SitRep, Central Command, Ba'quba: Single suicide-bomber attack. Target was an Iraqi Army recruitment centre–suicide-bomber had joined end of queue and detonated explosives when challenged. Casualty figure not known, but will be 'large': Message Ends.
Thoughts formed in Joe Hegner's mind, and they ran alongside the images he held of the days when he had lived in the rarefied atmosphere of the Green Zone, before his hospitalization, before his convalescence, and before it was confirmed that he could work out of the embassy in Saudi Arabia…A queue outside a grimy building that was set back from concrete blast barriers and sandbag parapets. A line of young and middle-aged men watching uneasily behind them as they shuffled forward with painful slowness. A table with three clerks sitting behind it and a wad of application forms, riffled by an early-morning breeze. A man joined the far end of the line, and perhaps he smiled, as if at peace, and perhaps his clothing was too bulky for the size of his shoulders or the shape of his head, and perhaps the sweat ran on his forehead when the sun was not yet high, and perhaps those in the queue smelt the scent of danger and started to run back, and perhaps a security guard–paid a pittance–had had the courage to charge towards the sweating, overweight, smiling man. But a hand was inside the robe. A finger was on a switch. A bomb detonated. A body disintegrated and many other bodies were mutilated…He knew those young men. They were the secondary field of Joe Hegner's expertise.
SitRep, 'Central Command, Baghdad: Attack on garrison (Coalition Forces) at Abu Ghraib detention complex. Reports still incoming. At least 5, repeat 5, suicide-bombers involved in vehicles and on foot, alongside insurgent ground forces using 88mm mortars, RPG launchers and 50mm' calibre machine-guns. Neither enemy casualties nor Coalition Forces casualties yet known or confirmed, but there are reports of at least two KIA from 101st Infantry: Message Ends.
He winced at the catalogue of disaster. He was not thirsty but sipped water from a plastic beaker as if that might moisten his dried, cracked lips. Joe Hegner never interrupted Cindy when she read aloud for him. The two unconfirmed Killed in Action soldiers might be sturdy white boys from Montana, where Hegner had been reared, or tough young black guys from Alabama, where he had done early years in his Bureau career. Each one, whatever part of his country they came from, was a wound to him. Part of that wound came from emotion, but more was from the failure of his professionalism. He was contemplating the scale of the attack on the gaol perimeter, estimating how many insurgent fighters had been deployed, considering the enormity of the use of five suicide merchants, pondering on the supply line–on a scale that Wal-Mart would not have sniffed at–of death volunteers his enemy could muster into line.
'That it?'
'Yes. Nothing else, thank God. That's what we have.'
'About as bad as it gets.'
'What are you thinking, Joe?'
It was the way they habitually worked. After she'd read to him, and he had assimilated what she'd told him, she would feed him anodyne questions that had the purpose of stirring the analytic juices in his mind. They had been together in Riyadh from three months before the launch of the invasion, had been together in the Green Zone from a week after the occupation of Baghdad to the December day in 2004 at the mess hail in the garrison camp at Mosul, and together once his convalescence had started in the Frankfurt military hospital. She had stayed at his side on his return to Riyadh. It was not a master-and-servant relationship–him an agent and her from the personal-assistant pool–or a relationship touched by sexual attraction, or unrequited affection, but had the stamp of elder brother and younger sister. He would have sworn that without her he would have been a finished, spent man; she would have said that meeting Josiah Hegner was the only meaningful event of her life. What hurt her most was that she was no longer permitted, by diktat of the Bureau, to fly with him for that one week in four when he returned to Iraq: then she lost the opportunity to watch over him. He was in his fifty-second year, and disfigured; she was thirty-four and attractive, but unavailable to any of the embassy staffers who pitched attention towards her. She waited for his answer.
'It's the scale of it that tells the story.'
'Five strikes in different locations and all within an hour of each other.'
'That's eleven in one sixty-minute slot, and five in just one strike.'
'Like they've a line of them backed up, and no shortages.'
'All coordinated. All put together by a single individual who controls them and wants to send a message to us. He is more important, so much more, than the fodder he's pushing forward. It's all about the coordination–it's about one man.'
