Sleeper Cell (8 page)

‘Be very careful, Reid,’ Lawrence said. ‘This is not a cover-up. The PM, no,
all
of them, want us to start with the most likely scenario. We’ve got to have something to hang our theories on. We’ve foiled dozens of plots in the last decade by using exactly these methods. This time one got through, but we stick to what we know and we’ll find the culprits. If you’re right and there’s another bomb coming, this is the best way to stop it.’

‘But you’ve got no intel. This is like a jigsaw puzzle and someone’s given us the wrong box. There’s no point trying to hammer the pieces together to make the picture you think you should be making. We’ll find the real picture if we work with the pieces we do have. And the first piece we’ve got is a solid Palestinian lead.’

‘And we’re following it up. If you have other ideas, be my guest. That’s why I brought you in. Get me more pieces. I’ll call you when we’ve got anything new here.’

Faran Jaafar sat in his beaten up armchair in front of his beaten up TV with his feet on the beaten up coffee table between the two. In his right hand he had a can of beer, his left rested on a tatty second-hand copy of Anderson’s
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
. He could have bought it new, but that wasn’t his style. He was using his years at SOAS both to get his degree and to rebel a little against his over-privileged Kuwaiti upbringing. Living in a run-down top floor flat that had mould in the bathroom and cockroaches in the kitchen was the most fun he’d had in his life.

He had been unmoved by the bomb that morning. London was a big place; his flat in Tower Hamlets and the hotel in Kensington were in the same geographical city, but culturally they might as well have been on different continents.

He had watched the video of the explosion with little interest; he’d watched the early evening news with even less. But what began to come through as evening fell was much harder to ignore.

At eight o’clock the first twitter feeds had started. At first Faran ignored the chirrup of his phone. There had been a lot of talk about the bombing since noon and this seemed to be just more of the same.

But the tweets kept coming, more and more frequently.

Around nine, he scrolled down the list and felt a chill even in the stuffy atmosphere of his flat. People he knew – people he would have said were as emotionally disengaged from today’s events as he was – were starting to post some disturbing stuff.

‘#reclaim our streets. the fightback has started. youtube of #mosque gatherings.’ That was from Sarah Gerrard, a fellow IR student he knew vaguely, who had never been particularly political before. It was typical of a slew of some thirty tweets that had stacked up in the last ten minutes.

‘#enough-is-enough. We all stand together or we all fall apart. #reclaim our streets at your local mosque.’ David Corby-Arras, probably the most liberal (and gay) man Faran knew. He had either retweeted it by mistake or someone had hijacked his account. Or maybe the bombers really had gone too far this time.

He felt his pulse beating hard in his neck.

He clicked on the #reclaim hashtag and there were thousand of posts. Selfies of skinheads in S52 t-shirts standing in front of mosques; images of 9/11, 7/7, Madrid, Paris, Tunisia; sinister white text on black flags that read ‘Je Suis #Reclaim’; declarations of war that boiled with urgency and hate.

For the first time, he became aware of voices down in the street. He couldn’t hear much, and the tingle in his spine may have had as much to do with what he had just read as with the voices themselves, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that these sounds were somehow more pressing, more immediate, than the usual background.

He woke up his computer and logged into Facebook. If the twittersphere was hot, FB was on fire. There were hundreds of messages, links to videos, images of the bomb site, cartoons of obviously Muslim men with dynamite in their turbans or AKs sticking out of their robes like cold, skinny penises.

He closed the computer’s lid. He needed to speak to someone, anyone. His phone whistled and he tapped the screen. A new image filled it. A photograph – faked, he assumed – of a person sitting, head back, on a bus. A shard of glass protruded from her neck and her shirt was a slick of glistening red. The woman’s eyes were open, staring blankly at the camera.

What shocked him most was the caption that had been added at the foot of the image. In faux-arabic script, it said ‘This Is Islam’.

