Sleeper Cell

by Alan Porter

  It confirmed her hunch that this bomb was not the end. It was either a signal to other cells that they were to commence further strands of the plan, or it was a smoke-screen for something far larger: focus attention on this while they got on with the main event.

  The problem was, nothing she had discovered so far got her any closer to knowing just what that main event might be. She needed to trace their one known suspect back to her source, before the next stage of the operation could begin.

  11

  When Leila got back to Scotland Yard there was already a stack of papers on her old desk and a slew of memos reporting tip-offs that had come in from the public. She didn’t read the latest police reports, preferring to get all her information direct from DCI Lawrence. She scanned the tip-offs but quickly dismissed them. It had been a mistake to publish CTC’s phone number online. The sorts of people who look up the phone numbers of Special Operations organisations on the internet were generally the sorts of people such organisations could do without.

  There were a dozen CTC officers in the briefing room when Leila took a seat near the back. More arrived over the next couple of minutes. Even this late in the evening, very few of the core staff had gone home. Mark Ross sat at the side of the room, flicking through images on his iPad. DCI Lawrence arrived on the dot of nine o’clock, still in hushed conversation with Keith Butler.

  Leila opened the meeting with her report of how she had come by the bomber’s primary identity. It was the only significant breakthrough so far. The department was drowning in false leads and back-checks on historic intelligence, none of which were going anywhere. When she had finished, Mark Ross sent a series of images of the t-shirt and jeans to the screen on the wall at the head of the table.

  ‘The clothes yielded nothing useful,’ Lawrence said. ‘They were all western, low-grade garments that could have been bought anywhere. Forensics are going through them for secondary trace but they’re not hopeful. Both items were brand new. She probably put them on moments before leaving her primary location.’

  ‘What about the body? Leila said.

  ‘We’ve only got fragments, mostly badly degraded by fire. We know from the CCTV that she was wearing a simple thob and a headscarf, nothing that would stand out in London. Cloth was cotton. Again, could have been bought anywhere. As for the body, forensics are looking at what we’ve got, but it’s not much. The only unique identification found on the body was this ring.’ Another image appeared on the screen.

  ‘It was on the middle finger of her right hand,’ Keith Butler said. ‘We got lucky: the finger was embedded in the driver’s seat. The bone stopped the ring being flattened. However, we’re not sure exactly what it is.’

  ‘It’s an old-fashioned key,’ Leila said. She walked to the front of the room and peered closely at the screen. ‘See how it’s been looped around so that the shaft forms the body of the ring and the bitting and bow meet at the upper side of the finger. It’s probably home-made. My guess is that it was fashioned out of an older piece of jewellery. I doubt it was ever a real key.’

  ‘You’ve seen this before?’

  ‘Similar. This points to her being a native Palestinian, or a close sympathiser. The key symbolises return from exile, literally opening the doors that were locked to them in 1948. I spent time in the camps of southern Lebanon. Keys were quite popular.’

  ‘That doesn’t fit with the ISIS angle,’ Lawrence said.

  ‘I’m just telling you what I see.’ She took her seat at the back of the room again.

  ‘OK. Preliminary DNA tests have not given us an identity. We’ll run comparisons with known Palestinian samples and we might get something. Forensics are doing isotope analysis of bone fragments, see if they can find out where she spent the last few years.’

  He nodded to Mark Ross, who sent another image to the screen. This one was a hastily updated spider diagram showing the latest intelligence on Islamist groups active in the West.

  ‘The wider issue,’ Lawrence went on, ‘is one of attribution. It’s nine hours now, and we’ve not had any claim of responsibility.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Leila said.

  ‘We’ve had Animal Liberation, Occupy, Combat 18, some guy with a Birmingham accent who said he was al-Koran. Nothing remotely plausible. Do you have any thoughts?’

  ‘With the Palestinian link, I’m still open to this being about the peace talks.’ She nodded at the diagram on the screen. ‘Your ISIS evidence is circumstantial at best.’

