False Friends (The 9th Spider Shepherd Thriller)

by Stephen Leather

  He switched on the kettle, then picked up his phone. He scrolled through his contacts list until he found Jamila’s number. He had a sudden urge to hear her voice and he pressed the green button. When she answered it was obvious that she had been sleeping and he apologised for waking her.

  ‘That’s all right, I had to answer the phone anyway,’ she joked.

  ‘I forgot it was so early,’ he said. ‘Sorry. Just wanted to wish you a happy day, that’s all.’

  ‘Are you okay, Raj?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You sound a bit stressed.’

  ‘I’ve got a test later today. I was up all night studying for it.’

  ‘Busy, busy boy.’

  ‘That’s the life of a med student,’ he said.

  ‘Too busy to see me?’

  Chaudhry laughed. ‘Of course not. Can we do something at the weekend?’

  ‘Let me check my diary.’ She paused and Chaudhry felt his pulse quicken. ‘I’m joking,’ she said. ‘Of course we can. What do you fancy doing?’

  ‘We could go down to Brighton. Walk along the beach.’

  ‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Sunday’s best for me.’

  ‘Sunday’s great,’ said Chaudhry. ‘I’ll check train times and get back to you.’

  ‘I can drive us,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick you up.’

  Chaudhry felt another wave of panic start to overwhelm him and he gripped the phone so tightly that his knuckles whitened. ‘Jamila?’

  ‘Yes?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I really like you, you know.’

  ‘I like you too. Raj, are you sure everything’s okay?’

  ‘I’ll be okay when this test is out of the way.’

  ‘Well, good luck with it,’ she said. ‘I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I feel better knowing that.’

  Shepherd drove to Finsbury Park and found a metered parking space round the corner from the flat where Malik had gone to meet the girl. Fifteen minutes later Singh arrived in a white Mercedes four-door coupé. He had to park on the other side of the road and Shepherd walked over and got in next to him. Singh was wearing a black suit that was clearly a brand name and a blue silk shirt.

  ‘This is nice,’ said Shepherd, looking round the car. It still had its new-car smell and there wasn’t a mark on any of the surfaces.

  ‘I wanted the CLK but the wife said we needed doors for the kids,’ said Singh. ‘I said the kids could take the bus but for some reason she didn’t agree.’ He shook hands with Shepherd. ‘Good to see you, Spider.’

  ‘Thanks for coming, Amar,’ said Shepherd. ‘You didn’t have to dress up.’

  ‘This old thing?’ laughed Singh, running a hand down his jacket. ‘It’s MI5 and they notice good tailoring. In SOCA they couldn’t care less – it’s all tax inspectors and Customs officers, cheap suits and scuffed shoes.’ He nodded at the zipped-up jacket that Shepherd was wearing. ‘That’s pretty stylish,’ he said. ‘So I’m guessing you didn’t choose it yourself.’

  ‘Damien picked it out for me,’ said Shepherd. ‘It’s what all the best arms dealers are wearing, I’m told, and it does a decent job of concealing my Glock.’

  ‘You’re carrying? You didn’t say that I was going to be dodging bullets.’ He gestured at his suit. ‘I don’t want this damaged; I’m still paying for it.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s going to come to that, Amar,’ said Shepherd.

  Singh switched off the engine. ‘So what do you need?’

  ‘I’ve got a guy who went round to see a girl last night. Her name’s Nadia. His phone’s off and so is hers. I need him back home now but I can hardly go knocking on the door claiming to be a friend of his.’

  ‘Because he’s Asian?’

  ‘Partly. But if it makes you feel any better it’s because, like you, he’s young and good-looking.’ He looked at his watch. It was just after nine-thirty. ‘We need to get a move on. We’ll go into the building, you go up to the door and have a listen. See what’s happening. Then knock. Assuming she opens it, ask if Harvey’s there.’

  ‘Harvey?’

  ‘Short for Harveer. Harveer Malik. Studying for his master’s in Business Administration at the London Metropolitan University. You can say you’re on his course; it’s not too much of a stretch. If he’s not there ask her when she last saw him. Try to get a look around if you can.’

