Button stared back at her. ‘Anything,’ she said, and she knew the moment the words left her mouth that she meant it. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘We know who the bomber was. ISIS have already released a video with the usual sort of anti-West shit. Ali Naveed. A Syrian. Came over here as a supposed child refugee. The council put him with a foster family in Ealing.’ Ellis smiled but her eyes were dull and lifeless. ‘I want you to kill anyone and everyone close to him,’ she said flatly. ‘Anyone who helped him, anyone who loved him, anyone he loved. I want every one of the fuckers dead.’
‘Patsy—’
‘Don’t try to talk me out of this, Charlie,’ she said. ‘I’m done with the lot of them. They took Eleanor from me and I want them dead. All of them. If anyone knows how I feel, it’s you. I want it done, and there’s nothing you can say that will make me change my mind.’
Button smiled tightly. ‘I’m not going to talk you out of anything,’ she said.
‘You’ll do it?’
Button nodded. ‘I’ll get it done. If that’s what you want, what you really want. But you need to think it through. If people start to die, won’t you be the first person they’d look at?’
Ellis shook her head. ‘I’m Eleanor’s godmother; she’s not a blood relative. Her mum and I were friends at university. Best friends. But no one is going to connect Eleanor to me. And even if someone at Five spots the connection, what then? No one’s going to go public with the information. Who wants to hand a propaganda coup like that to the enemy? You think they’ll let ISIS know that they killed the goddaughter of the acting head of MI5?’
‘My worry is that someone might put two and two together. It could end your career.’
‘Like it did yours? Let’s face it, Charlie, you’re doing very nicely in the private sector.’
Button held Ellis’s hands. ‘I’m not saying no, Patsy. I’m just saying you need to think it through. You need to be sure.’
‘I have done, and I am,’ she said, nodding earnestly. ‘You think I care about my career? About this country? The powers that be have allowed this to happen. They let scum like Naveed into this country. We let British-born Muslims pop over to the Middle East to fight for ISIS and then we welcome them back with open arms. Enough’s enough, Charlie. If it means the end of my career, fine. And if there are consequences down the line, I’ll face them, and I’ll face them gladly.’
‘Okay,’ said Button. ‘I hear you. And yes, I understand exactly. There are times when revenge is the only option.’
‘I owe it to Eleanor,’ said Ellis. ‘I will not allow her death to go unpunished. Whatever it costs, Charlie. I’ll pay. I’ll happily pay. Just have the fuckers killed.’
Button shook her head. ‘It won’t cost you a thing,’ she said. ‘It’s on me.’
Ellis hugged Button hard. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’
‘It’s the least I can do, Patsy. But I’m going to need help. The sort of intel I’ll need isn’t available to the private sector, not in the time frame I’ll need.’
Ellis forced a smile. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘I have a plan.’
Chapter 9
Present Day, London
D an Shepherd stared at the screen in front of him and tried to concentrate. It was recorded CCTV footage taken outside a mosque in South London, two weeks earlier. It was just after early morning prayers and there were hundreds of Muslim men, most of them wearing Islamic clothing and skullcaps, milling around and chatting in small groups. Shepherd was scanning faces, looking for anyone he recognised from MI5’s database of suspected and wanted jihadists. As he forced himself to work, his mind was still in turmoil from the previous day’s stadium bombing. He had raced to the scene and it had been carnage. There were bodies everywhere and the injured were screaming and begging for help. He saw at least a dozen dead and many more injured. One of the first casualties he had seen was a teenage boy, his arm a bloody mess. Shepherd had used the boy’s scarf as a compress and tried to stem the bleeding until a paramedic had arrived and taken over.
Half a dozen paramedics were on the scene within minutes but they were faced with an impossible task. Most of the spectators had fled but some stayed to help. Those with medical training did what they could, others just offered comfort. It was as bad as any war zone Shepherd had ever been in.
