Death by Design (16 page)

Patrick Riley looked up and narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s his story then?’ he said. ‘Any idea?’

‘The Israelis have him down as an agitator,’ Terry said. ‘Fiery speeches at rallies on the West Bank. Deported from Egypt nineteen ninety-seven. Again political agitation. Religion-wise he’s one of those “born again” types. He wasn’t involved in the revolution of seventy-nine, he came to religion later.’

‘Probably frightened not to,’ Riley said.

‘Anyway, he’s got a following of sorts. Call themselves the Brothers of the Light. Rabidly anti-Semitic. Interestingly, the Iranian government aren’t too keen on him or his “brothers”. Off message with them maybe.’

Riley shrugged.

‘He’s very down apparently on Muslims who give up their faith or who seem to side with the likes of us,’ Terry went on. ‘Also, he was heavily involved in the purges that took place once the Shah left and Khomeini took over. No involvement with terrorism as far as we know.’

‘And yet suddenly he is here,’ Riley said.

‘Illegally.’

‘Oh.’ Riley raised an eyebrow.

‘No record of entry. Back in İstanbul he had a posse of heavies. Çetin hasn’t spotted them here so far. He may or may not be alone. According to the other security guard at Hackney Wick, this Ayatollah Nourazar has “business” with Ülker. The other guard, by the way, is Mustafa Kermani. Turkish parents but Iranian forebears. Çetin thought he was illegal but he’s actually a UK citizen now. Entered illegally, but then married a Rachel Halliwell in nineteen ninety-six. He was twenty at the time, she was fifty-six.’ Terry shrugged. ‘They’re now divorced. Mustafa has got form for affray. One of those periodic things that take place outside the Israeli Embassy.’

‘Gawd.’ Riley rolled his eyes.

‘He’s a nothing, Kermani, and even this Nourazar isn’t exactly a big fish,’ Terry said. ‘It’s all low-key as far as I can see, guv’nor. Mind you, they took a delivery last night of a load of counterfeit Percodan – painkillers for arthritis. I was watching. The truck they were in was being driven by an old friend.’

Riley frowned.

‘Wesley Simpson,’ Terry said. ‘Everyone’s favourite getaway driver. Obviously given up on cars and has gone into the HGV business.’

‘Mmm. Could be useful to know as we get nearer to when we think these people are going to make their move,’ Riley said. ‘My recollection of Wesley is of a basically peaceable bloke who just wants to turn a quick quid.’

‘He’s a lazy bastard, guv’nor.’

‘But not a violent man,’ Riley said. ‘We’ll keep an eye on Wesley. What we must also do now, I think, is mount surveillance on our other Iranian connection.’

‘Ali Reza Hajizadeh?’

‘Yes. He, like this ayatollah chap, was born in Isfahan,’ Riley said. ‘I want to know if they meet. What, if any, connections they may have. Tell Çetin to keep his ear to the ground. This may or may not be the same holy man the police in İstanbul came up with but for the moment I think it’s safe to assume that it probably is. I’ll contact them to that effect.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We know that Ülker has some business involvement in the Far East,’ Riley went on. ‘There’s talk of business partners who may or may not be this cleric – maybe another gang. But if we haven’t managed to pin him down by the third, Terry, we are going to have to stake Mark Lane out and then if it looks in the least bit dodgy take Ülker down. I don’t care what the bloody mayor says. I hate all this fake stuff, especially the medication, as much as he does. But if Ülker is directly associating with terrorists then we can’t put the public at risk.’

‘No, sir.’

Riley sighed. ‘Well, as long as we’re all working off the same page . . .’ Then he looked up at Terry and said, ‘I know we could blow it with regard to getting at Ülker’s other business contacts. But we can’t have another seven/seven or the events that followed it.’

Terry looked down. He knew what Riley was referring to, the death at police hands of the innocent Brazilian man Jean Charles de Menezes.

‘Given time, Çetin İkmen could have given us a lot of information about Ülker’s operation. I feel we’ll probably under-use him, which is a shame but what can you do?’

Terry shrugged. ‘Inspector İkmen strikes me as a resourceful sort,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that one way or another he’ll play his part.’

Things came to Abdurrahman Iqbal, so he said, in fits and starts.

‘My memory isn’t what it was,’ he told Süleyman. ‘But I do now recall that Tariq was obliged to study a map of the London Underground before he took part in his “mission”. He wasn’t allowed to take it out of the Tarlabaşı factory. But he did have to study it.’

