Maryam pouted. ‘Boys’ stuff. Why can’t we have some girls’ stuff?’
‘Like? Tell you what, if you can find something you like in the DVD rack, you’re in charge. Never mind the fact you’re in school tomorrow.’
She rummaged about and several minutes later, reappeared triumphantly with the first Austin Powers. I got myself another beer.
24
Next morning I shuffled into the living room to find a slumber party massacre. Maryam was draped over Duckie, and there were dead cans everywhere.
The BBC News was on my wall TV. On it, Lord Khalil was complaining to camera about last week’s house raid in Walthamstow where some Salafi activists had been shot dead. He was demanding the trial of all the armed cops involved. Three had been suspended immediately. Next up was a spokesman from the Police Federation responding to that, the bloodbath in Piccadilly, and the claim that all Met firearms cops were going to go on strike over it all. Fuzz came in through the front door with several bags of groceries and plonked them on the carpet. She looked at the thumbnail image of Lord Khalil.
‘Tosser.’
I made myself a tea and had another look at the drivers’ licenses on the table. The address on the late Andy Bennett’s drivers’ licence read
Rookwood
Stoddards Lane
Beckley
East Sussex TN31 6TT
Fuzz came to look at the licence. We looked at each other. Bang-Bang was stumbling on unsteady legs.
‘God. I’ll get the kettle on.’
Fuzz, as usual, was as bright as a button.
‘Hey Holly. Good work on the web stuff. We’re going to have to start calling you the Stripping Detective.’
A laugh and a muffled ‘fuck off’ came from the kitchen. I nodded in that direction.
‘Fuzz, she’s a bit sensitive about that. Apparently it’s not stripping, it’s Burlesque. It’s different.’
Fuzz grinned that Dresden High Street grin at me.
We looked the license address up on 192.com. It was a residential address and a business. A farm, in fact. Fuzz picked up my HK and drove out there to look.
The late morning turned into the afternoon and we began to become more alive and presentable. Bang-Bang made some omelettes from the Len Deighton cookbook and cursed his name as she messed up my kitchen. I made a point of going back through each lead in turn, from the opposite direction. Meantime we looked up the company on the torn business card they’d retrieved from on of the other guys’ wallets. Goldenboy Global Limited. There was that name again. Lots of hits. A listing on alibaba.com told us they bought and sold HMS 1 and 2 scrap, copper scrap, used rails, and icing sugar. Bang-Bang was sitting with me and tracing the mouse lazily, following the trail. There was an address listing for a yard in Pylon trading estate, down in Canning Town.
Icing sugar? In a small, quiet recess of my mind, I could hear a faint alarm bell start to ring. I chose not to ignore it.
‘Holly. Follow me.’
We grabbed our coats and weapons and made for the white van. Bang-Bang then ran back and started scooping kitchen things into a bag. I didn’t bother asking. I’d learned not to.
We followed the satnav East, down the A13, round the many road diversions and out to Canning Town, to an industrial area coated in decades of dust and rail dirt. We meandered around Star Lane DLR station and into a forgotten zone. The arrow said to turn right after the TKO gym and a boarded-up pub. We parked 30 metres short.
Goldenboy Global’s yard was sat between a car breakers and an extremely moody-looking MOT centre. It couldn’t be a more perfect slam-on location if it had tried. They might as well have had a neon sign. Strangely for the time of day, there wasn’t a soul in sight and all the businesses seemed closed. I couldn’t see any alarm boxes on the outside of the sheds.
‘Ready, Holly?’
‘Born ready cuz.’
Acting like we belonged, we got our bags from the back and walked to the main door. Locked. We ambled round the side. Here was a window. I had a good look inside. Dark and empty. No motion sensor lights. Bang-Bang reached into a bag and presented me with a large sheet of brown paper and a tin of Tate and Lyle syrup. I laughed. Good drills.
She faced away and lay her pistol flat against her leg. I poured the syrup all over one side of the paper and then laid it against the window glass so that it stuck. Then with a sharp whack from the butt of my pistol, I broke the window and pulled it away from the frame in one piece and laid it on the ground. I boosted myself in and stood still, mouth slightly opened, head cocked. Nothing. Bang-Bang followed me in.
