by Nick Louth
To Wyrecliffe, the whole humiliating experience of meeting grieving relatives, the guilt and the sadness, carried resonances of the death of Fouad Adwan, and the fated visit he had made at the end of 1989 to the refugee camp in Ain al- Hilweh. That was twenty-one years ago. Now, at the end of 2010 he was doing it all over again, and the dead body was of Fouad Adwan’s child, Cantara. She was the only one of his offspring who had made it out of the camps alive. Only to die, inexplicably implicated, in a terrorist bombing. For the grieving relatives, now in Syria and struggling to scrape a living from Walid’s pharmacy, paying their return airfare from Damascus to Cairo and picking up the hotel bill was the least Wyrecliffe could do under the circumstances.
Wyrecliffe arranged to meet the relatives at their hotel. Walid al-Mansoor was a bear of a man, balding and dressed in an over-tight and threadbare suit. He cheerfully shook Wyrecliffe’s hand with both of his. Fatima, careworn and shrouded in a white hijab was subdued and tearful. It was she, after all, who had spent the years with Cantara during her mother’s mental illness, when Walid was working away in the Gulf, Iraq and finally Syria.
A government car and driver arrived to take them to the military compound, an hour’s drive away beyond the south western suburb of Heliopolis. Fatima gave a little gasp as the immense sun-burnished tip of the great pyramid of Khufu appeared in the distance behind the tatty high-rise apartments lining the flyover. It remained in view for fifteen minutes, stark and majestic, while the ephemeral high rise apartments of twentieth century Cairo, already crumbling and stained, raced past the car window in the foreground.
The compound itself was in an elderly but grandiose air force base, its ceremonial gateway crowned by a life-sized replica of a MIG21. To inhibit car bombers its gravel drive was partially blocked by white-washed concrete blocks and enormous metal caltrops. White-uniformed guards stood to attention by a pedestrian gate. The driver led them through the security formalities, which included x-raying luggage and a pat-down search. They were shown into a cavernous carpeted building whose walls were lined with portraits of a thousand senior officers, all with Nasser-style haircuts and thick moustaches.
Finally, they were shown into the enormous dark wood office of Air Vice-Marshal Sawalha. The officer, seated at an enormous mahogany desk, was an intimidating emblem of authority. Fully-buttoned royal blue tunic with white-edged shoulder epaulettes, red-edged collar insignia and over his left breast a series of coloured bars, markers for the many campaign medals he would wear on ceremonial occasions. His heavy tinted spectacles and grey moustache completed the look of a man who had never done anything on a whim in all his sixty years.
He bade Wyrecliffe sit. He barked at an intercom, and almost instantly an underling hurried in with extra seats for Mr and Mrs al-Mansoor.
‘You are friends and relatives of the terrorist, I understand?’
Wyrecliffe checked an urge to contradict. ‘Air Vice-Marshal. We have come to see the body of Miss al-Mansoor. We believe that a formal family identification would not only help her family,’ he indicated the Al-Mansoors, ‘but would assist the process of being sure about who exactly the perpetrators were.’
‘Do you have pertinent information regarding the terrorists not yet in the hands of the authorities?’
‘No. I mean that we still have doubts that Cantara, Miss al-Mansoor, could possibly have been carrying a bomb,’ Wyrecliffe. ‘There may be some confusion.’
‘Mr Wyrecliffe,’ Sawalha said, clearly used to rehearsing this line. ‘The Egyptian military services have many years of experience of dealing with terrorists, with militants, guerrillas, troublemakers and others who would undermine our society. We have rigorous processes to determine culpability and causation. Every bit as rigorous as those of Scotland Yard, or the FBI, let me assure you.’
‘Alright,’ Wyrecliffe held up his hands. ‘We’re getting off on the wrong foot here. We’d like to be able to identify the body. Can we see it?’
The officer paused, and waggled his moustache irritably, as if a fly had landed under his nose. ‘The bodies of all the victims are in our military mortuary just two minutes walk from here. But to see them for your purposes is not possible.’
‘Why not?’
