Spider Shepherd 11 - White Lies (24 page)

‘And if I refuse your request?’

‘Then, as I said, I’ll take that bottle and smash it over your head.’ She grinned. ‘Not literally, of course. But that’s what it’ll feel like after I’ve finished with you. Two major operations have gone bad and you’re the common factor. At the moment you appear to be flying below the radar but it wouldn’t take much to change that.’ She sipped her wine as she let her words sink in.

‘I haven’t done anything wrong, Charlotte. If there’s been a slip-up, it wasn’t me. I wasn’t even in-country.’

‘No, you weren’t. But I’ll tell you this, Jeremy. If it had been my operation, I would have been there, on the spot.’

Willoughby-Smith fumbled for his pack of cigars and lit one. He blew smoke before speaking. ‘OK, I’ll bring him back.’

‘Tomorrow?’

He nodded. ‘Tomorrow.’

She smiled sweetly and raised her glass to him. ‘Thank you so much.’

Lex Harper settled into a steady rhythm as he pounded along the walkway between the road and the beach. It was an hour after dawn had broken, his favourite time to run in Pattaya. The air was as close to cool as it ever got in the seaside resort, and the pavement was pretty much deserted, allowing him to run at a fair pace. A few foreigners were sleeping in the shade of palm trees, too drunk to make their way back to their cheap hotels, but the jet ski operators and stallholders had yet to arrive and there were none of the hookers and transsexuals who usually touted for business along the strip.

Harper ran every morning before breakfast; three miles to the start of Walking Street, the city’s main entertainment area, then three miles back to his apartment, a three-bedroom penthouse with a wraparound balcony that offered stunning views of the bay. He felt a vibration in the denim hip pack around his waist. Harper always had the hip pack on him, no matter what the time of day. It contained one of his many phones, an Irish passport in the name of Brendan O’Brien, two credit cards in the same name and fifty thousand baht in cash. The pack, and the heavy gold chain he always wore around his neck, meant that he could leave the country at a moment’s notice, either through the airport or overland to Laos or Cambodia if necessary. He had a larger bug-out bag under the bed in his apartment and another in the back of his SUV, but the essentials were in the hip pack. He loved living in Thailand, the Land of Smiles, but he had made it a rule never to be so enamoured with a place that he couldn’t leave at a moment’s notice. He jogged on the spot and took out his phone. The text message was from a UK number that he didn’t recognise. ‘YOU HAVE MAIL’.

Harper grinned, slid the phone back into the hip pack, and started running again. He ran at full pelt and he was drenched with sweat when he reached the point where the beach road became Walking Street, home to many of Pattaya’s raunchier go-go bars. At night it was neon lit and packed with drunks, sex tourists and Asian tour groups being shouted at by scantily dressed girls and overenthusiastic touts offering cheap booze and sex shows. It was a much gloomier place during the day, the sunlight exposing the shabby shopfronts, dubious electrical wiring and potholed pavements. Harper picked up a bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice from a roadside stall and drank it as he walked along a side street to a beauty parlour that doubled as an internet café. It was open twenty-four hours a day, and even at that early hour there were customers, a girl having her hair washed and two girls sitting together at one of the computer terminals. The bargirls were in the process of composing an email to one of their sponsors, a request for money to pay for an operation for an aged relative who in all likelihood didn’t exist.

The lady who ran the shop was in her late fifties. Khun Bee’s nut-brown face was wrinkled and her hair was starting to grey but she still had a fit body that suggested she had once made her living dancing around a chrome pole. He ordered a coffee and paid her for half an hour’s internet usage before sitting down at the terminal farthest away from the two bargirls. He took a swig of orange juice and logged on to Yahoo Mail. He had committed the email address and password to memory though he had never used the account to send an email. Only he and Charlotte Button had the password and they used the Drafts folder to communicate. It was a technique first developed by al-Qaeda to ensure instantaneous communication that was pretty much surveillance free. Between them the National Security Agency in the States and GCHQ in the UK could eavesdrop on every phone call made and read every email sent, but using the Drafts folder trick meant that the email was never actually transmitted and so never became visible.

