CHAPTER 26
Thursday, 17 August 2017
Harvey woke with a start and found Hamad standing over him.
‘What is it?’
‘I was following one of Khan’s associates and found something interesting.’
Harvey looked at his watch. It was just before five in the morning – three hours of sleep would have to do.
‘He took a cab,’ Farsi continued, ‘and stopped near a café. Someone else got in and they drove to a lock-up garage in the railway arches in Lambeth. Looks like they stayed for a few hours.’
Harvey eased himself off the travel cot, one of four that had been set up in the locker room to allow the staff to catch a few winks between sifting the huge pile of data. ‘Do we know who these people are?’
‘The guy I was tracking is Ghulam, one of Khan’s right-hand men. He met someone called Badawi. I checked him out and he’s a chemical engineer.’
‘Where’s Badawi now?’ Harvey asked.
‘Gone,’ Farsi said. ‘Flew to Turkey two days ago.’
‘That’s happening a lot recently. What do we know about him?’
‘Lived in London for fifteen years and spent the last eight teaching chemistry at North Lodge College. He sold his house for cash last week and sent the proceeds to an account in Syria.’
‘Sounds like he’s not planning on coming back,’ Harvey said. ‘Tell me about the lock-up.’
‘The registered owner is one Kasim Abdullah. I ran his name through the system and his cousin is in Khan’s inner circle.’
‘Get someone over there to check it out, and make sure they’ve got a Hazmat team with them.’
If a chemical engineer spent hours in a lock-up, it was unlikely he was playing video games. The last thing Harvey wanted was for London’s finest to go snooping around inside without the hazardous material team giving it the all-clear first.
‘Already organised,’ Farsi told him. ‘They should be there in a couple of hours.’
‘Thanks. Keep tracking Ghulam and Badawi. I want to know where they went afterwards.’
Farsi disappeared, and Harvey went to the washroom. He splashed water on his face and a little on his hair to get rid of the just-woke look. Still feeling like crap, he made a couple of coffees and took them to Sarah’s desk.
‘What are you working on?’ he asked, placing a cup next to her.
‘Badawi. Hamad told me about the lock-up and I offered to split the workload. It looks like they stayed there for five hours, then got picked up by the same taxi just after midnight. I’m looking to see if he had anything with him when he was dropped off.’
Sarah took a sip of her coffee. ‘Ew. What’s this?’
‘Decaf,’ Harvey said, lowering his voice. ‘Don’t want the baby up all night.’
They hadn’t told anyone about Sarah’s condition, preferring to delay the announcement until things had returned to normal in the office.
Sarah placed the mug to one side. ‘When this is all over, we really need to talk.’
‘Agreed.’ Harvey gave her a quick kiss, returned to his own station and entered his password on the PC. The screen presented him with the last thing he’d been working on: a list of vehicles that had left the shopping centre car park the previous day.
The team had tracked the green Nissan there and had seen the old man and a woman walking around the stores. They’d window-shopped for two hours, then driven back to a house in East London. Officers from SO15 had brought them in and the man had been briefly reunited with his wife, who had been picked up from Khan’s house earlier.
At first, the man had denied any knowledge of Khan, but after being presented with photo evidence, his story changed. He’d conceded that, under duress, he’d driven Khan to the shopping centre, but insisted that after dropping him off, he had no idea where Khan had gone.
Harvey had read the full transcript of the interview, and didn’t believe a word of it. He’d called the station and found that the suspect had been interviewed since, but wasn’t changing his story.
Having tracked Khan to the shopping centre, Harvey had no option but to check the plates of every vehicle leaving the car park in the hope that one of them might have some connection to the imam. He’d counted more than ninety cars, vans and motorcycles leaving in the hour after the Nissan had arrived, but checks made against the DVLA database hadn’t thrown up anyone even vaguely linked to Khan.
