Agent of the State (14 page)

‘What the hell does that mean?’ Kerr felt a stab of anxiety. ‘Who says?’

‘Detective Superintendent Metcalfe,’ said Melanie. ‘He’s Finch’s senior investigating officer for this job. Operation name “Dragstone”. We’re not allowed access while Jibril’s being interviewed.’

‘Who says?’

‘Orders from Finch himself, apparently.’

‘I’ll see about that,’ said Kerr. ‘What about his safe-house? How soon will they finish the search?’

‘Already gone,’ said Melanie. ‘Forensics were inside for less than two hours. If they recovered anything they’re not sharing.’

Justin seemed to understand even before Kerr turned to him. ‘Sure, boss,’ he said, ‘no worries. Want me to take a look tonight?’

Kerr smiled. ‘You and Jack wait till I get back to you.’

‘It’s just one room in a run-down Victorian house,’ said Fargo.

‘Anything on the history?’

‘I’ve got the terrorist finance guys in 1830 working on it. Should have a result by tomorrow.’

‘Good. Make sure you copy all your notes from the ops room, Al, and lock the originals away.’ Kerr pushed his chair back. ‘Right now we need access to Jibril’s passport, so I’m going downstairs to have a chat with Metcalfe. Thanks, guys. Try and take it easy today and let’s catch up later.’

Melanie stayed seated as the others began shuffling around her. ‘We’ve been talking about the possibility Joe Allenby was out of the loop, made a mistake, whatever. That Jibril is an informant, under control. We arrested a good guy, and now people are trying to protect their asset without telling us.’

‘I don’t buy that,’ said Langton. ‘What’s an agent doing walking to a bomb factory? Meeting up with suicide bombers getting ready to blow themselves up? What kind of control is that? The man’s a terrorist.’

‘Exactly. And I’m guessing the boss has already figured that out, too,’ said Melanie, tapping her pen on the desk. She looked at each of them in turn, ending with Kerr. ‘And if we’re right about that, we have to face another possibility, don’t we, John? Which you must have thought of. Am I going to say it, or will you?’

‘Don’t stop now,’ said Kerr.

‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? If Jibril is the bad bastard we think he is, we’re prising off the lid on some gigantic cover-up.’

Kerr nodded slowly. It was the possibility he had faced in the early hours, even before the news about the odd goings-on at Paddington Green. Now, as he felt their eyes on him, he was reassured. They were ahead of the game, their life experience as Special Branch officers allowing them to think the worst, and he found this liberating. He was already reaching for his BlackBerry, their collective energy bringing forward the call he had intended to make later that morning.

Bad people were slamming doors in his face, so he would find another way in. Kerr scrolled down through his contacts to ‘Kestrel’, the work-name for his mole inside MI5. He speed-dialled and held up his hand as the voicemail kicked in. ‘It’s eight-fifteen Friday morning and I need you to call me the minute you get this.’

Fourteen

Friday, 14 September, 10.26 local time, Istanbul, Turkey

When the office was quiet, Abdul Malik pushed his aviator glasses onto his forehead, carefully folded his shirt cuffs and leant forward in his slimline executive chair to scan the secret inbox. ‘So, let us move to business. Tell me every detail about our Foreign Office lawyer.’

Rashid Hussain opened the folder he had been preparing for Malik. Then he rotated his chair and retied his shoelace. He wore highly polished Oxfords. The shoes and navy suit, almost as expensive as Malik’s, had been purchased in London, a city Hussain had not felt safe to revisit for more than two decades. He crossed his legs, picking a speck of dust from his trousers, and rolled his chair closer to the desk. ‘His code name is Sandpiper, forty-seven years old, homosexual but married with two teenage children,’ he said, scrolling through the text. ‘Senior management and rising, and works in the main office in King Charles Street. All the detail is in the folder. I have the full profile with covering photograph.’ He checked the biographical details and background.

On his screen Malik studied the secret photograph of Sandpiper in a navy pinstripe suit, drinking a glass of champagne and laughing with a young man.

