by Rob Sinclair
‘Sometimes intel is wrong. Sometimes the wrong person is killed, even. We have to accept that. WMD ring any bells for you?’
Cox tried to respond but she just didn’t know what else to say. Having been amenable to her in Ankara, Flannigan was back to his usual belligerent self with a vengeance, barely giving any of what she was saying even a second’s thought.
‘Look, Cox, I’m not saying there isn’t something in why your friend Nilay was killed.’
‘Friends,’ Cox interjected. ‘It was Subhi too.’
‘Okay, friends. It’s suspicious. And this Aydin character, he needs to be stopped.’
‘And Germany?’
‘And Germany just raised even more questions. I need answers, not questions. What I’m saying is you’re still no closer to breaking out here and proving with any credibility that the so-called Thirteen are an imminent threat to society, or even that they exist.’
‘If you believe that, then it’s time to get your head out of your arse. Sir.’
Cox held her breath while she waited for her boss to respond to that. She was fifty/fifty as to whether he would explode or not.
‘I could say the same to you,’ he came back with, with absolute calm. ‘I agree there is a problem here. A potentially big problem. But so far it seems to be confined to one man. Aydin Torkal. We don’t know his full history, and we don’t know what his plan is. What we do know is that he’s on a mission, and that mission has already seen several people killed at his hands.’
‘That very fact alone suggests something bigger is happening here! Who are these people he’s gone after so far? Paris, London, Bruges. This isn’t random. And he was never in Germany so how do you explain what happened there?’
‘Which is what you need to find out. Help find this guy, before it’s too late.’
They both went silent. Cox wracked her brain, trying to think of something to go back at Flannigan with. As rattled as she was, she knew deep down he wasn’t being a dick to her for the sake of it. Not this time, at least. This time he genuinely didn’t see what she was seeing and was simply challenging her findings. She had to find Flannigan the proof he craved.
‘You have to reconsider my application to use the Trapeze team,’ Cox said. ‘We now have several locations where it’s very likely some of the Thirteen are based. Using Trapeze to target those cities we would surely crack this. Identify the cells, their addresses, stop them before it’s too late.’
‘No,’ he said almost immediately.
‘Just like that?’
‘It won’t pass. Miles won’t even think about it unless you give him more. Don’t waste your time, Cox.’
‘You said you want me to find Aydin Torkal. Using Trapeze will be the quickest way.’
‘It’s too much to find one man who’s already in our sights.’
‘In our sights? And it’s not just one man we’re trying to find, is it? It’s all of them.’
‘Do you even know why it’s called Trapeze?’
Cox sighed, not really interested in the history lesson. ‘A reference to the Circus, I’m guessing . . .’
‘Exactly. MI6, the Circus. Commonly thought to be a phrase coined by John le Carré for his novels, but actually simply because the Dorset Square office used to belong to the directors of Bertram Mills Circus.’
‘I think you’d make a good Smiley.’
‘I’m not going to ask you why you think that. The point is, Cox, it’s called Trapeze because that team sits above everything, and they see everything. It’s a big deal to use them. They have the capability to do things that the man on the street can’t even imagine. Tap into people’s fridges and TVs to listen into their homes, for fuck’s sake. They can hack your home Wi-Fi to record every single keystroke on your phone, your computer, your––’
‘Sir, I get it.’
‘Maybe you don’t. The trapeze is traditionally the last act of the circus. For us they are an absolute last resort. Every application approval for Trapeze has to be taken with the utmost seriousness and rigour. We invade people’s privacy beyond what many people can even comprehend. If we get it wrong . . . it’s arses on the line time. Not just for us, but for our friends over in Westminster.’
‘Friends? Never heard you call them that before.’
‘I’m sorry, Cox, but I won’t accept a new application. Not until you have something more. In the meantime, do everything you can to find Aydin Torkal.’
Cox opened her mouth to speak but before a word passed her lips, the call clicked off.
For a while Cox just sat on the fabric sofa in the hotel room, looking out over the bobbing water of the Bosphorous, the sky above darkening into a fusion of blues and reds and oranges as the sun set behind her. Her mind was in overdrive, thinking through what she could, and should, do next.
Eventually she got up and went back to the laptop on the bed. She pulled up the last report she’d sent Flannigan – three weeks ago – and to her previous sign-off sheet for her request for Trapeze support. How life had already changed so much in that time.
She didn’t take her eyes off the request form for several minutes as her brain chugged away. All that was missing from that document was the signature of a level six director and the rudimentary SIS stamp. For all SIS’s cutting-edge technology and sophisticated networks of agents and informants across the globe, dealing in all manner of threats, authority for operations still came down to nothing more than a scrawled name on a piece of paper.
Cox snorted at the thought rushing through her mind. Why was she even contemplating it? Even if it got her the answers she needed surely it would be the end of her time in SIS. She could even end up in jail on some trumped-up treachery charge. Or worse they’d bung her off to a black site and she’d never see the light of day again.
It had to be worth the risk, though. She couldn’t live with herself knowing she could have done something but didn’t. Knowing that her inaction cost hundreds, even thousands of innocent lives.
