THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author. (11 page)
Authors: David Videcette
Tags: #No. 30, #Subway, #Jake, #Victim, #Scotland Yard, #London Underground, #Police, #England, #Flannagan, #7/7, #Muslim, #British, #thriller, #Bus, #Religion, #Terrorism, #Tube, #Tavistock Square, #Extremism, #Metropolitan Police, #Detective, #Fundamentalist, #Conspiracy Theory, #Britain, #Bombings, #Explosion, #London, #Bomb, #Crime, #Terrorist, #Extremist, #July 2005, #Islam, #Inspector, #Murder, #Islamic, #Bus Bomb, #Plot, #Underground, #7th July, #Number 30 (bus), #Capital, #Fundamentalism, #terror
BOOK: THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author.
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25
Tuesday
19 July 2005
1516 hours
Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire
From the inventory list that had been made of every single item found in the Victoria Park flat, the team of receivers down at the Major Incident Room in London were beginning to send up action after action to Jake’s team of detectives in Bradford.
Jake’s team were supposed to investigate the object and let the MIR know what they’d found out by sending them back a message. The MIR looked at the message, indexed it and linked it to other information on the HOLMES computer.
HOLMES stood for Home Office Large Major Enquiry System and was a blatant backronym designed to crowbar in a reference Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous sleuth.
The HOLMES system had been dreamt up years ago in the wake of mistakes made during the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. Peter Sutcliffe had come up several times during different lines of enquiry, but the investigation team at the time had not connected the different pieces together, which had led to Sutcliffe killing more. HOLMES was supposed to connect the dots, attempting to avoid such mistakes in the future.
Jake was beginning to hate the requests coming out of London to investigate items found at the Victoria Park premises. Each night in his dreams, Wasim was sending him on wild goose chases and mocking him when he came up empty-handed.
He called Helen on his mobile.
‘Boss, it’s Jake.’
‘Hey, Jake – how’s things? I hear it’s going well up there?
‘Helen, HOLMES is creating its own problems by swamping the investigation team with infinite actions. It means that the intricacies of literally everything have to be investigated in minute detail.’
‘Well then, there’s plenty for you lot to be getting on with?’ his boss replied, unfazed.
‘Way too much evidence to suggest that, Helen!’ said Jake in annoyance.
‘What do you mean?’
Jake hesitated for a moment, then dived in. ‘This all seems a bit, well… convenient. They wanted us to find this bomb factory. We were handed it on a plate. Does that not ring alarm bells with you? Have you seen the living room area? You can’t move for evidence, you can’t even walk across it. There’s everything here that’s been used to conduct this bombing operation. I don’t buy it. We’re missing something. Something they wanted to hide by giving us this place. I’m sure of it,’ he said, with total conviction.
Helen laughed. ‘Well you scoot off and find it, Jake. In the meantime we’ll concentrate on the actual hard evidence we’ve got.’
‘Yeah, I’ll do exactly that, Helen,’ he replied dryly.
Jake was sick of it. He couldn’t take much more of these stupid actions.
‘Helen, there’s only so much we can do to investigate the hell out of a tube of toothpaste. Why do I have to make a member of my team drive to Peterborough to visit a company that supplied the packaging for that toothpaste more than a year ago? What does that have to do with a terrorist bombing down in London? It doesn’t solve anything.’
‘Put enough meat in the top and we’ll get sausages out the bottom – you know how it is, Jake,’ said Helen, repeating Denswood’s familiar mantra.
‘But why aren’t we looking at the motives behind it? What if the evidence we’re looking at doesn’t give us the motive? If it doesn’t tell us why?’
‘What do you mean? We know their motives. They were extremists and they’re dead anyway. The whys and wherefores don’t even matter in this.’
‘We found empty plastic packaging for ice at the Victoria Park flat, Helen. They bought ready-made ice. It matched up via HOLMES with a receipt that was found close to the seat of the blast where Wasim martyred himself. Using the details on the receipt we went back to the store and looked at the CCTV. Sure enough, Wasim went to Asda in Pudsey at 0520 hours with one of the other bombers on 6 July. They bought fifteen bags of ice that day…’
‘Good result. That shows that the system is working then? We’re slowly finding out stuff like this and HOLMES is doing its job?’
‘Fantastic. Yes.