‘Our enquiries are far from complete. Investigative work continues.’
Mrs al-Mansoor intervened. ‘What about ghusl? This is our right as Muslims, please. We need to honour our child.’
‘That will not be possible. This corpse cannot be washed. Impossible,’ Sawalha retorted.
‘I do understand, but we only need a quick look,’ Wyrecliffe said. ‘To satisfy ourselves that no mistake has been made.’
‘Mr Wyrecliffe, no mistake has been made. Your own security services concur with us. Ms al-Mansoor bought the ticket on her credit card, the booking was linked to her Lebanese passport. We have footage of her embarking, from the airport security cameras. Her seat was occupied, the airline confirmed it. The centre of the blast came from where she sat, our ballistics experts are certain. I really don’t see any grounds for confusion. No grounds whatsoever.’
‘Alright. Can we see the body?’
‘I think you would be disappointed.’ He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, which were small, lined and grey. ‘But yes, I will permit it. Only very briefly.’
Sawalha pressed his intercom and barked into it. A young officer was summoned and took them through a long carpeted corridor and down stairs into a Portakabin. There they were asked to hand over any metal objects, foodstuffs and drinks, and were handed white coveralls, overshoes, facemasks and gloves.
‘Please. You must not contaminate anything while investigations continue,’ the officer said. A young female officer, peaked cap protruding from her coverall hood, emerged from a side door. The male officer saluted her. When they were fully dressed in the coveralls, she led them out of the Portakabin. They walked through a baking hot temporary corridor of plywood and plastic sheeting which guided them across a car park into a large and low building. Ferocious air-conditioning hit them immediately. Straight ahead was a swing-doored entrance into a hangar from which echoing activity seemed to be taking place under intense light. But they were guided into a side room perhaps fifty metres long, much colder still and darker. A heavy tang of disinfectant masked something much worse. A taint somehow metallic, corrosive and bilious. An odour of death. The room had enormous grey filing cabinets and several wheeled mortuary trolleys. A white-clad man at the far end was bending over one of the trolleys, opposite an open drawer. He was examining under an intense light the contents of a long grey zippered bag, the kind of thing a suit might be kept in. He was reaching through the open zip with a pair of plastic scissor-like forceps, with which he prodded a collection of crusted black objects protruding from a mottled grey and purple goo.
The woman with them said something to the man with the forceps, and he stepped away from what he was doing. She then led Wyrecliffe, Aunt Fatima and Uncle Walid towards the slab. The relatives hesitated, and fell back. But it was only in the last few steps that Wyrecliffe realised that they were not going to open another filing cabinet. What they were here to see was right in front of him. His glance was drawn within the bag.
Oh God!
Blackened ribs, human viscera. A body bag of human remains. A fraction of a person in all respects.
He turned away, gagging. Poor Cantara!
The air vice-marshal was right, of course. What they had wanted was impossible. The ritual cleansing sought by Fatima and Walid, the chance to recognise a face, which was what he wanted. The realisation dawned that what he was seeing wasn’t some other victim. It wasn’t some anonymous, faceless, unfortunate from a faraway place. Not some dry, casually constructed headline from the many news stories that had passed over his desk from Iraq, from Afghanistan, or even from the twin towers of New York. The meagre contents of this bag were all that remained, all that had been retrieved, of a woman who had loved him. A woman who had apparently given her life
in despair of receiving the just love which the world, and he in particular, owed her. A woman who had perhaps been driven to an act of extraordinary desperation in her cry for help.
Cantara.
* * *
Fresh off the flight back to London, Wyrecliffe was summoned for another early morning interview at Paddington Green Police Station. Waiting for him, in interview room thirteen, was the imposing figure of Detective Sergeant Colin Cave. The same height as Wyrecliffe, but a good inch wider. Two other male officers were present, plus solicitor Simon Deakin.
‘Saw you on the telly the other night,’ Cave said, turning a biro over and over in his hand. ‘Tonight. Bit of an exposé, wasn’t it? BBC didn’t look too good, and neither did you.’
