Nemikov exhales loudly.
“You are good. I never saw that coming.”
Lewis looks up and smiles.
“Perhaps I may not have been as rusty as I had thought. Why don’t we cut through the pleasantries and you tell me exactly why I am here and what you’d like me to do?”
9
With his elbows on the small table in front of him, Nemikov steeples his hands and places his chin on his thumbs. The ends of his fingers are resting beneath his nose, his eyes staring straight at Lewis’s, deep in thought. He is on the verge of speaking when the main door to the room is flung wide open. In walks one of the most strikingly beautiful women that Lewis has ever seen.
“Ah, Valentyna,” Nemikov says suddenly on his feet. “Perfect timing. Come and meet my guest. This is Ben Lewis, former British Royal Marine Commando and Saviour of the British people. This is the man who prevented a small Islamic State massacre in London yesterday.”
Lewis gets to his feet and watches with genuine pleasure as Nemikov’s wife walks across the room to greet him. Lewis can feel the warmth of her hazel-brown eyes on his. She has the most perfect skin. It is wrinkle-free: the bare minimum of make-up, not even lipstick. In her wake, long, blonde, slightly curly locks flow freely. She seems well aware of the effect she creates as she glides across the room. An expensive mid-tan cashmere dress hugs her body perfectly as she walks: she also has shoes to match, with heels that are elegant, but not impossibly high. Valentyna smiles at Lewis and extends a long thin hand. Lewis is smitten and it shows on his face.
“Valentyna has the same effect on all the men she meets, don’t you, my darling?” He drapes an arm around her shoulder as she in turn shakes Lewis’s hand. “Ben, meet my wife, Valentyna.”
“It is a pleasure to meet you,” he says.
“The pleasure is all mine, Ben. What brings you here? Are you going to come and work with us?”
She looks at her husband and her eyes dance with his momentarily. He, in turn, raises an eyebrow and tilts his head to one side.
“Arkady, surely we could make use of someone with Ben’s background?” she says, turning once more to smile at Lewis, winking at him in a conspiratorial manner. “I rather like the sound of having a former Marine looking after the family. It would certainly make a welcome change from Sergei Fedorov and some of the oafs he seems to employ.”
“If you’d only let me have a few minutes with Ben here, we might perhaps get around to discussing some of that.”
Valentyna smiles at him and then looks down at the chessboard.
“I am sorry about my husband, Ben. He’s so wrapped up in winning at absolutely everything he does. He can’t help himself from asking each and every houseguest to play chess with him. Are you good at chess, Ben?”
“Ben here is a former junior champion. He’s giving me a run for my money and we’ve barely just begun.”
“Good. Well, that serves you right, Darling. Ben, I am about to head to Venice for a few days. If, by the time I am back, you have been persuaded to come and work with us, perhaps you might find some time to teach me chess? Arkady is too impatient with my lack of progress. Everyone else in the family seems to play apart from me.”
“I’d be happy to.”
“Perfect. Now, Arkady, I am off to Luton Airport to take the private jet to Venice. Can I have the Sikorsky fly me there? I do so hate travelling on the M25 motorway with all that ghastly traffic.”
“Sure. Ben and I will be at least another hour or so before he needs to head back to London. Who’s accompanying you on the trip? Is it Sergei?”
“No, it’s Gregor. I don’t care for him much, as you know. I find him rather creepy, to tell the truth. I’d much rather have someone like Ben here.” She smiles at Lewis and once more winks at him.
Nemikov laughs. “One step at a time, Valentyna. Take Gregor, go in the helicopter and enjoy Venice. I am sorry I won’t be joining you.” They kiss warmly and then Valentyna turns toward Lewis.
“Until next time, Ben. I hope my husband manages to persuade you to work with us. I would enjoy very much spending some time with you on my return.”
With that, she turns and glides gracefully out of the room.
10
It had been a joint operation between MI5 and the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command. Laura, the MI5 section head whose team was responsible for covert intelligence gathering, usually disliked joint operations. They had the propensity to be complex and were often impeded by ego, if not testosterone. Working with SO15, however, was different. Officers attached to this specialist police unit were part of a very small elite. They were all highly trained professionals, most of whom regularly went on joint exercises with the Special Forces. On standby twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, their role was to deal with all manner of terrorism threats. They were all skilled in the use of weapons and ordinances.
Following the arrest of both Ashraf and Khan, Laura’s agent handlers had been tasked with probing their networks. The question they urgently sought answers to was simple: had the thwarted beheading outside Westminster Cathedral been a one off? Or was it part of an orchestrated campaign of increased violence and terror being implemented across the UK – and London in particular?
It had been an MI5 deep cover asset who went by the code name ‘Alpha’ who had supplied the raw intelligence leading up to that evening’s operation.