Süleyman was walking with the old man along Mesrutiyet Street towards the British Consulate. Given Abdurrahman’s high level of cooperation, they had looked into his claim to know a person called Captain Jackson. The consulate had news about this which was why Süleyman was escorting the old man there now.

‘Given the boy’s poor state of health,’ Abdurrahman went on, ‘as well as his absolute foreignness in a place like London, I thought they would not leave him on his own there. But apparently he had to learn to move around alone.’

‘Do you know where he was going to obtain the explosives he was due to use?’

‘No,’ the old man said. ‘Although I do not imagine they were going to risk crossing borders with them. These people have sympathisers in England. I think that Tariq would have been given what he needed there.’

As they drew level with a small grocer’s shop, Süleyman saw Çetin İkmen’s son Bülent coming out, clutching a new packet of cigarettes.

‘Excuse me, Abdurrahman,’ Süleyman said to the old man. Then he called out to the young man. ‘Bülent!’

‘Mehmet!’ The young man came bounding over and then reached up to put his thin arms round his father’s friend. ‘So good to see you!’

‘And you too,’ Süleyman said. ‘I’m just escorting this man to the British Consulate and so I can’t really talk now. But, quickly, have you heard from your dad?’

‘I haven’t,’ Bülent replied. ‘Mum hasn’t mentioned it, but then my mother wouldn’t.’ He sighed impatiently. The feud between his parents was getting Bülent down. ‘I don’t think that anyone else has heard. But then Dad said that he wouldn’t be contactable. I worry.’ He sighed again and then asked, ‘Mehmet, you don’t know where Dad is, do you?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Süleyman said. ‘On my honour.’

‘I fear he’s somewhere out east,’ Bülent said. ‘There’s always trouble out there.’

‘Your father is not a man easily outwitted, Bülent.’

‘He can be shot as easily as anyone else, though, can’t he?’ Bülent said. He lit a cigarette and went on his way. Süleyman and the old Pakistani continued in the opposite direction towards the British Consulate.

Working at night wasn’t easy for Çetin İkmen. He had worked many night shifts in the past but never as a matter of regular routine. And he had to keep his wits about him. Terry had called to say that it was now more important than ever to report anything and everything that went on both at his residence and his place of work. Mustafa, his fellow security guard, had a police record, albeit minor, and Ayatollah Nourazar was a known fundamentalist agitator.

İkmen didn’t have a great deal of experience with terrorist offences. His speciality was murder. Furthermore, he was uncomfortable with the context in this case. He wasn’t a religious man by any means, but nominally he was a Muslim and it offended him to see the faith of his fathers, and of his wife, distorted to create prejudice and pursue acts of violence. He felt sympathy for Christian and Jewish Britons caught up in all this but he feared them too. What if a major incident did take place in Mark Lane? What if the people of Britain all became insanely anti-Islamic as a result? Clearly that was what the terrorists wanted and the thought appalled him.

It was pointless trying to sleep now that the sun was shining directly into his window. Also, Mr Yigit was vacuuming the stairs to a tuneless rendition of ‘Kiss, Kiss’ by Tarkan, and that alone was death to sleep. And yet the landlord knew that some of his tenants worked only at night. There was a Kurdish man who worked as a bouncer at a nightclub in the West End, and then there was also Süleyman Elgiz who Ayşe had said worked in Ahmet Ülker’s factories. He was out all night but thus far İkmen hadn’t seen him at Hackney Wick. Since most of the workers there were Africans who slept on site, Elgiz had to be a foreman or at least something a little bit more elevated than just a stitcher. İkmen wondered idly where the Iranian ayatollah laid his head at night. The vacuuming, and the singing, stopped, and İkmen heard the voice of another man.

‘Yigit, you know you’ve got to find a room for Mr Harrison, don’t you?’ It was Ali Reza Hajizadeh, speaking in English. ‘He needs to be here until Friday morning. He’s working with me.’

‘Why? Mr Harrison has house,’ Yigit said. ‘In south London I think.’

Ali Reza clicked his tongue in aggravation. ‘Just do it, Yigit,’ he said. ‘Orders of Mr Ülker.’

‘Yes, but I don’t have—’

‘Chuck one of the Kurds out,’ the Iranian interrupted. ‘You’re a Turk, you don’t like them anyway, do you?’

‘Ali Reza, I like all people!’ Yigit protested. ‘I have no problem with no one!’

‘Well, good for you, Yigit,’ Ali Reza said. ‘What a fine man you are! Just remember that this is Mr Ülker we’re talking about here. You know what will happen if you refuse him.’

