Nom de Guerre

by Gulvin, Jeff

  Boese had been put back in the cells and local uniforms were sent to the offices of Reeves & Co. When they got there, they were straight on the radio to the central command complex at the Yard; and Swann, Webb and Campbell McCulloch raced north to Islington. Already, there was blue tape cordoning off the doorway that led up from the high street. The solicitor’s practice, what looked like a one-man affair, was situated in the office above a television and radio repair shop. Swann showed his warrant card to the uniform standing guard.

  ‘The doctor’s upstairs now, Sarge,’ the uniform said to him. ‘We were told to leave forensics to you blokes.’

  Webb was already dressed in his white forensic suit and pulling on rubber gloves. He followed Swann up a flight of steep uncarpeted stairs, the soles of their shoes scuffing on the linoleum. Two more uniformed officers were standing in the outer office. Swann moved past them and gazed through the open door to Reeves’s office. The pathologist was kneeling beside the body, curled on its side in an almost foetal position, bald-headed with one long strand of hair falling away at the ear. Swann could see he had been shot through the middle of the forehead.

  ‘SO13?’ the pathologist said as he squatted back on his haunches.

  Swann nodded, his gaze being pulled to the heavily made-up woman, who sat upright behind the desk, with a trickle of dried blood running down the right-hand side of her nose. Two drops on her chin, two more on her blouse. The back of her head was scattered across the high-backed chair. He was aware of the hollow sound of his own heart. Webb was over by the desk, where papers had been shifted to one side, as if somebody had sat there. He peered at the ashtray where two cigar butts and a roll-up lay in a smattering of grey ash. He took a pair of tweezers from the small plastic box he carried, and lifted the butt of the hand-rolled cigarette from the ashtray. ‘Spliff,’ he said.

  They looked at one another for a moment. ‘Tal-Salem,’ Swann said.

  There was no doubt. Tal-Salem sucked his joints hard and he always smoked before he killed someone. They had recovered DNA from traces of saliva left on the end of the butt. It matched that found by the DST in France, at the scene of the 1995 assassination of the Italian banker called Alessandro Peroni, in Paris. It also matched a sample being held on file by the BKA in Germany. The perpetrators in France were known to be Pier-Luigi Ramas and Tal-Salem, a two-man hit team employed by Storm Crow to kill Peroni. Ramas had been shot dead by SO19 at Heathrow Airport, the previous May. Tal-Salem was still at large.

  Swann flicked through the other information he was putting together. He picked up a photograph of a meal receipt in Paris. It had been taken by an undercover FBI agent in Idaho, who was watching the compound of Jakob Salvesen, the Christian Fundamentalist, who’d employed Boese to attack London and Rome. Poking out from under the receipt was the slip of paper with the scraps of handwriting on it. Bits of words. Swann was sure they were Winthrop directions to a dead drop. He sifted through other stuff, some of the forensic bits they had gleaned from the car they had stopped on the motorway: a Ford Mondeo, one that Boese had bought a year previously and left in underground storage. Again Swann hesitated, aware of a presence in the squad room doorway. He had asked himself the same question a dozen or more times—why had Boese gone back for that car? He must surely have known they would track it. It did not matter now, Boese was in the special secure unit at Reading Prison; a building all on its own, housing only ten prisoners, with a razor wire fence, then it’s own outer wall, a second wire fence and the main perimeter wall. Even Storm Crow could not fly that particular nest.

  He looked up to see DSU Colson watching him. ‘You’re an early bird, Jack.’

  ‘Things to catch up on, sir.’

  Colson put his hands in his trouser pockets and strolled across to the window. They were the only two in the room; Swann could feel some kind of question, statement perhaps, weighing on his boss. He was aware of a tingling sensation, sudden butterflies in his stomach.

  Colson spoke without looking round, gazing at the still-darkened city skyline—the Palace of Westminster and Big Ben, clock face illuminated. ‘Everything all right with you, Jack?’ He said it casually, but Swann could sense the slight edge in his voice. He got up and walked over. Front it out, he told himself. Best way. He paused beside Colson, who looked round, a big man with an open, intelligent face. He raised the knuckle of one forefinger to his lips, leaning his elbow against the window. Swann was conscious of both their reflections in the glass.

