First Response

by Stephen Leather

  ‘We’ll keep it within SO15 at the moment,’ said Gillard. ‘We’ll need to run a check on all Asian men who went missing over the past forty-eight hours, obviously.’ He took a long drag on his cigarette and blew more smoke towards the Thames. ‘I’m knackered, Mo.’

  ‘It’s been a long day.’

  ‘Yeah, we should call it a night. Start fresh in the morning.’

  ‘What about the men we’re holding?’

  ‘We have to let them go home,’ said the chief superintendent.

  ‘It might be helpful to keep them here overnight.’

  ‘In a perfect world, sure. But we know they were forced to wear those vests. They’re victims in this, and if we start to make it look as if they were anything but victims we run the risk of being seen as heavy-handed. We don’t want anyone alleging that we’re keeping them in custody because they’re Asian men with beards. A couple of them have already tried to play the race card.’ He took another drag on his cigarette. ‘No, we let them go home. But we keep them under observation, for the time being at least. Our main aim now is to find the location of that warehouse, to identify the victim and, of course, to track down Shahid. I don’t understand why he never got back to you.’

  ‘Maybe something happened that we’re not aware of,’ said Kamran.

  Gillard smiled tightly. ‘Wouldn’t it be ironic if he got hit by a bus?’

  ‘There has to be some reason he hasn’t called,’ said Kamran. ‘He’d won. He’d got what he wanted. The prisoners were at the airport. So far as he knew, there was a plane there ready to fly them out. Why didn’t he follow through?’

  ‘Maybe he realised we were calling his bluff,’ said Gillard. ‘He knew we were about to send in the SAS and that would mean game over. The vests were fake so once we called his bluff he was out of options.’

  ‘But why didn’t he use real explosives?’ asked Kamran. ‘He obviously had the real thing because he killed the guy in the warehouse. How come that vest was real and the rest weren’t? None of this makes any sense.’

  ‘Go home and sleep on it,’ said Gillard. ‘I’ll tie things up here and see you first thing. And make sure you keep your mobile with you, just in case Shahid does call back.’ He patted Kamran on the shoulder. ‘You did bloody good work today, Mo. You should be proud.’

  Kamran smiled at the compliment, but he wasn’t sure it was merited. He felt that somehow he’d been out-manoeuvred, that Shahid had got exactly what he wanted. The problem was, for the life of him Kamran couldn’t work out what that was.

  BAYSWATER (11.35 p.m.)

  ‘There you go, Mr Ahmed,’ said the female constable in the passenger seat in front of him. ‘I’m sorry about the clothes. You’ll get them back eventually.’

  ‘That’s okay. I’m just glad to be home,’ said Ahmed. He climbed out of the car. He was holding a small plastic bag containing his wallet, mobile phone, spare change and keys. A woman with several carrier bags stared at him as she walked by, frowning. He knew how strange he looked in the paper suit and paper shoes, but the police had explained they needed all his clothing as evidence.

  He let himself into the building and went up the stairs to his second-floor studio flat. Once inside he made himself a mug of tea, then spent the next hour carefully wiping down every surface in the flat, taking particular care to clean every knob, handle and switch he had touched. He used disposable cloths and placed the used ones in a black rubbish bag. When he was satisfied, he stripped off his paper suit, put it with the disposable shoes into the rubbish bag, and went into the cramped bathroom.

  He stood in front of the mirror and stared at his reflection for several seconds. He had hated the beard from the start, but it had been necessary. He used a pair of scissors to hack away most of the facial hair then took a can of shaving foam and a Gillette razor and shaved off the rest.

  He showered and changed into brand new clothes he’d bought a week earlier. Then he placed all of his old clothes in the black rubbish bags. Also into the bags went anything that identified him as Zach Ahmed. That wasn’t his real name: it was an identity he’d carefully cultivated over the past two years. His real name was Daniel Khan.

  He peered out of the window and saw the police car parked across the road. The two officers had bought coffees from one of the all-night cafés and were sipping them as they chatted.

