by Henry Porter
She founded Philip Sarre in the library, leafing through some material on Uzbekistan, which he informed her was now his speciality. ‘If you go to Langley, you find whole rooms of Uzbek specialists; here it’s me in my coffee break.’
Sarre always maintained that he had been brainwashed by MI6 and was actually meant to be in Cambridge watching particle acceleration experiments. His friend Andy Dolph was equally improbable. The son of an independent bookie, he had come to MI6 via the City of London and a banking job in the Gulf States where he had allowed himself to be recruited to relieve the boredom. Sarre reported that Dolph was across the river in a pub waiting for him and an Africa specialist named Joe Lapping. Sarre said he’d extract both men and bring them to Heathrow.
An hour later Herrick and the three men were crowded into the security room at Terminal Three having arranged for two of the technical people to stay as long as they were needed. Their first break came after 1.00 a.m. Dolph had been going over the film from the gates of two flights that landed consecutively from Bangkok at 9.15 and 9.40 a.m. when he saw the man who had taken Rahe’s place walk off the second flight. Wearing a dark red jacket, a bright tie with hibiscus motif, grey trousers and black shoes, he was among the last passengers to leave the plane. This told them that he had probably been seated at the back of the Thai International Airways 747. The airline’s records showed that one of the rearmost seats had been occupied by an Indonesian national named Nabil Hamzi, who they later found was travelling on to Copenhagen at 11.40 a.m. from Terminal Three.
Herrick gasped. ‘Rahe didn’t check in until past midday,’ she said.
‘So?’ said Sarre.
‘Don’t be a fucking idiot,’ said Dolph. ‘It means that Rahe couldn’t have made the Copenhagen flight. And that means there wasn’t a straight swap between Rahe and Hamzi.’
‘There had to be a third man, at least,’ said Sarre.
‘By George, he’s got it,’ said Dolph, pinching Sarre’s cheek.
‘And the third man must have arrived in the airport before eleven to give him time to change clothes, tickets and passports with Hamzi and get himself to the Copenhagen departure gate.’
They crowded round a screen to watch film of flight SK 502 to Copenhagen boarding and with little surprise saw a man in a red jacket, hibiscus tie and grey trousers waiting to present his boarding card and passport. It was neither Rahe nor Hamzi but another individual who was the same height and build and who was also in his mid-to-late thirties. After a couple of hours they found this man on footage from one of the long corridors leading to the departure gates. Then, working back through recordings made by a series of cameras, they traced him to a flight from Vancouver. This worried Herrick – it had implications for the other North American airlines. Still, there was no way of pairing the face with a seat number and therefore a name, because they couldn’t work out at what stage he’d left the aircraft. However, Dolph realised that there was probably a pattern.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘These guys aren’t going to be travelling with baggage in the hold. And they are all likely to be booked on connecting flights out of Heathrow on the afternoon of the fourteenth. So all we have to do is go through the manifest of the Vancouver flight and match the two criteria.’
This produced the name Manis Subhi, who was travelling on a Philippine passport and had left London for Beirut four hours after landing.
Herrick wondered out loud whether she should let Spelling know the provisional results.
‘No, let’s tie this thing up, darling,’ said Dolph. ‘Present them with a fucking bunch of roses in the morning. Let’s follow the trail until it ends.’
Sarre reminded them that they hadn’t yet discovered the eventual destination of Rahe.
‘Maybe it’s not so important,’ said Herrick. ‘Perhaps he was just one element in a serial identity switch involving many people.’
‘A daisy chain,’ said Dolph.
‘Yes, just because we spotted that Rahe didn’t get on the right plane, it doesn’t mean he’s the crucial figure. He unwittingly let us in on the secret – that’s all.’
‘He loaned out his identity?’ said Dolph.
‘Could be. The whole point must be to shuffle a lot of key figures at once, and they can do that here in Terminal Three.’
‘Because it’s like the General Assembly of the United Nations,’ said Dolph.