She pushed the doubt aside and went back through into her old emails. It didn’t take long to find what she was looking for. Her promotion assessment. To fully convince herself of what she was contemplating, she had to feel truly aggrieved and disgruntled at the big machine.
She read through the document. At the age of thirty-seven she’d long been looking for a new path. Her application for level four supervisor nearly two years ago was both because she genuinely believed she deserved more internal recognition, and more reward for what she did, but also because on many levels she was becoming tired of the life of an undercover intelligence agent. She’d never seen herself as a pen-pusher, and the reality was she would probably hate the job Flannigan had, but how long was she going to keep up a homeless, globetrotting existence? The promotion would have changed her life. She would have been back in England, probably still happily married. Instead, all she had were her cover identities and the knowledge she was righting the world’s wrongs. Or trying at least.
She first read through the promotion self-assessment she’d written herself. Then the assessment of her sponsor – Henry Flannigan. What a bloody joke. He’d actually sung her praises on the document she was reading, but she had to wonder if the words that had come out of his mouth to the panel had been quite different. Why else would the ultimate conclusion have been in such contrast to what he’d written? Finally she reached the end of the document. The reject decision, signed off by one Roger Miles. Seeing the document again was all she needed to get her blood boiling.
Thirty minutes later, with a bit of tweaking to her request form to take account of the events of the last few days, including Aydin Torkal’s known movements through London, Paris and Bruges, and from her trip to Germany, it was done. Trapeze request authorised – kind of – and submitted. Within hours she’d have the most sophisticated surveillance team on the planet on her side, everything from live satellite imagery and real-time capture of CCTV in various locations, to the utilisation of cutting edge sof
tware to run keywords across real-time telephone and Internet communications, covering not just specific persons of interest at home and abroad, but hundreds of thousands of people in designated locations.
If there was evidence to find, Trapeze would find it. Screw the suits in Westminster if they didn’t like it.
Flannigan and Miles would find out what she’d done sooner or later. She had to believe that, and she had to expect the worst for her when that happened. She just hoped she would get what she needed before then.
Cox sat back in her chair.
‘You silly woman,’ she said out loud, shaking her head, though a smile broke out on her face before she repeated herself in Arabic.
‘I just hope you’re worth it, Nilay.’
FORTY-FOUR
Sofia, Bulgaria
Aydin had originally intended on moving from Italy to Greece before taking a bus on to his next destination – his family’s home country of Turkey. In the end his suspicions had got the better of him and he’d opted instead to move further east into Bulgaria to catch the overnight train. On a train there was more space, he could blend in and hide more easily than on a cramped bus. It meant, however, that he had to leave the Schengen zone, and in reaching Bulgaria he’d endured tortuous border crossings from Hungary and then Romania, traversing woodland, rivers and muddy fields out of the sight of authorities.
He was badly in need of rest as he walked through Sofia at dusk. But he fully expected the onward train journey to be just as fraught as the last two days since he’d left Rome. After the run-in with the police in Italy, and being wanted for murder in London, he not only had to worry about his brothers tracking him down, but also, most likely, the police and intelligence services of several countries.
Plan for the worst.
The journey from Rome had at least given him time to more thoroughly peruse the items he’d taken from Wahid’s safe. Firstly, the two passports; different names, different countries, two slightly different pictures of Wahid. Aydin had sneered when he looked at the passports in more detail. One was Turkish, the other German. One of the most recent stamps in the latter was a trip to Turkey. Nilay had been there not so long ago as well. Which fitted uncomfortably with the contents of the brown envelope from Wahid’s safe. A printout of an identity check on his sister, together with a residential address in Aleppo. He still couldn’t fathom exactly how she’d got into Wahid’s crosshairs, but he was determined to find out.
The thumb drive he’d pilfered was a different prospect, with yet more layers of security that would take Aydin time to break through. He would keep trying, at every opportunity he got.
With time to spare in Sofia before the train, he bought new clothes – some jeans, brown loafers and a smart roll-neck jumper – and a razor and scissors to tidy up his increasingly rugged appearance. Moving out of Bulgaria to Turkey would be the first time on his journey that he was passing through an official border crossing – the gateway between Europe and Asia. As such he knew it would be more substantially protected than most intra-European borders, and he wanted to rouse as little suspicion as he could.
Thirty minutes before the train was due to depart, Aydin headed to Sofia Central Station and bought a ticket for a single berth cabin on the overnight train to Istanbul. He waited in the huge central foyer that was framed by massive Brutalist-style concrete blocks and patterned with a multitude of straight lines and stars, a well-worn style that emphasised the country’s recent communist past. Cyrillic script scrolled along the electronic boards in front of him. He didn’t understand the language, but had bought a guidebook earlier to help with the basics.
As the local time approached nine p.m. he saw the platform announcement for his train and headed through the station, his eyes working overtime as he scanned the people and the security guards and the blue-uniformed policemen. No one he saw caused him any concern.
