Cold Kill

by Stephen Leather

  ‘If you call not allowing women to vote and stoning them for adultery, yes, they can be somewhat chauvinistic,’ said Button.

  Yokely pulled open a fire door and stepped aside to let her go through first. ‘We took the view that a woman – and, dare I say it, an attractive one? – would put him on the wrong foot and keep him there.’

  ‘How’s this going to work?’ asked Button.

  ‘I’d like you to handle the interrogation,’ he said. ‘We’ll have him in an interview room and you’ll be asking the questions. I’ll be in radio contact with you and two of my operatives will be there to assist.’

  ‘With the questioning?’ said Button.

  ‘With the physical side of it,’ said the American. The corridor came to a T-junction and he steered her to the left.

  ‘Physical side?’

  ‘From the intelligence we have, he’s not going to want to talk,’ said Yokely. ‘Of course, you might prove us wrong, in which case I’ll happily eat whatever item of headwear you have available.’

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ said Button. ‘If I’m running the interrogation, what exactly will your men be doing?’

  Yokely looked pained. ‘Charlie, the man you’ll be talking to might well be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people. And may be planning to kill hundreds more. We won’t be using kid gloves. I don’t want you going in there under any illusions. The interrogation is going to be quite robust.’

  ‘Robust?’

  ‘Hard core,’ said Yokely. ‘We’re going to do whatever it takes to get him to talk.’

  ‘Within the law, right?’ said Button, apprehensively.

  Yokely smiled without warmth. ‘Let’s just see how it goes,’ he said.

  ‘And I conduct the interrogation in Arabic?’

  Yokely shook his head. ‘No. English. But show him that you speak Arabic. I want him to know that you understand the way he thinks. You don’t become fluent in a language without understanding a country’s culture.’

  ‘So I’m a Western woman, but one who understands Arab ways?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘If he’s with al-Qaeda, he’s not going to respond to questioning.’

  ‘That’s a distinct possibility,’ said the American. ‘But we should give him the opportunity to co-operate. He knows we’ll never let him go now that we have him so we can offer him a way out. A new identity. Money. Whatever it takes.’

  ‘But again, if he’s al-Qaeda that’s not going to work. They’re fanatics. Most of them are prepared to die for their cause. Their religion promises them eternity in heaven if they die as martyrs.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘So if he won’t talk, and he refuses to be bribed, what then?’

  ‘Then we get robust,’ said Yokely. ‘Don’t worry, my men are experts. You’ll just watch, and learn.’

  ‘What about playing him the Barney song? Isn’t that what you do in Guantanamo Bay?’

  ‘You can mock, Charlie, but it works. It takes time, but exposure to banal music over long periods can bring on disorientation. And disorientation is half the battle. Problem is, we don’t have the time. You can try talking to him, but I think you’ll find that we’ll have no choice other than to get physical.’

  Salik smiled and passed a brand-new UK passport to Shepherd. ‘So, now I suppose I should call you Christopher,’ he said.

  ‘That’s the idea,’ said Shepherd. He opened the passport and examined the photograph and details. It was as perfect as the last passport Salik had given him.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Salik.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Shepherd. ‘I can’t sell the house until the court case is over. I might just have to walk away from it.’

  ‘Your fingerprints will always be on file,’ said Salik. ‘If ever you get caught by the police again, they’ll know you’re Tony Corke.’

  ‘I don’t plan to get caught again,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’ve got the money you’ve given me and that’s enough to start over. Spain, maybe. Or France.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe I’ll go and work for Kreshnik.’

  Salik’s smile evaporated. ‘I hope that’s a joke, Tony,’ he said. ‘Kreshnik is a dangerous man.’

  ‘You introduced me to him.’

  ‘No, he said he wanted to meet you. It wasn’t my idea for you to go to Paris, you know that. I do business with him, but at arm’s length. Anyway, he’s happy now. We can do more business together, Tony. You and Matiur and me. We trust each other, and we won’t let each other down. You can make serious money, enough to start a new life anywhere in the world.’

  ‘What we do is safe,’ said Matiur. ‘It’s clean. We’re not hurting anybody. We’re not dealing with drugs, or arms, or profiting from the misery of others. And we can pay you well.’

