Nom de Guerre

by Gulvin, Jeff

  ‘You saw the TV news, Louis. Boese got out.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  He heard Byrne sigh. ‘Look, I’m sorry to hassle you so soon. It’s just that this has implications for all of us. Did Boese see anyone in prison, visitors or anything?’

  ‘Only one person,’ Swann told him. ‘Benjamin Dubin. Your mate from the Jonathan Institute.’

  Byrne was quiet then. ‘What did Dubin want with him?’

  ‘He’s written a book on Carlos, hasn’t he. He thinks Boese is Carlos’s protégé. I guess he wanted to find out from the horse’s mouth.’

  ‘You’re going to talk to him?’

  ‘What do you think, Louis?’

  Swann arranged to keep Byrne posted on anything that he needed to know, then he hung up. Webb was deep in conversation with Colson. Swann went across to them. ‘Louis Byrne,’ he said as Colson looked round. ‘Just as anxious as we are.’

  Colson smiled crookedly. ‘Built his reputation on him, didn’t he.’ He turned back to Webb once more, who was holding a sheet of paper. ‘What’ve you got, Webby?’

  Webb handed him the paper. ‘Word just came in from the gun room at Lambeth. Russian. A 9-millimetre Gyurza, which means snake or viper.’ He looked across the room to the fax machine which had started whirring. ‘They’re beaming across some details.’

  Swann crossed to the fax machine, collected the specification sheet and read it. ‘Special forces pistol,’ he said. ‘Fires armour-piercing rounds, 9 by 21 millimetre, RG-054. They can penetrate body armour.’ He passed the sheet to Colson.

  McCulloch came over from the far desk by the window, where he had taken another call. ‘That was the gun room again,’ he said. ‘They’ve identified the shell casings.’

  ‘And?’ Colson said.

  ‘Probably from a machine gun called a Whirlwind, Russian name—Vikhr. It’s evil. Like a Kalashnikov, but more effective. The poor bastards in the front car didn’t stand a chance. Those rounds can clear thirty layers of Kevlar at two hundred metres. They were only feet away.’

  Amaya Kukiel served bigos to an old man who lived in a bedsit on his own. He came in three times a week and always ordered the same thing. She wondered if these were the only hot meals he had. She piled on a little extra, which he appreciated, smiling widely and showing her the gaping holes in his teeth. His chin was pointed and the stubble that clung there was the gathered fluff of the elderly. Carrying his tray in both hands, he shuffled to the table farthest from the door and settled himself down with a spoon. Amaya watched Vaczka watching her and fought to keep the colour from her cheeks. She wanted to urinate, something she had been doing a lot of since yesterday evening. Christine Harris had contacted her and told her about Liverpool and now she was nervous as hell. Had he been different since he got back? She did not know the answer. She did not know if she thought he had been different the last couple of weeks or so before he went north. Their love-making was as regular, more regular in fact; he seemed to want it every time he saw her. Was there something in that? She did not know. She had never experienced anything like this before and she was scared.

  He surrounded himself with so many people, faces she knew and lots of others she did not, but the British intelligence services would not be interested in him for the purpose of idle curiosity. She wondered who he was and what they knew about him. He had never done anything for charity in all the time she had known him, let alone hiring a van and delivering clothes on behalf of the Polish mission. And now she had this deep sense of fear, right in the bowels, right there, where you could feel it as pain—a hollowed-out sensation that had been with her when she finally fell asleep, with her when she woke up, and with her now as she met his eyes across the floor of the cafeteria. He smiled at her and she could not tell what his eyes were telling her, if anything. She could feel the paranoia setting in and that frightened her all over again. The door to the street opened and Stahl came in. He glanced at her, staring for a second or so it felt, then he slid into the chair opposite Vaczka. Amaya went out to wash some dishes and calm herself down.

  Vaczka looked at Stahl. ‘Have you got it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does it look legitimate?’

  ‘It’s in three parts. Bikes purchased, shipped to Poland on the instruction of the company.’ From his pocket he produced the copy invoice and slid it across the table to Vaczka. The final payment was to be electronically transferred, like the previous five. Six in total, nicely spread out and for amounts that varied considerably. Our US account to theirs.’

