Agent of the State (19 page)

Twenty

Saturday, 15 September, 09.12, Wanstead

Saturday dawned bright and fresh, a brief interlude of blue sky and sunshine before the onset of winter as Justin collected the dummy British Gas van from the surveillance-vehicle hideout in Wandsworth. The van was a fall-back, a contingency for urgent daytime incursions involving occupants, and Justin hoped it would prove unnecessary.

Julia Bakkour’s law office formed part of a handsome, three-storey Georgian terrace a stone’s throw from Wanstead Underground station in north-east London. The terrace, fifty metres long, formed one side of a quiet square overlooking a neatly mown green. Residential houses, some divided into apartments, shared the space with the offices of an architect, an accountant and another law firm. A pollarded oak, ringed by daffodils each spring, towered over the tranquil green, and a traditional award-winning real-ale pub nestled unobtrusively in the corner farthest from the road.

The square was an idyllic middle-class enclave cushioned by Wanstead Flats from the featureless urban sprawl to the south. Access from the arterial road linking Leytonstone with Ilford was through a single narrow thoroughfare, with scarcely room for two cars to pass. It was a no-go area for heavy vehicles, with car parking strictly with permit only. Julia Bakkour had chosen well. Residents knew their neighbours, collected litter, used the dog-waste bins on the green and watched for anything suspicious. At the far end of the green an old woman in a fleece was trailing her arthritic terrier, plastic bag at the ready, and Justin could hear birdsong from the oak tree to his right. Private yet overlooked, the area was a perfect oasis for the surveillance conscious.

Sensing the old woman’s eyes on him, Justin drove round the square in a slow recce before committing himself. He needed to check the layout, locate any CCTV and generally satisfy himself that the operation was viable. Bakkour’s office was at number twenty-three but, with no name-plate, could have passed as a normal residence identical to the others along the terrace. A couple of cyclists were dismounting near the pub as he paused outside number thirty to take a call from Melanie, who confirmed that Julia Bakkour had arrived at Paddington Green with her laptop. Had she left it in the office, the intelligence opportunity would have been greater but he would have needed more time inside. While Melanie was speaking he assessed the challenge. He saw Yale and Banham locks protecting the door, and a standard domestic alarm on the wall. Conditions were difficult, but he had faced far worse.

As he parked outside Bakkour’s address he clocked the illuminated desk lamp in the ground-floor office and a figure moving around inside. He swore beneath his breath, automatically pulling on his British Gas jacket. He checked his toolbox and fake laminated pass, then called Langton on the radio. ‘Someone’s home, Jack.’

‘What about the building to the right?’

‘Munro Investments. Looks unoccupied. Hard to say.’

‘I’ll cover the neighbours while you do the business.’

Justin drove fast to the house adjacent to the solicitors’ offices, opened the rear doors of the van and activated the disguised canisters his engineers had developed for this type of operation. He rapidly cordoned off a section of the square with plastic tape as the air filled with the pungent smell of domestic gas and the dog walker retreated to her front door.

Jack Langton rode up a minute later on a marked police motorcycle, smart in the uniform of a conventional traffic PC, and took up position outside the front door to the right of the target address.

Justin rang the intercom. When a voice spoke, he replied, ‘Emergency gas engineer. Can you come to the door, please?’ A dark-skinned man in white T-shirt and jeans opened the heavy door. He was mid-twenties with a black moustache, wire-rimmed glasses and a pencil wedged behind his ear. Leaning against the staircase was a bicycle, its tyre marks still damp on the carpet tiles. Justin held his pass in front of the young man’s nose, but he scarcely glanced at it. ‘Sorry, mate. We’ve got a major leak. Need to evacuate you while we fix it.’

‘Where?’ the man asked, wrinkling his nostrils and looking at Justin’s tape. ‘Oh, smells serious.’

‘Neighbour.’ Justin’s eyes flickered to the alarm pad just inside the door. It was new and conventional, but might complicate things.

‘Health and safety, yes?’

Justin indicated the bike. ‘Anyone else in the building?’

