Trojan

by Alan McDermott

  ‘If you’d come to me with that information yesterday, we would be well on our way to finding the X3. Next time, I want to know every tiny detail, no matter how insignificant you think it is. That goes for everyone.’

  Ellis entered the room and stood next to Harvey.

  ‘I just got off the phone with the Home Secretary. He has authorised unlimited overtime and manpower, so we’ll be absorbing a few people from Six until this is resolved. In the meantime, sleep is a luxury we can’t afford. If you’ve got plans for the next few days, cancel them. There’s a deadly agent out there, and we have no idea when they intend to use it. Let’s just assume it’s soon.’

  Ellis handed the meeting back to Harvey, who began assigning the operatives with names from the list.

  ‘Gerald, I want you in on this, too,’ he said to Small. ‘If you’re working on anything, put it on hold. We need every able body tracking these people.’

  Harvey dismissed the group and returned to his own desk, where he brought up the list of names. He’d opted to take the first five, and number one was Nasir Qureshi, the courier who had met al-Hosni days earlier. Because Qureshi had returned to Syria before the women had arrived in the UK, Harvey knew he couldn’t possibly have the X3, so he scratched him and moved on to the next person of interest. He referenced the man’s name in the surveillance log and, armed with the date and time of the meeting with al-Hosni, he looked up the nearest CCTV camera.

  His stomach growled as he logged into the camera control room, and he fired off a quick message to Ellis, asking her to order sandwiches for the team. It promised to be a long night, and his next hot meal could be days away.

  He stole a glance over to Sarah’s desk, but she was deep in concentration. Whatever it was that she had to say to him, it would have to wait.

  The imam sat in his office and looked at the clock on the wall as it ticked inexorably towards eight o’clock. His young charges would soon start to arrive, though there was only one he was interested in this evening. A young man who would carry out the act he had been working towards for the last few years.

  The imam had arrived in Britain as a dependant of his late wife, a solicitor who had succumbed to cancer two years earlier. She had been the one to arrange his visa based on his documents, almost all of which were convincing forgeries. The university diploma was fake, as were his work history and references. They’d been created by his masters in order to facilitate his move to the heart of the enemy stronghold. Within hours of his arrival he’d sought out the local mosque and passed on the message he’d been told to convey.

  The path to victory starts here.

  The incumbent hierarchy had resisted the orders, and days later their leader had been found dead in an alleyway. The new imam had quickly been asked to step into his position, mostly by those who feared a similar fate. The old guard had soon been cleared out, and the new regime had set about the task of finding young blood willing to listen to the new teachings.

  The kids he’d chosen had been those desperate for inclusion. They were the victims of bullying at school, or those whose fathers wielded a belt rather than offering a welcoming bosom. The imam had made them all feel wanted, needed, part of a new family.

  Their daily lessons had consisted of his version of selected verses from the Quran:

  And slay them wherever ye find them . . . Such is the reward of the disbelievers.

  The actual text and preceding verses referred to the act of self-defence, but that didn’t suit the imam’s purpose. He used the following verses to show that jihad, far from being a ‘spiritual struggle’, was actually a call to arms:

  Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it happen that ye hate a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing which is bad for you. Allah knoweth, ye know not.

  There is no blame for the blind, nor is there blame for the lame, nor is there blame for the sick (that they go not forth to war). And whoso obeyeth Allah and His messenger, He will make him enter Gardens underneath which rivers flow; and whoso turneth back, him will He punish with a painful doom.

  With the subtle omission of a few words and readings taken out of context, he had managed to convince his fledgling flock that Allah’s only wish was for them to defeat the disbelievers.

  These lessons were followed by first-hand accounts of the atrocities inflicted on their Muslim brethren over the last quarter of a century, from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Libya to Syria – tales backed up by graphic photos and the occasional video depicting crimes against Islam, each designed to instil further hatred of their oppressors.

  Several of his protégés had gone to fight in the Middle East, while the more promising ones had been chosen to make England their battleground.

  The imam watched as the first of the young men entered the mosque and took off their shoes. So far, three stood in front of him, all wearing hooded jumpers and carrying backpacks over their shoulders. He remained silent as he waited for the other five to turn up, and when the last one came through the door ten minutes late, he saw the nervous expression on the youth’s face. He was clearly expecting a dressing-down, but the imam saved him the humiliation.

  He’d sold the evening’s exercise as a test of their counter-surveillance skills, and had set them a challenge: get from a set point to the mosque in three hours using the most circuitous route imaginable. Some had started in Holloway, others in Kensington and White City. All of them would be followed, he’d promised, and those who took the easy route would suffer his wrath.

  In truth, he’d only had one boy tailed, a promising nineteen-year-old who had excelled at the training camp he’d attended in northern Pakistan. The trip was supposed to have been a pilgrimage to his parents’ homeland during his gap year, but only the imam and a select few others knew the real reason for the six-month vacation.

  Iqbal stood among the other boys, all looking at him expectantly, but he remained silent until Ghulam entered the building and offered the slightest of nods before disappearing into the imam’s office.

