Liz Carlyle - 06 - Rip Tide (29 page)

Going back to the door, Berger began to pound on it with his fist. When there was no response, he shouted, ‘Help!’ Then ‘Help!’ again. He felt very stupid. He had fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book. I’m past it, Berger thought to himself. He remembered his old colleagues in the Agency. How they would love to hear about this.

Chapter 43

Tahira did not usually wear the
hijab
, just a scarf loosely thrown over her hair when she went out. But today, before she went into the café, she carefully adjusted the scarf, pulling it forward to cover her hair entirely. She had swapped her heels for flat walking shoes, and her
shalwar kameez
covered everything else, including her ankles. It would be unusual for a lone woman to go into the café, but no one could say she was dressed improperly.

Several pairs of eyes watched as she went inside. A4 were stationed at various strategic points in the street outside and inside the café. They knew her quarry was inside; they had been watching him most of the day.

Tahira collected a small pot of mint tea from the woman behind the counter and walked with her tray towards a table by the window. Only as she crossed the room did she look up, and it was then she saw Malik in the corner, staring at her.

‘It’s Tahira, isn’t it?’ he called out. She smiled at him shyly.

‘I’m Malik, a friend of your brother’s. Are you meeting someone?’ He stood up, looking around the café. Only two other tables were occupied, by groups of much older men who were not paying them any attention.

‘I was supposed to meet my cousin here. But he’s just rung me to say he can’t make it.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘I thought I would have some tea anyway.’

‘Come and sit with me,’ said Malik, and giving her no chance to protest, he took the tray from her hands and led her to his table.

Sitting down, they looked at each, and Tahira adopted an expression of modest embarrassment.

‘Do you not remember me, Tahira?’ asked Malik.

In fact she did recognise him, but only just. She knew vaguely that she’d seen him in her brother’s company. They had certainly never been introduced; none of Amir’s friends from the New Springfield Mosque had, for her father had forbidden them to enter the family house.

‘Of course I remember you, Malik. Amir often spoke of you.’

‘Not badly I hope,’ he said, though he didn’t sound worried.

‘Of course not.’

‘Have you heard anything from Amir?’ he asked.

‘Not lately,’ she said. She knew her parents were too ashamed to have confided in anyone about their son’s whereabouts, not even extended family. And the woman from MI5 had been confident that word would not have got out about Amir’s capture and imprisonment in Paris.

‘Is he still in Pakistan?’ Malik asked, though Tahira sensed he knew the answer to his question.

‘We don’t know where he is. Our family out there said he went travelling. That’s the last we heard.’ She faltered. ‘I just hope he’s all right. We are very worried about him.’

Malik shot a comforting hand across the table, though he stopped short of touching her. ‘Don’t worry, Tahira. He’s fine, I’m sure of it. Your brother knows how to look after himself.’

‘You think so?’ she asked, trying to sound hopeful and pathetic.

‘Yes, I’m sure. It’s not as if he’s in enemy territory out there. Now in America, who knows what could have happened to him. They lock you up over there, you know, just for practising Islam. Half the inmates in Guantanamo didn’t even know how to spell Al Qaeda, much less belong to it. Their only crime was being Muslim.’

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely. The Jewish lobby sees to that. Look at the media there – the television stations, the newspapers. All owned by Jews. And they control the views people have all over the West. When was the last time you saw anything favourable about Islam on TV or in the Western newspapers, tell me that? They’ll praise Dubai all right, run features about its new hotels, and the way it lures white English people to spend their money on gambling and drinking and all sorts of decadence. But nothing about the real faith that is Islam.’

Tahira nodded submissively, knowing that he didn’t want anything but agreement from her. Malik went on, ‘You can be sure that Amir wasn’t going there. He is a messenger of true Islam, your brother, and he would only visit those places where Allah is respected. I am sure of that.’ He waved one hand dismissively, and Tahira sensed he didn’t really want to talk about her brother. What he really wanted to talk about was himself.

‘You know, I have always been interested in you.’

She stiffened slightly – it was important for her to seem demure. Malik quickly added, ‘Not improperly, Tahira. I mean, your brother always spoke of you in such a way that I thought you must be a very good person.’

‘We are very close,’ she said. ‘But,’ she paused, ‘we are so worried about him. Do you think the imam at the mosque might know where he has gone? I thought perhaps I could ask him. Would that be a good thing to do?’

‘Abdi Bakri?’ Malik stared at her, his eyes suddenly suspicious. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea at all.’

‘Why not? Amir always spoke respectfully of him.’

‘I am sure the imam thought he was a good and loyal student.’ Malik paused for a moment. ‘Someone else has been asking the imam about Amir. Someone who said he was his cousin.’

‘Really?’ She was as genuinely surprised as she sounded. ‘Who was that?’

‘A bloke called Salim. I know him pretty well but he never said before that he was related to your family. Is he?’ Malik sounded casual, but his eyes were hard now and searching.

‘It’s possible. Even my father sometimes has trouble keeping up with all the relatives we have over here. Especially on my mother’s side.’

‘But you don’t know Salim yourself?’

‘No,’ she said.

He seemed satisfied by this. ‘I thought not, somehow. Anyway, it’s better not to ask the imam yourself. Let me make some enquiries.’