But
… this stuff is only us telling about
how
. Not
why
. Not
who orchestrated this
…’
But
… this stuff is only us telling about
how
. Not
why
. Not
who orchestrated this
…’
‘We just keep doing the right things, Jake. Follow the evidence.’
‘And isn’t it just lovely we have so much to follow?’
‘I don’t see your point, Jake.’
‘Why did they plan the bombings that day? In all the planning materials we’ve removed from the scenes and the bomb factory, there was no mention of the G8 summit in Scotland, nor the Olympics announcement.’
‘So what?’
‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Jake, we’ve not found a single indication anywhere that they planned around any significant event. It was probably just coincidence that the G8 summit was on and the Olympic host city was announced the same week the bombings happened…’
‘But maybe they knew that the G8 summit meant that London would be short on security personnel with everyone up in Scotland? Did they even know that the Olympics announcement would be made that week?’
‘Well, if they did, none of them documented it,’ replied Helen.
‘Yeah, but don’t you think that’s really strange, when they’d planned everything else to the nth degree? Why no mention of it in anything we’ve found? That’s my whole point. There is nothing. There is nothing to follow but packets of ice and tubes of toothpaste.’
‘I don’t know, Jake, but I do know that you need to get on with the actions coming out of the MIR – that’s what’s important right now. Don’t get distracted,’ said Helen as she hung up.
Jake couldn’t fathom any of it. He was starting to believe that no one really knew what was going on.
26
Wednesday
20 July 2005
1530 hours
Sullivan House, New Southgate, north London
Jake found the address that Claire had given him using his police issue
Geographia Atlas of London
. Battered and bruised just like him, it was one of the few things that had survived the accident two weeks ago in Leeds. Its days were numbered though. Satnav was now being fitted in the faster, marked London police cars. Jake liked his old blue hardback book. He’d liberated it from a marked police car in the rear yard of Brixton station one afternoon several years ago.
Geographia Atlas of London
. Battered and bruised just like him, it was one of the few things that had survived the accident two weeks ago in Leeds. Its days were numbered though. Satnav was now being fitted in the faster, marked London police cars. Jake liked his old blue hardback book. He’d liberated it from a marked police car in the rear yard of Brixton station one afternoon several years ago.
The drive down to London from Leeds that morning had been slower than he had anticipated. There had been a fair few lorries on the two-lane A1, but the lack of traffic police compared to the featureless M1 meant he could get a wriggle on without worrying too much about being pulled over.
On the journey, he’d reflected on the news Claire had shared with him up in Leeds about the coded messages left following al-Iraqi’s arrest. She’d said she thought one was to Wasim. He guessed that another must have been to the place he was going to look at today. Despite running the phone number and address through all the intelligence databases he could think of, nothing of interest had come back.
The address Claire had given him corresponded to a sixties-built block of flats on a nondescript, north-London housing estate. The tower block bore over him like a giant as he got out of his car and made his way to the main door. He spotted a bin store directly adjacent to the path. There was no mistaking its horrendous stink; he could make out a strong odour of rotten vegetables. But there was something else – an unexpected chemical smell.
Inside the brick-built bin store were seven large communal containers. He peered into a couple. Cabbage leaves, carrot peelings and scores of empty bottles of hair dye. Someone obviously had a lot of hairdressing work on.
The communal entrance door to the flats was ajar. Broken. The sign next to the lift indicated that flat fifty-eight was on the eighth floor. As he walked up the stairs, he remembered that Mrs Rahman had said the front of her son’s hair had turned lighter. The box hedges at Victoria Park – they’d changed colour too. Hydrogen peroxide was a bleaching agent but it could also be used as rocket fuel. It was highly flammable – explosively so if you got rid of the liquid it came in.
Could someone here be using hair dye to make a bomb? Just like Asif had for 7/7?
Jesus. These guys had bombs too?
Jake arrived at the eighth floor and found number fifty-eight. He put his ear to the door and listened. No sound emanated from within. He knocked, intending to use a cover story about looking for a friend, but there was no reply. Jake gently pressured the door. He could tell that just the Yale lock at the top had been applied. He pushed hard against it. The door swung open straight into the living room.
The place smelled familiar; peppery, spicy, with synthetic undertones.
He followed his nose to the back wall of the lounge. The stench was at its strongest by a sixties-looking wooden sideboard. It was the sort that had once held a turntable and a decanter of whisky on top, but not now.
