“Asimat. My name is Asimat. My name is Asimat.”
The intense pleasure that had accompanied Faraj’s approval had evaporated. Instead, the self-doubt which periodically banked up like a stormcloud at the edge of her consciousness was threatening to inundate her. She felt a pain behind her breastbone, and the hard, bitter pounding of her heart.
Taking herself grimly in hand, she turned her attention back to the explosive. Taking three pipe cleaners, she pushed them through the cooling wax of the central sphere and out the other side—she was praying out loud now—and twisted the ends together for connection to the detonator hook-ups. Standing back, she cast a cold eye on the result. It looked as she wanted it to look, and the seamed, mirthful face of the Takht-i-Suleiman instructor seemed to nod in approval. The triple-cascade C4 detonation had always been favoured by the Children of Heaven. It was, you might say, their signature, and she, the fighter Asimat, was signing off.
Feeling more balanced now, and with the stormclouds in check, she carried the little pipe-cleaner-limbed fetish over to the fridge. It was very light, most of the weight was in the wax, and she laid it reverently on the top shelf. That done, she walked out of the back door and down the shingle to the sea’s edge, where she stood expressionless and unmoving with her arms by her sides and the wind lashing her hair about her face.
T ell me,” said Liz, pulling her coat around her as the wind shuddered the phone box door. It was the seventh reverse-charge call she’d made to Judith Spratt.
“As things stand, we’ve drawn a blank.”
“The Bath woman?”
“Sally Madden? She spent the evening and night of the murder in the town of Frome with a friend whose dog was sick.”
“Does that check out?”
“The friend corroborates and the Frome vet remembers the two of them bringing the dog to his surgery at five-ish. And according to your phone call earlier, the person we’re after was buying petrol at a Norfolk garage by six.”
“Damn. Damn. And none of the others … the ones who live alone, for example, what about them? And the Christmas shoppers?”
“They can all be accounted for at some point on that evening or night. Or were met off the Eurostar on the earlier date by someone who can vouch for the fact that they didn’t hire a car. Or both.”
“OK. Before you go through the same process with the French women and the non-EUs, I want you to do something for me. Have you got a copy of the passenger list there?”
“Yes.”
“Right. Cross off all the passengers in the right age group that have been cleared.”
“I’ve done that.”
“How many women left?”
“Of the seventeen to thirties, about twenty non-EU—Americans, Aussies et cetera—and fifty-odd French.”
“How do you know the French are French?”
“How do you mean?”
“How did you separate out the French from the Brits, when you first went through the passenger list?”
“By name, basically.”
“Not by passport?”
“No, both British and French are just down as EU.”
“OK. Go through the French names, and see if you can find a Christian name that’s not specifically French. That could be English. Can you do that now?”
“OK, I’ll do that right now. Here we go … I’ve got a Michelle Altaraz … Claire Dazat … Adrienne Fantoni-Brizeart … Michelle Gilabert … Michelle Gravat—that’s three Michelles—Sophie Lecoq … Sophie Lemasson … Olivia Limousin … Lucy Reynaud … Rita Sauvajon … and, um, Anne Matthieu. That’s it.”
“Damn. They all sound very French. No possibility of a mistake there, or of any of that lot being English?”
“None of them sounds very English.”
Liz was silent. The thought of having to ask the police, via Investigations, to check another fifty or so names, possibly with interpreters present, filled her with something close to despair. “The non-EUs,” she said eventually. “What females have we got in the right age group?”
“Nine Australian, seven American, five Japanese, two South African, two Colombian, and one Indian.”
“Forget the Japanese, but get your team on to locating and ringing the rest. All of them should have submitted details of where they’re staying at the immigration desk at Waterloo. We’re looking for an English accent, OK? A ‘mid-posh’ English accent, like I told you. Any that answer that description—get them checked out by the police as quickly as possible. And could you do something else? Encrypt and e-mail me the whole passenger list, divided by age, gender, and nationality. And have a team standing by to work tonight.”
