by Dan Fox
We were lucky as there was some other bigger problem elsewhere in the Airport and the Inspector went off to get involved in that. That left us free to go and we caught the first plane out of there which just happened to be to Caracas. We thought someone was looking out for us to give us such a good break.’
‘Interesting lessons to be learnt there aren’t there?’ said Jean. Some of their revelations were dynamite and she would have to get Steve to take heed of them and make sure that the president knew all about them rather than some arse saving politician sweeping them under the carpet.
Jean thought for a few moments about how she was going to continue this interrogation with them. There was of course one burning question she was anxious to ask and so she continued ‘Now tell me Rani how you felt when you killed Jeff Bloom so you could take his shift at the airfield?’
Rani shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He could feel sweat dripping beneath his arms and down his back. He didn’t know how to respond.
Eventually he said, ‘Jeff was a good guy and I’m sorry but I was on a mission and he was going to compromise it. I had no choice.’
‘I said how did you feel?’
Rani became even more uncomfortable and said ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Did you enjoy killing him? Did you laugh when you smashed that post into the back of his head? Did you laugh when you put the plastic bag over his head to suffocate him?’
Apart from the injury to Dado’s ear they had not been treated too badly up to this point. They had begun to see Jean as a friend and maybe saviour not an enemy and they thought they’d given her enough information to save their lives. They had told her everything on the tape. They’d not left anything out. Surely that showed they were cooperating. Now things had changed. Jean’s attitude was menacing and they were scared.
‘Of course I did not like it, Jeff was a good man, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time’, said Rani.
‘Why couldn’t you have knocked him out, tied him up and left him in the trunk of a car. You didn’t have to kill him. There is now a widow and two small children and no daddy.’
Rani’s head dropped. She had seen through his transparent façade. He had been trained to kill people not to spare them. That was true of both him and his brother. He now knew that neither of them would survive much longer now. They were expendable now that they had revealed all, and they were hated for what they had accomplished and for what they had tried to do and failed. Every normal decent Muslim in the USA would now pay a price for their treachery. There would be verbal assaults in the streets, bricks through windows, probably actual assaults and more than likely a number of deaths and they had achieved nothing which in any way justified the backlash which would surely come.
Their guilt and shame came in waves now but no more so than when Jean mentioned that a body, later identified as Alfred Strobl, a resident of Miami and a boat owner, was washed up on a beach in Bahamas. His heart had been penetrated by two nine millimetre bullets fired from a hand gun. A Double Tap. He had died instantly and either fell or was thrown overboard.
Obviously the connection had been made. They wanted a boat to take them to the Bahamas. Strobl had one for hire or maybe they threatened him, and they killed him as they approached the island so that he couldn’t give them away.
‘What happened to Strobl, why did you kill him?’
‘We hired his boat and gave him a lot of money. Maybe it was too much and he became suspicious. As we approached the port we asked him to make for a small cove just around the headland. We were prepared to jump off there into shallow water and make our own way from there. He started making noises about us being illegal immigrants and said he was going to make a call on his radio. We didn’t really have a choice did we?’
Jean gave him a severe backhander across the mouth which drew blood leaving Rani on the edge of consciousness and in significant pain. Composing herself she prepared herself carefully for the next part of the session.
‘You lived in America for more than ten years. You went to our University free of charge, you were given good jobs, you were given a lot of responsibility, you earned substantial wages and you had excellent health insurance.
You are extremely intelligent men with IQs between one hundred and forty-five and one hundred and fifty. In any other place that would have made you stand out above the crowd.
You had a good lifestyle in the USA, one that billions of people in the world would envy including most of your own countrymen, but you wanted to kill and maim the very people who had helped you. Why was that?’ Why did you want to kill the president? What had he ever done to you? What had those poor people on the plane that died ever done to you? Why did you need to kill Jeff Bloom? Why did you need to kill Alfred Strobl?
The problem is that you are insanely jealous of our affluence and our freedom.
A few centuries ago America was only inhabited by ethnic peoples and there were very few of them in comparison to the whole of the population today. The country was colonised over a long period by brave men and women from all over the world. They learned to work together, they didn’t have serious problems with religions and cultures because they were sensible enough to work their problems out and continue to build a great country. A country, I might add, that has helped to police the World’s trouble spots for over a hundred years, a country that has bailed out the poorer nations and has shared the wealth generated by its efforts with countless peoples.
The Americans don’t get everything right, but they always try to do the right thing. If the Americans had not helped in the Second World War, Hitler and the Nazis might well have won and we know what his solution to unwanted ethnic nations was don’t we? What do you think the situation in Afghanistan or Pakistan would be today if Hitler had have won that war? Your countries would have been little more than outposts with all your people as slaves. What opportunities in life would that have given you? You are pathetic.’
Rani always the more emotional of the two then looked at Jean with tears in his eyes and just said, ‘Sorry.’