  ‘You have done well this evening. The reports I received have been very encouraging, and I am glad to see you have all been paying attention to the lessons you’ve been given. However, the test is not yet over.’ He walked among them and handed each of them a twenty-pound note. ‘As you make your way back home, I want you to take a different route. Again, your job will be to evade the man following you. At some point, I want you to change your clothes. Get rid of the top you are wearing now and change into the one you have in your backpack. Make sure you do this in an area with no CCTV coverage.’

  He stood in front of Iqbal and looked him up and down. ‘Go into my office. There is something about your performance this evening that needs to be addressed.’

  Iqbal looked shaken but he did as instructed.

  ‘Wait here,’ the imam told the others, and followed Iqbal into the room, closing the door behind him. Ghulam was waiting, and had what looked like a silver fire extinguisher in his hand.

  ‘Take a seat,’ he said, and Iqbal sat in a chair opposite a large oak desk. He clasped his hands and held them between his knees, a nervous look on his face. The imam sat opposite him, resting his elbows on the desk and steepling his fingers.

  ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘I asked you here because I have a special task for you. The one you’ve been training for.’

  He paused to let the words sink in. He’d discussed this moment with Iqbal a few times, and now that the time had come, he wanted to make sure he could trust the boy to follow it through to its conclusion.

  Iqbal looked up at him, determination etched on his face. ‘What do you need me to do?’

  It was just the reaction the imam was hoping for. He took the device from Ghulam. ‘I want you to set this off on Friday.’ He showed the boy how to arm the canister. ‘Flick this guard up, move the switch to the “On” position and hold the button down for three seconds. Got it?’

  Iqbal nodded. ‘Will it hurt?
’

  ‘Only for a moment, but once it is activated, you can take another way out.’

  Ghulam reached into his waistband and produced a small pistol. ‘It is already loaded. Just remove the safety catch, like this, then point and fire.’

  ‘I can do that.’

  ‘Good. I won’t see you again after tonight, but you will always be in my thoughts. When word spreads of your deed, none will be prouder than I. Your own reward awaits you in Jannah.’

  He told Iqbal to place the device in his backpack, then gave strict instructions regarding the deployment site as well as the planned time.

  ‘When you leave this room, you must look as if you have been admonished. Tell no-one about this conversation, not even your closest friend. As I told the others, I want you to take the long way home and change your clothes during the journey. Did you bring a spare hoodie?’

  ‘I did,’ Iqbal said, ‘and I added these to my bag.’

  He showed the imam the white designs that adorned his backpack. ‘They are attached with Velcro, so when I change my top I can remove these, too. It will make it harder to spot me once I have changed.’

  The imam beamed at the boy. ‘You are more than ready. May Allah watch over your travels.’

  He opened the door and let Iqbal walk through, then followed him out, a stern look on his face. The youths had been chatting among themselves, but stood to attention when they saw the imam.

  ‘Go home, all of you. Ghulam will arrange the next test and will contact you at the weekend. Remember your instructions for tonight.’

  The imam turned and walked back into the office, relieved that his part in Karim’s plan was almost over.

  CHAPTER 21

  Wednesday, 16 August 2017

  Harvey sipped at his second cup of coffee of the morning, hoping it would work faster at waking him up. It was barely seven and, despite going home dog-tired, he had managed little sleep.

  He’d tried to get Sarah to open up to him, to reveal what it was that had caused their spat earlier in the day, but she’d insisted that it wasn’t the time, and had quickly fallen asleep. Harvey hadn’t been so lucky. He’d lain awake trying to figure out what he’d done wrong. He knew for a fact that he hadn’t consciously been flirting with Malika, which is what seemed to have set her off, but could she have read something into it that he hadn’t even noticed?

  He’d finally drifted off after three, only to be shaken from his dream two hours later. After a quick shower, he’d tried once more to prise something out of Sarah, but she’d brushed him off again. At least she’d been her normal, bubbly self this morning, and while he was still puzzled as to what had brought on the sudden change in her, he was grateful for the return to the status quo.

  His computer finished booting up, and he logged in and checked his messages. The Metropolitan Police had made no progress with the murder of the plastic surgeon. A van had been seen leaving the area, but the plates had turned out to be false. The rest of the team had sent in progress reports before clocking off for the night, and Harvey went through them one by one. Nine people had been eliminated from the suspect list, their actions nothing out of the ordinary. He finally came to Gerald Small’s report. He’d given the technician an additional duty, and that had been to hack into the computers of the haulage company that employed Anjam Shah.

  Shah had a delivery of motor parts to the south of France on Friday 11th August. No cargo on the return journey.

  It immediately struck Harvey as unusual. He had a friend who worked the roads and knew that on long trips, they only made their money if they took goods both ways. This was further proof that Shah was the one who had helped the women into Britain, and his ties to al-Hosni’s mosque confirmed that they were on the right track.

  It was the only positive, though. Everyone else on the team had struck dirt in their efforts to find anything on al-Hosni’s associates. That was to be expected with such a laborious task, but going over old CCTV footage was their only way to discover who had the X3. Gareth Bailey had suggested pulling in one of the people al-Hosni had met with, just to see if they could get him to talk, but it was far too risky. For one, it would tip their hand. As soon as word got out that his friends were being arrested, al-Hosni would destroy any evidence connecting him to the nerve agent. The second stumbling block would be trying to get such a person to talk. The worst they could do was question the suspect; if he refused to answer, they could do nothing more.

