‘And like I said, that’s not much of a plan.’
‘The security services are on full alert and they will be for the foreseeable future,’ said Shepherd. ‘There’s a lot of surveillance going on; internet chatter and emails are monitored; GCHQ eavesdrop on phone calls. We’ve got CCTV, we’ve got all sorts of technological advantages that the terrorists don’t have, and we’ve got right on our side.’
‘That gives you an advantage, does it? Having right on your side?’
‘It means that there will always be people like you who want to do the right thing, Raj. No one is totally alone. Everyone has friends, relatives, workmates, neighbours. Providing there are people who are prepared to do the right thing, the terrorists will always be identified, sooner or later.’
Two middle-aged women in matching raincoats, one with a spaniel, the other with a red setter, walked by. The woman with the spaniel glared at Shepherd with open hostility. He smiled at her and winked, and she wrinkled her nose in disgust and tugged hard at her dog’s lead.
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Chaudhry.
‘And what about you, Raj? After all this is over. What do you plan to do?’
Chaudhry frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘MI5 can use guys like you.’
‘Brown-skinned Muslims, you mean?’
‘I meant intelligent, self-motivated individuals who want the best for our country. You could go far, really. And not because of your ethnicity.’
‘My dad would …’ Chaudhry laughed. ‘Actually, I don’t know what my dad would say. But my mum, she’d freak out. She always wanted my brother to be a doctor and she went apeshit when he announced that he wanted to be an architect. The only thing that calmed her down was me saying that I wanted to study medicine. If I were to change my mind now …’
‘I think you’ll make a great doctor,’ said Shepherd.
‘I bet you say that to all your …’ Chaudhry smiled. ‘What are we to you, John? How do you describe us?’
‘You’re an agent,’ said Shepherd.
‘I thought you were the agent.’
Shepherd shook his head. ‘I’m an officer. An MI5 officer. You’re an agent. Or an asset.’
‘An asset? That’s good to know.’ He smiled thinly. ‘I just wish this was over, John.’
‘I know. It will be soon.’
‘I just keep thinking that Khalid knows what we’re doing.’
‘He doesn’t.’
‘He’s under surveillance, right?’
Shepherd nodded.
‘Would he have been followed tonight? To the restaurant?’
‘I would think so.’
‘I didn’t see anyone,’ said Chaudhry.
‘You wouldn’t. The people we use are real professionals. And if we even suspected that he knew you were talking to us we’d pull you out immediately. But that’s not on the cards, Raj. The fact that he wanted you to meet Lateef and Faisal shows that he trusts you. You’re his golden boys.’
Chaudhry shrugged. ‘I guess so.’
‘There’s no guessing about it. He recruited you, he sent you to Pakistan for training, now he’s getting ready for the big one. He’s never going to suspect you because you’re on the inside; he’ll see any threat coming from the outside. That’s why you and Malik are so important in all this. You’re on the inside.’
‘You’ve been in my position before, right?’
‘Lots of times.’
‘It’s scary, isn’t it? Lying all the time?’
Shepherd smiled. ‘It can be. But you get used to it.’
‘I don’t want to get used to it,’ said Chaudhry. ‘I just want it to be over.’
Shepherd opened his eyes and was disorientated for a few seconds until he remembered he was in his bedroom in Hereford. He’d driven up the previous morning, then taken Katra to watch Liam play rugby. Liam’s team had won, and afterwards they’d taken him and half a dozen of his teammates for pizza. Shepherd shaved and showered and dressed in a polo shirt and black jeans before heading down to the kitchen. Katra was already up and by the time he’d picked up the newspaper from the hallway she had a cup of coffee ready for him.
‘Breakfast?’ she asked. She was wearing a baggy sweatshirt over cargo pants and had tied her brown hair back with a scrunchy.
‘Egg and bacon would be great, Katra. I’ve got a busy day.’
‘Working on a Sunday?’ she said, taking a frying pan from a cupboard.
‘No rest for the wicked.’
‘Can I ask you something?’ she said as she began to cook his breakfast.