There was a single message in the folder. It had been placed there an hour earlier. ‘I NEED YOU IN LONDON. NOW’. Harper deleted the message just as Khun Bee arrived at his elbow with his coffee. He flashed her a beaming smile. ‘I’ll take that to go,’ he said.

The door was flung open and Shepherd flinched at the sudden bright light. He rolled over and sat up with his back against the wall, his hand up to protect his eyes from the glare. He heard the scuffle of sandals on concrete. He tensed, not sure what was coming. He squinted up at the light. There was a figure there, bearded and scarfed. There was a blur of movement and Shepherd flinched and then he was doused in water. He heard a voice say something in Arabic or Pashto and then the door slammed shut and he was in darkness again. Water was running down his face and chest and he used his hands to gather as much of it as he could, licking the precious liquid off his fingers. He dropped to the ground and ran his fingers along the floor. There was a small dip in the concrete and water had pooled there. He lowered his head and lapped at the liquid. It tasted foul but he forced himself to gulp it down. The fact that they had given him water was a good sign. It meant they wanted to keep him alive, for the time being at least.

Charlotte Button was sitting in her office studying a report on the Bradford mosque where Raj had been recruited for the overseas training when her mobile rang. It was Willoughby-Brown. ‘I’m reluctant to send this around by courier,’ he said.

‘Do you want to meet?’

‘I don’t think I have much choice,’ he said.

Button looked at her watch. It was ten o’clock and she was due to attend a JIC meeting at 10.30. ‘How about lunch? On me?’

‘I could do lunch,’ he said.

‘You’ll have to come across the river, I’m afraid.’

‘Not a problem.’

‘There’s a Pizza Express down the road,’ she said. ‘Cheap and cheerful. Shall we say twelve?’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘Isn’t there something you need to tell me?’ asked Button.

‘Of course,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘I’m really sorry about all this, Charlotte.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Button. ‘I’m talking about Taz.’

‘Ah, right, yes, sorry. He’s arriving this evening. I’ll give you the flight details when I see you.’

Button shook her head and ended the call. Willoughby-Brown was an idiot but until she had the data files she had to be reasonably civil to him.

Harper smiled as he handed the passport to the overweight Garda officer. ‘How’s it going?’ he said.

The officer scowled. He clearly hadn’t joined the Irish police force to end up checking passports at Dublin Airport. He took the British passport from Harper and slowly flicked through it, examining every page even though most of them were blank. The picture and the date of birth were Harper’s, but the name wasn’t. For the purposes of entering Ireland he was Nicholas Cohen. Harper had paid five thousand pounds for the passport to a guy in Pattaya who swore that it was genuine and that the details on the biometric chip were in the Home Office computer database. Harper could see that the passport was good, but there was no way of knowing what would happen when it was checked against the Home Office’s Warning Index, which immigration officers relied on to weed out suspected terrorists, criminals and paedophiles, so instead of flying direct to London he had caught a KLM flight to Amsterdam and from there flew to Dublin. The guards who carried out the duties of immigration officers did nothing more than give the passports a visual once-over, they didn’t check the details on biometric chip or run them against any databases. As a EU citizen Harper could enter Ireland without hindrance and then all he had to do was to take a taxi from Dublin Airport up to Belfast. Belfast Airport was in the UK so the only check made was that the name in the passport matched the name on his ticket. Harper always laughed when he heard British immigration officials talking about tightening up border controls as in his experience every man and his dog knew about the Irish back-door route.

The Garda reached the final page of the passport, looked at the photograph then at Harper. Harper smiled. The Garda handed the passport back and waved for Harper to move on. ‘You have a nice day,’ said Harper, though that clearly wasn’t on the cards.

Charlotte Button sat back in her chair. It was ergonomically designed to make sitting for long periods as comfortable as possible, but already her back and neck were aching. Lunch with Willoughby-Brown hadn’t helped the tension in her neck muscles and more than once she had had to fight to resist the urge to throw her wine in his face. He had given her the thumb drive in a folded copy of the
Daily Telegraph
and she’d asked him for a verbal briefing while they ate their pizza.

