by Tom Marcus
‘Which just leaves me,’ says the long-haired guy with the tattoo. ‘Ryan. I was in the Intelligence Corps, running agents in Iraq. Thought I’d come home before someone cut my head off.’
Well, there we are, I think. Odd to think that these strangers are now the only people I’ll be able to trust.
‘Bloody hell,’ says Claire. ‘This is like an AA meeting. “My name’s Claire and I’m a surveillance officer. It’s been three days since I last followed someone.”’
Riaz grins. ‘Not too much, I hope – a drink seems like a good idea. I’ve got a bottle somewhere. There’s a kitchen, I think. Let’s see if there’s anything to drink out of.’
He goes downstairs to the parking area and by the time he comes back with a litre bottle of vodka, Claire has found some paper cups in the kitchen, two doors along the gantry. Riaz pours the drinks and hands them round. Alex glances anxiously at me but I smile to let her know it’s OK, I can handle it.
Ryan looks at his cup thoughtfully. ‘I suppose we should drink a toast.’
‘Here’s tae us,’ says Craig.
‘To Blindeye,’ adds Claire.
There’s pause, and we form a circle with our raised cups.
‘To finding the fuckers . . . every last one of them.’ Everyone cheers and laughs as our cups bump together, except Alex. She knows my toast isn’t a smart little joke. I’m deadly serious. I want to find everyone who is thinking about causing us harm and kill them. All of them.
7
Joseph’s small coffin, in my arms, feels empty. Maybe it is. If it’s empty then where is he? I can see Sarah standing at the altar in her wedding dress. Fuck. What will I tell her? I’ve lost Joseph. I’m still walking towards her but feel like I need to slow down, to buy some time. But I can’t.
The look on Sarah’s face, confused at the coffin I’m carrying. I don’t understand it either. It still feels empty, I can’t see any signs or names on the top. Sarah crying. Distraught, gut-wrenching tears with a howling cry that erupts instantly. I want to rush towards her but my legs refuse to move any quicker. I feel heavy, lethargic. The coffin. It’s not empty.
Like someone is piling weights on top of my cradled arms, I can’t hold onto the coffin for much longer. Refusing to let go I drop to a knee, then both, the weight becoming unbearable as it pushes my arms to the ground. Sarah still screaming as the coffin, Joseph’s bed, digs into the tarmac, carving deeper into the ground, pulling my arms into the darkness. Sarah’s screams become louder, higher pitched, brutal.
There’s ringing in my ears, then my eyes snap open and suddenly I’m awake. It’s pitch-black. I have no idea where I am or how I came to be here. My heart starts hammering and a rising tide of panic threatens to engulf me. My brain starts to register the smell of plaster dust and it all comes back in a rush. I fumble for the light-switch above the bed and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling flickers into life, revealing the outlines of my new home. Not that there’s anything homely about it. It’s more like a monk’s cell, with a bed, a stainless-steel sink against one wall, and a flimsy-looking wardrobe on the other side. There’s nothing else apart from my kit bag and a plastic bottle of water on the floor by the bed. My mouth is bone dry and I take a long pull from the bottle.
I unlock my door and the cold air of this vast open-plan building rushes in to replace the staleness of my temporary home. It’s eerily quiet without anyone else here. I can just about hear the dull whines of the fans keeping the servers cool on the opposite side of the building as I step onto the metal gantry walkway. The cold metal against my bare feet makes me shiver. Right, I tell myself, get yourself sorted out before the rest of the team arrive.
I quickly wash, dress and head down the stairs. Poking my head into the tech room, I find I’m not quite alone. Alan’s sitting hunched over his work bench, doing something with a circuit board. The last time we worked together was in Northern Ireland against the Irish paramilitaries. But he hasn’t changed much – still the same big bear of a man with an unkempt beard and thick glasses. I take a seat opposite him and watch him work. His quietly methodical way of doing things instantly has a calming effect on me, and I remember why I used to enjoy being around him. In a world of unbelievable stress, with people often at – or beyond – breaking point, Alan always remains unflappable, however much pressure people are putting on him to produce miracles in double-quick time. After a couple of minutes, he looks up. ‘Pass me that thin-gauge solder, will you, mate?’
