[Spider Shepherd #13] - Dark Forces

by Stephen Leather

  ‘I think so. Something about university. Nothing major.’

  ‘Can you get away? What about the O’Neills?’

  ‘I’ll have to have a meet with Wedekind, that’s for sure. But as he gave me the Gibraltar job I don’t think I’ll have to report to Tommy and Marty. I might be able to get away tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Kids, hey?’

  ‘Have you got any?’ Shepherd didn’t even know if Willoughby-Brown was married. In fact, he knew next to nothing about the man who had his career in his hands.

  Willoughby-Brown shook his head. ‘Never had the time or the inclination,’ he said.

  Shepherd wondered what he had meant. Was he gay? Or did he mean he was married and just hadn’t got around to having children? Shepherd knew there was no way he could ask a direct question, so he looked out of the window as Willoughby-Brown concentrated on his iPhone.

  Mohammed al-Hussain rose at dawn, showered and trimmed his beard, then prayed for ten minutes before going downstairs. Jay and Adam were in the living room playing a video game, which seemed to involve them shooting and killing as many people as possible. It was almost certainly American, he thought. The Americans loved to glamorise war. They turned it into movies and computer games as if it was trivial, but al-Hussain knew that war was a serious business. Life and death, literally. Turning it into a game was disrespectful to the dead and to the living.

  He went into the kitchen. Ash was scrambling eggs and had slices of bread under the grill. There was a carton of orange juice on the table with a jug of milk. ‘Eggs okay?’ asked Ash.

  ‘Eggs will be fine, thank you,’ said al-Hussain, sitting down at the table. He was wearing a blue polo shirt, one of half a dozen he had found in the wardrobe, and a pair of jeans. ‘The clothes, they told you my size?’

  Ash nodded. ‘We were told to get you anything you might need,’ he said. ‘And if we’ve forgotten anything, please ask.’

  He took the toast from under the grill, slapped it onto a plate and put it on the table with a tub of butter, then spooned eggs onto another plate and handed it to al-Hussain, who poured himself a glass of orange juice.

  Ash helped himself to eggs and sat opposite him. ‘When you’ve eaten, we’ll take you to see the weapon,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Where are my eggs?’ asked Sunny, charging into the room.

  ‘In the fridge,’ said Ash.

  ‘You didn’t cook for me?’

  ‘You were in bed.’

  ‘Well, I’m up now.’

  ‘I’m not your chef, brother,’ said Ash.

  Sunny sat down and buttered a slice of toast. ‘Where’s the jam?’

  Ash pointed at one of the cupboards. ‘In there.’

  Sunny got up, grabbed a jar of strawberry jam and sat down again. ‘So, you good to go, bruv?’ he asked al-Hussain.

  ‘I hope so, yes.’

  ‘This is the first time you’ve been to England, right?’

  Al-Hussain nodded.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I haven’t seen much of it.’

  ‘It’s a great country,’ he said. ‘But it’ll be better under sharia law. How long do you think it’ll be, bruv, before we’re in charge? Our imam says fifty years but I think it’ll be sooner than that.’

  Al-Hussain kept his eyes on his plate.

  ‘I think twenty years. Maybe twenty-five. It’s the birth rate, that’s what’ll do it. Good Muslims have lots of children. Ten or twelve with one wife. And they have more than one wife, right? So one good Muslim can have twenty children, maybe more. But the kafir, most of them are sterile. They can’t even produce one kid.’ He smeared jam across his toast and took a bite. ‘They have one, we have twenty,’ he said, through his mouthful. ‘It’s just a matter of time before we outnumber them, innit?’

  Al-Hussain finished his eggs and put down his fork. He drank his juice, then nodded at Ash. ‘I’m ready,’ he said.

  Shepherd usually varied his journey from London to Hereford between the M40 and the M4, depending on what his BMW’s sat-nav told him. He climbed into the car and discovered from the sat-nav that he’d get to his home fifteen minutes earlier if he went via the M4. Assuming the device wasn’t lying, he’d be in Hereford at just after three o’clock that afternoon. He headed west, listening to light jazz on the radio, wondering what he would say to Liam. He’d spent so much time playing at being Terry Taylor that he’d given little thought to his son, one of the many downsides of working undercover. Terry Taylor didn’t have children so he had to banish all thoughts of Liam while he worked. If someone asked him about kids he had to answer automatically, without thinking, because if he hesitated – or, worse, was caught in a lie – then his entire legend could come tumbling down.