  Vaczka stuffed the invoice into his jeans’ pocket. ‘I’d rather have paid cash.’

  Stahl hunched his shoulders into his neck. ‘Nobody wants cash any more.’

  Vaczka stirred the dark coffee in front of him and nodded. ‘Things have changed, my friend. Things have certainly changed.’ Kukiel was back behind the counter again. He smiled sweetly at her.

  ‘Have you decided what to do about her?’ Stahl spoke from the side of his mouth.

  ‘Not yet, but I will. She’s a good fuck. I’ll leave it at that for a while. Just think how obliging she’s going to be.’ He leered at Stahl, then sat back. ‘This is the last meeting. Same for the others. Pass the word. Disappear, until I tell you otherwise.’

  Stahl looked briefly at him, nodding once. Then, scraping back his chair, he stared very coldly at Kukiel and went outside again.

  The following morning, Webb went out to Reading to begin the process of interviewing the remaining inmates of the special secure unit. The pathologist’s report on the biker was not in yet. They had his fingerprints and were checking to see if he had served any time.

  Swann flew to Edinburgh, then hired a car and drove over the Forth Bridge towards Perth, before turning off for St Andrews. With Boese gone, their case had gone too and they would have to start all over again. That meant retrawling through everything they had amassed over the past couple of years, relooking at every Storm Crow incident worldwide, and every known contact. Tal-Salem figured in this somewhere, Swann was certain of that. He thought again of the dead French banker and the solicitor and his secretary. Tal-Salem liked killing. You could tell, because of the hashish he smoked while he was doing it. Some killers might need to get high on hash in order to carry out their crimes, like others got shit-faced on booze. The original Hashinin, that Byrne had told him about, got high to generate the courage to assassinate, but Swann had the feeling that Tal-Salem just liked combining two pleasures.

  Before he had left early this morning, Webb had walked past his desk. ‘He always knew he could get out, Webby,’ Swann said to him. ‘And he always knew he would.’ Swann picked up the polythene-encased feather and rubbed its stem through the plastic. ‘That’s why he sent this to me again.’

  ‘What, sort of giving you the finger?’

  ‘Yes. Like he did in that interview room.’ Swann put down the feather. ‘Remember when we nicked him? Remember how cool he was over it all, how calm he was at Paddington?’ He twisted his lip. ‘He’s been ahead of the game, right from the off.’ A thought struck him then and he stood up. ‘If he hadn’t been arrested, he would never have been able to look me in the eye and make the phone call, which sparked off the thing in Rome. He would have missed all that drama. Webby, this was planned long before we caught him.’

  Webb leaned against his desk. ‘What about the plans, what about getting the word out from inside?’

  ‘It’s been done before.’

  ‘No mail. No visitors. No phone calls.’

  ‘Apart from Dubin.’

  ‘Yeah, but you don’t really suspect Dubin, do you?’

  ‘Why not?’ Swann flapped his arms at his side. ‘He’s the only person who’s spoken to Boese since he got banged up.’

  ‘Yes. And he has monthly meetings with the assistant commissioner.’ Webb shook his head at him.

  Swann drove into the old university town, past the Old Course Hotel on his left
and the modern university buildings, off the roundabout, to his right. Dubin had said up South Street, on to North Street and pull over by the clock tower. Swann saw the tower and the pedestrian entrance under the arch, and swung the hire car into a parking space at chevron angles to the camber of the road. Dubin had mentioned parking vouchers to him. Swann pulled the Met fuel-record book from his bag and stuffed it against the windscreen. He locked the door and looked across the road. Students were milling about everywhere. He could smell the sea beyond the height of the old grey stone quad, where Dubin’s office apparently was. He crossed the road, walked under the arch and came out on to a square of grass: the quad with four sides of three-storey buildings dominating it. He asked at the gatehouse and was told to cross to the far door. Dubin’s secretary would meet him.

  He waited in the stone-floored, high-ceilinged hallway, with the wide stone staircase rising before him. A woman in her late thirties appeared on the stairs. She had dark hair and was wearing a tweed skirt and nice, sensible shoes. ‘Sergeant Swann?’ she called. Swann followed her up the stairs.