‘No. It’s mine.’ That was good. Justin would not have to call on Langton’s uniform for persuasion. The man was already picking his jacket off the hook and reaching in his pocket for the keys. ‘Just me on Saturday mornings.’

‘So get yourself a coffee, yeah?’ Justin was already heading back to the van, a man with an emergency to handle. ‘Shouldn’t take more than an hour. If the van’s gone you’re in the clear. And don’t bother with the alarm,’ he called, making it sound like an afterthought. ‘Electrical charge could set things off.’

Langton, loitering outside the neighbour’s front door to demonstrate other engineers were already inside, gave Justin the all-clear as the young man ambled out of the square towards Wanstead station. Toolbox in hand, Justin trotted back to the offices. He defeated the Yale in less than thirty seconds. The Banham took ninety, and Langton covered him for both. On the ground floor a clump of office chairs in a waiting area faced an untidy reception desk. To the side were a small kitchen and washroom. The business area was on the first floor, converted to open plan with plain white walls and strip lighting, the staircase, with its original wooden banisters, ascending directly into the office.

Justin found five utilitarian oak desks heaped with documents, all in Arabic. There were more papers on wooden chairs around the room, and even piled on the floor. He spotted the wall safe in the corner while he was pulling on his gloves, a newish combination job. A half-full cup of coffee, still warm, marked out Saturday Boy’s workstation.

Flitting around the other four he eventually found an envelope with Julia Bakkour’s name beneath some sort of deed on the desk in the gloomiest corner next to the safe. The other stations had desktop computers but Bakkour’s had only a docking unit for a laptop, which Justin assumed she must remove every time she left the office. Almost buried beneath the papers was a small gilt frame with a photograph of a boy and girl aged around five and seven. The two unlocked drawers contained stationery, cosmetics, a clump of business cards in a rubber band and a couple of practitioners’ magazines, but nothing to catch his eye.

He took out his adapted Pentax Optio V10, switched on the desk lamp and photographed as many documents as he could, taking care to replace the papers exactly as he had found them. There were twelve business cards. He rapidly spread them on top of the desk to photograph them, then re-bound them in the same order. ‘You getting me, Jack?’

‘Go.’

‘I’ve got most of the surface stuff. No laptop. I want to have a crack at the safe. OK?’

‘I’m covering.’

Justin already had his magnetic calibrating sensor locked over the combination dial. The safe was the type on which he regularly practised in the workshop at Camberwell and he estimated he would need five minutes. He did it in just under four. Documents crammed the two interior shelves, with nothing of obvious reference to Ahmed Jibril. On the top shelf was an A4 desk diary, also marked in Arabic. He turned back two days to Thursday, the morning of Jibril’s arrest, and found an entry in script and numerals with a series of exclamation marks.

He almost confused the sound of a door being unlocked in the depths of the house with the shuffle of his Pentax as he grabbed shots of the diary. ‘What’s happening, Jack?’

‘All quiet. How long?’

‘Stand by.’ Justin froze, screwing his eyes in concentration. There was the sound of a door gently being pushed shut, coming from the rear of the house. ‘Signs of life downstairs. He must have come back early. Rear door, from the golf course.’

‘I’ll intercept him.’

The back door must have been swollen with damp, for the lawyer took a while to completely close it. Then there was the sound of the key being turned again.

‘No. I’ll handle it.’ Justin estimated he had about twenty seconds. He repacked his bag and spun the combination in fifteen seconds, leaving the same numerals on the dial. He could hear footsteps and stole a look from the banisters. The lawyer was carrying a Starbucks cappuccino and texting as he slowly climbed the stairs. Justin retreated into the office and checked around him again. The open plan left him no place to hide except behind one of the desks. His hand reached over the gas meter in his jacket pocket and he prepared to talk his way out.

Then he heard the lawyer’s mobile ring, a torrent of Arabic, and laughter. He took cover behind the safe as the young man walked past him into the office and peered through the window at Justin’s van, then at Langton standing by his bike. He was laughing so much at his cleverness in deceiving the gasman that he slopped coffee over his shirt. The distraction gave Justin the perfect cover to sneak past in his fake uniform and pad downstairs, remembering to avoid the steps that had creaked on the way up.

