The Black Madonna (9 page)

The difference between day and night is not what is used to be in the modern world. The sun’s rays never entered the fifth-storey office in the grey granite slab on Millbank where Sebastian Delahaye was whiling away what for those outside were the hours of darkness. There were no windows from which to savour the view across the Thames to Lambeth Palace or along the Embankment to the Houses of Parliament. If there had been, Delahaye would not have noticed; he had his own windows on the world. Thousands of them open upon the streets of London alone.

There were eyes everywhere and he could look through any of them. As a senior field coordinator of the intelligence service – and a man with a classical education – Sebastian Delahaye liked to joke privately he had more eyes than Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed watchman of the Greek god Zeus. Argus was the name he had given to the multilayered computer program that could gain immediate access to any of them.

The powers it wielded had not come cheap. But the cost had been spread thinly. Surveillance cameras on motorway bridges had been paid for by the Highways Authority for the sake of safety, at ATMs by the banks to deter fraud, in shopping malls by the retailers to deter shoplifters and pickpockets, at pedestrian crossings and on street corners by local councils working with police to reduce
accidents
and street crime, in London by the socialist mayor keen to cut traffic levels with his congestion charge.

Britain’s surveillance society had arguably grown from a single incident. In 1993 cameras at the Bootle Strand shopping centre outside Liverpool picked up crucial images of toddler Jamie Bulger being led away by the two ten-year-olds who were to murder him. That was followed by the 1994 Home Office paper entitled ‘
CCTV-Looking
Out for You’ and a mushrooming of cameras in every town and city, on every ‘dangerous’ bend on a country road or
pedestrian
crossing in a rural village. Civil liberties groups estimated
that the number of surveillance cameras in the United Kingdom was in excess of six million, or one for every ten members of the population.

In the days that followed the London bombings of 7 July 2005, surveillance cameras had identified the four British Muslims – three of them born and bred in Yorkshire – who had fallen under the spell of Al Qaeda – and murdered fifty-two of their fellow citizens. They also tracked down another gang of intended suicide bombers two weeks later, but when it came to action on the ground, the police instead misidentified and killed an innocent Brazilian plumber.

The advocates of surveillance, who included Sebastian Delahaye, insisted that error was human but surveillance remained efficient. That efficiency was being put to the test right now. As first reports of a killing in London’s volatile Bangladeshi community had come in, Delahaye had begun doing what he did best: sifting and collating.

For the better part of three months Delahaye’s department had been keeping loose but strict tabs on the movement of a man known as Sidi Al Barani, an Algerian granted political asylum from his country’s military regime after the rigged elections there in 2002, despite being known as a dedicated Islamic fundamentalist. Since his arrival in Britain Al Barani had taken pains to keep on the right side of the law, avoiding the outspoken Muslim clerics who attracted police and media attention with their virulent anti-Jewish sermons and praise for suicide bombers.

But those who worried the security services more were the ones who kept a deliberately low profile while maintaining links to more sinister figures abroad, the ones who flew below the radar. It was they who prepared the ‘specials’, the sleepers who laid in wait. They were the ones to watch. Sidi Al Barani was one of them.

Active monitoring of his movements had been stepped up after he was seen meeting with a young Iraqi, one of the rare few who came to Britain after the war that toppled Saddam but subsequently returned home. A young Iraqi reliably understood to be a courier for the shadowy figure who gloried in the cover name of Saladin, a man high on the West’s wanted list, believed to consider even Osama bin Laden a spent force.

Signals had rippled up and down the intelligence community like an electric current when Al Barani had set off in his trademark black Mercedes and sunglasses for Heathrow only hours earlier. It
was unlikely – given his status – that he was intending to leave the country, there being few others that would have welcomed him. The possibility, therefore, had to be that he was meeting someone else. And someone Al Barani wanted to meet was someone British
intelligence
wanted to get to know too.