  ‘And how do I know where he was?’

  ‘You were with him in Stoke Newington when she sent him a text last night. Her name’s Nadia.’

  Singh nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘And you don’t think I need to borrow your gun?’

  ‘I’ll be close by,’ said Shepherd.

  The two men climbed out of the Mercedes and walked round the corner. The building was a purpose-built apartment block that looked as if it was council-run. There was a main entrance with two glass doors and beyond it a tiled reception area with two sets of metal lift doors. There was an entryphone system but no CCTV camera. The flat they wanted was on the fourth floor. Singh pressed the button for one of the flats on the sixth floor, but there was no response. He tried another flat and this time a woman with a heavy East European accent asked who it was.

  ‘Postman, can you buzz me in, please, darling?’ said Singh, and within seconds the lock buzzed.

  Shepherd pushed the door open and as they got into one of the lifts he pressed the button for the fifth floor. When they got out they walked down one floor.

  ‘It’s 4G,’ said Shepherd. There was a fire door leading to a corridor with doors to the flats on either side. ‘I’ll stay here.’

  ‘And I shout if I need you?’

  ‘I’ll be watching you, Amar. If there’s a problem I’ll be with you in seconds.’

  Shepherd unzipped his jacket as Singh opened the fire door and walked down the corridor. The flat was on the left. Singh took out a ceramic contact microphone from his pocket. There were white earphones connected to it, giving the equipment the look of an iPod. He popped the earphones into his ears and gently pressed the microphone against the door. There was a small dial on one side that allowed him to change the frequency being listened for and a dial on the other side. Singh jiggled both dials as he listened intently. At first he thought the flat was unoccupied but then he heard a voice. A man. His frown deepened as he realised that it wasn’t English.

  He stood stock-still with the microphone pressed against the wood. After almost a minute he heard a woman’s voice but again he didn’t recognise the language.

  He put away the microphone as he walked back to the fire door. He didn’t say anything until the fire door had closed behind him. ‘There’s something not right,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘There’s a woman in there but she’s not speaking English. Not Urdu and not Hindi either. Your guy, where’s he from?’

  ‘British Pakistani,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘So Urdu, right?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’ve never heard him speak anything other than English.’

  ‘Well, whatever they’re speaking it’s not Urdu. It didn’t sound like general conversation either. More like she was giving orders or instructions. But that’s just a feeling because I didn’t understand a word.’ He ran a hand over his hair. ‘There was something else too. The guy groaned.’

  ‘Groaned?’

  ‘That’s what it sounded like.’ He shook his head. ‘Like I said, it feels wrong. Anyway, there’s definitely someone in there but I’m not sure that knocking’s the right thing to do.’

  Shepherd looked at his watch. ‘We don’t have time for anything fancy,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t think we need back-up?’

  ‘In a perfect world, yes, but this is a far from perfect situation,’ said Shepherd. He reached into his jacket and slid the Glock from its holster.

  ‘Spider, I’m not trained for this. I’m an equipment geek.’

  ‘You’re an MI5 officer
, Amar. And a bloody good one.’

  ‘Wearing a fifteen-hundred-pound suit,’ he said. ‘Don’t suppose you’ll let me go home and change?’

  ‘This is what we do,’ said Shepherd. ‘You knock and give them your best smile and ask for Harvey. See how they play it. They might well not open the door. Was there a viewer, a peephole thing?’

  Singh shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘That’s something,’ said Shepherd. ‘They’ll have to open the door to check you out.’

  ‘Okay. And if they open the door, what then?’

  ‘If there’s a problem in there there’s every chance they’ll just close the door in your face. I’ll step in.’

  ‘And do what?’

  ‘Stop them closing the door, for a start. Then we’ll play it by ear.’

  ‘And what do I do?’ asked Singh.

  ‘Which side were the hinges on?’

  Singh frowned. ‘The left, I think. The door handle’s on the right.’

