At Risk (17 page)

Essentially, she longed for transformation. For years now she had dreamed of leaving her unhappy and unremarkable background behind her, and of entering a new world where she would, for the first time, find total and joyous acceptance. Islam, it seemed, offered precisely the transformation she sought. It would fill the void inside her, the terrible vacuum in her heart.

She took to visiting the local Islamic centre, and, without telling her parents or teachers, receiving instruction in the Koran. Soon she was regularly visiting the mosque. She was accepted there, it seemed to her, as she had never been accepted before. Her eyes would meet those of other worshippers and she would see in them the same quiet certainty that she felt herself. That this was the right path, the only path. That the truths offered by Islam were absolute.

She told her teacher that she wanted to convert and he suggested that she speak to the imam at the mosque. She did so, and the imam considered her case. He was a cautious man, and something about this ardent, unsmiling girl worried him. She had done the necessary study, however, and he had no wish to turn her away. He visited her parents, who expressed themselves “totally cool” with the idea, and shortly after her eighteenth birthday he received her into the Islamic faith. Later that year she visited Pakistan with a local family who had relatives in Karachi. Soon, as well as speaking fluent Arabic, she was proficient in Urdu. When she was twenty, after returning twice more to Pakistan, she was accepted as an undergraduate at the Department of Oriental Languages at the Sorbonne in Paris.

It was at the beginning of her second year at the university that the frustration began to bite. She was trapped, it seemed to her, within an utterly alien culture. Islam prohibited the belief in any god but Allah, and this prohibition included the false gods of money, status or commercial power. But everywhere she looked, amongst Muslims as well as unbelievers, she saw a crass materialism, and the worshipping of these very gods.

In response, she stripped her life to the bone, and sought out the mosques which preached the strictest and most austere forms of Islam. Here, the religious teachings were placed in a context of hard-line political theory. The imams preached the need to reject all that was not of Islam, and especially all that pertained to the great Satan—America. Her faith became her armour, and her abhorrence of the culture that she saw around her—a bloated and spiritless corporatism indifferent to anything except its own profit margins—grew to a silent, all-consuming, twenty-four-hours-a-day fury.

One day she was sitting on a Métro station bench, returning from the mosque, when she was joined by a young, leather-jacketed North African with a straggly beard. His face seemed vaguely familiar.

“Salaam aleikum,”
he murmured, glancing at her.

“Aleikum salaam.”

“I have seen you at prayers.” His Arabic was Algerian in inflexion.

She half closed her book, looked meaningfully at her watch, and said nothing.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

Expressionless, she angled the book so that he could see the title. It was the autobiography of Malcolm X.

“Our brother Malik Shabazz,” he said, giving the civil rights activist his Islamic name. “Peace upon him.”

“Just so.”

The young man leaned forward over his knees. “Sheik Ruhallah is preaching at the mosque this afternoon.”

“Indeed,” she said.

“You must come.”

She looked at him, surprised. Despite his unkempt appearance, there was a quiet authority about him.

“So what is it that this Sheik Ruhallah preaches?” she asked.

The young man frowned. “He preaches jihad,” he said. “He preaches war.”

O
n the drive back to London Liz thought about Mark. Her anger at his untimely call had faded, and she needed a break from the rigorous business of analysing the day’s events. This would not, she knew, be time wasted. If she refocused her attention, her subconscious would continue to shuffle the pieces of the jigsaw. Continue to meditate on exposed headlands, terror networks, and armour-piercing ammunition. And perhaps come up with some answers.

How would it be if he left Shauna? At one reckless and wholly irresponsible level—the level to which Mark instinctively gravitated—it would be great. They would conspire, they would say unsayable things to each other, they would roll over in the night in the certain knowledge of the other’s answering desire.

But at every realistic level it was impossible. Her career in the Service would not prosper, for a start. Nothing would be said to her face, but she would be regarded as unsound, and in the next reshuffle moved somewhere risk-free and unexciting—recruiting, perhaps, or protective security—until the powers that be saw how her private life worked out.

And how would it really be, living with Mark? Even if Shauna kept quiet and didn’t make a fuss, life would change drastically. There would be new and only vaguely imaginable limitations on the freedoms that she currently took for granted. It would be impossible to behave as she had behaved today, for example—to simply get into her car and drive, not knowing when she would be back. Absences would have to be explained and negotiated with a partner who, not unreasonably, would want to know when she was going to be around. Like most men who hated to be tied down themselves, Mark was capable of being intensely possessive. Her life would be subject to a whole new dimension of stress.

And there were more fundamental questions to answer. If Mark left Shauna, would it be because the relationship between the two of them had been doomed from the start? If she—Liz—hadn’t come along, would the marriage have imploded anyway? Or would things have been fine, give or take the odd hiccup? Was she an agent of destruction, a home-wrecker, a
femme fatale
? She had never seen herself in that role, but then perhaps one never did.

It couldn’t happen. She would call him as soon as she got back to London. Where was she? Somewhere near Saffron Walden, it seemed, and she had just passed through the village of Audley End when she became aware of a familiar sensation. A prickling, as if soda bubbles were racing through her bloodstream. An expanding sense of urgency.

Russia.
The memory struggling towards the light was something to do with Russia. And with Fort Monkton, the MI6 training school, where she had done a firearms course. As she drove she could hear the unemphatic Bristolian burr of Barry Holland, the Fort Monkton armourer, and smell the torn air of the underground firing range as she and her colleagues emptied the magazines of their 9mm Brownings into the Hun’s-head targets.