Over many months, Alpha, a Karachi-born Pakistani by birth, had been infiltrating a London-based cell: this comprised three fellow Pakistani men, originally from Lahore and now living in North London. Alpha had met one of them whilst working as a casual labourer on a building site in Wembley. All three had been single; all had seemed to share common interests. Relatively quickly, Alpha had started socialising with them after work and at weekends. In time, he was joining them at their prayer meetings at a North London mosque. Finally becoming accepted, it had been at that stage that he’d been introduced to the leader of their cell, Fouad Bitar. Fouad immediately took to Alpha, in no time suggesting how beneficial it might be if Alpha and one or two of the others joined him on an education visit back to northern Pakistan. Appearing to be easily persuaded, he had accepted. Independently, he had therefore travelled via Qatar and Karachi to Islamabad. On arrival at the capital, a jeep had been waiting to transfer him to a training camp not far from Peshawar in the north-west corner of the country.
Making contact with deep cover assets usually took time and patience. Each MI5 handler used a pre-agreed contact mechanism if a crash meeting was being requested. Alpha’s handler was a thirty-two year old MI5 officer called Jonathan. Jonathan had posted an innocent-looking tweet on Twitter. It was his request to Alpha for such a meeting: the timing of the post, at nine thirty-three that first morning after the Westminster Cathedral incident, was significant: every proposed meet was always exactly six hours after when it was posted. If Alpha ‘favourited’ Jonathan’s tweet, it meant that the meeting was on. To Jonathan’s surprise, Alpha had confirmed the meeting almost immediately. They already had their pre-agreed meeting place: it was a betting shop on the Kilburn High Road.
By three-thirty that same afternoon when Alpha had casually walked into the shop, Jonathan had been in position for almost thirty minutes. He had been busy, giving the appearance of someone watching the afternoon race meeting from York on the widescreen television. On the small counter in front of him had been three crumpled betting slips, evidence that his chosen horses thus far had failed to be winners.
Alpha had studied the form for the next race at York, before placing a modest each-way bet on a particular horse, Orchid Bloom. He had then wandered over to the small counter that Jonathan had been standing next to, so as to watch the race on the television screen. Both had watched in silence as the three-thirty race drew to its close. Once all the horses had crossed the finish line, Jo
nathan had scrunched his betting slip into a ball before throwing it in disgust onto the counter, next to all of his others.
“No luck?” Alpha had asked innocently.
“Nothing so far,” was all Jonathan had said. “Unless you’ve got an inside tip or two to share?” he had added as an afterthought.
Alpha had not replied at first. Like Jonathan, he’d been checking who else was in the shop. A variety of men and women of mixed ages and race had been coming and going: several Asian men; a few elderly white males who had looked like permanent fixtures. There had been no one who had seemed particularly interested in the two of them.
“What’s up?” Alpha had eventually asked, still staring at the television screen showing the horses and jockeys for the next race being saddled up.
“The beheading that nearly happened yesterday. You must have heard about it.”
“Everyone has. There’s been talk of nothing else.”
“Was it a one off or the start of something more orchestrated, that’s what we’d like to know?” Jonathan had whispered.
Alpha had listened to this impassively, staring at the screen as his horse for the next race, Orchid Bloom, was shown being escorted out of the saddling enclosure. Only once the horse had begun its slow walk up to the starting gate had he spoken.
“There’s something about to happen. I’m not exactly sure what and I’m not sure when, but it feels big. There’s some funny stuff happening that I’m not privy to. The buzz, amongst the other three, is that it’s going to be a co-ordinated attack, aimed at London commuters. They keep talking as if hundreds are going to die.”
“Timescales, realistically?”
“They’ve already made a video. They intend to post it any time now, to begin their campaign of terror.”
“What’s your role?”
“To be a martyr, of course. Today, tomorrow, whenever.”
“Can you give me any names: of the high-ups, the people pulling the strings? We need something to work on.”
Alpha had looked around again before replying. Still no one appeared to be taking any notice.
“There are two of them. You need to be watching both. One’s called Fouad Bitar and the other is his supposed cousin, Hakim. Both are in their late twenties. Fouad lives not far from here: in Kensal Rise, on Mount Pleasant Road. He’s the one who arranged for me to go to Pakistan recently.”
“We know about him. Who’s Hakim?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve never met him. He’s apparently connected to the upper echelons, or at least that’s what they all say. I don’t know where he’s based. He’s never around much, or that’s what whispered. I think he’s the one who’s ultimately been planning whatever it is.”
The horses for the next race were at the starting gates. As the tape had risen and the race had gotten underway, Alpha had looked directly at Jonathan.
“You need to act fast if you’re going to stop them. Since the failed beheading yesterday, the heat’s definitely been turned up. The timeframe is being compressed, I am sure of it.” He had looked at his watch. “I ought to go.”
He had left his betting slip on the counter and walked back out into the street without looking back. Jonathan had remained, thinking about what he had heard, staring blankly at the screen as, a few minutes later, Orchid Bloom had romped home in first place by several lengths.
Back at Thames House later that same afternoon, they had begun planning the operation. Officers from SO15 and a man simply described as ‘an operational expert from Hereford’ had squashed into a secure basement meeting room with the doors locked. It was to be a police-led, MI5 supported, operation and not the other way around. One of their first tasks had been to navigate their way through the legal minefield that governed - and indeed restricted – police powers of search and arrest, as defined by the Protection of Freedoms Act. Since two separate properties in different locations were to be raided, a magistrate local to each had to be consulted before the relevant search warrants could be obtained.