İkmen heard Mr Yigit sigh very deeply.

‘Mr Harrison will be wanting his room at six o’clock tonight,’ the Iranian said. ‘Just make sure that one of your Kurds is on the street by then. Oh, and change the sheets before Mr Harrison gets in there, won’t you? And don’t give him the terrible nylon things you give to me!’

İkmen heard footsteps descending to the floor below and then the vacuuming started up again. This time Mr Yigit did not sing while he worked. He was no doubt puzzling over who he could move and under what pretext. Clearly, Ahmet Ülker’s word was law.

İkmen wondered why Harrison needed to move into the Rize and why the date of his departure was Friday, 3 May. Whatever Terry and Ayşe said, he couldn’t quite believe that Ahmet Ülker and his associates would plant bombs in London on exactly the same day they had planned to do so when Tariq had been involved. Ülker’s İstanbul factory had been raided in the interim and that surely would have made him nervous. Turks at the factory had talked – eventually. Whether or not Ülker knew about that, he would realise that if anyone had talked to the police in İstanbul, they would most certainly pass the information on to London. So the idea of mounting the attack as originally planned with Tariq seemed ridiculous. And why was Mark Lane the target? It wasn’t as if the Israeli Embassy or anything significant like that was down there. İkmen resolved to go to Mark Lane the following day and have a look around. He would have to be careful in case any of Ülker’s people saw him. Maybe he would run that by Terry first. He would have to speak to him anyway to pass on what he had just heard. He also wanted to express his doubts about the date, although the news about Harrison suggested everything was still on course for Friday.

‘It’s my day off tomorrow,’ Ayşe said as she sipped her cappuccino. ‘I could take you to the Tower of London. Nothing wrong with me showing my uncle the sights.’

İkmen smiled. ‘If I can stay awake,’ he said. He hadn’t managed to get any sleep since he’d listened in to Yigit and Ali Reza’s conversation in the hall.

‘You’ve got to try and get a look inside those factories tonight, Çetin,’ Ayşe said. ‘We need to know if that cleric and maybe some of the bodyguards reported to us from İstanbul are staying there. Keep your ears open.’

‘Unless he speaks Farsi and then I will be lost,’ İkmen said.

He’d asked to meet Ayşe in the İstanbul Büfe at the end of her working day and an hour and a half before the start of his. He’d spoken to Terry during one of his long, lonely walks around the Abney Park graveyard but his handler had just reiterated what had been said before. A covert surveillance operation on both Ülker and his associates and Mark Lane itself was scheduled for Friday. Those involved had to be apprehended with explosives or weapons of some sort before an incident took place. According to UK law, just finding such items on someone’s property did not mean that person was guilty. And the Met really wanted to take Ülker right down. If he was aiding terrorists he would have to give them up to the police completely in order to come out of the process with any sentence less than life. If he gave up information about his business dealings with other gangs or in other parts of the world as well, so much the better. Just thinking about it made İkmen frown.

‘I still don’t know why Ülker wants to get into bed with terrorists,’ he said. ‘He could just carry on making and distributing fake goods and keep his head down. He isn’t religious. Why does he need to ally himself with people like this Iranian cleric?’

‘Fakes are being cracked down on here,’ Ayşe said. ‘The mayor’s “Condemn a Counterfeit” scheme means that people can just ring up City Hall anonymously and tell the mayor’s office who is producing or selling fake goods. And if an actual gang member wants to provide the police with information, he will get a reward for doing so.’

‘Your Mr Üner is a very determined man,’ İkmen said.

She smiled. ‘He’s a bit of a hero – with the Met. And let me tell you, there isn’t a British woman of Turkish descent who doesn’t have designs on him. That includes me!’

‘Mr Üner isn’t married?’

‘No.’ She lowered her voice. ‘To be honest with you, Çetin, I tend to think that the rumour one sometimes picks up that Haluk Üner is gay may well be true. It would make perfect sense in terms of his abhorrence for fundamentalists.’

İkmen frowned. ‘And yet it still can’t be comfortable for him. I have seen him interviewed and he is obviously a believer and proud of it.’

‘So am I,’ Ayşe said. ‘We all are. I am not, believe me, happy about spying on and reporting fellow Muslims. But the belief that I cling to and that Haluk Üner lives by also is that these extremists are wrong. I don’t believe that stoning homosexuals or denying women an education takes you closer to God. We’re Muslims, we are enlightened, we’re above such things!’