[Spider Shepherd #13] - Dark Forces

by Stephen Leather

  ‘You’re playing with fire,’ said Shepherd. ‘They’re obviously here for a reason.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘But we know where they’re staying and we have our best surveillance people on them. The guy they were talking to in one of the pictures is known to us and he’s putting them up in his house.’

  ‘So what do you need me to do?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘At the moment, nothing. You can start looking for an exit strategy from the O’Neill brothers.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘The Gerry and Karl Palmer thing has turned into a can of worms. When the cops went through Palmer’s house to find the marijuana, they got a stack of paperwork among which they found receipts for a number of storage lockers. In the lockers they found more drugs, an Aladdin’s cave of stolen goods and vehicles. The Palmers were looking at serious prison time so they asked for a deal. Seems that their robbing the O’Neills wasn’t down to luck. They’ve had their own man in the O’Neills’ organisation for years and know where all the bodies are buried.’ He laughed. ‘Not the real bodies, obviously. But their drug connections, their storage facilities, and a fair bit of intel about their money-laundering. We can add that to what we’ve got on Sammy Patel.’

  ‘How’s that going?’

  ‘Very well,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘The video footage is perfect. And him talking about Tommy O’Neill is the icing on the cake. We’re still following the money and as soon as he opens the account in Dublin we can bring him in. He’ll fold, he’ll have no choice, and when he does he’ll give up all the O’Neill money.’

  ‘So it’s enough to put them away?’

  ‘It’s enough to get them on remand, that’s for sure. That’ll take them out of circulation for a year or two. So we can move against Wedekind on the conspiracy-to-murder charge. With the O’Neills on remand, there’s a good chance we can get him to open their books. We can explain that without their assets the O’Neills lose a lot of their influence. Plus we already have Wedekind on tape, talking about Mark Ashton.’

  Shepherd frowned. ‘You’ll threaten to get the video to Ashton? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘You make that sound so sinister, Daniel. We’ll exert whatever pressure we have to in order to get Wedekind to fold. I’m sure he will.’

  ‘So your whole case is based on planting evidence, blackmail and threats?’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. But all that matters is that the CPS has a case solid enough to put the O’Neills away for the rest of their natural lives. Their productive years anyway.’

  ‘And the end justifies the means?’

  ‘I’m afraid it does, yes. You’ve seen how the O’Neills operate. They destroy lives. They kill people. They profit from misery. Playing by the rules hasn’t worked and if we continue to do so they’ll never face justice. You don’t agree?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether I agree or not, does it?’

  ‘I don’t see why it upsets you, Daniel. Undercover work is hardly playing by the rules, is it? It involves lies and subterfuge. Hardly playing fair.’

  Shepherd bit his tongue, knowing there was no point in arguing with the man.

  ‘So, it’ll take a day or two for the Palmers’ lawyers to get a deal in place with the CPS. Then we can bring the O’Neills in. But we’re going to have to talk about the timing. We have to get Tommy here in the UK. If he realises what’s going on he’ll go to ground in Dubai and we’ll never get him back.’

  ‘He’ll be back for the boxing,’ said Shepherd. ‘The Kuznetsov-Hughes fight.’

  ‘And he and his team will have to go through security, which means no nasty surprises,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘Perfect. Marty and Evans will be with him. We let them pass through security and sweep them up. You too, right? Best they see you being pulled in.’

  ‘Might be as well,’ said Shepherd. ‘If I’m not there, alarm bells will ring.’

  ‘Excellent. Saturday night it is. We’ll pick up Wedekind separately and see if he can be turned. Patel, too. With what you’ve gathered over the past few months, plus the Palmers’ intel, we’re in good shape. Job well done, Daniel.’

  Willoughby-Brown ended the call and Shepherd looked at his watch. It was early afternoon, time to go home for a shower and a change of clothes before heading out for a night’s drinking with Paul Evans. Drinking with Evans was easy enough. He just hoped he wouldn’t get dragged along on another debt-collecting mission.