  With Shah’s involvement confirmed, Harvey went over the surveillance reports from the previous day. Al-Hosni had left his house at the usual time and travelled to the mosque as normal, only this time he’d stayed inside after everyone else had left. When he’d emerged an hour later, it had been with four men. Harvey studied the pictures that had been taken with a telephoto lens, but didn’t instantly recognise any of them, so he opened the facial recognition software and fed the images into the system. The search produced four confirmed matches, and he studied their files until he saw Ellis swipe her way onto the main floor.

  ‘I think we may have something here,’ he said, halting her progress. ‘Al-Hosni was seen to meet four new people yesterday, and their profiles ring all sorts of alarm bells. This one in particular.’

  Ellis bent to read the information on his screen. ‘A chemical engineering student?’

  ‘One who has just spent a year in Turkey, though I’ll bet our friends in Ankara will have a hard time coming up with an address for him there. Most likely he used it as a gateway to Syria.’

  ‘Check with them,’ Ellis told him, ‘and send details of all four to my screen.’

  She continued on her way to her office, and Harvey composed and sent a quick message containing links to the relevant files. That done, he placed a call to the Turkish National Intelligence Organisation. Three minutes later, he had their promise to contact him with the man’s details by lunchtime.

  This latest suspect ticked all the right boxes, and Harvey decided to make him his priority. The previous night, he’d followed the first of his suspects around London, but at no point did he hand off anything that could possibly be the X3, nor did he receive anything. That scratched one off the list, but he faced another long day of it.

  He was about to commence checking on the chemical engineer when a communication from GCHQ hit his inbox. He opened it and saw that a text message had been sent to al-Hosni’s phone.

  Two more days

  The timestamp was thirteen minutes earlier, and Harvey knew he had just been privy to the start of the countdown. The sender was unidentified, but the location the text had been sent from was appended to the message.

  Birmingham.

  He would now have to move his meagre assets around, spreading them even more thinly. Maynard had promised unlimited resources, but that had been when they thought the threat was confined to the capital. There was no telling how he would react to a request to double their numbers.

  Still, that would be for Ellis to deal with.

  Harvey went over to Sarah’s desk to pass on some instructions. While she got to work on it, he walked into the boss’s office with a printout of the message and waited until Ellis had read it.

  ‘We’re going to need more people,’ he said.

  ‘Clearly. What connections does al-Hosni have up there?’

  ‘Sarah is looking into that as we speak, but I’d like to get a small team assembled. They can head up there and we’ll brief them once they arrive.’

  ‘Take four men off their assignment down here and get them moving. I’ll organise their replacements after speaking to Maynard.’

  Harvey turned to leave, then stopped. ‘I was thinking, maybe it would be a good idea to have a chat with al-Hosni and let him know that we’re on to him.’

  ‘You mean like Sarah did with Alexi Bessonov last year?’

  Her reply was like a slap in the face. Sarah’s decision to confront the Russian gangster had resulted in her torture, and if Ellis had taken a few more minutes
to find Bessonov’s hidden cellar, Harvey’s girlfriend would most certainly have died.

  ‘She did it alone, but I was thinking more of a cosy chat in the street, with plenty of backup. If we can make him nervous, he might make the mistake that leads us to the X3.’

  ‘I’ll consider it,’ Ellis said, ‘but only as a last resort.’

  Harvey left her office and saw that more of the day shift had arrived, unsurprisingly none of them looking fresh or relaxed. He returned to his desk and greeted Hamad Farsi, who was too busy yawning to respond with anything but a grunt.

  ‘Got a job for you,’ Harvey said. ‘This one’s nice and easy.’

  He gave Farsi the details of the phone that had been used to text al-Hosni and asked him to locate it on CCTV, specifically the place where the text message had originated. While his colleague got on with that task, he composed a message to the rest of the team, asking them to pay special attention to anyone on their list who made a journey north in the last few days. He sent it out, then looked through the duty roster to see who he could send to Birmingham. He cross-referenced them with the nine people who had been scrubbed from the list, then pulled them from their current assignments. Ten minutes later, he’d spoken to each one and given them their new instructions.

  While he waited for them to battle the traffic on the M40 en route to their destination, Harvey checked the log to see when chemical engineer Malik Hansa had met with al-Hosni. From there, he backtracked through CCTV, another yawn escaping as he settled into what promised to be another marathon shift.

  David Manners checked his tablet as his colleague pulled into the outside lane to overtake a slow-moving lorry. The motorway journey had taken an hour so far, and they still had another sixty miles to go. Commuter traffic and roadworks meant they wouldn’t hit Birmingham until after ten, but he was at least grateful for the change of scenery. After days of watching people do nothing at all, moving felt good. The lead might turn out to be nothing, but it beat sitting in the back of a van for hours on end, waiting for a suspect to do something more sinister than put the bins out.