Sleeper Cell (26 page)

‘Will do, thanks.’

He waved her through and turned his attention to the rusting Ford Transit that had come to a stop behind her. She watched in the rear-view mirror until she had crested a low hill and the van was lost from sight. With luck that should keep the road behind her blocked for at least ten minutes, and keep the traffic officer busy long enough that he forgot all about her. She could do without him deciding to check her story with base.

She drove past the turn-off that led up to the house and continued along an avenue of poplars that marked the edge of the estate. It was eight seventeen, still fully light, and with the car window down she could hear the Air Support Unit helicopter somewhere over to the south of the house. She needed to lose the car and make her way across the three hundred yards of no-man’s-land between the lane and the secure perimeter of Mapleton on foot.

She pulled the car off the road beneath an ancient oak tree. It would be obvious to anyone driving past, but she thought it was unlikely that security would be doing regular sweeps of the outer lanes. Any locals who saw the car would think it was just someone out walking the dog. Most importantly, the car was not visible from the air. If it was spotted by ASU it would bring a lot of unwanted attention to this side of the estate.

A hundred yards back towards the main drive a hedge cut up towards the house. As she walked, she sent Phillip a single full-stop text message indicating that she was ready. She had eighteen minutes to get to the fence. If she wasn’t in place then, it would only be because she had been discovered and arrested. If she was there, she just hoped Phillip was as good as he said he was.

On one side of the hedge was a field of ripening wheat; on the other a field of cows. Leila took off her leather jacket and scrambled through the hawthorn hedge and the ditch beyond. With the jacket rolled up against her chest, she began to make her way through the rustling ears of wheat. They provided very little cover against being seen from ground level, but should ASU make a pass overhead, she hoped her pale shirt would blend in enough not to be spotted easily. As it was still light, they would not yet be using thermal imaging against which there was very little defence.

Ahead was a five-foot dry-stone wall topped with barbed wire. Beyond, some two hundred yards away, was the house. Since she had not tripped the SHIELD alarms yet, this wall must be the boundary.

She checked her watch. Six minutes until the switch.

She crouched by the foot of the wall and waited.

The minutes went by agonisingly slowly. If Phillip had been wrong, if there was another layer of security that he knew nothing about, she was a sitting duck. There could be snipers outside the perimeter, external patrols, sniffer dogs. She could do nothing but wait and watch the seconds tick by.

At eight thirty-seven precisely she took a deep breath. Counted:
one… two
… threw her jacket over the line of barbed wire, scrambled onto a protruding stone, committed…
three
. She dived over, hooked her jacket free and rolled into the long grass at the foot of the wall.

No alarms sounded, no screaming sirens or running feet.

She counted ten seconds and glanced up towards the woods. All was quiet. Two uniformed officers were chatting in the distance. As they parted, she ran the fifteen yards to a huge beech tree and again crouched, scanning the ground ahead. An MI5 man crunched along the gravel path a fifty yards away.

She’d been inside the perimeter for forty seconds now. It could be over a minute before Phillip would have her on the roster, but she couldn’t stay here.

When the MI5 man was out of sight, she stood up and began to walk towards the house. She knew she would have been spotted after no more than a twenty paces but no one paid her any attention. Even the ASU helicopter was now up at a thousand feet, making slow passes down-wind of the building so as not to disturb the dining guests.

Nothing was out of the ordinary. Nothing was wrong with this picture of English peace and quiet.

But something was coming. She knew it was coming.

What Leila didn’t know was that Black Eagle were already inside the perimeter too.

They had been for over a week.