Dust. Flyblown documents. And at the back of the office, a big pile of bags. Some were marked “ALUMINIUM POWDER ECKART 5413”. Others were marked “ICING SUGAR PRODUCE OF BRAZIL”. I took a photo with my BlackBerry, flash on.
Behind me, Bang-Bang was standing on a chair and gingerly trying to unscrew the main light bulb from its shade. She was doing that sticky-out tongue thing again. She stepped down from the chair with the bulb and, from her bag, fetched a syringe and a plastic bottle. She grinned at me.
‘Petrol into the bulb. When those fuckers hit the lightswitch, they’re going to get lit up. Literally.’
‘OK. Good stuff. Three minutes and we go.’
She nodded and went back up to screw the lightbulb back in. I had a quick leaf through the paperwork, BlackBerry to hand. After several inches of import documents and receipts, I found something. There was a Goldenboy Global address in Derby on a letterhead. This address hadn’t come up on any of the internet searches. There were also many, many maps of Hounslow and Isleworth with some junctions and roundabouts circled in red. I took some more photos.
I had a minute to think for a bit. OK. So the slam-on scams generated a lot of money. That money filtered back to here and then … and then they put money down for industrial amounts of aluminium and icing sugar and only God knew what else, and they had the clearances to bring it in. It was as smooth a scheme as I had seen. If we had done this when I was in the Crevice plot, we’d have been home free and legends of jihad.
The only thing you needed at the UK end were a couple of people with training to bring it all together to make viable bombs. I’d had that training and I was betting there were people in Derby who’d had that training too. And I was also wagering they’d been laying low since 2005, waiting for … waiting for what exactly?
We exited through the same window and left quietly. All was clear. We put the bags back in the rear and drove back to mine in silence, thinking about the stuff in that office. As I turned off the A13, Fuzz rang. She sounded perturbed and excited at the same time.
‘Riz bhai. Yes it’s a farm. Still run by his mum and dad. Yes the police have already been round to tell them. They’re really cut up by all this. They had no idea about his politics. He was working there, bhai, and get this - he was in charge of ordering in the supplies. His dad let me look at their paperwork. Feed, spares, red diesel … and ammonium nitrate fertiliser.’
My inner jihadi had to admire this part of the jigsaw. They’d recruited a white, non-Muslim guy who had a legitimate reason to buy bulk amounts of the oxidising agent in improvised high explosives, and he’d used his parents’ business to bring it in. Mix it together with fuel oil at the ratio of 96 percent AN and 4 percent red diesel, and you had ANFO. Add aluminium powder or icing sugar and you had the most apocalyptic bang. One step down from a small nuclear device.
Fuzz was talking. ‘… Ammonium nitrate with sulphur, to be exact, bought in from Growhow. We went through the bulk order amounts and what they had sitting out the back. Want know how much is missing?’
I didn’t. I really didn’t.
‘Two point four metric tonnes, Riz.’
We let ourselves into my flat. In the living room, Calamity was looking at me with a smug expression. Oh no.
‘Calamity … what have you done?’
‘We’ve been busy on the Silk Road. You have an invite to the Derby gang, bro. Y
ou’re in. Your name is Riz Natha and they’re expecting you when you’ve provided credentials. Some guy called Jawad is eager to have you on the team.’
Credentials. That meant some jihad tourism. Great. I fired up Skype. A girl in a hijab answered the call and smiled at the camera. ‘Alhamdullileh! Hi, Riz, how are you?’
I was always thrown by the American accent. This was Asma El Khairi, senior Black-Eyed Girl in Jordan. We’d been talking on Skype for years but had never met.
‘Asma! Got some news for ya. I’m coming to Jordan ASAP. And you’re taking me to the border.’
She blinked and sat back.
‘THE border?’
‘The border.’
She grinned.
‘See you at the airport.’
25
I stepped out of the plane door into a wall of heat and humidity. Damn. Even through the connecting tunnel it hit me like a wet towel. I was travelling light, out of necessity. Just a daysack. Anything I’d need I would have to find here, because if I survived my jihad tourism I was going to be popped straight back to the UK and into the Derby al-Qaeda cell.