‘No, because departing and arriving passengers mingle on their way to and from the gates. Also, passports are barely inspected when passengers are boarding – the airline just matches the name on the passport with the name on the boarding card.’
They watched film of the Middle Eastern airlines flight to Beirut, recorded by a camera close to the desk, and duly noted that Manis Subhi had been replaced by another, obviously taller man who, other than wearing the red jacket, hardly bothered to impersonate him. He also carried a bag that Subhi had not had with him. Then by chance, when the technician made an error and fast-forwarded the film instead of rewinding it, they spotted Rahe in a dark suit carrying a camera bag. This meant that Rahe had left for Beirut with another man involved in the operation.
It was now 5.00 a.m. and Herrick had seen all she needed. She asked the technicians to splice together the film of each man onto a single videotape. Then she borrowed a security pass and a radio and walked into the terminal building. There was a surprising amount of activity in the public areas – maintenance men fiddling with cable ducts, gangs of cleaners moving slowly with their machines like ruminants, and one or two passengers waiting for the first flights out. After half an hour, having tramped the best part of a couple of miles, she found what she was looking for.
Discreetly tucked into a bend was a men’s lavatory, the entrance completely hidden from CCTV cameras. She went in and found a cleaner wiping down the basins. The name on his identity tag read Omar Ahsanullah and by the look of him she guessed he was Bangladeshi. The washroom was relatively small and consisted of six cubicles, a row of urinals, four basins and a locked storeroom.
She nodded to the man, then went out and radioed Dolph in the security room. She wanted him to watch as she walked down the corridor so that he’d see the exact moment she disappeared from view on the cameras. They found there was a blind spot of about fifty feet either side of the entrance. Although they were unable to watch the washroom’s entrance, she realised they would be able to go back over the film for the two nearest cameras and get all they needed: anyone making their way to the men’s toilet would have to pass under them. Dolph said he would try to verify her theory by checking the film for these two cameras from 12.30 until 2.00 p.m. to see if Rahe showed.
The sight of the cleaners reminded her that there must have been a man on duty in the lavatory when the men were swapping their clothes and possessions. She went back in. The cleaner explained that there were two shifts, one that started at 5.30 a.m. and finished at 2.30 p.m., another that ended at 11.30 p.m. It was possible to do a double shift, and those with many relatives back home often needed the extra money. As he spoke, she suddenly saw the drudgery and fatigue in his eyes and she remarked that it must be a hard life.
He stopped polishing the mirror and replied that yes, it was tiring, but he was in the West and his children would get a good education. He was lucky. He paused, then told her if he was looking unduly sad that day it was because a friend, a fellow Bangladeshi, had died in a fire. His wife, two children and his mother had also died. Herrick remembered hearing about the blaze in Heston on the radio news the day before. It was being investigated as a hate crime. She said how sorry she was.
The man continued to talk about his friend in a distracted way and then as an after-thought mentioned that he had been a cleaner at Heathrow too. He had been working there on the day he died, the fourteenth.
‘Here?’ asked Herrick, now very alert. ‘In this washroom?’
The man said that he was on this floor on Tuesday because they had both worked double shifts that day. But he could
n’t be sure that he was working in this exact toilet.
‘I am sorry about your loss,’ she said. ‘Is it possible for you to give me his name?’
‘Ahmad Ahktar,’ said the man.
She said goodbye. As she was about to leave the washroom she noticed a sign propped under the basins. She bent down and turned it, almost knowing that it would read ‘Out of service’.
By the time she got back to the control room, they had found Rahe on the film taken near the lavatory. More important, they had got him in both sets of clothing and were able to see which man he had changed with. Dolph and Lapping had started cross-referencing the information they had gathered with names on the FBI and British watch lists. It was an inexact process but they had seven faces to play with. Dolph made an impressive case that two of them belonged to an Indonesian cell. He told them he’d lay odds on it.