There was one hire car among them, but he wouldn’t be able to find out who’d rented it until the firm’s office opened later that morning. Just to be on the safe side, he entered a marker for it on ANPR. The automated number plate recognition system would alert him each time it passed one of the networked cameras, and he would at least be able to keep it in his sights until it could be eliminated as irrelevant.
Harvey had just finished entering the details when a yellow box flashed on the screen, showing the car’s index along with the current time and location.
M90, junction 6.
Harvey brought up a map of the UK and searched for the location.
‘What are you doing in Scotland?’ he asked himself. It was hardly an offence to drive hundreds of miles in the middle of the night, but it certainly seemed suspicious.
He logged into the road-traffic-management system and located a camera a few miles further up the road. He was disappointed to see that it was static, so he moved on until he found one that could be controlled remotely.
The traffic was light, the cars nothing but dots on the screen. Thankfully, the sun had risen a quarter of an hour earlier, so he wasn’t presented with oncoming headlights. Harvey zoomed in and concentrated on an approaching white van. The detail was so sharp that he could make out the logo on the disposable coffee cup sitting on the dashboard.
The van disappeared out of shot a second later, and Harvey repositioned the camera so that he had a good view of oncoming traffic. Several more vehicles passed the location, and he was beginning to think he’d missed the suspect when a black shape appeared at the top of the screen. As it grew larger he could make out the distinctive shape of the BMW and his pulse quickened as he zoomed in. There was only one person on board, and as it neared, he could see that the driver was Asian, but he looked nothing like Khan. No long beard, just a goatee, and this man wore glasses. Still, Harvey knew enough tradecraft to realise such subtle changes in appearance would be a decent disguise. The only way to be sure was to run the image through facial recognition.
Harvey took a dozen snaps before the car passed out of view, then looked for the clearest one and uploaded it. He set the match parameters to the most recent photo they had of Khan and hit the ‘Enter’ key. The result came back within three seconds:
98 per cent match.
‘I’ve got Khan,’ he said aloud, and his colleagues gathered round.
‘Where?’ Farsi asked.
‘Scotland. I doubt he’s got the X3, but he certainly knows who does. We need to alert every port north, east and west of him. Gareth, take over and keep an eye on him. Let me know if he turns off the motorway.’
He gave Bailey Khan’s current location, then asked Sarah to contact Police Scotland and see if they could spare any armed units to help.
‘From what I remember, they only have something like ten armed officers for every thousand on the beat,’ Sarah told him.
‘Try anyway.’
Harvey logged out of the RTMS and called up the PAP system. He checked the map overlay and saw that there were a dozen airstrips as well as a few marinas dotted along the coastline. If Khan were looking to skip the country, he was unlikely to be heading for a major port, but Harvey wanted to be thorough. The PAP alert he’d sent out had contained Khan’s old photograph, and he needed to update it as soon as possible. That meant uploading the latest image he’d taken, but he also wanted to speak to someone at each of the locations to make sure they kept their eyes peeled. Some of these places had little more than a nightwatchman on duty at this hour, and he didn’t
want to have to rely on them being awake and alert enough to check the system for updates.
‘Andrew, he just hit the A90, heading east towards Dundee. If he turns off before he gets there we could run out of coverage very soon.’
‘Thanks, Gareth.’
Harvey was able to eliminate the sites to the west, which included most of the airports. That left just one strip and a handful of marinas, and Harvey started with the closest one.
‘Hello?’ a voice said after a few rings. It was the sound of a man who’d just woken up. Harvey introduced himself and asked who he was speaking to.
‘Ross Matthews, air traffic control.’
‘Do you usually sleep in the tower?’ Harvey asked.
‘Actually, the phone diverts to my home just outside the fence. We don’t have any traffic before nine in the morning.’
‘Well, I need you to go to work early today.’ Harvey explained the reason for the call and gave Matthews his personal mobile number. ‘When you get to the tower, call me with a list of flights scheduled to leave today, as well as any passenger details you may have.’
