The Rhythm Section--A Stephanie Patrick Thriller

by Mark Burnell

  ‘And who do you think can say?’ Stephanie asked him.

  He offered her yet another Gallic shrug. ‘Your friend Qadiq, maybe?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was a rushed job. Good money but very urgent. Whoever organized it must have known what they were doing. So it seems likely—but no more than likely—that they knew who they were doing it for.’

  Stephanie watched Bradfield light the roll-up. Then they were looking at one another and she felt their eyes were engaged in some form of conversation but that her brain was failing in the translation.

  ‘Your memory suddenly seems to be working rather well.’

  ‘Some experiences are more memorable than others.’

  ‘And this was one of them?’

  ‘In its own way, yes.’

  ‘What way, exactly?’

  She saw that Bradfield was eager to talk, but that some part of him—fear, perhaps, or some lingering respect for the remains of his confidentiality—was making it difficult for him. But she knew from experience that if she waited long enough, he would unburden himself. They always did. The dithering helped soothe the guilt, making disclosure seem a more honourable choice. Stephanie had always been amazed by what her clients told her. And by the fact that of all the people to tell, she was the one they chose. This was no different.

  Eventually, when the silence could no longer be endured, Bradfield said, ‘They refused to use my go-between. For me, it’s an important form of protection. In fact, it’s my only protection, as you’ve seen for yourself. And generally, I’d say it was a precaution that is mutually beneficial. But they insisted on side-stepping it.’

  ‘Insisted?’

  Bradfield nodded. ‘In the way that only such people can.’

  And the underlying message was clear: I shall not be unhappy if harm comes to them.

  10

  I remember all too vividly what Cyril Bradfield said to me last night. Don’t carry a gun unless you’re prepared to use it. I know that I’m not going to kill Ismail Qadiq but he doesn’t know that. In fact, he thinks he might be about to die. Two things are helping me to create this illusion. Firstly, there is Qadiq himself. Unlike Bradfield, he is an aggressive man—a rampant misogynist, I suspect—and I am finding it easy to dislike him. Secondly, I have already fired the gun at him. It was an accident. I was thrusting the Browning at him menacingly and, in an effort to reinforce my sincerity, I released the safety-catch. The trigger was much lighter than I had imagined. When the weapon discharged, I was as shocked as Qadiq. Fortunately, he was too concerned with the bullet embedding itself in his office wall to recognize the expression on my face. The truth is, I missed him by a yard but that margin was still narrow enough to persuade him that I am a serious threat.

  * * *

  Qadiq turned round. He was a short man whose girth strained the beige silk of the shirt beneath his quilted climber’s jacket. He wore tinted glasses with lenses that magnified his eyes enormously. There was a minuscule mobile phone clipped to his trouser-belt. He was shaking, his podgy hands half-raised, as if in surrender. Stephanie gathered herself quickly, fixing him with as hostile a stare as she could muster. She hoped he wouldn’t see that she, too, was trembling.

  Had anyone outside the warehouse heard the shot? Would the police be called?

  She tried to think of something sinister to say. ‘The next one’s going to hurt.’

  It had still been dark when she arrived in Whitechapel, an hour earlier. There had only been one other passenger on the Underground for most of her journey; an old man with silver stubble and bags beneath his bloodshot eyes. His head had lolled to one side as he snoozed, whereas she had been uncomfortably alert, the adrenaline making her jittery. Whitechapel had been mostly quiet, a few early traders opening up, a dog investigating rubbish on the pavement, the aroma of Balti cooking on the icy air. Ismail Qadiq’s warehouse was in a small side-street. Down one side, there were the blackened backs of small commercial buildings whose façades lined the parallel street. On the other side, there was a row of small warehouses, each garage door with a large white number painted on it.

  Stephanie had found Qadiq’s premises and had then looked for a vantage point from which to watch and wait. That was how she came to pass an hour crouched behind a skip full of snapped wood and splintered glass. Her hands froze in minutes, her fingers becoming lifeless around the grip of the gun in her coat pocket. She clenched her teeth to stop them chattering. The buildings on either side of the street only allowed her a small slice of sky to glimpse. She watched the gradual change from sapphire to aquamarine. It was going to be a brilliant, bitter day.

