Three cars.
The ape wasn’t alone.
As if on cue they heard a crash in the long hallway behind them, light spilling through an open doorway as more of Swain’s men emerged from the room beyond. Glancing at the cars again, Jack remembered the keys he’d taken off the ape, then grabbed Sara’s hand.
“Come on!”
They stumbled toward the main entrance, Jack pulling her along, using momentum more than anything else to carry him. They passed the reception counter, ducking low to use it as a shield, just as a shot cracked, splintering wood. Sara yelped and Jack jerked her sideways, then started zigzagging, trying to make them as difficult a target as possible. He stayed close to the benches in the waiting area as they afforded some protection from the gunmen.
Shots gouged the seatbacks, causing the chairs to rattle on their metal bases. Their shoes crunched glass and then they were outside and headed for the cars—two SUVs and a BMW behind them. Jack yanked the keys from his pocket as they ran. He jabbed at the buttons on one of the keys and the BMW chirp-chirped as its doors unlocked.
Swain’s men were shouting behind them. More shots pinged off the asphalt and the SUVs as Jack instinctively darted toward the left side of the vehicle, then suddenly remembered he was in England. Swearing, he pulled open the rear door and shoved Sara in, then got into the front seat and scrambled across it. He got behind the wheel and jammed the key into the ignition.
A shot shattered the rear window and Sara yelped again, glass showering around her, as Jack started the engine and stomped on the accelerator.
He had no idea where they were. A wooded area, surrounded by thick trees that looked malevolent in the moonlight. From the outside the hospital looked old, very old. It was a majestic, neglected relic from another century, from the shameful era of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, also known as Bedlam.
But where he was didn’t matter. There was a driveway ahead of them, and a road beyond and Jack drove as fast as he could to get to them.
Checking his rearview mirror, he saw Swain’s men spilling from the hospital entrance and running toward the remaining cars. But he already had a fairly good lead on them and it wasn’t likely they’d catch him.
Shooting out to the road, he picked up speed then blasted past a row of old country houses and disappeared down a tree-lined street into the early morning darkness.
* * *
The sun was coming up by the time they reached Central London.
Jack had used the GPS on the cell phone to chart the course, then memorized the route and tossed the phone into the street as they rolled through a suburban neighborhood. If these guys really were MI6, he had no doubt they’d be able to track the thing.
So be it. Even if the spook patrol found them they would probably give Jack some space, the way Swain did in San Francisco. Intelligence ops were like vampires: they preferred the night, the shadows. Especially now, when anyone with a cell phone could be a journalist.
Sara hadn’t said a word during the drive, and when he turned to check on her he found her flopped across the seat, passed out. He didn’t blame her. He was halfway there himself. He wondered for a moment if she had been hit by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel kicked up by the gunfire, but he saw no sign of blood. When they stopped at a light he reached back and touched her neck, found a steady pulse.
So he drove, too exhausted to think about much more than the mechanics of his journey—left turn, right turn, brake, gas, brake, check the mirror for any sign of hostiles.… It took special concentration because he wasn’t used to driving on the opposite side of the road.
When they got to central London he didn’t go back to the Beresford Hotel. Although he had checked in under a false name, he couldn’t risk Swain showing up there, so he headed into Paddington and found a place that made the Beresford look like Buckingham Palace.
He left Sara in the car as he checked in, then woke her enough to get her into the rickety elevator.
“’Ard night?” the round, scruffy concierge chuckled.
“The girl likes her scotch,” Jack said, affecting a British accent. He didn’t want to make the same mistake he did with Sara, tipping his nationality. Just in case anyone asked.
Jack got her into the room and onto the bed, its springs groaning noisily as she sank onto it. Then he went back to the car, drove for several blocks, and abandoned it in the car park of another, much larger hotel. That would keep the bastards busy for a while.
When Jack got back to the room, Sara was out again—which didn’t surprise him—so he drew the curtains to mute the morning sun, then sank into the threadbare armchair across from her and allowed himself to doze.
A couple hours later he heard her stir and opened his eyes. She still had her head on the pillow, but she was staring at him.
“We were interrupted,” she said. “You were about to tell me your name?”
Jack smiled. “Jack Hatfield. Nice to meet you.”
She haltingly pulled herself upright, as though testing her stamina each step of the way. Without a shirt or a bra, her sweater clung to her in a way that made it difficult for Jack not to look. The room was a little cold and it showed, but he was a gentleman and averted his gaze. He couldn’t help but wonder what kind of danger, what kind of physical duress, it would take for a man not to think about sex. Obviously, he hadn’t reached that threshold.
“You ready to talk?” he asked. “I’m sure you have as many questions as I do.”
“I don’t know if anything I have to say would make much sense at the moment.”
“You seem fine to me.”
“Thanks to you,” she said. “And I mean that. Thank you. You could have left me with those sadists but you didn’t.”
“Not part of my DNA,” he said. “And you’re welcome.”
She offered him a wan, fragile smile. A grateful smile. It was restorative, not like the hardened mask he’d seen in al-Fida’s flat and in that alley.