I cleared customs without a hitch and thanked Teacher under my breath for his good work with the passport. Better still, that passport now had the entry stamp to prove I’d been here. I walked out into the cavernous terminal of Queen Alia International. And there they were in Arrivals - two Palestinian girls, one with a hijab, and one with raven hair.
The hijabi smiled at me. This was the famous Asma.
‘Ahlan wa' salaaan.’
She might as well have been speaking in Geordie. Quranic Arabic I could get by with, this was something else.
‘Evening babe.’
‘Love your accent. Come on - it’s a cliché but my uncle’s taxi awaits.’
Her sidekick laughed and gave me a sideways look. She looked dark and dangerous. Good. I needed dangerous people to get me through the next few days.
We walked outside into a breathtaking vista. The terminal architecture looked like vast white fronds, spreading away over the front short-stay car park. And here were the ubiquitous cabs.
I nudged Asma. ‘Where we headed?’
She looked up at me. ‘My family’s house. Edge of town. Big house. We’ll smoke shisha but be on best behaviour. You’re the crazy English so my parents might look a bit, what is the word, “askance” at you?’
I nodded assent. ‘Askance. Best behaviour.’
From nowhere a yellow Toyota swooped in and driver in wrap-around shades beamed at us. Asma gestured. ‘My uncle Jameel. Hop in. You in the front. We go in back.’
We drove out to the northern suburbs of Amman, so far as I could tell. The main road gave out and we arrived at a sprawling house lit up by strung bulbs and fairy lamps. Some kids were having a football kickabout in the dusty front yard and they all stopped to gawp as we decamped from the cab. I realised they were gawping at me.
I bowed. ‘Salaam Aleykuum.’
They all burst into giggles.
Asma slapped my back. ‘Ha! They already like you, English Salafi!’
We went in to a party welcome. The whole extended family had turned out to look at the visitor. Palestinian music went on, lamb was cooked, the brothers glared at me. Nothing new. Asma and her sidekick went out onto the balcony to get the pipes ready and fire up the laptops and Skype.
Her sidekick patted my shoulder as she walked past with the serpentine components of a shisha pipe. ‘Hey. English guy. Come out to smoke shisha with us in two hours when you are bored. We’ll be speaking to the men over the border for you. Tonight we look at overheads and maps.’
I nodded.
‘OK… er…’
She stopped and looked up at me. ‘My name is Bambi. Bambi like Bambi and Thumper. And now… shisha flavour, English guy. Apple or cherry bomb?’
‘Ah. I’ll take cherry bomb then.’
She nodded and walked out to the balcony, talking to herself.
‘English guy wants cherry bomb, cherry bomb bomb bomb…’
By 1am the party was winding down so I joined the girls on the balcony as invited. It was a sprawl of cushions, shisha pipes, and laptops. Skype feeds pinged and squawled. Asma took off her headset and gestured to a large ornate cushion. ‘Sit, brother.’
I sat. I leant forward to look at the screens.
‘What you got?’
She traced a blue-painted nail over a monitor. ‘Here’s the border between us and Southern Syria. See the fence line?’
I nodded. There was a nominal green line on the overhead.
‘OK. Up and to the left is the Syrian town called Daraa, where it all started. Now look slightly down and to the right…’
She made the image scroll right, and she took a hit on a pipe. Smoke curled. She offered the pipe to me and I took it. I took a hit and choked like a good’un.
‘See that industrial area? See the parks?’
I coughed and they laughed. I saw a vast square expanse of buildings and car parks, absolutely set square-on across the border line on the map.
‘Brother, that’s the Jordanian-Syrian Joint Industrial Free Zone. It sits across the border, like your Dover or Calais. You see?’
I wasn’t sure about her analogy but I looked and I saw. It was perfect.
‘And that’s where we’re delivering you at last light tomorrow, and that’s where the Abdullah Azzam Brigades will meet you and escort you through it, and then to Daraa.’
