by Jack Leavers
As I walked into Berkeley Square, I immediately spotted Pete and a group of guys wearing suits right in the centre by a wooden bench. I changed direction to head their way instead of into the Regus office block on the right-hand side where we were due to meet. What the hell were they all doing out in the middle of the square? I could see Scotty, another ex-bootneck who sometimes worked for Pete, over by the road at the edge of the square. He was also walking back towards Pete and the group.
‘Hey, Jack. I didn’t know he’d got you involved in this shite.’
I only knew Scotty through Pete rather than from service in the Corps and he was used to calling me Jack from the previous year. He knew it wasn’t my real name, but I’ve been called a lot worse.
‘Not really, mate. I’ve got a meeting at the Churchill, which it sounds like you lot are all going to crash. What’s going on here?’
‘I tell you, there’s something not quite right. I’ve told Pete I spotted a guy talking into a Coke can earlier and I’m sure I just spotted another one. I reckon there’s eyes on. And I cannae understand why they’re having a dry run through in the middle of the park?’
So, Scotty was in a counter-surveillance role and had been totally ignored when he spotted something suspicious. It didn’t surprise me, but I was relieved. This nonsense clearly needed to be knocked on the head and I headed over to Pete to tell him this should all be stood down. Pete turned from chatting to two guys I hadn’t met before while his Asian client sat serenely on the wooden seat.
‘Scotty tells me he thinks he’s spotted dickers. I assume that’s not a complete surprise or why have you got him here? You’re knocking it on the head, yeah?’
Pete was having none of it. ‘No mate. He’s just seen a couple of winos talking to themselves and got all excited. We’re just about done here. Meet…’
Pete introduced me to a barman and a bookmaker who both worked near to his home. Later I couldn’t remember their names, so I referred to them as the Barman and the Bookie. The Barman was a big fella and the Bookie shorter and slimmer. Both looked nervous.
‘So… what are these guys here for?’ I didn’t know the plan, but there were six of us involved who would be enjoying the curry and beers later.
‘They’ll be the customs guys who make the approach and serve the papers.’
He’d wanted seasoned blaggers involved in this charade, but with everyone else turning him down, he had to make do with the two local lads from back home. Pete pulled out a form, some sort of seizure notice, and explained how the ‘customs officers’ would approach the client during the meeting with his allegedly dodgy acquaintances at the Churchill Hotel.
The seizure notice was a prop intended to spook them into distancing themselves from his client because they would believe he was under suspicion and investigation from Customs and Excise. Even if that failed, Pete’s client would excuse himself from whatever scheme they were proposing due to the heat he was supposedly feeling from the authorities.
It all sounded overcooked to me. Quite a grand plan to basically tell a pair of chancers to get lost. My part involved being inside the hotel in the tabled area to the left of reception on the ground floor, acting in a mixed surveillance/protection role as close to the client meeting as possible. I’d forced Pete’s hand because I insisted on being sat inside for my scheduled meeting about Iraq, but he managed to shoehorn me into his plan anyway. Whether I’d be able to position myself anywhere near his client’s meeting was a different matter. Provided the meeting occurred in the public areas I should be able to keep eyes on, if nothing else.
If it all went to ratshit, I would need to intervene if things got nasty. Pete thought this might occur in the aftermath once the Barman and the Bookie had played their part and left. He and Scotty would be outside ready to join me if I needed them. Not the best-laid plan, but how much could go wrong in the lobby bar of a five-star London hotel?
‘What are you doing this out here for?’ I asked, with a sharp look left and right. Berkeley Square occupied an open piece of land in the heart of London, surrounded by buildings, overlooked by a thousand windows, and filled with people all day long. Pete was an experienced guy and it made little sense.
Pete brushed the question off. ‘It’s only a quick dry run-through for the guys. Nothing that would mean anything to anyone else. It’s a nice day for this time of year and it’s good to get some fresh air. Come on, let’s get a coffee in the office before we set off.’
He collected his seated client before leading the way into the Regus Business Centre.
I knew the hotel better than anyone else in the room, so I drew the layout on a whiteboard up in the client’s office to show the two alternative doors to the street other than the main hotel entrance. Scotty could cover the main door and the northern side door from his position parked up on Portman Square, while Pete would cover the main entrance and the southern door from the other side of the square from his van.
If the client went to leave with his two business associates, then we needed a clear distress signal agreed so I didn’t kick off when they might in fact have kissed and made up. We agreed the client would drop his pen if he required intervention and go down on one knee as he bent to pick it up. In case I missed seeing the pen being dropped, a stumble and dropping to one knee would be good enough on its own. A move to quickly help him would appear natural to any onlookers and get me in the mix. From there I’d need to improvise.
To avoid arousing suspicion with the use of radios, communication would be via mobile phones. I thought there might be other entrances and exits for the staff, so if they all took off somewhere other than the three public entrances I needed to be on my toes and calling for back-up.