  ‘I’ve had a bit of a bad time, sir.’ He looked Colson squarely in the eye now. ‘Things to deal with.’

  Colson nodded. ‘Your kids still living with you?’

  Swann shook his head. ‘They’re back with their mother now.’

  ‘You must miss them. What was it—almost a year?’

  ‘Thirteen months in the end.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘Muswell Hill.’

  ‘Not too far.’

  ‘I see a lot of them.’

  Colson was quiet for a moment, then he said. ‘How long have you been up here now, Jack?’

  That was it, what Swann had been waiting for, feared almost. What was it he had heard one time, some psychologist or other. You move towards your dominant thought. ‘Five years almost.’

  Colson kept his eyes on him, face open; no furtive glances, no avoidance of the eye. ‘You’ve been good, Jack. Very good.’

  Swann felt something break in his chest.

  ‘And you’re right. You did have a bad time.’

  ‘Look, sir. I know I haven’t been at my best, but I’m dealing with it.’

  Colson held his gaze. McCulloch came in clutching two bundles of files, with a polystyrene coffee cup balanced precariously on one of them. Colson moved away from the window. ‘If you want an extension on your five years, I’ll back you,’ he said.

  Swann could hardly believe his ears. Two minutes ago he was sure Colson was going to ask him to transfer out of the Branch. ‘Thank you, sir. I do.’

  ‘Good.’ Colson patted him on the shoulder and made his way to the door. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘Chrissie Harris has been doing some spade work on a team she thinks might be looking to cause us problems. I’ll put you on it when the time comes.’

  ‘Great.’ Swann moved back to his desk.

  ‘You OK, Macca?’ Colson asked McCulloch.

  ‘Not bad, Guv. Piled high with paperwork.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Operation Airwaves. The Iraqi group in Bayswater.’

  Colson nodded. He turned to both of them. ‘By the way, we’ve got a visitor coming this morning, the assistant commissioner’s bringing him down.’

  ‘Who’s that, then?’ Swann asked.

  ‘Dr Benjamin Dubin.’

  Ben Dubin was an academic, formerly of the Jonathan Institute in Israel, an organization that studied terrorism, set up after Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother was killed leading the raid on Entebbe. Swann had only heard of him through Louis Byrne, the FBI agent who had led the Foreign Emergency Search Team that came over after an American was killed in the Storm Crow incident. Apart from Byrne himself, Dubin was the leading light on Storm Crow. Swann remembered that it was Dubin who had put forward the theory that Storm Crow was the protégé of the Jackal.

  Swann had heard a lot about Dubin from Byrne: allegedly, he was the best theoretical terrorism expert on the planet. Byrne had rumoured that he once worked for the US government, but would not elaborate. Now he was director of the centre for study of terrorism at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and had headed the RAND Corporation in the late 1970s. Swann had no idea what to expect, none of them did, even how old he was. Colson brought him down to the squad room; a small wiry man, with the darkened complexion of a Middle Eastern birth. Byrne had told them he was fluent in both Hebrew and Arabic. Swann put him in his early fifties, though he was tight-limbed and lean. He wore a checked cotton shirt, brown tie and a brown corduroy sports jacket, and circular tortoiseshe
ll glasses pressed the bridge of his nose. Swann looked for the leather patches on his sleeves, but could not find them.

  Colson introduced the team to him and explained that they could only tell him so much about the Storm Crow investigation, as Boese was still on remand.

  ‘I understand. Don’t worry.’ Dubin spoke with a heavy New York accent. ‘Gotta keep it pure. Nothing that’ll prejudice a prosecution. Get it with the FBI all the time.’ He smiled a wide smile, showing a set of crooked, off-white teeth. His hair was intact and his beard still dark, just a few salt and pepper flecks here and there.

  ‘You’re Swann?’ he said, shaking hands. Swann nodded. ‘Louis Byrne told me all about you. I guess you two worked pretty closely on this one, huh?’

  ‘Pretty closely, yeah.’ Swann folded his arms. ‘I wasn’t aware you’d left the Jonathan Institute.’

  ‘End of the last academic year.’ Dubin dragged fingertips over the desktop. ‘Mutual decision, I think, though I guess the fact of it is I fell out with them.’

  ‘The Israelis?’

  ‘Kinda.’ Dubin indicated the desk. ‘Mind if I …’

  Swann swept an arc with his hand. ‘Be my guest.’

