Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus

by Charlie Flowers

  All part of the office culture. We’d once replaced his mug with one that said “I should be out catching rapists and murderers”.

  Time to act, erm, cool.

  ‘You rang?’

  The Colonel looked at me for a long, chilly moment.

  ‘Riz.’

  ‘Boss.’

  ‘Did you pay Teacher?’

  ‘Of course Boss.’

  ‘Can you explain the fracas at Northolt and why the gate guard was knocked out and relieved of his personal weapon?’

  ‘I had a package in the boot and it had to be delivered to the aircraft at all costs. Sir.’

  ‘Was the package delivered to the aircraft?’

  ‘After I’d sparked the guard and broken through the barrier and onto the apron, yes Sir, it was.’

  ‘Did you hand the package over to the CIA in one piece, Riz?’

  ‘Course, boss. Just like every other time.’

  He nodded. Maybe I was home clear on this one.

  ‘Riz. I have spent most of today fielding phone calls from the Met, the Royal Air Force, the Ministry of Defence, the London Ambulance Service, Greater London Council, the Fire Brigade, oh, and finally and some shop I’ve never heard of who are now in the possession of a load of charred salwar kameezes. Can you shed light on any of this?’

  My mouth opened but nothing useful was coming out for the moment.

  The Colonel was gearing up for the big finale.

  ‘Can you also explain why you and your opposite number saw fit to destroy Commercial Road in the pursuit of one poxy Jihadi?”

  I had no answer to that one either so I deployed the shit-eating grin. The Colonel turned away from me to gaze out of the window and I could see that his shoulders were shaking. Anger? Laughter?

  He turned back to me. He was laughing. This was why I loved working with the Colonel - he was an even bigger hooligan than I was.

  ‘Riz, you are a piece of work. Sit down, I have something to run past you.’

  I sat. Nice chairs in here, but that was what working on the top floor got you. The Colonel sat too, heavily, then swivelled his chair to face out onto the window.

  A minute stretched but I was used to this. The Boss liked to do his Bond villain act and keep the other ranks guessing.

  Colonel Mahoney was one of those Army senior officers you’d only read about in An Phoblacht or Cryptome. Captaincy in the SAS. Oman. Then 3 Int and Sy Company in Berlin during the Cold War, chasing the Russians. Then Lisburn, running FRU, the Army Force Research Unit. Double agents. Hit squads. It was rumoured he’d personally run the PIRA source known as Stakeknife. And then a new war beckoned - Iraq. Operations Telic One and Telic Two. More agent-handling, and more bodybags. I took the piss out of the Colonel, but carefully. He could have you killed.

  Colonel Mahoney had been tasked with applying FRU’s methodology to the UK mainland’s streets to fight Islamic extremism. His brainchild had been to bring the CAISTER intelligence system over from Northern Ireland and to apply it here, lock stock and barrel - but to do it as a Ministry of Defence contractor. The Army could not be seen to be having a Northern Ireland-style operation going on in England, so it was done at one remove. It was the part of the government’s CONTEST 2 strategy that wasn’t talked about, ever. And that is where people like me came in.

  Finally he swivelled his chair round and spoke.

  ‘Dean has found something interesting in the LATENCY data at Hendon. He thinks you should go down there with him and have a look at it.’

  ‘Aw boss, not Beaker. Don’t make me go down there with Beaker.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Cause he’s a cock, that’s why.’

  ‘A ‘cock’. Is that your technical description?’

  ‘Alright Sir, he’s a borderline Aspergers Martian with no social skills. And he’s boring. Why d’you think everyone calls him Beaker? And besides, he’s not that good a hacker. My cousin’s better than him. Sir.’

  Mahoney looked down at some files on his desk.

  ‘Your cousin being the young lady known as “Bang-Bang”? On account of that mosque incident.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Alright then, after you and Dean liase with NPIA Hendon, you can take me to meet this wonderful “Bang-Bang”, of your extended family. Usual club?’

  Great. First I had to endure a day of Beaker and all the other IT spods, and then my boss was seriously going to invite Bang-Bang to the Special Forces Club. I clamped down on the involuntary mad giggle that was threatening to erupt from me. This was only going to end one way.