  Shepherd nodded, but didn’t say anything. He slid the passport into the top pocket of his shirt. He had a plastic Ziploc bag in his jacket pocket and he’d transfer the passport to that when he was outside.

  ‘What are you doing at the weekend, Tony?’ asked Salik.

  ‘Why? Are you ready for another run?’

  Salik laughed. ‘It’s always work with you, isn’t it? No, it’s my wife’s birthday on Saturday and there’s going to be a big party. It’s supposed to be a surprise but I’m pretty sure she knows what’s happening. It’ll be in the afternoon and there’ll be lots of children. Bring your boy.’

  Shepherd pretended to consider the offer. Then he nodded. ‘I’m not sure if my ex-wife will let me have him for the weekend but, yeah, I’ll be there.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Salik. He gave Shepherd a printed invitation. ‘Don’t bother with a present or anything, just come.’

  Shepherd thanked him and put the card into his coat pocket. He stood up, suddenly feeling guilty at what he was doing. He shook hands with Salik. ‘See you,’ he said.

  ‘On Saturday,’ said Salik.

  ‘On Saturday,’ repeated Shepherd, although he knew he would not be at the party.

  Matiur stepped forward and hugged Shepherd, patting his back.

  Shepherd stiffened, but relaxed when he remembered he wasn’t wearing a wire. Button had only wanted him to collect the passport. They already had everything they needed to put the Uddin brothers away.

  He went downstairs. Part of him was relieved that he wouldn’t have to see them again, but another part was sorry he wouldn’t be going to the party. He liked Salik, and under other circumstances he could imagine them being friends. But Salik liked Tony Corke, and Tony Corke was only a role Shepherd had been playing. After today he would cease to exist. In a few weeks, or months, Salik’s world would collapse around him, and it would all be Shepherd’s fault. He didn’t want to dwell on his betrayal of Salik Uddin.

  As he walked out of the stairwell and into the street a man in a beige raincoat stepped aside to let him go by.

  ‘Thanks,’ muttered Shepherd.

  The man grunted. He had his head down but Shepherd caught a glimpse of his face. Light brown hair, a long face with a dimpled chin, brown eyes. It was a face Shepherd had seen before. He looked over his shoulder but all he saw was the man’s back disappearing up the stairs.

  Shepherd walked down the road and stopped outside a mobile-phone shop. He stared into the window, unseeing, as he flicked mentally through his memory files, searching for that face. It wasn’t someone he’d met, or spoken to, he was sure. And it wasn’t a computer file he’d seen. It was a photograph – but where? And when? Then the correct neurones fired and Shepherd remembered. He took out his mobile and phoned Sharpe. ‘Razor, are you in the car?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. Where are you?’

  ‘Still parked up. Did everything go okay?’

  ‘I’ve got the passport, but something’s cropped up. I’ve just seen a face I recognise.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ said Shepherd. ‘I recognise the face but I don’t know the name. It’s a terrorist tha
t Button’s on the lookout for. She had his photograph up on some sort of hit list.’

  ‘What sort of terrorist?’

  ‘Al-Qaeda.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Exactly. Look, you hang fire there. I’m staying put until I’ve spoken to Button.’

  Shepherd cut the connection and phoned Button.

  Yokely and Button gazed through the glass window at the man sitting in the room next door. He was an Arab in his early thirties, good-looking with jet-black hair and piercing black eyes. He was wearing a well-cut suit and a crisp white shirt, buttoned with no tie. He sat with his legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his chest.

  ‘He can’t see us, but he probably knows he’s being watched,’ said Yokely. The American nodded at a manilla file on the table behind him. ‘I’ve printed out some of the information we have. See what you think.’

  Button sat down and opened the file. There were a dozen or so surveillance photographs of the Saudi, taken with a long lens.

  ‘Can I get you some coffee?’

  ‘Tea would be nice,’ said Button, setting the photographs to one side and picking up a computer printout. ‘Low fat milk, if you have it.’

  Yokely went out of the room and reappeared a couple of minutes later. ‘On its way,’ he said.