  Willoughby-Brown woke up to the sound of his mobile ringing. He looked at the illuminated clock on his bedside table. It was just after five a.m. He took the call. It was Wendy Aspden. ‘They’re on the move,’ she said. ‘They left the house before dawn and went to a local mosque. There they picked up a metal case and put it in the boot of the car. They’re heading south now, to London.’

  Willoughby-Brown sat up, rubbing his face. ‘What sort of case?’

  ‘Long and thin, three feet by a foot or so. There’s no way of knowing what’s inside but it looks like a gun case to me. We have photographs.’

  ‘We need to take a look at it, obviously,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘What’s the surveillance situation at the moment?’

  ‘We’re short-handed, just two cars. But I have two bikes en route. We’ll be fine.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll get you more eyes in London.’

  Willoughby-Brown hung up and called MI5’s duty-man in the surveillance department, told him what was needed, then headed to the bathroom to shower and shave.

  Shepherd got back from a run in Battersea Park to find two missed calls, both from blocked numbers, and a terse voicemail from Willoughby-Brown. Just two words – ‘Call me.’ Shepherd tapped in his number.

  His boss answered immediately. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Battersea,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Your two jihadists are in London, and we think they’ve got a gun.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘All we’ve seen is a case, but it looks like the sort that would contain a rifle. They had it in Sheffield and drove it down to London.’

  ‘And you’re thinking what? An assassination?’

  ‘No, we figured they were going to sell it on eBay,’ said Willoughby-Brown, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘Of course we’re assuming they’re planning to shoot someone.’

  ‘So pull them in.’

  ‘We’re hoping to see who else is involved,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘I’ll pick you up outside in ten minutes.’

  Shepherd showered, changed into jeans and a polo shirt, grabbed a jacket and hurried down to the pavement. Willoughby-Brown’s van was already there with the engine running. The door opened and Shepherd climbed in.

  As he sat down the door closed electronically and the vehicle pulled away from the kerb. Willoughby-Brown handed him a photograph taken by the surveillance team. It was of Amma al-Kawthari holding a long metal case. Elyas Assadi was standing at the back of the car, a white Toyota Prius. The picture had been taken at night but it was clearly a gun case.

  A third man – the one al-Kawthari and Assadi had been talking to outside the mosque – was opening the driver’s door. Willoughby-Brown tapped the third man. ‘Haaziq Masood,’ he said. ‘Uses the name Harry. British-born Pakistani. He went to Pakistan for six months about ten years ago, before we started regarding such family visits as a red flag. He’s on the dole and seems to be living beyond his means, which suggests that someone is funding him. He rents the house from a Pakistani landlord. His name is on the utility bills and the electoral roll.’

  ‘How could they get a rifle here in the UK?’ Shepherd asked. ‘It’s a specialist weapon.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be easy but it wouldn’t be impossible either. You know as well as I do that anything is available at the right price. I doubt there’d be one for sale in the UK but you could definitely pick one up in the States – you’d just have to get it into this country. The thing is, it’s not the weapon that matters, really.
It’s the man. There’s no way of knowing what the gun is from the case, but if it’s a sniper’s rifle then a gun like that needs a professional to fire it.’

  Shepherd passed the photograph back to Willoughby-Brown. ‘Where’s the gun now?’

  ‘A house in Ealing. Masood drove them down early this morning, dropped them off and headed back to Sheffield.’

  ‘And the rifle?’

  ‘We’re assuming they took it into the house with them but there was a bit of a cock-up surveillance-wise and we didn’t actually have eyes on them as they went inside.’

  ‘Run that by me again?’

  ‘The house is on a busy road and it was the time of the school run, which made it worse. We had a car in front and a bike but Masood turned into the driveway without indicating and our guys had no chance to slow down. By the time they’d doubled back the suspects were all inside. Masood left after half an hour. He’s being followed back to Sheffield as we speak and we’ll be looking to see if he still has the case, but I think it’s a fair assumption that he dropped it off with al-Kawthari and Assadi.’

  ‘So what’s the plan?’

