No, he shook his head. He’d been two days dry now, and found himself absurdly proud of such a small victory. Don’t blow it.
He turned to go back into the room, nearly running into a hotel maid as she moved down the corridor, pushing her cart before her. “Please, sir…I am sorry,” she exclaimed in broken English, a distinctively Slavic accent to her voice. Russian?
He started to turn away, then stopped, pulling his phone from his pocket and brushing his thumb across the screen until he brought up the picture of the prostitute who had accompanied the Shaikh into the hotel. “Excuse me,” he began, holding the phone out toward the maid. “Do you know this woman?”
11:45 A.M.
Middleton Park, outskirts of Leeds
North Yorkshire
Mobile number out of service. Tarik Abdul Muhammad looked down at the phone in his hand, a chill pervading his body. He glanced across the green of the park, spotting a young boy playing football with his father. A woman walking a dog.
There had been no detonation at Victoria Station, he thought, checking the phone’s browser once more. That much was certain.
The Jews might have had tight control over the world media, but there was no way even they could have prevented a bombing from leaking out onto the Internet.
And although the boy might have lost his courage, there was no way he possessed the skill to actually disarm the vest.
He could feel his heart begin to beat more rapidly, his eyes darting from one point of the park to the next. First the Security Service discovering his location at the hotel…now this.
Ya Allah. Taking one final look around, Tarik turned toward the woods, making his way hurriedly down one of the many trails. The phone seeming to burn a hole in his pocket.
Unable to escape the question repeating itself again and again in his mind: had it been a lie ever since the beginning? Was Arthur Colville setting them up?
12:38 P.M.
Thames House
London
The phone was still silent from the Home Secretary, Marsh thought—turning his attention briefly away from the ongoing television coverage of the march on Tower Hamlets, a haze of tear gas obscuring the cameras’ view as protesters clashed with police on horseback.
No matter. She would be calling soon enough and he had nothing to give her. Politicians tended not to be accepting of reality.
A knock at the door of his office and he looked up to see McCallum standing in doorway. “I need you to take a look at something, sir. We have fresh intel on the boy.”
“We confirmed his presence at the station off CCTV,” the section chief said when Marsh joined him on the operations centre floor a few minutes later. “And this…was uploaded to an Islamic State-affiliated web forum just forty-five minutes ago.”
His finger found the button of the remote and the video began to play, its shaky image showing a young man clad in a suicide vest standing before the black flag of jihad. His face easily recognizable, even through the low-resolution camera, as that of the teenager found in Leeds.
La illaha illa Allah, the DG mused ironically—recognizing the familiar lettering of the shahada. There is no God but God. But no…of course religion had nothing to do with this.
“…message to the kuffar that as you bomb, so will you be bombed,” the boy’s voice continued, trembling with nerves. “As you kill, so will you be killed. Enough is enough. The seeds of war which you have sown in Palestine, in Iraq, in Syria, now bearing fruit in your own streets. In your own homes…where you have felt secure in defiance of God and His laws. Where—”
“So, we’re dealing with the body of a martyr who didn’t reach his target,” Marsh observed dryly, raising his voice to talk over the audio. “Did they find a vest?”
The analyst shook his head. “No sign of one.”
None of this made sense, but then again, when had it ever? Not since the end of the Cold War at least, when all the rules had come crashing down along with the Wall. The uncomfortable détente of superpowers replaced by the chaos of a world gone mad.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Marsh grimaced, remembering only too well how that particular line of Henry V ended.
But the boy hadn’t finished, his voice growing higher as he stared into the camera. “…who will say that I abandoned my family, but for years I hid my faith, tried to be ‘normal’—and found only emptiness. Those who know me know that I have never been happier than I am now, more secure in the guarantee of Jannah. Truly was it said of the Prophet, every man will be with those he loves. My brothers are those who war in the cause of—”
“Look at this,” Norris interrupted from several feet over, an unusual urgency in the analyst’s voice. “The CCTV from Leeds Station…we’ve got a face.”
“Who is it?” Marsh asked, circling around the workstation until he could see Norris’ screen.
“Mehreen Crawford.”
8:29 A.M. Eastern Time
Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C.
The leadership, Coftey mused, casting a sidelong glance at his reflection in the mirror which hung on the far wall of his office. The early morning call from the Majority Whip hadn’t come entirely as a surprise, but he hadn’t expected it to be this soon.
Cahill was making his move. He paused, attempting to straighten his tie. That was the only explanation for it, the only thing that could necessitate such a meeting.
“Here, let me,” Melody said, brushing his hands aside as she stepped in close, fussing with his collar. “You’re nervous.”
“Am I?” he smiled indulgently, the smell of her perfume filling his nostrils as he looked down at her. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“You are such a terrible liar,” she whispered, suddenly pulling his tie tight. He winced, rubbing his throat.
“And you, well you’re actually rather pretty when you’re mad,” he responded, his hand wrapping around the back of her neck and pulling her in for a fierce, passionate kiss. Her body soft and yielding against his.