  When Qadiq arrived, she waited until he’d unfastened the padlock and heaved open the garage door. Then she slipped out from behind the skip. Qadiq had pulled the door down again but had left an eighteen-inch gap at the bottom which was quite sufficient for Stephanie. She rolled over the concrete threshold. It was damp and cold inside. There was a baby fork-lift truck by the entrance. She saw unopened crates, recently arrived from Cairo. On the left, there were cardboard boxes filled with T-shirts of all colours. There were others that had had designs or logos printed on them; they were individually wrapped in plastic. Stephanie passed half a dozen hanging rails sagging under the weight of leather jackets. Their scent was powerful.

  She tailed Qadiq through the gloom until he entered a small office at the rear of the warehouse. That was when she coughed and he spun round, a hand held to his chest.

  ‘Who are you?’ he barked at her.

  Stephanie hoped coldness would give her authority. She held out the photograph that Bradfield had developed for her the previous night and said, ‘Take a look. Where can I find him?’

  Qadiq’s shock subsided and was replaced by hostility. ‘Get out! Leave!’

  ‘Not until you answer the question.’

  He glanced at a desk overrun by paperwork. There was a telephone on it. ‘I’m going to call the police.’

  Stephanie took the gun out of her pocket. ‘No you’re not.’

  His eyes widened behind his magnifying lenses, each pupil a dark golf ball. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Just answer the question and then you can forget I was ever here.’

  Beneath the superficial composure, Stephanie was a collection of electrocuted nerves. Qadiq took a peep at the photo and shook his head.

  ‘I’ve never seen him. Now please go!’

  ‘He came here. You helped him.’

  ‘I told you, I’ve never seen this man before.’

  ‘He needed forged documents. You organized it.’

  Increasingly angry, Qadiq raised his voice. ‘I’m an importer of T-shirts!’

  ‘Among other things?’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  Despite her determination to suppress it, doubt was entering her mind. ‘I’m talking about passports. Stolen or fake.’

  ‘Okay, where are they?’ Qadiq swept a hand over the warehouse. ‘Show me where you think they are.’ Stephanie was stumped. She saw the contempt in his eyes. ‘I thought not. So why don’t you put your stupid little gun away and leave?’

  The look on his face suggested that it was inconceivable that she—a mere woman—could pose a threat to him. For her part, Stephanie found herself flummoxed for the second time in twenty-four hours. She was the one with the gun but Qadiq, like Bradfield before him, was the one in charge.

  ‘Go on! Get out of here!’

  That was the moment she released the safety-catch, which was all she had intended by way of menace. Perhaps it was frustration, perhaps it was nerves, but whatever it was, her jittery right forefinger squeezed the trigger.

  The accidental shot changed everything. Having convinced himself that he had read the situation correctly, Qadiq was now confused, his fear compromised by lingering disdain. He gawked at the hole in the collection of receipts that were pinned to the wall, while Stephanie looked at the gun with alarm, as though it had mutated into
a living creature with a mind of its own. However, by the time Qadiq turned back to face her, she had found a familiar mask; in a moment, she was clinical dispassion.

  Qadiq was blinking in disbelief, a reaction inspired by the change in her as much as by the shot itself. Stephanie showed him the photograph again. ‘Why don’t you take another look? And then tell me where I can find him.’

  Qadiq shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’ Stephanie raised the gun again. ‘Please,’ he wailed, ‘I don’t know where he is. I was never told.’

  ‘Then give me a name.’

  Qadiq paused for a moment before saying, ‘I don’t know his name.’

  That pause betrayed him. They both knew it.

  ‘You’re lying to me.’

  ‘No. I swear…’

  ‘This one’s going to hit you between the legs, Ismail.’

  She adjusted her aim and Qadiq gasped. ‘Mohammed!’

  ‘Mohammed?’