  Liam had been doing well at school and was expected to get good A-level grades, certainly good enough for most decent universities. It had been a while since he had spoken to his son about his career plans but in their last conversation Liam had said he was interested in video-game design. With the way the world was going it was probably as good a career as any. The problem in offering advice to his son was that Shepherd’s own career path had been fairly random. He had joined the army because he wanted travel and excitement, then switched to the SAS when he realised that regular army life wasn’t as exciting as it was portrayed in the recruitment advertising. He’d been happy enough in the SAS but his wife had begged him to leave when Liam was born because he was away from home so much. That was when he’d joined the police and been co-opted into an undercover unit. From there he’d moved to the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and when his then boss Charlotte Button had moved to MI5 he had moved with her. None of that had been planned so Shepherd really had no right to expect Liam to have his career mapped out.

  It was when he crossed the M25 that he spotted the tail. Two men in a grey Toyota. They were good – they did nothing that made them stick out – but he made a habit of varying his speed and checking his mirror. When he accelerated, the Toyota would hang back but eventually catch up with him. When he slowed, so did the Toyota. There were always several cars between them and Shepherd’s BMW and no matter how slowly he went they matched his speed. That meant they were alone: if there had been several they’d have taken it in turns and the Toyota would have dropped back at some point. He used his phone on hands-free to call Willoughby-Brown and quickly updated him.

  ‘You think they’re working for the O’Neills or is there something else I should know about it?’ asked Willoughby-Brown, when Shepherd had finished.

  ‘I’m in Taylor’s BMW, my own car’s in Hereford,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘This is unfortunate.’

  ‘It would have been a hell of a lot more unfortunate if I hadn’t spotted them,’ said Shepherd. He gave Willoughby-Brown a description of the car, and the registration number. ‘I’ll drive to Reading Services and stop there,’ he said.

  ‘How do you want to handle it?’

  ‘In a perfect world I’d just swing back to London, but I really need to see my boy. They stick pretty much to my speed so how about this? I’ll wait at Reading, and make it look as if I’m there for a meet. Then I’ll head back to London on the M4. If you can get a patrol car fixed up, I’ll go over the speed limit, take them with me, and the cops can pull them over with blues and twos. That way we hold them up and get a definite ID. I’ll leave at the next junction and head back to Hereford on the M40.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘But what if they’ve put a tracker on the car?’

  Shepherd grimaced. Willoughby-Brown was right. If they’d attached a tracker to the BMW they’d know where he went even if they lost sight of him. The fact that they had stuck close to him suggested they weren’t using a tracker, but it wasn’t definitive proof. He could dump the car and get to Hereford by train, but if he did that and they were tracking the vehicle, he might have some explaining to do down the line.

  ‘How about I get one of o
ur tech guys to run out and check the car? If the car’s clean you can be on your way. If not we can plan how to proceed.’

  ‘That would work,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘So where do we do it?’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘There isn’t time to get it done at Reading and the next service area eastwards is Heston, between junctions two and three.’

  ‘It’s a long way but it would make sense,’ said Shepherd. ‘I was aiming for a meet here, the person didn’t turn up so I headed back to London. I stopped off to use the toilets at Heston. If there’s a tracker it would all seem logical. But if I head up the M40 they’re going to know something’s wrong, especially after the cops have stopped the car.’

  ‘Heston it is, then,’ said Willoughby-Brown.

  ‘Maybe I should switch cars, too,’ said Shepherd. ‘It might have been a mistake to use it in the first place.’

  ‘I’ll have a replacement ready for you at Heston,’ said Willoughby-Brown.

  ‘Not the bomb-proof van,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘You jest,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘That’s way above your paygrade. Stay put, I’ll send you a text when the cops are in place.’ He ended the call.