She pulled away after a moment, doing her best to frown at him and failing. “Are you sure you want to be wearing my lipstick when you walk into Fuentes’ office?”
“Why not?” he chuckled, turning for the door. “Might do the old girl some good.”
“Roy,” Katherine Fuentes greeted, not a trace of warmth to be found in her voice as she gestured toward the chair facing her desk, “sit down.”
The Majority Whip didn’t even look up at his entrance—as he took his seat. Just kept looking through the papers on her desk. Pausing at one point to adjust her glasses before continuing to read. A power play, as so much was with her. Making him wait.
Putting him in his place.
He smiled, leaning back in his chair as he waited silently for her to finish. Southern charm might have kept him in office for over three decades, but it wasn’t going to help him here. Not with her.
Fuentes had grown up in the barrios of Eastside Los Angeles, the daughter of an illegal immigrant mother and an absentee father who’d walked out of her life never to return when she was five.
She might have stayed there, found herself stuck behind the counter of a bodega—living from one paycheck to the next. More of a subsistence than a life. But Fuentes was nothing if not a fighter, and made of sterner stuff than her parents. She’d graduated from UC Berkely with a law degree at the age of twenty-seven and gone on to become a highly successful LA defense attorney before running for elected office, first in the California Assembly—then on the federal level, becoming the first Latina ever elected to the US Senate. And now, at the age of sixty-two, majority whip.
She hadn’t made it this far by being the kind of woman you crossed.
“I’m going to get straight to the point, Roy,” she said finally, closing the folder and looking up. Her eyes cold and hard as they met his. “It has come to the attention of leadership that you’re lobbying hard against the NSA legislation, attempting to use yo
ur influence to sway other senators to vote ‘no’ on the Senate’s version of the bill.”
He shrugged, his eyes never leaving her face. “I don’t think I’ve made any secret of my opposition.”
“It needs to end,” Fuentes replied, seeming to bristle at his tone. “Now. The moment you leave this room.”
Coftey shook his head. “I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen.”
She broke eye contact for a moment, flipping open a folder on the desk before her. “You have a bill coming to the floor next week, I believe. Further appropriations for disaster relief in Oklahoma in the wake of last fall’s devastating tornadoes.”
“That’s correct,” he replied, knowing all too well what was coming next. The way this game was played.
“You’ve been in the Senate a long time, Roy,” she said, adjusting her glasses once more as she looked up. “And you’ve always been a team player…until now. We can make sure that there’s more there than you asked for. You can be the hero again, just like you have been so many times over the years.”
The carrot and the stick. Her unspoken alternative, so nakedly obvious.
He smiled, shaking his head. “Or else it will die an untimely death? I’m sorry, Katherine, but I’m not so easily bought. People where I come from? If the government won’t help them, they’ll help each other. They’ll live.”
“Perhaps I’ve failed to make myself completely clear,” Fuentes said after a moment, clearing her throat. Her dark eyes meeting his in a steely, unwavering gaze. “The party is invested in the passage of this bill. You can either get onboard, or we will be finding a chairman who is.”
2:04 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time
MI-5 Regional Office
Leeds, West Yorkshire
“She’s known to the local police,” a woman’s voice announced and Roth looked up to see a middle-aged Security Service officer standing in the doorway. She walked forward, placing a folder on the desk he had commandeered upon his arrival in Leeds. “As might have been guessed, her name isn’t ‘Eve’. It’s Sarah Russell, a twenty-five-year-old native of Kent. She was first picked up for solicitation as part of a sting operation in 2011—someone paid the fine and back she goes. Two more arrests since, both went exactly the same way.”
It was a familiar story, Darren thought, idly opening the folder. Prostitution was legal in the UK—although not Northern Ireland as of recently—but soliciting for sex in a public place on the part of either prostitute or john was punishable by law. A piece of paper about the size of a brochure fell from the folder as he did so, landing face-down on the desk.
A “tart card”, he realized, turning it over to find a voluptuous brunette staring back at him. Not, he suspected, Sarah Russell—if experience was to be any judge.
“They’re up in phone booths all over the city,” the woman added, a slight air of disapproval about her, as if she had read his thoughts.
That too, was common—however anachronistic it might have seemed these days. “The police…do they know how to find her?”
She nodded. “They’re familiar with the areas she’s known to frequent—particularly at night.”
“Then have them pick her up.” They were grasping at straws at this point, but this woman was better than nothing. And according to Parker, the Shaikh was known to have a weakness for prostitutes.
A bit of intel the Americans might have been better off sharing a month earlier, in Darren’s opinion.
“On what charge?”
He waved a hand. “We’re dealing with a known tart. Tell them to get creative.”
5:45 P.M.
Thames House
London
Forty injured, a half dozen critically. That was the report out of Tower Hamlets in the wake of the afternoon’s march.
MacCallum shook his head, looking at the screens displaying BBC, Sky News, CNN…in any normal week those casualties would have headlined every evening broadcast.
Now they were barely even granted a passing mention, brushed over in favor of the unfolding horror out of Birmingham—a young mother who had taken the wrong turn into the middle of a riot. She had been dragged out of her car and beaten to death before her six-year-old’s eyes by what the BBC was euphemistically calling an “Asian street gang.”