Jake looked underneath it for wires but found none. He gently pulled the sideboard out from the wall before fetching a knife from the kitchen, which he used to prise off the back panel. Inside, he found five large, clear plastic food tubs containing a strong, spicy-smelling yellow goo.
The stench was blistering now. The sticky yellow mixture looked similar in texture to the substance they’d found on the plates at Victoria Park. This must be where all that highly explosive hair dye had gone. He had to think fast.
Water. Add water. Make it less concentrated and less flammable, he heard a voice in his head say.
He went to the kitchen. Under the limescale-covered tap, in a stained washing-up bowl, he spotted a selection of glasses which he filled with water and carried back through to the lounge.
He repeated this until he’d added four glasses of water to each tub. The mixture seemed to suck up the water like a sponge. Was it safe? There was no way of knowing. He had to get out of there. He had to call this in.
He replaced the back panel of the sideboard, carefully pushed it back against the wall and returned the glasses to the sink. He left the flat, closing the door behind him. It was like he’d never been there.
Now to tell Claire.
27
Wednesday
20 July 2005
1626 hours
Sullivan House, New Southgate, north London
‘Claire, it’s Jake.’
Jake was crouched in a garage forecourt area adjacent to the block of flats he had just left.
‘Jake – you OK?’ Claire could hear the unease in his voice.
‘No. That address you gave me. I think I just saw explosives in there.’
‘You went inside? Are you nuts? I didn’t give you that intelligence for you to go snooping around inside the fucking flat! I asked you what you knew! That information came from the Americans, from the NSA. If they find that out, I’ll go to prison! You said you’d look at it. Not go into the flat!’
‘But I’ve found something. I’ve tried to make it safe. I’m pretty sure it’s some sort of peroxide-based explosives.’
‘Jake, you’ve got to let this run. You can’t claim the glory for this. Not unless you have some of your own, definitive evidence to lead you there!’ she said angrily before hanging up.
Jake stood there looking at the blank screen of his phone. It was the second time in two weeks he’d been in this predicament. Did she really think that he was going to do nothing after what had happened on the seventh? Which one of them was nuts?
Jake considered his options. He’d illegally entered a premises using intelligence that he shouldn’t have had. If that substance in the sideboard had been explosive, he hoped it wasn’t any longer thanks to the water he’d added. Jake didn’t even have enough information to go and apply for a search warrant at court. He couldn’t go and speak to the bosses. He was in enough trouble as it was and he’d have to tell them he’d broken in. That was a non-starter.
Jake called Claire again.
‘I can’t fucking believe you went there,’ Claire shouted down the phone as soon as she picked it up. ‘That’s the last time, Jake! You know anything that I give you is for intelligence use only! You don’t tell anyone I’ve told you. You don’t use it or act upon it in isolation. If you do, the trail leads back to me – I go to prison!’
‘Claire – I’m sorry. You can’t blame me. Somehow you’ve got to get that place on the radar tonight.’
‘It is on the radar. Just low down. You sure it was explosives? Positive?’
‘The smell, it’s distinctive. I recognised it from Victoria Park. The substance is gooey just like what we saw there. You said the other day they were learning how to make new substances in Pakistan, Claire. We’ve got to make this official.’
‘I can’t just bloody tell them that my friend, DI Flannagan, broke in and illegally searched the place after I breached the Official Secrets Act by passing him the intelligence. Plus, it’s the Yanks’ intelligence. They’d extradite me for less! Look, I’ll do my best. It won’t happen fast – twenty-four hours if we’re lucky. I need to pull in a couple of favours to elevate it without arousing suspicion,’ Claire said, clearly still upset.
‘I’m sorry, Claire,’ replied Jake, as the line went dead again.
28
Wednesday
20 July 2005
1740 hours
New Scotland Yard, Westminster, London
Jake drove south to Scotland Yard. He parked underneath the high-rise police headquarters and called his boss. Helen’s answerphone clicked in straight away. He decided against leaving a message.
He made his way up to the fourteenth floor. Sitting at a computer terminal in the corner of the large office, he spent several hours scouring the police intelligence systems. He was hunting for something that he could legally use to mount an investigation into Sullivan House and the gooey, sticky, peppery substance he’d just discovered.
There was nothing. The Security Service had not alerted the police. God only knew how long they’d been aware of the people there, he thought.
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