  ‘OK boss, I’ll bite. What have they found in the LATENCY data?’

  Again, the Colonel regarded me with unreadable eyes.

  ‘But that’s the thing, Riz - I’m not going to tell you. I want you to go and look at it, and find it for yourself.’

  4

  The Police National Computer (PNC) is a computer system used extensively by law enforcement organisations across the United Kingdom. It consists of several databases available 24 hours a day, giving access to information of national and local significance. From October 2009, the National Policing Improvement Agency state that there are over 9.2 million personal records, 52 million driver records, and 55 million vehicle records. Since 1 April 2007, it has been maintained by the NPIA, which inherited the activities of the now disbanded Police Information Technology Organisation. Prior to the establishment of PITO, the PNC was managed directly by the Home Office. The mainframe server is located at the Hendon Data Centre with back-up servers located around the UK. In 2005 the only back-up server was located next to Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal, Buncefield, which was the scene of a major civil emergency when it burned to the ground in December 2005. According to the Home Office the location had been assessed as low-risk.

  ‘Dean.’

  ‘Riz, I haven’t finished reading this out.’

  ‘DEAN.’

  ‘What Riz?’

  ‘Shut up and tell me why we’re really coming here.’

  Dean looked up from his PDA and out of the car window. His Adam’s apple started bobbing up and down, a surefire stress indicator.

  ‘Stuff they won’t put on the landline, Riz. Stuff that stays in LATENCY. I dunno, mate, you’re the jihadi. You take a look at it.’

  I wheeled the car left and up to the Hendon Centre guardhouse. Government establishments never really changed over the years. They smelled the same, the staff were always the same, the buildings were always generic. You got into them the same way all over the UK and you got out of them the same way. Good afternoon sir, do you know where you’re going, yes, if you do, can you hang this strange lime-green thing off your mirror and head right and sign in, thankyou sir. Dean and I ambled into the reception area and up to the unaturally chirpy Helen. Would we like to sign in and here also for our visitor stickers and she could send for an escort from Northrop Grumman. Here was where the fun began. I signed myself in as “T Adams” and Dean, depressingly, signed himself in as “Dean”.

  While we waited and I leafed through The Job, the rather lacklustre inhouse magazine of the Met, the doors opened and in walked some plainclothes cops. One of them was a man I knew very well, Emlyn Thomas. A legend in policing circles. He’d guarded the Queen, hunted Maddie… and me. Actually he’d caught me during the Operation Crevice arrests. Emlyn ambled over.

  ‘Walk youse two down to the mainframe, boyo?’ Emlyn grinned. OK, he’d got me. Again. I put the magazine down.

  ‘Anytime, Emlyn. Found Maddie yet?’

  ‘I found you first, Mr Bomber. What’s new?’

  Truth to tell I was glad to see Emlyn and glad for his escort - he’d been one of the few cops that were civil to me on the day of my arrest. The rest had been a hair away from beating the crap out of me. So we walked with Emlyn. Dean was deeply involved with his PDA again. It was three hundred yards from the guardhouse to the fortified bunker that held the mainframe and the databases. And it was here, at the gates, that Eml
yn’s jocular countenance changed.

  ‘Riz- they sent you down here to look at the LATENCY take so you might as well know this. We have a problem. A big one. We have a leak.’

  ‘A leak where? In the Met?’

  Emlyn said nothing but just looked at me.

  ‘Great.’

  ‘So anything you do or see here today stays off the radar. You find something, ring me on my mobile and not on my office line.’

  ‘You worried Em?’

  ‘What do you think? I’m up to my arse in stuff I don’t understand from your world, and a whole bunch of shite from the subcontinent about a carload of UK lads who got smeared in a drone strike. We’re checking all leads. Get in there Riz, and good luck.’

  We went through the turnstile gates and I looked back at Emlyn. For the first time since I’d known him he didn’t look happy. I raised a hand in farewell and he raised one back. A technician from NPIA was there to greet us on the other side.