  ‘There’s nothing in the file that says you arrested him,’ said Button.

  ‘He’s not under arrest,’ said Yokely.

  ‘Just helping you with your enquiries, I suppose,’ said Button.

  Yokely flashed her a cold smile. ‘This isn’t a police investigation,’ he said. ‘We’re not bound by the usual rules of interrogation. He stays here as long as need be. And if he refuses to co-operate, he sits in a cell in Cuba for as long as we deem necessary.’

  ‘But what evidence do you have?’

  Yokely sat down at the table and adjusted the cuffs of his shirt. ‘Your Forensics boys found a DNA sample on a glass in a safe-house used by one of the suicide-bombers who hit the Tube last year. They drew a blank but we gave it to our guys.’

  ‘And they had him on file?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Yokely. ‘We knew it wasn’t the bomber because the bomber’s DNA was all over the place. It matched the DNA of the guy your man Shepherd shot in the Tube station. But we couldn’t get a match on the other DNA on any of our databases, and there were no prints other than the bomber’s. All we had was the DNA from saliva on the glass and no match. That’s when we got creative.’ He grinned. ‘We ran a check through all the available databases looking for a close match. Not a perfect match, but enough of one to suggest a family relationship. And we got a hit, from Baltimore of all places. There was a guy there, a Saudi, who’d been accused of rape back in the nineties. He was a Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins. The alleged victim was a secretary. She claimed the guy had doped her with Rohypnol, then raped her. She vaguely remembered the rape and a video camera, but there was no physical evidence.’

  ‘He used a condom?’

  ‘He did indeed. But he left his fingerprints all over the place, so off the back of that the police took DNA and blood samples to cross-check with other unsolved rapes. Nothing came up, and the case never went to trial. The Saudi left the country and the secretary was driving around in a brand-new Porsche.’

  ‘He paid her off?’

  ‘That’s what it looks like, and we couldn’t get her to press charges. But the guy’s DNA stayed on file, and it was a close match to the saliva sample we found in the bomber’s flat. Not close enough to be a sibling, but definitely a first cousin or a nephew. We had enough information to start tracking down all the members of his family. Two hundred or so names, as it turned out. Then we started cross-checking them with visas issued for the UK in the six months running up to the London bombings. That gave us a handful of hits, but by then we’d realised that quite a few of them had British passports.’ Yokely smiled. ‘You do make it easy for them, don’t you?’ he said. ‘The way you hand out citizenship to almost anyone who asks for it.’

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ said Button. ‘You need to take it up with our home secretary.’

  ‘Your capital city is now so foreigner-friendly they call it Londonistan, you know?’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Button patiently. ‘It’s part of being a multicultural society.’

  ‘Anyway, the ones with British citizenship wouldn’t be recorded entering or leaving the country, so we started to look further afield,’ said Yokely.

  There was a discreet knock at the door, which was opened by a young blonde woman carrying a tray with a mug of coffee, a pot of tea, a jug of milk and a bowl of packets of sugar and sweetener. Yokely smiled at the woman and took it from her. He put it on the table, waited until she had closed the door behind her, then resumed. ‘We looked for countries where there had been terrorist incidents and started cross-checking the coming and going of the family members. As you can imagine, it took time. Milk and sugar?’

  ‘Just milk,’ said Button.

  ‘Am I right that the Queen puts the milk in first?’

  Button smiled. ‘I’ve heard she does, yes.’

  ‘And why would that be, do you think? Doesn’t it make sense to put the tea in first so that you can see how strong it is before you add the milk?’

  ‘I think it’s to do with the flavour,’ said Button. ‘If you add cold milk to hot tea, the milk scalds and tastes bitter. If you add the hot tea to the cold milk, the temperature of the milk rises slowly, so it doesn’t scald.’

  Yokely nodded as he added a splash of milk to Button’s cup. ‘Okay, but if that’s the case, why does everybody add milk to coffee? Coffee’s just as hot as tea, isn’t it?’ He poured tea into the cup, then handed it to her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Tea has a subtle flavour that can be spoiled by scalded milk. Coffee is more … robust.’