‘You have to record the whole interview,’ Deakin said, pointing to the tape recorder. ‘Please turn it on,’ It was about the first intervention from his solicitor that Wyrecliffe could recall.
‘This isn’t an interview yet, Sunshine, it’s just small talk,’ Cave smirked. ‘Ain’t that right, Mr Wyrecliffe? We’re discussing what we saw the other night on the box.’
‘I’ve not seen it yet. I was away in Egypt.’
‘You’ll enjoy it. Especially the downstairs neighbour. She’s priceless.’
Wyrecliffe’s heart sank at the prospect of Tina having spilled the beans. No wonder his voicemail and e-mail inbox was even more jammed with messages than usual.
Okay,’ shrugged Cave, turning on the recorder. ‘Look at this. Who do you know on here?’ Cave showed him six pages of e-mail addresses.
Wyrecliffe looked at the list. There were a few of Cantara’s colleagues at the BBC, two dozen with Imperial College identifiers, and Alan Cummings, the drunken young medic from the party. He didn’t recognise any of the other names or identities.
‘This list is everyone who had e-mail contact with Ms al-Mansoor in the three months before the account was closed on February 26. We then requisitioned server traffic from Google, the webmail account provider, to read every e-mail she sent for two weeks before the account was deleted. Not one of these contacts were told, at least by e-mail, of her new e-mail address.’
‘That does seem strange,’ Wyrecliffe agreed.
‘To us, it seems evidence of radicalisation. A complete change of friends and contacts is utterly abnormal, unless you are trying to disappear. And she did disappear, very effectively. We can only presume she was told exactly how to do it by professionals. No credit cards, debit cards, mobile phone, e-mail. All traces came to an end on February 26, and there was nothing until the purchase of her ticket by credit card nine months later.’
‘So do you have any clues?’ Wyrecliffe asked.
‘Maybe. Ever heard of the Islamic Light Group?’
‘Vaguely. It was in the news a couple of times. Isn’t it run by some fire-breathing imam?’
‘Top marks. Yes, it’s run by an Islamic big-mouth called Irfan Tiwana, certainly someone of interest to the security services. ILG is suspected of being a front for terrorist funding. Your girlfriend…’
‘She was not my girlfriend.’
‘ITV says otherwise, my friend. It’s on the telly, so it must be true, right? Ms al Mansoor received a lot of spam from ILG. It might be nothing. There are a couple of others she corresponded with who also seem to be on the ILG mailing list. Still, none of those she corresponded with shows up on the persons of interest register, either for us or the security services. We’re making further checks, but that’s where we are.’
‘Okay.’
‘So you really don’t know any of these people?’
‘No. I’ve told you.’
‘Someone must have helped her, Mr Wyrecliffe. Here’s the proof. Look at this.’ He showed him a photograph of a red Puma sports bag from a retail catalogue.
‘Have you ever seen her with a red bag like this?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘At her flat? When she was out and about?’
‘No. It’s more of a man’s bag, a sportsman’s holdall. Not her style.’
‘Maybe, but she carried the bomb in just such a bag. Five hundred grams of PETN. An undetectable, odourless and powerful explosive. A real professional bomb. Ms al-Mansoor was in seat 14A. She put this bag underneath the seat in front, right over the wing. Just happens to be above the biggest fuel tank. Forensics have found a few dozen surviving unburned red fibres, embedded in bodies, stuck to the ceiling, mixed in with fabric from the seats, in some cases a long way from where the bag was.’
‘So what are you saying?’ Wyrecliffe asked.
‘Your girlfriend knew some clever and dangerous people. People who knew how to make a sophisticated bomb, how to get it through security, and under which seat it would have the most impact. We’d love to ask her who they are. But we can’t can we? She’s dead. Blown to bits. And no one seems to know anything about how she came to move from being a lonely student to a professional suicide bomber.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
December 8, 2010
He hadn’t expected the call from Monaghan. The Middle East Editor was a very busy man, and notoriously terse. E-mails of more than a line from him were rare, and phone calls rarer. But the moment he heard his friend’s voice Wyrecliffe knew something was wrong.