  He squatted on the edge, one foot on the floor. ‘Between you me and the wall,’ he explained, ‘I’m not too keen on Netanyahu’s policies. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m Jewish.’

  ‘But not an Israeli,’ Christine Harris from the Special Branch cell observed.

  Dubin smiled at her. ‘Right. New York City born and raised. Did my Ph.D. at Columbia.’

  There was an ease about him that warmed Swann to him. Webb too was relaxing. They had had academics on the fifteenth and sixteenth floors before, most of them about as streetwise as a statue of Louis XIV. Often, they pontificated on the politics behind the violence. John Garrod generally gave them short shrift, which was why they were left to assistant commissioners to handle. As far as the Branch was concerned, terrorists were criminals. Police officers arrested criminals. That was the end of the story.

  ‘You’re in Scotland now?’ Harris asked him.

  ‘Right. I went back to RAND for a few weeks, but I’m settled north of the border now.’

  ‘I remember reading something you wrote,’ she went on. ‘After the Tripoli bombings.’

  Dubin nodded. ‘That was just before I left RAND. Guess I fell out with the Reagan administration.’ He laughed. ‘Seem to fall out with everybody these days. Age creeping in, I guess. Must be getting cantankerous.’ He looked again at Harris. ‘I had a public row with Reagan over the Tripoli air strikes.’

  ‘Why?’ McCulloch spoke for the first time.

  ‘Because fundamentally they didn’t work. I knew they wouldn’t at the time. I tried to tell the government, but they didn’t listen. Told me to butt out in the end.’

  Swann motioned for McCulloch to get some coffee. ‘Anyways,’ Dubin went on. ‘I was right, of course.’ He smiled again. ‘I generally am. Reagan claimed that the Tripoli attacks would halt the state sponsoring of terrorism by Libya. Far from it. Between 1987 and 1988 Libya funded at least twenty-three separate acts. That was more than they’d done period, before Reagan hit them. Qaddafi also hiked up his supply of arms to the IRA, because you guys let the F15s take off from British soil.’ He made an open-handed gesture. ‘Well, matter of fact, I got pissed off with the States and went to Israel for a while. I worked at the Jonathan Institute, took my data base with me. But then I started to question what they were doing, how accurate their information was, and in the end I took up the post at St Andrews.’

  Swann moved off the desk. ‘You said data base?’

  Dubin looked at him over the rim of his glasses. ‘That’s right. I got a data base listing every terrorist incident in the world, going back to the Irgun in 1945.’

  Swann and Webb showed him round the rest of the floor. The squad room, senior officers’ rooms and the SO12 cell where Harris linked with upstairs. Finally, they went to the Buckingham Palace end of the building, exhibits, where things that went bang were dealt with.

  ‘And bomb data?’ Dubin asked, when they had shown him the weapons and various other devices they had on the wall of the anteroom, next to the evidence cages that each officer kept. Webb showed him the mortars from the two Heathrow Airport attacks by the IRA.

  ‘We log everything,’ Webb explained. ‘Link up via the Trevi Committee; BKA, DST, FBI, whoever we can share information with.’

  ‘The relationships are good, then?’

  ‘Now they are.’

  ‘The French?’

  ‘Yes, even the French.’

  Back in the exhibits office, the three of them sat down and Colson came through to join them. Dubin leaned forward with his hands clasped together, black hairs disappearing up his sleeve from his wrist. He looked keenly at Swann. ‘You arrested Storm Crow,’ he said.

  Swann looked evenly back at him. ‘Ismael Boese, yes.’

  ‘Rome,’ Dubin said. ‘Not to mention what he did here. The political shock waves are still reverberating throughout the world.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Swann said. ‘That incident proved the very fear that was generated by Saddam Hussein back in February.’

  Dubin nodded slowly. ‘Only much much worse.’

  Swann sat forward then. ‘You were the one who first put forward the idea that Storm Crow was a protégé of Carlos, is that right?’

  ‘I guess. Louis Byrne agreed with me.’

  ‘You know him well?’ Webb asked.

  Dubin chuckled. ‘Pretty well. As good as one gets to know anyone from FBI HQ. Byrne’s a good agent. What they call a “Blue Flamer” in the FBI field offices. A suit from D.C. on the fast-track career programme.’