According to Willoughby-Brown, the operation had been all about Akram Al-Farouq, at least in the early stages. Al-Farouq was an al-Qaeda paymaster and a legitimate MI6 target. Somewhere along the line, Willoughby-Brown didn’t seem to be exactly sure when, the name of a Bangladeshi-born British imam based in a Bradford mosque had surfaced. Mohammed Ullah was the sort of Muslim cleric the British media adored, a moderate who believed that British Muslims should be building bridges with other religions in the country. He was often quoted in the
Guardian
and the
Independent
and was a frequent guest on BBC radio panel shows such as
Any Questions?
, where his moderate views were loudly applauded. But according to the MI6 investigation, Ullah was in fact a hardline fundamentalist who was helping funnel al-Qaeda money to home-grown jihadists. Unlike many of the hardline clerics who burned poppies and called for British soldiers to be killed and demanded that sharia law be instated in the UK, Ullah just smiled and told the British what they wanted to hear. He was all sweetness and light, and was even rumoured to be in line for an MBE or CBE in the next New Year’s Honours list. According to Willoughby-Brown, Ullah was playing a very clever long game, and the British were falling for it hook, line and sinker. The only way to test that theory for sure was to send in an undercover agent, and Raj had been selected for the task. Knowing how successful he’d been when working for MI5, Six had appealed to Raj’s patriotic instincts and he’d agreed to help. He’d been briefed, given a watertight legend, and sent to Bradford where he’d begun to attend Ullah’s mosque. Raj had portrayed himself as an angry young British-born Asian Muslim and had started hanging out with other young extremists. After six months he had been invited to evening sessions with the imam, supposedly for extra Qur’an studies, but it soon became clear that the meetings had a much more sinister purpose. Raj – or Rafiq, as he had been known in Bradford – was groomed to become a jihadist and eventually offered the opportunity to travel to Pakistan for specialised training.

What Button didn’t understand – and what Willoughby-Brown seemed to be at a loss to explain – was why details of the Ullah investigation hadn’t been passed on to MI5. Or why the decision had been made to run an MI6 undercover agent on British soil. And there was no justifiable reason for MI5 not being informed that one of their former agents had been reactivated. She had the feeling it was because Willoughby-Brown had been determined to keep any credit for himself, but if that were true he was a liability and deserved to be out of a job. He wouldn’t admit that, though, he’d insisted that the decision to go it alone had been taken at a higher level.

Button sighed and massaged the back of her neck with her fingertips. The key to finding Shepherd and Raj was to locate Akram Al-Farouq, and the key to finding Akram Al-Farouq was to get Mohammed Ullah to talk. And that wasn’t going to be easy, not when he was a British citizen with the full protection of the 1998 Human Rights Act.

Her mobile beeped to let her know that she had received a message. She didn’t recognise the number but the message made her smile. ‘Bloody London weather. Same place as before? 4pm?’

She sent a text message back. ‘Sounds good to me.’

There was a cold wind blowing along the Thames, and Charlotte Button turned up the collar of her coat before checking her watch for the umpteenth time. He was late. She looked across the river at the London Eye, the 135-metre tall Ferris wheel between Westminster Bridge and Hungerford Bridge.

‘You ever been on it?’ said a voice behind her.

The man she had been waiting for had come up behind her without her noticing, and from the grin on his face he was obviously taking pleasure in the fact. His name was Richard Yokely; former CIA, former NSA, former DIA, the intelligence agent had accumulated enough initials on his CV to play a half-decent game of Scrabble.

Button smiled and held out her gloved hand. ‘Richard, thank you for coming.’

The American smiled. ‘How could I refuse a summons from my favourite MI5 operative?’ he said, with a slight drawl that suggested a Southern plantation and iced tea on a terrace. He was in his very early fifties with short grey hair and thin lips. He was wearing a long black coat over a dark blue blazer, a crisp white shirt and a blue tie with pale yellow stripes. His shoes were tasselled, the black leather gleaming as if they had been freshly polished. He had a chunky gold ring on his right ring finger and an even chunkier Breitling watch on his left wrist.

‘Not so much a summons as a cry for help,’ she said.

His smile widened. ‘Charlotte, my dear, as you are very well aware, I owe you one. So ask and you shall receive.’

‘That’s lovely to hear, Richard. I hope you’ll still be so generous when you’ve heard what my problem is.’