‘Sure.’ I hand it over and he nods his thanks. We’ve made eye contact for about a second and hardly had what you’d call a conversation, but somehow in that brief, trivial exchange we’ve communicated something important. He understands my pain, but he knows talking about it won’t help.
‘There’s coffee if you want it.’ He points with a screwdriver to a sink unit with a coffee-maker alongside. I grab a mug and sit down again to watch. It looks like he’s assembling a normal iPhone. I’m so absorbed trying to work out what he’s doing I lose track of time, and when Alan finally looks up from his work my coffee’s gone cold.
‘Guessed what it is yet?’
‘A . . . phone?’
He grins. ‘Well, don’t take it back to Apple, because they’ll tell you it’s proper fucked! No, it’s a very small incendiary device. Generates enough rapid heat to combust and burn for around thirty seconds.’
‘Incendiary? Why—?’ Before I can finish asking why, all of a sudden, we might need something like this, Alan’s face changes. He looks cagey.
‘Probably best we wait for the briefing. All I do is make the kit, you know.’
I nod. ‘No problem. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.’
We both hear the shutter motors kicking in at the entrance. I get up and walk over to see several team cars come in and park up. Alex is first out, carrying a McDonald’s takeaway bag and a cardboard coffee cup.
‘Thought you could do with some sugar and fat this morning.’
I grab the bag with a grin. ‘You’re a fucking legend, Alex. Alan, you want some of this mate?’
‘No thanks, Logan. Gotta keep an eye on my figure.’
‘Good point, Alan,’ Alex says, grabbing the hash browns out of the bag before I can stop her. I pull out the sausage and egg McMuffin before she can steal anything else back.
We stand there, stuffing our faces and grinning at each other, when Leyton-Hughes walks in. He strides past the team without a word and starts walking up the stairs, obviously expecting us to follow him. Halfway up, he turns. ‘Briefing room, please.’
We walk up the stairs like a bunch of schoolkids who’ve been caught shoplifting and file into the briefing room. Leyton-Hughes is standing in front of a whiteboard, arms folded.
‘OK, first Blindeye briefing. In an ideal world, we would have had more time before our first job, but it’s become a matter of extreme urgency, so we’re going to have to hit the ground running. The DG believes he picked the right people for the job. This is where you prove him right. I know all of you at some point have been deployed on Stone Fist and Iron Sword, the two brothers who recently fell off the grid. These two are our targets. They’ve been classed as priority-one targets. The guys in the office at Thames are still working to get control of them and get some actionable intelligence, but not to put too fine a point on it, we fucked up. They’re smarter and better trained than we thought, and the chances are we’ve lost them for good. But the DG has asked me to put a stop to them. It’s imperative that they don’t get back into the system or, worse, get to their endgame.’
We still didn’t know what their endgame was. The intelligence we had up to this point was that they’re hell-bent on mass murder. Whether that be a car bomb at a busy school fair, opening fire on a packed tube in rush-hour London or targeting specific people, like high-ranking soldiers, these two brothers are about to kill. They need to be caught.
I can feel the adrenaline start to surge through my veins. Losing control of the brothers had been
the last straw for me. Stopping them would prove that Blindeye can really make a difference. But something isn’t adding up.
‘Boss, you said we have to put a stop to them? Does that mean we have new intelligence?’
‘No, Logan. That’s the point. They’ve gone dark, and the DG doesn’t believe that we can find them again with . . . traditional methods.’
‘So how are we going to get in front of this?’
‘The white Muslim convert turned cleric who radicalized them in prison is the target today. Khalid Nasir; target name Stormy Weather.’
There are puzzled looks around the room. Claire puts a hand up. ‘But he was interviewed. They didn’t get anything useful out of him.’
Leyton-Hughes smiles thinly. ‘Well, you’re going to interview him again. But in a slightly different way.’
