‘But with Tariq dead . . .’
‘We have to assume that the attack is still going ahead,’ Ayşe said. ‘We have to protect people, that is our first priority.’ She leaned across the table and lowered her voice a little. ‘And you, Uncle Çetin, you must pay very close attention to what goes on over at Hackney Wick. Ülker isn’t going to take any potential terrorists to either his flat in Dalston or his posh home on The Bishops Avenue. We know that most of his slave workers sleep on the premises at the Hackney factories. The bomber or bombers could be doing that too.’
‘I hope this new bloke of yours really is as pig thick as you think he is,’ Derek Harrison said to Ahmet Ülker. The two of them were having a late lunch at the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant in Old Street. Ahmet fancied himself as a bit of a gourmand. Harrison thought he was a pretentious ponce.
‘He is an Anatolian peasant,’ Ülker said. ‘I know the type. The blank eyes, the deference, the only thought in his head for the immediate need. He has to send money home to his family in Turkey. He’ll focus only on that.’
‘I don’t like the way he just conveniently appeared when them pot-heads of yours got themselves arrested.’
‘The man is nothing,’ Ülker said. ‘You don’t understand Turkish people, Derek. He’ll be fine.’
‘Provided he doesn’t see too much.’
‘We’ve a consignment coming in from Abuja tonight. If he deals with that . . .’ He shrugged and then said, ‘What do you think of the ceps?’
‘The mushrooms?’ Harrison snorted. ‘All right.’ He pushed his half-finished meal away from him. ‘Wish you could smoke in here. Fucking hell, you’d think for all this money . . .’
‘Can’t smoke anywhere,’ Ülker said. ‘It’s the law. Mr Blair and now Mr Brown—’
‘Fuck Mr Blair and Mr Brown!’ Harrison said. ‘Mr Blair was the one who started the war your mates take such exception to. How is your old Iranian friend anyway?’
Ahmet Ülker winced.
‘Likes our young nutter, does he?’
Ülker finished his meal and then laid his cutlery down on his plate. ‘It was a pity we lost our young man back in İstanbul. But at least he had the sense to kill himself. As for Ali Reza, I think the Ayatollah finds his enthusiasm inspiring,’ he said.
‘Doesn’t think he’s a fucking nutter then?’ But Ülker did not reply. ‘Not that I’m complaining about that meself.’
‘No, Derek, you shouldn’t.’
‘I am grateful, to you and to him,’ Harrison continued. ‘Not that I believe in his reasons of course. But then neither do you, do you? Nor our partners neither.’
Ahmet Ülker blanched. ‘We don’t talk about them, Derek. Not here.’
Derek Harrison shrugged. ‘Whatever.’ He looked out of the window into the street below and said, ‘You having a sweet, are you?’
Ülker smiled, the tension suddenly released from his face. ‘I thought I might have a little something.’
‘I’m going off to see John, finalise things,’ Harrison said. He rose quickly from the table, took his suit jacket off the back of his chair and put it on.
‘OK,’ Ülker said. ‘But leave the car, please, Derek. I haven’t had a drink and so I’m fine to drive. Take a taxi.’
Harrison smirked. ‘What, on to the estate?’ he said. ‘You want me to get mugged before I even leave the cab?’
‘I’m sure you can handle yourself, Derek,’ Ülker said with a weary sigh. ‘But if you’re that bothered then take a cab to Barking station and then walk. The exercise will do your heart some good.’
‘What, with five grand in my pocket? I don’t think so,’ Harrison said. ‘I’ll get John to meet me at Barking station, give it to him there.’
Ülker lowered his voice. ‘Well, just make sure that no one sees you and that you are well away from the CCTV cameras. I haven’t forgotten about how my operation came to an end in İstanbul. The police got there on a tip-off. We can be discovered at any time.’
Harrison snorted contemptuously. ‘What do you think I am? A bloody amateur? I’m not like those local yokels back in your country.’
‘No, but . . .’ Ülker caught the eye of one of the waitresses across the room and beckoned her over. ‘Just give him the money and get the code,’ he said. ‘Oh, and tell your friend nothing about our friends – any of them. Also, if he does have any intention of double-crossing us, I know where all his children live. Our partners would decimate them, as you know.’
