Jack read the entire document, which intimated that Iranian sleeper agents had been awoken and were now mobilised on the British mainland. He shivered at the thought, not knowing that the very next morning he would be faced with a mission of mammoth proportions - one that would lead to him crafting a devious espionage plan that might, just might, work.
‘Good morning Jack,’ the tall, suited man said as he entered the vehicle and closed the door in a single flowing movement, intent on making a strong entrance. ‘I’m Detective Superintendent Alan Toombs. Come on, I’ll show you around, but I warn you it’s not very pretty.’
Jack watched the Superintendent open the visitors’ book, scribble something inside it and then ask him to sign it. Jack wrote his name as Jack H and nothing else.
‘Just a couple of points before we go in,’ Jack said, handing his business card to the SIO. ‘This is your primacy as a criminal investigation, but my Director General has asked me to make sure we get full disclosure on any evidence retrieved from these murders.’
The SIO looked down on Jack, whose five-foot-eight frame was dwarfed by the surly Scotsman. A purposeful and lingering stare followed. ‘This is a police matter, not MI5,’ came the rebuttal. ‘If we find anything that relates these murders to terrorism, I’ll let you know. I’m not sure why my boss even said you should attend.’
Jack shrugged. ‘Very good. Now what have we got exactly?’
‘Two dead. Husband and wife. All knife wounds from a frenzied, brutal attack. They broke in from the rear and it’s unlikely to be terrorism I’d say.’
‘If it’s an assassination, it’s very much terrorism and I’ll let you know when I decide that,’ Jack agitated.
The SIO grunted. ‘It hardly looks like a clean professional hit to me. Just a messy set of gruesome murders. What on earth makes you think it’s a professional assassination other than that they were Jews?’
‘I read a lot. Let me have a look.’
The Superintendent pointed to a stack of sterile white suits, gloves and boots on the table. ‘Changing room is the tent outside. I’ll meet you inside the house.’
‘Thanks. By the way, have you recovered any of the weapons at all?’
‘None so far. Come and have a look when you’re changed. The scene is still pristine.’
What Jack saw of the crime scene haunted him immediately.
Elise Van De Lule, who had suffered a frenzied attack to the stomach with a knife and had been decapitated, was sprawled across her sofa, while her husband lay nearby, his clothing blood-soaked and in tatters from the savage knife attack. According to the SIO, the couple had both been sprayed in the face with an unknown substance, and the attackers appeared to have entered through a basement-level window that was smashed.
The couple had been fighting for years to establish political leverage against anti-Semitism and were the most prominent of the British Jews who were continuously outspoken against the Republic of Iran. That in itself had probably elevated them up the target list of the MOIS, Jack thought, and made them the focus of Iranian surveillance. No matter how much this looked like a savage murder by intruders, only a state-sponsored capability could have pulled this off and defeated the close-protection teams, high-tech alarms and the regular police attendance and patrols around their home.
Jack stood and surveyed the scene closely. Scanning. He searched with his eyes to try and find anything that might confirm his supposition. They must have suffered horribly, he thought, as he looked at Elise’s body, whose slash wounds were ferocious. One, or two attackers he wondered? He spotted the broken spectacles of Jonathon Van De Lule next to a large glass table that was sodden with blood and a few small links of what looked like a gold chain that had been ripped from his neck, perhaps to suggest a violent burglary. But Jack’s gut instinct was that it was not and that this was an assassination of an intensity and brutality he had never seen before.
He realised that the moment he declared it a terrorist murder, panic would seep into central government. He imagined the flurry of activity in the Chief of Staff’s office at 10 Downing Street and the furore amongst the political staffers who would end up working in overdrive to get their media messages woven. A high-profile Jewish assassination in the heart of central London. Would they try and dampen the Iranian threat if he declared it? Quite probably. Would they try and avoid the connotations of a state-sponsored assassination right in the middle of a political maelstrom surrounding the ever-increasing tide of anti-Semitism within the UK? Definitely. This was a professional hit with a message. Talented investigative journalists would be all over it and would soon begin to stitch together the developing trends of Iranian activity across the UK and Europe, activity Jack had known about for some time but had only read in specific detail the night before. He’d already been planning his moves before this hit. Predicting. Staying a few moves ahead of everyone else, including the politicians.