Herrick had other things on her mind. It was obvious that the timing of this operation was subject to flights arriving late or being diverted. They must have built flexibility into the schedule so that if one man was delayed, there was still someone for him to switch identities with. That probably meant there were one or two floaters, men who at the beginning of the day were prepared to be sent anywhere. These would have to be European citizens with clean passports who could board a plane bound for Barcelona or Copenhagen and enter the country without raising suspicion. She thought of Rahe, a British citizen, sitting in the Garden of Remembrance. Although they hadn’t seen him use his phone, he must have received a text message or phone call to tell him when he was due to swap.
Some of the detail could wait, but they were getting a picture of an impressive operation. To put as many as a dozen people into Heathrow from all over the world, with passports that were stamped with the correct visas, and then to achieve what was in effect a relay switch, required miraculous scheduling skills. Whoever was controlling the switches would need to speak to each man the moment he arrived, which was why, she now realised, three suspects had been filmed talking on their mobiles just after disembarkation. The controller would also have to ensure that the men didn’t all arrive in the washroom at the same time. An early flight might leave a man loitering in the corridors, drawing attention to himself, so a premature arrival would have to be taken out of circulation, perhaps hidden in the locked storage cupboard, until the moment his pair arrived and he could be sent on his way.
There was one more question she needed to answer before returning to London and writing the report for Spelling, which she now rather relished.
She went down to Arrivals, bought a cup of coffee and stationed herself under the flight displays. Heathrow was now open for business. Four flights were expected in the next quarter of an hour and already the roped-off exit from Customs was fringed with small welcoming parties.
She noticed that the chauffeurs and company drivers seemed to know instinctively when planes had landed and the passengers would start to clear Customs. Often the drivers appeared from the car park exit with just a few seconds to spare. She asked a lugubrious man clutching a sign and sipping coffee how they managed it. ‘Trick of the trade,’ he said, blowing across the cup. ‘The top deck of the car park for this terminal has the best view of the airport. When you see your aircraft landing you drive down to the lower floor and then you know you’ve got another half hour or so to wait. It makes a difference if you’re doing this three times a week.’
‘What about when it’s busy?’ she asked.
‘At peak you’ve got about forty to fifty minutes,’ he replied.
Herrick could have gone back to the control room, satisfied that she’d tied up all the loose ends of the operation, but the obsessive part of her nature told her there was always more to be had by seeing something for yourself. A few minutes later she was standing in the open on the top level of the car park with a little huddle of plane spotters. She watched for a while, briefly marvelling that men stirred so early in the day to jot down the details of very ordinary-looking Jumbo jets, then caught the eye of a man with an untidy growth of beard and asked him if this was always the best place to see the aircraft.
‘Not always,’ he replied without removing his eyes from a jet taxiing in to the terminal. ‘They change the runways at three in the afternoon on the dot. Whichever one is being used for take-off becomes the landing runway. Then we go across to Terminal Two and watch from the proper viewing terrace.’
She was about to ask him whether he had seen anyone acting unusually the day before last, but thought better of it. That was a detail. Special Branch could deal with it later.
She walked out of earshot of the plane spotters towards the centre of the near-empty car park and dialled the duty officer at Vauxhall Cross.
It was 6. 45 a.m. Isis noticed she was very hungry.
CHAPTER FOUR
Silence. No word from the Chief’s office; not the merest hint that her report had been discussed at the Joint Intelligence Committee, which Herrick knew was meeting four times a day in the wake of the death of Norquist. Even the people in anti-terrorism, who had been known to make the odd, oblique compliment, said nothing. Dolph, Sarre and Lapping shrugged and went back to their work. Dolph said, ‘Fuck ’em, Isis. Next time we’ll stay in the pub.’ Sarre pondered the behaviour and came up with the phrase ‘institutional autism’, then went off to look at a map of Uzbekistan.
Herrick was not as easily resigned. She didn’t understand why there was not an immediate operation to trace the men who had darted into the glare of Heathrow’s security system and dispersed into the dark. Anyone could see these men had been imported into Europe for a specific purpose, a particular act of terrorism. But the trail was growing colder by the minute.
