Empire State

by Henry Porter

  By now it was 4.30 p.m. Herrick, Dolph and Lapping separately left Vauxhall Cross to go to Bayswater. Herrick had made an appointment in the hairdressing salon across the street from the Pan Arab Library, while Dolph and Lapping planned to install themselves in a betting shop fifty yards away. She had been told that Harland would also be there. On the way, he called her mobile to say he was already in position at a café named Paolo’s down the street.

  As she sat waiting for the hairdresser to finish his previous appointment, Herrick glanced up from her magazine. Everything was as normal. Rahe’s disagreeable wife was sitting at the desk serving customers and working at the computer. The assistant whom Herrick had spoken to once could be seen darting between the shelves and a pile of books that had clearly just been delivered. The street itself was relatively free of traffic, though there were quite a few pedestrians about and a gas repair team was examining a hole in the pavement about thirty yards from the bookshop.

  She received a hair wash then a head massage, which made her suddenly feel so drowsy that she had to ask the stylist for coffee. While a couple of centimetres were taken off her hair she watched the shop in the mirror. At about 5.30 she noticed the bookshop filling with an unusual number of customers. If these were members of the public it meant the raid might have to be delayed, but then it occurred to her that the book buyers were from the police and MI5. It wasn’t beyond either to raid the place early and take any evidence for themselves. Moreover, the Secret Intelligence Service had no rights in this domestic matter and agreements between chiefs tended to be ignored or bypassed by officers on the ground. She sent a text message to Dolph, asking him to have a look at the shop. A reply came. ‘Just had 5-1 winner at Windsor.’ A minute later she saw him pass the Pan Arab Library with Lapping in tow. Another text arrived - ‘Nothing doing yet’. They headed back to the betting shop.

  A few people left the bookshop, but one or two remained.

  At 5.47 Herrick left the salon and took a stroll up to the café, where she spotted Harland with his head buried in the Financial Times. He did not look up, but signalled to her by waggling the fingers at the edge of his newspaper. It was 5.52. She walked back and noticed the gas workers ahead of her replace the manhole cover, pack away their gear into the back of the van and make a beeline for the shop. Then three unmarked police cars pulled up just before the shop. The raid was on.

  She phoned Harland and hurried towards the entrance of the bookshop. Dolph and Lapping were already there and pressing their case to be admitted behind the police officers, apparently without success. When Herrick arrived, slightly out of breath, she was told by a thick-set Special Branch officer that he knew of no agreement that would allow SIS people to search the premises before it had been secured.

  ‘Of course it’s been secured,’ said Herrick, pulling out her phone again. ‘There’re only a couple of women.’ She used the speed-dial to call the Chief’s office and walked a few paces away to explain the situation to his assistant. He told her to keep the line open while the problem was sorted out. Herrick went back to the policeman and said, ‘Look, you do realise we’re working for the Prime Minister’s office? It’s imperative that we have access to this building now.’

  ‘I don’t give a toss who you’re working for,’ replied the policeman.

  Harland was behind her now and also began to argue with him. But at this moment one of the men inside the shop appeared to have been contacted and the policeman barring the door was told to stand aside.

  Herrick’s first thought on entering was that there were too many people there. Men were already rummaging around the shop, randomly picking books from shelves and searching the drawers of the desk. Rahe’s wife and the shop assistant were seated on two chairs at the end of a run of bookshelves. Lamia Rahe, as they now knew her name to be, was looking at the ground, holding her head in her hands. The assistant’s eyes oscillated wildly. No one seemed to have any idea what to do with them, and even Herrick didn’t know whether they had an arrest warrant for Mrs Rahe. She went up to the officer in charge and was about to suggest clearing the shop when she realised that she was still holding an open line to Vauxhall Cross. She placed the phone to her ear. ‘Christ, I’m sorry. Are you still there?’

  ‘I gather you got in,’ said the Chief’s assistant. ‘But while you’re on, you might as well know that the man in Bristol appears to be about to make contact. He’s just switched the SIM cards from the new phone to one he had in his pocket. We heard a few moments ago.’

  Herrick hung up, and was about to ask the officer to stop the search, but at this moment she became aware of an insistent noise coming from the apartment above the shop. She noticed Lamia Rahe’s head rise at the sound, but no one else seemed to have noticed. She found herself calling out to the room. ‘Can everyone shut up for a moment.’ She held up her hands and clapped rapidly. ‘Please! Can you shut up!’ The shop went silent and they all heard the sound of a mobile phone. Then it went dead.

  ‘Have you searched upstairs yet?’ she asked the policeman.

  ‘There’s no one there. We’ve checked.’

  ‘No children?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I’m certain that phone was silenced by someone. Didn’t you hear the slight noise before it stopped ringing? And anyway, where the hell are the children? School finished at least two hours ago.’

  Of course. There weren’t any children. Suddenly she understood that they had been part of a cover.

  Herrick was aware of Lamia Rahe’s gaze coming to rest on her with an oddly thoughtful expression and knew she had recognised her from the night of the break-in.