I run through the possibilities in my head. What is he thinking? That we’ll send someone into jail posing as a prisoner to try and get his confidence? Maybe pose as someone ripe for radicalization and hope he takes the bait? I’ve taken on some difficult and dangerous roles, but that was a suicide mission. It would take too long, surely? How the hell would you pull it off?
Alex obviously has the same thought. ‘So he’s out, then?’
Leyton-Hughes shakes his head. ‘Day release. Thames are running Operation Cloud to gain access to his financial trails. He’s a big recruiter and facilitator. Sends a huge amount of cash to overseas cells. But he only does it once, then the accounts lie dormant. We think he’s about to transfer a huge amount of money to Algeria via Western Union.’
That means there’s a window of opportunity. But something still doesn’t add up. Claire is the first to put it into words.
‘Sorry, I must have missed something really obvious here. If A4 teams are on Stormy Weather, then why are we being used? I thought the whole point of Blindeye and the reason we were recruited was to go where they can’t.’
She’s right; A4 teams are the best in the world at what they do, not much misses their control.
Like a crowd watching a tennis match, our heads swivel from Claire back to Leyton-Hughes, waiting for the thing we’ve all missed. For the first time, he doesn’t look entirely comfortable.
‘OK, an A4 team will be deployed on Stormy Weather today. I don’t have direct access to the team’s comms or the ops room any more, for live feeds. However, our job is to get to Stormy Weather without A4 seeing us and find out where the brothers might have gone. It’s highly likely he will have given them safe places around the UK to drop off the grid.’
Claire sits back in astonishment. It’s one thing to operate outside of the normal constraints of MI5, but this is asking us to deploy against an A4 team to achieve our goal. We could normally outwit suspected terrorists, but our own intelligence service, when the stakes are so high? For the first time, I wonder if the DG has actually lost it.
‘How the hell do we get a target off the street who is being followed by an A4 team without them seeing us do it? It’s like trying to make an elephant disappear on stage. Apart from anything else, we’ve all been recruited from A4 – there’s a big chance at least one of us will be recognized.’
We all look at Leyton-Hughes. He glares back like a teacher sorely disappointed in his pupils. ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, eh? Who watches the watchers.’
What the fuck is he talking about? He’s briefing us in Latin? Somehow I’d never picked it up, growing up on the streets, but it had never been a problem until now. He catches my hostile look.
‘Come on. Who better than you to defeat a surveillance team? If anyone knows how to do it, you do. But you’ll have an edge; Alan’s got some new kit that should cause enough of a diversion, if you’re quick.’
With that, maybe we have a chance. I stop being pissed off with Leyton-Hughes and his Latin phrases and start to try and figure out the logistics.
‘Have we got any maps of the prison? The pick-up is where we need to disrupt the team.’
I’m thinking that getting control of Stormy Weather quickly is our best chance of pulling this off. Leyton-Hughes points to a table behind us, where there’s a pile of maps and two laptops. ‘Ordnance survey and Google Street View and some other bits and pieces.’
We crowd round the maps and laptops, trying to identify likely positions for a surveillance team near the exit of the prison and surrounding streets. Alex grabs a pen and pinpoints places on the OS map.
‘Here you’ll likely have the direct position, allowing you to see Stormy Weather leaving the prison. Here, someone close in for a foot or bus move. Vehicle here and here, watching for a vehicle move on a stand-by. Biker probably waiting out of the area here, in the services. We’ve got to have someone close in to get a grip of Stormy Weather the minute he comes into view and try and get the jump on any A4 team that might be there.’
We all agree with Alex’s quick analysis. We’re all used to doing this sort of stuff on a daily basis, often while driving at high speed towards a target’s location. The only difference here is we are looking at it from an aggressive point of view. So much for the surveillance team. But what are we going to do?
While we all scratch our heads, Riaz jumps in. ‘Once we see Stormy Weather come out, we can’t take him off the streets there and then. Too many cameras, right? What about if we had two high-sided vans? We use one travelling westbound, here, to block the cameras, then the second van travelling east to pick him up with the side door open as he crosses the road. Ryan, I bet you’ve done similar pick-ups in Iraq and Northern Ireland, right?’