  ‘I’ve always been a coffee-drinker,’ said Yokely. He sipped and smacked his lips. ‘I can’t function without a high caffeine level.’

  ‘There’s more caffeine in tea than there is in coffee,’ said Button.

  Yokely arched an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t know that,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you live and learn.’

  ‘And then you die and forget it all,’ said Yokely. He chuckled and put his mug on the table. ‘Anyway, enough chit-chat. The family are all well travelled. Rich Saudis like to stay away from their own country during the really hot season, and there are perks to being on the move during Ramadan. Like no fasting. Anyway, we came up with several possibilities, so then it was a matter of getting DNA samples on the quiet. That was fun, I can tell you. We had guys posing as waiters, garbage-collectors, hairdressers. No stone unturned, as they say.’ He gestured with his thumb at the two-way mirror. ‘I have to hang my head in shame and admit that we used a lady of the night to get Abdal Jabbaar bin Othman al-Ahmed there. I won’t bore you with the details but we took a perfect sample from him last night. Anyway, we struck gold. He was in the bomber’s flat, no question. And as you’ll see from the file there, he’s been in and out of countries where some pretty heavy stuff has gone down. Madrid. London. Bali. And the kicker was that he was in Australia just before the bombings there.’

  Button’s mobile rang and she smiled apologetically at the American. She looked at the screen: Shepherd. ‘Do you mind if I take this?’ she asked.

  ‘Please,’ said Yokely. He gestured at the door. ‘Do you need some privacy?’

  Button shook her head and accepted the call. ‘Dan, I’m in a meeting, can I get back to you?’

  ‘It’s urgent,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Go ahead.’ She mouthed, ‘Sorry,’ to Yokely. He waved away her apology.

  ‘I’ve just spotted one of the faces on your board,’ said Shepherd, ‘going in to see the Uddin brothers.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘It was one of the pictures with no name. Colour. Light brown hair, long face, brown eyes. Dimple in his chin. It wasn’t a surveillance picture, more officia
l, head and shoulders staring at the camera.’

  Button knew there was no need to ask Shepherd if he was sure. His memory was near-photographic and he had not hesitated when he gave the description. ‘On his own?’

  ‘Just him. He definitely knew where he was going so I’m figuring he’d been there before. My guess is that he’s picking up a passport.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll get a colleague to send the photographs to your mobile. Tell him which man you’ve seen. He’ll give you a name and let me know who it is. It might take half an hour or so, but stay there. Is Sharpe with you?’

  ‘Yes. He’s got his car.’

  ‘I’ll get other surveillance around there ASAP. If he moves, stick with him.’ She ended the call. ‘I’m sorry, Richard, one of my people has spotted someone on our watch list. Give me a minute, will you?’

  ‘No problem,’ said Yokely. ‘I could do with a visit to the men’s room anyway. You go right ahead.’

  The American left the room while Button phoned her number two in the SOCA undercover unit. David Bingham was in his early fifties and had moved with her from MI5. Like Button, he had worked closely with Patsy Ellis and had been her number two in Five’s Belfast office for two years. He was a safe pair of hands, trustworthy and a good friend. She told him what she needed and Bingham promised to get on to it immediately.

  ‘Call me as soon as you have a positive ID,’ she said. She glanced through the window at the Saudi, who was frowning at the four plasma screens. ‘David, my mobile might well be off. Leave a message or text me if it is, okay?’

  ‘Will do, Charlie. Talk soon.’

  As Bingham cut the connection, Yokely came back into the room. ‘Everything okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ she said. ‘Sorry about the interruption.’ She nodded at the Saudi in the next room. ‘All you’ve got at the moment is a link between him and the bomber. Nothing concrete.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Yokely. ‘But this isn’t about making a case against him. That’s for later, if we ever decide to put him on trial. Here’s the clincher, Charlie. When we busted him in the Savoy early this morning, we found a first-class ticket to Dubai for a midday flight. Today. Which means that whatever he’s got planned is almost certainly under way. The clock, as they say, is very much ticking.’ He put a Bluetooth headset into his ear and handed a matching one to Button. ‘Okay, let’s get started.’