Sleeper Cell (16 page)

At the desk – also polished to within an inch of its life – a woman greeted her. Leila showed her ID and laid the key on the desk.

‘Is this one of yours?’ she said.

The woman examined the key.

‘I am not at liberty to discuss any matters concerning our customers,’ she said.

‘Did you see the warrant card?’ Leila said. ‘Counter-Terrorism. The owner of this key is dead, and the clock’s ticking before whole lot more people join her. Now, is this one of yours?’

‘I will bring the manager.’

‘You do that.’

The woman disappeared into a side office. It was 10.37am by the clock on the wall. There was no way of knowing when the second attack would come, but it would be symbolically powerful if it was at noon today. Hitting exactly twenty-four hours after the first strike would underline the point that the security services were doing nothing to keep the city safe. That gave CTC less than ninety minutes to figure out where the attack might come… and stop it.

Leila was about to ring the desk bell when an elderly gentleman opened the door to the side office.

‘Please,’ he said, motioning her towards the door.

Leila stepped into the oak-panelled office. The manager sat down behind a leather-topped desk and studied Leila for a moment before speaking.

‘3289 is a deposit box in this bank,’ he said. ‘But unless you have a warrant, I can not tell you any more than that. There is a reason people choose to bank with us.’

‘There’s a warrant on the way, but we’re short of time. I need to see that box, now. The owner is a prime suspect in yesterday’s bombing in Hyde Park.’

‘I will be happy to assist you in any way I can. When your warrant arrives. Now, would you care for a tea or coffee?’

‘No. Look,’ she glanced down at the name plate on the desk, ‘Mr Menkes, you are going to take me to the vault right now, or the blood of dozens more people could be on your hands. Time is running out.’

‘I’m sorry. There’s really nothing I can do.’ Joseph Menkes shrugged and continued to stare at Leila across the desk.

Leila reached into her shoulder holster and pulled out her Glock 17 service pistol.

‘Take me to the vault. Now,’ she said.

‘You threaten me in my own bank?’

‘To focus your attention. Now that I have it, please take me to the box. I won’t ask you again.’

‘Very well,’ Menkes said. ‘As you wish.’

He led Leila out of the side door of his office and down a flight of stairs to the basement. She slipped the Glock back into its holster. She could do without the security guard spotting it and sounding an alarm.

Menkes unlocked a barred door and led her into a small room, at the far end of which stood the huge circular door to the vault. He tapped in a six digit code and leaned towards the iris scanner. A small light above the door changed from red to green and there was a faint hiss as the room’s seal was broken. Menkes hauled the door open. The inside of the vault was already lit.

‘3289 is in the right corner,’ he said.

‘I need you to get whatever information you have on the owner. Everything: dates, times, accounts, images if you have them.’

‘It is not permitted to allow customers to remain unsupervised inside the vault. You will be able to examine the box in that booth…’ he indicated a screened desk on the far wall, ‘but I must remain within the vault while you do so.’

‘Then get someone else to dig up the file. I’ll want it as soon as I’ve finished in here.’

‘Or you will threaten my staff with your weapon?’ Menkes said.

‘I’m just trying to do my job. Unlike you, I don’t have all the time in the world for niceties.’

She walked to the far corner of the vault and scanned the box doors. There were two sizes: 3289 was one of the smaller ones – eight inches wide, four high. She opened the door and slid out the heavy inner box.

She glanced at Menkes and slipped on a pair of latex gloves. Despite his insistence on remaining in the vault he was now outside in the corridor, talking to the woman who had been on the front desk. He held a sheet of paper in his hand, probably the warrant. Leila caught the word ‘file’ then the woman left. Menkes turned and stood in the doorway.