Derek Harrison picked up the holdall that had been under the table by his feet and with a sour look at his boss’s hard face walked away.
Mustafa came to check on İkmen every hour. On one occasion they’d had to chase away a gang of kids that Mustafa said had come down to the waste ground to sniff lighter fluid. It wasn’t easy shooing away people who were shouting at him in English. He’d wanted to yell at them in kind, but he couldn’t and so he had to leave Mustafa to swear at them very ineptly in their native tongue. Most of the time, however, Mustafa just asked him questions. How İkmen had come into the country was a subject frequently discussed. It made the policeman wonder how much of this was curiosity on Mustafa’s part and how much Ahmet Ülker’s. But then if Ülker was indeed planning something big then he had to be sure that everyone in his organisation was who he said he was. İkmen again rolled out his ‘German Jew’ and this time told Mustafa a little about his nightmarish journey across the English Channel.
‘I too came in with Africans,’ Mustafa said when İkmen told him about the terrified African couple he had shared the journey with. ‘They were very dirty.’ He wrinkled up his nose in disgust. ‘Tonight we have a delivery from Africa.’
‘Do we?’
‘I think it is medicine,’ Mustafa said. ‘Mr Ülker is very keen to provide cheap medicine to people.’
‘Oh. Good.’
If it was what İkmen thought it was, it would all be counterfeit and of no clinical value whatsoever. Fake Viagra to leave you impotent, painkillers to leave your pain undiminished whilst toxifying your kidneys – the list was endless. Much of this stuff came out of Africa and it was a logical move for Ülker as he extended his counterfeit portfolio across the planet.
Mustafa left, leaving İkmen alone with the hum of many sewing machines from inside the factory and his thoughts. If anything was going to happen it would most probably be on 3 May, which was only four days away. Four days to find out as much as he could about this possible attack on London and hopefully help the Metropolitan Police to do something about it. Then, with luck, he could go home. Not being himself was giving him problems he hadn’t even considered before he went undercover. The loss of status bothered him. It wasn’t something he had even considered before. Had someone asked him how he would feel about play-acting a poor and destitute man, the last thing that would have come to mind was that he would feel unhappy about it. But he did. Çetin İkmen wasn’t used to being talked down to. People, including his boss Ardıç, did that at their peril. But Çetin Ertegrul was another matter. He was a poorly educated illegal immigrant and everyone talked down to him. Everyone also took money from him for all sorts of reasons whenever they felt like it. They took him for an ignorant fool. He was helpless and alone. He thought about Fatma and how much he missed her in spite of the fact that they were no longer on good terms. He missed his children, his friends and his colleagues. He thought of Süleyman working his end of the Ülker case back in İstanbul with no idea that he was in London doing this awful security job with a man who looked like a retarded grease wrestler.
‘Çetin!’ He looked up and saw said grease wrestler running towards him. ‘The delivery! It’s now!’
A large truck was parked up beside the factory that Mustafa guarded. As İkmen approached, his colleague pulled a large sliding door in the back of the building open and then whistled to the driver to take the thing inside. İkmen followed and found himself inside a carbon copy of Ülker’s factory in Tarlabaşı. Row u
pon row of people bent over sewing machines, heaps of leather down on the floor beside their thin, usually brown, feet. The noise was bad but the smell was worse. Just as in İstanbul, these people pissed and defecated where they sat, the women bled. Most of them seemed to be African. They hardly looked up as the truck drove into the big space at the back of the building and came to a halt. The driver jumped down from the cab and went over to Mustafa.
‘Stuff for arthritis,’ he said as he handed İkmen’s colleague a piece of paper, presumably a delivery note. The man was black and spoke English with a very strong London accent.
‘Arthritis?’
‘Painkiller for it,’ the man said.
‘Oh?’ Suddenly there was another man, a small, pale individual with a trim grey beard and a large white turban on his head. He had emerged from a small office at the back of the building.
‘Don’t work,’ the driver said. ‘Load of crap. Why? You got arthritis have you grandad?’
Mustafa took in a sharp breath. ‘Wesley,’ he said, ‘you cannot speak to Ayatollah Nourazar in that way! He is very holy man!’
