Empire State

by Henry Porter

  She flipped through the list once more, making notes and adding to a chart she’d begun on a large sheet of drawing paper bought from a shop in Victoria that afternoon. A series of names plus lines and arrows and several brief sentences were written in her neat hand. She knew the diagram didn’t add up to much, but she found it a useful way of working through a problem, putting a thought down, discarding it and moving on. On her desk were two packets of sandwiches, a piece of fruit cake wrapped in cellophane, a bottle of water, a banana and a bar of chocolate - not a feast considering the quantities of food she put away during periods of concentration. She ate one of the sandwiches distractedly and turned to the papers propped against her computer screen and on the floor around her feet. These were printouts of web pages showing the landing and take-off times for planes that passed through Terminal Three the day before - a timetable that varied considerably from the published schedules, she noted.

  She didn’t expect to prove anything conclusively; it would be enough to show that Rahe’s disappearance was important, though he clearly had no role in the shooting of Norquist. She now knew for certain that he had not got off KU102 in Kuwait. Half an hour before, a clear head-shot had arrived of the man travelling on Rahe’s passport, taken in Kuwait City airport before the individual flew on to the United Arab Emirates. By this time he had disposed of Rahe’s clothes and adopted the local white jellabah. However, the Kuwaiti Intelligence service, al-Mukhabarat, were certain it was the stand-in.

  She emailed the picture to Heathrow security and asked them to go through CCTV film to see if he’d come from London or arrived on another flight. Her belief was that he’d flown into Heathrow that morning, which was why she was trying to match possible suspects’ names with passengers who had ended up in Terminal Three, a forlorn task if ever there was one. Still, she liked the solitary purpose of working late and was buoyed by the idea that while the rest of the Secret Intelligence Service was absorbed by muffled agony over the killing of Norquist, she was at least making some positive steps to unravel the events at the airport.

  As she talked on the phone to a security officer named George, she looked out of the window and into the streams of traffic moving along the north bank of the Thames. Her focus drew nearer, to her reflection in the window, which she examined without reproof or anxiety. She looked good for thirty-two, although the lights made her appear haggard and - God - she had to get some new clothes!

  George still had nothing for her. She put the phone down and went back to the watch list, thinking that Manila was the perfect place for the stand-in to embark. Just then she noticed a movement behind the glass panel in the office wall and saw Richard Spelling, deputy head of MI6, and his side-kick, Harry Cecil.

  Before she had time to compose herself or her desk, Spelling was inside the door. ‘Mr Cecil here says you’ve got something good.’

  ‘That would be a bit premature of Mr Cecil,’ she said, smiling at Cecil without affection.

  ‘Well, you must have something if you’ve been asking favours of our friends in Kuwait City.’

  ‘I was checking on the man who took Rahe’s place on the Kuwait flight. As you know, I told Thames House yesterday afternoon, but I think they’re rather tied up at the moment and nobody has got back to me about it. So I thought I’d do some ground work.’ This was weak. She knew she was going way beyond her role of walk-on part in the surveillance of Rahe.

  Spelling sat down on the other side of her desk and indicated to Cecil that he was dismissed. ‘I’ll say the Security Services are tied up!’ he said.

  Herrick cautioned herself not to say too much. She nodded.

  ‘It doesn’t get much worse than the President’s special envoy being killed before his meeting with the Prime Minister. I mean, how bad does that make us look?’ He gave her a despairing look and then exhaled heavily, which caused his lips to vibrate. She didn’t like Spelling, his punchy name-dropping manner or the managerial style that someone had described as exultant decisiveness. Around the building it was said that his intelligence was sharp rather than deep and that he had none of the incorruptibility, shrewdness or ease of the outgoing Chief, Sir Robin Teckman. Spelling had won the appointment as a moderniser. There was much talk of horizontal management structures and the flow of ideas between different levels, but the evidence pointed to the opposite leaning. He was a hierarchical bureaucrat pretending to be a general.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ he asked. ‘The shooting, I mean.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been pretty busy today. I haven’t had time to catch up with the people I was working with yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but you have a view. You must wonder.’

  ‘Yes, I wonder why Admiral Norquist was on a scheduled flight and there was no security prepared and ready to meet him. It all seems a bit slapdash.’

  ‘And further down the time line…?’

  Time line was a typical Spelling phrase. ‘You mean later on - when the shooting occurred?’ She put it as neutrally as possible. ‘It looks pretty confused.’ ‘Yes, it was certainly that.’

  She remained silent. It was still his call.

  ‘And you don’t have any theories about where that bullet came from?’

  ‘Nothing apart from what I’ve read. I imagine they’ll know if they retrieved it from his body.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think that will happen.’

  ‘So there was an exit wound. I didn’t notice that mentioned in the papers. They said it was lodged in his spine.’

  ‘They tend not to publish too much of that sort of thing - it’s distressing for the family.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, understanding that there would be no official revision of the story. Norquist had been ‘assassinated’ in an operation involving a pair of young men, traced by the registration of one of the vans to the Pakistani communities in the Midlands, and the truck driver, who was also believed to be of Asian origin. With the two men dead and the driver still missing after an escape through the undergrowth along the railway embankment, the British media happily accepted the theory of a carefully coordinated plan. The enthusiasm for this account had not been dampened by the fact that no detonator had been found attached to the drums of petrol on the lorry.

  His eyes scanned her desk. He reached forward and turned one of the Terminal Three schedules towards him. ‘Now, tell me what you’re doing here, Isis.’

  ‘I’m trying to see what Rahe’s likely destination was yesterday. ’

  ‘Any ID on the man who took his place?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Could you write a side of theory backed up by a few facts? The Chief’s very interested in what happened out at Heathrow.’

  She hesitated.‘You want a report on this? It’s all very preliminary…’

  ‘By tomorrow then. If you need help, Sarre and Dolph are around. Tell them this is for me and the Chief.’ He made for the door, but before he reached it, stopped. ‘And in your report, leave out all mention of the shooting. Just focus on the contemporaneous events at Heathrow. That’s what interests us.’

  Herrick went back to the airline schedules. Out of seventy-two flights to land between 5.55 a.m. and 1.45 p.m., fifty-one had come from the United States or Canada, which she excluded for the moment because of the heightened airport security and emigration watches in North America. The remaining twenty-one flights came from places such as Abu Dhabi, Dhaka, Johannesburg, Beirut and Tehran, cities where controls were far less stringent. She guessed that most of the aircraft were wide-bodied jets, carrying an average of two hundred passengers, which meant that around four thousand people had landed at Heathrow that morning. It would be an enormous task to search all the flights for a man matching the picture, and to establish what had happened to Rahe.

  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 couldn’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 t
o 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.