Leila opened the lid of the box. Inside there were three rolls of coins, twenty in each little skin of brown paper. She picked one up. One ounce Krugerrands, the most widely accepted currency in the world, coins of choice for shady deals from Argentina to Zimbabwe. That accounted for the weight, and somewhere around fifty thousand pounds in untraceable, liquid cash. At the back of the box were neat bundles of bank notes. She flicked through one of them: around twenty thousand dollars in used, clean fifty dollar bills. Four bundles of ten thousand pounds sterling in used tens, another four of twenties. There was well over a hundred thousand pounds in total. The box still had space for at least as much again, and Leila had an idea that until very recently it had contained a lot more.

The cash was impressive, but ultimately irrelevant.

What she had been hoping to find was underneath it.

In an unmarked envelope was a black passport: a US passport.

She opened it. It was Ghada Abulafia’s all right. Same photograph as the unused British one they had found in Faran Jaafar’s flat, same date of birth and birthplace. The surname had changed to Mussan, but other than that only the number and issuing country were different. She had made very little attempt to create an alias. She had simply obtained a passport from a different nationality and altered her family name to confuse casual searches.

The only way Abulafia could have obtained such a passport was if she had dual nationality, and they had discovered nothing in her history to indicate that that was the case. This was not, therefore, a legal alias. It was an identity specifically created to enable their bomber to stay under the radar.

She flicked through the pages. Abulafia was a traveller, as they had suspected. There were stamps for New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles as well as a few for Washington DC. More intriguingly, there were several for Ben Gurion International in Tel Aviv, spread evenly approximately six months apart.

Ghada Abulafia might have been born a West Bank Palestinian, but she had found a way to move about freely in Jewish Israel.

And someone in the US government had enabled her to do it.

Daniel Peretz and Harel Cohen had arrived at Mapleton House just before noon as part of the Israeli delegation’s security. They were kept waiting at the rear entrance for nearly two hours while officers from CTC and MI5 swept the building with bug-detectors and sniffer dogs. When Peretz and Cohen were finally allowed inside, uniformed Met constables were trawling the grounds around the building. Nothing out of the ordinary was found either inside or out.

Mapleton House had been built by Sir George Mapleton – he of the tobacco and slaving fortune made in the eighteenth century – as a country retreat. With crippling death duties in the 1960s it had been seized by the treasury and converted for governmental use. It was used for conferences, visiting dignitaries and meetings too secret or sensitive for central London. It had been a favourite of Margaret Thatcher and in her time as PM she had converted the vast drawing room into what was effectively a Georgian bomb shelter. The walls were reinforced with sheet steel and lined with lead to make them impenetrable to radio or listening devices. The windows were half-inch-thick toughened glass said to be good enough to repel an RPG. They had never been put to the test, and no one currently in the vicinity had any intention of having them tested in the next three days.

Harel Cohen had always been on the roster for the Peace Talks. He was Mossad, though his day-to-day work was done with the Embassy in London. His cover as a diplomat was good enough that his name had not been flagged by any of the security searches performed by the Palestinian delegation. London knew who he was, and having him on site was a condition of Prime Minister Aaron David attending the talks. MI5 didn’t like it, but these talks would require bigger sacrifices of principle than that.

If the Palestinians would not have been happy about Cohen’s presence, they would have been livid if they had known anything about Daniel Peretz.

Officially Peretz was with the caterers, a simple government man tasked to keep an eye on the food and make sure everything was Kosher – literally and metaphorically. In fact he was something much more than that. MI5 suspected he was Mossad; even Harel Cohen thought he was Mossad. Only a tiny number of people in the very highest echelons of the Israeli Defence Force knew who he really was.

‘I’m going to have another look round the kitchens,’ Peretz said.

‘You want company?’ Cohen replied. The two MI5 officers glanced at him. They had barely spoken since the two Israelis entered the main building.

‘No. I think better alone,’ Peretz said. He slipped out of the drawing room and along the corridor towards the servants’ part of the house at the back.

There was no one in the kitchen.

Mossad had been using the same detailed plans of the building as the British, but they had a little more experience of the many and devious ways unwelcome visitors could find to infiltrate a building. There was something Peretz needed to see for himself.

