London Twist: A Delilah Novella (3 page)

“Yes, of course. I was told I’d be meeting a stunning blonde. Not to say you’re the only one in London, of course, but what are the chances of such a creature showing up unaccompanied right here in the appointed place, an hour ahead of schedule like a good professional, with a casually watchful demeanor, as well? You checked the corners of the room first, the bar after. If you were just some socialite, you would have done things in reverse.”

Like most men, he seemed to be a talker. That suited her. You didn’t learn when you were talking, only when you were listening.

“Is that what I look like? A socialite?”

“Well, you’re certainly gorgeous enough, if you don’t mind my saying.”

She neither minded nor welcomed it. “What’s that you’re drinking?”

“Gordon’s martini, vermouth wash, olive garnish. Would you like one?”

She didn’t like to be steered and almost reflexively said no. But he seemed the kind of man who enjoyed sparring, and in fact she had the sense he was actively looking for buttons to push. So instead she said, “Shaken, not stirred?”

He chuckled again. “Of course. Where would we British be without our traditions?” He signaled one of the waiters, then pointed to his drink. “Another of these, Henry—thanks.”

“Henry?”

“Yes, and at the bar we have Joseph and Giuseppe. Giuseppe isn’t quite a local, as you might have guessed from the name, but his bartending skills are unsurpassed.”

She was appalled. “You’re known here.”

“Good God, yes. It’s practically my second home when I’m in London. It’s all right. They all think I’m a financier. Hide in plain sight and all that.”

She looked around. The clientele did indeed seem to be about half bankers in suits, half hipsters in skinny jeans. Still, there would have been no downside to meeting someplace where neither of them was known. She didn’t like his dilettante’s approach. Probably the worst an MI6 operative faced for a mistake was a declaration of persona non grata and expulsion from a host country. If Delilah screwed up, she’d almost certainly be killed, most likely after being raped and tortured. He could afford to treat all this as a game. She couldn’t.

“Why didn’t we just meet at your flat?” she said.

He blinked and laughed, but for once, the laugh wasn’t self-assured. “That would be a bit forward, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’d say it would be stupid. As stupid as meeting anywhere you’re known and will be remembered.”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. She knew exactly what he was thinking, what they were all always thinking:
What a bitch.

She didn’t care. She didn’t want his friendship. She didn’t even want his respect. What she wanted was compliance.

“I need to know you’re reliable,” she said. “So far, I’m not impressed.”

He cocked his head and smiled, but the smile looked strained. “Really? And what if I’m not?”

“Then I’ll tell my people I can’t be part of this op because our counterparts sent an amateur. They’ll tell your people. I don’t know what happens after that, but on the other hand, I don’t really care. Though I have a feeling your superiors already have their concerns about your attitude and your tradecraft, and, if I’m right, they won’t be pleased at all about this latest development.”

He watched her, his lips pursed and his eyes cold. The bonhomie suddenly gone, he looked quietly dangerous. Good.

“You don’t know the first thing about my attitude. Or about my superiors. Or about me.”

“I only know what I can see. Show me something better.”

The waiter arrived with her martini. He deftly placed a leather coaster on the table, set the drink precisely in the coaster’s center, nodded formally, and moved off.

Delilah lifted the drink, thinking,
Your move.

A long moment went by. He said, “All right. What do I call you?”

“Bertha.”

His eyes widened slightly. “You don’t look like a Bertha.”

“What do I call you?”

“Kent, actually.”

“You don’t look like a Kent.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “What does a Kent look like?”

“I’m kidding, Kent.”

There was a long pause, and then he laughed. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“I was also kidding about the name. Call me Delilah.”

He lifted his drink. “All right, Delilah. Sorry we got off to a bad start. Cheers.”

They touched glasses and drank. The drink was lovely—cold, crisp, and strong.

“Right,” Kent said. “Down to business, then. How much have they told you?”

“Very little.”

