Sleeper Cell (14 page)

‘Why would they?’

‘According to your first interview, you were in Israel with their backing,’ he said.

‘Of course not.’

‘You were never shot and kidnapped by British agents?’

‘No.’

‘And no one’s coming to break you out of Low Newton?’

‘No.’

‘I really don’t understand. You’re saying this was all a fabrication?’

‘I think I knew it wasn’t true, but maybe a part of me wanted it to be. Maybe I even believed some of it in those first few days. I had lived my whole life in Iran. Suddenly, I’m in here. I’m in the West; I’m important. So yes, maybe I told you what I thought you wanted to hear; what I wanted to believe.’

‘But you were really a nurse?’

Golzar nodded again. ‘On holiday.’

‘Then how the hell did you end up here?’

‘Wrong place, wrong time, wrong face. I had a couple of days in Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem, that was all.’

‘Can you do that? Move between east and west, I mean.’

‘I did. The Qalandia checkpoint in Ramallah allows medical staff passage. Maybe that was my mistake. I guess someone thought I was someone else. I was picked up as a terrorist suspect and brought to England. Then they discovered I was… not entirely sane. As you saw yourself, back then they might have been right.’

‘So why did you keep the pretence up? You could have retracted this statement at any of your sessions. You never said a word. To anyone.’

‘I was safe here. I haven’t felt safe before in my life. I thought maybe I could get political asylum. If not, even being here was better than going back to Tehran. Can you imagine what VAJA would have done to someone who’d spent this long mixed up with the British security forces?’

‘VAJA?’

‘Iranian secret police. Don’t look at me like that. Everyone in Iran knows about them. Anyway, I guess it’s time to, what do you English say? – “face the music”? I know I’ve done nothing wrong; maybe I can persuade your courts of that too. I might even be able to spin out my deportation long enough to grow old in peace.’

‘Well, I wish you luck. They asked me to decide whether you’re sane, and nothing you’ve said or done persuades me otherwise. I have to release you. To be honest, I’ll be quite sorry to see you go. You’ve never been easy to work with, but you’ve never caused us any trouble.’ He smiled and closed the file. ‘I’ll draw the papers up and you’ll be on your way south by this time tomorrow. Is there anything else you want to say to me?’

‘No. I’m ready. Thank you, Dr Penhalligan.’

Golzar walked to the door then stopped. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘is this file going to used against me?’

‘The courts can apply to have it released as evidence, but so far we’ve not had any request. As I told you when you arrived, this part of F Wing is technically a medical facility. Our talks are confidential until otherwise authorised, and the doctor the government sent here for your first interview made no notes. Do you want it to be made available?’

‘Until two minutes ago, I was a paranoid covert CIA agent. Now I’m a nurse. What do you think?’

‘Probably best not. I’ll make sure it disappears into the black hole that is the NHS computer system. Whatever your legal problems are now, they don’t seem to have anything to do with this.’

‘Good. Thank you again, doctor.’

Golzar was returned to her cell. She asked one of the new orderlies to see if the library had a copy of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, then dealt herself a hand of Patience. Her chess opponent had been hospitalised after slamming her arm in a door – intentionally – and no one else came even close to giving her a game worth playing.

She thought she’d played her interview it about right. Some truth, some lies, some of her original statement confirmed, some denied. Just enough to get her out and heading south.

But why had all this happened now?

If the British wanted her safely out of sight, what could they possibly gain by putting her on trial? The only logical answer was that there was no trial. They were keeping up the act of due process – legal transfer, access to counsel – but an act was all it amounted to. For now, at least, no one from Human Rights Watch would have her in their sights.

After fifteen months of silence, she was now a pawn in a new game, and other than Donald Aquila, she had no idea who the players were.

Either someone was trying to tidy up loose ends… or Black Eagle were operational again.

