Firefight (7 page)

'What is it you want me to do?' he asked.

Pankhurst pressed his fingertips together. 'It's complicated,
Will,' he said. 'Why don't you sit down, let me order you
some coffee.'

Reluctantly, Will took a seat. 'Forget about the coffee,' he
said. 'Just talk.'

Pankhurst nodded his head. 'We need to find Ahmed,
and we need to find him quickly. But we're stabbing in the
dark. Truth is, we haven't got a clue where he is. Don
Priestley's a yank through and through, always exaggerating
the Americans' capacity to do things; but he wasn't exaggerating
about Ahmed. They did a
very
good job with him.
If he doesn't want to be found . . .'

'You must have people looking.'

'Of course we have, Will. We've got a
lot
of people
looking. But it won't do any good. We don't even know if
he's in the country.'

'Then how the hell - ?'

Pankhurst raised his hand in the air to silence Will's
outburst. The director stood up, moved round to the other
side of the desk and perched on the edge, just in front of
Will. 'You don't like me, Will,' he said suddenly. 'That's OK,
you're in the majority. My job means that I have to do
some pretty unlikeable things. But we have to work together
on this and that means you need to start putting some trust
in the fact that I know what I'm talking about. Are we
agreed?'

Will held his gaze and for a moment the two men simply
stared at each other.

'We're agreed,' he conceded finally.

'Good.' Pankhurst returned to his seat and continued as
if that little confrontation had never happened. 'As I say,
we have a lot of people looking for him, but I don't hold
out much hope that he'll be found. But we have another
lead and that's what I want you to follow up.'

'What's the lead?'

'His sister. Latifa Ahmed.'

Will blinked. 'You think she'll know where he is?'

'It's possible,' Pankhurst replied. 'At least, she's our best
shot. It seems that Ahmed was always very close to her.
Don Priestley told you yesterday that she was the only
person in Afghanistan who knew the truth when Ahmed
staged his own death. What he didn't tell you was that
they kept in occasional but regular contact while he was
in the US.'

'How?'

'Letters, mostly,' Pankhurst said. 'Ahmed would pretend
to be a distant cousin living in Kabul. The letter would be
sent to a US contact in the capital, then passed via a long
sequence of agents - long enough that it would be nighon
impossible to trace the source of the letter - before
being delivered to her. It would never be more than a few
lines and it could take months to arrive. Even so, from what
I could glean from Priestley, the CIA were less than wild
about letting him do even that.'

'Why did they?'

'Because it was his condition. He refused to help them
at all unless he could have some way of letting Latifa know
that he was OK. The CIA had to give in. Then, when he
was reinserted into Afghanistan in 1990, he found his own
ways to keep in touch with her.'

Pankhurst paused for a moment. 'Tell me, Will,' he
continued, 'how much do you know about the Taliban and
the way they treated the women of Afghanistan?'

Will shrugged. 'Bits and pieces,' he said.

'Right. Well let me give you some idea of the conditions
under which Latifa Ahmed was forced to live when the
Taliban came to power in 1996. She was forced to wear
the burka, of course; she was banned from proper medical
care if she was ill; she was looked upon as a third-class
citizen. But in actual fact, Latifa had it a lot better than
most women in Afghanistan at the time. Ahmed saw to that.
He had infiltrated the highest echelons of al-Qaeda by then
and had influence among the Taliban authorities. Of course,
no one knew she was his sister, but he let it be known
around the neighbourhood where Latifa lived that if she
was interfered with in any way, it would not be tolerated.'

'Sounds dangerous,' Will commented. 'Surely he was
worried people would ask questions.'

'It was a risk he ran,' Pankhurst agreed. 'But he meant
what he said. In 1998 a member of the Taliban police
stopped Latifa in the street. It's unclear what he thought
her misdemeanour was, but the punishment he gave her
was brutal. Nothing out of the ordinary, you understand,
but still brutal. In a busy street she was beaten with a metal
stick; her arm was broken and she was left weeping in the
gutter. Nobody offered to help, of course, because to do
that would have been to risk imprisonment or worse.