“Well, regrettably, there’s not all that much to tell. Our target is named Fatima Zaheer. Nationality, British; extraction, Pakistani; age, thirty; politics, radical.”

“And she’s of interest because… ”

“She’s the oldest of four siblings—three brothers, one of whom, named Imran, is her fraternal twin. The two younger brothers were killed five years ago outside the family home in Peshawar in an American drone strike.”

Delilah’s own brother, her only sibling, had been killed in Lebanon when Delilah was sixteen. Her parents had never recovered from it.

“That’s terrible,” she heard herself say.

Kent nodded. “Fatima and Imran were living in London at the time. After the death of their brothers, the two of them returned to Pakistan to care for their parents, who, as you can imagine, were devastated by the loss of their two children. Eventually, Fatima returned to London. Imran never did. There are indications he’s become a leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and is currently in hiding somewhere in the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The Americans have been hunting him with drones for years, so far without success. We believe Fatima knows where he is, or at least that she might inadvertently fix him. If we can acquire something actionable from her, we can pass it along to the Americans, who ought to be able to use it.”

“But the TTP is mostly a Pakistani problem. Why are the Americans so interested?”

“Ah, that. It turns out our man Imran is somewhat special. Before answering the call of jihad, he received a degree in chemical engineering at the University College London. After that, a promising few years in a research lab at INEOS, a British-headquartered chemical multinational. His expertise lies in aerosols.”

“Aerosols.”

“Yes. A very dangerous expertise when combined with, say, anthrax. Or cyanide. Or sarin. The sorts of matériel al Qaeda is known to traffic in, but has hitherto been unable to transform into a means of achieving mass casualties.”

“So he’s wanted for his knowledge? But you can learn these things on the Internet.”

“Some you can, yes, and half of what you find will get you killed. In fact, we believe Internet information is responsible for eliminating a not insignificant percentage of our potential problems, by blowing up the idiots who try to make their pipe bombs based on diagrams they find on jihadist blogs.” He smiled. “It’s even possible the unreliable information on some of those blogs was planted there by certain Western intelligence organizations. But don’t quote me on that.”

She wasn’t surprised. Mossad ran similar operations, with similar results. “The worry is that Imran is graduating a higher percentage of his students?”

“Precisely. And equipping them with advanced degrees in very unhelpful subjects.”

She took a sip of her martini and considered. “The two brothers. They were terrorists?”

He shifted in his chair. “According to the Americans, yes.”

“The Americans count as a terrorist every military-age male killed in a drone strike.”

“Yes, I know. You have to admire the Americans for their creativity. They’ve certainly come up with a convenient metric to reduce civilian casualties.”

He took a sip of his drink. “But candidly? No. No evidence they were terrorists, just two kids in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their deaths were tragic, not least because the tragedy really did radicalize the surviving brother and sister. It’s like all those prisoners the Yanks mistakenly ‘detained’ in Guantanamo. Were they innocent? Yes. And after a decade of abuse and encagement, how many of them could be counted on to return to their innocent civilian lives upon release? If they weren’t terrorists when they went in, they certainly would be when they got out.”

It was a familiar story, and Delilah hated it. It made her own work seem so pointless. No, not just pointless. Pernicious. Part of some huge, insensate machine capable of nothing but fighting fire with fire, and causing a conflagration in the process.

“You say Fatima was radicalized, too. In what way?”

“We believe she’s a recruiter. As you know, London has a substantial Muslim population. Fatima’s a poet—getting quite renowned, in fact. Written up in the
London Review of Books
, and
The New Yorker
set to publish one of her pieces. She’s also become something of a freelance journalist, a chronicler of the Muslim diaspora for various leftie publications like
The Guardian
. In addition to all that, what happened to her family has conferred upon her a kind of… status in the community. We believe she’s putting local radicals in touch with her brother, who provides training. These radicals then return to Britain and perhaps elsewhere, where they reside as sleeper cells.”

“I was told you’ve tried offering her two insiders as potential recruits.”