In the old days in Riyadh, in his embassy office where an armed marine-corps guard stood sentry at the door, he had plastered the walls with photographs of the first men who had been identified as leaders of the insurgency. They were all gone. And 'one man's' image could not have gone on to the wall anyway because that man had neither a name that could be given him, nor did a photograph exist.
'But, Joe, you know who he is.'
'Yes. Yes.'
'It's the Twentyman, Joe. What are you thinking?'
'I've got a sense, almost a scent–but like he's signing off and moving on. Does that sound stupid, giving him that name? Christ, there ain't anything laughable about that bastard…but it's what he is, the Twentyman. He's the only guy who could do eleven suicides in an hour, four locations but–and this is my sense–it's as if he's heading for a rest or for new territory. Can't say which, but it has to be him–know nothing about him, only his quality. Has to be the Twentyman. I feel it.'
The flight was called, the departure of a KLM air-liner to Amsterdam.
He rose from the bench where he had waited for the announcement.
Ibrahim Hussein had been chosen, so the man he thought of as the Leader had told him, because he walked well. In front of him, inside the number four terminal of the King Khalid International Airport, lay an open expanse of shining floor, and he strode across it, not looking back to see if his last escort watched him go. He had been driven from the desert, then taken to a house in a slum quarter of the town of Qatif to sleep dreamlessly, then brought to the airport. In all of that time, and with each of the escorts, he had not been offered conversation, and he realized it was intended that he should not know who had handled and moved him. That morning he had been given a new pair of jeans, a yellow T-shirt, a leather jacket and trainers. He had a lightweight rucksack hooked over his arm, and on his head was an 'I Love NY' cap with a broad, extended peak to hide part of his face from the terminal's ceiling cameras. In the airport car park he had been passed an envelope containing a passport and a single sheet of scribbled writing that described a family history and justified the visa entry for the Netherlands on the passport's second page; he had been given time to read the sheet, then it had been taken from him and dumped in a rubbish bin. Already he marvelled at the care for detail that had been employed. At one moment, as the flight was called, his last escort had been at his side; at the next, the escort was no longer there. His target was the departure gate and, as was expected of him, he walked purposefully towards it. He heard the shout from far behind him. A name was called: not the name on the passport he held tight in his hand. The shout came again. He did not break his stride and as the departure gate yawed open automatically and swallowed him, the shout was repeated: 'Ibrahim? Is that Ibrahim Hussein? Are you Ibrahim–'
The gate dosed and shut out the sound of the shout.
Across continents and time differences another flight was called. The charter for Sun Tours would fly a cabin of Spanish tourists from Barcelona to the English airport at Stansted.
He could not fault the arrangements in place for him, or the cover supplied by his travel documents. He was not Muhammad Ajaq, or the Scorpion. He would make the final leg of his journey with a Spanish passport, and the light olive skin of his cheeks and hands–not European and not north African–would be explained in the passport he now carried by a father's origin in Valencia and a
mother's in the Moroccan city of Tetouan. He obeyed orders given to him three months before, but with them had come a labyrinth of planning of which he had no criticism. At every travelling stage he had been met, treated with the courtesy and respect to which he thought himself entitled, and money had been provided. Rendezvous arrangements had been flawlessly in place. The previous day he had been driven by a man, who asked no questions and made no idle conversation, into the mountains to the north-west of Barcelona, and there he had met a cell of Basque fighters from the Euzkadi ta Askatasuna, two men and a woman. Near to the town-of Irurzun, overlooking it, in a shed where winter animal fodder was stored, he had been shown and then had purchased fifteen kilos of PTEN explosives in one-kilo sticks; he had paid twenty thousand American dollars, and four commercial quarrying detonators were added to the package.
He had thought the men good and strong, the woman pretty–there had been a moment when her hand had rested on his thigh as she made a point of emphasis, and excitement brimmed in him–and there had been trust. If he was captured and talked, they would be destroyed, and if they were taken and went down under interrogation, he would be broken. The woman had limped, and had said, matter-of-factly, she had been tortured long ago, which had clinched the trust for him. He had left them, the men wrapping him in bear grips, the woman kissing him full on the mouth, and carried away the fifteen kilos of explosives with the detonators, in waterproof paper sealed with masking tape.