He hung up before Matthews could object, then started dialling the first of the marinas.
‘There are no armed units in the area,’ Sarah told him. ‘The best they can offer is a couple of squad cars.’
It wasn’t ideal, but sometimes you had to go with what you had. ‘Okay, get Gareth to liaise with them. He can give them a running commentary and help set up a roadblock. I’ll continue to notify the ports in case Khan manages to evade us.’
Ten minutes later, he’d just finished talking to the fourth marina on his list when Bailey came over to his desk.
‘We lost him.’
Khan yawned as he passed a sign that indicated twelve miles to Dundee. His next turn-off was five minutes away, when he’d transition from the dual carriageway to the back roads. He was still fifty miles from his ultimate destination, but he still had time to make his rendezvous despite the setbacks he’d suffered on the journey.
The first had come just minutes after joining the M1. An accident involving a lorry and a coach had closed two lanes, causing miles of tailbacks. It had taken him over three hours to clear the traffic, but once back up to speed it was clear he’d driven over some of the debris from the crash. His rear right tyre had blown out, and it had taken another thirty minutes to replace it with the spare. The extra half-hour wasn’t the problem; he’d been due to arrive seven hours early anyway. What concerned him the most was that the temporary spare tyre was supposedly only good for short distances at a maximum of 50 m.p.h.
A quick internet search on his new burner mobile had revealed a service station fifteen miles ahead, and he’d called a mobile tyre-replacement company and asked them to meet him there with a new wheel. That had used up another two hours, and four hundred pounds from the cash he was carrying.
Night had disappeared an hour earlier, and with light traffic, he’d been able to make up a lot of time, but the police scanner he’d been listening to revealed trouble ahead. Two patrol cars had been ordered to take up position at the junction with the A923 and intercept a black BMW. That was enough to make him nervous, but when they read out his licence plate he knew they were on to him. How, he had no idea. His first thought was that the old man who’d rented the car had rolled on him, but that was all they were likely to get out of him. Only one other person knew where he was heading, and that was the man he was supposed to meet in two hours’ time.
Khan pulled into a lay-by to analyse the situation. If he was going to make the rendezvous, he would have to move quickly, but with the police waiting for him up ahead, his options were severely limited. He checked the online map and saw that the next main turn-off was the one the police were covering. There were many side roads, but these dead-ended at farms or small villages. A central barrier dividing the carriageways made turning round impossible, leaving him no choice but to continue down the road.
It didn’t necessarily have to be in the same car, though.
Khan looked up the number for the largest roadside assistance company and placed a call. He gave them his location and said his car had suddenly died on him.
‘No, there’s plenty of petrol. I think it might be electrical,’ he said.
The operator tapped at her keyboard and asked if he was a member. When Khan said he wasn’t, the woman gave him a price for the call-out. It seemed a little steep, but under the circumstances, Khan had no choice but to agree to it.
‘I have a team member who can be with you in twenty minutes.’
‘That’s perfect,’ Khan lied, and hung up. Twenty minutes was far from ideal. The police lying in wait were clearly expecting him, and if he didn’t arrive at the junction soon they would no doubt come looking for him.
Seconds felt like minutes, minutes like hours, as he stood by the car, looking up and down the road. He was relieved that it was mild enough to require a jacket, because the long sleeves were perfect for hiding the tyre iron.
The recovery vehicle arrived two minutes early, and Khan positioned himself near the back of his car. Traffic was a little heavier now, and if he were going to make his move, he’d have to be careful not to do so in front of witnesses.
‘Morning,’ the van driver said as he walked to the front of the BMW. Khan was pleased to see that he was in his fifties and had a beer belly. A younger, fitter man might have been more difficult to deal with.
‘What’s the problem, then?’
‘I was hoping you’d tell me,’ Khan said. ‘I was driving along and suddenly there was no power.’
The mechanic frowned. ‘Can you get in and start it up?’