  ‘Harakat al Sahm is real enough. GCHQ’s intel amounts to something too solid to be just someone playing the fool.’

  ‘Is there any third-party corroboration on the online forums?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And surveillance threw nothing up in the last few weeks?’

  ‘No. What’s your point?’

  ‘My point is that al Sahm’s only link to Islamic State is what they themselves claim. Has al-Baghdadi ever even formally accepted their bayah?’

  ‘The claim of allegiance? No, but that doesn’t mean they’re not acting as agents of IS.’

  ‘Except that without al-Baghdadi’s consent, they wouldn’t have access to IS weaponry or support. And they’re clearly being supported by someone. I agree, everything about this points to a sleeper cell of a major organisation. I’m just not convinced we’ve got the right organisation.’

  ‘We’ll find the link.’ Lawrence drew breath to move on.

  ‘I don’t think you can ignore the possibility that this whole IS thing could be a smokescreen,’ Leila said.

  ‘For who?’

  ‘Someone who has reason to put us onto the wrong path. Look at it: we’re chasing shadows inside one of the most complex affiliations of insurgents and terrorists the world has ever seen. It’s like looking for a piece of mud in a swimming pool full of shit. We’re wallowing around in there while they have a run at the main event. Which I think is the peace talks.’

  ‘Then get me evidence.’ He turned his attention back to the room in general. ‘Whether this is about the peace talks or not, it’s all about how it looks, and right now, that’s not good. There’s a formal welcoming dinner for the delegates at seven on Friday evening, which means we’ve got less than forty-eight hours to get on top of this. The PM is adamant that this should not be used as unfair leverage by either side.’

  ‘There is one more thing,’ one of the uniformed officers said. ‘Things are starting to kick off on the streets. Response officers are reporting a higher-than-usual number of 999 calls-outs.’

  ‘GCHQ have told us there’s an abnormally large number of emails and tweets inciting retributive action,’ Ross said. ‘Trouble’s brewing in all the major cities, especially here.’

  ‘Solidarity 52 were out near the bomb site,’ Leila said.

  ‘Territorial Support are deployed,’ Lawrence said. ‘I think we can keep a lid on this. There’s never been serious unrest following a terrorist incident before. But we need to be seen to be making progress. What counts is perception. I’ll brief Commander Thorne and see if we can get the PM to do something in time for the morning papers even without a concrete attribution. The rest of you, you know your duties. Let’s get this thing contained, and quickly.’

  Lawrence left. Leila caught him up as he was about to enter Commander Thorne’s office.

  ‘Can I say something?’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure you’re going to anyway,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve got to stop trying to make this fit an extant pattern. If you spend time chasing after an organisation as diffuse as Islamic State, you’re going to get nowhere.’

  ‘COBR concluded that the ISIS angle should be the main focus. That’s not CTC, it’s all the intelligence agencies. The PM backs them.’

  ‘Because he wants to believe this is a one-off, a new skirmish in his ridiculous war on terror. We find the culprits, shoot some people, it all goes away again. Or maybe we could just shoot some people anyway. Brazilians have funny-coloured skin.’


  ‘Be very careful, Reid,’ Lawrence said. ‘This is not a cover-up. The PM, no, all of them, want us to start with the most likely scenario. We’ve got to have something to hang our theories on. We’ve foiled dozens of plots in the last decade by using exactly these methods. This time one got through, but we stick to what we know and we’ll find the culprits. If you’re right and there’s another bomb coming, this is the best way to stop it.’

  ‘But you’ve got no intel. This is like a jigsaw puzzle and someone’s given us the wrong box. There’s no point trying to hammer the pieces together to make the picture you think you should be making. We’ll find the real picture if we work with the pieces we do have. And the first piece we’ve got is a solid Palestinian lead.’

  ‘And we’re following it up. If you have other ideas, be my guest. That’s why I brought you in. Get me more pieces. I’ll call you when we’ve got anything new here.’