As he scrolled through the contacts list on his phone he heard the screech of tyres in the distance. In a street where traffic noise was the norm, it took something special to stand out, and this did. He drew the net curtain aside as the blaring horn grew louder.

Driving a high speed down the wrong side of the road was a white Ford Transit. A man sat half-out of the passenger window, two others stood just inside the open back doors. They were chanting something Faran could not make out and beating a rapid, heavy salvo on the van’s walls. It turned right at the end of the road and disappeared.

Other vehicles followed. Groups of men in the familiar S52 t-shirts, some wearing Occupy masks, most brazenly bare-faced, ran along the pavements.

They were heading for the mosque on Whitechapel Road.

Faran glanced at the time on his phone as he put it in his pocket. It was 9.20. Maghrib prayers would be under way. Raised voices seemed to surround the building now.

He locked the front door behind him and looked out of the window at the rear of the buildings. Below was a small car park and a row of houses that were mostly occupied by Pakistani and Bangladeshi families. A group of white youths had crowded around an old Nissan Micra, rocking it from side to side. Inside, a woman in a hijab was frantically trying to get the car started. She succeeded and reversed, hitting a Mercedes parked on the other side of the car park, before screeching away. The men jeered. One of them looked up towards where Faran was standing and he let the curtain fall back into place.

On the first floor, directly below Faran’s tiny attic flat, lived a group of three, sometimes four, women. As he passed, he knocked on the door. No one answered.

‘It’s Faran from upstairs. You all OK in there?’ he shouted. He heard a movement inside but no one spoke. He would check on them again when he returned.

Outside it was still hot, the air heavy with an approaching storm. Faran looked along Vallance Road before slipping out, keeping close to the wall as he made his way towards Whitechapel Road. He ducked into an alleyway thirty yards or so from his front door as another van sped past.

At the junction he stopped. From just beyond where he stood the street was gridlocked. Several drivers were already trying to do three-point turns to head back out of the chaos.

The mosque was about two hundred yards away on the other side of the road. A crowd of a hundred or more people had gathered outside and more were joining all the time. There were a few placards and banners, but most of the people there were happy just to shout abuse at the building and leave it at that. It was those joining the back of the group who looked more intent on mayhem. Most wore balaclavas or scarves pulled up over their faces. One had a grainy enlargement of the ‘This Is Islam’ image taped to a placard.

He took out his phone and began to film the scene.

Police sirens approached from behind him. A riot van peeled off down Turner Street to get to the far end of the mosque while a patrol car stopped near the back of the crowd. The two uniformed officers abandoned their vehicle and began to run towards the building.

Faran followed, keeping close to the shop fronts, always alert for escape routes. He held his phone out in front of him, trying to keep a steady image on the screen.

At Davenant Street he stopped again, moving behind a petrol pump on the Shell Garage forecourt. From here he was barely twenty yards from the back edge of the mob across the road.

The two policemen were fighting their way through the crowd towards the closed door of the mosque. A bottle arced high above the mob and came down just behind the rear officer. The crowd cheered and closed in behind the two policemen. A few seconds later the doors of the building opened a crack and the two men disappear inside.

More bottles began to fly.

Across the road a window smashed. The Islamic bookshop on the ground floor of a tall, forlorn-looking building had been spotted by a group of half a dozen youths, some wearing the distinctive S52 emblems on their t-shirts. Two of the gang tore the shattered window out and began to throw books out into the street. Another set fire to the pages of a book and threw it into the shop.

That was the catalyst that turned what had been a rowdy demonstration into a full-scale riot.

Three men ran along the pavement with a metal barrier between them and charged at the car showroom next to the bookshop. They battered it until the glass shattered. With no interest in the cars inside, they ran off with their weapon between them and began to attack a clothes shop for no reason other than that no one tried to stop them. Others poured into the showroom and petrol-bombed the cars within.

Faran retreated. He’d seen enough. If he wanted to see any more, he could turn on the TV. There were at least a dozen people who, like him, were standing back from the main group, holding mobile phones above their heads.