  Dubin’s office was on the third floor, the last of the three doors between two sets of double fire doors. An essay box was fixed to the wall. The secretary knocked on the door and Dubin’s voice called for them to go in.

  ‘Sergeant.’ Dubin stood up as Swann went in. ‘Nice to see you again.’

  ‘Doctor.’ Swann glanced about the room. The US Stars and Stripes flag was draped behind the desk on the window blinds, a globe dominated the desk already dominated by papers, a computer screen to one side and books. The walls were lined with racks of shelving and every available space filled with one box file or another. ‘Some of what I brought from RAND,’ Dubin explained.

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘God, yeah. Two rooms full of the stuff.’

  ‘Terrorist events.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Swann looked across the desk at him. Then Dubin moved round to the easy chairs and the coffee table between them. He wore a tweed tie and corduroy trousers, his glasses perched on the end of his nose. ‘Your assistant commissioner has been speaking to the families of the officers who got killed,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve just phoned him myself to offer my condolences.’

  Swann stared coolly at him. ‘That’s nice of you. Thank you.’

  ‘Sixteen police officers and three civilians dead.’ Dubin sat down heavily in the easy chair.

  ‘Five,’ Swann corrected him. ‘Two more died this morning.’

  ‘That’s too bad. I’m really sorry.’ Dubin looked at the floor, then up at Swann, eyes dark and intelligent. His gaze was almost penetrating, as if he would be the interviewer and not the other way round.

  ‘Dr Dubin, you’re the only person from outside the prison to speak to Boese since he was placed on remand,’ Swann began.

  ‘Is that right?’ Dubin rubbed his nose. ‘No other visitors?’

  ‘Not only that, but no mail and no phone calls, either given or received.’

  ‘Then how did he plan the escape?’ Dubin cocked one eyebrow.

  ‘That’s what we’d like to know.’ Swann shifted himself in the seat, then asked: ‘What did you talk to him about, exactly?’

  Dubin thought for a moment, looking beyond him to the window and flag behind the desk. ‘The meeting didn’t last long,’ he said slowly. ‘And it was nothing like as successful as I’d hoped. I spoke a little about my interview with Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez.’ He broke off, looked at Swann and made a face. ‘Basically, he wouldn’t give me the interview.’

  ‘How long were you there?’ Swann said.

  ‘Not very long. I couldn’t tell you the exact amount of time, though I guess you could check with the prison.’ His face was open. ‘They’d know, wouldn’t they.’

  Swann thought for a moment, then said: ‘Did you have any trouble getting Boese to see you?’

  Dubin shook his head. ‘I wrote the prison. They wrote back. Then I called and they told me he had agreed. I guess they checked me out, then I received a letter telling me a date and time.’

  ‘So you didn’t have to try and persuade him at all?’

  ‘No. He seemed to be quite keen. He stipulated no tapes and no pictures, but apart from that he would see me.’

  ‘But when you did meet him, he refused to be actually interviewed.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t quite like that. We talked a bit, I guess, but it didn’t go where I wanted it to. He denied what I knew to be true.’

  ‘That he had been with Carlos?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s not surprising really, is it?’ Swann cocked an eyebrow. ‘I mean he was still on remand.’

  ‘I suppose so, yeah. He seemed to want to see me, but what was the point if he wasn’t going to talk to me.’

  Swann made a face. ‘Seems odd, doesn’t it. I mean, I guess he knew who you were. If he knows the major players worldwide, then he’ll know about the bloke who chronicles them.’

  ‘I don’t chronicle them, Sergeant, so much as their activities.’

  ‘It’s much the same thing.’

  ‘Is it?’ Dubin looked at him carefully. ‘I’m not sure that it is.’

  Swann pressed on. ‘But it’s likely he knew who you were.’ He gestured with one hand. ‘You must have told him who you were in the letter.’

  ‘Of course. I gave the prison my full background.’

  Swann dabbed at his upper lip with his tongue. ‘So he agreed to see you, talks some, then effectively declines a formal interview. I find that very strange, don’t you?’

