Operation Certain Death

by Kim Hughes

  Riley reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the bag containing the piece of plastic-coated copper, held it up in front of his field of vision, keeping his eyes on the road, and turned it over between his fingers. Where have we met before? he asked it. But the wire stubbornly refused to answer.

  His phone buzzed again and the dashboard comms took over. The caller ID came up on the screen. Riley pressed ‘accept’.

  ‘Scooby?’

  ‘Yeah. Just wanted to see if you’re okay. After yesterday. I suppose you was in the thick of it.’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘The second bomb… fuck.’

  ‘It’s an old favourite.’ Just not one used in the UK for a long, long time. ‘They should’ve let it soak,’ he said bitterly. The term ‘soak’ actually meant to do nothing, in case a follow-up, timed device was in place.

  ‘Yeah.’ Philip ‘Scooby’ Roscoe was his oldest friend, another ex-soldier, although they had never served together. They had been mates since school, the state one, not the psycho ward of Royland Hall. Roscoe had been a swotty, unsporty kid, prime bully fodder, but the fact that he was a talented mimic often saved him. One of his favourites was channelling the voice of Scooby Doo seeing a ghost every time they were set homework. And he could also do pretty much every South Park and Simpsons voice. New boy Riley, too, had been picked on initially and he and Roscoe formed something of a self-protective double act.

  ‘And you saw the shrink?’

  ‘That’s my psychotherapist you’re talking about.’

  ‘Fuck off with your big words. How’d it go?

  ‘I have no idea,’ he said honestly as he joined the A42. ‘She wants me to talk about my feelings.’

  ‘You have feelings?’ Roscoe asked in Moe the bartender’s voice.

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Must look out for those.’

  ‘I’ll flag it up when I feel one approaching. And I’m in again for another going-over next week. It’s like sticking your finger into a bullet wound, rummaging around, seeing what you can dig out.’

  ‘Sounds great. FAP sometime? If you can find your way to London?’

  ‘Fancy a pint’. The army habit of reducing everything to acronyms sometimes spilled over into Civvie Street, which was where Roscoe was now. Technically, at least.

  ‘Sometime. But I’m picking up Ruby at her school.’

  ‘And seeing Izzy?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Seeing Izzy.’

  ‘You told her about TJ?’

  Scooby was the only bloke he ever shared details of his personal life with. He had told him about the near-miss with TJ. ‘What? No, I haven’t. You think I have a death wish?’

  ‘Well, given your jo—’

  ‘Fuck off. It’s easier to defuse a bomb than a ticking Izzy.’

  ‘You know, I was reading a piece on why so many people who had lost a partner in 9/11 ended up with someone in the same situation.’

  ‘That’s simple. Shared experience that no outsider can understand. End of Second World War, lots of men and women who had been captured by the Japanese ended up marrying each other. Nobody else could appreciate what they had endured.’

  ‘Yeah. But it also said that the bereaved, particularly women, give off this vibe of vulnerability that brings out the white knight in men. They think it might even be a pheromone.’

  ‘In TJ’s case it was the booze.’

  Which you bought her.

  Well, Nick was right there.

  I always thought she fancied you.

  Really? He doubted that. She was a dark, Italian-looking brunette – Monica Bellucci-ish, he supposed – who could have her pick of men. And he was hardly a like-for-like substitute for Nick, certainly not physically. Nick had stood about six-three, was fair-haired and rake thin. If they ever had a bomb in a tight culvert, they sent for the Pipe Cleaner – Nick – not Riley. He was hardly short, but he felt it next to Nick, who had a handsomeness that brought to mind Michael Caine in his Zulu phase. The darker Riley was more akin to one of the better-looking (to his mind, at least) Welsh troopers at Rorke’s Drift. Rugged might be the word for it. Yeah, he’d settle for rugged.

  Anyway, that boozy lunchtime there had been a fumbled kiss between TJ and Riley that acted more like a bucket of cold water than a stoking of passion. He really hadn’t wanted it to go any further and he was pretty sure she felt the same. A momentary rush of blood to the head. And maybe elsewhere.

  I would have come back to haunt you if it had gone the distance.

  You already have, mate.