  12

  Faran Jaafar sat in his beaten up armchair in front of his beaten up TV with his feet on the beaten up coffee table between the two. In his right hand he had a can of beer, his left rested on a tatty second-hand copy of Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. He could have bought it new, but that wasn’t his style. He was using his years at SOAS both to get his degree and to rebel a little against his over-privileged Kuwaiti upbringing. Living in a run-down top floor flat that had mould in the bathroom and cockroaches in the kitchen was the most fun he’d had in his life.

  He had been unmoved by the bomb that morning. London was a big place; his flat in Tower Hamlets and the hotel in Kensington were in the same geographical city, but culturally they might as well have been on different continents.

  He had watched the video of the explosion with little interest; he’d watched the early evening news with even less. But what began to come through as evening fell was much harder to ignore.

  At eight o’clock the first twitter feeds had started. At first Faran ignored the chirrup of his phone. There had been a lot of talk about the bombing since noon and this seemed to be just more of the same.

  But the tweets kept coming, more and more frequently.

  Around nine, he scrolled down the list and felt a chill even in the stuffy atmosphere of his flat. People he knew – people he would have said were as emotionally disengaged from today’s events as he was – were starting to post some disturbing stuff.

  ‘#reclaim our streets. the fightback has started. youtube of #mosque gatherings.’ That was from Sarah Gerrard, a fellow IR student he knew vaguely, who had never been particularly political before. It was typical of a slew of some thirty tweets that had stacked up in the last ten minutes.

  ‘#enough-is-enough. We all stand together or we all fall apart. #reclaim our streets at your local mosque.’ David Corby-Arras, probably the most liberal (and gay) man Faran knew. He had either retweeted it by mistake or someone had hijacked his account. Or maybe the bombers really had gone too far this time.

  He felt his pulse beating hard in his neck.

  He clicked on the #reclaim hashtag and there were thousand of posts. Selfies of skinheads in S52 t-shirts standing in front of mosques; images of 9/11, 7/7, Madrid, Paris, Tunisia; sinister white text on black flags that read ‘Je Suis #Reclaim’; declarations of war that boiled with urgency and hate.

  For the first time, he became aware of voices down in the street. He couldn’t hear much, and the tingle in his spine may have had as much to do with what he had just read as with the voices themselves, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that these sounds were somehow more pressing, more immediate, than the usual background.

  He woke up his computer and logged into Facebook. If the twittersphere was hot, FB was on fire. There were hundreds of messages, links to videos, images of the bomb site, cartoons of obviously Muslim men with dynamite in their turbans or AKs sticking out of their robes like cold, skinny penises.

  He closed the computer’s lid. He needed to speak to someone, anyone. His phone whistled and he tapped the screen. A new image filled it. A photograph – faked, he assumed – of a person sitting, head back, on a bus. A shard of glass protruded from her neck and her shirt was a slick of glistening red. The woman’s eyes were open, staring blankly at the camera.

  What shocked him most was the caption that had been added at the foot of the image. In faux-arabic script, it said ‘This Is Islam’.

  As he scrolled through the contacts list on his phone he heard the screech of tyres in the distance. In a street where traffic noise was the norm, it took something special to stand out, and this did. He drew the net curtain aside as the blaring horn grew louder.

  Driving a high speed down the wrong side of the road was a white Ford Transit. A man sat half-out of the passenger window, two others stood just inside the open back doors. They were chanting something Faran could not make out and beating a rapid, heavy salvo on the van’s walls. It turned right at the end of the road and disappeared.

  Other vehicles followed. Groups of men in the familiar S52 t-shirts, some wearing Occupy masks, most brazenly bare-faced, ran along the pavements.

  They were heading for the mosque on Whitechapel Road.

  Faran glanced at the time on his phone as he put it in his pocket. It was 9.20. Maghrib prayers would be under way. Raised voices seemed to surround the building now.