His appearance at Terminal 3 posing as a chauffeur waiting for a M. Joliet from Tangier had caused mild amusement, but also a
thorough
scrutiny of all known databases for anyone whose real or cover name was Joliet with a record of travel to Morocco. The discovery of a middle-aged Marseille businessman of that name with a business importing merguez sausages was received for a few minutes with some excitement but quickly dismissed, especially when the young female agent deployed on the spot reported that despite the placard, Al Barani had not met M. Joliet nor anyone else; he had not even waited for the arrival of the flight from Tangier.

In fact, according to the MI5 agent who had been watching Al Barani at Heathrow, it appeared their target was engaged on a
surveillance
operation of his own. The object of his interest she reported was an arriving passenger, a pretty, dark-haired woman of
Mediterranean
appearance met by a Caucasian male in his mid-thirties. Neither had employed routine counter-surveillance techniques.

On the recorded images from the airport cameras Delahaye could make out his own agent at the coffee shop in the background paying no obvious attention to anyone or anything except prattling
aimlessly
into her mobile. A few metres in front of her was the
unmistakable
figure of Al Barani holding his placard for the spurious M. Joliet. And in front of him stood a good-looking, tousle-haired man with a furrowed brow and an apprehensive expression staring directly at Sebastian Delahaye, or rather at the terminal’s arrivals board above which the camera was situated.

So that was ‘Professor’ Marcus Frey. Delahaye let the name roll over his tongue as he often did when he first learned the identity of whichever of the grains of sand on the digital beach had been chosen by fate to come to his attention. The name had been provided by the head waiter in the Brick Lane curry house where the killing had taken place. He had been an ‘occasional regular’, someone the late owner – ‘Mister Ali’ they all called him – had made a fuss over. The waiter said he was a professor from Oxford University, an important man. No, he did not know what his connection was to the gunmen. 
But he thought for certain it had been ‘the professor’ they were after, and not Mister Ali.

It had not taken Delahaye long to ascertain that the man was telling the truth. There was indeed a Marcus Frey who held a
position
at Oxford. He was not actually a full professor but a Fellow of All Souls, a South African who had written a controversial book about the Middle East, which might or might not have been relevant. Until now he had made no appearance on Delahaye’s radar at all, and yet here he was twice in one day, linked to a man about whom they thought they knew everything. For the man on the screen in front of him, standing in the arrivals hall at Heathrow, was unquestionably the same man as the South African-born historian in the passport photograph in a tabbed browser window on the screen to his left.

The identity of the woman, however, was for the moment a mystery. She was wearing a headscarf, not wrapped tight in the
traditional
Muslim way but sufficiently to obscure her face from the cameras mounted above, save for one brief, tantalising moment when she stood on her toes and looked up at the professor to give him a remarkably chaste peck on the cheek. Indeed the whole meeting was indescribably gauche. Delahaye had suspected – as he usually did in male-female encounters – that the pair were lovers. Watching their greeting to each other he decided that was a mistake.

He watched Al Barani’s head swivel as she came through the sliding door. The swivel any man’s head might make when a
beautiful
woman came into sight. But not quite. His interest was definitely more than sexual. Delahaye frowned.

Delahaye turned back to the screen on his right, clicked the tab button on the corner of his customised Argus browser to call up another image from the queued files that had been hurriedly patched together. This from the camera installed just below the
roof-line
of the newly restored Hawksmoor church in the East End, close to the scene of the shooting. Installed to deter graffiti artists from defacing the pristine white walls, it usefully also contained within its scan and pan field the main entrance of the one time church, now mosque, opposite.

The image on Delahaye’s screen was timed at 21.58 the
previous
evening. It showed a remarkably clear view of the wall of the Hawksmoor church on one side and a row of terraced houses on the other ending in the staid bulk of the mosque. Pressed into its
doorway, were two figures. Seconds later, in the zoomed, cropped and enhanced image, Delahaye could see the expressions on their faces: a panicky desperation on the clearly identifiable Frey and a pretty, dark-haired young woman with a look that was not so much of fear as of hard anger on her face. The headscarf was pushed back, her hair awry. Now that he could for the first time see her face clearly Delahaye felt there was something about her that was familiar, although for the life of him he could not say what or why.