  ‘Riz? Dean? Come with me please. We think we’ve found SOAP SUD.’

  Wallahi. SOAP SUD. The great white whale. The missing link. I took a deep breath.

  5

  We sat in the bowels of the NPIA computer centre before three massive flat screens and watched as the resident geeks span up the LATENCY data. LATENCY was the codename for the vast intelligence and evidence take from the various UK terror plots. 7/7, 21/7, Operation Crevice - there were gigabytes of material. Thousands of hours of video and audio tapes; reams of statements. Tens of thousands of leads. Precious little of it had ever seen the light of day, but every now and then we would be dragged in to see if someone or something was worth another look.

  The technician before us cleared his throat.

  ‘I won’t have to reiterate the sensitivity of the LATENCY data. As you will also know, SOAP SUD is one of the major unknown persons of interest in the Operation Theseus enquiry. To recap. On 6th July 2005 at 12.39, a call was made from an East London telephone kiosk to the Phase Three operational mobile of the suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer, 07910 859927. Up until this time there was no camera footage of that kiosk. We gave the codename SOAP SUD to whoever would eventually turn up making the phone call from that telephone box.’

  The technician allowed himself a small smile.

  ‘What has not been released to the outside world is that we have been undertaking a trawl of geolocation stamping of every video or photo on that day, and thanks to … National Means … we now have a result. Please roll the video.’

  I glanced at Dean. ‘National Means meaning the NSA, right?’

  Dean nodded.

  The main screen came to life. The technician brought his laser pointer into view.

  ‘National Means provided us footage from a school on the corner who were making a video log on the day. They were interviewing each other on the street at the time, and if you zoom over their shoulders …’

  The screen held on a gaggle of schoolkids messing with some big yellow microphones and thrusting them into the face of what looked to be one of their teachers or a governor. A rectangle target went up on the display, held, wobbled and zoomed beyond them and down the street. The image focused, but it was pixellated. There, distantly, was the callbox. The callbox door opened and a blocky, hooded figure barged out and down the street towards the camera. The timestamp at the bottom right of the screen read 12.40.11.

  I called out. ‘Freeze that!’

  Dean jumped up and looked all excited. ‘Let’s have that screengrab!’ As one, the entire room turned round and looked at us, and the lights went up. I shrugged.

  ‘What he said.’

  Ten minutes and two bad teas later, we were in a side room and Dean was sweating over his laptop. Two SO15 guys were hanging over our shoulders. On Dean’s screen was a very zoomed, very blurry colour still of some guy in a hooded top walking away from a phone box and towards the camera. He seemed brown, Asian, and had a beard of medium length. That was all. So far, so nothing much. Dean was muttering to himself and then the room in general.

  ‘It’s all about the forensic recovery range, guys. You’re looking for a blur width between 10 and 20. We’re going to use Focus Magic, scale this image up and then look at the width. Give me five minutes.’

  We drank our tea. Dean worked on the image and it grew steadily larger and sharper, by degrees. I grew bored with the wait and went outside to see if I could get the vending machine to work. Several minutes later I was in possession of a Wispa, and returned to the side room. And stopped dead in my tracks. I saw him.

  It was as though the air-conditioning had been turned on in an otherwise heated building. The man in the blowup had a medium-length beard; fist-length, in fact, as required of Wahaabis. His face was hard and determined. A long nose and widely-spaced, intense dark eyes. I was looking into the face of SOAP SUD.

  And SOAP SUD was my old comrade Iqeel al-Afghani.

  6

  I sat on the low brick wall outside the computer centre and lit a Silk Cut I shouldn’t have been smoking with unsteady hands. SOAP SUD was Iqeel al-Afghani. Fuck me.

  Back when we’d all been jihadis fisabillillah, Iqeel was the legend, the Dad. He’d come down from Luton to London to help co-ordinate al-Muj’s training camps; he’d run Islambase, our central website. He’d even talked his first wife into becoming a suicide bomber and blowing up Tony Blair, but that had fallen through at the last moment when her parents found out and got her clear of him and into hiding.