  ‘TJ and I are going to have words,’ he said. ‘And Izzy needn’t know anything about it. Besides, it’s none of her business.’

  ‘Like that’s ever mattered.’ Scooby and Izzy had never really bonded.

  ‘True enough.’

  Scooby adapted the gravelly tones of a police sergeant from some half-remembered TV series. ‘And remember, you be careful out there, soldier.’

  ‘Always, Scooby. Always.’

  TWELVE

  Kate Muraski hadn’t had the best prep for a meeting with her immediate boss. She’d had trouble putting in her eight hours of sleep, given she had been one of the agents selected to help analyse the data and disinformation explosion across the internet in the wake of Nottingham. More like three, all told. And not consecutively. So, her eyes were scratchy and her head full of expanded foam. She felt as if she had just got off a plane from Los Angeles with the worst dose of jet lag ever. Instead of going back to Toby’s and run the risk of reopening the argument, she had bedded down for a few hours in one of the ‘guest’ cells in the basement. It was frowned upon but tolerated. She would have to go back to the flat soon, though, or go shopping. She was running out of emergency knickers.

  Before she suffered the meeting with her line manager, she went to the lavatory, splashed water on her face, re-applied her lipstick and took a couple of Pro Plus pills. There was a time when she might have done a cheeky line, back in the days before she joined the Service, after university, during the few months of aimless thrill-seeking that followed. Well, truth be told, for a while after she had been recruited, too, until it dawned on her it wasn’t big or clever to be doing coke while Defending the Realm. What she had since discovered about the cocaine trade, and the men who ran it, had only reinforced the wisdom of that decision. Still, sometimes she felt a little echo of the old craving in her stomach.

  She looked in the mirror and rubbed at the dark crescents under her eyes, as if they consisted of mascara that could be wet-wiped away. Nope, still there. From her handbag she fetched a travel toothbrush and cleaned her teeth. They still felt as if they were coated with creosote. Too much bad coffee.

  Prior to the Nottingham emergency, Muraski’s latest assignment had been to track the movements of and assess the potential threat of the so-called jihadi widows, the women who had married ISIS fighters in Syria and whose husbands had been killed in the fighting. A large number had applied officially to return to their country of origin – not that many nations actually wanted them back – but in the wake of Shamima Begum being stripped of her UK citizenship, those who were British had few illusions about going down the official route. So at least twelve of the widows, many with children, had gone missing from Kurdish-controlled camps, with some believed to be heading for the UK, aiming to enter illegally.

  It was while scanning CCTV footage of refugees in France that she came across the man whose image she had shown to Henry Clifford-Brown. Bravo-900. A jihadi bomber, trained by British special forces, and heading for, if not already in, the United Kingdom. And then the horror of Nottingham happened, MI5’s worst nightmare. Fingers would be pointed. Like every agent, she hoped they didn’t find an excuse to point her way.

  In one of her fantasy lives, one she barely acknowledged because it was so out there, Kate Muraski solved the Sillitoe Circus bombing and was rewarded with a slot on the Russia desk. This scenario was extremely unlikely given the number of teams acro
ss the security services that would be deployed on hunting the bombers. But a girl could dream. Bravo-900 might be her ticket to something other than vetting widows.

  Muraski pushed the thoughts away, guilty that she had reduced the unbearable sufferings of Sillitoe Circus to concern about her career. She finished with the damage control on her face, scowled at the dark rings under her eyes, and tried to shake off her tiredness as she headed for the meeting on the fourth floor.

  Her line manager at Thames House occupied a relatively spacious office. Although only in his forties, Paul Oakham was old-school Five, Harrow- and Cambridge-educated, who favoured shirts from Turnbull & Asser, suits from Poole or Gieves, shoes from Crockett & Jones. She didn’t know where he had his hair cut, but she’d lay a large bet it was Trumper on Jermyn Street. There were hunting scenes on the walls – scarlet jackets, hounds, horses and hedges, the sort of prints that belonged in a naff pub or a Berni Inn, if they still existed. On the face of it, Oakham was a pre-diversity throwback. However, that didn’t mean he wasn’t good at his job.

