Back for the hols. But at least Mooreland had lost interest by then. He had lost interest pretty much as soon as Harry’s voice broke. And the oddest thing? The thing Harry could still not reconcile in himself, and yet another reason to hate himself? A small part of him felt rejected.
The camper van grinds to a slow-motion halt and Harry can just make out three young blokes inside, with beanie hats and, despite the still weak early morning light, mirrored aviator sunglasses. The driver unwinds his window.
“Where you going mate?” he says in an expensively educated accent aiming at something street and that sounds half-cut on weed or something. Harry’s reflection stares back at him from the guy’s shades.
“Into town,” he says.
“Cool, jump in,” says the driver, his mirrored eyes dropping down Harry’s ripped salopettes to his saturated city shoes. Harry opens the back door before they can decide that he’s some sort of desperado, and slips on to the back seat, where a bundle of jumpers has been hastily thrown into the back to make room for him, joining a whole load of other rubbish and a stack of snowboards. Harry was right: they are stoned, the van’s interior reeking of spliff.
“Can you drop me at the train station?” says Harry, noticing a top note of alcohol amidst the cannabis residue.
The guy beside him grins through a few days’ worth of beard and nods, like Harry has made an amusing observation.
“There’s no train station in Verbier,” the driver shouts over his shoulder. “We can drop you at the telecabine, which will take you down to the station at Le Chable.”
“Okay, great – that will do,” says Harry.
“Where are you headed?” asks the driver.
“Wherever the wind takes me,” says Harry.
The guy beside him is grinning and nodding wildly now.
“Cool,” he says.
“Wow!” exclaims the driver, as a police car shoots past going in the opposite direction. It’s going fast, but probably not as fast as these stoners think, and its lights aren’t flashing. Harry can see the driver appraising him afresh through the rear-view mirror.
“Don’t worry, they’re not looking for me,” says Harry.
The driver breaks into a grin.
“Don’t care if they are, mate,” he says. “Don’t care if they are.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Omar, when he sensed the movement that made his head turn, had been sitting in the car thinking that the Saudi bitch was good for one thing. Her money.
The hundred thousand euros she had given him in cash went a long way in the black market, and among various toys he had bought this radio-frequency jammer from a Serbian guy in Rome. One of the mafia links.
The jammer was American-made, one of the tens of thousands of such devices developed by defence contractors during the Iraq insurgency to counter the massive problem of roadside bombs.
Under al-Qaeda tutelage, Omar had quickly graduated from his simple IEDs to more sophisticated weapons involving radio frequency receivers and digital signal decoders crammed into the bases of fluorescent lamps. These would link to firing circuits and then the weapon itself. The Americans called these bombs ‘Spiders’, and Spiders were carrying away American lives at an alarming rate. One year after President George W Bush declared the end of major combat operations, improvised bombs had killed more than 2,000 American troops in Iraq – a small proportion blown up by Omar and his little team.
At first Omar used simple trigger switches, like key fobs and the little plastic devices used to open garage doors, to detonate their roadside bombs, but the Americans eventually found a way of jamming these, driving around with so-called Warlock jammers in their Humvees and so Omar’s men moved on to more sophisticated triggers, latterly cell phones. Mobiles were designed to overcome the reflected signals and therefore weren’t fooled into being triggered by the jammer.
The Americans spent billions on developing these devices, and ultimately money talks, and their more advanced jammers could block anything from a key fob to a mobile phone, and it was one of these state of the art devices, with its four antennas, that Omar had pointing towards the ski chalet. It was effective to a range of about fifty metres and he was pretty confident nobody in that house would be able to get a signal on their phone. Thank you America!
By 2007, remote controlled IEDs were becoming next to useless, but by then Omar had been invited to join a training camp, not in Afghanistan as he’d assumed – most of these had all been obliterated by the Americans – but just over the border in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. He flew to Islamabad by way of Turkey, and was met at the airport by a man he later learned to be a member of the Pakistani intelligence services, and who drove him deep into the mountains of Waziristan – an eight-hour journey in an off-roader in which the two men exchanged barely one word.