“Yes, without success. She has a keen nose for deception. We were hoping a different approach might produce better results. Instead of a potential recruit, a possible friend. Instead of a local Muslim, a foreigner. Instead of a man, a woman.”

It all sounded a bit desperate to Delilah, but no more so, she supposed, than other ops she’d worked on, many of which had borne fruit.

“How do I approach her?”

“I understand you’re a photographer.”

Delilah was instantly on guard. “How is that relevant?”

“Did your people not tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Your cover is that you’re here on assignment. You’re going to photograph Fatima. Is that… a problem?”

It wasn’t a problem, exactly, but she didn’t like it either. She really was a photographer, and really did freelance for various magazines, mostly covering fashion—after all, a deep cover legend had to be real if it was going to be worth anything. But it was one thing to have that legend as background for a man she met and was exploiting some other way. It was another to use it as the actual basis for a relationship with a target. They were really exposing her on this op. It was their right, she supposed, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. Or that she couldn’t question it.

“You say she has keen instincts. Don’t you think she’ll check out my story? How thoroughly am I backstopped?”

“As I understand it, you’re not just backstopped—the assignment is real. Apparently, the editor who’s hired you is some sort of CIA asset.” He moved the copy of
Granta
aside—discreetly, she was pleased to see—revealing a thumb drive beneath it. “I’m told you’ll find all the details in here.”

He seemed to be talking out of school. She didn’t respect it, but she couldn’t help being curious. “A CIA asset?” she said, pocketing the drive.

“Yes, it’s all fairly aboveboard, or nearly so, anyway, if you look at it just right. When the government or some corporate interest needs coverage of a certain topic or location, they pitch the idea to various media contacts, offering to bankroll the story if the editor agrees to it. No pressure, of course. But the financial backing reduces to zero the risk of running a story, so unless the topic is a complete nonstarter, the editor always bites. Not so remarkable, really—just another version of the usual access-in-exchange-for-favorable-coverage arrangement we all depend on from the establishment media.”

“Still, an exchange of favors is one thing. A cash payment is another.”

“Oh, I don’t know. There are all kinds of prostitution, after all. Not all of them involve cash, strictly speaking.”

Delilah wondered how much he knew of her role with Mossad, and whether his reference to prostitution was deliberate.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I’m sure most of the editors in question believe that in exchanging these favors and taking these payments they’re not even compromising their journalistic integrity and independence. And who knows? Maybe they’re not. In the end, we’re all doing God’s work.”

She couldn’t tell whether he was being serious or facetious. Or if he even knew the difference. “How do I make contact?”

“That should be easy enough. The U.S. defense secretary is in town tomorrow for a meeting with the prime minister. There’s going to be a rally against U.S. drone attacks to greet him. Fatima is one of the featured speakers. Details on the thumb drive. Also available on the website of the Stop the War Coalition and on several Facebook pages advertising the rally.”

“A terrorist, at an anti-drone rally?”

“Yes, why not? No reason she can’t use legitimate dissent to obscure its more extreme versions, when you think about it.”

“Where will it be held?”

“Along Whitehall, between Downing Street and Parliament. Noon. They’re looking for publicity, you know. It should be a perfect opportunity for you.”

“A photo shoot ordinarily lasts a few hours. Maybe a day. You really expect I’m going to learn something actionable in that time frame?”

“I don’t expect anything. Management devised this op. You and I are only here to make the best of what they’ve come up with. But if I were in your shoes? I’d use the time I spent shooting her, if you manage to get that far, befriending her. Turn the assignment into more than one shoot. Maybe a ‘one month in the life of a London peace activist,’ something like that. You’re very alluring, you know. I imagine it’s why they selected you. Bait the hook properly, and she’ll bite.” He smiled. “I know I would.”

What he’d suggested made sense. She ignored the last part, which she understood was intended as a volley he was hoping she might return.

“I need to know what you know about her relationship with her brother. How you think they stay in contact. How she sends people to him.”

“Sorry, why?”