The arrests ten days earlier of two Iranian academics at University College London may have seemed innocuous to most. But Jack had foreseen a trend emerging. The UCL academics had been arrested for undertaking surveillance activity on London synagogues as well as for photographing prominent Jewish families. And then there was the secret intelligence, not known by the wider world and the media, of a very small cache of military-grade explosives found in a garage in Battersea. MI6 had received this intelligence from officers in Bahrain who had cultivated human sources linked to three Iranian caches that were found there in 2017. The investigation included a case where Bahraini security forces had discovered a large bomb-making factory in Nuweidrat and arrested several suspects linked to the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and its infamous killing machine known as Al Quds. Authorities said the facility contained more than a tonne of high-grade explosives, making it one of the biggest finds in the Middle East linked to Iranian state-sponsored terrorism. Now small caches were being found in south London and the forensics linked them to Bahrain and to an ongoing investigation in Istanbul.
Jack knelt down next to Jonathon Van De Lule. His eyes were open, yet far away. Thick red blood had congealed on the slash wound on the side of his neck and a gaping hole in his cheek had ruptured the bone. His mouth was pursed, and the acrid smell of bodily fluids breached Jack’s flimsy mask.
Jack cast his mind back to the ‘80s and ‘90s when Iranian state-sponsored assassinations were at their apex - a series of slayings dubbed the ‘chain murders’ took place across America, with the victims including political activists, writers, poets, translators and ordinary Iranian citizens. The MOIS assassins’ modus operandi varied greatly between each murder: some were slain in staged robberies, many were stabbed to death in their beds or on the rooftops of their homes, one doctor was killed by an assailant posing as a patient, others died in car crashes and, most ingenious of all, some were injected with potassium chloride to simulate cardiac arrest.
‘Can you come this way Jack? There’s something I want you to look at,’ the Superintendent asked. Jack followed him into a large bedroom with open-plan closets and a marble floor. The clothes were immaculately hung and a small corridor that led to the bathroom delineated between the male and female wardrobes. A suited and booted forensic officer was searching the bathroom but had been ordered not to move or touch anything until Jack had arrived on-site. Unbeknown to them, the Metropolitan Commissioner had given an order on the advice of the Director General of MI5, who had recommended that the Executive Liaison Group would need to meet if Jack determined it necessary once he had assessed the murder scene.
The Executive Liaison Group is unique to major terrorism investigations and allows decisions to be made between the police, who have primacy for obtaining arrests and public safety, and MI5, who retain the lead for collecting, assessing and exploiting intelligence. The Executive Liaison Group allows MI5 to safely share secret and raw intelligence with the police to decide how best to gather evidence and prosecute in the courts. The two organisations work in partnership throughout the i
nvestigation but Jack would make the call on how this would pan out in terms of intelligence collection that could lead to finding wider terrorist cells.
Jack entered the bathroom, where the smell of perfumed soaps and lavender lingered and a circular bath dominated the room. He walked across and peered into the white Villeroy & Boch crucible. Inside the bath were fourteen prominent dots painted in blood and precisely drawn in a shape that Jack immediately recognised. Four of the dots were connected by thick lines of blood. Presumably from the Van De Lules.
‘A calling card?’ the SIO said questioningly.
‘An assassin’s calling card.’
‘What exactly does it represent? Any ideas?’
‘I do. I know exactly what it is. It’s the star constellation of Scorpio with fourteen stars, four of which represent the deaths at the hand of the assassin. The rest are his target list.’
‘Or hers?’
‘Could be. Quite rare though. Most Nizari assassins are male.’
‘Nizari?’
‘Persian murderers. My guess is we have a Nizari assassin on the loose and he or she has only just begun.’