He slipped on a pair of thin leather gloves and moved down the bare stone treads into the wine cellar so silently that even a stray agent in the kitchen would never have known he was there.

The wine cellar was just that: rack upon rack of bottles. Nearest the door were the cheap ones used for general meetings; beyond lay the dusty Petrus and Yquem bottles that were the preserve of visiting heads of state and royalty. Peretz never touched a drop, but his training was thorough enough that he could spot a fake dignitary by his choice of vintage from any of a dozen or more Grands Cru. Only a junior agent acting a part would pick an ’81 Lafite-Rothschild off a menu if an ’82 was being offered as well. Details: Peretz understood the value of details.

Beyond the wine racks was a second large room, now empty. This gave onto two smaller rooms at the far east end of the building, former cold-stores back in the days before electric refrigeration. He opened the first door and shone his pen torch in. The room was empty except for a few bundles of newspaper in the corner. The walls were all blank Victorian brick, leaching lines of white salts from the ancient mortar. He closed the door and opened the other one.

This room was whitewashed and had racks of wooden shelves against the far wall. He stepped in and tested one. It was not attached by anything more substantial than fifty years’-worth of cobwebs. On the wooden slats that once might have held the winter’s supply of apples were boxes of bottles, demijohns, pickling jars and huge copper pans. None had seen use in decades.

Behind one of the racks was the almost invisible outline of a door, bricked up and painted over decades ago and detectable only because of the too-regular edges of the bricks where they met the old frame. Unless he had been looking for it he, like everyone else who had been down here, would not have given it a second glance.

He closed the entrance door behind him. With the torch in his teeth, he carefully unloaded the shelf and piled the glass and copper junk against the left wall. He then slid the fruit rack away from the wall.

He did all this with the same stealth as he had moved into the room, conscious that the slightest sound might be heard upstairs. This small room was directly beneath a wide corridor that ran between the kitchens and the drawing room, and on to the main banqueting hall. A dumb waiter in the corner behind the door confirmed Peretz’s suspicions regarding the original purpose of this space. The Georgians loved their icecream, and it would have had to make the shortest possible journey from the cold store to the kitchen and awaiting guests.

With the shelves emptied, he took his Entourage automatic knife from his back pocket and ran the blade around a brick about five feet from the ground. The mortar was soft; poor quality in the first place and now rotted out by damp.

He worked the tip of the blade into the mortar for several minutes. He sliced it through all around the brick then dug out a small hole at each end. Dust and flakes of paint rained onto the floor. He stopped, allowing the complete silence of this underground world to resume. Then he eased the tips of his fingers into the tiny holds and began to draw the brick out.

It took him almost three minutes to get it free.

The 1978 plans the National Trust had drawn up showed this wall as being completely solid. Mossad had got hold of much earlier plans that MI5 had either not found or had considered so out of date as to be irrelevant, and even these showed only a gap in the brickwork, not what lay beyond.

None of this part of the cellar had been used since the 1930s, and as Peretz shone his torch through the hole he had made, he saw why.

The old doorway led into a tunnel, about two feet wide and five feet high. It had collapsed and he could see no more than six feet into it before the rubble completely filled the space. Not even the faintest trickle of a draft came through the blockage.

This abandoned and derelict tunnel, shown only on the very earliest, hand-drawn building plans, led to an icehouse about four hundred yards away, buried deep in a wood. Ice would have been brought from there to the house where it could either be used or transferred up through the dumb waiter to the kitchens or reception rooms above.

Peretz nodded to himself and slid the brick back into place. It was a snug fit: not invisible, but tidy. With the torch still in his mouth he moved the shelves back into place and left the room, aware that by now his long absence might have been noted.

He met one of the MI5 officers in the grand entrance hall a couple of minutes later.

‘What’s perimeter security like?’ Peretz said without preamble.

The MI5 man looked at him.

‘We’re on the same team,’ he said. ‘I want to know no one is going to sneak up on us. You’ve got heavy woodland cover less than four hundred yards away.’