‘Abdullah Azzam Brigades? I thought the Al-Nusra Front was taking me.’
Asma shook her head. ‘We did some checking. ANF has been penetrated by the Syrian Intelligence. Al-Qaeda elements are now leaving ANF and joining Abdullah Azzam Brigades. They’re better. And you need to be in there with a good al-Qaeda group, nope?’
I had to agree. I needed the full backstory.
‘Whatever it takes, sis.’
‘OK. Tomorrow at last light Bambi and I will take you to the zone. A man who works there will take through it, to the northern side, inside Syria. He’ll call the AAB. They will take you to Daraa. Where I’m sure you will encounter many adventures, including rescuing refugees trapped in buildings and some Red Crescent workers.’
She looked up at me.
‘You will not fail. Rizwan Sabir, you will bring those refugees back to the line twenty-four hours afterwards and they will be brought across. Every last one of them. I have faith in you.’
Great. Now I was getting ops orders from teenagers.
I placed my hand on my heart.
‘Inshallah.’
‘Inshallah. Your main problem over the border will be the gunships, the Syrian army, and the shabiha.’
‘Shabiha?’
‘Yep. The ghosts. The Ba’ath party’s thugs. They are the worst.’
That night I lay out on the balcony in a borrowed sleeping bag, looking up at the stars and listening to the crickets. All I could smell was jasmine and insect repellent. My brain was racing. I’d thought about emailing a will but there was little point. My car had been trashed, I didn’t have a great deal in my current account at the moment, and Bang-Bang had the spare flat keys. I hadn’t even been able to tell my parents what I was up to. Heck, I’d go and see them when I got back. If I got back. For some reason the thought swam into my mind that I wasn’t far short of my thirtieth birthday. I wondered if I’d see it.
Next day the girls dragged me round Rainbow Street and Souq Jara, which was basically the flea market. This was a last-ditch attempt to kit me out to look like a local. I changed one of my 500 Euro notes at a money-changers. The notes were known in the trade as Bin Ladens because you hardly ever saw them. Maybe they should have called them something else. I got a pair of fake Oakley wrap-around shades, some even faker Levi 501 jeans, and a black zip-up jacket. Apparently the jackets were all the rage. Back at Asma’s, she found a brother with the same shoe size as me, and ignoring his protests, took his pair of white Reebok classics. She topped it off with her own shemagh, which sh
e spent several minutes arranging around my neck until she finally stepped back and pronounced me ready to go.
There was one more family meal, with mounds of couscous and lamb shish kebabs, and then we trooped down to the front yard for the ride to the border. Uncle Jameel was waiting in his taxi.
We drove north up Highway 15 as the sun set. Uncle Jameel drove in standard Middle Eastern style, that is, as though he was trying to overtake a fighter jet. We all clung on. Just past Al Maghir we turned off and headed out into the sticks. We drove through farmland, until all of a sudden the tarmaced road simply came to a stop and turned into a dirt track. We went down onto it with a bang and trundled along. Presently even that ran out and we came to a low irrigation ditch.
Asma spoke. ‘We’ll walk you to the fence.’
We got out. About half a kilometre ahead in the evening gloom was a brightly-lit perimeter. Between us and that was an expanse of dirt and scrub. Asma took my hand.
‘Come on.’
We set out across the wasteground. After about five minutes stumbling and trudging, we reached the fence line and Bambi pointed to a gate a hundred metres to our right.
‘We wait there.’
We walked to the massive chainlink gates I and stood there looking through, wondering what on earth was going to happen next. The girls stood either side of me and Asma sent a text from her mobile.
Minutes passed. Slowly, darkness fell and above me the bright stars came out. I tried to blend. Suddenly I heard an approaching car and saw lights. I shielded my eyes. My heart was hammering. The vehicle stopped and the drivers’ door opened, but the engine remained running. A figure came to the gate and started rattling keys and the padlock. It swung open. I could just about make out a burly figure.
‘English?’
For fuck’s sake. I may as well have been wearing a bowler hat and carrying a brolly. Asma and Bambi started rattling off in guttural Arabic, and then Asma switched for my benefit.
Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus Page 10