  ‘Ideally we’ll put a tracker on the gun so we’ll always be able to follow it. And we’ll keep the Ealing house under surveillance. Once the sniper turns up, we’ll have him.’

  ‘You don’t think the men you have under surveillance are the snipers?’

  ‘There’s no way of knowing for sure but it looked as if they were just delivering it.’

  ‘That’s a guess.’

  ‘Agreed. But an educated one. They had Syrian passports so they probably came in with the rest of the refugees who flooded into Europe. There’s no record of them having come by air or rail, which suggests they were smuggled in, possibly through Calais. That’s a haphazard way of getting a sniper into the country. So I’m assuming these two guys are legmen and at some point they’ll deliver the rifle to the sniper. Whoever he is.’

  ‘And I’m in your van because?’

  ‘I want you on the ground with the surveillance team to see if you recognise anyone else from the passports you saw. It’ll save time.’

  ‘What about the O’Neill job?’

  ‘This takes precedence for now.’

  ‘Don’t forget I’ve got to be at the boxing tomorrow. The main bout’s at six.’

  ‘We should be done by then,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘But right now I need you with the surveillance team. There’s a very real danger of a major terrorist incident.’

  The bombs had taken weeks to prepare. Work had started even before Mohammed al-Hussain had left Syria and begun his journey to England. They were relatively simple, similar to the ones made by the IRA during their campaign of terror. The main explosive was ANFO – ammonium nitrate, fuel oil. The ammonium nitrate had come from fertiliser; purification had taken time. Each bomb required 200 kilograms of ammonium nitrate, which required 600 kilograms of fertiliser. Four bombs meant 2,400 kilograms of fertiliser. Buying that much in one go would attract attention so two jihadists drove around the north of England buying individual 50-kilogram bags, forty-eight bags in total. Their names were Farooqi and Hashmi.

  Farooqi was the older of the two. He had recently turned forty and was the father of three young girls to one wife and two sons to another. Hashmi was half Farooqi’s age, and was studying chemistry at Reading University. Farooqi had attended a training camp in Afghanistan six months before the Nine Eleven attacks and had been involved in the preparations for the Seven Seven attacks in London, but had never come to the attention of the UK authorities.

  Hashmi’s training had been confined to the internet, and while he had been something of a firebrand in his youth, his local imam had explained that he should start thinking long-term. He needed to stay below the radar, to keep his fundamentalist leanings hidden from outsiders, and it had been the imam who had encouraged him to study chemistry.

  Farooqi and Hashmi took the bags to a unit on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Reading, where they purified the ammonium nitrate under the watchful eye of a Pakistani chemist, who had studied at the University of Birmingham and never returned to his homeland. His name was Aleem Sayyid but his friends called him Ali. He was married with two young daughters, lived in Wolverhampton and had told his wife that his company was sending him to do trouble-shooting on a lab they had in Scotland. In fact he slept on a camp bed in the industrial unit, phoning home every evening for a before-bed talk with his children.

  Farooqi and Hashmi didn’t know what the bombs would be used for, but they knew they were working on something big, something that would echo around the world. Unlike Sayyid, they went home each evening, returning first thing to continue their work. The task was simple and repetitive but had to be done perfectly. The main problem was to ensure that the ammonium nitrate stayed dry. Any moisture would render it inert so the purification stage was done in small amounts, just one kilogram at a time. It was filtered twice, then dried and placed in Tupperware containers. The work was slow and the men had to wear heavy masks to filter out the fumes and dust. The process reduced a kilo of fertiliser to a third of a kilo of ammonium nitrate. Working from eight o’clock in the morning until six o’clock in the evening, they managed to produce about thirty kilos of ammonium nitrate each day. There were other units on the industrial estate and the men didn’t want to draw attention to themselves by working late at night so the two assistants went home. Sayyid switched off all the lights and stayed there on his camp bed, watching movies on Netflix.

