Heartbreaker: Love, secrets and terror

by Nick Louth

  ‘What should we do?’ asked someone from the audience.

  ‘We have to mobilise, we have to fight,’ Tiwana said. ‘The crusade against Islam is being fought in every country in the West. If we are all treated like terrorists, then some in the community may decide to respond as terrorists. If civil resistance, and the assertion of Muslim identity and equality in Britain is not permitted, then some will strike. And they may very well strike back in the way the West does understand. I do not condone it, but I understand it. We have worked hard, very hard, to choose other more nuanced channels to get judgement for our grievances, but every day across the world our Islamic brothers and sisters, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and even still in Iraq are being slaughtered from the sky by American drones. If the world will not listen, then we must make it listen.’

  Tiwana then fell to his knees, and tossed his spectacles to the floor. Beads of sweat stood out on his furrowed brow, and on the sparse stubble of his head. In a strained and emotional voice he cried out a supplication: ‘Oh my sustainer! Grant me victory and do not give anyone victory over me. Devise plans in my favour and do not allow the plans of anyone to work against me. Guide me and make guidance easy for me. Help me against those who oppress me. O my Sustainer! Make me such that I remember You abundantly, that I am ever grateful to You, that I am ever fearful of You, that I am ever submissive to You, that I am ever obedient to You, that I find solace from You alone, that I turn my attention to You alone, and alone that I turn to You.’ He leaned back as far as he could and cried out ‘ALLAHU AKHBAR!’.

  Though this time Cantara knew what to expect, she still felt a wave of energy and power surge through her at the crescendo of Tiwana’s address. She stood, almost breathless, and watched this little ball of charismatic power waddle off the dais, and ushered by the musallah’s own imam, go into a private office.

  ‘My God, wasn’t that something?’ said Zainab, who seemed to be trembling. ‘I’m ready for my suicide vest right now.’ She immediately put her hand over her mouth, and giggled conspiratorially, as if she’d done nothing more serious than belch. Cantara stared at Zainab, dumbstruck by the implications of her joke. Is this what she thinks? Is this what she believes I feel too? Cantara glanced at Rifat. He too was looking at Zainab, but he had a completely different expression, almost stony in its seriousness. From the corner of her eye she had seen him raise his finger to his lips, as if to say to Zainab: this is our secret, keep it quiet.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  London

  July 2010

  Rifat was nervously pacing around his father’s apartment. It was midnight and his hands were hurting, as they often did when he became excited. He kneaded them gently, trying to ease the tingling pain. He had just stumbled across something incredibly exciting on Wyrecliffe’s computer, a confidential BBC e-mail.

  STRICT EMBARGO – NO NEWS REFERENCE UNTIL MIDNIGHT GMT 31 Dec 2010

  Restrict circulation

  Colleagues,

  State Department sources unattributably confirm long-awaited UN Middle East peace conference agreed Feb 11-15, 2011 – location shortlist now Aqaba or Sharm el-Sheikh (Jerusalem dropped). Please find attached updated conference logistics plan, and begin resourcing as required. NB this information released for logistical assistance reasons only.

  Rgds

  William

  Wyrecliffe hadn’t been on the original circulation list, but it had been forwarded to him by Gerald Monaghan, the Middle East editor, with the single line message above

  Mid East career opportunity?

  G

  For Al Qaeda, it was dynamite. To know, seven months in advance, that global leaders would be converging on one of two Middle eastern resorts gave them every chance of planning a spectacular operation to disrupt it. Rifat was convinced this would be a far better ten-year anniversary project for 9/11 than trying to replicate an attack on New York, which Yemen had originally been working on.

  He logged into the secure e-mail he shared with Yemen. He opened the latest saved draft, and beneath the page-long spam-type text that was always there to fool casual viewers, pasted a message in, with a suggestion that this could be the operation they had been waiting for. Now, all he had to do was wait for a reply.

  * * *

  Cantara was confused by the messages she was picking up from Rifat and Zainab, when they had exchanged that knowing glance. It struck her with force that they must know each other quite well. Neither of them had ever mentioned it to her, even though she had written acres of e-mail to Rifat about her new and bubbly room-mate, and likewise told Zainab about her Saudi friend. Rifat, she had admitted, was the man who had brought her back from the wilderness and into the arms of Islam. Now she wasn’t sure what to think.