  He had a large nylon kitbag under his bed and pushed the rubbish bags into it, then zipped it up. He went around the flat one last time, checking he hadn’t forgotten anything, then headed downstairs. One of the reasons Daniel had rented the flat in Bayswater was that it had a way out through a small backyard where the rubbish bins were stored. He locked the flat and went downstairs, out of the back door to the yard and through a wooden gate into the alley that ran behind the terrace.

  He caught a black cab in Queensway and had the driver drop him at Victoria station. He caught a second cab to south London and got out in Peckham. He walked for a good ten minutes with the kitbag, doubling back several times to reassure himself that he wasn’t being followed.

  The warehouse had a for-sale sign over its door. It had been on the market for more than two years but planning restrictions meant it was proving difficult to sell. There was a chain-link fence running around it and the surrounding yard. The gate was unlocked and he walked through and around to the rear of the building where there was a delivery bay and a metal shutter that had been raised. He went inside.

  The nine chairs were still standing in a circle. Shahid had taken off his ski mask and overalls and was wearing a pink polo shirt and faded blue jeans. He was taking the SIM card out of a phone as Daniel walked in. He grinned. ‘Hello, bruv.’

  Daniel dropped his bag and hugged his brother. Adam Khan was three years older than Daniel but they were often mistaken for twins. ‘Did you get the money?’ asked Daniel, as he stepped back.

  ‘Of course. All five million.’

  Daniel punched the air. ‘Fucking ace.’

  ‘I had it collected and put into the banking system. I’ll move it around a bit but it’s pretty much untraceable already. And you got the recording?’

  Daniel pulled his mobile phone out of his back pocket. ‘The quality’s great. You can hear every word.’

  ‘And the cops didn’t examine it?’

  ‘They took the other phone but I told them this was my personal one and they let me keep it.’

  ‘How did the interrogation go?’

  ‘Piece of cake. But there’s something you need to know. The guy you sent to Tavistock Square? He was a cop.’

  Adam’s jaw dropped. ‘No fucking way.’

  ‘Undercover with the NCA. We thought he was a paedo but he was undercover.’

  ‘Fuck me, he looked the part.’

  Daniel grinned. ‘Any Asian with a beard is a paedo or a jihadist? That’s racial profiling, bruv. But once he told them what had happened here, they had to believe him. And us.’

  Adam shook his head. ‘Shit, that’s not good. We went to a lot of trouble making sure they were bad. If not potential jihadists, at least they were criminals.’

  ‘He was good at his job, that’s for sure,’ said Daniel. ‘He looked as if he was part of that gang.’

  ‘We were lucky he wasn’t hurt,’ said Adam.

  ‘The plan was never for anyone to get hurt,’ said Daniel. ‘The only way he’d have got hurt is if the cops had overreacted. But, yeah, we were lucky.’

  The two men embraced again. ‘Time to move,’ said Adam. ‘I cleaned up the body.’

  Daniel laughed and went to look behind the screen. ‘It worked a fucking treat, didn’t it? They shat themselves.’

  ‘It looked real, all right,’ said Adam. ‘That bit of leg sticking out of the trainer was the clincher.’

  ‘Bog-standard special effects,’ said Daniel. ‘Shows you my degree wasn’t a total waste of money.’ He nodded at the kitbag. ‘The stuff in there needs burning.’

  ‘Put it in the car with the rest of
the rubbish.’ He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘I’m looking forward to getting back to the real world.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Daniel.

  SCOTLAND YARD, VICTORIA EMBANKMENT (the next day)

  Kamran’s secretary put a mug of coffee on his desk, with a folder containing mail to be signed. He thanked her, picked up his pen and signed the letters one after another. When he’d finished he looked at the whiteboard on the wall to his right. He had fixed eighteen photographs to it. The top row were the surveillance photographs of the nine men wearing the suicide vests. Below them were the nine hostages. All had now been released and were back home with their families. The hunt for Shahid had been passed onto MI5 and GCHQ as there was virtually nothing that the police could do. They had no description or intel of any sort. All they had was his voice. So far GCHQ hadn’t been able to come up with a match, and neither had their American counterparts, the National Security Agency. It was a mystery, and so far as Kamran could see, it was destined to remain that way.