The counter at the bottom of the image clicked over to 22.00 and the bright image disappeared into darkness. Delahaye cursed. That was bloody environmentalists for you: saving the planet by turning off a few floodlights. The camera quickly began to readjust to the diminished lighting, then became a blur as its sensors reacted to the rotating flasher on a police car roof. The couple in the doorway were gone.

He switched tabs again to the last image, which Argus’s facial
recognition
software gave an eighty-five per cent probability (it worked better with two faces together) as being the same couple, in the entrance hall of Liverpool Street Underground station, some
forty-five
minutes after the incident in the restaurant.

He clicked back to the airport arrivals image from the morning and scrolled the camera timeline forward to the moment when Frey’s passenger emerged to greet him. Rear view. Difficult at first. He switched to the view from the camera opposite, mounted on the currency exchange booth, but the pan was wrong, the angle too oblique. Back again, a few seconds further down the timeline, the image was better, a profile shot. He nodded his head appreciatively. Definitely the same girl in all three captures. Good-looking.
Probably
early thirties. Dark, shoulder-length hair, with a headscarf worn more like a Western-style fashion accessory than a token of Islamic orthodoxy.

A quick check of the Heathrow Terminal 3 online arrivals list for the relevant time window offered Osaka, Lagos and Mumbai as possible embarkation points for the woman, but also Cairo and Kuwait as well as a delayed flight from Istanbul – why did she seem familiar, and where, if anywhere, did she fit into the bigger picture? The trouble was, Delahaye mused, as he scrolled the video footage from the Heathrow camera forward, frame by frame, that he was no longer at all sure what the bigger picture was going to look like. It
was as if he was collecting ever more pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but had lost the photograph on the lid.

He turned his head back to the single screen in the room that was displaying data rather than images and scrolled once again through the information the system had collected on Frey: thirty-five years of age, South African by birth, Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, currently research fellow in comparative historiography – whatever that was – at All Souls. Not a professor, but an academic of some standing nonetheless, with a couple of books to his name, notably the one on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which had aroused anger in Jewish circles, although it had been praised as remarkably impartial by non-partisan reviewers.

Delahaye was not a huge fan of the ivory towers and their
left-leaning
inmates but Frey wasn’t an obvious reason to be an
assassination
target for a bunch of mad mullahs. Something here didn’t look right on the face of it. If, Delahaye wondered, glancing
sidelong
once more at the strangely familiar picture of the girl, he was looking at the right face. Given Al Barani’s interest wasn’t it more likely she had been the target, not him?

A glass chime announced the arrival of an incoming instant message. A small avatar of cartoon punk announced it was from the indefatigable Chloe, working late again – or was it early by now – the sort of information scientist who made her business seem like a black art: ‘Still chasing more stuff on this guy, Frey,’ she said, ‘but a few things popped straight out of the hat. I took a quick skim, but decided you’d probably want to take a look yourself. We may have found the connection.’

The sun rose pale and watery in a flaccid sky dimly glimpsed through grimy net curtains. Marcus opened his eyes wide and saw Nazreem’s dark hair spread across a candlewick coverlet. They were both fully clothed.

As pandemonium engulfed Brick Lane, they had abandoned the now useless car and ducked back into the side streets behind
Spitalfields
Market. There were three Tube stops within running distance. But the two closest, Aldgate and Aldgate East, were on lines with fewer trains; the last thing they wanted was to be trapped on an Underground platform. Marcus still had the sound of the gunshot ringing in his ears, followed by the scream of ‘Murder’. Someone had died, and he was sure it had been intended to be one of them. Or both.

Dashing into the station, they had gone down to the Central line platform, deliberately ignoring the Metropolitan and Circles lines that also ran through Aldgate or Whitechapel. Nazreem had
surprised
him by producing a pre-paid London Transport Oyster card. He wondered where she had got it, but now wasn’t the time to ask. They travelled three stops to Chancery Lane, a station that was
bustling
in daytime but relatively quiet out of business hours and got out onto the platform alone. Sure for once that this time they had not been followed, they climbed the stairs to the street. They were within walking distance of their hotel but one thing was clear to both of them.