The operation had been timed to begin at four-fifteen the following morning, with both properties being raided simultaneously. The first was a flat above a shop front on Buckley Road in Kilburn, where Alpha and his three Pakistani ‘friends’ were based; and the other, a two-up, two-down, terraced house on Mount Pleasant Road near to Kensal Rise, where Fouad Bitar was meant to be living. At that time, they had no data on Hakim’s whereabouts.
At the appointed hour, a four-man assault team, each wearing night vision glasses, had used a ram to break open the front door at the Buckley Road property. A sniper from the Met’s CO19 specialist firearm unit on the rooftop of a nearby building had been keeping watch in case of any unforeseen difficulties. The raiders, climbing the stairs to the first floor, had found Alpha, and two other Pakistani men, asleep on mattresses strewn about a first floor bedroom. There was a fourth mattress on the floor, but it had been empty and had not been slept in. Dazed, confused and disoriented, all three had been arrested, handcuffed and swiftly led away to a police van waiting outside. A short time later, forensic officers with sniffer dogs had uncovered the explosives: a stash of RDX in the form of rectangular blocks of C-4 plastic. They had been cleverly disguised: split into pairs, each had been stuffed inside a hessian bag, the bag topped up with sand and made to look like ordinary sandbags. Along with various detonators and timers, it had been sufficient plastic, as one officer had later commented, to start a small war.
Over at Kensal Rise, all did not go smoothly. At four-fifteen in the morning, Fouad had not been asleep. In fact, he had been fully awake, in the process of taking a Skype call with his cousin Hakim, at that moment back in Jordan. On hearing the sound of the front door being rammed off its hinges, Fouad had tried to escape from an upper second floor window. Unfortunately for him, he had lost his footing in the dark and slipped. He had fallen two stories to the ground and broken his neck. There had been no one else in the house at the time. When they discovered Fouad’s open and unlocked laptop computer, they soon found the video that Alpha had alluded to earlier. It had shown Fouad, dressed in black with an IS flag behind him, vowing to wage a war of terror on London to assuage for British crimes against Islam. It had promised a bombing campaign against the capital’s transport system, intended to drive terror into the heart of every man, woman and child living, or visiting, the city.
If they had been able to keep the content of the video out of the public eye, events might have turned out differently. Sadly for them, Hakim had a duplicate copy. He also intended to broadcast it. As soon as he sensed that cousin Fouad’s UK house was being raided, he ended the Skype call. There and then he had decided to post the video online himself. Using an untraceable webserver based in Bahrain, that same morning the video had gone viral. Within hours, although most Western social media channels quickly blocked access to it, its message had been disseminated far and wide.
London was officially a high-risk IS terror target.
London’s transport system in particular was under threat.
11
“Is that you, honey?” Hattie Zeltinger yelled down from the top of the house upon hearing the front door slam downstairs.
Saul Zeltinger removed his wet overcoat. He shook it a little before hanging it on one of the hooks in the hallway.
“Only me, Hats.”
He looked at the small pile of post that had been left for him on a silver tray and flicked through them. Most were bills and junk, although two folded scraps of A4 paper caught his eye. They were drawings produced by his six-year old twins. One depicted a stick-like person with a large truncheon in his hand attacking someone else. The words, ‘Got you punk,’ were written inside a speech balloon coming from the truncheon holder’s mouth. He looked up as Hattie came bounding down the stairs to greet him. They kissed briefly, she smiling radiantly when she saw that Saul h
ad found the drawings.
“Aren’t they great? The one you’re holding is from Zach. The man you’re beating up is, Zach informs me, ‘the master criminal’.”
She giggled as she said it and Saul looked up at her. She was as pretty as the day they had first met: flowing blonde hair, sparkly bright blue eyes and a wonderful smile that was rarely turned off.
“Where does he learn words like ‘punk’ from?” Saul asked.
“Darling, it’s the school playground. Don’t tell me you didn’t say those sorts of thing at the same age? Anyway, look at Nate’s.”
Zeltinger opened the second picture and laughed. It was much more detailed than the other, with various squiggly lines in all directions. In the middle was someone with what looked like a gun in his hand, the word ‘superhero’ written on his chest.
“I think I ought to explain,” Hattie said, still laughing. “You, the world famous super hero, are in amongst all the baddies here,” she pointed to several people who appeared to be lying on the ground. “They are all dead and all this other stuff,” she pointed at the wiggly lines everywhere, “is, and I quote, ‘gun smoke, Mummy. I mean obviously’!”
“They’re terrific. You’re terrific too, Hats. I’m sorry about last night. The world started going crazy. People trying to kill one another left, right and centre.”
“Not you I hope?” Hattie followed him into the kitchen at the back of the house. It was a family room, with toys and books stacked away neatly on various shelves.
He turned to look at her.
“Not me, thankfully.”
They held each other close for a moment. He then seemed to remember something and broke away.
The Gambit (Ben Lewis Thriller Book 2) Page 5