The first camp was tiny, just a couple of huts really, and he was only there for under a week. Omar got the feeling that he was being carefully scrutinised. Spies were a constant threat. The people who ran it weren’t al-Qaeda as such, but a Pakistani outfit called Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP for short – the training had been outsourced it seemed.
He moved to a succession of similar camps over the next two months, but wherever he went the routine remained the same. Morning prayers followed by a lecture on the significance of jihad, before some weapons training and physical drills. Omar was bored by the lessons on how to handle AK-47s and PK machine guns, and how to plant mines and construct IEDs – he already knew all that. So after a while the veteran jihadists, some of them gnarled and really old mujahideens dating back to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, suggested he help train the raw recruits, Pakistanis and Afghans mostly, but also one or two foreigners. Omar remembered one in particular because he stood out so much – a blond, blue-eyed Australian whose requisite beard was laughably wispy.
In the evening came the interminable videos of atrocities committed against Muslims, from Bosnia to Chechnya and Palestine to India, along with lectures about the Crusades and other historical crimes. Omar again quickly became bored by these – he had enough reasons to hate the Americans without this stuff – but what electrified him was something totally unexpected. Religion.
Raised in a largely secular Ba’athist military family where religious observance was outward at best, Omar was initially sceptical when a middle-aged cleric from Saudi Arabia, who acted as the camp’s travelling religious adviser, seemed to single him out for special attention. Perhaps he sensed Omar’s lack of faith, but this guy started to work on him, gently at first.
He’d ask him about the Prophet and what he knew about Muhammad, and then he’d get him to read aloud passages from the Quran. He’d then encourage Omar to memorise devotions and say them several times a day, whenever he felt his attention straying from what he called ‘the cause’. The cleric won over Omar by exempting him from the evening’s repetitive video horror show so that they could discuss the holy book and its relevance for today’s Muslims.
They had deep and, for Omar, very meaningful discussions. Suddenly it all seemed to make sense, and he felt ashamed of his irreligious upbringing, and he could see how Iraq had allowed itself to be weakened from within by its lack of absolute devotion.
“We have all been asleep for hundreds of years,” the cleric said. “But now it is our strict duty to emulate the Prophet in every way.”
This included the complete imposition of Sharia law – not the watered-down version that they had in the Kingdom, said the Saudi – the complete submission of women, and absolute opposition to heretics and apostates, not just Jews and Christians, but to Shia and Sufi Muslims as well.
Omar started to see apostates everywhere, even in the camp. He caught a young recruit smoking and hauled him in front of the camp’s leader, a burly ex-Taliban fighter. The veteran laughed it off, but he caught the cleric’s eye and saw that he approved. He was becoming teacher’s pet.
* * *
Sensing the move
ment behind him, Omar quietly but purposively opens the door and slides out. His Browning is already poised to shoot. Listening he can hear the sounds of salopettes rubbing noisily as someone makes a run for it.
He goes round to the back of the Audi, holsters the Browning, opens the boot and takes out the silenced Kalashnikov, and heads after the sound of the retreating salopettes. Whoever is wearing them seems to have stopped. Omar waits too, controlling his breathing as taught by the Australian jihadi in Afghanistan. It turned out that he had actually been in the Australian Special Task Group occupying the country when he saw the light and converted.
And then the salopettes start up again, and Omar can tell that he’s breaking up the hill away from the house. Without even glancing at Simon’s body slumped against the car, Omar jogs round the side of the house, and round to a back door bathed in light. He can see the figure heading for a large shrub at the top of the sloping garden.
Omar hasn’t fixed the sights on the rifle, and cursing his stupidity he takes as good an aim as he is able at the figure wading through the drifts, and squeezes the trigger. A miss, and another – the man was moving just too quickly. He would wait for him to stumble, which, judging by his wild movements, he would do at any moment.