This just confirmed her belief that the parts of the Secret Intelligence Service were more decent and reasonable than its sum. She trusted colleagues individually, but rarely the collective, which she regarded by turns as needlessly calculating, merciless and plain stupid.
This had been her view since the Intelligence Officers’ New Entry Course when, like the others in her class of a dozen, she was sent abroad on what was presented as an actual mission. A cover story was provided, fake credentials, a task and a deadline. Everything seemed straightforward, but during the trip the trainees were arrested by the local counter intelligence service, held and questioned, the object being to test their powers of resistance and resourcefulness.
The test is never pleasant but Herrick knew that, like most female entrants, she had received especially severe treatment. She was detained by the German police and members of the BFD for a week, during which she was questioned for long stretches at night, roughed up and deprived of sleep, food and water. The particular harshness perhaps had something further to do with the fact that she had followed her father into MI6. No daddy’s girls in the Service, not unless they could stand having a chair broken over their back by a borderline psychopath.
Every reason to take the Cairo posting offered to her a couple of weeks earlier and get out of Vauxhall Cross. Egypt was one of the few Arab countries where she could use her language and work without having to remember at every step she was a woman. Besides, the cover job in the embassy as political counsellor would not be too difficult to master alongside the business of spying.
She shook herself – she had work to do – and returned with little enthusiasm to the investigation of Liechtenstein trusts being used to move Saudi money to extremist clerics and mosques around Europe – a worthwhile job perhaps, although it seemed pedestrian after her night at Heathrow.
Khan had kept going through the first day and, having taken care to memorise the shape of the landscape ahead of him, walked through the night, too. By the following morning he reckoned he had put a good distance between himself and the security forces. He decided to rest up in the shade. But down in the valleys he saw much more activity than would normally be expected in the pursuit of one fugitive. He realised they couldn’t let him leave the country with his knowledge of the
massacre of innocent men. He lay low until the early evening and set off again in the warm twilight, eventually coming across a village in the mountains where some kind of celebration was in full swing. A small dance floor had been erected; strings of lights had been hung between its four corners and a band was playing. He guessed it was some kind of religious feast or a wedding.
He had gone for two days without food, sucking leaves and grass and eking out the water in the soldier’s canteen. But he made himself wait a good half-hour, watching a group of houses that could be approached under cover of a wall that ran down from a ridge not far from where he lay. He set off, moving cautiously, at every step of the way looking back to see his best escape route. He entered two houses but in the dark couldn’t find anything to eat. He came to a third and felt his way to the kitchen, where he found a loaf of bread, half a jar of nuts, some dried beef, cheese and olives. He wrapped them in a piece of damp cloth that had covered the bread.
An ancient voice croaked from the room next door, making him freeze. He put his head round the door-frame and saw an old woman sitting in a chair, bathed in red light from an illuminated religious icon. Her head moved from side to side and she was slashing at the air with a stick. He realised that she must be blind. He crept over to her, gently laid his hand on hers and with the other stroked her brow to reassure her. Her skin was very wrinkled and cool to the touch and momentarily he had the impression that she had woken from the dead. He caught sight of a bottle of Metaxa brandy and a glass, which had been placed out of her reach. He poured an inch or so, put the glass in her hand and helped her lift it to her lips. Her wailing suddenly stopped and she murmured something which sounded like a blessing. Placing the bottle in his piece of cloth, he left the house by the front door.
A couple of dogs pursued him along the wall and he was forced to sacrifice some of the meat, which he hacked off with his knife and chucked at them. Then he melted into the rocks and scrub, making for the place where he had left his belongings. He ate a little of the cheese and bread to give him energy, but it was another hour before he found some rocks where he could make a fire that wouldn’t be seen from below, or indeed from any other direction. He prepared a sandwich, eating it slowly so as not to give himself indigestion, and washed it down with some brandy mixed with a little water. It was his first alcohol in seven years and he knew himself well enough to watch his consumption.