Richard Morgan slipped into the bathroom next to his office on the top floor of the Palace of Westminster. He had shooed his aides and various ministers out after a scant good morning and an assurance that his 9am address to Parliament was in hand. Liam Treadwell, his Head of Corporate Services, had passed him an anonymous-looking brown envelope as he walked along the top floor corridor five minutes earlier. There had been no sign of anyone paying undue attention, but he knew his caller hadn’t been bluffing when he had said the exchange would be monitored.

Morgan had taken the envelope and put it with the other papers under his arm. A minister from the Home Office had been at his shoulder, bringing him up to date with the latest on the investigation, and his new SO1 protection officer, hand picked by the Met Commissioner himself, had dropped back a little. Richard dismissed the minister and looked over his shoulder. The SO1 man was talking into a radio. Was he confirming that the PM was safely at his office… or that the handover had gone without a hitch?

‘Give me a minute,’ Richard said. He slipped into the quiet of the executive bathroom and bolted the door behind him. He took the papers over to the vanity unit. It was lit by fluorescent tubes, a light that made his face look even paler and more washed-out than he felt.

The envelope wasn’t a bomb, and it wasn’t anthrax. Killing him now would achieve nothing, and whoever was behind Ruth’s kidnapping needed him alive to further their plan. There was no risk in opening it. He might still report it to the police, but he had to know what the demand was first.

He tore the envelope open, ripping the back of it nearly in two, and pulled out a single sheet of paper. He could see the ghosts of barely a dozen words printed on the other side.

Carefully he unfolded it.

Something fell into the sink and for a moment his attention was distracted from the text printed on the sheet.

Moved by pity and revulsion in equal measures, Richard picked up the thumbnail that had fallen from the envelope. It was Ruth’s – expensively manicured and varnished with a subtle shade of pink that accentuated her skin tone rather than fought against it.

The nail had been ripped out. There were marks from the jaws of a pair of needle-nosed pliers in the varnish. They had done this for no reason other than to authenticate the message. If there was any doubt before, there was none whatever now that they would kill her unless he did exactly what they said.

He scanned the text.

It was a simple instruction. Bald, precise and shockingly easy. He’d expected something far more: the immediate repeal of a law, a high-profile prisoner pardonned, the revelation of clandestine military secrets. But this was not only easy to do, it was something that had crossed his mind as an option anyway. It could even be turned to the government’s advantage with the right preparation and management. Whoever these people were, they had not done their research. They had not reckoned on the combined force of some of the best military, intelligence and police forces in the world.

‘Prime Minister?’ his SO1 guard knocked again on the door. ‘Are you all right, Sir?’

‘Yes, I’m coming.’

He folded the note around the bloodied fingernail and dropped the lot into his inside jacket pocket. He hit the hand-dryer with his elbow, paused for a moment, fixed a confident smile, and stepped out.

He could do this. He just needed to make the COBR Committee think it was their idea and not his. The fire service had attended nineteen blazes last night in Tottenham alone, almost two hundred across Greater London. Tonight was going to be the same. The Met police had officially launched Operation Orchard to investigate the cause of the riots, and the open sores that ran along racial and ethnic fault-lines would be inflamed again. London was no place for talks of peace.

So the talks of peace would happen somewhere else...

It was not ideal, but it was going to work.

Faran Jaafar lived in a dump, but at least his dump was on a reasonably decent street. Ibrahim Abulafia just lived in a dump.

Leila parked a hundred yards away on a quiet residential street and walked to the block of council flats. There was a burned out car on the grass verge in front of the single storey services building and half a dozen boarded-up windows on the ground floor. A council road sweeper was making slow passes up and down the far end of the road, collecting up the remains of last night’s mayhem.

Leila checked her phone and made her way along the concrete walkway to the stairs at the back of the block. The lift had lost its ‘out of order’ sign, but the badly dented doors rendered it redundant anyway. Even if it had been in service she wouldn’t have risked it. The stairwell stank of urine; the lift was probably considered to be a private cubicle.

She mounted the stairs to the third floor. A rash of newly sprayed anti-Islamic graffiti adorned the walls, the spray cans abandoned amongst the used needles and broken bottles.