  When she entered the office, he motioned for her to sit. She placed her notes in a neat pile before her. He had on half-moon glasses and was scanning a paper file in front of him and cross-referencing it with a document on the screen. She looked at his desk. There were three wooden picture frames that she could tell were expensive – the sort of thing Fortnum or Asprey sold on their ‘Gentlemen’s’ floors – but all were orientated away from her. What was held in them? Wife? Kids? Mistress? Gay lover? Margaret Thatcher? That was the sort of icon he would probably go for. Her or Winston Churchill. Eventually Oakham looked up and took off the ridiculous specs, quashing her mindless speculation.

  ‘Well, this is a fucking mess, isn’t it?’

  Muraski nodded. It didn’t really need a reply.

  ‘The CCTV for the entire Circus was down because of teething troubles with the installation.’

  ‘I heard. Anyone claimed responsibility yet?’

  ‘Ansar al-Islam.’ Supporters of Islam. ‘Which as far as we know has never operated here. But there is always a first time, I suppose. IIE, of course.’ Isis In Europe. ‘Although they claim responsibility every time someone in government stubs their toe. And someone called the Brigade of Muslim Brothers, about which we know exactly nothing.’

  ‘BOMB?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The acronym. Brigade of Muslim Brothers. BOMB. Christ, we’ll be getting calls from SPECTRE next.’

  He looked slightly miffed that he hadn’t noticed that the organisation’s name was most likely someone’s idea of a sick joke. ‘Well, yes, as I say Cheltenham says nothing on them, and given the name, it might be a prank. LOL, eh?’ He didn’t sound entirely comfortable with the acronym.

  Oakham flicked a file closed and leaned back into the black mesh of his expensive ergonomic chair. ‘You know that we’ll be hung out to dry no matter what happens. If it turns out the bomber or bombers were on our radar, then why didn’t we stop them? If it turns out we didn’t know about them, then why the hell not? COBRA is meeting again in’ – he made a show of checking his vintage Omega Railmaster – ‘one hour. I think we’ll find this COBRA is the spitting kind. No doubt there will be another fucking ISC review.’ Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee had castigated – mildly in public, scathingly in private – the ‘compartmentalisation’ of intelligence between MI5 and the police in the years prior to the attacks of 2017. In the days before London Bridge and Manchester Arena, the demarcation was clear cut – Five did intelligence gathering, the police made the arrests – but it was now all about share and share alike. Which meant the police were now complaining about being swamped by a slurry of raw data. The ISC had also publicly crucified Five for being too slow in picking up Salman Abedi, a trained bomb-maker, who had detonated the device at the Manchester Arena. The report still made very uncomfortable reading. Thames House had had to offer an apology. It was unheard of.

  ‘Any backchat from behind the wire?’ Muraski asked.

  She was referring to GCHQ. The government’s monitoring agency was going back over its intercepts to see if they had missed anything that might have flagged up the Nottingham bomb.

  ‘Not yet. And counter-terrorism says their snitches have drawn a blank. Not a sniff. Usually, hindsight tells you something you missed. Embarrassing, but at least you know the intelligence gathering was working, even if the brains behind it weren’t. Nottingham came out of the blue.’ He pursed his lips in thought, debating whether she was worth asking the question. ‘You think we might have a lone wolf?’

  Muraski wasn’t sure he really wanted an answer. A lone wolf was a problem, because they only talked to themselves. Nothing for GCHQ to pick up. Groups were easy. They called, they texted, they tweeted, Instagrammed, WhatsApped – they even wrote letters. Deranged individuals operating solo, not so much. ‘Anything is possible,’ she said. ‘My instinct is it is possible that one man—’

  ‘Or woman.’

  She sighed. He looked incredibly pleased that she had walked into the gender trap. ‘Or woman. Or a person who identifies as a woman,’ she said, raising the stakes slightly, ‘could be behind this. Even now, it isn’t hard to find a mosque where a lone actor can scoop up some help on an ad hoc basis.’

  ‘I think CT might have something to say about that. Most mosques have eyes and ears in place.’

  ‘Counter-terrorism’s people didn’t see or hear much about Sillitoe, did they?’ she countered, as forcefully as she dared.

  Oakham sniffed, as if he had caught the whiff of a bad smell in his nostrils. ‘Point taken. What’s social media say?’