With the parcel in the car's boot, the driver had negotiated narrow, winding roads and brought him to the port of Castro Urdiales. There, he had sat in a café and sipped coffee with a florid-faced Englishman, who had failure written at his mouth and defeat in his eyes. The price, without haggling, was agreed at twenty-five thousand American dollars, and the parcel had been slipped from its place on his knees under the table into the grasp of the Englishman, and the money was given over. From the near-empty café's window, he could see the grey skies over the harbour and the spray climbing over the outer groyne. The launch was pointed out to him–it nestled against a pontoon but shook in the swell.
He had been taken back, through the night, towards Barcelona, and in the dawn, with rain in the air, near to a station on the city's railway, he had suggested that the driver might wish to relieve his bladder after the long drive. Then he had come behind the man, taken his throat in his hands and strangled him. He had torched the car and left the body in undergrowth at the end of an uncleared track; the killing was to protect his identity. He had taken the train, with the day's early commuters, and after two changes had reached the airport, and forgotten the man who had driven him.
As he presented his ticket–best to travel in a tourist mass because with a group the scanning of passports at his destination would be slack–a ground hostess smiled at him, and he smiled back, but his eyes were on the bursting cleavage under her blouse.
She giggled and he laughed, as if he was going on holiday, took back his ticket, walked on and was buried in the flow of tourists.
He thought the package was drugs–heroin from Afghanistan or cocaine from Colombia–and Dennis Foulkes didn't give a damn. He was broke, and likely to be formally bankrupted. The cash stashed in a plastic bag in a galley cupboard would be enough to hold off the creditors, and protect his proudest possession.
She was the Joker of the Pack, and Dennis Foulkes loved her with passion. The money paid to him would hold off the inevitability of their parting. She was a motor-cruiser with two Volvo 480 h.p. engines that gave her a maximum speed, in good conditions, of thirty-three knots. She was a little over thirteen metres from bow to stern, with a beam of fractionally more than four metres. Inside those specifications were a cockpit, a saloon, a galley and dinette, three master staterooms–two of them en-suite–and crammed into every corner of her hull were the luxuries of wealth…He had had wealth. Money had dripped off him when he had run a prospering Rover car dealership, and he had not heard the warning sirens–eye off the ball–because he had just shelled out £265,000, paid without a loan, and he had taken the berth at the Kingswear marina on the south Devon coast, and had thought his business could run itself.
What a bloody fool. The car factory had collapsed in insolvency, what was in his showroom couldn't be given away, and he had not seen it coming. House gone–repossessed when the mortgage could not be met. Wife gone. All he had to remind him of what he had once been was the Joker of the Pack, which boasted the best electronic navigation systems, cocktail cabinets in solid wood, carpets and a bed in the biggest master stateroom that he could have shagged three little beauties in and not felt it a crowd. He did chartering. Any sod who'd pay could get a ride across the Channel, and he wasn't too proud to do day trips to Plymouth in the west or Lyme Regis to the east. He was for hire, and each pound or euro he was paid helped to keep his love under his feet. And if there were no punters, too early in the season, just a package wrapped in waterproof paper and bound with masking tape–stacked at the back of the galley cupboard–Dennis Foulkes wasn't losing sleep. The nightmare in his life was that his creditors at the bank or the mortgage company would hear of the Joker of the Pack, send in the bailiffs and flog her off dirt cheap to settle against the million, might be two, that he owed the bank and the building society–but a drip of cash showed willing and would keep them off his bloody back…Necessity, and love, dictated that he had made no judgements on the man who had sat with him in the café overlooking the harbour at Castro Urdiales.
The Joker of the Pack shuddered under him in the crested waves of a force six, might be seven, and he was far out in the Bay of Biscay and on course for a landfall sighting of the French coast at the Île d'Ouessant and then the run, God willing in calmer waters, across the Channel and into the Dart estuary.