From the injured boy he had moved to help a middle-aged man who had lost most of his right hand, his face slashed by dozens of pieces of shrapnel. He was slumped against a wall. Again Shepherd used the man’s scarf, this time to fashion a tourniquet.
‘My boy, where’s my boy?’ the man kept mumbling. ‘Where’s Alex?’
There was a youngster on the ground, not far away, and Shepherd didn’t have to go over to see the boy was dead. He had ignored the man’s questions but stayed with him until a paramedic was able to take over.
The media was now saying that twenty-two had died in the bombing and that many more were badly injured and the death toll was expected to rise over the next few days. A video had been released on social media of the suicide bomber launching a rambling tirade against the West and how the British were persecuting Muslims at home and in the Middle East. Most news outlets were refusing to show it. Messages of condolences were coming in from around the world, and a group of eighties pop stars were planning to record a single to raise funds for the injured.
Shepherd’s thoughts were interrupted by a loud ‘Yes!’ He turned to look at the woman sitting at the workstation next to his. She was a relatively new member of the unit, Sally Anne McLachlan, a former family liaison officer whose recognition abilities were noticed after she arrested two wanted paedophiles she had spotted in a cinema while out with her kids. She had recognised them from photographs the paedophile unit had sent out six months earlier. She had only glanced at the pictures but a glance was all she needed. The Super-Recogniser Unit heard about the arrests and called her in for a test that she passed with flying colours.
Shepherd went over and stood behind her. ‘What have you got?’ he asked.
She pointed at the screen. It was CCTV footage of a group of Asians gathered in the street. She had paused the image. It was black and white but quite clear.
‘This is one of the cameras outside the mosque in Stoke Newington you wanted me to keep an eye on. See the guy on the left with the white skullcap?’
She pointed and Shepherd immediately recognised the man. He was a former sociology student from Westminster University who a year earlier had gone to fight with ISIS in Syria. His name was Tahir Rahman and voice recognition experts at MI5 were sure that he was the masked man seen in ISIS videos decapitating a French journalist with a machete. He was one of several hundred home-grown jihadists that MI5 suspected had slipped back into the UK. Border Force were supposed to be watching for the returnees but their record was patchy at best. McLachlan pressed a button to restart the video. Rahman was in deep conversation with the other men and had his head to the side but as he turned, Shepherd got a full-on view. There was no question it was him. Shepherd grinned. Rahman was the third jihadist she had spotted.
‘Well done,’ he said. ‘I’ll pass on the intel. He’s close to the top of MI5’s most wanted.’
‘Do you want me to work backwards, see if I can get an address?’
Usually that was too much trouble and would take up too much time but Rahman was a high-value target. ‘Go for it,’ said Shepherd. He went back to his station and fired off an email to his boss at MI5, updating him on Rahman’s identification. Just as he pressed ‘send’ Shepherd’s phone vibrated in his pocket and he took it out. It was a landline calling. ‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Mr Shepherd?’ It was a man. Upper-class accent with a slow drawl that made Shepherd think of wood-panelled boardrooms and grouse-shooting weekends.
‘Yes?’
‘Mrs Ellis would like to see you in her office. Can you make a two o’clock appointment?’
‘Sure,’ said Shepherd.
‘Excellent,’ said the man. ‘We shall see you at two.’
The line went dead and Shepherd stared at the screen of his phone. Patsy Ellis was the acting head of MI5 and had been since the untimely death of Jeremy Willoughby-Brown a year earlier. Her appointment was supposed to have been temporary but there had been no sign of a permanent replacement being found. Shepherd had never met Ellis but knew of her. She had spent much of her career with MI5 but had left to join the Joint Intelligence Organisation, the agency that was responsible for assessment and forward planning. JIO offered advice and support to the Joint Intelligence Committee that oversaw the work of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. She was close to sixty and the office gossip was that she had requested retirement so that she could pursue her dream of writing crime thrillers. But no one knew more about the workings of the British intelligence agencies than Patsy Ellis and the powers that be were reluctant to let her off the leash.