Wesley shrugged. ‘Not to me, he ain’t. You lot want this delivery or what?’
İkmen and Mustafa began unloading boxes of something that declared itself ‘Percodan’. İkmen wondered whether Percodan was a real drug or just a name the counterfeiters had made up. The boxes, of which there were hundreds, looked very new, clean and professional. As the two men worked, the man Mustafa had referred to as Ayatollah Nourazar looked on. He smiled beatifically at the two men and then went back into the small office.
‘Who’s that?’ İkmen asked Mustafa during one of the frequent breaks he had to take in order to catch his breath.
Mustafa smiled at İkmen’s lack of fitness. ‘That is a very holy man. Ayatollah Hadi Nourazar, from Iran.’
‘From Iran?’
‘Why do you look surprised?’
‘Well . . .’
‘He is a holy man,’ Mustafa said. ‘You have a problem with Shi’a people? I am Shi’a. My family name is Kermani. They come originally from Iran. Shi’a is a most noble path.’
İkmen shrugged. He was about to say that religion meant nothing to him, but then he changed his approach. After all, Çetin Ertegrul was not the secular person that he was. ‘I am Sunni,’ he said, ‘but I have no problem with Shi’a. What does your holy man do here?’
‘Oh, he has business with Mr Ülker,’ Mustafa said. He unloaded the last two boxes on his own and then pulled the shutter down on the back of the truck. ‘Wesley!’ he called over to the driver. ‘Truck is ready now!’
The driver ran over to the truck, climbed into the cab and drove out of the building. ‘Be lucky!’ he said with a smile out of the cab window.
İkmen and Mustafa returned to their duties outside. İkmen wanted to know more about Ayatollah Nourazar but he was glad to be out of that building. The stench and sheer hopelessness of it was almost beyond endurance. And now Ülker and his company were peddling more misery. Fake drugs that would bring no relief to those already unfortunate enough to be crippled by arthritis. İkmen’s own father had suffered from the disease and so he knew how bad it could be. Thinking about the fake Percodan tablets made him angry. Terrorism or no terrorism, he would get something done about that when this was all at an end.
Chapter 15
* * *
It was almost lunchtime before Terry got in to see Inspector Riley. But then engineering a chance meeting with the Turkish copper after his shift had finished at Hackney Wick hadn’t been easy. Then he’d had some work to do based upon both what he had himself observed and what İkmen had told him.
‘Seems that Iranian holy man they’ve been looking for in İstanbul could very well be here, guv’nor,’ he said as he sat down on the chair in front of Riley’s desk. ‘According to our Turkish friend who saw him last night, he’s called Ayatollah Hadi Nourazar. About sixty years old. Born in Isfahan.’
Patrick Riley looked up and narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s his story then?’ he said. ‘Any idea?’
‘The Israelis have him down as an agitator,’ Terry said. ‘Fiery speeches at rallies on the West Bank. Deported from Egypt nineteen ninety-seven. Again political agitation. Religion-wise he’s one of those “born again” types. He wasn’t involved in the revolution of seventy-nine, he came to religion later.’
‘Probably frightened not to,’ Riley said.
‘Anyway, he’s got a following of sorts. Call themselves the Brothers of the Light. Rabidly anti-Semitic. Interestingly, the Iranian government aren’t too keen on him or his “brothers”. Off message with them maybe.’
Riley shrugged.
‘He’s very down apparently on Muslims who give up their faith or who seem to side with the likes of us,’ Terry went on. ‘Also, he was heavily involved in the purges that took place once the Shah left and Khomeini took over. No involvement with terrorism as far as we know.’
‘And yet suddenly he is here,’ Riley said.
‘Illegally.’
‘Oh.’ Riley raised an eyebrow.
‘No record of entry. Back in İstanbul he had a posse of heavies. Çetin hasn’t spotted them here so far. He may or may not be alone. According to the other security guard at Hackney Wick, this Ayatollah Nourazar has “business” with Ülker. The other guard, by the way, is Mustafa Kermani. Turkish parents but Iranian forebears. Çetin thought he was illegal but he’s actually a UK citizen now. Entered illegally, but then married a Rachel Halliwell in nineteen ninety-six. He was twenty at the time, she was fifty-six.’ Terry shrugged. ‘They’re now divorced. Mustafa has got form for affray. One of those periodic things that take place outside the Israeli Embassy.’