‘Of course,’ said Shepherd.
Katra had worked as his au pair for more than four years and he thought of her more as family than as an employee. Over the years she had lost most of her Slovenian accent though her love of soap operas meant that her pronunciation was a blend of north of England and the East End of London, with the occasional Australian twang thrown in for good measure.
‘Now Liam’s at boarding school and you’re in London so often, I was just wondering if you really still needed me.’
‘Of course we need you,’ said Shepherd. ‘Liam’s here between terms and at most half-terms too. And the house still needs looking after.’ He grinned. ‘Besides, who would cook breakfast for me? And I really don’t want to be ironing my own shirts.’
She laughed. ‘I like ironing,’ she said.
‘Then you’re not going anywhere. Plus, I don’t know how long I’ll be in London. My situation can change at short notice.’ He put down his newspaper. ‘Everything’s okay, right? You are happy here?’
Katra turned round to look at him, the spatula in her hand. ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘I have been happy ever since I started working for you.’
‘That’s fine. You’re happy, we’re happy, everyone’s happy.’
‘But what if you get married?’
Shepherd laughed. ‘Trust me, Katra, marriage isn’t on the cards, not at the moment. And if I do meet someone it’ll just mean twice as much ironing.’
Katra nodded, reassured, and went back to cooking his breakfast.
An hour later and Shepherd was pulling up in front of the Stirling Lines barracks at RAF Credenhill, home to the SAS. He was driving an MI5 Range Rover that had been registered in the name of his Garry Edwards legend. He wound down his window. ‘Dan Shepherd, here to see Major Gannon,’ he told a young trooper.
The trooper consulted a list on a clipboard and nodded. ‘Can you show me photo ID, please, sir?’ Shepherd took out his wallet and showed him his driving licence. The trooper looked at it carefully, handed it back and then wrote down the registration number of the car. ‘If you could park by the shooting range, Major Gannon is expecting you,’ he said, raising a boom barrier so that Shepherd could drive through.
The Major, dressed in a black Adidas tracksuit, was waiting for him in front of the shooting range. He grinned as Shepherd got out of the car. ‘Traded in the BMW?’ he asked.
‘Nah, this is a pool car. More in keeping with what an arms dealer would drive, apparently.’ Shepherd walked round to the rear and opened the tailgate.
‘The guns are inside,’ said the Major, nodding at the double doors that led to the range. ‘I’ve got you three Yugos, but there’re more if you need them. I thought there were six but three have been signed out.’
‘Three’ll be fine,’ said Shepherd. He followed the Major through the doors into the range. He wrinkled his nose at the acrid smell of cordite.
At the far end of the range was a line of terrorist targets in front of a wall of sandbags. There was a table close to the entrance in front of a rack of ear protectors, and on the table was a wooden crate and a metal ammunition case.
‘So I’ve been hearing stories about you from a couple of Navy Seals we’ve had embedded with us for a few weeks.’
‘Just make sure they’re careful where they’re pointing their weapons,’ said Shepherd.
‘They do have a reputation
for friendly fire, don’t they?’ agreed the Major. ‘Friendly fire ranks right up there with military intelligence in the tautology hit parade, doesn’t it?’
‘You know there are two thousand active Navy Seals? Hardly special forces, is it? I mean, how special can they be to let that many in?’
The Major grinned. ‘They’re not exactly fans of you, either.’
Shepherd’s eyes narrowed. ‘They were telling tales out of school, were they?’
‘What happens in Stirling Lines, stays in Stirling Lines,’ said the Major. ‘They were among friends; plus, they can’t hold their liquor. Not like our lads.’
‘And what did they say?’
‘Just that you were on the Bin Laden operation. Not that they knew who you were, not by name. Just that there was a Brit there and he was none too happy about the way it went down.’
‘They must have been well pissed if they talked to you about the Pakistan operation.’
‘What can I say? Part of the Sass initiation is to have your drinks spiked, you know that.’
‘Yeah, well, careless talk costs lives.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I did give them a piece of my mind, that’s true. No one told me that we were going out there to kill him. And I certainly wasn’t there to shoot women and kids.’