‘How do you know it’s not just a serial killer leaving a calling card? A signature killing?’
‘Oh, it’s definitely a Nizari calling card,’ Jack said nonchalantly, before turning to walk back into the bedroom. ‘Like any serial killer, it’s figurative. A signature to make sure investigators know it’s them. And to taunt us. It also shows the modus operandi and how much he took enjoyment in it.’
‘Or she,’ the SIO ventured again.
‘I’m not convinced. Anyway, let’s see if he or she is playing any mind games with us. Have a look under the pillows.’
Jack watched the SIO walk around the king-size bed, so that he was facing the photographer. Jack nodded and the SIO carefully lifted the first pillow nearest to the bedroom window.
Sure enough, under the pillow was a curved Persian dagger covered in the blood of the Van De Lules.
Chapter 3
Westminster
Jack immediately made his way to D’s office to brief him on what he had seen at Sloane Gardens. D had instructed him to rendezvous at the covert offices of The Court located in the heart of London’s legal chambers set back from the Strand.
Jack was certainly no lawyer, and often shunned the advice he was given by lawyers as the Director of Counter Terrorist Operations. They were far too risk averse and too trapped in their world of legalese to make a real difference in the world he existed in, one where he plotted to catch terrorists and spies. Although, if there was one thing he had noticed in terms of a cultural change at MI5, there were now more lawyers in the corridors of the intelligence services than at any other time in history – such was the microscope they had been placed under in these heady days of ensuring transparency.
Jack did however look like a lawyer, which was part of the reason he had chosen the Strand for the covert offices of The Court’s operations.
Jack was the archetypal grey man. A person who would never stand out in a crowd. Most often dressed in a blue Marks and Spencer suit and a crisp white shirt accompanied by a drab tie, and always with a foundation of black brogues. Despite being in his fifties, he looked ten years younger and was sporting nothing more than a few strands of grey in his short back and sides. His only vice was the occasional pint of beer at his local pub in the village of Denham in Buckinghamshire and the occasional red wine with dinner at home.
As Jack stepped out of the Tube at Charing Cross station, few would have imagined this was a man who had interrogated the toughest of Al-Qaeda commanders in Afghanistan or known of his citation for bravery in Beirut, when he had shot a suicide bomber who had breached the inner cordon of a British family-housing compound. On that occasion he had taken a set of red-hot ball bearings in a leg for his trouble. Jack was not just a loyal Crown servant, but a spy who operated best in the deserts of the Middle East, the mountains of Central Asia or with the dark gangs of the Balkans, where he had made his name as an MI6 interrogator.
Now the most senior counterterrorist spy in MI5, his expertise was plotting traps and lures for traps. His mind was deep in such a plot when he arrived at a passageway on the Strand. A passageway that started off narrow and rubbish-filled, but soon opened up into a much wider passage with grand buildings looming overhead inside Devereux Court. A court named after a traitor. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex was once a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, but he had tried to lead a coup against the Queen, commanding a small force from this location to the City. The layout of Devereux Court dates from around that time, and today the passageway leads from the Strand into the heart of legal London and is lined with the sorts of legal chambers you’d expect in the ancient streets of the capital. One of the chambers had a brass plaque with the words D Winship and K Fenton Chambers on it. A secret court within a court. Home of The Court.
Jack flashed his key fob across the console and punched a six-digit key code to open the door, which led to a second door behind which were a narrow set of dust-ridden stairs. He opened the second door with a key and made his way up the creaking steps to a series of offices that had been maintained in its 1970s decor and style. It was how D liked it.
The offices were small. Four rooms on the first floor and a large expansive room on the second which was situated in the loft. The secret facility had a secure storeroom, a small briefing room with a table and eight antique wooden chairs, a reception room and a central office. Jack stepped onto the landing, where he turned right into the outer reception office that was manned twenty-four hours a day by highly vetted ex-military signals staff. He walked around the wooden veneer counter, placing his briefcase next to the coat stand, and knocked on D’s office door.
