At Risk (11 page)

“What sort of query?”

“Ballistics identified the round as . . .” there was the sound of papers being shuffled, “7.62 millimetre armour-piercing.”

“Thanks,” said Liz, noting down the calibre. “What’s the name of your bloke down there?”

“Steve Goss. Want his number?”

“Please.”

He gave it to her and she broke the connection. For some minutes she stared at her notes. She was no expert, but she had been around firearms long enough to know that 7.62 calibre weapons were usually military or ex-military rifles. The Kalashnikov was a 7.62, as was the old British Army SLR. Perfect for the battlefield, but a pretty unwieldy choice for close-quarter murder. And an armour-piercing round? What was that all about?

She turned the facts around in her mind. Whichever way she combined them they looked bad. Dutifully, but with a sense of pointlessness, she rang Bob Morrison. Once again the Special Branch officer rang her back from a public phone, but this time the reception was better. He had heard about the killing at the transport café, he said, but not in any detail. He had never heard of the victim, Ray Gunter.

Liz repeated what Ferris had told her. Morrison’s responses were curt, and she sensed his acute resentment that his source, however supposedly useless, had cut him out of the loop and was now reporting to her.

“Zander says that Eastman was livid,” she told him. “Shouting about Pakis and ragheads and networks being overloaded.”

“I’d be livid if I was Eastman. The last thing he wants is trouble on his patch.”

“Is Norfolk on his patch?”

“It’s on the edge of it, yeah.”

“I’m sending you the details of Zander’s call, OK?”

“Yeah, sure. Like I said, I don’t believe a word the little toerag says, but do by all means nod the stuff over if you like.”

“On its way,” said Liz, and hung up.

Would he forward the conversation to the Norfolk Special Branch? she wondered. He certainly ought to. But he might just sit on it out of sheer bloody-mindedness. It would be a way of putting her—Liz—in her place, and if anyone asked questions afterwards he could claim that Zander was a compromised and unreliable source of intelligence.

The more Liz thought about it, the more certain she became that Morrison would say nothing. He was a jobsworth, a man whose entire life had become a bullying, nit-picking course of least resistance. The more valuable Frankie’s product proved to be, the worse he’d look for having mishandled him. He’d probably just bury the whole thing, which was fine by Liz, because when all was said and done it meant that she had more pieces of the jigsaw than anyone else. Which was how she liked it.

Pencil in hand, she stared at her notepad and its headings. What did they tell her? What was it reasonable to surmise? Something or someone had been brought in by sea from Germany, and “dropped off” at “the headland.” This activity related to Melvin Eastman’s operations, but was not one of them—indeed she had the impression that Eastman might well be being squeezed, that things were out of his control. A fisherman, meanwhile—a boat owner, presumably—had been found shot dead in a lorry park near the Norfolk coast. Shot dead with a weapon which, as things stood, looked as if it might have been military.

Reaching for her keyboard she called up an Ordnance Survey map with Fakenham at its centre. The town was about ten miles due south of Wells-next-the-Sea, which was on Norfolk’s long north coast. Wells was the biggest town for a good twenty miles along that northern coast—most of it seemed to be salt marshes and inlets, with a sprinkling of villages, wildfowl sanctuaries and large private estates. Lonely, sea-girt countryside, it looked. Probably a few coastguard stations and yacht clubs, but otherwise a perfect smuggler’s coast. And less than three hundred miles from the German ports. Slip out of Cuxhaven or Bremerhaven when the light began to fade, and you could be lying off one of those creeks under cover of the early-morning darkness thirty-six hours later.

Bremerhaven again. The place where the fake UK driver’s licence had been issued to Faraj Mansoor. Was there a connection? At the back of her mind, quiet but insistent, was Bruno Mackay’s report that one of the terrorist organisations was about to run an invisible against the UK.

Could Faraj Mansoor be the invisible? Unlikely—it would almost certainly be an Anglo-Saxon type. So who was Faraj Mansoor, and what was he doing in Bremerhaven buying a forged driver’s licence? Was he a UK citizen who’d been banned from driving and wanted a clean document? Bremerhaven was a known source of fake passports and other identity documents, and the fact that Mansoor wasn’t after a passport suggested that he didn’t need one, that he was already a UK citizen. Had anyone checked that?

Mansoor,
she wrote, underlining the name.
UK citizen?

Because if he wasn’t a UK citizen, then two things were possible. That he was coming into the UK on a fake passport that he had acquired from some other source at some other time. Or, more seriously, that he was coming into the UK in such a way that he didn’t need a passport. That he was someone whose entry had to remain unknown to the authorities. A senior ITS player, perhaps. A contact of Dawood al Safa, whose job in a Peshawar auto repair shop was a cover for terrorist activities. Someone who, whatever the state of his documentation, couldn’t risk passing a customs point.

Every instinct that Liz possessed—every sensibility that she had fine-tuned in a decade of security intelligence work—whispered to her of threat. Pressed, she would have had difficulty in defining these feelings, which related to the way that particles of information combined and took shape in her subconscious. She had, however, learned to trust them. Learned that certain configurations—however fractured, however dimly seen—were invariably malign.

Beneath the words
Mansoor. UK citizen?
she wrote,
Still working at auto shop?

A methodical search of the north Norfolk coastline yielded a number of possible headlands. The most westward of these, Garton Head, jutted several hundred yards into the sea from the Stiffkey Marshes, while an unnamed but similarly sized projection nosed into Holkham Bay a dozen miles to the west. Both looked like navigable landfalls. A third possibility was a tiny finger of land reaching out into Brancaster Bay. The property was on the edge of a village named Marsh Creake, a couple of miles east of Brancaster.