But, he reminded himself, he still didn’t know what she was about and who she worked with.
Sara’s smile faltered as she stared at him with those dark, vulnerable eyes. “Why do I feel like I’ve seen you before?”
Over the years, Jack had got that a lot, though mostly in the States. People seeing him on television and remembering his face but not quite able to place him.
“I told you, I’m a reporter. I used to have a show on GNT, although I don’t think there’s much chance you’d ever see me on this side of the Atlantic.”
Something shifted in her expression as a memory came to the surface. “Hatfield,” she said. “Of course. Brendan told me about you.”
“Brendan?”
“A colleague. He showed me one of your videos on YouTube. You’re the one the Home Office banned from traveling here, one of Copeland’s friends.”
The name landed like a depth charge in Jack’s brain. He sat upright. “How do you know Bob Copeland?”
She must have sensed a threat from him, because she put her hands up as if to reassure him. “He was a friend,” she said. “When we heard about what happened to him, we were devastated.”
“We?” Jack had no idea what to make of this. “Sara, I think you’d better explain.”
“I don’t know how much I can tell you,” she said. “We’ve already been compromised, and if you were to report anything about—”
“Report anything? Are you serious?” Heat rose in Jack’s chest. “This isn’t about my job. I don’t have a clue what’s going on here yet it’s cost me two friends and nearly my own life—”
“You’re not the only one who has lost friends and nearly his life,” she said.
Right, he thought. He remembered her half dead in the chair. He sheathed his claws.
“A man who was like a brother to me was found dead in a pub toilet, his throat slit. And a woman I was close to was suffocated in Bulgaria.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “That still doesn’t tell me how you know Bob Copeland. Wha
t do you mean, he was a friend?”
She lowered her head a moment as if to gather her thoughts. Probably trying to decide how much she should tell him. “You may have a hard time believing this, but I’m a field agent for Interpol.”
He looked at her as if she had said she was one of Santa’s elves. Not because there weren’t women agents but because the FBI and MI6 were already folded into this thing. Now Interpol?
“Okay,” he said. “You’re Interpol. And?”
“For the last two years I’ve been working with a small, international task force, trying to gather information about an extremist Muslim group called the Hand of Allah.”
Jack knew the name well and his reaction made it obvious.
“I see you’ve heard of them.”
“An offshoot of Al Qaeda, way under the radar. I used to talk about them on my TV show, but I wasn’t sure anyone was listening. People wanted to believe we had this stuff under control.”
She nodded. “A lot we do … some we do not. The Hand of Allah is among the latter. Their leader is a nasty piece of work named Faakhir Zuabi, who reportedly used to rub shoulders with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden’s chief of operations.
“After Mohammed was taken into custody, Zuabi went out on his own. Since then he’s had his fingers in more death and destruction around the globe than we can track, all the while sitting comfortably in a mosque in East London—not that the British authorities want to believe this. He’s spent the last several years getting cozy with the elites in this country, financing campaigns of people who are sympathetic to Muslims.”
“You have people like that here?”
Sara made a face.
Jack realized he’d stepped in it.
“Not all Muslims want to be witness to the downfall of Western Civilization,” she said. “Some of us are quite fond of it, in fact.”
“Sorry,” Jack said, though he wasn’t sure he meant it.
Her expression relaxed. “But it goes much deeper than political influence.”
“What do you mean?”
“Abdal al-Fida was one of Zuabi’s followers, but he also worked for the British government. My job was to gather information from him about the Hand of Allah.”
Jack looked at her, thinking she must have had a very powerful motivation beyond a sense of duty to voluntarily lie down with a known terrorist. He imagined she’d had to take many long, hot showers after their time in bed to wash away the taint. Her stone-cold reaction to al-Fida’s so-called suicide suddenly made all the sense in the world.
“What kind of information were you hoping to get?”
“Names, places, anything actionable. But he was also a computer technician and we thought he might be our back door into the government’s counterintelligence network.”
Jack frowned. “Why would you want access to that?”
“To explore. We think that over the last several years, helped by the politicians who were in their pocket, the Hand of Allah has been slowly infiltrating the British government with hadist sleeper agents like al-Fida. Particularly the Home and Foreign Offices. All the way to the top. Which means they’d have access to and control of the counterterrorist branches, like MI5 and—”
“MI6,” Jack said. “Adam Swain.”
She nodded. “He and his gang of thugs may not look like your average Muslim radicals, but they are sympathizers. We believe they were bought off by some very deep pockets.”
“And you think Zuabi’s behind all this?”
“Without a doubt,” Sara said. “But he’s very clever about it. He keeps everything on a need-to-know basis. I don’t think even his own men—the true believers—are aware of how far this reaches. Even though al-Fida worked for the government, I never got the impression he knew anything about Swain and the others. Zuabi likes things fragmented so that it’s not so easy to connect the dots.”
“That still doesn’t tell me about Copeland. How did he fit?”
“Copeland was working with us,” she said, “a clandestine consultant, I’d guess you’d say.”
Jack nodded. Typical Bob. “So he knew about al-Fida all along.”
“Al-Fida—and several others.”