  She had little time to mull it over, because later that evening, Bram came to see her in her room. Bram Malik was normally one the calmest and most thoughtful of all the musallah residents. Yet tonight he looked slightly distracted, excited even. His brown eyes seemed wide with possibilities, a smile never far from his lips as he paced around. She made him some tea, and had to ask him twice to sit down on the room’s one easy chair before he did so. She placed herself opposite him on the bed. It was obvious Bram had something important to say.

  ‘Dr Khan says you seemed quite distracted in classes today.’

  ‘I know. I stumbled over one or two suras. I wasn’t concentrating. I did apologise.’

  ‘You have seemed restless since the Jordan trip. When was it, a week ago or so?’

  Cantara smiled. ‘Nine days. Yes, I haven’t really settled down from the excitement. Learning text by heart seems a little boring by comparison.’

  ‘Well, I have some good news. I know you have wanted to spread your wings a little. So you are going to do some travelling for us again. Something important.’

  ‘Really? That’s good news. Where will I be going?’

  Bram paused, then gave her a little smile. ‘I don’t know the details. It’s something that Rifat is organising. But I can tell you one thing, if you absolutely promise not to breathe a word to anyone. I can tell you where the first leg of your journey takes you.’ The intensity of his look was almost alarming.

  ‘I promise,’ Cantara said.

  ‘Cairo,’ he whispered. ‘You’re going to fly to Cairo. In November.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Hammersmith Hospital, West London

  July 2010

  Qaladar Tanoli was washing his hands when the call came. He had already rubbed anti-bacterial surgical solution around his hands, between his fingers, into his wrists, up almost to his elbows and was just about to finish off with a single use brush to get under his finely-pared nails. A process undertaken many times a day, and second nature to all clinicians, but never to be taken lightly. Then the vibration in his tunic breast pocket.

  Always the way. Important calls always come just when you are getting ready to operate. In truth, he should have had his mobile switched off at this stage, with a cardiac patient already being prepared for theatre, but this was a call he had been expecting. A very important call. A worrying call. But there was no one present who would dare reproach him for taking it. Mr Tanoli was a consultant cardiologist at Hammersmith Hospital’s National Pulmonary and Hypertension Service, and like all consultants demanded and received respect. Tall, lean and narrow-shouldered, with a swept-back wave of dark hair and a sharp hooked nose, he had the intensity of an eagle focused on prey. He looked like he knew what he was doing. In control. Capable, calm, confident.

  If only they knew what he felt like now.

  On the fifth ring, the last before it would go into voicemail, the surgeon plucked out the phone with an antiseptic wipe and answered it, tersely barking out his surname.

  ‘Mr Tanoli, be in the Muslim worship centre at 9.15am on Wednesday,’ the voice said.

  ‘Tomorrow? I have three operations scheduled.’

  ‘Cancel them.’ The caller hung up.

  Ta
noli replaced the phone, and then sprayed some surgical solution on his hand, carefully wiping each finger as if the taint of the message could somehow be eradicated. He wasn’t used to being told what to do. But from the message passed to him by the imam at his own mosque, he thought it would be foolish not to take this seriously. So having tried unsuccessfully to find someone else to take his place in cardiac theatre that day, he did reschedule the three operations.

  * * *

  Tanoli left his home in suburban East London a little earlier than usual that Wednesday. He walked to Gants Hill tube station, and boarded a crowded Central Line train, as usual, that rattled its way through central London and out into the fading western suburbs of Acton. Normally, he would get off at East Acton and walk back along Du Cane Road, and past the notorious Wormwood Scrubs Prison, with its Victorian battlements capped with razor wire, and its dozens of CCTV cameras. Hammersmith Hospital was right next door, and it was the quickest route. But today he didn’t want to walk past the jail. He didn’t want to be reminded of the brooding weight of British justice that might one day catch up with him, if his suspicions of the danger posed to him were accurate. Instead, he got off at White City, a stop early, and walked past the BBC TV centre, then past the newer buildings in parkland which were the home of the BBC Trust, guardians of the state-run broadcaster’s conscience. The attractive young media women, plugged into iPods, or texting as they walked, were a welcome distraction from the worries ahead.

