Sleeper Cell

by Alan Porter

  She glanced at Menkes and slipped on a pair of latex gloves. Despite his insistence on remaining in the vault he was now outside in the corridor, talking to the woman who had been on the front desk. He held a sheet of paper in his hand, probably the warrant. Leila caught the word ‘file’ then the woman left. Menkes turned and stood in the doorway.

  Leila opened the lid of the box. Inside there were three rolls of coins, twenty in each little skin of brown paper. She picked one up. One ounce Krugerrands, the most widely accepted currency in the world, coins of choice for shady deals from Argentina to Zimbabwe. That accounted for the weight, and somewhere around fifty thousand pounds in untraceable, liquid cash. At the back of the box were neat bundles of bank notes. She flicked through one of them: around twenty thousand dollars in used, clean fifty dollar bills. Four bundles of ten thousand pounds sterling in used tens, another four of twenties. There was well over a hundred thousand pounds in total. The box still had space for at least as much again, and Leila had an idea that until very recently it had contained a lot more.

  The cash was impressive, but ultimately irrelevant.

  What she had been hoping to find was underneath it.

  In an unmarked envelope was a black passport: a US passport.

  She opened it. It was Ghada Abulafia’s all right. Same photograph as the unused British one they had found in Faran Jaafar’s flat, same date of birth and birthplace. The surname had changed to Mussan, but other than that only the number and issuing country were different. She had made very little attempt to create an alias. She had simply obtained a passport from a different nationality and altered her family name to confuse casual searches.

  The only way Abulafia could have obtained such a passport was if she had dual nationality, and they had discovered nothing in her history to indicate that that was the case. This was not, therefore, a legal alias. It was an identity specifically created to enable their bomber to stay under the radar.

  She flicked through the pages. Abulafia was a traveller, as they had suspected. There were stamps for New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles as well as a few for Washington DC. More intriguingly, there were several for Ben Gurion International in Tel Aviv, spread evenly approximately six months apart.

  Ghada Abulafia might have been born a West Bank Palestinian, but she had found a way to move about freely in Jewish Israel.

  And someone in the US government had enabled her to do it.

  25

  Daniel Peretz and Harel Cohen had arrived at Mapleton House just before noon as part of the Israeli delegation’s security. They were kept waiting at the rear entrance for nearly two hours while officers from CTC and MI5 swept the building with bug-detectors and sniffer dogs. When Peretz and Cohen were finally allowed inside, uniformed Met constables were trawling the grounds around the building. Nothing out of the ordinary was found either inside or out.

  Mapleton House had been built by Sir George Mapleton – he of the tobacco and slaving fortune made in the eighteenth century – as a country retreat. With crippling death duties in the 1960s it had been seized by the treasury and converted for governmental use. It was used for conferences, visiting dignitaries and meetings too secret or sensitive for central London. It had been a favourite of Margaret Thatcher and in her time as PM she had converted the vast drawing room into what was effectively a Georgian bomb shelter. The walls were reinforced with sheet steel and lined with lead to make them impenetrable to radio or listening devices. The windows were half-inch-thick toughened glass said to be good enough to repel an RPG. They had never been put to the test, and no one currently in the vicinity had any intention of having them tested in the next three days.

  Harel Cohen had always been on the roster for the Peace Talks. He was Mossad, though his day-to-day work was done with the Embassy in London. His cover as a diplomat was good enough that his name had not been flagged by any of the security searches performed by the Palestinian delegation. London knew who he was, and having him on site was a condition of Prime Minister Aaron David attending the talks. MI5 didn’t like it, but these talks would require bigger sacrifices of principle than that.

  If the Palestinians would not have been happy about Cohen’s presence, they would have been livid if they had known anything about Daniel Peretz.

  Officially Peretz was with the caterers, a simple government man tasked to keep an eye on the food and make sure everything was Kosher – literally and metaphorically. In fact he was something much more than that. MI5 suspected he was Mossad; even Harel Cohen thought he was Mossad. Only a tiny number of people in the very highest echelons of the Israeli Defence Force knew who he really was.