He was getting far too old for all of this.
“Look at this,” came Norris’ urgent voice from a few workstations over.
“What do you have?”
The analyst gestured excitedly toward his computer screen. “I was going over the tapes from the bus station again…once the commotion starts, there’s a man who goes out the door right after the would-be bomber. As though he’s in pursuit. So I went back to see if I could find him earlier.”
“And?”
“And that man is all over that station in the hour leading up to the incident, once at Mehreen Crawford’s side—and they appear to speak for a moment. But not once does the camera capture his face. Not even a decent profile shot.”
“He’s had training.” That was the only reasonable conclusion you could draw from it. Any normal person would have been picked up a score of times in that window.
“He has,” Norris responded, using his mouse to bring up another window beside the first, “and something about it all seemed very familiar—so I went back and grabbed the CCTV from the Shaikh’s disappearance on the Leeds train platform. Remember the man who was always just there—right at the edge of the screen whenever he had to be looking toward the cameras, out of focus. Never a clear shot of his face?”
“I do,” MacCallum responded, feeling a cold fear begin to creep down his spine. The fear that he knew exactly where this was headed.
“I put the two CCTV feeds side by side and ran stride analytics on them. There’s not much room for doubt—it’s the same man.”
“So you’re saying…” No. It wasn’t possible.
The analyst nodded grimly. “I’m saying that Mehreen Crawford knew the man at the station that day with Tarik Abdul Muhammad—was perhaps even working with him. And chose not to tell us. Which means we have to consider the possibility that—”
“That she was the one who blew the op,” MacCallum finished for him, finding himself in disbelief. Denial. “Alerted the Shaikh. Deliberately…good God.”
6:57 P.M.
Leeds Central Police Station
West Yorkshire
“No,” Darren managed, finding his voice at last as he stared at the blank wall of his small office. Remembering the call from Mehreen, her insistence on obtaining the route information for Besimi’s transport. “That’s not possible.”
“I found it hard to believe myself,” came MacCallum’s voice from the other end of the line at Thames House. “Mehreen has been more than a colleague, she’s been a friend.”
“You’re not hearing me,” Darren snapped back, anger boiling over. “I didn’t say it was hard to believe—I said it wasn’t sodding true. I served with Nick Crawford in Iraq, had him pull my arse out of the fire more than a time or two. If it wasn’t for him, I might not be standing here today—least there’d be a lot less of me here. No way his wife is one of them.”
And yet he could see the faces of the murdered constables who had made up Besimi’s escort. Silent, haunting condemnation in their eyes.
My God, what have I done?
11:04 P.M.
Outside the Rahman residence
Leeds, North Yorkshire
“Lights just went off in the front room,” Jan Traeg announced, monitoring the screens before her in the back of the surveillance van. “Looks like he’s home to stay.”
They should be so lucky, the American intelligence officer thought—massaging her neck gently with both hands. But they weren’t. She was missing her daughter’s anime convention for this. All because some madman wanted to set the world afire.
Then again…a wry grimace passed across her face, envisioning her husband amidst a sea of twenty thousand screaming teenage girls. Per
haps she was better off here.
“Dennis should be almost back by now, shouldn’t he?” she asked her counterpart, glancing at the screen of her phone to confirm the time. The second British officer had gone out for a coffee run quite a while before.
“Nearly,” the man replied, seeming unconcerned. “Pretty near time for checkin with McBrien’s crew.”
The other van was parked on a flanking street, watching the exit of an alley that stretched behind Rahman’s flat, finally coming to a stop in a dead end behind the row of buildings.
“Echo 1,” he began, picking up the radio, “calling Echo 2. How copy?”
“Loud and clear, Echo 1,” a thick Cockney accent came back in reply. “All’s quiet.”
There were two vans, the watcher thought—aiming his binoculars through the Vauxhall’s windshield. Unmarked, but clearly identifiable if you knew what you were looking for. Standard protocol for the Security Services on a surveillance op like this one.
Two vans, three officers in each. Two, he corrected himself, glancing back at the barely visible form of the British officer lying unconscious and bound in his backseat.
The van watching the front of the residence was now down a man.
He pushed open the driver’s side door of the Vauxhall, his balaclava-masked face visible in the glow of the streetlight for only a moment before he raised a gloved hand from his side, casually putting a single bullet through the light.
Fiery sparks fell to the street, soon consumed in darkness as he moved around to the rear of the car, removing a messenger bag from the boot.
He took another look down the street toward the van as he unzipped the bag, his fingers closing around a metal cylinder. Time to do this.
11:09 P.M.
Boredom was the most formidable enemy you faced on any surveillance operation. It dulled the senses, took off the edge.
The only solution was to rotate personnel incessantly, Jan thought—scanning the screens once more in an effort to keep herself alert—but that was getting more difficult as time wore on. As the civil unrest in the UK continued to build.
Embrace the Fire (Shadow Warriors Book 3) Page 46