Shepherd was reasonably sure that it was Ellis who had sidelined him with the Super-Recognisers. The summons from Ellis meant one of two things – either he was being brought in from the cold, or his career was over.
Chapter 10
Present Day, Pattaya, Thailand
L ex Harper’s phone buzzed and he opened his eyes. He groped to his left but instead of his phone, on the bedside table he found only air. He opened his eyes. The lamp was missing. And his clock radio. He groaned as he realised he wasn’t in his own bedroom. His phone was in the pocket of his jeans and his jeans were on the floor by the bed. He rolled over and pulled out the phone. The message was from Charlie Button and as usual it was short and to the point: You have mail. He groaned. It was five o’clock in the morning, which meant it was eleven at night in the UK.
A soft hand brushed against his chest and slowly moved down between his legs. ‘You horny?’ asked the girl sleepily.
‘I’ve got to go,’ said Harper, sitting up.
‘Okay,’ said the girl, turning away from him and curling up into a ball, her long black hair covering the pillow. Within seconds she was snoring again.
Harper pulled on his boxers and jeans. He found his shirt on the back of a chair and his socks on the dressing table. He took out his wallet, trying to remember whether he was supposed to pay the girl or if it had been a freebie, and decided that either way she wouldn’t complain if he left her a couple of thousand baht. He took out the notes and placed them on the pillow, pulled on his shoes and headed out. He went along a corridor to a lift and as he waited for it to haul itself up to the seventh floor, fragments of the previous night began to return. He’d been playing pool in a bar by the beach and Mickey and Mark Moore had turned up, two London criminals who had made Pattaya their home, and after a couple of games they had led him astray. At some point they were in an ice bar, shivering and drinking shots as their breath feathered around them, and in the early hours they had headed for Lucifer’s disco in Walking Street. The Moore brothers were regulars and were ushered to a table in a corner. The brothers always preferred to drink with their backs to the wall.
Harper had spotted the girl almost immediately. Or she had spotted him. Their eyes had met and he’d smiled and she’d smiled back and within seconds she was by his side. She had waist-length glossy black hair and a tiny silver dress and impossibly high heels. Her name was Noy or Poy or Doy and she had latched on to him as if her life depended on it. He remembered buying several bottles of champagne and at some point he might have been sitting on a motorcycle with his hands around her waist as she drove at breakneck speed, her hair blowing across his face. Other than that, the night was pretty much a blur.
The lift arrived and he took it down to the ground floor, hoping that he wasn’t in the middle of nowhere. He walked out of the building and smiled as he saw the beach. Joy her name was, and he remembered her telling him that she had three overseas sponsors, men who sent her money every month so that she could live in the style to which she had become accustomed. One was from Holland, another from Germany and the third was the most generous, a fifty-five-year-old car salesman in Glasgow who was sending her thirty thousand baht a month with the promise that he would marry her and retire to Thailand. All three were going to end up disappointed because Joy was planning to marry an American so that she could live in New York, a city she had only ever seen in the movies but which she had set her heart on.
He flagged down a yellow and blue taxi and had it take him to an Internet café on Beach Road that was open twenty-four-seven. It was owned and run by a former go-go dancer called Rose. Harper had known her, and her brother Kung, for more than five years, and they had never questioned why he popped in to use their computers at all hours of the day or night. Most of their customers were bargirls who would use Kung to help them draft emails to their sponsors, offering a range of reasons why they needed money – sick family members was a common one – and tourists wanting to keep in touch with home. Rose was behind the counter and she flashed him a beaming smile. She was in her forties and her dancing days were long behind her, but even after three children she still had a figure that turned heads.
‘Hi Lek,’ she said. ‘Are you up early, or late?’
Like most Thais, Rose usually mispronounced Alex or Lex as ‘Lek’, which meant small and was a common Thai nickname. He’d long since given up trying to get them to not call him Lek.
Harper laughed. ‘Late, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Can I have a coffee?’
‘Of course.’