  ‘I’m going to have another look round the kitchens,’ Peretz said.

  ‘You want company?’ Cohen replied. The two MI5 officers glanced at him. They had barely spoken since the two Israelis entered the main building.

  ‘No. I think better alone,’ Peretz said. He slipped out of the drawing room and along the corridor towards the servants’ part of the house at the back.

  There was no one in the kitchen.

  Mossad had been using the same detailed plans of the building as the British, but they had a little more experience of the many and devious ways unwelcome visitors could find to infiltrate a building. There was something Peretz needed to see for himself.

  He slipped on a pair of thin leather gloves and moved down the bare stone treads into the wine cellar so silently that even a stray agent in the kitchen would never have known he was there.

  The wine cellar was just that: rack upon rack of bottles. Nearest the door were the cheap ones used for general meetings; beyond lay the dusty Petrus and Yquem bottles that were the preserve of visiting heads of state and royalty. Peretz never touched a drop, but his training was thorough enough that he could spot a fake dignitary by his choice of vintage from any of a dozen or more Grands Cru. Only a junior agent acting a part would pick an ’81 Lafite-Rothschild off a menu if an ’82 was being offered as well. Details: Peretz understood the value of details.

  Beyond the wine racks was a second large room, now empty. This gave onto two smaller rooms at the far east end of the building, former cold-stores back in the days before electric refrigeration. He opened the first door and shone his pen torch in. The room was empty except for a few bundles of newspaper in the corner. The walls were all blank Victorian brick, leaching lines of white salts from the ancient mortar. He closed the door and opened the other one.

  This room was whitewashed and had racks of wooden shelves against the far wall. He stepped in and tested one. It was not attached by anything more substantial than fifty years’-worth of cobwebs. On the wooden slats that once might have held the winter’s supply of apples were boxes of bottles, demijohns, pickling jars and huge copper pans. None had seen use in decades.

  Behind one of the racks was the almost invisible outline of a door, bricked up and painted over decades ago and detectable only because of the too-regular edges of the bricks where they met the old frame. Unless he had been looking for it he, like everyone else who had been down here, would not have given it a second glance.

  He closed the entrance door behind him. With the torch in his teeth, he carefully unloaded the shelf and piled the glass and copper junk against the left wall. He then slid the fruit rack away from the wall.

  He did all this with the same stealth as he had moved into the room, conscious that the slightest sound might be heard upstairs. This small room was directly beneath a wide corridor that ran between the kitchens and the drawing room, and on to the main banqueting hall. A dumb waiter in the corner behind the door confirmed Peretz’s suspicions regarding the original purpose of this space. The Georgians loved their icecream, and it would have had to make the shortest possible journey from the cold store to the kitchen and awaiting guests.

  With the shelves emptied, he took his Entourage automatic knife from his back pocket and ran the blade around a brick about five feet from the ground. The mortar was soft; poor qual
ity in the first place and now rotted out by damp.

  He worked the tip of the blade into the mortar for several minutes. He sliced it through all around the brick then dug out a small hole at each end. Dust and flakes of paint rained onto the floor. He stopped, allowing the complete silence of this underground world to resume. Then he eased the tips of his fingers into the tiny holds and began to draw the brick out.

  It took him almost three minutes to get it free.

  The 1978 plans the National Trust had drawn up showed this wall as being completely solid. Mossad had got hold of much earlier plans that MI5 had either not found or had considered so out of date as to be irrelevant, and even these showed only a gap in the brickwork, not what lay beyond.

  None of this part of the cellar had been used since the 1930s, and as Peretz shone his torch through the hole he had made, he saw why.

  The old doorway led into a tunnel, about two feet wide and five feet high. It had collapsed and he could see no more than six feet into it before the rubble completely filled the space. Not even the faintest trickle of a draft came through the blockage.

