Spider Shepherd 11 - White Lies (28 page)

‘And you want me to take this to the President, is that it?’

Yokely shook his head. ‘I don’t want the President informed,’ he said.

The Secretary frowned. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’

‘He needs plausible deniability,’ said Yokely.

‘In case something goes wrong?’

‘I’m not planning for that eventuality, but yes.’

The Secretary sighed. ‘So you want me to give you the go-ahead for an operation that if it goes wrong will mean us going toe to toe with the Paks again?’

‘Do we care what the Paks think? Half the al-Qaeda leaders are on their territory. And do either of us really believe that they didn’t know Bin Laden was holed up in Abbottabad? They’re not our friends. Never have been and probably never will be. Let’s not forget they’ve already agreed to sell nukes to Saudi Arabia.’

The Secretary held up his hands. ‘I hear you, Richard.’

‘All I need is your approval so that I can take this to Virginia Beach. I don’t see it’ll need any extra funding, it can all be done within their budget.’

‘And if it’s successful, what do we do with him?’

‘I’m not suggesting a trial, obviously. Interrogation followed by a deal if he cooperates. No one knows more about the workings of al-Qaeda than Al-Farouq. He’d be a gold mine. With his cooperation we could set the organisation back years.’

The Secretary stared at Yokely with unblinking pale blue eyes. ‘Are you telling me everything, Richard?’ he asked eventually.

‘How long have you known me?’

‘Long enough to know that sometimes you have more than one iron in the fire.’

‘And have I ever let you down?’

‘Not once.’

‘So you know you can trust me?’

‘Now that is a non sequitur if ever I heard one.’ The Secretary leaned across the table towards Yokely. ‘Let me just ask you this, Richard. Are you putting me in a position where I will have plausible deniability?’

Yokely smiled. ‘Would you want that, rather than being told something which might come back and bite you on the arse?’

‘That’s a good question,’ said the Secretary, sitting back. ‘One that is probably best left unanswered.’ He stood up and offered his hand.

Yokely shook it.

‘Be lucky, Richard,’ said the Secretary. He turned and walked down the steps to the waiting limousine.

The cockpit door opened and the pilot appeared in a short-sleeved white shirt with epaulettes. ‘Everything OK, sir?’ He was in his forties with greying hair and nicotine stains on the fingers of his right hand.

‘Everything is just fine and dandy,’ said Yokely. ‘Could you file a flight plan to NAS Oceana?’ Naval Air Station Oceana was the military airport located in Virginia Beach, home to the Navy SEALs. Yokely fastened his seat belt as the pilot returned to the cockpit.

Button’s driver dropped her outside her front door and waited until she had let herself in before driving off. It was almost midnight and she was dog-tired but she still had work to do. She opened her laptop on the kitchen counter and made herself a cup of tea while it booted up. She put three Jaffa cakes on a plate and sat down on a stool with her tea and launched the browser. The website that logged all the calls and messages to Taz Bashir’s phone was password protected and also required her to press her index finger on to a fingerprint reader that she had plugged into her USB slot. For a few seconds the page seemed to hang but then it cleared and she was looking at a spreadsheet showing all the activity on the phone since Singh had installed the surveillance software.

There had been a text message sent from a Pakistan mobile shortly after Bashir had left the safe house, presumably while he was in the car. ‘Are you OK? Did you get there? XXX’. There was no name but the three kisses suggested a girlfriend.

Bashir had replied with ‘Will call soon. Miss you lots. XXX’.

Fifteen minutes later the Pakistan number had called Bashir’s phone but he hadn’t answered. A few minutes later the Pakistan number sent another text message. ‘Where are you? XXX’.

Bashir had replied with ‘In the car. Can’t talk now. XXX’.

Bashir had phoned the Pakistan number about ninety minutes later, using the iPhone’s Skype app. Button clicked on the speaker icon to the right of the number and the call began. ‘Salma, baby, hi, it’s me.’

‘How are you calling me, I don’t recognise the number?’

‘I’m on Skype. It’s cheaper.’

‘What happened, honey? Was your plane late?’ She had a Pakistani accent but Americanised, as if she had studied at an international school. Button reached for a pen and wrote down the number, and ‘Salma’.