  Dubin crossed one leg over the other. ‘I do, yes. It was strange.’

  ‘And then a few months later, he gets out.’ Swann made a face, twisting his mouth down at the corners. He stood up then and stretched his legs, not speaking, walking to the window. ‘Can I see the rest of the data base?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure. Why not.’ Dubin collected his keys from his desk and led the way down the corridor to the far end of the building.

  ‘How could he get out, Dr Dubin?’ Swann asked him.

  ‘You mean, who would he use?’ Dubin looked over his shoulder. ‘Christ, now you’re asking.’ He scratched his head as he walked. ‘He’s Storm Crow, isn’t he,’ he said, ‘Who couldn’t he use? Boese’s had links with all the major groups you could think of.’

  ‘What about Abu Nidal?’

  Dubin pulled a face. ‘It’s possible, I suppose. Why, d’you have some reason to think that the ANO might be involved?’

  ‘We’re not sure of anything yet.’

  Dubin showed Swann into an anteroom which housed hundreds of box files and two desks with computer screens standing on them. Two students were working at the respective keyboards. Dubin introduced him and Swann walked up the three steps which opened into a long, thin room, with a full-size window overlooking the back of the university and the estuary beyond. He leaned against the glass.

  ‘Best view in the building,’ Dubin told him.

  Swann looked back at him, observing the calm expression in his big, dark eyes, then beyond him to the boxes and boxes of information: every terrorist event, every terrorist gang perhaps, going back fifty years.

  11

  SWANN SAT AT THE bar of Finnegan’s Wake and watched the news on television. Webb and Harris were with him, together with Phil Cregan, the explosives officer. The carnage at Hanwell Broadway had been cleared, Webb and Cregan supervising the shipment of the wrecked vehicles to the Defence Research Agency at Fort Halstead in Kent. Webb had fully zoned the area for evidence and the forensics team had packed all that they could recover into nylon evidence bags, before wrapping the vehicles in sterile tarpaulin. The attack was still the main headline, with the name of Storm Crow dominating every newspaper and every half-hourly bulletin. Already, alleged sightings of him from France to Germany and Switzerland, and as far away as Chile, had been reported on national television. Swann took them all with a pinch of salt; over two hundred calls had come into the Ya
rd that morning alone.

  He lit a cigarette and one for Cregan and they all watched the news. Five-thirty, and the bar was filling up with workers from the various offices in and around Victoria. Normally they drank further away from the Yard, but with the ceasefire still holding, fears for personal security had calmed considerably. Benjamin Dubin was being interviewed, the reporter standing with him in the quad at St Andrews University, where only days before Swann had also talked to him. The camera was close up on Dubin’s face: dark skin, bearded. His hair was still black and he looked fifteen years younger than his actual fifty-five.

  ‘Dr Benjamin Dubin,’ the reporter was introducing him, ‘recognized by security services the world over as the leading civilian authority on terrorism. Ten years with the RAND Corporation, then another five with the Jonathan Institute in Israel, before coming here to St Andrews.’

  Dubin stood behind him, hands in the pockets of his chinos.

  ‘Dr Dubin, what can you tell us about Storm Crow? How could such an escape have happened? The worst attack the Metropolitan Police have ever suffered. Not even the IRA, who were at war with the UK mainland for thirty years, have ever engineered such a massacre.’

  Dubin scratched his beard along the jawline. ‘Storm Crow is nothing like the IRA. It’s important to establish that fact immediately. Matter of fact, he’s nothing like anybody the Western world has really come across before. Before his arrest in May of last year, Storm Crow had never been identified. That had always been his greatest asset. In the seventies and early eighties, Carlos, Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, was reputed to be the ultimate enemy of Western governments after what he did with the OPEC ministers in 1975, the Rue Toullier and, of course, the hijacked aircraft that the Israelis liberated at Entebbe. But the security forces always knew who Carlos was. No secret was made of his identity. Although a considerable number of myths were created.

  He stopped talking, the wind coming off the sea to ruffle his hair. Students walked behind him, and Swann suddenly thought of the narrow upstairs room, where his two assistants logged every terrorist event in the world on computer.