worn claymore mine. The cylinders were connected by a wire to a trigger in the middle of the chest.

  Once the vest was detonated, the explosion would resemble a shotgun blast. The main killing power of any bomb is not the explosion itself. The shock wave from a few explosives used is small, but the fragments of the vest being launched in every direction by the explosion do the real damage.

  Khadim Salah had selected the most dangerous and the most widely used shrapnel; steel balls that were 5mm in diameter. He had added nails, screws, and nuts to his recipe. He had learned in Pakistan that shrapnel was responsible for ninety per cent of casualties when a device such as his was detonated.

  The loaded vest now weighed twelve kilos and despite the summer weather, he knew he needed to hide it under a suitable loose outer garment.

  In Pakistan, he had watched an engineer using something he called the ‘Mother of Satan’. One glance at the two fingers missing on his right hand told him everything he needed. Khadim had opted for TATP, the acetone peroxide, as the initiator, and ammonal a simpler, far less dangerous material as the main explosive.

  Khadim had smuggled a quantity of TATP home with him in a plastic bottle hidden in his wash bag. No matter how well-trained the dogs were they could not yet detect acetone peroxide. He stored the bottle away in his sock drawer.

  The sweat on his brow gathered. The clock ticked ever onward. Shamila was due to arrive on the bus at the War Memorial stop soon. He had just a few more things to do, and then he could tidy up and then shower and change.

  Khadim stood in the shower ten minutes later and as the hot water battered his body, he wondered how long it would be before he stopped shivering. As he dried himself he heard the door of the cottage squeak open.

  “Hi, Khadim, I’m back. Wait until you see what I’ve bought.”

  Khadim closed his eyes in exasperation.

  “Not long now. You can put up with her for a while longer,” he told himself as he dressed.

  Shamila displayed the sparkly tops and shoes she ‘had to buy’ and Khadim tried to appear interested. Once the fashion parade ended, Shamila showed him the other items she had bought.

  Khadim looked at the pitta bread, the hummus and the dates. He couldn’t look anymore. He suddenly realised he was hungry, but he knew he had to wait until dark before they sat down for iftar. Khadim chose a bottle of water from the goodies in Shamila’s many bags of shopping and decided on a drive.

  Khadim needed to do something to take his mind off his stomach rumbling.

  He drove into Dorchester, topped up the hire car with fuel, and then headed back to the cottage in the little village. As he drove, he thought how beautiful the countryside was. Khadim Salah shut the thought out of his mind; earthly beauty was nothing compared to paradise.

  CHAPTER 19

  There was less than a week until the Opening Ceremony. The level of excitement around the country grew, even amongst those who were normally not that interested in sporting occasions. The Torch Relay, the Diamond Jubilee weekend and an occasional ‘feel good’ factor were reported in the news. All of this contributed to a notion that whatever the weather, the summer of 2012 would be fun.

  At Larcombe Manor, the mood brightened too. The news from the ice-house lifted spirits. So far, there had been no confirmed sightings of Khadim Salah and Shamila Javed, but at least, they had something positive to aim for. Before those two pieces of information dropped in their lap, they had been rushing around in the dark.

  Erebus asked Athena and Phoenix to stay behind after the morning meeting on Monday. He had several things on his mind.

  “Please do not mention what I am about to say to anyone outside this room. Do you understand?”

  They nodded.

  “Since I lost my beloved Elizabeth, I have been giving serious thought to the future. I need to hold the reins for the time being. As soon as you are ready Athena, I can assure you I shall stand aside. You will lead the Olympus Project. Phoenix, you are to become her right-hand man.”

  Colin was startled.

  “Me sir, surely one of the other three heads expect to be chosen?”

  “If they do, then they are mistaken. You may think these old eyes miss things but I know you two have let’s say grown close, shall we? Even if that were not so, Phoenix, you would still be the only logical choice. Thanatos, Alastor, and Minos have been indispensable; yet they are followers, not leaders. You and Athena have youth and ambition on your side. The Olympus Project needs that in abundance as it faces an even more challenging future. I believe the two of you working together possess the necessary skills to meet those challenges.”

  Athena got up and hugged the old man.

  “Phoenix and I won’t fail you Erebus,” she said, kissing him on top of his head.

  “I wish to give you both an insight into my vision for Olympus as you take it forward, without me. I hope you will develop the organisation following the principles I es
tablished when we started.”

  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” said Colin.

  Erebus rose from his chair at the head of the table and walked over to the drinks cabinet. He gestured to Athena and Phoenix to join him. He poured himself a large glass of brandy and invited the others to fix themselves a drink. Erebus sat in his favourite chair by the fireplace and when they were comfortable too, he outlined his thoughts on the future of the Olympus Project.

  “A collaborative, international approach to security underpins the ethos of many of today's successful independent organisations. More and more independents are tackling issues of scale that may have limited them previously, with the help of global affiliations and technology. In a globalized world, an international organisation network is one way to tackle the limitations of size for an independent, such as ourselves. Such a partnership can unlock worldwide opportunities. Olympus must seek to develop partnerships that take advantage of the benefits of global scale, shared insights, and knowledge of the local criminal activity. This offers the Project local support. The collaborative approach will allow the organisation to deliver more. The combination of different but complementary skill sets through collaboration with different partners around the world allows us to deliver integrated global campaigns. Campaigns where the result will be much greater than the sum of the parts. Collaboration plays a key role. It is not always the easy choice, especially with a mix of talented, opinionated, and ambitious people in the mix. I would suggest that you take an objective view and, use coercion, be polite and finally direct action to get the result you want. We live in a digital world now and technology has influenced how we create, connect, and work together. We are more connected and accessible than ever before and this immediacy helps us work more quickly and efficiently. Partnership and collaboration will continue to bring organisations together and in the final analysis, getting the criminals is what matters. This is my vision. The Olympus Project will become a global agency for good.”