“What kind of ‘others’?” That didn’t sound good.
“When Abdal left for California a few weeks ago, he didn’t say anything to me about his real purpose in going there because that would have betrayed his oath to Zuabi. But I knew that his trip wasn’t for consulate business, so we started taking a closer look. We discovered that the Home Office had sent several employees to San Francisco over the last two years, all Muslims, all traveling on diplomatic passports.”
“A sleeper cell?”
She nodded. “We think they’re planning something in the U.S. That exploding Land Rover was a good indication that we’re right. Al-Fida was like a child, no impulse control and a desire to be patted on the head—I can certainly attest to that. When he went off the rails, the Hand of Allah had to scramble to cover their tracks. They couldn’t afford for him to expose them and interfere with their real objective.”
“So why didn’t they just kill him?”
“I suppose Zuabi had his reasons,” Sara said. “Perhaps he wished to allow a loyal follower to make peace with God or take his own life. That would have been honorable. Either way, after Abdal returned to London he was very subdued. If not for me, for wanting to spend more time together, I believe he would have died by his own hand.”
“Not that I believe Swain, but he told me that killing al-Fida was not on his to-do list.”
“That may be true,” she said. “I think Abdal was killed by a man who is devoted to Zuabi, another true believer.”
Jack suddenly remembered the guy he nearly bumped into last night as he left the pub near al-Fida’s house, a dark, angular-faced man with a wispy black goatee who had seemed to be in a hurry. Jack had thought the man was just another Muslim resident of the neighborhood, but maybe he was wrong.
“You have a name?” he asked.
Sara hesitated.
“Maybe I know him,” Jack prodded.
“Hassan Haddad,” she said. “He’s one of the Hand of Allah’s top soldiers, recruited when he was a child by Zuabi himself. Very skilled, quite ruthless. We picked him up on a cell phone call, tailed him for several days, followed him to Bulgaria where we think he may have been in contact with an arms merchant named Anton Chilikov. We don’t know if any purchases were made, but Haddad killed one of our agents to prevent us from finding out.”
“The girl who was suffocated?”
“Yes,” Sara said. “Someone I recruited.” A faraway look crept into her eyes and Jack knew the loss must have been difficult for her.
“So where is this Haddad guy now?”
She quickly refocused. “We’re not sure. We lost him here in London, after he killed another one of our agents.”
“Jeez. The guy sounds like a one-man jihad.”
“Well said. That’s why we think he’s the point man on whatever Zuabi’s planning in San Francisco, and we’re assuming he’ll be headed there soon.”
“On a diplomatic passport, no doubt.”
She nodded. “Bob Copeland was our man on the ground over there, but with him gone we’re not sure who we can trust.”
Jack wondered why Copeland hadn’t been more forthcoming. Then again, the way things were looking back in San Francisco, Sara was right. If Zuabi’s people had managed to infiltrate the British government, who was to say they weren’t working on the Americans as well. So Copeland had to play it sly, as he always did.
As if reading his thoughts, Sara said, “He told us about you. Copeland.”
“It would have been nice if he’d told me about you.”
“We instructed him to be cautious,” she replied. “You’re a journalist. We did not know whether you would put a story, a scoop, above a principle.”
“I remember when those two went hand in hand, when members of my profession kept D-day a secre
t and hit the beaches with the first wave,” Jack said.
“That’s the reason I’m telling you all this now. Copeland insisted that you might be a valuable asset down the line.”
“Down to the wire, you mean.”
“That, too. And it may not be far off.” She eased herself forward wearing a grave expression. It was as though she were telling herself she had rested enough. More than anything, that gesture told Jack how little time might be left. “Abdal al-Fida thought I was just like him, a die-hard extremist. He may not have told me much, but he once said that the infidels would soon see destruction that would dwarf 9/11.”
“You’re talking nukes.”
“I am. You’re aware of the recent leak of diplomatic documents revealing that al Qaeda was sourcing nuclear materials and hiring scientists to build dirty bombs for use against Americans. Jack, al Qaeda isn’t nearly as well connected and well funded as the Hand of Allah.”
“Operation Roadshow,” Jack said ominously.
She nodded. “Coming to a city near you.”
26
Eurostar, London to France
It was late afternoon and they were aboard the Eurostar, a high-speed train that connected London to Paris through the Channel Tunnel.
Once they’d gathered their strength and left the hotel, Sara had taken Jack to an old boxing gym near the Tower Bridge where the task force kept private lockers—both men’s and women’s—in case of an emergency.
The men’s locker contained identification documents, money, and prepaid cell phones, along with a toiletry kit and several changes of clothes. The IDs were useless to Jack—he still had his Israeli passport with him, and it would have to do. He found a pair of slacks and a shirt that fit, and a suede leather jacket that was much like the one he’d left with Rabbi Neershum in Tel Aviv.
He also found a small theatrical makeup kit, a savvy addition to the provisions. There was a passable beard inside. That would save him having to explain why his passport showed him with a beard while he had just a stubble. He would put it on at the terminal; it wasn’t something he just wanted to spring on Sara.
Abuse of Power Page 21
