Ops Files II--Terror Alert (25 page)

The street the shop fronted onto ran perpendicular to the lane where she’d parked, and she covered the distance quickly. The meeting had been scheduled for twenty minutes earlier, and her hope was that Abreeq was still there, assuming he hadn’t skipped it entirely. That was the only variable, but her gut told her he was there, and her instinct had been unerring so far.

She crept along the sidewalk as she neared the building and, when she was only a few meters away, stopped and stared at the cobblestones in front of the twin wooden doors. A black stream of blood was coagulating on the short angled driveway, trickling from inside the shop.

Maya moved to the barrier and listened. There was no sound. She took a deep breath and pushed the nearest door open, sweeping the garage with her weapon as she stood in the darkened aperture. She registered the three dead men in a blink, saw their guns on the ground, and stepped in, leading with her pistol. The air had the distinctive metallic smell of blood, and she made her way into the shop, the overhead incandescent bulbs providing enough light so she could quickly determine that she was alone.

A wheeze sounded from behind her and she pirouetted, weapon at the ready. One of the bodies moved, and its chest uttered another wheeze. She approached slowly and looked down at the wounded man. His jacket was soaked with bright red blood, oxygenated from his lungs. Each time he wheezed, a little more blood gurgled from his chest, where he’d taken two bullets.

She glanced at the pistol by his feet. Sound-suppressed. So a professional. Maya reached for it and checked the magazine – full, only one shot fired. She slipped it into her belt and turned back to the man.

“What happened here?” she asked. The man’s eyelids fluttered open and he looked at her in surprise. He tried to speak, but more blood bubbled from his wounds, and his eyes slowly drifted shut.

“I’ll do a field dressing on you if you can tell me. Otherwise you’ll be dead in minutes.”

He groaned, but no words were forthcoming. He was obviously too far gone, judging by the amount of blood he’d lost.

She frisked him and found a cell phone and a spare magazine for the pistol. She pocketed the magazine and glanced at the phone. It had a signal.

Maya rose and did a quick search of the remainder of the space, which was cluttered and disorganized, engine parts everywhere. The desk in the deepest depths of the garage had stacks of papers on it and an old PC with a monitor that was prehistoric. She looked next to it, at where a green LED was winking periodically, and shifted a pile of documents aside with her arm. Behind the papers was an equally ancient VCR with a tiny flat-screen monitor next to it.

She switched the monitor on and saw an image that momentarily lifted her spirits – the outside of the shop, the quality reasonable, although black and white. A timecode flickered in the corner, the time displayed current. She rewound the tape for fifteen seconds and pressed play, and an image blinked to life from half an hour earlier.

Maya pressed the fast-forward button and the image accelerated, the numbers advancing rapidly. The image darkened and then lightened as fog drifted across the camera’s field of vision, and her agitation grew until a figure walked into the frame. She slowed the playback to normal speed and peered at the man, but couldn’t make him out – he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt that obstructed the view of his face.

“Come on. Look up. Just. Look. Up,” she whispered through clenched teeth, and as if hearing her, he did. She paused the tape and the image wavered, but not before she’d confirmed that it was Abreeq. “There you are, you bastard. Now let’s see where you went…”

Maya pressed play and the video advanced at normal speed. Nothing happened for several minutes, so she fast-forwarded again. When the doors opened beneath the camera, she slowed the playback to normal and gasped when she saw the time code. Two minutes before she’d arrived, no more.

A van pulled into the street and Abreeq got out of the driver’s seat and closed up the garage. She watched as he returned to the van and climbed in, and she paused the footage again as the vehicle pulled away, the license plate frozen onscreen.

“I’ll be damned.” She’d almost had a head-on collision with her quarry. The irony wasn’t lost on her as she lifted the handset of the desk phone and dialed the Mossad’s number, and then abruptly hung up. A landline would leave a record of her call.

But the cell she’d recovered had a signal.

She entered the number and pressed send, and when the operator answered, identified herself and asked to speak to the duty officer. The thirty-second wait seemed to drag like hours, and when the same man’s calm voice came on the line, she could barely contain her anger.