  He picked up his mug of coffee and stood up, his back aching from the two hours he’d spent at his desk. He walked over to the whiteboard and sipped his coffee as he studied the top row of photographs. All nine had told the same story, pretty much. Abducted, masked and hooded, a suicide vest put on them, covered with a raincoat. A waistpack with a phone and written instructions as to what they were to do. The men had seemingly been chosen at random, other than that they were all Muslims. Eight of Pakistani origin, one Somalian. Cleanskins, more or less. Not one considered a threat to the state. The picture of Zach Ahmed was the only one not taken as a close-up. Ahmed had refused to co-operate: he hadn’t wanted to be photographed and had refused to give his fingerprints or a DNA sample. The picture on the whiteboard was the one that had been taken by the bomb-disposal officer through the window of the coffee shop.

  He lowered his gaze and looked at the hostages. Another nine people, again seemingly chosen at random. Wrong place, wrong time. Except for Roger Metcalfe, the MP. He’d obviously been chosen because of who he was. He peered at the photograph of Mohammed Al-Khalifa, the man taken hostage at the coffee bar in Marble Arch. He frowned as he stared at the photograph. Something wasn’t right but he couldn’t quite place it. He scratched the side of his face as he stared at the photograph, then back at the one of Zach Ahmed. His frown deepened. He called through to his secretary in the outer office. ‘Amy, see if you can track down Kashif Talpur with the National Crime Agency. Ask him to come in as a matter of urgency.’

  Two hours later, Amy showed Talpur into Kamran’s office. At first Kamran didn’t recognise the man: he’d shaved off his beard, cut his hair short and was wearing a dark pinstripe suit and a red-and-black-striped tie. ‘You’ve certainly changed your appearance since we last met,’ said Kamran, waving Talpur to a chair.

  ‘What happened blew my cover on the drugs operation, obviously,’ said Talpur. ‘In fact, it’s pretty much blown me for undercover work ever again. They’re deciding where to use me next as we speak.’ He shrugged. ‘Probably for the best. Undercover work takes it out of you and plays havoc with your private life.’

  ‘Do you want a coffee, water, anything?’

  ‘I’m fine, sir. Just a little confused.’ He gestured at the whiteboard. ‘I thought MI5 were handling the case now.’

  ‘They are. But SO15 is still involved and I had a thought or two that I wanted to run by you before I talk to Chief Superintendent Gillard. The day it all happened. Your instructions were to take a hostage, correct?’

  Talpur nodded.

  ‘Any hostage? Or a particular one?’

  ‘Shahid said that as soon as I got on the bus I was to grab the nearest person. He said the driver was behind a screen so I should ignore him and just get the closest passenger. I grabbed a woman. With hindsight I should maybe have gone for a male but I wasn’t thinking too clearly at the time.’

  ‘And was there a key? For the handcuffs?’

  Talpur shook his head.

  ‘We didn’t find one in the waistpack he gave you to wear, but I wondered if you had had a key and it was lost or thrown away.’

  Talpur shook his head again. ‘There was no key.’

  ‘So if you’d had a change of heart at the time and wanted to swap the woman hostage for a man, you couldn’t have done?’

  ‘I’m confused, sir.’

  ‘I’m sorry, just humour me for a little while longer. You couldn’t have changed your hostage, once you’d made your choice?’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  Talpur frowned as the superintendent walked over to the whiteboard and pulled off two photographs. He sat down again and pushed one of the photographs across the desk. It was of the hostage-taking at the coffee shop in Marble Arch, the shot taken by the bomb-disposal officer through the newspaper-covered window. The bearded Asian man in the vest could be seen close up, and behind him was half the face of his hostage. ‘This was the bomber in Marble Arch,’ said Kamran. He smiled ruefully. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t be calling him a bomber, should I? His name was Zach Ahmed.’ He pushed the second photograph across the desk. ‘This is a photograph of the hostage, taken after you were all off the coach. His name is Mohammed Al-Khalifa, an asylum-seeker from Sudan.’

  Talpur stared at the two photographs. He nodded but had absolutely no idea what the superintendent was getting at.

  ‘If you look at the photograph of Mr Ahmed, standing just behind him is his hostage. And if you look carefully, you’ll see that it is most definitely not Mr Al-Khalifa.’