‘It’s OK, it just took a while for my bag and I didn’t want to talk in the taxi.’

‘How long are you going to be in London?’ asked the girl.

‘I don’t know,’ said Bashir. ‘They haven’t said.’

‘Are you in trouble, honey?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because of that thing going wrong? The agent you were trying to rescue.’

‘I don’t think that’s anything to do with it,’ said Bashir.

Button frowned. When he’d lied about the taxi she’d thought he was following protocol, but telling an outsider about an ongoing operation was a total breach of MI6 rules.

‘They’re not blaming you, are they?’

‘Why would they blame me, baby? I was just the agent handler, I wasn’t there. I was in Islamabad all the time.’

‘It’s just not fair,’ said Salma. ‘I want my baby here with me.’

‘You could come to London. If I’m here for a while.’

‘Do you think it’ll be that long?’

‘I don’t know, baby. Look, I’m going to sleep now, I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘Goodnight honey. Love you.’

‘Goodnight, baby.’

The call ended. Shortly afterwards there was a spate of text messages declaring undying love, then silence. Button nibbled a Jaffa cake as she stared at the spreadsheet. Whoever the mysterious Salma was, she seemed to know more than she should about Taz Bashir’s work for MI6.

Shepherd heard them in the corridor outside his cell, muttering between themselves, so he had time to prepare himself. There would be no point in fighting, he knew that. The first time they hadn’t expected him to lash out so he’d managed to hurt two of them. They wouldn’t make that mistake again. His survival now depended on playing weakness. They clearly weren’t planning to kill him, at least not in the short term. They would hurt him until he passed out or until it looked as if he couldn’t take any more, so he had to convince them he was at death’s door. Suffering in silence was supposedly what heroes did, but when it came to surviving torture the best strategy was to scream your lungs out.

The bolts drew back and Shepherd tensed. The door opened and his eyes instinctively closed. He squinted up through his fingers. A bearded man waved a Kalashnikov at him then stepped to the side. Two big men rushed in and grabbed an arm each. Shepherd didn’t resist as they pulled him to his feet.

They dragged him out of the cell. The big man had moved down the corridor and was pointing the barrel of his AK-47 at Shepherd’s chest. It was a stupid thing to do because at that range the bullet would probably go right through Shepherd and hit one of his colleagues who was standing at the other end of the corridor.

They frogmarched him down the corridor and then turned left. Then along another corridor and through an open door that led down into a dusty basement. It was a big room, twenty times the size of his cell. There was a cage at the far end, about four feet square and four feet high. There were several chairs and tables stacked against a wall and a pair of what looked like stocks with holes cut out for legs or arms. Shepherd gritted his teeth. It was a torture chamber, there was no doubt about that. They’d done the isolation thing, they’d stripped him of his clothes and deprived him of food and water. Now they were moving on to the next stage. The pain.

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He’d get through it. He knew he’d get through it. This wasn’t about killing him, it was about hurting him. The pain would go eventually.

There were several metal hooks in the ceiling and in the middle of the floor a coil of rope. More men came into the room. Two of them wore long dishdashas and were carrying AK-47s, one was holding a machete and three were holding canes. The men he’d hit earlier were nowhere to be seen so he figured they were still out of commission. That gave him some small comfort, though he knew it was a pyrrhic victory at best. It didn’t matter how many of them he punched or kicked, there’d always be more to take their places.

One of the men tucked his cane under his arm and picked up the rope. He grabbed a chair and stood on it before threading the rope through a hook. The men holding Shepherd grabbed the free end of the rope and used it to tie his wrists behind his back. They were talking to each other in Pashto, and laughing. The man with the other end of the rope yanked it savagely and Shepherd was forced forward. He grunted but then screamed as it was yanked again. Red-hot bolts of pain seared through his shoulders. The men laughed even more and the rope was pulled again, lifting his feet off the floor. Shepherd roared. There was nothing he could do to alleviate the pain, all he could do was hang there and scream.