  He entered the hospital’s main reception area, as normal, and took the south corridor. But instead of turning left and taking the lift to the second floor cardiac unit, he carried on, heading towards the postgraduate teaching facility of Imperial College, a newer set of buildings at the rear of the hospital. Just before the end, he turned right through a set of firedoors. These opened into a narrow courtyard surrounded by high Victorian outbuildings, an area often used, illicitly, by staff desperate for a smoke. To reach the worship centre, he recalled, you had to climb a red-painted fire escape into a wood-clad 1950s building.

  While most NHS hospitals had a prayer room of vaguely Christian configuration, Muslims working in or visiting British hospitals normally had to use some bland ‘shared worship area’ a catch-all minority facility devoid of anything specific to any one faith. Hammersmith Hospital was different. Tanoli didn’t normally pray while at work, and on the one occasion when he had tried to attend Friday prayers, had found the worship centre crowded. While some worshippers were reading quietly, others were making mobile phone calls or holding loud conversations. There were many men there but no women, and some were dressed as if they had just stepped out of the bazaar in Lahore. He didn’t know a single person. He doubted that many of them were in truth employed by the NHS at all.

  Today, though, the centre looked quiet. It was 9.10am. After passing a paramedic and a workman finishing off their roll-ups, he ascended the stairs, his feet clanging out his arrival on the rusting metal. The door was unlocked, and he stepped inside, finding only one other pair of shoes on the rack. They were a pair of well-polished black brogues. The prayer room was deserted, and for the first time he noticed its green carpet laid obliquely, so the woven minarets pointed south-east to Mecca. The surgeon felt he was being watched, and turned around. A young Arabic man, smartly dressed in a suit and raincoat was looking at him, and beckoned him into a smaller room at the end, one normally reserved for women’s prayer.

  The young man was wearing black leather gloves. Tanoli introduced himself, but the young man declined to give his name. He ignored the proffered handshake, but instead fixed him with a steady stare, and asked him, no, he told him to sit down. Dr Tanoli, unused to being ordered around in his own hospital, sat cross-legged on the floor. Perhaps he had a premonition of what was to happen next.

  Over the next fifteen minutes the young man described with incredible accuracy parts of Tanoli’s past in Pakistan. These were not only his past as an Islamic agitator, who had been arrested in Islamabad in his youth. Anyone could have found that out. No, there were real secrets, events that Tanoli found shameful and which he thought would be unknown to anyone here in the UK. Tanoli denied the accusations. The young man nodded, and then withdrew from his briefcase a sheaf of photocopies. They were copies of documents that proved the lies Tanoli had lived. These facts, long buried, would destroy Tanoli’s career and perhaps his entire life in Britain. They couldn’t be allowed to come out. Then the young man said that there was no reason they should. Just as long as Tanoli understood his religious duty to put his life on a path consonant with the wishes of God.

  At first Tanoli thought he was being asked to pray more often. But then the young man said what he really wanted. Surgery. Just a minor procedure, with which the young man said he knew the doctor was familiar. The fitting of a heart pacemaker, plus an ancillary device. For a special patient whose name he would never know. The existence of the operation would be totally secret. The venue, equipment and all support staff would be arranged for him. And at the end there would be money. Rather a lot of money. Enough to pay the surgeon’s substantial debts. But only so long as he kept his mouth shut.

  * * *

  Rifat sat in his bedroom at his father’s London flat. He was wearing disposable vinyl gloves and staring intently at a Nokia mobile phone under the harsh light of a jeweller’s lamp. He was out of practice at building bombs, so relished the chance for this very important one.

  First he turned the phone on then typed in *#3700*. This code accessed the firmware which closed down a series of the most power-hungry facilities in the Nokia. The only functions required were the SIM card, the GPS chip, and silent mode. Once the screen was removed too, that would extend the battery life from just a few days to six months. He also set the phone to only vibrate when a call came in from a pre-determined number. That was his own Blackberry, the trigger phone.