  He nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. That’s his name. Mohammed.’

  ‘Well, that narrows it down to a few hundred million, I suppose. Mohammed who?’

  She watched Qadiq agonize. Eventually, he whispered, ‘Reza Mohammed.’

  ‘Is that his real name or just the name he’s using here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If you were a cat, you’d be eight lives down. Now, where can I find him?’

  ‘I swear, I don’t know that, either.’

  According to Proctor’s information, Mohammed was a student at Imperial College. ‘What’s he doing here in London?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He must have a job of some sort.’

  ‘Probably, yes…’

  ‘I’m losing my patience with you, Ismail. What does he do?’

  ‘Please! I was never told such things.’

  Stephanie let him stew, wondering whether an uncomfortable silence would loosen his tongue. When it appeared that it wouldn’t, she said, ‘I’m leaving now but I want you to listen to me first. I’ll find Reza Mohammed. You can count on that. But if he gets a sniff of trouble and disappears, I’m going to know where it came from. Then I’m going to come back here and shoot you in both knees. And then I’m going to tell the authorities what you’ve been doing, so that when they’ve finally rebuilt your legs and let you out of hospital, they’ll throw you in jail for twenty years. Do you understand?’

  Qadiq nodded feebly.

  Stephanie raised the gun and pointed it at the small spot between his ludicrously magnified eyes. ‘I want to hear you say it.’

  * * *

  Back at the King’s Court Hotel in Bayswater, three telephone calls established two things. Firstly, Reza Mohammed was currently a student at Imperial College. Secondly, Mustafa Sela had been a student at Imperial College, until eighteen months ago. Stephanie worked it out. That was before Reza Mohammed procured the Mustafa Sela documents from Bradfield. But that didn’t necessarily mean that the early Sela and the late Sela were not one and the same man, neither of them Mustafa Sela himself. Perhaps Mohammed had lost the originals, or had them stolen. Or maybe there were two Mustafa Selas, one legitimate, the other an impostor. For that matter, maybe there were more than two. Why not?

  On her way from Bayswater to South Kensington, Stephanie tried to withdraw another two hundred pounds on Proctor’s Visa card but the ATM denied her and retained the card. She succumbed to a stab of panic but allowed logic to tackle it. It was to be expected. She was fortunate to have collected as much cash as she had.

  The buildings of the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of London are situated between Exhibition Road and Queen’s Gate. Stephanie found the administration centre in the Sherfield Building, an unattractive block at the centre of the complex. Mustafa Sela’s UCAS course code number—H402—had been on one of Proctor’s disks. Using it, Stephanie was able to obtain a prospectus for the undergraduate course itself: Aeronautical Engineering with a Year in Europe. She also picked up a prospectus for Reza Mohammed’s course: a Postgraduate Study in Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology.

  Reza Mohammed appeared at half past three in the afternoon.

  He was in a group leaving a lecture, several of whom were of Middle-Eastern or Arabic appearance, but Stephanie picked him out straight away. Compared to his photograph, the hair was a little longer and the beard had been thinned to little more than heavy stubble, but the aquiline nose and the hooded eyes were unmistakable. Although he was in the middle of the group, he was alone. Others chatted in pairs or clusters, but not Mohammed.

  At a discreet distance, Stephanie followed him on to Queen’s Gate, where he turned left. At the Cromwell Road, he turned right and she guessed he was heading for Gloucester Road Underground station. She closed the gap between them so as not to lose sight of him once they reached the station. As it turned out, he bypassed it, only turning off the Cromwell Road when he reached Knaresborough Place, which leads into Courtfield Gardens. He entered a building on the corner with Barkston Gardens.