“Sure.”
Ten minutes later, in her room at the Trafalgar, she was scrolling through the list on her laptop. It was just 2:30 p.m.
What have we missed? she asked herself, staring at the screen. What have we missed? Somewhere on that neat black and white list was the invisible’s name.
Think. Analyse. Why did she come into the country under her own name?
Because whoever she was working for—whichever cell of whichever network—would have insisted on it. They would never have risked using false documentation and compromising their operation if they didn’t absolutely have to. Because transparency was an essential element of invisibility.
Why use a stolen licence to hire the car?
Because once she was past Immigration and in the country there was nothing to connect her to the transaction. It was a cut-out. Even if the car was spotted its hirer would be untraceable, leaving the woman free to use her own identification as and when she chose. But for Ray Gunter, the plan would have been perfect. Gunter, however, had got himself killed, and from then onwards things had started to unravel.
But not quite fast enough. Whatever the terror cell were intending might still happen. Was Mackay right? Were they planning an assault on one of the American air bases, on Marwell, Lakenheath or Mildenhall? On the face of it, as symbols of the hated US–UK military partnership, they were the obvious local targets. But she had seen plans of the bases and they were vast. You couldn’t get near them for security, both military and police, especially now that the status had been upgraded to red. What kind of attack could two people mount? Shoot a couple of guards at long range with a sniper’s rifle? Loose off a rocket-propelled grenade at a gatehouse? Only with enormous difficulty, she suspected. You’d never live to tell the tale, and the press wouldn’t be allowed within a mile of the story, so the impact of the attack would be minimised.
A bomb, perhaps? But how delivered? Every incoming consignment of baseballs, auto parts or hamburger buns was being X-rayed or hand-searched. No vehicle venturing outside a base was now left unattended or out in the open so that a device could be attached. All such scenarios had been played through in exhaustive detail by the RAF, the Military Police and the USAF security planners.
No, Liz told herself. Her best bet was to go at the problem from the other end. Find the woman. Catch her. Stop her.
Glancing at the laptop screen, a thought occurred to her. Had Claude Legendre been wrong? Was the woman in fact French, but fluent in English?
Instinct said no. Legendre dealt with English and French customers day after day, month after month, year after year, and would have subconsciously interiorised every tiny nuance of difference between the two nationalities. Accent, inflexion, posture, style … If his memory said that the woman was English, then Liz was prepared to trust that memory. And if the same woman had been identified as “mid-posh” by a Norfolk garage assistant …
The woman looked English. You couldn’t see the details on the blurry Avis CCTV footage, but in a strange sort of way you could see the person. Something in the diffident carriage of the upper body and shoulders spoke to Liz of a particularly English coupling of intellectual arrogance and muted physical awkwardness.
The clothes, she guessed, served as a disguise on several levels. They were ordinary, so people ignored her, and they we
re shapeless, so she escaped being identified by her physique. They were security-conscious clothes. But they were also the clothes, to Liz’s eye, of a woman who wanted to pre-empt criticism. You will never be able to accuse me of failing to be attractive, these clothes said, because I will never attempt to be attractive. I despise such stratagems.
And yet according to Steve Goss the man in the garage had volunteered the information that she was attractive. Did he mean that she was pretty in the conventional sense, Liz wondered, or something else? Some men were subconsciously attracted to women in whom they detected low self-esteem, or fear. So was this woman afraid? Did she sense Liz’s faint but insistent step behind her? From the moment she learned of Gunter’s death she must have known that the operation was compromised.
No, Liz decided, she wasn’t truly afraid yet. The arrogance was still curtaining off the fear. Arrogance and a trust in the controllers to whom, psychically or actually, she remained leashed. But the strain must be telling. The strain of remaining inside the hermetic cocoon that she had created for herself—the cocoon within which any mayhem appeared justifiable. Reality and the outside world must be beginning to bear on her now. England must be bleeding through.