Charlotte Button’s phone rang. It was Yokely. ‘I have some good news for you,’ he said. There was a buzz on the line as if he was calling from overseas, or from a plane. She rolled over and looked at the digital clock on her bedside table. It was just after six o’clock in the morning and as it was a Saturday she had been hoping for a lie-in.

‘I’m all ears,’ she said, sitting up and running a hand through her hair.

‘The NSA had a synchronous satellite taking photographs and video of the area in the days before the attack. And the CIA had two drones pass over.’

‘Can I see the footage, Richard?’

‘That’s why I’m calling. I can arrange a feed for you this afternoon, if that suits.’

‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘What do you need from me?’

‘I’ll give you a number to call, talk to a guy named Eric. Put him in touch with your technical people and you should be able to watch it from the comfort of Thames House.’

‘You’re a star, Richard. Have you had a chance to look at the footage?’

‘No, but Eric tells me there’s some coming and going that might be helpful.’

Button remembered the call that she had listened to the previous night. She asked the American to stay on the line while she ran downstairs to her kitchen and picked up her notebook. ‘Can you check a Pakistan number for me?’ she said. She gave Yokely the number, and he repeated it back to her. ‘It’s a girl, Pakistani but with good English, I think her name is Salma. The MI6 guy who was running Raj looks like he might have been talking out of school.’

‘And that’s how the operation was blown?’

‘It’s possible. Let me know what you find out about her.’

‘And how are you getting on with nailing a location for Spider?’

‘I’m on the case,’ said Button.

‘I’ve put out a few feelers but haven’t come up with anything,’ said Yokely. ‘I hope he’s hanging in there.’

‘Me too,’ said Button.

Shepherd came to, coughing and spluttering. He was lying on the basement floor in a pool of water. He realised that he must have passed out again and they’d thrown a bucket of water over him. He tried to roll over but he had lost the use of his arms so he lay where he was and tried to suck up some of the water off the floor. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious, or how long he’d been down in the basement.

The pain was unbearable, but he had no option other than to bear it. The only saving grace was that the pain stayed the same. It didn’t get worse, it didn’t come and go in waves, it was simply searing, unrelenting pain and all he could do was to scream and wait for it to stop. It was usually unconsciousness that saved him. Sometimes he passed out after a few minutes, once he lasted as long as an hour by his reckoning, but when he did slip into unconsciousness they would let him down, throw water over him and wait for him to recover. There were no questions, there was nothing they seemed to want from him, so there was nothing he could say that would stop them. It was part of the process; that was what kept running through his mind like a mantra. It wasn’t personal. It was going to happen no matter what he did or said. And at some point it would stop. All he had to do was to take one breath at a time and eventually they would take him back to his cell.

Hands grabbed him and dragged him to his feet. The rope was pulled through the hook, his arms went up behind his back, and the screams started again. He had been screaming for so long that it no longer felt as if the screams were coming from him. It was just noise, part of the process, and nothing to do with him.

Chief Petty Officer Adam Croft was deep in thought, walking across the DEVGRU compound, a cluster of brick buildings around a car park that was part of the Dam Neck Fleet Training Centre in Virginia Beach. The military loved initials as much as any bureaucracy, and DEVGRU was itself short for NAVSPECWARDEVGRU, which was in itself a shortened version of the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group. But to the outside world, DEVGRU was known as the Navy SEALs, the best of the best. Croft was due to give a presentation about decision-making in combat to a group of new recruits and was starting to regret not having made some sort of PowerPoint presentation.

‘Adam!’ The shout stopped him in his tracks. It was Shaun Allen, another chief petty officer and a close friend. The two men were often mistaken as brothers – they had the same square jaw, piercing blue eyes and close-cropped blond hair. Croft waited until Allen caught up with him. ‘Adam, Gold commander wants you in his office, stat.’

‘What’s up?’

‘He didn’t say. But it looks like someone’s lit a fire under his arse.’ Lieutenant Commander Dick Blanchard was in charge of Gold squadron, nicknamed the Knights. The Knights were the best of the best and Blanchard was one of the most experienced commanders in DEVGRU, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, both in Desert Storm in 1991 and in the Iraqi War of 2003.

‘I’m on my way to deliver a talk to the new intake.’