‘Have you seen Al Jazeera today?’
‘No. What’s on it?’
‘There’s a piece about the EgyptAir bombing. It’s only on the Arabic channel so far, but I thought I’d let you know before the press gets onto it. The suicide video of Cantara al-Mansoor has finally emerged.’
Wyrecliffe’s heart skipped a beat. It was twenty days after the bombing, but the mention of her name clenched him every time. ‘Oh Christ. I suppose I should have expected it. Is it on the web?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. Just a jihadi website so far,’ Monaghan gave Wyrecliffe the details. He typed them in to his PC. Monaghan waited on the line while Wyrecliffe watched the grainy video. A dark-haired young woman with a sash around her forehead was sitting cross-legged, speaking to camera. The sound was scratchy and inaudible, and there was an Arabic subtitle running along the bottom.
‘Gerry. I don’t think it’s her.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Not a hundred per cent. It’s very grainy. But it just doesn’t look right.’
‘The one on Al Jazeera is better quality. You’ll know then. Good luck,’ said Monaghan, and hung up. Wyrecliffe went into the news room, and found a knot of journalists crowded around a big screen, already tuned to Al Jazeera Arabic. A few faces turned and glanced at him, before turning quickly away. They already knew. The bastards were already onto it. His heart thumped as he waited out the long minutes through other news items. Then there were pictures of the plane wreckage, and a reporter speaking Arabic. Then they showed the video. This time he could just hear the sound, the woman’s voice, behind the voiced over Arabic translation. The woman said that she was Cantara al-Mansoor. But she wasn’t. The face wasn’t quite right, and the voice definitely not.
But if it wasn’t Cantara, who was it? Did someone else do the video for her? Were those pitiful remains in Egyptian mortuary still Cantara’s or some other hapless, misguided woman? A kindling spark within him gradually managed to hope, but not yet believe. That Cantara was not dead at all. That she had never been amongst the one hundred and seventy-six dead in that air crash. That she had never taken that flight. That she was out there, somewhere, alive.
* * *
Three weeks after the bombing. Wyrecliffe sat in the now familiar gloom of interview room number four at Paddington Green Police Station, and looked at his watch. Forty-five minutes, he had been waiting. With him was his new solicitor, Vikram King. Urbane, sleek, arrogant and rather notorious, the Anglo-Indian lawyer specialised in ‘defending the indefensible.’ Wyrecliffe’s barrister friend Turner-Crossland had joked that this was precisely the reason the BBC man needed him. King was for a while employed by Birnberg Pierce, a law firm which had inf
uriated successive home secretaries by foiling all attempts to have firebrand preacher Abu Qatada deported to Jordan. Qatada was due to face charges of terrorism there, charges first levelled in 1999, but successive courts had ruled that he might have evidence obtained by torture used against him, which would compromise his human rights. Turner-Crossland was convinced that Wyrecliffe would be better off with a man of King’s experience on his side. However, that was better off in a judicial rather than financial sense. King’s charges were royal indeed, at seven hundred pounds per hour. Plus VAT. Sitting waiting to be interviewed, Wyrecliffe calculated that King’s two minute soliloquy about the weather as he emerged from the rain had just cost him twenty-eight quid. Then a few slurps of coffee, a surreptitious belch and a leisurely flick through The Times: one hundred and seventy-five pounds.
Finally, Detective Chief Inspector Daniwar Shah arrived. She was flanked by two other officers, Detective Sergeant Cave, and a tall officer in a crumpled light grey suit. He was introduced as Detective Inspector Michael Concannon, from the intelligence division of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command.
‘Christopher Hugh Wyrecliffe, I am arresting you under section 38B of the Terrorism Act 2000,’ Cave said.
‘Terrorism act? I’m not a terrorist and you know it,’ Wyrecliffe said.
‘This section applies where a person withholds information which he knows or believes might be of material assistance, either in preventing an act of terrorism, or which might help in securing the prosecution or conviction of another person for such an act,’ Shah said.