It was Nazreem who said it first walking down Holborn in the late evening drizzle: ‘We can’t go back.’

Marcus nodded. That much was obvious. Marcus had used his credit card to pay upfront for their rooms and had left nothing in his room, not even a toothbrush, not having planned to spend the night away from Oxford. Nazreem, however, was different.

‘What about your things?’ he asked. ‘Your clothes, the big bag, all those books?’

She simply shook her head: ‘It’s not a problem.’

‘It’s not?’

‘While … while you were resting, at the hotel, I … I went out.’

Marcus let her talk. Maybe she was going to come clean with him at last. It was about time. Whatever was going on in her life it wasn’t another man. Not unless he was extremely jealous.

‘I took the books to the person they were intended for, at the British Museum. I meant to tell you. It’s just, it didn’t seem …’

‘Important?’ Marcus smiled. It made sense, sort of.

‘Yes, it was just an errand. That’s when I got the travel card.’

Marcus’s smile faded. He had seen her get into a taxi. But then perhaps she had picked up the Oyster card on the way back. He let it ride. For the moment they had more pressing problems.

‘What about everything else? Clothes, passport, money?’

She patted her shoulder bag. Everything I need is in here. The clothing is not important: just jeans, shirts. Remember, I live in Gaza. The dispossessed have few possessions.’

Marcus turned and grabbed her by the shoulders, gently but firmly, looking her straight in the eye.

‘Nazreem, what’s happening? Who were those people? Why are they after you?’

She sighed, deeply, a weary sigh that could have been fatigue or exasperation, and looked him direct in the eyes: ‘I don’t know. I really don’t.’

‘You realise they may have killed someone tonight.’

‘The Israelis kill many … every day …’

‘Nazreem, those were not Israelis. You heard them, for G …’ he had been about to say ‘for God’s sake’ but thought better of it. ‘They had the waiters in the palm of their hands. One of them talked about an imam.’

She said nothing.

‘We should go to the police.’

She said nothing.

‘I mean it.’

‘Do you? I am a Muslim, a Palestinian. How much time do you think the British police would give me?’

Marcus thought about it, and realised they would give her a lot more time than she imagined. Far more than she would want. Most of Britain’s huge Muslim community were decent law-abiding folk
who abhorred violence, but 9/11 and the Iraq war had polarised sections of society, even before the London bomb attacks sent a frisson of horror the length and breadth of the country threatening to destroy Britain’s already fragile multi-ethnic consensus. The fact that most Islamic extremists cited the Palestinian situation as
justification
for terror would hardly help them.

‘Come on, let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘We need to find
somewhere
to sleep. We can think about it in the morning.’

The guesthouses around Paddington were a step down even from the tawdry Country Hotel, but they asked no questions and were more than happy with cash. Nazreem looked askance at the double bed in the only room offered them, then lay down on it, curled into a foetal ball and within minutes was asleep. Marcus kicked off his shoes and lay next to her, flat on his back and stared at the ceiling for what seemed like hours until eventually sleep overtook him too.

Now, in the pallid light of morning he looked at the young woman still asleep next to him. He longed to put his arm around her, at least to stroke her hair, but he knew that to do so without invitation would be taking a liberty. Something had happened to her since he had last seen her, something worse than just this business with the missing icon or whatever it was. Something that had to explain why a gang of what appeared to be Muslim fundamentalists were trying to capture or kill her. And him if need be. And God knew who else.

He got up, splashed water on his face from the tap in the cracked porcelain sink, scribbled a quick note in case she awoke, slipped on his shoes and made his way quickly downstairs. A smell of sour coffee and bacon fat accosted him. He opened the front door and went out. From an Italian sandwich shop on the corner opposite he picked up two polystyrene cups of strong espresso and a couple of fresh buttered rolls. At the entrance to the Tube he found a copy of a special edition of
Metro
, a free commuter newspaper put together in the early hours. The splash headline grabbed his attention
immediately
: ‘BRICK LANE SLAYING!’