‘It was messy?’
‘It was a cock-up from start to finish,’ said Shepherd. ‘One of the choppers crashed. You know why?’
The Major shook his head. ‘But they do have a habit of crashing their choppers. The Iranian hostages. Somalia. All over Iraq and Afghanistan.’
‘This wasn’t just pilot error, this was plain bloody incompetence. The compound was surrounded by a concrete wall, eighteen feet high. We were supposed to land inside the wall and that’s the way they’d rehearsed it. For weeks. They’d built a mock-up of the compound in Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The plan was to fly over the compound and drop down on to the building. They’d rehearsed it a hundred times. But they screwed up. For the rehearsals they’d replaced the wall with a wire fence. I guess some prick decided that so long as it was the right size, all well and good. Except, of course, the downdraught could escape through the wire fence when they practised the manoeuvre. But as soon as we started descending towards the walls the downdraught blew straight back up and the pilot lost control. So they crashed because some idiot couldn’t be bothered to build a wall.’
The Major nodded. ‘Yeah, for the want of a nail. That’s the big problem with the Yanks: everything’s done for the lowest price. I wouldn’t use an American weapon if you paid me.’
‘Yeah, well, let’s make sure that this operation goes as it should.’
‘No problem,’ said the Major.’ He patted the crate. ‘I’ve put six clips in there, fully loaded.’
‘Excellent,’ said Shepherd. ‘And the suppressors?’
The Major nodded at a black holdall. ‘In there too. Do you want to check them?’
‘No need,’ said Shepherd. ‘When do you need them back?’
‘Whenever,’ said the Major. ‘They’re off the books and the serial numbers won’t cause us any trouble.’ He opened the ammunition box. It was filled with large polystyrene beads and the Major shoved in his hand and pulled out a spherical grenade. He brushed off a few stray beads and then gave it to Shepherd. It was painted a deep green with a thin yellow band across the top just below where the safety clip and fly-off lever were attached to the casing. Stencilled on the side were the yellow letters spelling out GREN HAND HE L109A1 and a lot number.
‘You ever thrown one?’ asked the Major.
Shepherd shook his head. ‘They were still using the L2A2 in my day.’
‘This is pretty much the same,’ said the Major. ‘Based on the Swiss HG85 but the boffins played around with the design so that the fragments can penetrate the latest body armour.’
‘Nice,’ said Shepherd.
‘Yeah, funny the way that so much money is put into coming up with better ways of killing people,’ said the Major. ‘You’d think a grenade would just be a grenade, but someone somewhere thought it worth spending a few million quid on coming up with a better one.’ He took it back from Shepherd. ‘Bog-standard percussion fuse with a delay of three to four seconds. Effective killing radius is sixty feet unprotected, fifteen feet if you’re wearing body armour and a Kevlar helmet, but frankly there wouldn’t be much left of your arms and legs. Explosion produces about eighteen hundred fragments, any one of which could ruin your day.’
‘And you don’t want it back?’
The Major put it back into the box. ‘It’s non-traceable,’ he said. ‘The lot number won’t lead anywhere, so if you do get caught with it just say you found it.’
Shepherd laughed. ‘Yeah, that should do it.’
‘And you’ve no idea what these clowns want with grenades?’
‘We’ve just got a shopping list, that’s all. They’re not very chatty about their motives but they’re talking about forty Yugos and a stack of ammunition. Charlie reckons that they’re tied in with the Norwegian mass murderer.’
‘White supremacists, then?’
‘They didn’t come over at all Ku Klux Klan when we met them,’ said Shepherd. ‘But they might have been on their best behaviour.’
‘So what do you think? They’re going to start shooting blacks and Asians?’
‘The Norwegian didn’t, did he?’ said Shepherd. ‘Most of his victims were white kids. He did what he did to draw attention to his manifesto. The only thing that made them targets was that they were at a left-wing camp. So, if anything, his target was political rather than racial.’
‘With any luck they’ll head for Westminster and get all Guy Fawkes on the Houses of Parliament,’ said the Major.