When she nodded her agreement to this, his face lightened momentarily then grew serious again, though this time there was nothing hard about his eyes. ‘Tahira, I am going away soon.’ When her eyes widened he looked pleased. ‘To Pakistan. It is something of a . . . mission, you could say.’

‘It sounds serious.’

‘It is, and possibly quite dangerous. I must ask you to tell no one I spoke of it.’

‘Of course not, Malik. When will you go?’

‘Quite soon, and it may be some time before I come back.’ He hesitated, and Tahira wondered if he expected to come back at all.

‘I will miss you,’ she volunteered, then realised how absurd this might sound – this was the first time they’d met. She blushed. ‘I mean, it is very nice speaking with you. I have so often heard Amir talk about you that I feel as if we have known each other for a long time.’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ he said approvingly. ‘Perhaps before I go, we could meet again? I have enjoyed this talk.’

‘I would like that very much,’ Tahira replied with a smile. It was after all just what she’d been aiming for.

Chapter 44

Geoffrey Fane had reluctantly conceded that it should be one of Liz’s colleagues, rather than one of his, who would join the crew of the
Aristides
on its next voyage from Athens to Kenya. But it seemed that he was still trying to run the operation. Liz had been astonished to receive an invitation to what he was describing as a ‘co-ordination meeting’ at Vauxhall Cross. She suspected that he had not been completely frank with her about the extent to which he had already involved the Americans, and that he was now trying to ‘uninvolve’ them and hoping she could help.

Not much chance of that, she thought, once Langley had got a sniff of it. She wondered who else he had invited to the meeting. The room would probably be full of people, all vying for position: Bokus and colleagues from the American Embassy, a team from MI6, probably the Navy, the SAS, the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office . . . and heaven knows who else. It was all far too premature, and would be sure to result in a muddle.

She decided to go to the meeting alone and let them all talk. Her aim was to avoid anything happening that might mess up the operation in Birmingham which, now she had Tahira in play, she felt might at last be getting somewhere. All this had put her in a thoroughly bad temper, and she was crossly putting her papers away in her security cupboard, ready to go across the river, when Peggy came in with the latest update on the monitoring of emails from the mosque.

‘I can’t stop now,’ Liz said, ‘or I’ll be late for the Fane jamboree.’

‘I think you’d better read it before you go over there,’ said Peggy. So Liz sat down and read:

URGENT

Re:
New Springfield Mosque Communications

We have had some success in analysing the internet communications from the New Springfield Mosque. A variety of machines are in use, mainly laptops which appear to be used by different individuals and are probably brought into the premises and used in some sort of library or study room. A4 surveillance linked with emanations has enabled us to identify several individual users.

There is one particular machine that remains in place. It has an Arabic keyboard. We believe, again from A4 observation, that this machine is used only by Imam Abdi Bakri, and is probably situated in his office.

Bakri sends messages to a variety of radical Islamic groups throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, he is a contributor to message boards based in Europe but consulted by Arabic-speaking users. Many of Bakri’s contributions could be considered inflammatory or even illegal under existing UK incitement laws, but none so far has suggested involvement in or planning of actual terrorist missions.

The exception is a series of messages, increasing in number in the last five days, which are clearly designed to be unbreakable by monitoring. These messages go to a parallax repository, which functions as a depot to which outside visitors travel; in that sense it is not unlike a bulletin board in a chat room. The key difference is that access is restricted, and the identity of visitors is technically almost impossible to back-trace as they arrive through a series of relays, each of which can involve half a dozen different ISPs as well as literally dozens of different national boundaries. At present we cannot identify individual visitors to the depot.

Attempts at decryption are complicated by the twin facts that a) the encryption is double-ended and intrinsically hard to crack; and b) it is changed algorithmically every hour – which means we have effectively to decipher an algorithmic adjustment within another algorithm every sixty minutes to keep up to speed with the contents of the transmitted messages.

Nonetheless some deciphering has taken place. Particles and conjunctions – ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘or’, etc. – have been relatively easy to decipher and freeze, and increasingly we have isolated recurring proper nouns as well as base verbs and nouns. For example . . .

There followed a series of transcribed bits and pieces – mainly phrases, few of which made any sense to Liz. But her eye was caught by one phrase that stood out, even with all the synonyms provided by the technical team:

Passengers [[travellers, voyagers]] due in ten days city [[town, village]] will require//need//want immediate transfer [[relay, travel, shipment]] out
.

It would have been meaningless without everything else she already knew, but as it was she thought she could fill in the blanks. People were travelling to what was most likely a city – that could be Islamabad or Athens since both were cities. Or somewhere else perhaps. But if, as was most likely, these communications were connected to the goings on at the mosque she already knew about, then Athens seemed most likely. Interestingly, it appeared the travellers were then being moved on right away. Where to? Could it be Somalia? She would have put money on it; in any case, it was happening soon.

Liz was only five minutes late for the meeting at Vauxhall Cross. Fane had chosen the grandest of the conference rooms for the get-together, with a river view and a gorgeous Georgian burred oak table that could have seated twenty-five people. It seemed a bit unnecessary, since to her relief the only others present, apart from Fane, were Andy Bokus from the US Embassy and Martin Seurat, whom she was very surprised to see – he hadn’t told her he was coming over. He had broken with protocol, moreover, in coming without anyone to accompany him from the French Embassy in London. When Liz gave him a quizzical look, he smiled apologetically. He must have been called in by Fane at the last minute.