  She looked away. ‘I think you should see who stopped it ringing.’

  Then Lamia Rahe erupted from her chair, gesticulating and muttering in Arabic.

  ‘Sit that woman down,’ said the officer. But before anyone could take hold of her, she had produced a gun from her shirts and, still screaming, took aim in Herrick’s direction. Herrick went blank, then at the precise moment the gun went off, something hit her like a train from behind. Next she was sprawling across a length of rope matting by the desk. Five or six shots were loosed off into the mêlée of men at the front of the shop. One of the policemen pulled a gun and fired a single round. Lamia Rahe sank to the ground, dead.

  Herrick whipped her head round. Immediately in front of her was Harland, who had been hit in the back by a bullet meant for her. Beyond him lay Joe Lapping, who was writhing on the floor, clutching his right thigh, and Andy Dolph was on his back with blood all over his chest. For a moment she simply could not absorb what she was seeing. She scrambled over to them. Dolph was white but he grimaced a kind of smile and whispered an oath.

  ‘Get help,’ she shouted. ‘Get an ambulance here.’

  She cast around. The confusion was total. The shop assistant had dropped to the side of her dead boss and was shrieking and hammering on the floorboards with her fists. Two policemen were shouting into their radios and another three had taken off to the back of the shop to climb the stairs to the flat. There was a noise from above, something being moved across the floor, then a sash-cord window being flung upwards, but Herrick was unable to interpret these in any meaningful way. There were more shots, so rapid that it seemed like a machine gun was being fired. Something fell above them.

  Somehow she got a grip on herself and, dimly remembering the first aid course she once attended during IONEC training, she began to conduct a hurried triage. Of the three, Harland was the best off. The bullet had sliced across his back like a sword stroke, giving him a gash of six to seven inches long on the left side. Dolph had been hit just below his collar-bone and there was a nasty exit wound in the middle of his shoulder blade. When she saw the massive amount of blood pouring from just below Lapping’s groin on his right thigh, she knew she had to act.

  ‘We can’t wait,’ she shouted. ‘Let’s get all of them to St Mary’s right now. It’s only minutes away.’ The commanding officer agreed. St Ma
ry’s was alerted and two of the unmarked police cars moved to the front of the shop. Dolph was placed in the back seat of the first car, which tore off towards Paddington with a single blue light clamped haphazardly to its roof and a siren wailing. Lapping went in the second car, Harland having elected to wait for the ambulance. To show that he was going to be okay, he insisted on getting to his feet and then bent over so that a policeman could press a field dressing to the wound.

  By now, the men who had gone up to the flat were spilling down the stairs. None was hurt, but they were evidently very shocked and couldn’t answer Herrick’s questions. She got up and physically accosted one of the men.

  ‘What the hell happened?’

  ‘Look for yourself,’ said the young officer quietly.

  Driven now by an insane need to complete what she had come for, she mounted the stairs to the flat and entered a kitchen. Sunlight streamed through a window. She passed through a living room at the front of the building and then turned left towards a bathroom and bedroom. It was here she found Youssef Rahe lying dead beneath an open window. Net curtains ballooned into the room. Beside him was a gun.

  It was obvious what had happened. Having heard the shots from his wife’s gun, Rahe had pushed at the door of a secret compartment built behind the headboard of the double bed, causing the bed to shift a few inches across the room. He had then attempted to escape through the window, but hearing the police already in the flat, had turned round to fire on them and been shot himself. There were four or five bullet wounds in his upper body and a number of holes around the walls and furnishings.

  Herrick crouched down by the body to make sure it was Rahe. He had lost weight and grown a beard, and in his final expression there was a hardness and strain which was never evident in the film of him from Heathrow, but it was definitely the man she had thought of as a harmless little butterball. Two silver bangles on his left arm caught her attention, and then just beyond them, under the bed, the mobile phone. It must have flown from his pocket as he was hit by the hail of police bullets. She retrieved it and slipped it into her pocket, all the while looking at his face and half praying that his eyes would open and all the knowledge of what he had planned with his group would be restored. Already she understood that his death was a disaster.

  She rose, stepped over the corpse and hefted the bed a little further into the room so she could get at the wall-hanging that disguised the entrance to the compartment. She lifted it and felt along the side of the entrance for possible booby traps. Satisfied that the entrance was clear, she reached inside and pulled at the cord switch. A single fluorescent strip flickered. She squeezed through the opening and immediately realised that the compartment had not just been taken from the bedroom, but ran the entire length of the flat, shaving space from three different rooms. At the far end there was another door which opened into the utility cupboard in the kitchen. Judging by the dusty impression of his hands around its edge, this was the preferred way in and out, even though it must have required Rahe to crouch down. She turned round. The compartment was oppressively narrow, measuring only four feet across, and was without natural light or ventilation. There was an air freshener at each end, yet there was still a marked staleness in the air, the odour of tedium and sweat. At the end nearest the street there was an old-fashioned army camp bed propped against the wall. Next to this was a rolled up prayer mat and some lifting weights.