  He locked the front door behind him and looked out of the window at the rear of the buildings. Below was a small car park and a row of houses that were mostly occupied by Pakistani and Bangladeshi families. A group of white youths had crowded around an old Nissan Micra, rocking it from side to side. Inside, a woman in a hijab was frantically trying to get the car started. She succeeded and reversed, hitting a Mercedes parked on the other side of the car park, before screeching away. The men jeered. One of them looked up towards where Faran was standing and he let the curtain fall back into place.

  On the first floor, directly below Faran’s tiny attic flat, lived a group of three, sometimes four, women. As he passed, he knocked on the door. No one answered.

  ‘It’s Faran from upstairs. You all OK in there?’ he shouted. He heard a movement inside but no one spoke. He would check on them again when he returned.

  Outside it was still hot, the air heavy with an approaching storm. Faran looked along Vallance Road before slipping out, keeping close to the wall as he made his way towards Whitechapel Road. He ducked into an alleyway thirty yards or so from his front door as another van sped past.

  At the junction he stopped. From just beyond where he stood the street was gridlocked. Several drivers were already trying to do three-point turns to head back out of the chaos.

  The mosque was about two hundred yards away on the other side of the road. A crowd of a hundred or more people had gathered outside and more were joining all the time. There were a few placards and banners, but most of the people there were happy just to shout abuse at the building and leave it at that. It was those joining the back of the group who looked more intent on mayhem. Most wore balaclavas or scarves pulled up over their faces. One had a grainy enlargement of the ‘This Is Islam’ image taped to a placard.

  He took out his phone and began to film the scene.

  Police sirens approached from behind him. A riot van peeled off down Turner Street to get to the far end of the mosque while a patrol car stopped near the back of the crowd. The two uniformed officers abandoned their vehicle and began to run towards the building.

  Faran followed, keeping close to the shop fronts, always alert for escape routes. He held his phone out in front of him, trying to keep a steady image on the screen.

  At Davenant Street he stopped again, moving behind a petrol pump on the Shell Garage forecourt. From here he was barely twenty yards from the back edge of the mob across the road.

  The two policemen were fighting their way through the crowd towards the closed door of the mosque. A bottle arced high above the mob and came down just behind the rear officer. The crow
d cheered and closed in behind the two policemen. A few seconds later the doors of the building opened a crack and the two men disappear inside.

  More bottles began to fly.

  Across the road a window smashed. The Islamic bookshop on the ground floor of a tall, forlorn-looking building had been spotted by a group of half a dozen youths, some wearing the distinctive S52 emblems on their t-shirts. Two of the gang tore the shattered window out and began to throw books out into the street. Another set fire to the pages of a book and threw it into the shop.

  That was the catalyst that turned what had been a rowdy demonstration into a full-scale riot.

  Three men ran along the pavement with a metal barrier between them and charged at the car showroom next to the bookshop. They battered it until the glass shattered. With no interest in the cars inside, they ran off with their weapon between them and began to attack a clothes shop for no reason other than that no one tried to stop them. Others poured into the showroom and petrol-bombed the cars within.

  Faran retreated. He’d seen enough. If he wanted to see any more, he could turn on the TV. There were at least a dozen people who, like him, were standing back from the main group, holding mobile phones above their heads.

  By now the violence was spreading down Whitechapel Road, cutting off his escape, so he crossed Davenant Street to make his way home the back way.

  Along the road that led to the back of his building a group of two men and two women had stopped a taxi. The car’s tyres were flat and the windscreen was shattered. The passenger door of the vehicle was open.

  He was trapped. The two men smashed the driver’s side window and wrenched the door open. They pulled the asian driver out into the road and punched and kicked him as he tried to crawl under the car. When he made it far enough under the vehicle to be out of range, one of the men climbed onto the car’s roof and jumped up and down on it. The other lay beside the vehicle trying to drag the driver out. While the women ransacked the driver’s cash box, the taxi’s passenger decided to make her escape. She opened the door and made a run for it towards the main road.