'The following day, the policeman was found. His throat
had been sliced when he was sitting at his table eating a
solitary dinner. Nobody saw the killer go in or out of the
house, but rumours travelled fast. Nobody lay a finger on
Latifa until Ahmed was outed in Afghanistan in the year
2000.

'When word of his true identity reached al-Qaeda's ears,
the rumours that he had been protecting Latifa Ahmed
simply confirmed their intelligence. Latifa's luck changed
then. She was imprisoned by the Taliban, where we can
only assume she experienced the brutality for which that
regime is so notorious.'

There was a silence as the two of them considered the
kind of horror Latifa would have gone through.

'How do you know all of this?' Will asked after a while.

'When Ahmed arrived in England, we debriefed him
thoroughly. At first, all he wanted to do was return to
Afghanistan to rescue his sister, but we nipped that in the
bud.'

'How?'

Pankhurst's face twitched. 'We told him she was dead.'

'Nice.'

'We do what's necessary, Will. Faisal Ahmed was no good
to us dead in a ditch in Afghanistan. We calculated that
learning of his sister's death would harden his resolve against
the Taliban, make him more likely to help us. The British
and American governments had always advocated regime
change in the region; if he worked with us, he could be
doing his bit to avenge his sister.

'He didn't have to grieve long. British and American
troops marched into Afghanistan shortly after 9/11. Latifa
Ahmed was discovered in a prison on the outskirts of Kabul
and we were able to break the news to a grateful Ahmed
that his sister was not dead after all. She wasn't in a good
way, though. She weighed a little under six stone and her
body was covered in sores. She hadn't eaten for weeks, nor
had she been allowed out of the tiny cell in which she had
been imprisoned, even to use the lavatory. She was practically
swimming in her own excrement.

'From that point on, our intelligence on Latifa gets a bit
thin. Faisal Ahmed was already proving his worth to us, so
to keep him sweet, we offered to look after Latifa. She was
cared for by the security forces out there for a short while
- a couple of weeks at the best, until she regained some
of her strength - then she disappeared. Our best guess is
that after the traumas she underwent at the hand of the
Taliban, she hid herself away in a quiet village somewhere
- although, as you know, quiet villages are few and far
between in Afghanistan. We're fairly sure, from all we know
about their relationship, that Ahmed will have kept in touch
with his sister somehow. We're equally convinced - and a
number of psychiatric reports back this up - that he will
have continued to remain in contact with her even after
he went dark in 2003.

'As I've said, we rather lost track of Latifa once the Taliban
fell. A few days ago, however, word reached us of her whereabouts.
When the Taliban were thrown from power, their
supporters were scattered around the country. Since then,
certain factions have regrouped and gained in strength. It
seems that Latifa has been abducted by one of these resurgent
factions.

'Why?' Will asked, suspiciously. 'Surely the Taliban have
bigger fish to fry at the moment.'

'I don't know,' Pankhurst admitted. 'I don't know why
the Taliban do anything. What you've got to remember is
that they're a law unto themselves and they have all sorts
of warring factions that we don't even know about. I'm
sure that most Taliban members couldn't give a fig about
Latifa Ahmed. But clearly there's one group that does. If
you want to know why, perhaps you can ask her when you
see her.'

Will's eyes widened.

'We have an informer in the area who claims he can lead
us to her. And that, Will, is where you come in.'

'You want me to go back to Afghanistan?'

'Precisely. You'll meet our contact and your objective will
be to extract Latifa Ahmed from wherever she's being held
and to bring her back safely to this country for questioning.
If she can shed any light on Faisal Ahmed's whereabouts,
we have to know. He could strike any minute and, frankly,
this is our only lead.'

Will chewed on a fingernail for a moment. 'How reliable
is your source?'

Pankhurst shrugged. 'We think he's sound. But we're not
following this up because our source is reliable; we're
following it up because we don't have any other options.
And we don't have the luxury of time: at the moment we've
no reason to believe that Faisal Ahmed knows Latifa's location.
But he'll find out and we're pretty sure he'll try to
free her. We have to get our hands on the woman before
that happens.'