  Stephanie held back for a minute, before making the first of several passes. From the pavement, stone steps rose beneath a first-floor balcony to an entrance which, through the glass door, looked like some sort of reception area; there was a young man slouched behind a desk, smoking a cigarette. He looked bored. Most of the surrounding buildings were private and residential—once substantial homes converted to flats—or cheap hotels. This one seemed to be neither. Sticking close to the railings, she was able to peer into the basement; two large rooms divided by a corridor. In one room, there was a soft-drinks vending machine, plastic chairs on a linoleum floor, an old TV in the corner. In the other room, she saw a rowing machine, a set of weights on a rubber mat and a stair-climber. On the wall, in the corridor, she noticed there was a pay-phone. It was just inside the fire-exit door, at the foot of the steps which descended from the gate set in the railings at pavement level.

  There was no sign on the front entrance, but there was a small side entrance and next to this, on a grubby brass plate she saw: al-Sharif Students Hostel. In the corner of one window, there was a sticker, white on a green background, a crescent and a star.

  During the third pass that she made, she saw Reza Mohammed downstairs, apparently watching TV, his back to the window. There was another young man sitting close to him but they were not speaking.

  She dialled Directory Enquiries and got the number of the al-Sharif Students Hostel, which she then called. A male voice answered. She asked for Reza Mohammed and was told to wait for a moment. Another phone began to ring. From the pavement, she watched a young man emerge from the gym into the corridor. He picked up the pay-phone’s receiver. She saw and heard him utter a word that she did not understand before she switched off Proctor’s mobile.

  * * *

  I am consumed by a rage that cannot be expressed by words. Over the last couple of days, I would have appeared to the casual observer to have been quite calm and composed. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Over the last two years, my life has been conspicuously free of bitterness. I was too stoned, too drunk or too tired to find the energy for anger. I couldn’t hate Dean West, or Barry Green, or any of the others who exploited me. I didn’t feel rage towards those who bought me by the hour. And I’m not sure that if I’d known then that the cause of the tragedy was terrorism it would have made any difference. My behaviour was determined by me, not by events around me.

  But now, things are different. Now, I do feel the fury. And I feel it in a way that suggests it was there all along, locked away in some secret deposit account, earning astronomical interest. I feel angry towards Christopher for cheating death, I feel angry towards the rest of my family for succumbing to it. I feel hatred for West, Green and all the other users. Even Proctor does not escape my wrath: how could he leave me just as I had come to depend on him? And then, of course, there is Reza Mohammed, the man with the bomb. Mostly, however, I am angry with myself. I de
spise my decline and I am now bitter about everything that has happened to me in the last two years. I am angry about the way I behaved during all the years before that. What makes it worse is knowing that I can’t change any of it, that I can only act retrospectively.

  So that is what I will do. Tomorrow.

  I consider Mustafa Sela’s undergraduate course. Aeronautical Engineering with a Year in Europe. Did the knowledge gleaned from Imperial College help blow NE027 out of the sky? Sela would have been in the third year of his four-year course at the time. I look through the prospectus. Areas already covered include topics such as Aircraft Structures, Materials, Mechanics of Flight and Airframe Design. If Sela and Mohammed are one and the same person, which seems quite likely to me, then that course has a particular, personal sting to it. Either way, Reza Mohammed’s current course looks potentially alarming: a Postgraduate Study in Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology. Armed with such knowledge, the nightmares that he can surely transform into reality are too horrifying to consider.

  I open a can of Coke and study Reza Mohammed’s photograph. I look at him looking at me. Are his parents still alive? Do they know where he is and what he does? Does he have brothers or sisters? Maybe they are like him. Will he be mourned or missed?

  As for my own future, I do not care beyond what happens tomorrow. I shall not succumb to alcohol and narcotics again, but my future may be no brighter for that. Then again, I’m used to living in the darkness. The question I am asking myself has nothing to do with what follows tomorrow but is this: when the moment comes and I look into Reza Mohammed’s eyes—the eyes of a fellow human being—will I be able to pull the trigger? I have done it accidentally—and missed—but can I do it deliberately and hit? Despite the rage, it runs against every natural instinct within me.

  Can I really kill in cold blood?

  * * *

  There had been no sleep during the night. She watched TV instead, hoping it would distract her. It didn’t. Nor did the arguing couple in the next room, or the sirens in the distance, or the occasional squeal of car brakes.