THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author.

by David Videcette

  Jake thought back to February 2004 and the conversation he’d overheard Wasim having with the Crawley lot on that windy and rainy night in Sussex. He’d sounded like he never intended on coming back from the trip to Pakistan. He’d even resigned from his position at the school where he worked. It looked to all intents and purposes that he had planned to become a martyr abroad – on foreign soil.

  But then he’d come back. Why had he returned home in February 2005? The intention to return to the UK from Pakistan had surely been made over there. It looked like someone, somewhere, had convinced Wasim to return, in order to undertake a suicide mission on home soil. That, or he had sought permission to do it – and it had been granted.

  Al-Qaeda logos were plastered all over the footage, together with claims that it had been produced by the al-Sahab video production house. It seemed to Jake that there were lots of messages in this video. Hidden messages. He just couldn’t decipher them at the moment.

  The clock kept showing 8.50 on the cartoon start of the video, the time that the bombs went off. Had this been agreed in advance? Why was that relevant? What were they trying to say?

  Wasim continued his sermonising. ‘…Raise me amongst those whom I love like the prophets… I and thousands like me are forsaking everything for what we believe… Our driving motivation doesn’t come from tangible commodities that this world has to offer… Accept the work from me and my brothers and enter us into the gardens of paradise.’

  Over and over again, Jake watched the video of Wasim explaining why he would soon martyr himself. He watched it two hundred times, possibly more, until eventually he could no longer stand it.

  He needed a break.

  All he could see in his head was Wasim talking to him. He was tired.

  He got up, made himself a coffee, then logged on to the internet and trawled through the news reports covering the 2001 Twin Towers attacks in New York – the attacks that made bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network known to every household in the world.

  Jake looked at the time that the first plane had hit the World Trade Centre.

  0850 hours.

  The time on the clock in the video.

  The time of the attacks in London.

  If al-Qaeda were claiming this attack, saying they had also attacked London, why not release Wasim’s martyr video immediately?

  If they’d filmed it and had it in their possession, why wasn’t it released on 7 July – as soon as the bombings were perpetrated? That would have got them maximum media exposure, surely?

  Why had this footage taken so long to come to light if they were responsible?

  Had someone been holding it back until the last of the 21/7 lot were arrested? If so, then the 7/7 and 21/7 attacks must surely have been connected?

  If someone had had since the winter to edit the footage and put all the al-Qaeda graphics on top, thought Jake, then why wasn’t it ready to go by 6 July?

  After all, that was the original date that the attacks had been planned for – before Wasim’s wife had been rushed to hospital with pregnancy complications and everything had been delayed.

  46

  Monday

  1 August 2005

  2334 hours

  Greek Street, Leeds, West Yorkshire

  Jake was drunk; his team had all gone back to their hotels.

  He called Claire.

  ‘Jake, what is it?’ Claire sounded like she’d just woken up.

  ‘Hey, you OK? I miss you! What are you doing?’ Jake slurred down the phone.

  ‘Well, I was sleeping, Jake. And by the sounds of it, you should be too.’

  ‘I just wanted a friendly ear to talk to. Everyone hates me. Those that don’t hate me have gone home. I’m on my own. I want you to talk to me.’ Jake had to shout above the late-night revellers packing the crowded cobbles.

  ‘Jake, get some sleep. Call me in the morning.’

  ‘When are you coming to see me?’ he pleaded.

  There was no response.

  Jake stared forlornly at the call-ended sign. Claire had hung up on him.

  ‘I need love! I’m going to find someone to love me tonight…’ he shouted to no one in particular, before tagging onto the back of what looked like a fun, lively crowd. He followed them into a club playing loud music. The door staff took some money off him. He had no idea how much. He didn’t really care. It was noisy; there were people dancing and drinking. They were the type he needed right now. Not the sleeping type. Not the grumpy type. Not the fundamentalist bomber type… but the happy type; the drunken type.

  When Jake awoke the following morning, he wasn’t alone in bed.

  47

  Tuesday

  2 August 2005

  0930 hours

  Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire

  Tuesday morning meant that it was time, once again, for another update meeting between the Leeds team and the Major Incident Room down in London. Jake felt as though these video conferences were starting to eat away at his soul. He could see that they were all working in separate silos which should have been joined up, but weren’t. There were now around three thousand people on the job. They had created a monster.

  Back in London, the Major Incident Room would decide what actions would be undertaken for the rest of the week. Jake wondered whether the slower some people could perform an action, the more money they hoped to pocket in overtime.

  That morning was the usual. The analysts seemed to be no further forward with the phone data from the bombers’ phones and the MIR manager had talked a lot about systems administration management, how many new staff had been brought in and how much overtime was being undertaken.

  Jake had had a month’s worth of this. They’d not come up with anything. He was starting to feel that things weren’t looking too rosy.

  He murmured under his breath, ‘Jesus H Christ. We’ve got three thousand people working on this and we still haven’t made any progress?’

  Jake’s head hurt; he seemed to be drinking more and more in the evenings. It didn’t matter which day of the week it was. He drank to blot out the boredom of filling in pointless reports twenty hours a day. He drank to alleviate the loneliness of nights in his hotel room. He drank to blur the thoughts of Wasim’s world.