‘Gawd.’ Riley rolled his eyes.
‘He’s a nothing, Kermani, and even this Nourazar isn’t exactly a big fish,’ Terry said. ‘It’s all low-key as far as I can see, guv’nor. Mind you, they took a delivery last night of a load of counterfeit Percodan – painkillers for arthritis. I was watching. The truck they were in was being driven by an old friend.’
Riley frowned.
‘Wesley Simpson,’ Terry said. ‘Everyone’s favourite getaway driver. Obviously given up on cars and has gone into the HGV business.’
‘Mmm. Could be useful to know as we get nearer to when we think these people are going to make their move,’ Riley said. ‘My recollection of Wesley is of a basically peaceable bloke who just wants to turn a quick quid.’
‘He’s a lazy bastard, guv’nor.’
‘But not a violent man,’ Riley said. ‘We’ll keep an eye on Wesley. What we must also do now, I think, is mount surveillance on our other Iranian connection.’
‘Ali Reza Hajizadeh?’
‘Yes. He, like this ayatollah chap, was born in Isfahan,’ Riley said. ‘I want to know if they meet. What, if any, connections they may have. Tell Çetin to keep his ear to the ground. This may or may not be the same holy man the police in İstanbul came up with but for the moment I think it’s safe to assume that it probably is. I’ll contact them to that effect.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We know that Ülker has some business involvement in the Far East,’ Riley went on. ‘There’s talk of business partners who may or may not be this cleric – maybe another gang. But if we haven’t managed to pin him down by the third, Terry, we are going to have to stake Mark Lane out and then if it looks in the least bit dodgy take Ülker down. I don’t care what the bloody mayor says. I hate all this fake stuff, especially the medication, as much as he does. But if Ülker is directly associating with terrorists then we can’t put the public at risk.’
‘No, sir.’
Riley sighed. ‘Well, as long as we’re all working off the same page . . .’ Then he looked up at Terry and said, ‘I know we could blow it with regard to getting at Ülker’s other business contacts. But we can’t have another seven/seven or the events that followed it.’
Terry looked down. He knew what Riley was referring to, the death
at police hands of the innocent Brazilian man Jean Charles de Menezes.
‘Given time, Çetin İkmen could have given us a lot of information about Ülker’s operation. I feel we’ll probably under-use him, which is a shame but what can you do?’
Terry shrugged. ‘Inspector İkmen strikes me as a resourceful sort,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that one way or another he’ll play his part.’
Things came to Abdurrahman Iqbal, so he said, in fits and starts.
‘My memory isn’t what it was,’ he told Süleyman. ‘But I do now recall that Tariq was obliged to study a map of the London Underground before he took part in his “mission”. He wasn’t allowed to take it out of the Tarlabaşı factory. But he did have to study it.’
Süleyman was walking with the old man along Mesrutiyet Street towards the British Consulate. Given Abdurrahman’s high level of cooperation, they had looked into his claim to know a person called Captain Jackson. The consulate had news about this which was why Süleyman was escorting the old man there now.
‘Given the boy’s poor state of health,’ Abdurrahman went on, ‘as well as his absolute foreignness in a place like London, I thought they would not leave him on his own there. But apparently he had to learn to move around alone.’
‘Do you know where he was going to obtain the explosives he was due to use?’
‘No,’ the old man said. ‘Although I do not imagine they were going to risk crossing borders with them. These people have sympathisers in England. I think that Tariq would have been given what he needed there.’
As they drew level with a small grocer’s shop, Süleyman saw Çetin İkmen’s son Bülent coming out, clutching a new packet of cigarettes.
‘Excuse me, Abdurrahman,’ Süleyman said to the old man. Then he called out to the young man. ‘Bülent!’
‘Mehmet!’ The young man came bounding over and then reached up to put his thin arms round his father’s friend. ‘So good to see you!’
‘And you too,’ Süleyman said. ‘I’m just escorting this man to the British Consulate and so I can’t really talk now. But, quickly, have you heard from your dad?’
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