The front-page picture showed a scene of urban chaos: red-striped police cars, flashing lights, people wildly gesticulating. Beneath was a photograph, several years out of date, of a face Marcus recognised: Ali, the restaurant owner. The report said he had been shot once, in the head. Three people had been arrested, two of them waiters at the restaurant, but it was not clear which, if any, was suspected of being
the killer. The murder weapon had not been found. There were rumours of gang wars between rival groups of Bengalis and
Pakistanis
. Some eyewitnesses had spoken of a young woman involved, and a white man. Police were asking for others to come forward. They were continuing their inquiries.

Marcus cursed under his breath as he climbed the stairs back to their room. It was his fault Ali was dead. If he had not chosen that restaurant, if he had not over-reacted when the waiters began closing in on them … No, that at least was not a mistake. Whatever they wanted with Nazreem, it was nothing good. They had not been carrying weapons for show; they had proved that.

When he opened the door, she was awake, sitting on the bed, staring at the carpet. She looked up when he came in and made an effort at a smile. He handed her the coffee and the roll. She set the roll aside but removed the plastic lid from the polystyrene cup and sipped at the hot, sweet coffee. He had ordered it with extra sugar, the way he knew she liked it. He was in two minds about showing her the paper; what had happened was no more her fault than his. He opened it at an inside page, folded it over and set it on the table. She lifted it anyway.

Marcus sat on the end of the bed, drank his coffee and ate his roll and waited for the exclamation. He did not have to wait long. Within seconds Nazreem gave a sharp intake of breath.

‘It is not possible,’ she exclaimed. ‘This cannot have happened?’

Marcus sighed. What was he to tell her? That they had unwittingly caused an innocent man’s death? That unless she came clean about whatever it was that his killers wanted from her – and he refused to believe she had no idea – then the same thing could happen again. He turned to face her, only to find that she was not looking at the front page of the paper at all, but at a story on the page to which he had casually folded it: a story on the foreign pages.

‘Merchant of Death loses heart – literally!’ the headline ran. ‘In a bizarrely gruesome case, German police are investigating how the severed heart of an Islamist terrorist, wanted in connection with the Madrid and London bombings, turned up in a Bavarian monastery within hours of his death in an Israel suicide bombing.’ He did a
doubletake
and read it again. It seemed bizarre all right, but he did not see how it affected them. The suicide bombing had taken place three days ago, he read, at Erez, the crossing point from Gaza into Israel.

‘Horrible story, but Nazreem, I have to tell you, something as bad happened last night. A man was killed almost in front of our eyes. Killed by accident. It was you they were gunning for.’

She looked up at him with an expression of anguished
resignation
, and said quietly, ‘I know, I know. But this. This is connected. I know it is. It is part of it.’

Marcus looked at her blankly. ‘Part of what? You think this, this piece of butchery in Germany, is significant? I simply don’t c. Do you think this has something to do with the theft from the museum?’

‘Yes. I don’t just think it. I know it.’

‘How? Why?’

‘For a start it was because of the industrial area around Erez that they were working on the road.’

‘I’m sorry, you’re losing me. The road?’

‘The road they were repairing when they came across the ruins of the church. The crossing is only a few miles at most from where we found the artefact,’ said Nazreem. ‘This is a signal, a message of some sort. We must go there.’

‘Erez?’ Marcus was confused.

‘No, Germany. This place, this monastery: Altötting, in Bavaria. Now.’

‘What? Why on earth …?’

But Nazreem was already on her feet, splashing water on her face and checking the contents of her shoulder bag. ‘Don’t you see,’ she said impatiently. ‘Read the rest of it.’

He did: ‘Police said they had no idea what the link could be between the Middle East, and a little town known chiefly for its Roman Catholic shrine to the black Madonna.’

‘You understand now?’ said Nazreem.

Marcus shook his head. He didn’t understand anything.

Nazreem reached out and took his hand with what was almost a look of pity.

‘Now I know where this road is leading me, but you do not have to come with me.’