By 5 p.m. the light had faded and afternoon had become evening. After the initial promise of the encounter at the garage at Hawfield, the Identifit portrait had proved disappointingly generic and unrevealing. The woman was wearing a blue-black baseball cap and olive-coloured aviator sunglasses and looked vaguely like Lucy Wharmby, although the eyes were a little wider-set.
The portrait was quickly e-mailed to Investigations, and to all the police forces involved. In response Judith Spratt requested a call-back, and, when Liz had once again made her way to the phone box that had practically become her second home, told her that the police had drawn a blank on all the non-EU seventeen to thirties.
Eighty-odd women checked. And none of them the target.
“So what do you want me to do?” asked Judith. “The area police chiefs want to know whether to have relief teams standing by for this evening. Do you want me to go with the French women?”
“I think we’re going to have to.”
“You sound unsure.”
“I just don’t believe she’s French. Instinctively, I know she’s English. Still, I guess it’s got to be done.”
“Go for it, then?”
“Yup. Go for it.”
When Liz got back to the Trafalgar, Mackay had returned, and was holding a Scotch up to the light in the bar.
“Liz. What can I get you?”
“Same as you.”
“I’m having a malt. Talisker.”
“Sounds good.” And maybe it’ll help nudge the answer into place about our phantom Eurostar passenger, she thought tiredly. It wasn’t Cherisse behind the bar, but a girl with a bleached crewcut, barely eighteen. Between her and Mackay a faint but detectable tension hung in the air.
“So what kind of day have you had?” he asked, when they were installed at a quiet corner table.
“Mostly, a bad one. Wasting the time of half a dozen police forces and running up the Service’s phone bill amongst other activities. And failing to identify our invisible. On the credit side, I had a nice toasted sandwich with Steve Goss at lunchtime.”
He smiled. “Are you trying to make me jealous?”
She tilted her chin at him. “It’s no contest. Steve’s a considerate guy. He’s not arrogant. He keeps me in the picture.”
“Ah, so that’s the trouble.” He sipped his whisky. “I thought I left a message.”
“Yeah, and the cheque’s in the post. Ring me, Bruno, OK. Keep me in the loop. Don’t just bugger off.”
He looked at her steadily, which she guessed was the nearest thing she was going to get to an apology.
“Let me fill you in now,” he said. “I’ve had a quiet word with our friends at Lakenheath, all of whom seem very together and switched-on and generally prepared … and I’ve stressed the need for them to continue to be so. End of story, really, and I tell you, when you see those places—the sheer size of them—you do begin to wonder what a single bloke and a girl could achieve in the way of damage. Have you ever eaten a twenty-ounce steak?”
“Not to my knowledge. Steve Goss thought the USAF would feed you hamburgers.”
“A fair guess. Hamburgers were indeed on the menu. But this Lakenheath steak … Unbelievable. I’ve had girlfriends with less meat on them. And frankly, a couple of chancers like our two, well, they’d be very hard pushed to get near enough to fire a Stinger or anything like that and have any hope of hitting an aircraft. I mean, I guess they might just about take out a couple of the guys at the gate, but even that would be pretty difficult.”
“I’ve seen those bases, and I was thinking much the same thing. My instinct says that they’re after a softer target.”
“Like?”
“Like I don’t know. Something.” She shook her head. “Damn it!”
“Relax, Liz.”
“I can’t, for the moment, because I know there’s something I’ve missed. When we’ve finished these drinks I want you to have a look at that passenger list, see if anything suggests itself.”
“I’d be glad to. We’re assuming that up to the point when Gunter was killed, our girl had no reason to disguise her actions in any way, right?”
“Right. All she had to do was make sure she wasn’t picked up by the police for a driving offence. As long as she kept clean in that respect, she was fine: her only vulnerability was that stolen driving licence. So she’s got to be on that list somewhere. But they’ve drawn a blank on every British woman between seventeen and thirty on that list. Every one.”