My meeting with Mohammed was arranged for four o’clock. Scotty drove me round to Portman Square and parked up, with the others due to follow on about thirty minutes later. They were waiting for a final confirmation that the targets were en route to the hotel. Not that it would have bothered me in the slightest if they’d cancelled. Scotty found a parking spot which gave him a decent view of the two doors he needed to cover. We had a quick chat about the best curry house to visit that night before I made my way into the main hotel entrance a few minutes early.
After stopping to say hello to a doorman I recognised from a job during the summer, I entered the hotel and turned left, scouring the tables for sight of Mohammed. He hadn’t arrived yet, so I grabbed a table at the far end with a good view of anyone passing the reception desk from either the main or the northern side entrance, and anyone entering the hotel from the nearer southern entrance. I ordered an orange juice and settled in to see how late Mohammed arrived and what kind of drama Pete’s crew would serve up.
*
By 4.30pm we had agreed the decision to give up the lease of the office in Baghdad was warranted. Even Mohammed was loath to travel back to the city and he was clearly worried about Walid living in a mixed Sunni-Shi’a neighbourhood.
‘There’s no reconstruction happening now. Everything has stopped. Everyone is scared. The criminals are running all over the city as they like, and the Americans don’t seem to care. I can’t see how we can keep the business going.’
He was right. Baghdad still seemed to be a total bust, so all the more reason to follow up with Basra. If these Germans got an operation going, then we could forget about Baghdad for the time being and concentrate down there.
‘What about Basra then? Did you speak to the people in the south?’ I asked.
We were engrossed in our Basra discussion when I noticed Pete’s client walking towards us from the direction of the reception desk. He turned immediately right as he reached the corner a few metres from our table and greeted two Asian men sat at a table positioned fifteen feet away on its own across the passageway.
Anyone walking in between our two tables would turn left to find a short passage leading to toilets on the rig
ht, a bar on the left, and the southern side door to the street a few metres ahead. I was ideally placed to keep eyes on the meeting, but too far away to hear anything they were saying unless they started raising their voices.
I hadn’t told Mohammed anything about my secondary role at the hotel. If it came to it, he might prove useful; after all he was a broad guy with a fiery temper. But if I’d let him in on the plan, he’d probably have shone out like a beacon and compromised everything.
As for Basra, although he had some distant family connections involved in import/export down there, I was disappointed when he told me he doubted he could arrange reliable support in the south. He did, however, offer to join me if I intended to travel there, just as I spotted the Barman and the Bookie approaching from the main entrance.
The two of them performed better than I’d expected. They looked every inch like officialdom as they strode purposefully through the hotel lobby and stopped at the table where the meeting was taking place. They spoke with Pete’s client as the other two men sat back and watched on. The client made an open gesture with his hands. I assumed to indicate they could talk to him there rather than going somewhere quieter.
I couldn’t hear the conversation, but it gave all the appearance of a plausible scenario, at a stretch. After a couple of minutes, the Barman pulled some papers out of an envelope carried in by the Bookie, pointed out parts in apparent explanation, and handed them over. The two ‘customs officers’ then turned and left. They walked past the reception desk and out through the main entrance.
Back at the table the three men engaged in a quiet conversation; no sign of anything out of the ordinary. I excused myself from the table, walked down the passageway past the gents’ toilet doorway, and made a quick phone call to Pete to report everything appeared to have gone okay and there was no drama inside.
‘Okay mate, tha…’ The phone signal dropped out and cut us off.
Chapter 21
As I put the phone back in my pocket, three people began marching our way from near the reception desk. Two tall, lean guys in dark suits, one in his forties and one at least a decade younger, and a slender woman in her late twenties/early thirties, wearing a smart skirt suit and with her brown hair tied in a ponytail. The trailing man and woman stopped at the table with the client meeting, and the leading man’s eyes flicked across the nearby tables and on to Mohammed, before he focused on me. Hardly breaking step, he veered towards where I stood, still trying to reconnect the call with Pete.
‘Can I ask what you’re doing in the hotel today, sir?’
Although his two colleagues had stopped to engage our target meeting, an indication something was afoot, my first thought was that hotel security might be looking to move Mohammed from the table. The waitress had taken our cups and glasses, so he was sitting there alone without any food or drink in front of him while the place filled up with the paying early evening crowd.
‘Sure. I’m here meeting with my colleague to discuss our business in Iraq,’ I said, indicating Mohammed sat at the table ten feet away.
As hotel security, this guy was probably ex-job (police) or military so I expanded on the Iraq angle. ‘We’ve had to close our office in Baghdad and we’re reviewing the options for Basra. Things are really fucked up over there. Why, what’s the problem?’
He studied me closely, then looked at Mohammed who rose out of his seat.
‘What’s wrong, John?’ he asked.
I looked at Mohammed as he spoke and then back to the suited guy who appeared to be wrestling with a decision.
‘It’s nothing to concern you. Sorry to have bothered you,’ he said grudgingly, before moving to join his nearby colleagues. He leaned in to speak to Pete’s client who rose out of his seat. The two men then walked towards the main entrance.
‘What was that about?’ asked Mohammed.
Two more guys came in through the front entrance and spoke with the suit who’d just questioned us.
‘I don’t know, mate. But something’s obviously going on.’