  Shepherd looked in his rear-view mirror. The Toyota was still behind him, five cars back. He glanced at his speedometer. He was doing just under the speed limit. At that rate it would take him less than half an hour to reach the service station. He settled back and concentrated on the traffic ahead of him.

  Ash parked at the side of the road and turned to Mohammed al-Hussain. ‘This is it, brother.’ He pointed at the mosque in the distance. Ten years before, the building had been a pub, but as the area had been taken over by Muslims, the brewery had been forced to put it up for sale. A group of local Muslim businessmen had found the money to buy it, applied for planning permission and within a year it was a mosque.

  ‘The imam knows about this?’ asked al-Hussain.

  ‘He lets us use the room for meetings,’ said Ash. ‘Other than that, he doesn’t want to know. But he’s one of us.’

  Sunny nodded in agreement. ‘He’s all right, bruv. No need to worry. He’s the one who arranged for me and Ash to go to Pakistan for training.’

  Al-Hussain looked over at the mosque. Sunrise prayers had taken place just after eight o’clock in the morning and Zohar prayers weren’t due until midday so the street was quiet. ‘Okay,’ he said.

  The three men got out of the car and walked across the road into the mosque. There were racks in the hallway and they removed their footwear. There was a small bookshop to the right full of copies of the Koran and various religious works. Al-Hussain saw at a glance there were no controversial volumes to attract the attention of the authorities. The prayer hall was off to the left presumably, in what had once been the main bar. At the end of the corridor double doors opened into another corridor off which were several smaller rooms. There was a sign on one of the doors: STUDY ROOM. It was locked but Ash had a key. He opened it and switched on the lights. There were four wooden tables each with four plastic chairs, and a whiteboard on one wall on which were written several Arabic phrases. A thick purple curtain had been drawn across the window.

  Ash locked the door behind them. Sunny pushed a bookcase across the wooden floor and knelt down. He took a small knife from the pocket of his jeans and prised up a loose board that had been covered by the bookcase. He reached into the hole and pulled out a long package wrapped in sacking, carried it over to one of the tables and laid it down. He and Ash watched as al-Hussain carefully unwrapped it to reveal a metal transit case with two catches. He flicked them and opened the case to reveal the twin of the rifle he had used in Syria, with a Schmidt & Bender 10×42 telescopic sight, a chunky suppressor, mount, bipod, magazines, a sling and a cleaning kit.

  He took out the rifle and examined it. It appeared to be brand new.

  ‘They make shit-hot guns, the Yanks,’ said Ash.

  ‘It’s British,’ said al-Hussain.

  ‘I was told it had been brought in from America,’ said Ash.

  ‘It would have been bought there, yes, but that is because it’s almost impossible to buy in England even though they manufacture them here. All guns are illegal in the UK.’

  ‘What’s it called?’ asked Sunny, stroking the barrel.

  ‘It’s an L115A3.’ Al-Hussain picked up the telescopic sight. It was slightly different from the one he’d used in Syria, but it was good and would do the job.

  ‘That’s a mouthful,’ said Ash.

  ‘Its nickname is “Silent Assassin” because it can be used at such a long range. The targets never hear a thing. Best sniper rifle in the world. Some guys who shot at the Olympics designed it.’

  ‘It looks the business,’ said Sunny. ‘Can I have a go?’

  ‘It’s not a toy,’ said al-Hussain, putting the sight back in the case.

  ‘I know that,’ said Sunny. ‘But we fired all sorts of shit when we went to Pakistan. AK-47s and RPGs, the lot.’

  ‘This is different,’ said al-Hussain. ‘It’s sensitive. It’s the difference between a knife and a scalpel. Anyone can kill with a knife, but a scalpel has to be in the hands of a surgeon.’

  Sunny laughed. ‘That’s what you are, bruv? A surgeon?’

  Al-Hussain nodded. ‘It’s how I like to think of myself, yes.’

  ‘Fuck me, bruv, you’re so far up your own arse it’s not true.’ He laughed.

  Al-Hussain’s face hardened but he said nothing. He looked at Ash. ‘I need to fire it.’

  ‘Here?’ asked Sunny.