  Talpur picked up the two pictures and looked at them in turn. The superintendent was right. The man in the picture taken through the window was in his early twenties. The head-and-shoulders shot taken afterwards was of a man in his forties. ‘He switched hostages,’ said Talpur.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ said Kamran. ‘But how could he have done that unless he had a key? And why did he have a key and you didn’t? In fact, keys weren’t discovered on any of the bombers.’ He grimaced. ‘There I go again. I really must stop doing that. But you hear what I’m saying. There were no keys. But clearly Mr Ahmed had access to one.’

  Talpur put down the photographs. ‘Why would he change hostages? Like I said, I could imagine swapping a man for a woman, but why swap a younger man for an older one?’

  ‘How about we go and ask him ourselves?’ said Kamran. ‘Are you free?’

  Talpur nodded enthusiastically. ‘Hell, yeah.’ He grinned. ‘Sir,’ he added.

  BAYSWATER

  According to the statement taken by Chief Superintendent Gillard, Zach Ahmed was a security guard. He had worked for a north London firm for the past year. Prior to that he’d worked as a security guard in Leicester. He was British born of Pakistani parents. He’d never been in trouble with the police, never even had a speeding or parking ticket. He lived in a block of flats in a road close to Bayswater Tube station in a four-storey terraced house that in the distant past had been home to a single wealthy family and their staff but, decades ago, had been converted into more than a dozen studio flats.

  Kamran’s driver dropped them outside the building and went off in search of a place to park. There was an intercom to the left of black doors with fourteen buttons, each with a handwritten number on it. Kamran rang Zach Ahmed’s bell several times but there was no answer. On one of the buttons was the word ‘CARETAKER’. Kamran pressed it and eventually a man growled, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Police,’ said Kamran. ‘Can you come to the door, please?’

  A minute or so later a black man with greying hair and thick-lensed spectacles was standing in front of them. He was short and squinted up at the two policemen. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked.

  Kamran and Talpur showed him their warrant cards. ‘Do you know the tenant in number six? Zach Ahmed?’

  The caretaker shook his head. ‘People come and go. I don’t know all their names.’

  ‘I’m not getting any answer from his bell.’

  �
�Maybe he’s not in,’ said the caretaker. Kamran wasn’t sure if the man was being sarcastic or matter-of-fact.

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  The caretaker screwed up his face. ‘I’m not even sure what he looked like, to be honest.’

  Kamran took out a photograph of Zach Ahmed and showed it to the caretaker. The man nodded. ‘Ah, Mr Taliban.’

  ‘Mr Taliban?’

  The caretaker handed the photograph back. ‘You know, with that beard. He looks like a terrorist. No offence.’

  Kamran frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he’s Asian, right? I didn’t mean to say that all Asians are Al-Qaeda.’

  ‘Just the ones with beards, right?’ said Talpur.

  The caretaker put up his hands. ‘I said, no offence.’

  ‘None taken,’ said Kamran, putting the photograph back in his jacket. ‘Do you have a spare key?’

  The caretaker nodded.

  ‘So how about you let us have a quick look at Mr Ahmed’s room?’

  The caretaker opened the door wide, suddenly eager to please. He took them up to the second floor and pulled a set of keys from a retractable chain on his belt. He unlocked the door and stepped aside.

  It took Kamran less than a minute to realise that Ahmed had gone, and that he’d cleaned up before he’d left. ‘The bird has flown.’ He sighed. ‘Fancy a coffee, Kash?’

  ‘I’d love one, sir.’

  They walked to Queensway and Talpur grabbed a table at the rear of a Costa Coffee while the superintendent ordered and paid. As Kamran stirred two sugars into his, he shook his head. ‘I doubt we’ll be seeing Mr Ahmed again. In fact, I doubt that’s his real name.’

  ‘He might just have moved to escape the press,’ said Talpur. ‘The newspapers and TV people have been all over the hostages and the guys forced to wear the vests. I’m hard to find but a lot of them have had press packs camped outside their houses.’

  Kamran sipped his coffee. ‘Let me ask you something, Kash. When they took the hood off your head in the warehouse, what did you see?’

  ‘Guys like me wearing ski masks and tied to chairs. All with suicide vests on.’