A train rattled past and the building rattled in sympathy. That could be the only reason Ibrahim stayed here. Its proximity to South Ealing tube station, and therefore free transport to work, would not have been enough for most people, but she guessed compared to his native Silwan, this was OK.

The lock was a simple Yale. Picking it would take no more than a few seconds, but she was not alone. A woman with a pushchair approached her along the walkway. Leila knocked on Abulafia’s door and pretended to wait for an answer.

‘He’s at work,’ the woman said.

‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’

‘Tonight. Why you looking for him?’

‘It’s his daughter Ghada I’m after. Is she still living here?’

‘Ain’t seen ’er in months. Don’t think she lives here no more.’

‘OK, thanks. I’ll leave a note.’

The woman walked on as Leila felt around her pockets for a pad of paper and pen she knew weren’t there. When the sound of the pushchair bumping down the stairs had faded, she took out her lock picks and swiftly opened the door.

The flat was a tiny one-bedroom affair with the front door opening straight onto the living room. It was clean and tidy, with a minimum of furniture and very little decoration. On the wall above the dining table – already laid out for dinner for one – was a hamza, a five-fingered amulet popular in the middle east as a defence against the evil eye. On a 1960s teak sideboard against the far wall were three birthday cards. Leila leaned over to read them. Two were from friends – signed only with British first names – the third was from Ghada. There was no note giving her father her current whereabouts, only ‘Happy Birthday Baba, your Ghada’. A little stiff, written in a hurry maybe, but genuine.

On the opposite wall, over an old-style CRT television was a picture of Jerusalem. It was nothing more than an image cut from a magazine and framed in a cheap wooden frame with thin glass, but it was a beautiful picture. It showed the golden Dome of the Rock at sunset with the Mount of Olives in the background.

On the settee in the middle of the room was last night’s Evening Standard, folded back and open at page four. A half page image of the search and rescue operation at the hotel was uppermost – the last thing Mr Abulafia had looked at.

He had no idea his daughter was behind the bomb. This was as much news to him as it was to the rest of London.

Ibrahim Abulafia was a modest man. There were a few books, mostly paperback novels probably picked up in his work as a cleaner on the underground or given to him by friends. There was no non-fiction, nothing related to his homeland. Other than the picture of Jerusalem, there was nothing that hinted at any nationalistic leanings. The lack of a computer suggested that he got all his news from the TV or the slightly right-of-centre, British establishment Evening Standard. He was not a political animal. His daughter had been radicalised some time around 2006 when she left this Ealing flat for a brief stint in Wembley, then an address unknown. She had not tried to bring her father into the fold.

She had, however, maintained contact with him. She thought enough of her father to send him a birthday card.

She had moved around enough that she had been off the grid for nine years. That meant a stream of temporary addresses, never for more than a couple of months at a time, never putting down roots. Yet she did have roots, here in Ealing. She had only trusted her Vallance Road friends with her ‘official’ papers. There had to be more.

She opened the cupboard and drawers of the side board but quickly dismissed their meagre contents. Same in the bedroom. The bedside cabinet contained a box of tissues, an out-of-date bottle of Nitrolingual (the man had heart trouble) and a remote control for a TV that was no longer in evidence. She moved the clothes aside in the wardrobe and examined the frame, but again, it just didn’t feel right. Ghada was clever: she was hiding her whole identity, not just a few pounds she didn’t want the taxman to know about.

She went into the kitchen. It was common to hide small items in the freezer compartment of a refrigerator. She did not expect to find anything, but opened it anyway. Ibrahim’s dinner was ready for the microwave when he came home: a bowl of mashed potato, some carrots in a Tupperware dish and four slices of cooked beef in a sealed container on the top shelf. Other than a bottle of milk, with its top sealed with clingfilm, and some chocolate biscuits, the fridge was barren. The freezer compartment contained nothing but a thick layer of white frost built up over many months.

The drawers and cupboards likewise contained nothing out of the ordinary so she returned to the sitting room and stood looking out over the grass quadrangle at the centre of the block.