She made him a cup of instant coffee and he grabbed a pack of crisps. He paid her and sat down at a free terminal. He sipped his coffee and then went through to the Yahoo Mail account that he used to communicate with Charlotte Button. He clicked in the draft file and there was one message there, short and to the point: I need you in the UK now. Under the radar. At the end of the message was a mobile phone number, presumably a throwaway.
Harper logged off the account and started popping crisps into his mouth as he considered his options. A pretty girl next to him with dyed blond hair was on Skype tearfully telling a guy in Norway that she was pregnant and needed money for an abortion. She was in her late teens but her English was surprisingly good, with a slight Australian accent that suggested either she watched a lot of Australian television or had shacked up with an Australian for several months at least. When Lex had walked in she had been telling the same sob story to a guy in Dubai who had promised to transfer fifty thousand baht to her bank account. She seemed to be able to cry on cue and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue as the Norwegian guy told her not to worry and that he would help her. He asked her if she was sure the baby was his and she burst into tears again. He apologised quickly and asked how much she needed. ‘Sixty thousand baht,’ she sobbed. Lex figured she had upped the price for daring to question her integrity.
He finished off the pack of crisps, screwed up the bag and tossed it into a wastepaper bin.
‘More coffee, Lek?’ asked Rose. She had recently taken up vaping and blew a cloud of whatever it was up at the ceiling.
‘I’m good, Rose, thanks.’
He ran his hands through his hair. Button had said ‘Now’ whereas usually she’d say ‘Soonest’ or ‘Urgently’, so she meant he had to be on the next flight out. And the ‘under the radar’ was new. She knew that he was always careful about flying in and out of the UK, so the fact that she mentioned that she didn’t want anyone to know he was there was significant. The lowest of low profiles. He had to be the invisible man and that meant the job she had for him was big. He could buy his ticket at the airport, that wouldn’t be a problem. But first he had to go home and pick up one of several bug-out bags that he kept for those occasions when he had to move fast. He had three, each with different passports and driving licences, money and clothes, depending on where he planned to be. His European bug-out bag had a UK passport and an Irish passport, wads of sterling and euros, a washbag and shaving kit and a pair of black Levi jeans and a Ted Baker shirt. The clothing and toiletries he could buy anywher
e but the UK passport was genuine, albeit not in his name. He looked at his watch. He might have time for a shower but if not he could do it at the airport. The fact she wanted him there immediately meant money would be no object, which meant he’d be flying first or business class.
Chapter 11
Ten Years Ago, New York
I t took Yokely just under four hours to drive from Washington to Queens. A helicopter would have been quicker but would have attracted attention, and it gave him the opportunity of making a number of phone calls. The first was to Gerry McNee, whose ancestors had fled the Irish famine and repaid their adopted country by supplying generations of men for the American armed forces. McNee was a former Green Beret who had moved to Military Intelligence, where he had shown a talent for interrogation. He had spent two years at Guantanamo Bay and had been a frequent visitor to Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad before control had been handed over to the Iraqi authorities in the spring of 2006. These days he was pretty much on full-time attachment to Grey Fox.
McNee answered as he always did with a curt ‘Yeah?’
‘Gerry, please tell me you’re in Manhattan,’ said Yokely.
‘Heading out for dinner as we speak,’ said McNee.
‘Cancel that, I need you in Queens, ASAP,’ said Yokely. ‘I’ll text you the location. I’m en route from DC so you’ll probably get there before me. Keep a lid on whatever you find there and wait for me.’
He cut the connection and phoned Peter Leclerc. Leclerc was a Canadian by birth but had moved with his parents to live in Detroit when he was a toddler. He had joined the Coastguard after leaving university but had soon tired of searching vessels for contraband and refugees and had switched to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Yokely had met Leclerc there during an operation against the Medellin cartel there and had been so impressed with the man’s attention to detail and complete lack of emotions that shortly afterwards he’d invited Leclerc to work with him at Grey Fox.
Tall Order: The 15th Spider Shepherd Thriller Page 4