  ‘Then I’ll stand on the right. When you see me move, you move to the left.’ He patted Singh on the shoulder. ‘You’ll be fine, Amar.’

  They went back down the corridor, walking on tiptoe.

  Nadia looked at her watch, then back at Malik. ‘Why are you making this so difficult, Harvey?’ she asked. ‘Do you know how long you’ve been sitting in that chair? Almost twelve hours. Just tell me who you’ve told and the pain will stop. We’re not hurting you for the fun of it. We just want the information, that’s all.’

  Malik closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. They had used a dishcloth to gag him when he’d started screaming and his hands were tied behind the chair. He’d lost all sense of time. She’d said twelve hours but she could just as easily have said twelve days. They’d started with threats, then they’d beaten him, then they’d broken two of his fingers and then they’d gone to work on his right foot with a pair of pliers. She knew that he was hiding something from her. Malik didn’t know how she knew but she knew. It was as if she was able to look into his very soul.

  She bent down and softly stroked his cheek. ‘We don’t want to hurt you like this, Harvey. No one wants to hurt you. But you have to tell us who you told about The Sheik. You did tell someone, didn’t you, Harvey? Just nod. You don’t have to say anything. Just nod.’

  Malik’s cheeks were wet from crying but his tears had finished hours ago. He was exhausted, mentally and physically, but he knew that the moment he admitted anything it would all be over. They would kill him, he knew that for sure. He and Raj had been taken to meet Bin Laden and they had told MI5 and MI5 had told the Americans. They were directly responsible for the death of Bin Laden and if he admitted that then he was sure they would kill him. The one chance he had was to just keep denying that he’d done anything wrong.

  His instructors at the al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan had taught him the basics of interrogation. Real secrets had to be buried deep and it helped to visualise them locked away in a safe or a vault. Then the safe was to be put in a deep dark place. That’s what Malik had done. The truth was in an old-fashioned safe with a rotary dial and each time they tortured him he focused on the safe. And he kept repeating to himself that so long as the safe stayed locked they wouldn’t kill him.

  What the instructors hadn’t done was prepare him for the pain. In Pakistan he’d been slapped and punched and been made to stand for hours with a sack over his head, but that was nothing compared to what Nadia and her two companions had done to him.

  The one with the gun had hit him on the knees with so much force that he was sure the left one had cracked. Later he’d brought the butt of the gun down on Malik’s right hand, breaking his fingers. Then he’d used the pliers. And all the time he’d been smiling as if he enjoyed every second of the torture.

  The other man, the one with the knife, had been more precise with the pain that he’d inflicted. He had worked the knife into Malik’s hands with the precision of a surgeon. That was when they’d gagged him. The man would torture him for a few minutes then they would wait for him to stop crying before removing the gag and asking him if he was ready to talk.

  He’d pretended to be confused, that he didn’t understand what they were asking. That was the first line of defence, the instructors had said. Play dumb. And if that didn’t work, say nothing. Then, if the pain became unbearable, lie. Lies had to be checked, which meant that the interrogation would have to stop.

  The problem for Malik was there was no lie he could tell Nadia that would stop the punishment. She had only one question for him. Who did he tell?

  At first he’d denied that he’d gone to Pakistan, but Nadia knew which camp he’d been in and who had trained him. Then he’d denied that he’d been taken to see The Sheik, but Nadia knew when he’d been and who had taken him to the compound in Abbottabad. She knew everything, Malik realised. And that meant she had been sent by al-Qaeda.

  At just after midnight the man had stopped using the knife; he had produced a pair of pliers and gone to work on his toes. Malik kept passing out, and each time that happened they would wait until he woke up. The waking up was the worst time, because for a few seconds he’d imagine that it was all a dream and then the horror would pour over him like a cold shower, the realisation that the torture was real and that there was nothing he could do to stop it. Well, there was one thing he could do, of course. He could tell the truth. He could tell them that he was an MI5 informer, that he’d told MI5 where Bin Laden was hiding. If he told her that then the torture would stop. Everything would stop.