But the figure clears a fence with some ease, so Omar takes another pot shot – this one closer. The man is making for some sort of low shelter in the next-door garden, which gives Omar something larger to aim for. This shot hits something solid, to judge by the thwack as the bullet lands. He can see the man’s head clearly now, and it’s stock-still. He obviously thinks he can’t be seen. And as Omar draws his sights onto the man’s head, there is a sound to his left. Someone is opening the back door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“My name is Maurilio Marcone and I am an officer with the Polizia di Stato based here in Rome,” says the pleasant young man, somehow managing to look professional in his tennis shirt and tracksuit bottoms. He has pulled up a chair to Tariq’s bed and is surveying him in a friendly manner. What he hasn’t revealed is that he is one of the foremost Italian specialists in enhanced cognitive interview technique that aims to retrieve as much accurate information as possible from witnesses to a crime.
Nadia Pizzuto of the ‘Antiterrorismo Pronto Impiego’ had phoned him at home yesterday evening as he unwound over supper, looking forward to spending a long Easter weekend with his family. Anybody but Nadia and he would have refused the request to attend the hospital first thing in the morning, but he respected this tenacious detective as someone as dedicated as himself to the craft of policing. He had also always quite fancied her.
“How are you this morning?” he says, leaning in slightly towards Tariq. “Have you had any breakfast?”
“What time is it?” Tariq asks.
“It’s half past seven,” says Maurilio. “Have you managed to sleep?”
It’s a good question thinks Tariq. Has he slept? Yes, for a while during the night, and he could drift off now, given half a chance.
“I know, I’ll order some coffee and rolls,” says Maurilio. “Are you allowed to eat or is it ‘nil by mouth’?”
The man is looking at the end of the bed for some doctor’s notes, but there aren’t any. Tariq doesn’t know why, but he likes this man. He doesn’t seem like the police.
“I was going to take my family to the coast this morning,” he is saying. “Maybe I still will. It’s a gorgeous day outside.” And he lifts a couple of the strip blinds over the window, but the view of the backs of other buildings is in shadow. “Well, you’ll have to take my word for it.”
Maurilio is conducting a textbook cognitive interview, indeed Maurilio Marcone has written the textbook – the one used by every budding interrogator in the Italian police force. Step one: greet and personalise the interview and establish rapport. Step two: explain the aims of the interview.
“Okay Tariq,” he says. “So I need to know as much as you can remember about the last few weeks. Now I understand that the blow to your head has made this difficult, but I’m going to help you. Is that all right?”
“Perfectly,” says Tariq, who suddenly now feels quite hungry. “Perhaps we could have a pastry and a coffee, if I’m allowed.”
Maurilio smiles. “I’m so glad.”
* * *
Once the bolts have been slid back, the door of the chalet swings open wildly and a young woman with very long bare legs and a too-large ski jacket around her shoulders stumbles out on to the path.
“Kylie, for fuck’s sake, you can’t leave,” says a man’s voice that Omar recognises from Rome. One of the British spies. He shrinks himself into the wall, props the Kalashnikov beside him and reaches for the Browning.
“I don’t care… I’m leaving,” she announces dramatically. “I can’t just sit in that house with Simon dead outside.”
“Kylie, whoever killed Simon is probably still out there. For pity’s sake come back.” This is a woman’s voice, also one that Omar recognised. The Saudi whore.
“No, no, no… I’m going to fetch the police.”
“You’ll freeze,” the whore says. “Come on, Kylie – we’ll keep the doors bolted and he won’t be able to get in. We’ve both got guns.”
“Come back, Kylie, please. Simon’s dead… there’s nothing that can be done about,” the man cajoles. “Harry’s already gone to fetch the police.”
So that was Harry, thinks Omar. He estimates it will probably take him at least fifteen minutes to get into town. Let the idiot girl go, he’s thinking, and Allah grants him his wish.