By now the violence was spreading down Whitechapel Road, cutting off his escape, so he crossed Davenant Street to make his way home the back way.

Along the road that led to the back of his building a group of two men and two women had stopped a taxi. The car’s tyres were flat and the windscreen was shattered. The passenger door of the vehicle was open.

He was trapped. The two men smashed the driver’s side window and wrenched the door open. They pulled the asian driver out into the road and punched and kicked him as he tried to crawl under the car. When he made it far enough under the vehicle to be out of range, one of the men climbed onto the car’s roof and jumped up and down on it. The other lay beside the vehicle trying to drag the driver out. While the women ransacked the driver’s cash box, the taxi’s passenger decided to make her escape. She opened the door and made a run for it towards the main road.

Faran scrambled over a six foot wall and stood on a bin on the other side. He could do nothing to help the taxi driver, but he could get make sure his attackers would be unable to just walk away. He zoomed in and got a perfect image of the hate-filled faces of the men.

There was a scream from further along the road. Faran risked leaning over the wall, one eye on the road, one on the image on his phone.

Half way along Davenant Street the two women had caught up with the taxi’s passenger. She was dressed in a chador, which was all the encouragement her attackers needed.

They shoved the woman back and forth between them, all the time becoming more and more enraged by her screams for help. One of them pulled the veil up over the woman’s head and punched her in the face. The other took hold of the skirt part of the garment and began to rip it down.

Faran stopped filming and moved through the back yards behind the wall. When he had gone as far as he could – he hoped, far enough that he was out of sight of the taxi – he climbed back over the wall. By now the two female attackers had torn the top half of the chador to shreds.

Faran ran towards them. He caught the first of the women with a fist in the back of her neck. She immediately crumpled to the ground. Her accomplice screamed. Faran scanned the street for help. A small grey door had opened some fifteen feet further along the road. A terrified old man looked out, beckoning to the now almost naked Muslim woman. Faran pushed her towards the door just as the second attacker launched herself at him. Although not a big man, he was a rower and swimmer, and was more than a match for her. He threw her to the ground and began to run as he heard feet approaching him from behind.

He glanced over his shoulder. The two men had now given up on the taxi driver and were closing in on him fast. He shoved the grey door but it didn’t move and he had no time to wait for it to be unlocked again.

He easily outpaced his pursers as far as the main road. The sky was now almost dark, and the increasing number of fires cast huge shadows of the restless mob across the road. More police vans had arrived and officers in riot gear were breaking the crowd into smaller sections, herding them along side streets and trying to get to the mosque.

Faran ran towards Vallance Road.

He thought he heard a gunshot, but he couldn’t be sure. It may just have been fireworks or a car’s petrol tank exploding.

He made it almost to the corner of his road when he ran into a group of youngsters running towards the mosque. One of them caught him on the chin with a lucky hit before running on.

He staggered back against the fence of a derelict lot just yards from Vallance Road and safety. From his right the two men from the taxi attack bore down on him. One was carrying a long metal bar – a piece of scaffolding or a part from one of the market stalls that lined this part of the street, Faran never knew.

The last thing he knew for sure was that he had been hit.

The first blow struck his stomach; a second took his legs out from under him. He tried to crawl under his attackers. He made it a few feet along the pavement before a third blow smashed the side of the head.

He lost consciousness then.

If it hadn’t been for the volley of gunshots that rang out from Vallance Road a few seconds later, momentarily distracting his attackers, he would have lost his life.

At a little after 10.30, Richard Morgan left the Cabinet Room on the ground floor and slowly climbed the broad staircase to the second floor. He couldn’t face the flat at the top of the building yet. As long as he wasn’t ‘home’, he didn’t feel the need to phone Kate in Brussels to tell her Ruth was missing. His wife was away on business and would probably be in meetings herself until midnight. With luck, the crisis would be over by the time he had to speak to her. With luck, he may not have to mention it at all. His marriage was a sham, a front maintained for the sake of the public images. They had barely spoken for the last three years.