  Her eyes moved to a shelf where there was a cloth laid out with half an apple, an open packet of cheese crackers and a bottle of mineral water. Underneath she noticed a small red lightbulb. The wire from the socket ran down the wall and through the floor to the bookshop below. She guessed this was a warning light, operated from the cashier’s desk. But there were no other power points - nowhere to plug in a computer or charge a phone.

  She moved towards two wire coat hangers on a waste pipe that ran from the flats above. On one of these was an old brown suit jacket with biro stains in the lining. She felt the jacket with a clapping motion, then stopped, delved inside the pocket and withdrew a passport and a wallet. She was about to examine these when a man’s voice called out from the bedroom. ‘Don’t shoot,’ she shouted.

  She left the foetid atmosphere to find four policemen in the room, two of them wearing body armour and carrying Heckler and Koch machine guns. One of them said, ‘You have to leave the building now, Miss.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You know where to find me when you need a statement.’

  ‘You can tell the officer downstairs,’ came the reply.

  In the event, she slipped away without being challenged and melted into the crowds that had gathered in the street to watch Harland being helped into an ambulance.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Herrick rushed to St Mary’s Hospital but was told she would have to wait for news. After an hour, a woman in her thirties, still dressed for theatre, came to speak to her. Lapping’s injury was far more dangerous than Dolph’s because the bullet had grazed the femoral artery and he had been on the point of dying from blood loss when he was brought into casualty. He was now very weak, but out of danger. Dolph’s injuries would take a lot longer to heal. The collar-bone had been shattered by the impact of the 9mm bullet and his shoulder blade would need further surgery. It would be three or four months before he was able to work again. Harland was also still under anaesthetic, having had an operation to repair the damage done to the muscle tissue and skin on his back. He wouldn’t be fit to see anyone until the following day.

  As the doctor spoke, she touched Herrick’s shoulder. ‘You know, you look pretty drained yourself. If you were involved in the shooting, you may experience some shock.’

  She shook her head and said she had better be getting back to work. She left the hospital by the main entrance and walked through the courtyard. As she hit the street she saw a couple hurrying from a cab. They were unmistakably Dolph’s parents. The man in his sixties moved with Dolph’s heavy, rolling walk while the woman had his alert eyes. They looked modest people and somehow ashamed of the worry. Herrick turned to say something as they passed but suddenly couldn’t find the words. She stopped in her tracks, realising she needed to sit down and collect herself, maybe have something to eat. Across the street there was a pub named the The Three Feathers, festooned with hanging baskets of petunias. She entered an almost empty lounge bar, where a barman and the few customers were glued to Channel Four News. A distant shot of the Pan Arab Library was being shown: police tape was stretched across the road, forensics were entering the building as plain-clothes officers left with boxes.

  Herrick ordered a double whisky and a meat pie that was sitting unappetisingly in the display cabinet. She perched on a bar stool while the pie was microwaved and tried to get a hold of herself by concentrating on the pocket of anxiety lodged at the top of her diaphragm.

  As the pie was presented to her on a paper plate, she heard a voice from her left. Walter Vigo stood with one hand on the bar. ‘A bad business, Isis. Are they all right?’ He attempted a sympathetic smile but produced only a leer.

  She turned and examined him for a moment. ‘No, they’re bloody well not all right. Joe Lapping nearly died. What the fuck are you doing here anyway?’ She cut into the pie. Vigo looked down at the flow of gravy with acute distaste.

  ‘I was concerned to see how they were and spotted you crossing the road.’

  ‘Right,’ said Herrick, grimacing. ‘What is it you really want?’

  ‘A word - somewhere more private, perhaps.’

  ‘I’ve got to go back to the office in a few minutes.’

  ‘This can’t wait,’ he said.

  ‘Then say it now.’

  He waited for the barman to move away. ‘I want to know what you found in the bookshop.’

  ‘If I had found anything it would be none of your fucking business.’

  Vigo’s mouth pursed into a tight little hole. ‘I need to know - lives may depend on it.’

  She said nothing a
nd continued eating the pie, noticing that the strange throbbing in her left arm had developed into an ache.

  ‘It’s important that I know. I gather there have been some useful discoveries in Bristol.’

  ‘Then go to Bristol.’

  ‘Look, Herrick. These are my people, Jamil and Youssef Rahe. They’re my contacts. Where would we be if I hadn’t made use of them?’

  This amazed her. ‘Well, three of my friends wouldn’t be in hospital for a start. You were suckered. No one is going to see it any other way.’

  ‘I don’t care what they think about this. There may have been significant intelligence in that shop that only I am in a position to appreciate.’

  She was struck by the plaintive note in his voice, and if she had been feeling less strange she would have thought about it more deeply. ‘You forget, Walter, you’re on the outside now. I can’t talk to you about any of this.’ She gestured to the TV set.

  ‘Do you think I would bother to come here and talk to you if it wasn’t important?’

  Herrick shrugged. ‘Frankly, I don’t care what your interest is.’