  This abandoned and derelict tunnel, shown only on the very earliest, hand-drawn building plans, led to an icehouse about four hundred yards away, buried deep in a wood. Ice would have been brought from there to the house where it could either be used or transferred up through the dumb waiter to the kitchens or reception rooms above.

  Peretz nodded to himself and slid the brick back into place. It was a snug fit: not invisible, but tidy. With the torch still in his mouth he moved the shelves back into place and left the room, aware that by now his long absence might have been noted.

  He met one of the MI5 officers in the grand entrance hall a couple of minutes later.

  ‘What’s perimeter security like?’ Peretz said without preamble.

  The MI5 man looked at him.

  ‘We’re on the same team,’ he said. ‘I want to know no one is going to sneak up on us. You’ve got heavy woodland cover less than four hundred yards away.’

  ‘Fifteen of our people will be patrolling the grounds twenty four hours a day, plus uniformed Met police, high profile. ASU with infra-red in the air when the delegates arrive. If a mouse breaks cover, they’ll see it.’

  ‘Tech?’

  ‘Doppler microwave sensors ringing the area.’

  ‘You’re using fast-switching quad wireless?’

  ‘Unofficially. You know your stuff.’

  ‘I live in Tel Aviv; it pays to. Main gate’s the only way in or out?’

  ‘Yes, heavily guarded. And before you ask, water comes in through a four-inch main. Sewage goes out through six-inch pipes to a fifteen thousand gallon septic tank under the rear lawn. Air’s covered by radar, anti-aircraft guns and two Typhoons on standby. Apart from the jets, everything’s within the sensor perimeter, so it’s tamper-proof.’

  ‘And there’s no way it can be bypassed?’

  ‘Shit, were you born this paranoid or is it just practise? No, it can’t be bypassed, unless you can hack the government mainframes. The protocols are switched randomly every thirty minutes with four-core overlaps. You’d need a computer faster and smarter than anything commercially available to get round it, and someone to drive it. No, the perimeter’s secure. And even if anyone could get past it, we’ve got the best security devices in the world inside the building.’

  ‘Your famous Goshawk MLs?’

  ‘No. These.’ He pointed at his own eyes and turned to go. Peretz watched him jog down the wide stone steps to the drive.

  Pride before a fall, he thought. Pride before a fall. He actually had a lot of respect for British intelligence, as far as it went. It just wasn’t far enough for his taste.

  Peretz himself had been schooled in a much tougher way of working. After national service he had signed on as a regular in the IDF and quickly risen through the ranks to a point where he had to start lying to his family about just how he spent his days. At twenty-eight he was recruited into Sayeret Matkal, a Special Forces unit not unlike the British SAS or the US Deltas only with fewer screw-ups. For six years he had worked around the world tasked with counter-terrorism and hostage rescue. Then he had been head-hunted again and life started to get very interesting indeed. To the very few people with whom he could talk freely he was part of Kidon – a unit of secret service spooks who specialised in simply assassinating the bad guys rather than waiting to rescue the good ones.

  But even that was only part of the story.

  As the British agent’s black BMW crunched away down the drive, Peretz walked along the front of the building. The afternoon was hot and unpleasant – not the dry heat of Tel Aviv, but the clammy, stifling heat of an island under an approaching front. There would be another storm tonight.

  Checking the locations of the uniformed officers who were wandering somewhat aimlessly around the croquet lawn or standing on the ha-ha watching swallows soar and dive over the meadow beyond, Peretz walked along the edge of the camelia borders towards the woods in the distance.

  The wood was old growth, a mixture of ash and oak, and not natural. The trees were all the same age, most likely planted to give the impression of a royal hunting forest for the delight of guests at the house. It would also have been a very good shelter for the ice house.