“So it’s a French woman. A French woman who sounds English. Plenty of those.”
“I guess you’re right,” shrugged Liz, unconvinced.
“Look, for the moment there’s nothing we can do. Why don’t we see what sort of a dinner Bethany can rustle up for us, order a decent bottle of wine …”
“I thought you were full of T-bone steak. And who on earth’s Bethany? That sullen-looking adolescent behind the bar?”
“She’s twenty-three, in fact. And the memory of lunch is fading fast.”
Why not? thought Liz. He was right; until the French women had been checked there really was nothing they could do. And she really ought to try and unwind a few notches.
“OK, then,” she smiled. “Let’s see what Mr. Badger and his catering team can do.”
“You’re on. And until then, let’s retire to your boudoir and examine this passenger list.”
“Perhaps you should let your little friend Bethany know that we’re eating here.”
“Oh, she knows,” murmured Mackay, throwing back the last finger of Talisker. “I told her when I got in.”
A sudden paroxysm seemed to seize the windows. Outside, as the wind got up, the rain streaked against the leaded panes, blurring the yellow streetlights. Beneath these, Liz could see a white hatchback with police markings crawling along the sea front, checking the parked cars.
T wenty minutes later the white hatchback came to a stop in the car park below the Dersthorpe council flat where Elsie and Cherisse Hogan lived. Zipping up his dripping police waterproofs, Sergeant Brian Mudie reached under his seat for the heavy Maglite torch.
“Looks like they’re mostly lock-ups,” said PC Wendy Clissold, peering along the rain-hatched beam of the headlights. “I wouldn’t leave a car out in the open in a dump like this. You’d come back and it’d be sitting on bricks.”
Mudie considered staying in the car, and just shining the torch out of the window as Wendy Clissold cruised round the place. Don Whitten’s instructions to them, however, had been to get out, to look through garage windows and behind walls—generally poke around and make nuisances of themselves. And so once again he pulled on his wet cap. The cap’s elasticated rain cover was in the glove compartment, but Mudie left it there because he thought it looked daft, like a woman’s sho
wer cap.
Wriggling his toes experimentally in his sodden Doc Martens, he stepped out into the wet. The wind was coming in hard off the sea and he had to hold his cap on with the hand that wasn’t holding the torch and nudge the car door shut with his knee. Inside the car he saw a brief flare as Wendy Clissold lit up. God, but she was a beautiful woman.
It took him five minutes to check the estate car park and a further eight to run the torch along the line of vehicles outside the Lazy “W,” ensure that neither of the clapped-out hulks outside the Londis mini-mart was a nearly new Vauxhall Astra, and seriously alarm two young men who were smoking skunk in a Ford Capri on the sea front.
He got back to find that Clissold had switched the heater on. The patrol car smelt of hot dust and the peppermint scent of her breath-freshening spray.
“Any good?” she asked, as he bundled his wet kit over into the back seat.
“Course not. Give us one of those smokes.”
As he lit up Wendy Clissold steered the car slowly out of Dersthorpe and back towards Marsh Creake. Halfway between the two, she pulled into a layby and switched off the engine and the lights, leaving only the faint hiss of the police intercom. On the seaward side of the road they could see the silent leap of the spray.
They sat in silence as he finished his cigarette.
“Are you sure your wife doesn’t suspect?” asked Clissold eventually.
“Doreen? No, she’s too busy with her soap operas and her lottery cards. Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t care if she did.”
“What about Noelle?” asked Clissold gently. “You said she’d just started at that new school.”
“She’s going to find out sooner or later, isn’t she?” said Mudie with finality. Opening his window an inch and flipping out his cigarette butt, he reached for Clissold.
A minute or two later she drew her head back from his.
Mudie blinked. “What is it, love?”
“Those holiday cottages on the Strand? There was a light in one of them.”
“Brancaster, Marsh Creake and Dersthorpe, Whitten said. Nothing about the Strand.”
At Risk Page 21