Jean rushed across to him and grabbed him by the throat, ‘Sorry, is that all you can say you worthless piece of shit. My god I am going to take the greatest pleasure in killing both of you’ and left the room.
Rani and Dado just looked at each other and started to sob.
Chapter 48
Attwood phoned Steve and said ‘I was coming over for a chat but one of my guys called and said they’d got a line on Professor Samir Sardar and should be able to bring him in without too much fuss. Do you want us to do it now?’
‘Yes’ said Steve and disconnected before Attwood could say another word. Steve was still seething about bin Laden’s brother.
Professor Samir Sardar duly arrived at the facility and was taken into the building and pushed into a cell with his head still covered with a hood and he was handcuffed. He was shivering with fear.
Attwood bounded into the day room and found Steve, Marcel and Jackson relaxing for a few minutes. Jean was asleep in the bunk room.
‘Hi’, said Attwood and in return received hostile stares. ‘Hey, what have I done?’
Steve stood up to face him shrugging off Jackson’s attempt to restrain him. ‘You are a useless, incompetent asshole. You and your no hope surveillance team missed the second biggest prize available at Massood Malhi’s house. Do you have any idea who the visitor was?’
A cold sweat appeared on Attwood’s brow and a trickle ran down his back. He’d fucked up big time, but now he would find out just how much.
‘I don’t know’, he said.
With that Steve took out his phone and pulled up a very rarely used number. ‘Do us all a favour, call that number and when it answers tell the president that you let bin Laden’s brother visit Massood Malhi’s house and let him walk away.’
Attwood was close to having a bowel movement. ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ Suddenly he was unsteady on his feet and grabbed for a chair to
sit on. He took his head in his hands and shook it slowly.
‘Steve, I’m sorry, so sorry. I’ve really fucked up big this time.’
Steve picked up something else in Attwood’s voice. There was something that was not being said. ‘You’d better tell me what you’re not saying and for the sake of your health I’d be damn quick about it’, said Steve anxiously.
Attwood said, ‘bin Laden does not have a brother. He’s an only child.’
The enormity of that statement sank in quickly. It didn’t need a brain surgeon to work out who they’d really missed. They sat there stunned into silence.
Eventually Steve left them to it and went to see Professor Samir Sardar with Jackson. Steve yanked off the hood and looked into the startled eyes. ‘We want a few words with you about some things you had made for Massood Malhi.’
The Professor gasped. He now knew real fear, real terror and the wet patch at the front of his trousers grew larger. Steve grabbed him and frogmarched him into the Interrogation Room. The Professor spotted the blood on the dentist chairs and floor and went weak at the knees. He was strapped into one of the chairs quaking with fear. Steve approached him with a scalpel in his hand and raised it towards Samir Sardar’s throat.
‘Who designed and made the two devices you supplied to Massood Malhi?’
The Professor was a powerful man in his own environment and had a tendency to be a little stubborn. Perhaps he was a little drunk with his power for he chose, for whatever insane reason, not to answer Steve’s simple question. Jackson who had followed Steve into the room was standing on the opposite side of Samir Sardar and waited for a few seconds. When it was plain that Samir Sardar was not going to answer the question, he launched a vicious left hand roundhouse punch straight into Samir Sardar’s left cheek. Sardar squealed with the shock and the intense pain. Jackson reckoned he had cracked the cheekbone.
Within a few minutes the pain had subsided enough to continue the interrogation but the side of Samir Sardar’s face was swelling and bruising badly and his left eye was beginning to close.
‘Shall we try again?’ said Steve. Still no answer. This time Jackson didn’t wait for as long and as Samir Sardar made no attempt to answer he moved round in front of him and landed a straight punch to the bridge of the nose. Crack. The nose was broken and blood spewed out and into Samir Sardar’s mouth, down his chin and onto his shirt. In just a few seconds he was an absolute mess.
Steve fetched a mirror from off the shelf and held it out so Sardar could see his face with his one good eye. He gasped with shock.
‘You’ve been in here for less than five minutes and you can see what a mess you are. Just think what you’ll look like after five days, if you live that long’, said Steve.
Samir Sardar’s good eye then revealed to them all that they needed to know. He had tried to resist, more from ignorance than strategy and he had paid the price. Now he had given in and he needed to be cooperative. His terrified reasoning had told him that after all Massood Malhi must have told them about him so there was nothing he could tell them that they probably didn’t already know.
‘So what’s it to be Professor? Shall I leave you with my colleague here for a few hours, or are you going to answer a few simple questions?’
Samir Sardar nodded. ‘We have a brilliant experimental chemist called Yasir Chaudhry. He has been working on muscle relaxing drugs for years, partly because there is some medical or anaesthetic demand for them. Once I had established that Curaramine would do the job, I instructed the Physics department to build me a device. Neither Yasir Chaudhry or the Physics department knew what the device would do when it was finished. Chaudhry knew nothing about the Physics department’s involvement and vice versa. All they were given were precise parameters to work to.’