“I’m in Dover. There’s been a shooting. Three men. Two dead. One badly wounded. Abreeq was here. He must have shot them.”

“Slow down. You’re at the address in Dover?”

“Are you deaf? I just told you I am. Abreeq made his meeting, no thanks to you, and just left after killing everyone – or trying to. I have the license number of the van he drove away in.”

“You…what?”

“Take this number down and get it to the British authorities immediately. He left no more than fifteen minutes ago, so they should be able to track him and stop him.” She read off the number slowly, and the duty officer repeated it back to her. When he was done, she cleared her throat. “You also need to get some police to the shop. Call it in anonymously if you like, but the wounded man’s a goner unless they get here quickly.”

“We can do that. Any idea what they were doing there?”

“No, but my guess is they weren’t exchanging recipes. We know that Abreeq was planning something for the match. I think it’s a reasonable guess that he was picking up whatever bomb he was going to use. No other reason for him to travel halfway across the country for a meeting in the middle of the night on the eve of the match. If I’m correct, the bomb is probably in the van.”

“Stay on the line. I’ll be back shortly.”

Three minutes later the voice returned. “You’re to stay in Dover awaiting orders. The police are on their way. You shouldn’t be at the shop when they arrive, though, just in the vicinity. You say there’s a security tape?”

“Correct.”

“Can you record over it from the time you showed up?”

Of course
. Stupid that she hadn’t considered it. “I’ll do it right now. How much time do I have?”

“Assume they’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Okay, I’ll get out of here. Does this phone show a caller ID?”

“Yes. We have the number. It’s registered to a John Smith.”

“I’ll leave it on. Call me when you have instructions.”

“Roger.”

“Any word on the shooting in Manchester – my superior there?”

“Negative.”

She punched the call off and fast-forwarded the tape to where she appeared in the image. After rewinding for a few moments she depressed record and forced herself to wait calmly for ten seconds. When she was sure that her image had been erased, she double-checked the image and watched as the video went to static a few seconds before she arrived, and nodded to herself when it resumed playing again after she was already out of sight. She switched the tape off and rose, looked around, and quickly found a rag.

Maya wiped down the VCR buttons and moved to the doors, pausing to glance at the dying man before looking out into the street. She thought she heard engines approaching, but with the fog it was hard to tell – it distorted direction and proximity. She ducked through the doors, leaving them open, and bolted full speed down the sidewalk, not stopping until she’d reached the Rover. Panting from the run, she opened the door and hotwired the car again, noting that the engine didn’t sound great.

She put the transmission in gear and eased onto the street, and was two blocks away when she saw the glow of emergency lights in the fog from the road a block north of her. The dash clock told her that Abreeq had been on the road for twenty minutes. A small eternity, but if the London office had done its job, he would be apprehended shortly.

But a niggle of anxiety burned in her stomach. So far the terrorist had proved more resourceful than they had, and she wasn’t convinced that it would be as simple as cornering him and slapping the cuffs on. He was a survivor, that much was clear, and that he’d made it across England to his rendezvous after a full-blown gun battle told her that he was as determined to carry out his plan as she was to stop him.

She wanted to believe that the English police would be up to the task, but if their reaction to being warned their stadium was about to be blown up was any indication, her money was on the terrorist.

Maya pulled into a filling station near the train station and left the engine running as the sleepy-looking attendant filled the tank, and then pulled into a slot by the attached all-night market. She settled in to wait for the call that would tell her that her mission was over and Abreeq had been stopped.

A20 highway, six kilometers west of Dover

The fog on the coastal highway was dangerously heavy, slowing Abreeq’s progress to a snail’s pace as he motored west, visibility reduced to no more than ten to fifteen meters. The van’s engine thrummed steadily in second gear as he drove past what he knew were rolling hills of green, now invisible due to the blanket of white that stretched to infinity.