Khan got behind the wheel and turned the key in the ignition. He’d earlier popped open the fuse box and removed items until it rendered the car useless, so he wasn’t surprised when his actions produced no result.
‘Hmm, definitely electrical,’ the mechanic said.
Khan got out, hoping to follow the man back to the van to collect some tools. It would be the ideal place to take the man down, out of sight of passing motorists. Unfortunately, the mechanic opened the front passenger door and knelt down to remove the fuse panel cover.
His handiwork was about to be discovered, leaving Khan no choice. He pulled the tyre iron from his sleeve and hit the man’s skull as hard as he could. Bone crunched and the mechanic pitched forward, and Khan followed up with a few more blows for good measure.
His victim lay still, half inside the car. Khan quickly checked for a pulse but found none. He stripped off the man’s high-visibility jacket and put it on, then searched him until he found his ID and the keys to the van. He started up the victim’s vehicle and repositioned it so that he could dump the corpse in the BMW’s boot without anyone witnessing the act.
Khan moved his bag from the boot of the car to the van, then pulled the corpse to the back of the saloon. The body was heavier than he’d expected, and Khan was sweating by the time he slammed the boot closed and locked it. It was worth the effort, as it would buy him some extra time. When the police found the car, it would take some time to discover the body in the boot, by which time he’d be miles away.
Khan started the van and pulled out into the road. He still had ninety minutes to reach his destination, and if the mechanic’s body remained undiscovered for long enough, he might just make it.
‘What do you mean you’ve lost him?’
‘Vanished,’ Bailey said. ‘He passed one camera and didn’t reach the next. There’s a few turn-offs but they lead nowhere.’
‘What about the local police?’ Harvey asked.
‘They were in position when Khan went past the last camera. He just didn’t reach them.’
‘How long should it have taken Khan to reach them?’
‘About six minutes,’ Bailey confirmed.
‘And how long has it been?’ Harvey asked, dreading the answer.
Bailey looked sheepish, confirming Harvey’s fears. ‘Twenty-three minutes.’<
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‘Christ on a stick! What were you doing all that time?’
‘I was looking to see if there was any way he could have turned off and joined up with a major road, but I came up empty.’
Harvey was almost purple by the time Bailey had finished his excuse, but chewing him out wasn’t going to rectify the situation. He would deal with him later, once they’d reacquired Khan.
‘Whoever you’re liaising with, patch them through to my phone.’
Bailey scuttled off, and Harvey’s phone rang a few moments later.
‘Andrew Harvey.’
‘This is PC Glen Cottrill of Police Scotland. I was just dealing with one of your colleagues.’
‘Not anymore. What’s your current location?’
‘We’re sitting at the junction of the A90 and A923 waiting for your man,’ Cottrill said.
‘I think it’s pretty clear he’s not coming. I suggest you go looking for him.’
‘I’ll have to wait for orders from control—’
Harvey slammed the phone down, vowing to check later to see if it really was National Idiot Day. In the meantime, he looked up the number for the chief constable of Police Scotland and dialled his mobile.
A two-minute conversation with the top man got the ball rolling, and Harvey was promised a dozen vehicles to help in the search for Khan. He’d requested helicopter support, too, but the chopper was temporarily out of action. The cop assured him that, given the small number of major roads in the area, finding the suspect shouldn’t be that difficult.
Harvey didn’t share his optimism, but thanked the brass for his help and hung up.
How Khan had managed to evade the roadblock he didn’t know, but bringing him in wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d expected. He would have preferred to be in Scotland overseeing the search, but time wasn’t on his side and his presence was needed in the office. The local police would have to handle it, and hopefully his chat with the chief constable would result in a little more motivation on their part.
Harvey finished speaking to the marinas near Khan’s last known location, then opened the list of Khan’s associates. One of them had to either have the X3 or know where it was, and the time for sitting back and watching had come to an end. He dialled Ellis’s mobile. She sounded wide awake, even at such an ungodly hour.
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