  ‘But it was you who thought Boese was linked to Carlos,’ Colson stated.

  Dubin sat back and placed his hands behind his head. ‘Yes. I’ve always thought so. Carlos is in prison in Paris now.’

  ‘We know. We interviewed him last year.’

  Dubin nodded. ‘So did I.’

  Swann stared at him then. ‘The DST let you in?’

  ‘I asked to see Carlos. He agreed. The authorities vetted me and I passed. If Carlos wants to see me—I can see him.’

  ‘The only person who ever interviewed Carlos was Assem El Jundi, the Syrian poet,’ Swann said.

  Dubin nodded. ‘I think he must’ve got up Carlos’s nose, because he ended up getting shot for his trouble.’ His face lost its smile. ‘Anyway, after the French convicted him of the Rue Toullier murders I was allowed to interview him. I’ve just finished a full biography.’

  ‘And Storm Crow,’ Webb said. ‘Did Carlos confirm your theory?’

  ‘He neither confirmed nor denied it.’

  ‘But he knew Ismael Boese,’ Swann said.

  ‘Oh, yes. He definitely knew him. Boese was there in 1982. I’ve had two independent witnesses over and above Carlos, who have separately confirmed the young man from America, whose parents were SLA, and whose mentors were Provisional IRA. Entirely separate accounts. When Carlos declared war on the French government over Magdalena Kopp being imprisoned, Ismael Boese was there. I think his first real blooding was the Paris-Toulouse express.’ Dubin paused. ‘If my theory is correct, Boese learned a great deal from Carlos, not just about the terrorist act. Carlos wrote a letter to Gaston Defferre, the French Interior Minister, on the 25th February 1982. He proved he was the sender by enclosing a set of his fingerprints.’

  ‘Identity,’ Swann said. ‘And vanity.’

  ‘Right. Carlos revelled in the glory. Most of what’s been attributed to him is pure fiction. He could not have possibly done all that’s been claimed about him. One argument is that he was a CIA/KGB disinformation exercise who started to believe his own publicity.’

  ‘And Boese learned from that,’ Swann said.

  ‘Yes. To keep his identity secret.’ Dubin looked from one to the other of them. ‘Funny thing is, if Carlos was not responsible for much of what was claimed abou
t him, Storm Crow was responsible for everything that was claimed about him. Not only that—he did keep his identity secret for almost ten years.’

  ‘Until last year,’ Colson put in.

  Dubin lifted his shoulders. ‘Everybody gets careless. What was it, a set of prints from a beer glass or something?’

  ‘ATF in California,’ Webb told him. ‘Louis Byrne located them.’

  ‘You’re certain that Boese is Storm Crow,’ Swann said.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘I wasn’t.’ Swann glanced at his colleagues. ‘Until last May.’

  Dubin nodded. ‘Boese’s Storm Crow all right. All the evidence points to it.’ He smiled and scratched the palm of one hand with the fingernails of the other. ‘I suppose there’s only two people in the world who can say with absolute certainty, though, and one of them is Carlos.’

  ‘And the other, Boese himself,’ Webb said.

  ‘Yes.’ Dubin pursed his lips. ‘That’s why I want to interview him.’

  3

  GIBBS HAD A VISITOR. Boese always took a quiet interest whenever anyone had a visitor. Since he had been here, there had been quite a number: Gibbs three, McClellan one, Butcher three. Brynn Morgan, the Welsh murderer, had been visited regularly by his sister in the past, but apparently she had not come for a year now. The day before Gibbs’s visitor came, he sent his spare clothes through to be searched and laid ready for him in the sterile area. The wardens were vigilant. Since the IRA break-out from a similar special secure unit at Whitemoor Prison, they had doubled their searches. The routine was much the same, however, the ten prisoners in the unit had their days pretty much to themselves. They worked if they wanted to, at a metal and woodwork shop. Although the product of their endeavours was strictly scrutinized, Terlucci had still managed to fashion himself an excellent replica of the Italian stiletto knife. Boese watched him as they ate breakfast at the tables in the dining area. The cover was still on the pool table and Terlucci sat with his back to it. He was on his own this morning. Normally he hung around the Blues Brothers, but they were deep in some conversation of their own. Boese watched him and Terlucci avoided his eye.