A ship’s horn sounded somewhere out in the English Channel, startling him. He was preoccupied, still trying to grasp why his longtime ally, Vladimir, had turned on him once he’d okayed the deal.

It had to be about money. Abreeq had thought he knew the man well enough, but he’d clearly mistaken his intentions, and he was lucky to have escaped with his life. For the first few minutes on the road he’d been so shaken he’d probed his limbs and torso to confirm he hadn’t been hit. He’d been wounded before, and he knew that in a firefight, often those who took a bullet didn’t even realize it until after the shooting was finished – one of the human body’s miraculous chemical tricks, part of the fight-or-flight survival mechanism that dulled pain until the adrenaline surge faded.

But he was unhurt and in possession of the deadliest weapon to ever fall into terrorist hands. Not that he thought of himself as a terrorist – that was a label others used to demonize what he did. He was a freedom fighter, tackling insurmountable odds as superpowers bullied his people and ensured his homeland was constantly at war with itself. Part of a century-old scheme that the colonial British had concocted with their American allies to keep the oil-producing regions off balance and permanently fighting each other. When, at the end of the Second World War, they had inserted Zionists into Palestine, confiscating it from its rightful owners so the fringe Israeli political movement could serve as a permanent destabilizing force in the region, it had sealed the fate of the Muslim states. An insult that could never stand.

His dream, and the dream of his sponsors, was twofold: a united Muslim caliphate under a single rule, and an end to the tyranny the West had imposed on the Middle East. To achieve his goal meant that many in the West would have to die, so the populace would lose its appetite for meddling in his people’s affairs. It was regrettable, but so was the death of millions in generations of wars of aggression masquerading as peacekeeping missions in the region. Only in the West could the wholesale slaughter of entire civilian populations be positioned as measures in the interests of peace. The hypocrisy sickened him, and he reveled that the time of reckoning was near.

He dug his phone from his pocket and called Kahn to inform him of the Russian’s treachery. When he’d finished, the imam was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his tone was as hard as Abreeq had ever heard it.

“This cannot go unpunished. We must extinguish his entire organization and send an unmistakable message.”

“I agree. Although, upon consideration, perhaps the Russian arms merchant’s death is message enough. His network is the best developed we have. It would be a shame to eliminate our access to devices like this one. I’m quite sure that once word of his untimely demise reaches the right ears, when coupled with news of the detonation, his associates will understand that they badly misjudged us.”

“I shall take it under advisement. But my initial impulse is to draw the sword of Allah and cut them down like sheep.”

“Yes. I understand. However, a wise man uses his enemies to achieve his objectives whenever possible. There may be ways we can benefit from this. Do not be hasty.”

“You are more patient than I.”

“This is a long war. We must harness our resources for the battles that matter, not create new ones to distract us.”

“Agreed. You intend to end this tomorrow?”

“The Western bitch will be bleeding into the ocean by midday.”

“Allah is great. Call me if you require anything.”

Abreeq shut off the phone and cocked his head, listening through the half-open van window. He thought he heard sirens.

He debated turning on the radio to see if there was any news, but decided against it. Nothing would be on the air yet, and even if the police had discovered the dead Russians, there was no way they would know about the van.

“Or would they?” he muttered to himself. He knew that as part of the government’s drive to subjugate its people, the British had embarked on an extensive surveillance camera installation campaign, starting in London and branching to other metropolitan areas as budgets and technology allowed.
Could they have connected the dots that quickly and somehow captured the van on one of the traffic cameras?
He supposed anything was possible, although he considered it unlikely.

His rumination was interrupted by an eerie blue strobing glow in the fog ahead as he passed through an area where the covering thinned from a brisk offshore breeze. It had to be a roadblock.

And he couldn’t be taken alive.

His eyes drifted to a sign on his right, and he pulled off the highway without hesitation. He was just passing the station for the trains that ran beneath the English Channel, Le Shuttle, and a billboard advertised the new Motorway Service Area just beyond it – part of a network of MSAs that dotted the country, rest areas with a filling station, restaurant, restrooms; most importantly, large enough to get lost in.