‘Chance’d be a fine thing,’ said Shepherd. ‘But that’s not how it works with terrorists, is it? They always choose the weakest targets. And the guys we’re dealing with are from the Midlands; there’s no evidence they’ll be heading down to London.’
‘So what’s Charlie’s plan? Nip them in the bud or let them run?’
‘She’s not letting me in on the bigger picture,’ said Shepherd. ‘She pinched the case from the Brummie cops, that much I do know.’
‘You think she’s after the glory?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Shepherd. ‘But at the moment she’s got me in the middle playing both ends. I’m reporting to Sam Hargrove, who reports to the top brass in Birmingham, then I get debriefed by Charlie. The shit’s going to hit the fan if Charlie moves in over the heads of the cops.’
‘Hopefully none of the shit’s going to head your way.’
Shepherd shrugged. ‘I’m hoping that Sam will take the flak,’ he said.
‘He’s the guy you worked for when you were a cop, right?’
‘Yeah, he’s a straight shooter. One of the best. So I don’t see that he’ll hang me out to dry. But the Brummie cops are going to be spitting feathers when they find out that all the work they’ve done has been pinched by Five.’
‘It’s a mucky business at best, isn’t it?’ said the Major. ‘It’s so much more black and white in the military. Both sides wear uniforms and carry weapons and the best side wins.’
‘And the losers end up dead,’ said Shepherd. ‘Unlike the world of terrorism, where the losers end up as MPs.’
The Major laughed. ‘Yeah, funny how the world changes,’ he said. ‘There’s a whole generation already who’ve no real idea what a threat the IRA were. You ask most teenagers about the Brighton bombing and they wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about. But say what you want about the IRA, at least you knew what they wanted: the Brits out and a united Ireland. You might not agree with their methods, but you could understand what they wanted and why they did what they did.’
‘They murdered plenty of civilians,’ said Shepherd sourly.
The Major held up his hands. ‘Hey, you won’t ever hear me defending the IRA,’ he said. ‘They killed enough of my friends over the years. What I
’m saying is that at least you knew what was driving them. But this new lot of terrorists? Who the hell knows what their motivation is?’
‘A life in paradise with seventy-two coal-eyed virgins if they kill the infidel,’ said Shepherd.
‘Yeah, but they can’t really believe that, can they?’ said the Major. ‘Even if you believe in God you can’t possibly believe that God, any god, would want to see innocents maimed and killed. Those guys who crashed the planes into the Twin Towers – what did they hope to achieve? And the British Muslims who blew up the tube. Does anyone know what they wanted?’ He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘The world’s going crazy, Spider. And an old fart like me just can’t make any sense of it any more.’
Spider laughed. ‘You’ve a fair few years left in you yet, boss,’ he said. ‘The mistake you’re making is assuming that they think the way that we do. They don’t. They’re brainwashed, most of them. They’re led into it, trained for it, then, if need be, they’re pushed.’
‘But what are they trying to achieve? Death to all Christians? Because that’s not going to happen. The Islamification of Europe? That’s not going to happen either. And it’s not about Iraq or Afghanistan because that happened long after the attack on the Twin Towers. And most of the troops have already been pulled out. There doesn’t seem to be any objective; and if there’s no objective, if it’s just a religious war, then it’s never going to end, is it?’
‘It’s all becoming a bit Alice in Wonderland,’ said Shepherd. ‘I can’t believe that the London bombers really believed that their actions would change anything. Or that they were going straight to heaven. There’s something else at work. Something self-destructive. Self-hatred, maybe, which spills over to hatred of the world. If you really want to worry about something, Major, think about what’ll happen if they ever get a nuclear weapon. You know that the IRA would never have even contemplated using a nuclear bomb, but these morons will. That’s what I find so scary.’ He laughed harshly. ‘I’ve got my psychological evaluation coming up so I’ll see if the MI5 shrink has any ideas on what it all means.’ He patted the crate. ‘I’ll get the guns back to you tonight.’
False Friends (The 9th Spider Shepherd Thriller) Page 19