  When he slept sober, Wasim was with him there too.

  Jake’s drunken world was the only place Wasim didn’t inhabit. Jake found himself going there more and more often.

  The only drop of pleasure he could wring from the situation was the thought of what he was doing with the money he was being paid to investigate Wasim. He derived great amusement from the fact that he could deliberately spend it on alcohol, clubbing and – when Claire snubbed him – potentially meeting women for no-strings-attached encounters. He wanted to use his salary for everything the extremists were opposed to. All the Western extravagances that the fundamentalists were against.

  Swallowing four paracetamol, he opened the first file of the day. Yet another MIR action created via the HOLMES system. It read: Investigate rice packet DB/14 found at Victoria Park.

  He cursed aloud to Lenny who was sat opposite.

  ‘Fuck me, Lenny! We’ve done pitta bread, pasta, now rice. We’ve investigated 265 items in the past three weeks. I’m fed up of finding out where food was made and looking at fucking sell-by and use-by dates. All this stuff! We’re knee-deep in it. There’s too much of it for one flat. How did they move around in there? They wanted us to look at this stuff. They even left the receipts so we could go and visit the shop they bought it in and investigate the bastard CCTV to see them actually buying it. Why? They’re trained terrorists. Why would they leave this trail behind for us? This isn’t right. We’re missing something else.’

  ‘Yeah,’ nodded Lenny over his computer monitor. ‘No one we’re interviewing seems to know anything. None of their
stories add up. It’s all shit.’

  ‘Well…’ replied Jake, ‘there’s going to be an end to this shit…’

  He stood up and dropped the note about rice packet DB/14 in the bin. This wasn’t the first time he’d done this and it wouldn’t be the last where MIR actions were concerned.

  ‘I can’t bear it, Len. I just feel like we’re getting nowhere.’

  ‘I know, boss. No one has a handle on this case. We need to do something different.’

  ‘So what else do we have, Lenny? What do you suggest?’

  ‘I dunno, guv. Witness statements? You could look at those?’

  ‘I like your style, Lenny – try a new approach. At the moment, nobody can see across the board.’

  Jake went to the store cupboard and grabbed a couple of unopened boxes of computer paper. He needed a fresh start. He filled the printer trays of every printer in the borrowed office to the brim with blank sheets of paper.

  This would be a new beginning, he thought.

  Jake settled down to begin the mammoth task of printing out every single witness statement obtained in the entire investigation to date. All 1,392 of them.

  ‘Cup of tea please, Lenny. Two sugars.’

  48

  Sunday

  7 August 2005

  1950 hours

  Longthorne Oak Hotel, central Leeds, West Yorkshire

  There was little that Jake didn’t know about the 7/7 witness statements by the end of trawling through almost 1,400 of them. But it had thrown up absolutely nothing new.

  So he’d gone through the exhibit records. There were already thousands. He’d looked at every description and every photo of the items that had been found in the Victoria Park flat to date.

  Still nothing.

  He was back to square one.

  He called Claire, sober for once.

  ‘The investigation is going round in circles,’ he said. ‘We’re all working in silos.’

  ‘Well, what about the friends and relatives up in Leeds? Have you got anything out of them?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t believe any of the witnesses up here. Half of them don’t know anything and I worry that the rest of them are not credible or are covering their tracks. No one wants to speak to us properly. And we’re inundated with exhibits. That’s all we do. We just spend every day investigating a new object from the flat.’

  ‘Then speak to London. Get them to send you more help?’

  ‘No one in London is taking this by the scruff of the neck. No one has got an overview on this. No one is telling us what’s really going on. We need to look at something else. We need to know what you lot know, Claire. Who’s behind this?’

  ‘We have no idea either, Jake! What else have you got?’ she asked.

  At this stage, Jake didn’t know.

  Later that evening, Jake lay in the bath in his hotel bathroom. The water was going cold.

  ‘What else have you got?’ he repeated Claire’s question before submerging his entire body under the water.

  He sat back up. The water ran out of his ears and nose. He could almost recite by heart the thousands of inanimate objects his team had been given to investigate by the MIR. They were overwhelmed by the stuff – inundated by actions – as if they had packets of food coming out of their ears like bath water.

  He got out the bath and pulled on a hotel robe before calling Lenny.

  ‘Len, do you think it’s all been put there, dumped in one place for a reason?’

  ‘Evening, guv. Good weekend? Do I think what has been planted where?’

  Jake dispensed with the niceties and continued, ‘All that stuff in the Victoria Park bomb flat. It’s telling us nothing, but it’s keeping us busy. Keeping us from finding out other stuff. I wonder whether they were very happy for us to find this treasure trove of evidence. One that’s taking ages to investigate. We have a hideously slow chain of request and command. The whole thing is painful and useless.’

  ‘Yeah – but how do you take control away from the MIR? We have to do their bidding. That’s what we’re here for, right?’

  ‘No. We have to stop doing their work and come up with some leads of our own.’

  ‘What about re-interviewing the witnesses, guv?’