“You’ll have to suit yourself,” the man says. “But for God’s sake be careful.” And with that the door pulls shut, and the bolts are slammed tight. The girl stands there for a while looking at the door, pulling the ski jacket more tightly round her shoulders. And then she notices Omar standing there, and jumps out of her skin. Omar puts a finger to his lips.
“Police,” he mouths at her.
She looks at him petrified, and begins to step forward.
“Thank fuck,” she says.
“What’s happening?” he mouths again. “We got a call from someone called Harry.”
“Oh, thank Christ,” says the girl. “Me friend… he’s been shot. I say ‘me friend’, but I don’t know him really. We met at a nightclub in London. But he’s dead.”
“Okay… okay…” hisses Omar, wanting to keep her quiet. “Come closer… I have a plan.”
The girl hesitates, and Omar can see her looking at his scar. Then she steps nearer anyway, near enough. He grabs the lapels of her ski jacket and swings her round so that he has his left forearm across her throat. He then places the barrel of his pistol against her right temple.
“Right, this is what you do if you want to live. Got it?”
The girl nods vigorously and squeaks her assent.
“You bang on the door and say you want to come back in. You’ve changed your mind. You want to come back in.” Omar tightens his forearm around her throat and she nods again.
“Let’s go then.”
* * *
Tariq is regretting the coffee. It’s gone straight to his head and he’s having difficulties not tripping over his tongue as he relates his story to this Maurilio Marcone with the easy manner and sympathetic intelligent face.
“It’s all right, slow down,” Maurilio is saying in accented but faultless English honed during three years studying for a psychology MSc in Manchester. “Start at the beginning.”
“How about starting in Sirte?” says Tariq, draining the last of the coffee and lying back against the bank of pillows that Maurilio has arranged for him.
“Sirte,” says Maurilio, spelling out the word. “In Libya?”
“My birthplace. And the birthplace of Muammar Gaddafi, although that, as every Libyan schoolchild knows, was in a tent just outside the city. Gaddafi turned Sirte into the seat of government after he took power and transformed the place, my father told me. Parliament was moved there from Tripoli, and
all the ministries. My father worked in the oil ministry – he was quite high up and knew Gaddafi personally.
“Gaddafi was crazy, everybody knew that – but crazy like a fox. You know he wanted to turn Sirte into the capital of a United States of Africa?”
“Really? I didn’t know that,” says Maurilio. “I did, however, know that it was the administrative capital under Italian occupation during the Second World War.” And then he holds up the phone he has by his side. “Google.”
Both men laugh.
“What was it like growing up there?”
“Idyllic, in a word,” says Tariq, sinking back into his pillows. “My father was important, we had a good income, although you don’t know any different as a child, do you?”
Maurilio shakes his head.
“The streets were clean, there were always new buildings going up, the sun always shone and we had the Mediterranean on our doorstep. It was a happy time. I couldn’t believe it when I came back in 2011. The place was completely devastated.
“Near the end of the civil war Gaddafi declared that Sirte was the new capital of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya – Jamahiriya was Gaddafi’s own word he made up, it means the ‘republic of the masses’. Gaddafi was always changing Libya’s official name.”
“Tell me about your father. Why did he flee to the UK?”
“He was loyal to Gaddafi up to a point, but he was more loyal to Libya. He was well travelled as part of his job with the ministry, and he knew that with the country’s small population – we’re only six million – and huge oil reserves, that the country could be really prosperous. Tourism too – Libya has beautiful beaches and climate, and many archaeological sites, although Daesh are starting to do their worst there.”
“By Daesh you mean Islamic State?”
“Yes, but we don’t use those words”, says Tariq. “They are not truly Islamic and not a state. But, anyway, Gaddafi kept needling the West. I think my father’s disenchantment really started with the bombing of the Pan Am flight over Scotland. He knew Gaddafi was openly supporting groups like the PLO, the Red Brigade and the IRA – he had become in America’s words ‘a state sponsor of terrorism’. Daddy just thought it was craziness. You know that there is a theory that Libya wasn’t behind the Pan Am bombing at all – that it was Syria?”
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