‘Why did Massood Malhi contact you?’ said Steve.
Professor Samir Sardar now knew he was in real trouble. How did these people know everything? Who else had they interrogated?
‘I am not an extremist group member like Massood Malhi, but I have some sympathy with their cause and their fight. Massood Malhi has on occasion sought recruits from within the University and I have sponsored some of these sessions.’
‘What about the Autopilot Override?’ said Steve.
‘That was a difficult device to construct’, replied Samir Sardar. ‘I gave the task to one of our electronics wizards as a puzzle. I said I wanted to prove something and asked him if he could work out a solution. I outlined my requirement in a general way so that the person would not understand the intended purpose. I said that I wanted to trigger the download of information into a computer via its own network cable from an attached memory stick or similar, but I wanted to be able to accomplish this remotely from a significant distance, say up to ten miles. Additionally I said that the device to be triggered would be within a partially shielded environment. Initially my electronics expert believed what I wanted to do was impossible but eventually with a little pushing from me and a considerable donation to his personal funds, he began to research and plan. The first two versions worked in principle but the first one couldn’t handle the distance and the second one could not penetrate any level of shielding. However, he persevered and came up with the final versions of transmitter and receiver to be triggered by an extremely powerful short wave radio burst. We proved this at over ten miles and triggered the device in a solid concrete building.
‘So you knew precisely what the devices were for and who was to be the target’, said Steve.
‘No, I knew what they would do, but I didn’t know who the target was’, said Samir Sardar.
‘So you commissioned two devices from within your University, knew what they were for but didn’t know who the target was, am I right?’ said Steve with rancid sarcasm.
‘Yes, that is the case.’
‘You are a fucking liar. You had to know what software was being run on the plane’s servers. You would need to know Firewall settings and IP Addresses and all that technical mumbo jumbo. You knew exactly which plane it was to be and, let me have a guess you hadn’t quite worked out who usually flew in that plane. Bullshit. Now try again before I tear you apart.’
Samir Sardar gulped and said ‘Well Massood Malhi told me it might be the president but it could have been other high ranking officials instead couldn’t it?’
What he said was technically true but with the timing of the delivery to the plane, particularly for the Autopilot device, he would already know about the intended trip which included India. There was no doubt in Steve’s mind that he was totally complicit and as guilty as the rest of them.
‘When I return I want the names of all the people at the university that were involved in this and for your sake it had better be a complete and accurate list.’
At that point Samir Sardar wished he had never been born.
Steve and Jackson left Samir Sardar to stew for a while and went back to the Day Room. Marcel sat there reading and Jean had returned from her nap.
Steve said, ‘Glad we’re all here. We are mightily close to the end of our job, which thanks to you all has been a tremendous success. We have secured our objective which was to track down all the perpetrators. What happens now is down to others. There are a few loose ends to tie up but the CIA, FBI, NSA and Homeland Security can sort those out. As far as I’m concerned I believe we have finished what we set out to do. I’d just like to say that there is no better operational team and no better bunch of people to work with, full stop and new paragraph.
However, before we close the books on this one, we have to decide what we’re going to do with our prisoners. The president wants them all dead. Well at least that’s what he said earlier, I dunno, maybe he’s changed his mind since then. Attwood has to get a severe rocket if not the sack. His lot are paid to be vigilant. They are paid to concentrate. I have to tell the president. There’s no cause to cover it up and frankly I don’t want to.
bin Laden is not going to hang around now. Christ, his gu
ardian angel must have had her eyes open that day. A huge opportunity missed but nothing that can be laid at our door.
The only key player we haven’t interviewed is the boy’s uncle, but I don’t believe he could tell us much that we don’t know already. And anything we don’t know is going to relate to the years before they were even seven years old. I’ve also told Samir Sardar that I want a list of all the people he dealt with at the University. That should round it all off.
Can I have your comments about our mission in turn please?’
Jackson started, ‘As usual we have been well led and looked after. No injuries to speak of’, as he rubbed his shoulder and smiled ’and it has been worthwhile and exciting as well as being a great responsibility. I think it’s an honour to serve our country in this way.
The prisoners all have to go. They are all heavily complicit, although I agree that some are more so than others. But whatever, they were all a serious part of the plan to kidnap and probably kill the president. There have been many needless deaths along the way. We should get rid of them all.’
Jean then said ‘Jackson, that was eloquently put and I agree with every word of it. The prisoners have to disappear without trace. We can’t leave them here alive or dead.’
Marcel then added, ‘Agreed, agreed, agreed. I suggest that we take them fifty miles out to sea in a boat and blow it up. Oh yeh, after we’ve got off.’ Smiles all around.
Steve said, ‘Okay, what time is it in Washington?’
‘About nine a.m.’ said Jean.
‘Okay, I’ll call the president’, which he did.’
Chapter 49
The number rang three times before it was answered.
‘Hi, hello, who is it?