  ‘Of course not here,’ snapped al-Hussain, his eyes still on Ash. ‘I need to be outside, somewhere I can shoot for eight hundred metres.’

  ‘We weren’t told that you needed to practise,’ said Sunny. ‘No one said, did they, bruv?’

  ‘It’s not about practising,’ said al-Hussain. ‘The sight has to be calibrated. I’ve never used this weapon before so I won’t be used to it.’

  ‘What do you need?’ asked Ash.

  ‘Somewhere we won’t be disturbed and where no one will hear the gun being fired. As I said, I need to fire at over eight hundred metres.’

  ‘We can do that,’ said Ash. ‘We’ve run training exercises for brothers before they go out to Pakistan. We do it in the Peak District. Midweek this time of the year there won’t be anyone around. The place we used was well away from the walking trails and I know a valley that will trap any sound.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, of course. If that’s what you want.’

  Al-Hussain folded the stock of the rifle and put it into the case.

  Sunny took out his mobile phone.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked al-Hussain.

  ‘Taking a picture, bruv.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll put it on our Facebook page.’

  ‘Facebook page?’

  ‘Don’t worry, bruv. It’s not under my name. It’s an account we use to encourage recruits.’

  ‘You post on social media?’

  ‘Sure, bruv. Everyone does. And a picture of a gun like this, shit, it’ll go viral in no time.’

  Al-Hussain closed the lid. ‘No pictures, no social media, no nothing,’ he said. ‘And you need to stay off social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, they’re all monitored. What we’re doing is too important to be jeopardised by a Facebook posting.’

  ‘Okay, bruv, no problem,’ said Sunny, putting away the phone. Al-Hussain handed the case to him and he replaced it in the hole in the floorboards.

  ‘So, you can arrange a trial firing tomorrow?’ al-Hussain asked Ash.

  Ash nodded. ‘Not a problem.’

  ‘I’ll need some fruit, too.’

  ‘Fruit?’ repeated Ash.

  ‘I’ll give you a list.’

  Shepherd indicated left and slowed to leave the motorway. The Toyota also slowed and indicated a left turn half a dozen cars back. He parked and made a show of looking at his watch, then walked into the main building
. He ordered fish and chips and coffee and carried his meal to a table by the window, overlooking the car park. He couldn’t see the Toyota. If they were pros, one would stay with the vehicle and the other would come inside, but the fact that he had spotted them in the first place meant they were less than professional.

  He ripped open a couple of sachets of ketchup and smeared it across his chips. He looked around casually but no one was paying him undue attention. He sipped his coffee, then began to eat. The fish was surprisingly good, though the chips were slightly soggy. He was halfway through the plateful when his phone buzzed to let him know it had received a message. It was Willoughby-Brown: Call me. Shepherd picked up the phone and rang him back.

  ‘The car’s registered to a Chris Batey of Beckenham, and nothing’s known,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘We can’t find any connections between him and the O’Neill brothers either.’

  ‘Well, they turned off into Reading Services when I did,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Have you had eyes on them?’

  ‘They didn’t park near me. I don’t want to walk around the car park because then they’ll know I’m on to them.’

  ‘This might have nothing to do with the O’Neills, you realise that?’

  ‘Sure. But the car is in the name of Terry Taylor and I’ve been based at the Battersea flat for going on three months. I can’t see it can be anyone else. But you’re right, we need to keep an open mind.’

  ‘And if it is the O’Neills, do you think you’ve done anything to arouse suspicion?’

  ‘Everything’s been as good as gold,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘They might just be checking on you before they take the next step,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘A final look-see before admitting you to the inner sanctum.’

  ‘Or it could be Wedekind doing it off his own bat. He’s going to be vouching for me on the money-laundering and might want to make sure he’s not setting himself up for a fall.’

  ‘How do you want to play it?’

  Shepherd looked at his watch. It was after one o’clock. ‘I think we stick with Plan A,’ he said. ‘Can you get a patrol car to pick them up between junctions eleven and ten? I’ll get them to speed and they can be pulled over. I’ll head back to Maidenhead and take the A404 up to the M40.’