‘There are two or three images I need to enhance, but the identifying features are good,’ said Hussain, clicking the ‘Forward’ button again.

The digital photographs that flashed up on Malik’s desktop showed Sandpiper naked and being sodomised by the same man. In five of the seven images his face was clearly identifiable. ‘And we have video, yes?’ he asked.

‘Yes. All the images are usable.’

‘How long has Harold known him?’ he asked, scanning the text.

‘From his days at Cambridge University.’

‘How many guests at the party?’

‘Twelve, including two women, who were the first to occupy the bedrooms.’

‘The corruption of those whores knows no bounds,’ growled Malik, staring in disgust at the incriminating photographs. ‘And few infidels can match the depravity of Western foreign services.’

He spoke from personal knowledge. During the nineties his own father had been posted to the Turkish consulate in London’s Belgrave Square as third secretary, responsible for developing trade links. He had displaced the family from their comfortable home in Ankara to a government-owned apartment in Maida Vale, and a young Malik had gone to the London School of Economics to study for a BSc in international economics. In his youth he had been small and unprepossessing, with an adolescent’s stringy moustache. But he was deeply thoughtful, with an intellectual horsepower that set him apart from most other LSE students.

The unworldly teenager had never been out of Turkey before, and the loud manners of Britain’s capital had disoriented him. He was deeply offended by the drinking, drug-taking and promiscuity, the lack of modesty among the women and brashness of the men. When he watched television the whole of British society seemed depraved, and when protocol required that he and his elder sister attend the occasional reception at the consulate, he had realised with deep sadness that even his parents had been seduced by the excesses of the West.

By 1997, his final year at the LSE, Malik had emerged as the best in his class, on course for a first, and moved from his father’s government apartment to a student flat in Herne Hill. He had had the smallest room at the very top of the rambling Victorian merchant’s house, which he shared with three female and five male LSE undergraduates, including Dimitri, a third-year in labour economics.

Halfway through the new term Dimitri took him to a student party in Brixton where everyone was drinking and smoking cannabis. The students from his house were taking photographs of their friends having sex on the floor, often three at once, sometimes men with men. He went to find Dimitri to tell him he was going home, only to discover his fellow Turk having sex with an English girl in one of the bedrooms.

Late into the night, an English student, one of the most boorish offenders, had fallen to his death from the second-floor balcony. As everyone screamed and panicked around him, Abdul Malik had felt a quiet sense of justice. An hour before he had fallen, the victim had been kissing another man. Malik saw the tragedy as Allah’s punishment for his decadence.

Back in the privacy of his loft room he had reached out for the Koran, which had opened at the story of the Fall of Adam. It was a moment of revelation. The accident was a sign. Here was a modern allegory of the wickedness of man through which Allah had spoken to him. From that night he had withdrawn from student social life into the shell of his private thoughts, studying the Koran and praying regularly. His housemates grew impatient with his shyness, which they misread as aloofness, and academic excellence, which made him a swot. They began to call him Shish Kebab, mocking his Turkish roots. The Turkish boy who should have protected him was especially vindictive, because he was a product of the age: Istanbul might be a cool city, they said, but boys with ambition sprinted across Turkey’s cultural bridge to the West.

One night, as he was reading the Koran, his housemates had started throwing stones at his window. Peering through a chink in the curtain he had seen them crowding the pavement, drunk and shouting up at him. The men had been carrying takeaways and the women were passing round a bottle of vodka. When he had switched his light out he had heard them barge into the house, falling up the narrow stairs.

As he had trembled on the bed they had crashed through his locked door and stormed into his room. The noise had been unbearable. His most violent oppressor, a third-year physics student from the ground floor, had helped Dimitri tear away his duvet and hold him down on the bed. As he had screamed and struggled they had torn off his underpants and covered his genitals with chilli sauce. One of the women had masturbated him while they all chanted, ‘Shish Kebab! Shish Kebab!’ at the tops of their voices. As he had endured the shame of his erection, another woman had poured vodka over his penis and sucked him until the chilli had made her throw up. They had let him cover his face with his hands and Dimitri had laid the Koran over the vomit, chilli and semen. It had been his first sexual experience.