Four hundred yards from the main building, the Mapleton ice house lay abandoned and forgotten. Daniel Peretz had walked right over the top of it as he wandered through the woods. He’d seen no trace of it, but it was still there, a huge conical structure lined with brick and buried beneath the ornamental woodland through which British security agents now patrolled. In its heyday it had been an unseen architectural marvel. Like a giant forty foot-wide laboratory flask, it contained two hundred tons of lake ice packed with snow. This was taken to the house along a deep tunnel that ran beneath the gardens as it was needed. From its creation in 1772 to its final abandonment with the coming of artificial refrigeration in 1922, two men had been employed doing nothing else but stocking, maintaining and carrying ice. Other than the odd tree root that poked through the double skin of brick, it had been maintenance free and had served its purpose perfectly.

In 1923 the small hut that stood at the top of the entrance shaft had been demolished, and the entrance to the conical workings of the ice house had been covered over. Decades of leaf-fall and the snaking roots of grass and trees had entirely buried the small flat area where for years two men took their lunch at the top of the shaft. The 1945 map of the grounds marked its position only vaguely, and a 1968 National Trust survey map failed to show it at all. Even in the 1960s it was assumed that the structure would long since have collapsed without regular maintenance so no one bothered to try to find it. It would have been pointless anyway: as Peretz had confirmed, the other end of the tunnel had collapsed and been walled up decades ago.

Six months before the Peace Talks had been moved to Mapleton House an elderly gentleman with a walking stick and a springer spaniel had ambled through the woods at the edge of the estate. Where trees had fallen and not been cleared, thickets of bramble had grown up. A badger set pocked the ground near the outer edge, and years of neglect had rendered the ground difficult to navigate. There were no footpaths through here, and other than occasional security patrols, no one had been in here in years.

In his pocket was a GPS device. He threw a ball for his dog and wandered this way and that through the trees, tapping his stick, probing the ground for more then half an hour. Eventually the tip of his stick met resistance at the edge of a thick tangle of blackberries and ferns. If he had not been told roughly where to look he could have stumbled about for hours.

He called the dog back to him and as he crouched to stroke the animal he dug his fingers into the frosty ground. Brick: several bricks arranged in a uniform pattern.

He pressed a button on the GPS and continued to walk after his dog. Mapleton security spotted him and told him to clear off. He bowed his head apologetically and made his way down the main drive and back to his car half a mile away.

A week before the peace talks, that same gentleman, now an athletic thirty-three without the heavy disguise, led a group of ten men back to the spot marked on his GPS. They came on a moonless summer night, pitch black, and stole across the fields in total silence, keeping below ridge lines and skirting hedges so that they would be undetectable from any of the inhabited buildings in the area.

This time there was no grounds security because the only thing alive at Mapleton was a conference of NGO AIDS agencies, and they were not really anyone’s first choice of target. The conference ended that night.

He had lowered them one at a time through the shaft into the ice house’s conical body, then had sealed them in. They would live and work down there for a week in appalling conditions. And only then would their true mission start. Few, if any, of them would get out alive.

For five days they took shifts digging through the blockage and shoring up the tunnel, forming a widely-space chain to pass plastic buckets back and forth along the ever-lengthing passage. Back in the ice house the earth and brick was carefully stacked and their equipment constantly moved as the floor rose upwards. The tunnel was ventilated by a hand-pumped air compressor feeding a long pipe that snaked its way to the working face. It kept them alive, just. The effective oxygen percentage made it the equivalent of doing hard manual labour at the summit of Kilimanjaro. Fit though these men were, progress was slow. They also had to maintain total silence. Mapleton House, usually used as an exclusive conference venue, had been cleared three days into their dig. It had always been a back-up venue for the peace talks, and as such had to be security-checked whether it was to be used or not.

They had broken through to the wall at the end of the narrow passageway at almost exactly the time the Hyde Park bomb had exploded. It had then been a matter of rebuilding a bank rubble and brick thickly and solidly enough that should anyone take the trouble to unseal the wall in the cellar, the tunnel would still appear to be blocked. Only the most thorough investigation would indicate that the collapse was now only four feet thick.

The blockage had been removed and the wall dismantled quickly and silently in the hour and a half that it took Leila to drive to Mapleton. The heavy shelves beyond the wall, cleared of their loads of copper and glass when Peretz visited the room the previous day, moved easily.