She was almost at the M25 when the memory finally surfaced, and she realised why Ray Gunter had been shot with an armour-piercing round. The knowledge brought no sense of release.

She sat down opposite Wetherby shortly after eight. She had arrived at her desk to find a two-word telephone message: Marzipan Fivestar. This, Liz knew, meant that Sohail Din wanted to be rung at home as a matter of urgency. She had never received this message from him before, and it immediately concerned her, because a Fivestar request usually meant that an agent was fearful of discovery and, on either a temporary or permanent basis, wanted to cease contact. She prayed that this was not the case with Marzipan.

She dialled his number, and to her relief it was Sohail himself who picked up the phone. In the background she could hear canned laughter from a television.

“Is Dave there?” Liz asked.

“I’m sorry,” said Sohail. “Wrong number.”

“That’s strange,” said Liz. “Do you know Dave?”

“I know six or seven Daves,” said Sohail, “and none of them lives here. Goodbye.”

In six or seven minutes, then, he would call her back from a public phone. She had instructed him never to use the nearest one to his house. In the interim, she called up Barry Holland at Fort Monkton, and by the time Sohail called back, her laser printer was disgorging the relevant information.

Wetherby, she thought, looked tired. The shadows seemed to have deepened around his eyes, and his features had assumed a fatalistic cast which made her wish that she was the bearer of better news. Perhaps, though, it was just a matter of the time of day. His manner, as always, was fastidiously courteous, and as she spoke she was conscious of his absolute attention. She had never seen him take notes.

“I agree with you about Eastman,” he said, and she noticed that the dark green pencil was once again between his fingers. “He’s being used in some way, and it very much looks as if the situation’s spiralled out of his control. It sounds certain that there’s a German connection of some kind, and that the connection points east. More specifically there’s the truck in the car park to consider, and the probability that some sort of handover was made at that point.”

Liz nodded. “The police seem to be proceeding on the basis of the weapon in question being some sort of military assault rifle.”

The faintest of smiles. “You clearly think otherwise.”

“I remembered something we were told at Fort Monkton. How the KGB and the Russian Interior Ministry troops had phased out the old Stalin-era hand weapons in the early nineties because they kept coming up against ballistic body armour that the rounds couldn’t penetrate.”

“Go on.”

“So they developed a new generation of handguns with massive payloads. Things like the Gyurza that weighed more than a kilo and fired tungsten-core and armour-piercing rounds. Barry Holland showed us a couple of them.”

“Any of them 7.62 calibre?”

“Not that I remember. But there have been a lot of developments in the last ten years. The FBI have test-firing results on something that so far doesn’t even have a name. It’s just known as the PSS.” She glanced at the print-out.
“Pistolet Samozaryadne Specialny.”

“Special Silenced Pistol,” translated Wetherby.

“Exactly. It’s an ugly-looking thing, but technically it’s way out in front. It’s got the lowest sound signature of any existing firearm. You could fire it through a coat pocket and the person standing next to you wouldn’t hear a thing. At the same time it’s got enough punch to take out a target wearing full body armour.”

“I thought silencers reduced power.”

“Conventional silencers do. The Russians rethought the issue, and what they came up with was silent ammunition.”

Wetherby’s left eyebrow rose a millimetre or two.

“It’s called SP-4. The way it works is that the explosion is completely contained in the cartridge case in the main body of the gun. None of the gases escape, so there’s no noise and no flash.”

“And the calibre of this ammunition?”

“Seven point six two armour-piercing.”

Wetherby didn’t smile, but regarded her thoughtfully for a moment, lowered the sharpened point of the dark green pencil to the desk, and nodded. The fact that he didn’t find it necessary to congratulate her afforded Liz a quiet pleasure, despite the topic’s grimness.

“So why has our man gone to the trouble of acquiring a specialist weapon like this?”

“Because he is expecting to find himself up against armoured or flak-jacketed opposition. Police. Security guards. Special forces. He’s going to need the technical edge that the PSS can give him.”

“Any other conclusions we can draw?”

“That he, or more likely his organisation, has access to the best. This is a limited-edition weapon. You’re not going to find one in an East End pub, any more than you’re going to find one in a North West Frontier arms bazaar. So far they’ve only been issued to a handful of Russian Special Forces personnel, most of whom are currently engaged in undercover operations against Chechen militants in the Caucasus mountains. We’re never going to get the facts and figures, but they will certainly have taken casualties, and it’s reasonable to suppose that one or two of their personal weapons will have passed into rebel hands.”

“And from there into the hands of the mujahidin armourers . . . Yes, I see where you’re going.” Wetherby glanced bleakly at the window. He seemed to be listening to the irregular beat of the rain. “Anything else?”

“I’m afraid it gets worse,” said Liz. “When I came in this evening I returned a Fivestar call from Marzipan.”

“Go on.”

“There’s some kind of online Arabic newsletter that his colleagues read. He thinks it’s written by ITS militants in Saudi—possibly al Safa’s crowd—who are in on the planning stages of anti-Western operations. Marzipan hasn’t seen it himself—the letter’s written in some sort of code—but those in the know seem to think that something’s about to happen here in the UK. A symbolic event of some kind. No clue as to the what, when or where, but the reported wording is that ‘a man has arrived whose name is Vengeance before God.’ ”

Wetherby sat unblinking for a moment. “We’re definitely talking about an ITS operation here?” he asked carefully. “Not some flag-burning demonstration, or the arrival of a new imam?”

“Marzipan said that his colleagues didn’t seem in much doubt about it. As far as they were concerned the letter signalled an imminent attack.”