The next day Dimitri had glared at him with contempt. A couple of the British guys had tried to laugh it off. None of it had mattered for, by the end of his second year, Malik’s economics tutors were encouraging him to take a doctorate in econometric theory. By this time he had had few friends but a sound knowledge of the Koran. Then he had met a young Turkish woman studying chemical engineering. Her name was Jumaima and she was the only Turkish girl he knew to wear a
hijab
and dress modestly in jeans and dark tops, concealing her arms and breasts. They had begun to hang out around Edgware Road, searching for literature about Islam, and in restaurants behind Warren Street. She had taught him to embrace the Wahhabi tradition and put into words his innermost feelings about the decadence of the West.

Jumaima’s home was in Istanbul, where her father was a wealthy industrialist manufacturing agricultural machinery for export around Europe. When Malik had graduated with his predicted first-class honours degree, she had introduced him to her father and asked him to take Malik under his wing.

Malik had quickly shown commercial promise and helped Jumaima’s father set up a combined finance house and export business. The young couple had married as soon as Jumaima graduated. He had bought a house in a prestigious area of Istanbul and, over the next decade, she had given him three healthy children. Malik had quickly become an entrepreneur to match his father-in-law, expanding his businesses to include chemical plants, property, cement, fertiliser, trucks and carpets.

When Malik’s new family had encouraged him to invest in a property portfolio in London, alongside his other investments, he had searched for houses and apartments in the capital’s wealthiest districts.

The two men worked in silence for twenty minutes, then Malik reopened the photographic folder and examined the images of Sandpiper again. ‘As for this high-flown pervert,’ he said, looking across at his partner, ‘when will you make the approach?’

‘As soon as he takes the boy,’ replied Hussain, quick as a flash.

Fifteen

Friday, 14 September, 08.30, S015 investigations unit

Derek Finch’s team was located three floors down from Weatherall’s intelligence branch. Created in the seventies to investigate extremist crimes, the unit had become famous for its expertise in recovering forensic traces from bomb scenes and building the evidential case.

Avoiding the lift, Kerr walked to the end of the corridor and took the fire escape. He spotted Detective Superintendent Jim Metcalfe, Finch’s senior investigating officer, the moment he entered the main office. He needed to find out exactly what Metcalfe had discovered about Ahmed Jibril, but knew he had a job on his hands. Resentful by nature, Metcalfe had regularly allowed skirmishes between the two sides of SO15 to spiral into civil war. Jacketless, dressed for action with tie loosened and double cuffs turned back, he looked as if he wanted to punch someone. For a second Kerr imagined him on the floor, being thrashed by Jack Langton.

‘What are you doing here?’ demanded Metcalfe, a Liverpudlian and champion of the get-your-retaliation-in-first philosophy. He was a leather-belt-and-loud-braces man, and both were too tight, drawing attention to his pot-belly. Close-cropped greying hair receding into a V accentuated his ferrety nose and made him appear permanently stressed. He was taller than Kerr and meaner-looking, and as they shook hands his close-set, hooded eyes leaked the hostility Kerr remembered from a decade ago. ‘Come to apologise for your surveillance fuck-up?’

‘Nice to see you again, too,’ said Kerr.

‘Welcome to the real police,’ Metcalfe whined.

Kerr said nothing. This was one of Metcalfe’s standard gibes, a clumsy reminder that his investigators had a background in regular CID offices. About fifteen officers were working the phones and desktops designated to Holmes, the standardised national database for any major criminal investigation. They were mostly twenty-year men, paunchy, with ties loosened and shirt cuffs folded back, glasses perched on the ends of their noses. Kerr was surprised that they were already occupied in such routine work. The hours immediately following a terrorist arrest were crucial and the place should have been buzzing as they chased leads to track down other cells and disrupt further attacks.