  The more the men had tortured him, the gentler Nadia had become. She would stroke his cheek, call him sweetheart, tell him that she hated seeing him in pain. ‘Just tell me the truth,’ she’d said to him a hundred times or more. ‘Tell me the truth and I’ll make them stop.’ But Malik couldn’t tell her the truth because he knew without a shadow of a doubt that if he did they would kill him.

  As dawn broke he was unconscious most of the time and the carpet around his feet was wet with his blood. That was when Nadia had started asking him about Chaudhry. She knew that he had been in Pakistan with him. She knew that Chaudhry had gone with him to the compound in Abbottabad. She began to ask more questions about Chaudhry. Who his friends were. Where he went, who he spent time with. How often he went to see his parents. Malik began to hope that Nadia was starting to believe that he hadn’t betrayed The Sheik and was looking for someone else to blame. Chaudhry. Malik tried to concentrate, tried to work out some sort of strategy that might result in him staying alive. If he could make them think that Chaudhry was the traitor maybe they would let him live. And if he could get away he would be able to get help; he would call MI5 and they would pull both of them out and keep them safe. As the minutes went by and they continued to hurt him and make him bleed he clung to the hope that he might somehow be able to fool them.

  ‘How long have you known Raj?’ she asked.

  ‘Since we were kids.’

  ‘Do you trust him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think he would betray The Sheik?’

  ‘No. I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘What about you, Harvey? Did you betray The Sheik?’

  ‘No. I swear. As Allah is my judge.’

  ‘Allah is not your judge today, Harvey. I am. And I do not believe you.’

  Then the gag was pushed into his mouth and the man with the pliers began to work on his toes again and he screamed into the dishcloth.

  When Malik came to, the man with the pliers was standing in front of him. There was blood on the serrated tips and what looked like pieces of flesh. The man was looking at Nadia and Nadia was staring at the door. Then there was a ringing sound. A doorbell.

  Nadia waved at the man with the pliers to go into the kitchen. He knelt down and picked up his knife, then hurried over to the kitchen door. The doorbell rang again. The man in the Chelsea shirt aimed his gun at the door and whispered something at Nadia. She shook her head and pointed at the bedroom.


  There was a knock on the door, three rapid taps.

  The man in the Chelsea shirt disappeared into the bedroom and closed the door.

  Nadia bent down and put her mouth next to Malik’s ear. ‘Make a sound, any sound at all, and I will slit your throat myself,’ she said. She patted him gently on the cheek, then walked slowly over to the door. ‘Who is it?’ she asked.

  Malik heard a man’s voice but it was muffled and he couldn’t hear what was said. The doorbell rang again, three short rings followed by a longer one.

  Nadia slipped the chain lock on and opened the door a fraction. ‘Who is it?’ she asked. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m here to get Harvey,’ said a voice.

  Singh hadn’t expected the girl to be so pretty, but he could see that she was nervous.

  ‘This is my apartment. There’s no Harvey here,’ she said. ‘You must have the wrong address.’

  She tried to close the door but Singh put up his hand and held it open. ‘Harvey said he was coming here. You’re Nadia, right?’

  She frowned. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Harvey did,’ said Singh. ‘He said he was coming to see you. Said he might stay overnight and that if he did I was to pick him up here.’

  ‘He gave you this address?’

  Singh nodded and grinned. ‘How else would I know to come and ring your bell? Now stop messing about, Nadia. If Harvey’s still in bed then tell him to get his trousers on, will you?’

  Shepherd listened, his gun pointing up at the ceiling. Singh was ad-libbing brilliantly, making it very difficult for her to close the door in his face. If anything he was doing too good a job because if Nadia did have Harvey captive in the flat there was a strong possibility that she might decide to do something about the man at her door.

  ‘Nadia, I know what it’s like, family honour and all that, but if Harvey’s there he needs to get out here now, and if he isn’t you need to tell me where he is because his phone’s off.’ He winked. ‘Come on, honey, I don’t care what the two of you got up to.’