Hellfire (18 page)

‘Go ahead, Zero Alpha,’ Danny said.

‘
A team from Porton Down is en route to your location. ETA 05.00 hrs. Covert insertion – we’re keeping this quiet from the Nigerians.
’

‘Roger that.’

‘
Your instructions are to keep the patient isolated. You understand what that means?
’

Danny, Tony and Caitlin exchanged a look. ‘Yeah,’ Danny said, ‘we understand.’

‘
What’s the status of your prisoner?
’

Danny looked over at Jihadi Jim. He was lying by the side of the road shivering, his eyes rolling, his pale face sweating. ‘Bad,’ he said.

‘
Can you question him?
’

‘He’s barely conscious.’

‘
Do what you can to keep him alive until the medics get there.’

‘Are we being airlifted out?’

‘
Not immediately. When the medics arrive, they’ll try to treat the patient in situ. You need to stay on the ground and provide close protection while they do that.
’

‘Roger that.’ A pause. Danny glanced at Tony. ‘We need to track the Chinese guy down.’

‘
That’s a negative. Your instructions are to remain where you are.
’

‘We can locate him. The roads are bad, we can catch him up.’

‘
Negative. Keep the patient isolated. Do not move from your position, repeat, do not move from your position.
’

Danny swallowed his frustration. ‘Do Ripley’s family know what’s happening?’

‘
Negative. London want this kept quiet for now. Any more questions?
’

Danny had none. ‘Bravo Nine Delta out,’ he said, and the radio went quiet.

But Danny’s head was noisy. Something wasn’t right. London were making a bad call. Why were they so insistent that all the unit stayed
in situ
, when some lunatic with a bioweapon was on the loose?

Time check. 17.32. Caitlin moved over to where the prisoner was lying. She knelt down beside him and started examining the wound. Tony sidled up to Danny. ‘He’ll try to make a run for it, you know.’

Danny glanced at the prisoner. ‘He’s not going anywhere.’

‘I’m not talking about this fucker. I’m talking about Ripley.’

‘Why would he do that? He isolated himself, didn’t he?’

‘He’s all fucking noble now, but there’ll come a point when he’s not thinking straight. He won’t want to just sit there and take what’s coming to him. Look, Black, all I’m saying is, nobody would know if we put Ripley out of his misery before he has a chance to spread the infection. I’ll do it if you don’t want to. We can say he tried to escape and we . . .’

‘Forget it, Tony. The medics are going to sort Ripley out.’

Tony gave a dismissive snort. ‘Right,’ he said.

‘We’ve got other things to worry about, apart from Ripley,’ Danny said. It was true. He estimated that it was an hour till sunset. And just under twelve hours until the Porton Down team got here. In the meantime, they were exposed and in the open. Boko Haram militants could return at any minute.

Danny turned to what remained of his team. ‘We need to get off the road,’ he said.

Eleven

‘What you have to understand, is that the secret of effective counter-terrorism intelligence work lies in answering three simple questions: who, what and how.’

Spud Glover stood by the door of a small office on the third floor of the MI6 building. It was getting late – almost seven – and he was pissed off. A petite woman with dark skin, a head scarf, fashionable thick-rimmed glasses and a smart navy trouser suit sat at a desk. She had a small pile of manilla folders in front of her. Her name was Eleanor. When they’d met for the first time that morning, she had taken Spud rather by surprise. It wasn’t just that this woman who was clearly a Muslim, with her rather plain hijab, was working for the security services. It was also this: Eleanor was a looker. She floated his boat.

His first thought was one of relief that he’d kept his powder dry by not responding to the advances of Tony’s missus the previous afternoon, after the others had been hauled in to base. Don’t dip your pen in the company inkwell, he’d told himself. Or maybe he’d been giving himself an excuse not to reveal the network of scars and sores that now made up his abdomen. And maybe that was why he hadn’t found himself flirting with Eleanor quite as outrageously as he once might have done.

As the day went on, however, she had started to irritate the hell out of him – not least because she was reading the folders at the same time as talking rather absent-mindedly to him, as if he was just an afterthought. And then, of course, there was the way she sounded like a teacher talking to an ignorant schoolboy.

‘
Who
do we think might represent a threat?
What
opportunity might such a person have for carrying out such a threat? And
how
might they do it? Does that make sense, Spud? You’ll tell me if I’m going too fast for you?’

‘Don’t you worry about it, love. I’m just about keeping up.’

‘Once you’ve answered
those
questions, you have a more
important
question to answer: what behaviour does your subject display when they’re preparing a strike? We call these behaviours “terrorist attack pre-incident indicators”, or “TAPIs” for short.’ She gave him a hard look when she saw he was staring into the middle distance above her head. ‘Can you tell me what TAPIs stands for?’ she asked.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be reading those files?’

Eleanor removed her glasses, laid them upside down on the files, and turned to look at him.

‘Spud,’ she said. ‘The idea of you shadowing me is that you
learn
something about what we do here. It’s going to be rather difficult for both of us if you’re going to take that attitude.’

‘Terrorist attack pre-incident indicators, TAPIs for short. Trust me, love, I’ve seen more terrorists than you’ve had hot dinners. The best indicator that they’re going to attack is when they pull out a gun and try to shoot you. And the best counter-attack is to shoot them first. Maybe they didn’t teach you that at spy school?’

‘There’s no such thing as spy school,’ Eleanor said primly.

‘Did they sit you down in a classroom and teach you this stuff?’

‘Well, yes, but . . .’

‘Then you’ve been to spy school. And it sounds to me like you never bunked off.’