  Testing, testing. ‘Isn’t that Deepika’s department?’

  ‘You mean you haven’t looked?’ he asked frostily.

  Of course she had. She wasn’t going to be caught out that easily. ‘I trawled hashtag Nottingham and several other examples.’ Such as hashtag fuck Muslims and hashtag white war. ‘As you’d expect. A tsunami of anti-Islam posts, drowning out the moderates.’

  ‘Russian?’

  She nodded. ‘Ninety per cent SSAs. Just pissing into already murky waters. Sniffers say Moscow this time.’ The last big wave of Islamophobic tweets, many of them aimed at the London mayor, claiming he was backing the introduction of Sharia law in certain boroughs, had come from the International Research Agency and another bunch laughingly called World Tolerance, Inc, which had both been traced to St Petersburg. They were unofficially known as SSA – Shit-Stirring Accounts – and were designed to raise blood pressure and promote discontent among the public. They often did the job beautifully.

  ‘So, your Clifford-Brown interview. What have you got?’

  She took a deep breath, trying to mask the brain-spin of his abrupt change of subject. ‘Bugger all. Says he didn’t recognise the man in the recent picture. I’m not sure I believed him. Admitted that he had known Bravo-900 back in the day and had trained him here. Or had had him trained. But said he could not ID the man in Caen as one and the same. So we have no confirmation he is actually here.’

  ‘Yet you are assuming the Sillitoe bomb was his. That’s quite a leap.’

  ‘I appreciate that.’

  ‘Not a sniff of Bravo-900. You’ve tapped every chapter?’

  ‘Of course.’ Muraski bristled a little. He shouldn’t doubt that she had also checked with GCHQ for any chatter around her quarry’s name or his many aliases. Or that she had consulted with the CIA at the US Embassy in Vauxhall, as well as SO15 in London and the six regional CTIUs – Counter Terrorism Intelligence Units – across the country. That was all par for the course. And it had yielded zero intelligence. If Bravo-900 was in the country, he was a ghost.

  ‘Which is hardly proven cause and effect, is it? You claim an active, known actor has entered the country, intent on a bombing campaign. Then, lo and behold, a bomb goes off. But that wouldn’t stand up in court.’

  ‘He is most likely in this country,’ she said firmly. ‘And
possibly behind this atrocity.’

  ‘I don’t much care for “most likelies”. Or, indeed, “possiblies”, come to that. Did you really not get anything from Clifford-Brown?’

  ‘Not really. He’s as smooth as an eel in a bucket of snot. Sir.’

  He chortled at that.

  Muraski thought it best not to mention her little exchange with the wife. Her arm still ached, like the afterglow of a particularly bad cramp. ‘I think he is being obstructive, given the way he clammed up.’

  ‘Clamming up is probably his default position. He’s an old-school Intelligence operative. Old habits and all that.’

  ‘You know they have a Russian living next door. Kutsik?’

  ‘I know of him. He’s all over Bellingcat.’

  She made a mental note to read the website more often. ‘Why?’

  ‘Anti-Putin donor. Always warning about GRU activity, most of which is spurious. It’s nothing to do with our business here. To recap, there is no evidence that the two things we are discussing are connected. The bomb in Nottingham and this idea of yours that your bomb-maker is behind it.’

  ‘Occam’s razor,’ Muraski offered. ‘If the timetable we have established is right, he wouldn’t have been in the country long enough to set up a network. So, he’d be this lone wolf we were talking about.’

  ‘I think you’re using Kate Muraski’s Gut Feeling, not Occam’s bloody razor. It’s not the same thing. Let’s stick with the tangibles for now.’

  ‘Such as?’

  He raised an eyebrow at her abrupt tone. It was a moment before he replied. Just enough to let her know who was in charge. ‘Without treading on CTU’s toes, I want you to check about the DNA recovered from the Nottingham site. The Bomb Data Centre has had twenty-four hours. I also want you to make sure they have run it through the FBI biometrics.’

  ‘And Clifford-Brown and his wife?’

  Oakham’s mouth stretched into a thin slash of a smile. ‘They’ll keep.’

  She was dismissed. She gathered her notes and left the office, head humming from the Pro Plus, unable to shake the feeling that she had just been misdirected.