  ‘Len, you’ve said it yourself that we can’t rely on witnesses. This stuff is time critical. CCTV disappears. Witnesses forget things. People wash their cars and dispose of clothes. The faster you can get to these things, the better. Already we’re a month down the road! We need something that can’t lie to us. Something permanent, but something that tells a story. How about we look at the… phone records?’

  ‘But the analysts down in London are working on investigating the bombers’ operational phones, boss.’

  ‘Yeah, but who is tasking them? What are they looking at? We’re not getting any breakthrough information from them. That team is deathly quiet. They’re not detectives. What the hell are they actually doing?’

  ‘I really don’t know. There are loads of dirty phones. The bombers had tonnes of pre-paid, unregistered handsets, and they changed them regularly to avoid detection. There might be all sorts on those.’

  ‘Yeah. Exactly, Len. Phone records. They can’t lie to us or forget stuff like witnesses can. They’re not being washed to remove clues. We should be able to use them to look back in time six months or maybe even further? That data is impossible to fudge or tamper with.’

  ‘So what are you going to do with that data, boss? Why is it so important to you?’

  ‘Well, we can pinpoint where each handset was when it made a call or sent a text, because the network exchanges signals with it from the nearest mast. Once the phone sends a signal back, that mast or cell-site location is recorded by the service provider.’

  ‘So we can track them according to their cell-site locations?’

  ‘Yeah, from the list of phone communications that a network provider holds, we can work out exactly where our suspects were calling from and therefore where they’ve been, over a period of time. They’ll light up like a beacon. We need that phone data, Lenny. It’ll create a framework over which we can overlay the rest of our evidence.’

  49

  Monday

  8 August 2005

  0800 hours

  Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire

  There was an urgent call from Helen. She sounded distinctly unhappy.

  ‘Jake, the MIR manager has been on the phone to me. He’s moaning that you’ve got 150 actions outstanding. He’s threatening to report you to Denswood.’

  Jake skirted round the subject.

  ‘I don’t think we’re making headway fast enough here, Helen. The route we’re taking is a scenic one – or worse, it might not even be the right way.’

  ‘The actions from Victoria Park have got to be done, Jake. There could be something in there; we’ve got to work through each item properly.’

  ‘Helen, this is pointless. It will take eighteen months to complete all these billions of actions and this crazy system will still never solve the job. If we put crap in, we’ll get crap out.’

  ‘But, Jake, there’s a system in place and it’s there for all of us. We all have to do what we have to do.’

  ‘I understand that, but what if the systems are not being used in the right way and by people who aren’t detectives. A lot of the guys in the MIR have a background in traffic or community policing. Where is their detective nous? They’re not investigators. I want to know who helped the bombers commit these crimes, Helen, and why. None of the instructions sent up from the MIR are helping us to do that. There’s no crossover between any of the teams. I’m getting a different story from every other person I speak to. You know yourself what a rabbit warren HOLMES is. It’s a self-propagating system. It’s not really solving the job.’

  ‘Jake, j
ust have more faith. We will solve the job in time, if we follow a logical route and use the proper system.’

  ‘But we don’t have time. We need to get moving from point A to point B. I need leads now. I need stuff cross-referenced with our other counter-terror cases. I need to know who we’ve seen before. No one’s got a handle on it! What if whoever masterminded this whole thing has no connection whatsoever to the bomb factory? What if he’s someone that they only made one phone call to?’

  ‘Stick with it, Jake. The analysts will throw up all the phone numbers to the MIR. We’ll get there…’

  ‘I’ve been looking into the phone stuff, Helen. Since May, the four bombers have been using four different operational handsets each. One of them used three. We’re approaching twenty phones already, and that’s not even including their personal ones. Then there’s the seven-page request form that needs to be filled in and signed off by the right people every time we ask for data from a phone network. The analysts have made nearly 4,500 requests to phone companies for information in the last fortnight alone! They are requesting everything. It’s the same with the MIR. We’re creating our own haystack and burying the needle ourselves. This won’t work. Both the MIR and the analysts are banking on the system throwing up the important stuff. They’re doing their best, but we simply do not have the manpower to use the system in this way and the analysts are not detectives. They don’t see what we see…’

  ‘But, Jake, that’s what the MIR is there for.’

  ‘Helen, the analysts are saying that they are focussing on two hundred priority numbers. Then there’s two hundred and fifty to three hundred calls and texts for every single one of those numbers. That’s around sixty thousand communications to look at in the entire investigation. Which one of those calls is the important one? It’s there, I’m sure of it – but I don’t think an analyst is the person that’s going to find it for us. That’s where all of our leads are. We need a magnet to retrieve the needle from the haystack, Helen. No one has got the helicopter view on this. A witness statement or a phone call or a piece of evidence has no meaning in isolation. You have to give it meaning. You have to link it into other things in order to understand the context. On its own, it’s worth nothing. No one is doing that. It’s like giving too many chefs a single, stand-alone ingredient to cook with. It doesn’t work until you put all the ingredients together. Then you can bake the cake. But the starting point needs to be the phone data. It’s pure. It’s the primary constituent in this recipe. I need that phone data.’