While Leila waited for Phillip to get her into the house, ten Black Eagle men waited in the darkness of the cellar.

‘Stop! Turn around slowly, keep your hands where I can see them.’

Leila had made it half way across the closely-mown lawn that led to the front of the house when the MI5 officer spoke. He approached from the cover of the shrubbery with a SIG P229 trained on her.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘DS Reid, Counter-Terrorism Command.’

‘Open your jacket.’

‘I’ve got a gun in a shoulder holster,’ she said. ‘My ID is in my back pocket.’

‘Hold that side open so I can see the weapon and slowly get your card.’

Leila turned slightly so that her holster was clearly visible, then reached round to the back pocket of her jeans. She took her warrant out and opened it.

The MI5 man read the number into a microphone attached to his cuff and listened. His face gave nothing away.

He moved so fast that Leila was unaware that he was coming for her until he grabbed her arm and span her around. He kicked the backs of her knees and an instant later she was face down on the grass with the agent pinning her down. He unclipped her weapon and threw it some distance across the lawn. She felt the cold barrel of his own gun pressed into her neck.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘DS Reid, Counter-Terrorism. Can you let me breathe?’

‘You’re not on the roster. Put your hands behind your back.’

‘You’re kneeling on my fucking arm!’

He took her free arm and pulled it round behind her. Shifting his weight slightly, he did the same with the other one. He held her wrists together and snapped plasti-cuffs around them. He performed the entire operation in seconds and without his gun ever leaving her neck.

‘Get up, slowly,’ he said as he took his weight off her. Leila got to her feet.

‘How did you get in here?’ he said.

‘I’m part of grounds security! Check the roster again!’

‘You’re not listed.’

‘You read the number wrong. It ends four-five. You said five-four.’ She knew he hadn’t; she just had to sow enough doubt to get him to check it again. If Phillip had failed to get her onto the roster, she was in trouble. If it had just taken him a little longer than he had anticipated, she might get away with it.

The agent picked up her ID and read the number back to control. He frowned.

‘You got me this time?’ Leila said.

‘Yes. I apologise DS Reid. You understand we can’t be too careful.’ He holstered his weapon and snipped the cuffs off. He was even good enough to retrieve her gun and hand it back.

‘Reassuring to know you’re that vigilant,’ Leila said.

‘I’ve not seen you here before,’ he said. ‘You weren’t at the morning briefing.’

‘I was drafted in at the last minute. I’m going up to the house,’ Leila said. ‘Anything I should know?’

‘All quiet. This place is secure. Again, apologies for the mix-up. Have a good evening.’

She headed for the house before he could think of anything else.

Flanking the drive that led to the road were a pair of Foxhound armoured personnel carriers. They were arranged artistically, but there was no doubt as to their underlying message: don’t mess with Mapleton House. Armed guards stood beside the vehicles. Two men were positioned behind the parapet of the house’s roof, pointing their assault rifles out along the drive. It would be impossible for anyone to get near the building through the main gates without being spotted.

She walked quickly along the side of the house and up the newer driveway that led to the service entrance at the back of the building. There was a slight dip in the middle of the path and rainwater from the previous night’s storms, sheltered by the deep shadow of the house, still glistened in its hollow. She absently thought a sewer must have collapsed underneath here, then the thought was gone.

She took a few more steps the stopped, turned around and walked back to the puddle in the drive.

Sewers.

‘Shit,’ she whispered. ‘They’re coming in underground!’

She ran.

At the back of the house, between the main building and the old stable block were several vans. Two had brought police in, another two were with the official caterers. A fifth, with blacked-out windows, bristled with antenna and a thick cable snaked from it to the double door to the house.

Two uniformed police officers stood by the door, each holding a standard MP5 carbine across his chest.

‘Evening,’ one said.

‘Hi. DS Leila Reid, CTC. I need to get into the house, now.’