She gave him a withering look. ‘You’re impossible,’ she said. She replaced her glasses and turned back to her file. Spud continued to loiter by the door. It was true what she said. When it became clear that Spud was in no state for active service, the Ruperts and suits had given him a choice: honourable discharge with full army pension, or they’d try to find other work for him within the Regiment. That meant a desk job, pushing bits of paper from one side of a desk to another. But for Spud, paperwork was one down from scrubbing the toilets, and so some bright spark had come up with the idea of having him shadow an MI6 intelligence officer. The idea was that he would learn something about the intelligence trade, with a view to moving into that field.

At least, that was the headline. The reality, Spud knew, was that everybody at the Firm saw him as a lump of muscle, only there to provide spooks like Eleanor with backup when they were out in the field. He was a glorified bodyguard, and his first day in the new job had been about as bad as he’d expected. He’d have given anything to be out in the field, even if it was just tagging along on the Nigerian job with Danny and the others. And at times he thought his body would be up to it. But then, he’d make an unexpected movement – not much, just a sudden turn or a twist of his head – and a sharp jolt of pain would shoot down his abdomen, or he’d be overcome with a fit of coughing that wouldn’t stop. A constant reminder that his last op had left him in a very bad state indeed – a state in which he was of no use to his Regiment mates.

As these thoughts repeated themselves in his mind, Spud stood in silence as Eleanor continued reading through her files. He supposed she meant well, but her habit of talking like a text book didn’t half get on his wick. He’d like to put some of these spooks on the ground in a war zone, see how far their so-called expertise got them then.

He noticed that Eleanor seemed to be reading a particular file for the second time. ‘Something interesting?’ he asked.

‘Maybe,’ she murmured.

Spud knew what she was looking for. The order had come down from the head shed: there had been intelligence chatter about an extremist who called himself the Caliph. A selected batch of intelligence officers were now hunting down any reference to such a character. It was a painstaking operation. Lots of police and other intelligence reports were computerised, but plenty had been written by hand. Hence the pile of manilla folders on Eleanor’s desk. And hence Spud’s reluctance to help her with the donkey work. Reading wasn’t his strong point.

He stepped towards the table and glanced at the file. It was neatly packed with small type, and had a black and white picture of a Middle Eastern-looking man with a trim beard. ‘What is it?’ he said.

‘West Midlands Police report.’

‘And?’

She scanned down the document again.

‘
All
these files have some sort of mention of a “caliph”, but they’re all very non-specific. A caliph is an Islamic ruler – that’s a historical fact. We can’t drag people in simply for talking about history. I’ve got files here on university professors, TV researchers, all sorts of people. They’ve all made public utterances about caliphs and caliphates, and they’re all entirely innocent, so far as I can tell.
This
one’s a little different. West Midlands Police pulled over this cab driver, name of Kalifa al-Meghrani, in Dudley, on the outskirts of Birmingham, about five weeks ago. Nothing serious – it seems he was just operating without a licence, but they took him into custody when he started losing his temper with them. Here’s the interesting bit – one of the police officers involved reported that he shouted words to the effect of “I’ll set the fucking Caliph on you.”’ She frowned. ‘It’s pretty thin,’ she said, half to herself.

‘What’s the problem?’ Spud said. Finally, here was something he knew how to deal with. ‘We can be up the M1 in three hours. Let’s go ask this weirdo what he meant.’

He was halfway to the door when Eleanor said, ‘Sit down, Spud, for goodness sake.’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘We can’t just go barging
in
on this man. There are
protocols
we have to follow.’

Spud blinked. ‘You think this piece of shit might know where the bad guys are, and you’re worried about protocol? Take my word for it, love – ten minutes with me and you won’t be able to stop him talking. He’ll be
begging
to talk.’

‘This isn’t the dark ages, Spud. Confessions obtained by coercion are notoriously unreliable. In any case, there is a lot we can learn without even making contact with this man.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Spud said. ‘Look at him. You telling me he doesn’t tick all the boxes?’

Eleanor sighed. ‘You’re making an elementary mistake, Spud. It’s the first thing we’re taught. You’re making decisions based on stereotypes and your own prejudices. I mean, look at me – if you saw me in the street, would you think I worked for MI6?’

She had a point.

‘
Anyone
can be a terrorist, you know. Race is a particularly poor indicator. If you’re only looking for one type of person, you’ll miss hundreds of other groups and individuals who might be planning . . .’

‘Alright, alright.’ Spud waved one hand to shut her up. ‘You’re the one that’s been to spy school. Just don’t blame me when the nutter blows up a plane.’

‘You see?’ Eleanor said. ‘You
see
? He’s gone from a minicab driver to a crazy plane bomber in your head in about thirty seconds. Things are a lot more complicated than that in our world. Terrorists are rarely insane, you know? If you’re going to beat them, you have to get inside their heads, try and see the world from their point of view . . .’

‘You wouldn’t want to get inside the heads of some of the cunts I’ve met.’ Spud knew he sounded surly, but he couldn’t help it. ‘What’s his address?’

‘If you think I’m going to tell you
that
, you’re quite mistaken.’ And as Spud’s frown darkened, she continued: ‘Look, I’m not saying we won’t
speak
to him.’

‘What are you saying then?’

‘That we’re going to do our homework. We’re going to find out everything there is on record about Kalifa al-Meghrani, and we’re going to decide whether he’s a likely suspect based on more than just the colour of his skin.’

‘That could take ages.’

‘Of
course
it won’t. We’ll just pull in everything we know from the police national computer and GCHQ, we’ll examine his banking records and passport applications. We’ll have a measure of the man within a few hours. You didn’t have any
other
plans, did you?’ She gave him a slightly sheepish smile. ‘You think you might be able to manage an all-nighter without getting too exhausted?’