The Court was D’s very own cabal of hand-picked officers who ran the office and its much larger intelligence fusion centre located out of the city, together with a set of core staff who ran what D called his own active-measures campaigns around the globe. It employed a mixture of freelance ex-intelligence officers in the UK, as well as veteran special forces operators and a mix of former MI6 and MI5 specialists, all highly vetted and sworn to keep The Court’s operations fully secret.
‘Jack, good to see you. Sit down my boy. Did you put the Old Bill straight on all this?’ D asked, standing behind a 1970s vintage President desk that was empty except for a large ink blotter and two pens standing to attention in a wooden stand. His half-moon glasses sat at the edge of the curved desk, with a light blue swivel chair contributing nicely to the vibrant colours of the room.
Jack sat on a pale green seat opposite the desk, a battered and beaten high-back chair, its arms now decaying from D’s guests gripping them and fiddling with its material.
‘What have we got then?’
‘A vicious attack. Definitely Iranian and a professional hit.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ D remarked, slumping into his seat and giving the underside of his desk a fierce kick. ‘The Home Secretary’s going to be chuffed to bollocks with all this happening on our patch. It’s bad enough with the Russians running riot. Now this.’
Jack sat forward to show D a photograph on his phone, which he placed on the desk. ‘I think its Department 15 that’s been activated. What I saw today had all the hallmarks of an MOIS assassination with a bit of Nizari ideology thrown in.’
D grabbed his glasses and took a look. ‘By fuck Jack. This is brutal. Nizaris you say?’
Jack took a few moments to explain that Department 15 of the Iranian MOIS were a team of brutal regime enforcers who, like the ancient Nizaris, carry out assassinations abroad. He explained that victims of MOIS assassins tend to be Iranian dissidents who pose a threat to the regime or key opponents of the regime. The murders carried out are brutal, designed to instil fear into the hearts of any dissenter brave enough to speak out against the regime, and some of the victims of these hit squads had died in the most barbaric way.
D tutted and ran a hand across his chin.
‘Iranian assassins. Sleepers waking. Russian chemical attacks and cyber-attacks. All on my bloody turf Jack. Now a missing diplomat to boot as well.’ There was a pause while D pinched his nose before bloating his suited posture like a kangaroo puffing out its chest. ‘Bloody hell Jack. We’re in the shit here you know.’
Jack knew the signal well. A signal that was asking him what to do about all this chaos.
‘I know, sir. Deep shit I’m afraid.’
Jack placed both hands on the arms of the seat and adjusted his tie so that it sat perfectly in the middle of his shirt. A deep-seated habit of his. ‘We are entering a new dimension with the Russians and Iranians now hitting us time and time again. The intelligence is sporadic at best, and the chatter is rumour more than fact, but it looks like this is just the start of a massive campaign. Nasty stuff ahead I’m afraid, sir. The Iranians have gone dark and we’re in the dark.’ Jack took a moment and reached for his phone - hardly having to look to see D’s irritation. ‘It looks like sleeper agents are being tasked with more assassinations and, quite probably, acts of substantial sabotage too.’
‘You’re damn right as normal Jack. All because of the Americans’ impatience and their geopolitical folly. Anyway, let’s get to the important stuff.’ D pulled out a note from his jacket and laid it on the desk. ‘I need you to master this Iranian threat Jack. I need that magnificent mind of yours to plot away and give us a winning formula here. Let’s get on the offensive before it’s too late. I need someone right inside their crucible of terror.’
Jack fidgeted, making himself more comfortable in the chair. He found himself fiddling with the yarns again. ‘I have a few ideas and I’ve already set a few trains in motion. If you’re happy I’ll proceed, sir.’
‘Damned right Jack. You’re the man to make things work here. I’ll have to deal with those wretched ministers as they go into orbit over this. They won’t know how to handle this at all you know. Bloody useless the lot of them.’
The Kompromat Kill Page 3