She examined the three headlands again, and tried to look at the map with a smuggler’s eye. They were remarkably similar, in that each was a spit of land surrounded by mudflats. The Brancaster Bay headland, with its proximity to the village of Marsh Creake, was probably the least likely, as it appeared to have a large house on it. The sort of person who owned a property of that size was unlikely to allow it to be used for criminal activity. Unless, perhaps, the owner, or owners, were absentees. Impossible to tell by looking at a few inches of map on a flatscreen monitor. She’d have to check out the place on the ground.

Five minutes later she was sitting in Wetherby’s office and Wetherby was smiling his uneven smile. If you didn’t know him, she thought, you might think him a faintly donnish figure. A brogues and bicycle clips sort of man, more at home in some cloistered quadrangle than at the head of a high-tech counter-terrorism initiative. Facing him, but invisible to Liz, were two photographs in leather-look frames.

“What exactly do you think you would establish by going up there?” he asked her.

“At the very least I’d like to eliminate the possibility that there’s a terrorism angle,” said Liz. “The calibre of the weapon worries me, as it obviously does the Norfolk Special Branch, given that they’ve got a man sitting in on the investigation. My gut instinct, bearing in mind Zander’s call, is that Eastman’s had his organisation hijacked in some way.”

Wetherby rolled a dark green pencil thoughtfully between his fingers.

“Do the Special Branch know about Zander’s call?”

“I passed the information on to Bob Morrison in Essex—that’s Zander’s current handler—but there’s a good chance he’s going to sit on it.”

Wetherby nodded. “From our point of view, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing,” he said finally. “Not a bad thing at all. I think you should go up there, have a quiet word with the local Special Branch man—what’s his name?”

“Goss.”

“Have a quiet word with Goss, and see what’s what. Give the impression that you’re interested in the organised crime component, perhaps, and I’ll wait on your word. If you’re not happy I’ll speak to Fane and we’ll move on it straight away. If there isn’t anything there for us, on the other hand . . . well, it’ll give us something to talk about at the Monday morning meeting. You’re sure Zander isn’t just making the whole thing up?”

“No,” said Liz truthfully. “I’m not sure. He’s the attention-seeking type, and according to Bob Morrison is now gambling, so almost certainly has financial problems. He’s an unreliable agent at every level. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t speaking the truth on this occasion.” She hesitated. “It didn’t sound made up to me. He sounded scared stiff.”

“If that’s your judgement,” said Wetherby, returning the pencil to a stoneware jar that had once held Fortnum and Mason marmalade, “then I agree that you should go. Having said that, there’s only that 7.62 rifle round to suggest that the killing wasn’t the result of a falling-out between drug-dealers. Or a people-smuggling operation gone awry. Perhaps drug-smugglers have started carrying assault rifles. Perhaps Gunter was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and saw something he shouldn’t have.”

“I hope that’s what happened,” said Liz.

He nodded. “Keep me informed.”

“Don’t I always?”

He looked at her, smiled faintly, and turned away.

I
n the tiny bedroom at the east end of the bungalow, Faraj Mansoor slept in unmoving silence. Was this something he had learned to do? the woman wondered. Was even this aspect of his life subject to control and secrecy? Slung over the bedhead was the black rucksack that he had been carrying when she met him. Would he trust its contents to her? Would he be open with her, and treat her as a partner? Or would he expect her, as a woman, to walk behind him? To behave as his subordinate in all things?

In truth, she didn’t care. The essential thing was that the task should be executed. The woman prided herself on her chameleon nature, her preparedness to be whatever she was required to be at any given moment, and was happy to assume whatever role was required of her. At Takht-i-Suleiman, to begin with at least, the instructors had barely acknowledged her existence, but she hadn’t minded. She had listened, she had learned, and she had obeyed. When they had told her to cook, she had cooked. When they had told her to wash the other recruits’ sweat-stinking combat fatigues, she had carried the baskets uncomplainingly to the
wadi,
squatted on her haunches, and scrubbed. And when they had tied her eyes with a scarf and told her to field-strip her assault weapon, she had done that too, her fingers dancing fast and fluent over the machined parts whose names she had only ever known in Arabic. She had become a cipher, a selfless instrument of vengeance, a Child of Heaven.

She smiled. Only those who had undergone the experience of initiation knew the fierce joy of self-nullification. Perhaps—
inshallah
—she would survive this task. Perhaps she would not. God was great.

And in the mean time there were things to do. When he woke Mansoor would want to wash—the smell in the car the night before had been of stale body-odour and vomit—and he would want to eat. The water was heated by a temperamental Ascot which seemed to gasp and die every five minutes—half a box of spent matches lay in the bathroom bin—and the Belling electric stove looked as if it was on its last legs too. The salt air, she guessed, probably shortened the lives of these kind of goods. The fridge whirred noisily but otherwise seemed to work, and after Diane’s departure the day before she had driven into King’s Lynn and stocked up with oven-ready meals from Tesco. Curries, for the most part.

Her name was not Lucy Wharmby, as she had told Diane Munday. But what she was called no longer mattered to her, any more than where she lived. Movement and change were in her blood now, and any kind of permanence was unimaginable.

It hadn’t always been so. In the far beginning, in a past over which a kind of frozen unreality now shimmered, there had been a place called home. A place to which, with the simplicity of a child, she had thought she would always return. She could remember, in great detail, isolated moments from this time. Feeding stale bread to the greedy, snappish geese in the park. Lying in her paddling pool in the tiny south London garden, looking up at the apple tree and pressing her neck downwards on the rim of the pool so that the water rushed out through her hair.

But then the shadows had begun to fall. There was a move from the cosy London house to a cold block in a Midlands university town. Her father’s new teaching job was a prestigious one, but for the bookish seven-year-old it meant permanent separation from her London friends and a hellish new school in which bullying was rife, especially of outsiders.