Will stood up and walked to the window. He looked out
over the Thames to see that a flurry of snow was falling.
It would be snowing in Afghanistan, too, not like the last
time he was there. It had been high summer then, 35 degrees
at the height of the sun, dry and acrid. But the Afghan
winters were harsh. There would be deep snow - difficult
to move through, easy to be seen in. And Afghanistan - the
'Stan' as the Regiment guys called it - was just as bad now
as it was then. Worse, even. All this for a lead that could
very well come to nothing.

He turned back to look at Pankhurst. 'How sure are you
that Ahmed's planning something?' he asked.

'How sure do I need to be before I act?' the Director
General replied, quietly. 'Our intelligence is pretty concrete.
The student we apprehended in Rome gave us the basics.'

'Can I talk to him?'

'No,' Pankhurst said quickly. 'No. You can't do that.'

Will nodded, tactfully. He knew what that meant. If the
student had been taken to a black camp, chances were he
hadn't survived the questioning. Unfortunate for him,
convenient for the authorities - they didn't want anyone
running around spilling the beans about what they had been
through.

'He must have got his intel from somewhere, though,'
Will insisted.

Pankhurst nodded. 'He was a regular at the Rome mosque.
We've interrogated the people he was friendly with, but
they've given us nothing else. Trust me, Will, you won't get
anything out of them. Our people are
extremely
persuasive.'

Will fell silent again. The prospect of a return to
Afghanistan made him feel sick. But what was the alternative?
To go back to the flat in Hereford and pick up his
life where he had left off, dividing his time between the
graveyard and the pub? How could he, now that he knew
the truth about his family's death? How could he, now that
he knew their killer was out there somewhere? He stared
out of the window over the London skyline. Maybe Ahmed
was there, hiding somewhere, waiting to strike. Waiting to
kill more innocent people. Waiting to make widows and
orphans. Waiting to destroy more lives, just like he had
destroyed Will's. How bizarre that Will should have to go
all the way back to Afghanistan to find out this man's
location. Still, if that was what he had to do . . .

He turned back to Pankhurst. 'I'm not going in alone,'
he said firmly. 'I'll need a unit. SAS.'

Pankhurst's nose twitched. 'Out of the question. If I could
simply deploy the SAS, I would. You're being brought in
precisely because you've been out of play for two years.'

'Cut the bullshit, Pankhurst,' Will snapped. The Director
General's face flickered with annoyance. 'You and I both
know I'm being brought in because you've gambled that I
want Faisal Ahmed dead more than anything in the world.'
Will looked around him. 'It's a comfortable office, this,' he
said a bit more calmly. 'I'm not used to this sort of luxury.
You obviously are. And you've obviously never been on
covert ops in the Stan. If you had, you'd know that only
an idiot would lay siege to the Taliban in mid-winter. If
this were a more straightforward op, you'd be deploying a
squadron. I'm asking for three men and if I don't get them,
I'm not going.'

Pankhurst fell silent for a moment. When he spoke, it
was with the reasonable voice of a skilled negotiator. 'I'm
sure we could arrange some NATO troops in Kandahar.'

'I don't want NATO troops,' Will insisted. 'And I don't
want fucking Green Berets. I want SAS. I know how they
work and I know they're the best. Christ, sir, these guys
devote their lives to this kind of work. There's no more
chance of there being a mole in Hereford than there is of
there being a mole in this room as we speak.'

The Director General took a deep breath. 'All right,' he
said, quietly. 'I've asked you to trust me, so I'm going to
return the compliment.'

Pankhurst managed to sound almost gracious, but Will knew
it was simply that he had the DG over a barrel, so he stopped
short of thanking him. 'Don't you have any more precise
information about where this woman's being held?' he asked.

'Nothing. Our source is very jumpy - when you meet
him, you'll need to win his trust. But we can hazard a guess
that you'll be heading south from Kandahar - that's the
area where the Taliban insurgency is strongest.'

Will nodded, curtly. He knew how dangerous that part
of the world was.

'Listen to me carefully, Will,' Pankhurst continued. 'Your
unit are the
only
ones you reveal your objective to and even
they cannot know
why
you are extracting Latifa Ahmed.
Someone's been tipping this guy off and we don't know
how deep their influence goes. I know you've been trained
to trust everyone at Hereford, Will, but that's one part of
your training that you need to forget. We can't afford to
trust
anyone
. Do you understand?'