  Iqeel had been in on all the Crevice planning, and by some innate sixth sense he’d dodged Operation Last Supper, the Met op that had rounded up all the other plotters … and then he’d vanished.

  I’d known him. I’d worked on stuff with him, but right up till now even I had had no inkling he’d known the 7/7 group. What the hell had been going on, and where was he now? And doing what, exactly?

  I hit the encryption icon on my BlackBerry and dialled the Colonel. Mahoney answered within two rings.

  ‘Riz.’

  ‘Boss. We’ve pinged SOAP SUD. It’s Iqeel al-Afghani.’

  There was an ominous silence.

  ‘Fucking hell, Riz, he’s the one. He’s the link. We need to find him and quick.’

  ‘On it. Emlyn told me to keep it off the grid.’

  ‘OK. Get back here quick, bring what you have.’

  An hour later I was in the Colonel’s office and we were looking at a splitscreen blowup of the screengrab of Iqeel al-Afghani’s face, together with a pro-forma of everything known about him. I’d texted Emlyn the bad news and he’d just sent a text back that read “…”

  Colonel Mahoney eyeballed the display like he was about to bayonet-charge it.

  ‘We’ve been hunting that fucker since 2004 and it turns out he was under our noses the whole time. In East London! And now we have to find him without involving the Met because their command seems to be lousy with leaks. Great. We can’t even use the private investigators we normally use, because the Met use them too.’

  He screwed up a printout and threw it at the wall, just to get rid of some aggro.

  ‘I can do it, Boss, but I’ll need to contact the Blackeyes.’

  The Colonel gave me that look.

  ‘Riz, I don’t care if you have to use Hizbollah - find that man. Oh, and set up a meeting with your wonderful cousin “Bang-Bang”. Special Forces Club, Wednesday, 1500 Zulu. That is all.’

  I went home. There was a pile of mail on the mat, all of which I distractedly scooped up and leafed through. Intersec Magazine. My Sky broadband bill. Some old bollocks from the MOD. A quarterly from the Saint Andrews University terrorism studies course I was on. A postcard from Amman.

  I sparked up my PC and the screen lit up. I needed to make contact with Bang-Bang, but the only surefire method was to set yourself up as a tethered goat on the internet. The best way to do that was probably IMVU, so I activated my account there and left my avatar standing there like a mong in the Mocha Room. IMVU was like a Second Life for the funky
club kids, with a manga-styled look. I’d never got the hang of it.

  While that was percolating I got my Gmail, Twitter and Facebook running, and then started rattling them pots and pans. Between my mother and prison I’d learned to be a pretty effective cook and tonight I fancied spicy scrambled eggs with toast, and boiled rice cooked with garlic butter. The essential tools of a good South Asian chef are a gas hob and some good flat pans, Jolly Boy rice and ghee. I got busy. Facebook was lively and jumping with messages - a bunch of Salafi lads I hadn’t spoken to in a while and a married lady who was, apparently, madly in love with me and really wanted to feel the warm touch of my lips. Me and her were playing online Facebook chess. She’d done some mad move with her bishop. I was cornered. She’d left a wink emoticon on the chat. That was the thing about being a jihadi. It made you irresistible to a certain type of gal.

  The data from today was nagging me like an itch you couldn’t scratch. I got the laptop out and opened my copy of Xanalys Link Explorer. In front of me was a graphic representation of the 7/7 plotters, the 21/7 plotters, the Crevice plotters, and the many links between them. A line came from all of them to a big question mark titled “SOAP SUD”. I clicked on it and retitled it “Iqeel al-Afghani”, and added the scrubbed-up photo, the time and the geolocation data. And that was it. I sat back, staring at it.

  No. Nothing came to mind and Xanalys suggested nothing. Al-Afghani had dropped off the face of the earth. Even back then he had been super careful to avoid letting any photo of himself onto the net.

  This wasn’t working. I boosted myself out of the chair and got some whiteboards from the loft. Start from the basics. I got some Post-It notes and started scribbling with a Pentel magic marker, and within a half an hour I had a good semblance of the Xanalys data but something I could look at and manipulate on a large board. I sat back and let it soak in.