Aydin boarded the train at the front, right next to the block-shaped red engine carriage that looked at least fifty years old. The first carriage was one of the two air-conditioned sleeper carriages. He walked all the way through and took the first cabin in the second carriage – the closest to the exit doors. Before he closed the cabin door he glanced quickly into the corridor. A man and a woman – both in their thirties, casually dressed – were standing at the other end of the carriage. They looked Northern European, with light skin and blonde hair. The man paid Aydin no attention, but the woman caught his eye before the two of them disappeared inside a cabin. Aydin realised his heart was pounding as he closed and locked his cabin door. Was it exhaustion that made him feel so on edge? That sense of being watched?
At one minute past nine the train slowly crawled out of the station. Peering out of his window, Aydin had only spotted about twenty or so other passengers boarding the four carriages. Satisfied that he was as safe as he could hope for, he sat down on the garishly patterned fabric bench and looked around. The tiny cabin had a washbasin and mirror in one corner. Other than the communal toilet at either end of each carriage there were no other facilities on board – no restaurant car or even a snack bar. Not that Aydin would have dared venture out to those anyway, and if he needed the toilet he’d do it in the sink.
He stared out of the window, barely able to see anything in the black night. The train would arrive in Turkey in the morning, just in time for sunrise. He wanted nothing more than to shut his eyes and sleep, but his brain refused to allow him. After half an hour, though, it became increasingly difficult to keep his heavy eyelids open. A loud knock on the door caused him to jerk and bang his head against the wall behind.
Had he actually been asleep, or lost in some fatigue-induced trance? Through the frosted glass of the door he could see the form of a person – a tall man, given his head reached above the top of the doorframe.
‘Bileti,’ came the loud and gruff voice from the other side of the door.
Aydin got up from the bench and reached for the backpack on the floor. He took the ticket in one hand, and the large hunting knife he’d bought in Sofia in the other. He hadn’t yet had a chance to re-arm himself with a gun since leaving Rome, and it would have been too risky given the various borders he was crossing.
He moved to the door and stood to the side as he unlocked it and slid it open a few inches to stare up at the weather-beaten face of the bearded mountain outside, the knife held behind his back, ready to attack. The guy was a beast, but a uniformed beast. Aydin passed his ticket through the gap and after a long, suspicious study of the ticket the man stamped it and handed the stub back.
‘Leka nosht,’ the man growled before he turned and walked to the next cabin.
Aydin’s eyes didn’t leave the oversized guard until he’d gently shut and locked the door. He slumped down on the bench as he heaved all of the air from his aching lungs. Barely breathing, he waited until the guard was well out of earshot further down the carriage before inhaling sharply. He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take.
The screeching of the train’s wheels was enough to drag Aydin back to the real world. Without intending to, he’d succumbed to sleep. It was midnight – he’d been out of it for a couple of hours, yet his head was pounding and his body was aching even more than when he’d boarded.
The darkness outside poured into the cabin and Aydin stared back at it, his head throbbing, as the train pulled to a stop at Kapikule on the Turkish border. Seconds later the booming voice of the guard could be heard as he stomped along the carriage, banging on the doors as he barked at the passengers to wake up and prepare themselves for the border check. Aydin was still clutching the knife, so he slipped it into the bag and took out Wahid’s Turkish passport, stolen from the safe in Rome, before opening the cabin door.
On the platform, the cool night-time air hit him. He quickly scanned the passengers. The same light-haired man and woman again, standing alongside a handful of other passengers. There was a collective weariness to the group, put out by the late-night interruption – everyone,
that was, except for the Turkish border guards. They were more alert than Aydin had expected, their watchful eyes scanning, hands clasped at their fronts, a baton and sidearm adorning their belts. Aydin kept his head down as the passengers were corralled into the small, ageing platform building that smelled of an unusual concoction of bleach, varnish and sweat. The passengers waited in line to have their passports checked and visas paid for, Aydin about halfway along the queue. He felt surprisingly calm as he waited – perhaps the sleep, although short and disturbed – had done him good after all.
When it was his turn he smiled at the expressionless man behind the Perspex glass, holding out the passport in the name of Mehmet Kahveci. The guard snatched the passport and studied the photograph, before placing it under the scanner in front of him and switching his eyes to his screen.
Aydin knew this part was by far the biggest risk he’d taken since leaving Paris. He’d done his best to clean up his appearance, to make himself as convincing a lookalike of Wahid as he was able. But if the guard looked close enough he’d surely realise it was someone else in the picture. That wasn’t Aydin’s only worry. He knew from experience that there were varying qualities to passport forgeries. Some were basic – sufficient to pass a casual examination – but had no link to any official identification database, which meant they were useless for modern-day travel through airports and across borders in any country that used basic scanning software. Aydin had to assume that Wahid’s passports were the best. Wahid was a man who left nothing to chance, after all.
Even though he was doing his utmost to appear calm, Aydin still found himself clenching his fists tightly, digging his fingernails into the palms of his hands as he waited for the verdict.
‘Mr Kahveci, I notice this is the first time you’ve returned to Turkey since your last trip to Damascus. What was the purpose of your visit to Syria?’
Aydin had noted the stamp from Syria, dated some six months previously. He’d expected the question. Still, he’d decided it was better to use the Turkish passport for this trip than Wahid’s German one.