  Farooqi and Hashmi brought in food and water each morning, along with clean clothes and anything else that Sayyid required. They worked together, they ate together and they prayed together, united in their common aim to bring death and destruction to London, to show the infidels that nowhere was safe from the wrath of Allah.

  The van turned into the driveway of a large detached house. There were two black SUVs parked outside, along with a white van and a people-carrier. The house was shielded from the road by a line of poplars and spreading rhododendrons. ‘We’re using this as a base for the moment,’ said Willoughby-Brown, as he climbed out of the vehicle. ‘The house the jihadists are holed up in is a couple of hundred yards away.’

  Shepherd followed him over the gravelled drive to the front door. It was opened before they reached it by a man in bomber jacket, jeans and trainers. He nodded at Willoughby-Brown and held the door open for them.

  ‘This is Thomas Leigh,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘He’s one of three SFOs on standby here. We’ve another three in a car closer to the house.’

  Shepherd waved at Leigh and the man flashed him a tight smile, closing the door behind them. SFOs were specialist firearms officers, assigned to SCO19. They were the most highly trained of the Met’s firearms officers, almost to the level of the SAS. The hallway had rooms off to left and right. Two men with short haircuts and casual clothing were sitting on a sofa watching television. Glocks and spare magazines lay on the coffee-table in front of them. Willoughby-Brown tapped on the door to their left and pushed it open. A middle-aged blonde woman, wearing black-framed glasses and a headset, was sitting at a table with three screens in front of her. She waved at Willoughby-Brown as he ushered Shepherd in.

  ‘This is Wendy Aspden. She’s heading up the surveillance team,’ he told Shepherd.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Aspden, shaking his hand. ‘You’re the man with the magic memory?’

  ‘I never forget a face,’ he said, and looked at the screens on the table. The one in the centre was divided into four, each showing a different view of the target house, a neat semi-detached with an adjoining garage. To the left, a digital map of the area bore several red dots, presumably marking the positions of her team. To the right a comms screen was filled with emails and instant messages.

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked Willoughby-Brown, peering over her shoulder.

  ‘They haven’t moved out of the house all day,’ she said. She clicked her mouse and one of the
cameras switched to an infrared view. It showed three figures, two lying down in an upstairs bedroom, one sitting in the front downstairs room. ‘We think the two upstairs are your guys. The man downstairs is, we think, a Johnny Malik. He rented the house two months ago, a year-long lease, paid three months in advance in cash. Malik also has a lease on a car, a white Toyota Prius. It’s parked in the garage.’

  ‘And the gun? Where is it?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘Jeremy’s probably already told you that we haven’t actually seen the weapon, just the case. The case was in the boot of the car that drove down from Sheffield but we didn’t have eyes on it when it pulled up in front of the house. That car is now en route back to Sheffield. We’re assuming the case is now in the house but that’s all it is at present, an assumption. But as the two tangoes are in the house, I think it’s fair to assume that the gun is there with them. As soon as the house is empty we’ll send in an entry team for a look-see. I have one on standby.’

  ‘Anything known about this Johnny Malik?’

  Aspden shook her head. ‘Not much. He’s a cleanskin, British-born Pakistani. His parents came over in the seventies. Dad’s a dentist in Bradford, Mum was a nurse. Johnny is one of eight kids. He’s been to Pakistan several times but always with his parents and never for more than a week or so. Came down to London last year to study and his parents are funding him. We’re assuming he was radicalised in Bradford and sent to London as part of some greater plan.’ She tapped on her screen and a driving licence flashed up. Malik was dark-skinned with piercing brown eyes and glossy black hair spiked with gel. ‘Nice-looking boy,’ said Aspden.

  ‘I’m going to leave you with Wendy, Dan,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘If they get any visitors, I want you to see them straight away. I’ll be back the moment anything kicks off.’

  Willoughby-Brown let himself out. Aspden gestured at a coffee-maker on a small table by the door. ‘Help yourself,’ she said. ‘And there’s plenty of food in the kitchen.’

  Faisal looked at his wristwatch, a cheap Casio, and pulled a face. ‘What if they don’t come?’ he said.