Ryan nods. ‘Yeah, that’s what I was going to suggest. Although the chances of fucking it up are massive in confines like this. Why don’t we wait until he’s rounded a corner, presuming he’s on foot? The direct position for the surveillance team won’t move, we know that. Assuming Stormy Weather has to walk onto the south side to get a bus or for a vehicle pick-up, we can wait until he’s done this first corner, to the north. There will be an A4 vehicle or foot call-sign in this area, but again we can block that with the vans.’
Riaz turns to me. ‘Logan, what do you think?’
‘I like it. It’s simple, which means it’s harder to fuck it up. We need to assume that he’s not going to come along willingly. I’ll get close in, then once he’s in position near the pick-up van I’ll nudge him in, then Ryan and Riaz – I’m assuming you’ll be inside?’
‘Yeah that makes sense. I’ll be in full traditional dress to try and ease his cooperation with Ryan.’
A few minutes ago, I thought it was mad to try and snatch a target from under the noses of an A4 team. Now I can see how it can be done, with a little help from Alan. But I can tell from her body language that Alex isn’t convinced.
‘Guys, there’s only six of us. We need someone driving the pick-up van. That’s three people straightaway. Someone direct on the prison exit when Stormy Weather leaves and to disrupt the A4 team. Logan close in. That leaves one person to drive a second blocking vehicle . . .’
Claire now adds her own doubts. ‘We need to get down for a recce, to plan this properly. We don’t have enough time. This isn’t just a normal lift off the streets. He’ll be wearing a GPS tag on his ankle too and those things are monitored.’
So far, Leyton-Hughes has been letting the team figure things out for themselves, but now he steps in.
‘Iron Sword and Stone Fist are planning a major attack. They’ve dropped off the grid and we need to find them now. This cleric is our only realistic means, and we have a twenty-four-hour window. It might all look like a shower of shit but we have no alternative. This is the hand we’ve been dealt. We can’t just wait for something better to turn up, I’m afraid. So figure out how we’re going to do this. Alan’s waiting downstairs to brief you on your kit.’
No one speaks. The realization of what we’ve all gotten ourselves into really hits home for the first time as we make our way sullenly down to Alan’s tech room. The big man is waiting with three phones lined up
on his workbench.
‘OK, I’ve got three incendiaries for you. To all intents and purposes they look like broken iPhones, and don’t take long to get up to temperature at all. Around ten seconds and it will be at full burn, giving off a good-size flame, then a huge amount of smoke, so be aware of that. To switch it on, just flick the volume switch on the side of the phone. The safety switch, if you like, is the mode it’s in now; volume switch on silent. Once you’ve flicked the switch to loud, there’s no turning back – it’ll trigger the chemical reaction inside. The good thing is, it’s silent while getting to temperature and then at the start of the burn, so it should give you time to get enough distance to not be associated with it.’
Then Alan pulls out what looks like a really bad kid’s arts-and-crafts blanket from beneath the bench.
‘Excuse the patchwork, but this will work. It’s absolutely state of the art, something I designed personally. Stormy Weather will have a tracking tag around his ankle as part of his day release. Wrap this around the tag and it eliminates the problem. No more tracking.’
He dumps more kit onto the workbench, including two yellow DeWalt cordless cutting discs, rolls of duct tape and plastic zip-ties.
‘Once you’ve wrapped the blanket around his GPS anklet, it should block the tag’s signal while you cut it off.’
I can tell from the expressions on the faces of the rest of the team that they are beginning to see how we could pull this off. But I’m thinking a step ahead. The guys running the A4 surveillance operation on Stormy Weather, both on the ground and at Thames House, aren’t stupid. They’ll know within minutes of losing sight of Stormy Weather that something completely unnatural has happened. And that means they’ll come after us.
‘One more thing.’
Alan places a small stack of number plates on the workbench. They instantly topple over like an unstable tower of dominoes.
‘Put these on your respective vehicles. The registration plates are clones of identical vehicles elsewhere in the country.’