  All the ground plans showed the presence of the ice house, but even the earliest ones Mossad had sourced gave it only as a vague spot some twenty yards beyond the edge of the wood. That was not a problem; finding it was not Peretz’s concern. He just needed to be sure that no one else would find it. He wandered through the trees, constantly checking vantage points, views of the house, sight lines to the various security men patrolling the grounds. He knew he must still be inside the ring of doppler motion sensors: had he strayed over the invisible line there would already be a shit-storm rumbling up the slope towards him. That was good. The ice house, wherever it was, was as protected from intrusion as the main house itself.

  After fifteen minutes picking his way through the trees he came to a fence with wheat fields beyond. He must have passed right over the hidden structure without seeing it. And if he hadn’t found a single clue as to its position, no one else would either.

  He walked slowly back to the house.

  Cohen asked him why he had been poking around so far from the house when he was detailed to look after the catering arrangements, but Peretz just said he needed some air. Nothing to be concerned about.

  Everything was just as it should have been.

  26

  Commander Thorne was waiting for Leila when she arrived back at the CTC offices at Scotland Yard. The operations room was alive with activity. The junior detective who had brought the warrant to the bank took one look at his boss and quietly slipped into a side room.

  ‘DS Reid,’ Thorne said, ‘my office. Now.’

  He led her into the glass office and closed the door.

  ‘I’ve got the passport,’ she said. She placed the evidence bag on her boss’s desk.

  ‘That’s what I wanted to speak to you about. No, remain standing, DS Reid.’ He sat behind his desk and consulted a pile of papers.

  ‘Half an hour ago I received a call from a Mr Joseph Menkes at Gould’s Bank.’

  ‘OK…’

  ‘Anything I should know?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘He said you threatened him with a gun.’

  Leila did not reply.

  ‘Is this true?’

  ‘Menkes was obstructing a time-sensitive search,’ she said. ‘He was aware of who I was and what my reasons were for visiting the bank but he refused to cooperate.’

  ‘He was waiting for the warrant. That is his legal right.’

  ‘I told him the warrant was on the way and asked him to show me the suspect’s safety deposit box. He refused. I had reason to believe that he was stalling in order to obstruct my search. It was a Section 17 judgement.’

  ‘You were only preventing serious damage to a person or
property if your outlandish theory about another attack is correct. Which so far no one in this building believes it is. Any defence lawyer will rip you to shreds!’

  ‘The warrant was on the way, and reasonable force is permitted by TACT Section 114.2’

  ‘You threatened to shoot him!’

  ‘No. I drew my weapon, with the safety on at all times, to focus his attention.’

  ‘And you’ve blown the whole of that side of the operation! That was an illegal search. Any evidence you gathered will be inadmissible.’

  ‘I disagree, Sir. I saw Menkes in the corridor outside the vault with the warrant in his hand before I opened the safety deposit box. My actions in his office enabled me to access the vault more quickly, but the warrant enabled me to make the specific search.’

  ‘DS Reid, you are on very thin ice. Against my better judgement I allowed DCI Lawrence to bring you in on the peripheries of this investigation. You’re given a lot of leeway because you’re a talented investigator, but with this Menkes business you’ve shown yet again that you’re a liability to sensitive cases. You’ve screwed up an investigation before because of your disregard for the law. I won’t stand in the way of a prosecution if you’ve done it again now.’

  ‘Understood. Did my intelligence lead to discovering who in the US government has been helping Abulafia?’

  ‘Harris and Field are on their way to the Embassy now. They’re meeting with the Special U.S. Liaison Officer.’

  ‘Special Liaison? CIA?’

  ‘Unofficially.’

  ‘I need to be there.’

  ‘No. DS Reid, you need to take a break. Go home.’

  ‘Not when we’re this close, Sir.’

  ‘It’s not a request. Get some rest. Your imaginary noon deadline has passed and there’s been no further attack. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll reassess your position. The peace talks have been moved to Mapleton House; we’re going to need all the bodies we can get to cover it.’