I tried to call Pete and then Scotty from my unregistered ‘pay as you go’ mobile but both calls went to answerphone. From the looks of it, Pete might have been working with the authorities on a genuine operation. Maybe one linked to his VAT carousel investigation. That might explain the earlier dry run-through in Berkeley Square, intended perhaps to indicate to a watching team who was involved from his side; a watching team Scotty might have detected. However, the alternative red warning flag was the cheque Pete had told me about. The one he said customs recently confiscated when he flew into Gatwick Airport. There were no guarantees here that he was on the same side as the authorities.
I forced myself to remain outwardly calm as I went back over the events of the afternoon in my mind. I couldn’t believe customs would have sanctioned a Mickey Mouse op with an actual barman and bookie – civilians. So, either they were genuine customs officers, which was unlikely, or Pete had really been messing with the big boys and it had turned into a clusterfuck. I knew where my money lay.
Neither Pete nor Scotty were picking up calls. I considered my options. If this was the mess I suspected in the pit of my stomach, then I really didn’t want to get snared in it any more than I was already. To get up and leave now might appear suspicious, so, fighting every instinct to get the hell out of there ASAP, I ordered another orange juice for me and coffee for Mohammed.
When the drinks arrived, I asked Mohammed if he could get me a pen from the reception desk while I made a phone call. I did have a pen in my pocket, but I needed an excuse to send Mohammed to find out what was going on. I also had pens in my folder, which I realised wasn’t with me. Bollocks. I must have left it in Scotty’s car or back at the client’s office. Oh well, there wasn’t anything important inside. I’d pick it up later.
‘Ask Jerry what’s going on, mate. He’ll know.’
Jerry was one of the senior doormen who I’d seen on my way in. We both knew him to say hello to, from working with the Qataris that summer and in previous years.
‘Okay. I need to get something from the shop anyway.’ Mohammed set off towards the reception desk. Through the doors behind the reception desk was a passageway leading out to the northern side door. There were slightly posher toilets on that passageway, a small function room, a stairwell, and a general shop.
Five minutes later and Mohammed reappeared, stopped to try and talk to the suited guy who’d questioned me, and returned to our table after being waved away. He sat down with a satisfied glint in his eye. I still hadn’t got hold of Pete or Scotty and had now turned that phone off as a precaution. I had my contract phone with me, but it was registered in my name; calling from that one might be a bad idea. As unobtrusively as possible I switched it off under the table. My other unregistered pay as you go phone would be useful. Shame I’d left it in the forgotten folder in Scotty’s car.
‘When I spoke to Jerry, he told me there’s been a raid and a couple of guys have been arrested by customs and police. I could see some men with baseball caps; I think they might have been armed police. Two guys were on the floor in handcuffs. They lifted them up and then put them in the back of a Range Rover.’
Shit. That didn’t bode well. I glanced at the customs/police officers chatting amicably with the client’s two Asian business associates across from our table. It didn’t strike me they were being treated as the bad guys here. The younger man and woman were still with them and they had now been rejoined by my suited inquisitor. As soon as they all got up and left towards the main entrance, I moved to the edge of my seat.
‘Right mate, we need to get going.’
And before Mohammed could say anything I added, ‘Let’s go this way.’
I took off down the passageway towards the nearest side entrance past the bar. On reaching the pavement, I turned right heading towards the busy Edgware Road. Mohammed struggled to catch up.
&nb
sp; ‘What’s the rush?’ he panted as we crossed the road.
‘I’ve remembered something I need to get done.’ Better he didn’t know the real story.
As soon as we reached Edgware Road, I gave Mohammed a quick handshake and said I’d call him, before turning left and heading down towards Marble Arch at speed. The pavements were busy with early evening crowds and I wanted to get lost amongst them and as far away from the Churchill as possible.
I dodged the traffic as I crossed straight over Edgware Road. On reflection, this was a good time to be paranoid. Scotty had detected possible surveillance during the peculiar dry run-through of Pete’s operation in the middle of a public London square. Now arrests had occurred; an indication Scotty had not been mistaken.
It was safe to assume at least two if not all the other guys involved that afternoon were in some sort of custody; whether friendly or hostile remained to be seen. If I also assumed the area around the hotel was under observation during the raid, the watchers might well have acquired me as a target and perhaps followed me when I left. Time to throw in some amateur counter-surveillance. I didn’t care about detection, this was all about avoidance.
I cut left down towards Hyde Park and considered whether to head for a bus or tube at Marble Arch. Marble Arch underground walkway has multiple entrances/exits to all the surrounding streets and looks like the kind of setting George Smiley would use to shake off a KGB tail. As the closest underground station to the Churchill Hotel, it would be the obvious place for me to go, so bollocks to that. I headed into Hyde Park. If it came to it, I’d literally run for it across the park. If anyone was following and managed to catch me, then it would be a fair cop.
I knew the various routes in the big Central London park very well from many hours of training in the mornings before work over previous summers. If I broke into a run it would look suspicious, but I maintained a fair old walking pace. I passed the bandstand and moved into cover, taking a few seconds to observe the people in my wake. No obvious customs or police officers struggling to keep up. Everything appeared normal.