  He undid the tiny screws with a jeweller’s screwdriver, removed the screen, separated out the motherboard, and found the vibration cylinder in the top left corner. The cylinder powers the vibrations on silent mode. He soldered two tiny leads onto the connectors. Using tweezers, he connected a tiny glass tube of lead azide, smaller than a pencil-top eraser, which had electrical contacts at each end. The bottom end of the tube he connected with a fine wire to the phone battery. A second wire from the phone battery was connected to the negative lead of the vibrator cylinder. The detonator was now assembled. Now for the explosive.

  From a foil bag, he took a handful of what looked like light brown modelling clay. He broke off a fist-sized lump, setting it on a digital scale. When it read exactly two hundred grams, he picked it up and moulded it into the shell of the phone. He then took the base shell from a second identical Nokia and fixed it over the top. This black pod was now somewhat thicker than a normal mobile phone, and weighed in at two hundred and seventy two grams, about the same as a pack of butter. He put it on his table top and admired it. Compact, sleek and deadly. A bomb that was truly undetectable. A bomb that could be triggered from the other side of the world. Al Qaeda’s very own drone.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Eight o’clock on a dull wet evening. Though it wasn’t dark outside, there were candles burning in the cosy bedroom which Zainab and Cantara shared. Zainab was sitting on the bed, brushing Cantara’s hair while she sat cross-legged on the floor. They were listening to Capital Radio, but the music was turned down low. It was one of Zainab’s abiding weaknesses that she liked to listen to pop music, even though it was frowned upon in the musallah. Dr Khan hadn’t banned it as such, but had warned that popular western songs filled the heads of the young with immoral ideas and material aspirations. ‘These are not ideas consonant with Islam,’ he had said, a favourite phrase of his. ‘They are ephemera, seducing and twisting the mind with daydreams.’

  Zainab had nodded in agreement, and was very careful about her listening from then on. She had concealed her MP3 player and only listened in secret on earphones. But she soon found a par
tner in crime with Cantara, who seemed to enjoy the illicit feeling of minor rebellion as much as she enjoyed any kind of cheerful pop.

  The Palestinian woman’s dark curling tresses were so thick and lustrous. As Zainab slid the brush through, she envied the smooth silky weight of Arab hair. Her own naturally mousy hair, wiry and unmanageable had been the bane of her life since she was a child. That is why she had dyed it green. However, there were some things she could show Cantara that perhaps she hadn’t seen before. Zainab gradually pulled and fixed Cantara’s hair into an unruly ponytail.

  ‘Hang on a mo,’ she said, getting up and rummaging in a drawer. ‘I’m sure I’ve got a shabasa khaleeji hair clip somewhere.’ She found the ruffed hairclip, designed to give hair extra body, and clipped it onto the back of Cantara’s ponytail.

  ‘I’m going to be a khaleeji girl,’ Cantara giggled.

  Zainab opened the wardrobe door, which had a full length mirror on the inside – another female frippery frowned upon by the imam – and angled it so Cantara could see herself. She next took a wide ribbed black headband, much wider than a make-up band, and pulled it across Cantara’s head and down past her hair, before reversing it back so that it sat just under her hairline from forehead to neck.

  Cantara was moving her arms up and down and singing with the radio until Zainab forced her to sit still. She elongated the ribbed headband, stretching it back over the khaleeji clip. It extended the line of her skull behind and upwards, and made her coffee-coloured neck look even more delicate and poised.

  ‘You look like an Egyptian queen’, Zainab said. ‘Just wait until I do the make-up!’ Zainab took a plain black hijab, known as a sheila, and made a clean edge under the left side of Cantara’s neck, folded it over the top of her hair, and pulled it right around and under her neck, securing it in place at her throat with a special hijab safety pin. The final fold, to make sure the back of the neck was covered, took an edge from the tip of her shoulder, under the back and was secured with a long pin. Zainab then rummaged for another hijab, but Cantara had other ideas. ‘No, I’ve got a crinkle hijab,’ she said, waving excitedly towards her wardrobe. ‘It’s a lovely purple one, with white flowers.’