He reflected, hanging on to the wheel as she bounced on the swell and water cascaded on to the bridge's windows, that the girl who had come tripping down the pier at Kingswear to arrange all this hadn't seemed the type tied into drugs importation. The guy had, cold sort of bastard for all his smiling, and he'd left a taste of fear behind him that was still in Dennis Foulkes's throat–but he'd thought her a nice girl. A pity about that awful bloody scar on her face.
He kept her shoulders and back always in view. Jamal was beside her, but it was the woman on whom he concentrated his attention.
A hundred and fifty yards behind her and Jamal, it was hard for Syed to follow her, but he had the skills. Syed's home, where he lived with his parents and where he worked in the kitchen of a fast-food kebab store, was north-west London, Hanger Lane, but the skills he now used had been learned on the teeming streets of Peshawar. Pakistan was where he had travelled two years before, aged nineteen, to visit family, and there he had been recruited. He had been putty in the hands of those who had noted him: four months before he had flown to the homeland of his father and mother, his elder brother had been attacked on a late-night bus, punched and kicked unconscious by white yobs–why? Because his brother was a Muslim, Asian, a 'bastard bloody Paki', the family had spent weeks travelling to and from the West Middlesex Hospital to see a young man who,, for three days, had lingered close to death with tubes and drips keeping him alive. His brother was now recovered in body, but seldom left his Hanger Lane home. For what had been done to him, Syed had no regrets at having accepted the advances of the recruiters.
In Peshawar he had been trained in the arts of following a man or woman and remaining unnoticed. Ahead of him, the woman guided Jamal through the streets in the centre of the town and into the wide square, where the first buds were on the trees, and led him towards the steps up to the shopping centre. Using what he had been taught in Peshawar, Syed was in place to satisfy himself that the woman had no tail on her. If there had been a tail from the security people, he would have spotted the signs from as far back as a hundred and fifty yards. He would have seen men pass women and move forward without acknowledging a colleague, and men or women lift their hands to speak into their wrists, and the loitering of thos
e men and women with newspapers who did not read the columns of print. They had believed him an excellent pupil in Peshawar, and told him so * . . It was the first day that Syed had met others from the group, and the first time since his return from Pakistan that he had been called forward. He thought, his initial impression, that the woman believed she owned too great an importance with them, that she was flawed by the scar that marked her out and would make her remembered, but those decisions had been taken by others.
They climbed the steps to the shopping centre. From that distance, a hundred and fifty yards from it, he hated the place, and his thoughts were of avarice, its corrupting influences and ostentation. He saw the woman and Jamal skirt a gang of white youths. His brother would be avenged, his Faith protected, when the man came from abroad and they struck the target that was given them.
Looking for opportunities on Luton's streets was how Lee Donkin spent his days and evenings. Then, if he had found some and could buy, he spent his nights nodding out in the arms of injected heroin.
The best opportunities, and he had experience to back his opinion, were about in mid-morning: women pushing prams and buggies along the Dunstable Road, the Dallow Road or the Leagrave Road on their way to the town's shopping centre. Going to spend, weren't they? Cash in their purses, hadn't they? Never going to fight, were they? Lee Donkin, nineteen years old, fed his addiction with mugging and bag-snatching, and if the victim went down on to the pavement that was their fault for being flicking stupid and resisting, wasn't it? He had spiked hair, bleached white blond, but it was too distinctive when he worked and then he had his black hood over it. What made Lee Donkin most proud was the knowledge that he was a considerable statistic in the offices of the town's police station, among the detectives in the anti-street-theft team, but he had not been successfully prosecuted since he was sixteen when he had served thirty months in a young offenders' institution. Now, he reckoned, he was too smart for them. He was small and short but that was deceptive: his wiry body rippled hard muscle…He had an opportunity. A woman, not old but using one of those hospital sticks and bad on her feet, was ahead: she'd just missed a bus into town and was going to walk. She had a handbag hooked on her elbow, and he closed on her. Alongside that section of the pavement was the school playing-field over which he could leg it when he'd done her.
The Walking Dead Page 7