He opened the front door an inch and paused, waiting for sounds of movement above him. When he heard the floorboards groan again and the sound of the chair rolling over the thin carpet he stepped outside, silently pulled the door shut and hugged the front wall until he reached the safety of Munro Investments and Jack Langton.

They were clear in three minutes, Langton riding off while Justin was still rolling up his tape, each sensing the young man’s mocking eyes on them as they sped away to Lambeth.

Twenty-one

Saturday, 15 September, 12.17, Lambeth

They dropped off the cover vehicles at Wandsworth, changed and made mugs of instant coffee. Langton had already called Alan Fargo, waiting in 1830, and Justin had emailed the photographs even before the kettle boiled.

Before noon they were on the road again, heading for Lambeth and Ahmed Jibril’s safe-house. Justin rode pillion on Langton’s Suzuki, its high performance camouflaged by a scuffed and dented black chassis. Weaving through the Saturday shopping traffic they reached the rambling, three-storey Victorian house in less than fifteen minutes. This time Langton dropped Justin round the corner out of sight in the nearest side-street, then parked right outside the address.

The house was served by a communal front door reached by a short concrete path only five metres from the pavement. Speed bumps had done little to deter the constant flow of traffic using the street as a rat-run between Clapham Road and South Lambeth Road. Lining both sides of the street, once-grand houses had been converted into flats, interrupted by a launderette and a shabby twenty-four-hour convenience store. Across the road from Jibril’s safe-house, an ugly block of council flats dated back to the fifties and was in serious need of renovation. SAS secondee Steve Gibb had conducted the observation of Jibril from the tiny front bedroom of an uninhabitable flat on the top floor.

Langton dismounted, flipped up the visor and leant against the bike. He was just another courier checking a parcel against his job sheet, except that his attention was totally focused on the communal front door.

After a couple of minutes a girl appeared from the junction with South Lambeth Road and, absently searching for her key, turned into the path. She was wearing a sweatshirt and headscarf, and Langton saw the white iPod wire trailing into her jeans pocket. Immersed in the music, she only became aware of him when she unlocked the front door, which swung inwards of its own accord. ‘Cheers, love,’ he grunted, as pre-recorded fake messages from a non-existent dispatcher crackled from his helmet, making any challenge pointless.

He placed the package on the mail shelf just inside the door, loitered while she went upstairs, and gave a double click as soon as she was out of sight. In less than twenty seconds Justin was inside the lobby, taking the stairs two at a time, and Langton was astride his bike again, gunning the engine to dissolve any second thoughts from the girl and cover Justin’s ascent.

Flat nine was on the second floor at the top of the house and the locks were child’s play. Justin already knew what to expect because the surveillance team had watched Jibril pick up the keys from the letting agent. There were only two flats on the landing, and no sound came from the door opposite Jibril’s. He stepped inside, closed the door and stood on the threshold, perfectly still, acclimatising himself. The heavy curtains were closed, but even in the gloom he could see practically everything from the doorway. It was a bedsit, one half of the large converted attic, with the roof sloping from left to right. There was a small oak table with two chairs pulled clear of the window and a single bed against the left inner wall beside a chest of drawers. The only other item of furniture was an uncomfortable-looking armchair facing a small TV.

The tiny bathroom and shower lay directly ahead of him, but the kitchenette was no more than an alcove in the far corner, hidden by a dirty floral curtain. An ancient gas water heater hung above the stainless-steel sink and drainer, and a laminated shelf held a kettle, electric ring, tiny fridge and microwave.

The place looked as if Jibril had just left, with the bed unmade and clothes scattered on the armchair. A chipped dinner plate, knife and stained mug had been dumped in the sink, and the fridge was empty, except for an open carton of milk and the remains of the fruit and veg Jibril had bought from the stalls around Brixton on his mid-morning walks. The waste bin still contained the remains of his three days’ occupancy. In the bathroom Justin found a toothbrush, a pair of nail scissors, shower gel, shampoo and a razor, with Jibril’s towel draped over the shower rail.