Spy Shadows

by Freddie P Peters

  “That I can not only construct a financial structure no one will ever detect, but that I can deliver the source of income to go with it myself.” Henry’s bluntness was a match for Wasim’s tone. “Kidnapping is one of the main sources of income for terrorist groups, so let me use her as a way of knowing how they proceed.”

  “The UK does not pay ransom.”

  “I’m aware of that, but her paper, The Sunday Times, might, it’s worth a try.”

  “And if you fail… then what?”

  “She had already been abducted when we came across her. If I don’t do anything, she will…” Henry was stuck for words. The alternative to him not succeeding he could not contemplate.

  Wasim leaned forward, elbows on knees, head bent. Henry waited for his verdict. He had no chance of pulling this off if Wasim said no and he had learned to trust his judgement too. This no longer was the trading floor at GL’s offices in London.

  “OK,” he lifted his head, weary. “OK… but if I tell you to drop it because it threatens to scupper the mission, you drop it.”

  “You’re the boss.” Henry lifted his hands up in surrender. “As long as you convince me.”

  Wasim shot him a dark eye that Henry ignored. Wasim had worries of his own.

  “I’m not entirely surprised about the laptop and mobile, but I need to find a way of replacing them.”

  “I presume the need to call your ailing MOTHER will go some way towards that.”

  “That was the idea when we set it up. Still my gear has ended up with al-Haddawi and The Treasurer doesn’t know me yet.”

  “How about a good old fashioned phone call?” Henry jerked his head towards the phone that lay on one of the bedside tables, wincing as he did so.

  “If it were only that simple… I fear I’ll have to get an authorisation to make an international call… and I hope I don’t need to ask al-Haddawi for it.”

  * * *

  When they entered the room, the screens were flickering again with activity. Breaking news poured from well-known providers Bloomberg, Reuters, Al Jazeera, even CNN and Sky News. Others seemed to be plugged into sites Henry could not identify but knew enough of to recognise as part of the dark web.

  Henry had not been given the official tour but twenty years in banking had taught him enough about the proper organisation of a treasury operation. And this operation was being run professionally…

  Astonishing.

  The treasury room was not only keenly following activity in the Middle East and in neighbouring countries but also the large international players that could affect the oil market, the US, Russia and their sworn enemy… Iran. A cluster of three men at the far end of the large room were actively discussing prices and trading the large volumes that ISIL was already extracting from the ground. There were another two or three groups that seemed to be tracking other activities. He was not yet sure what these were. He planned to find out what the rest of these young men were doing for ISIL. Perhaps they were managing the money collected from other sources of income: theft, kidnapping, the looting of assets… Henry was certain all this information would be flowing back to The Treasurer, filed and ready for inspection.

  The Treasurer had appeared more interested in hearing what Henry had to say about the key subject on his mind… money laundering. It was important for the group to have at its disposal cash that looked clean. The purchase of armament was one, although it did not always require clean cash – but certainly the purchase of food, medical or IT supplies required a clean bank account and clean cash to go with it.

  Henry smiled his best commercial smile. He would oblige The Treasurer with his top five tips for best results when it came to laundering money.

  “First stage is placement.” Henry and Wasim had been shown into The Treasurer’s office. Henry had immediately walked to a whiteboard that hung on one of the walls, grabbed a couple of pens and started writing in large letters. Wasim started to translate from English into Arabic, keen to ensure that their interlocutor understood something more technical that perhaps Henry would not convey so well if he used Arabic. Henry and Wasim worked well together, Henry full of energy, Wasim providing the steadiness of well-expressed knowledge… two people giving the impression they had known each other for years.

  A formidable team.

  “Placement,” Henry repeated, tapping on the board. “Many ways of disguising the origin of funds, but the best way is always the most complex way. Using derivative instruments and playing the market this will work.”

  “Not interest rates though.” Wasim had butted in.

  “Absolutely, not interest rates, only shares… If the transactions go one way, we make money, if they don’t, we lose but we will in any case always recover something and that something will become clean cash… laundered through a bona fide bank.”

  The Treasurer had moved to the whiteboard too. A good indication that Henry had caught his imagination.

  “I’ll help you set up companies that are legitimate and that can justifiably enter into these transactions.”

  “The way we discussed yesterday?” The Treasurer had spoken in English, accented but fluent. Neither Henry nor Wasim showed surprise, a man moving in financial circles had to speak the language of business.

  “Exactly, we use Qatar, the UAE and Cyprus.”

  The Treasurer hesitated and finally took a writing pad out of his desk and started taking some notes.

  Encouraging.

  “Next step after placement… layering.” Henry was on a roll. His voice had taken a serene tone, purring like a well-oiled engine. He was doing what he had been so very good at doing all his career… making the complex world of finance comprehensible to whoever he was speaking to. His clients used to love him.

  He drew the second word in another colour on the whiteboard.

  “We make it more difficult for the money placed to then be detected…”

  “And you suggest?” The Treasurer eyes glittered with the prospect of coming up with an international impregnable structure. All for the good and financial wealth of ISIL, of course.

  “That’s why the UAE is interesting… let’s go for property purchase and sale. Again, we are not trying to make a lot of money, we are simply trying to buy and sell legitimately to produce clean cash that will reach ISIL’s bank accounts.”

  Wasim was nodding reassuringly.

  “Finally,” Henry took another pen of a different colour, “integration.” Henry wrote the word once more. “We use the cash we have earned from our property dealings.”

  Henry walked over to the water fountain, helped himself to a fresh glass of water and returned to his place next to the whiteboard. It was almost theatrical…

  “We can do more property deals. We can buy our own oil, blend it with oil from other producers, and resell the blend on the market… Do this on a large scale.”

  The Treasurer ran his fat little fingers through his salt and pepper beard. “How do you…?”

  “… know you already sell oil to other countries and that the buyers blend it?” Henry was not trying to make a point, rather he was helping a client articulate an important question.

  The Treasurer waited.

  “Because that’s the only way oil can’t be analysed and traced back to the wells that produced it in the first place.”

  Henry would certainly not mention he had done extensive research on the subject while preparing for his infiltration.

  “How quickly can we implement?” The Treasurer had gone back to his desk and pushed his plump body back into his leather armchair. The lines of his face had become smooth. He could see a way of exploiting this new asset… called Henry Crowne.

  “As soon as I have a desk in this room.”

  The Treasurer looked him up and down. “It’ll be done by mid-afternoon today.”

  Henry nodded his t
hanks.

  “But we are very full… you’ll need to sit in another room.”

  “Of course…” Henry stayed relaxed… one step at a time.

  There was nothing else to discuss. Henry replaced the pens where they belonged, in a small cradle off the whiteboard.

  Wasim was already walking out of the door.

  “I hear you had a visit last night.” The Treasurer was back at his desk.

  “We did.” Wasim turned back. “Commander Haddawi doesn’t seem to trust us.” He shrugged. “I’d like to see my laptop back or at least my phone at some point. I call my mother who is unwell regularly.”

  The Treasurer nodded. “I’ll speak to Commander al-Haddawi. He does not decide a move like this without telling me.”

  * * *

  When they arrived back at their hotel Wasim and Henry were welcomed by the same dishevelled little man who had shown them their room the day before. He was fidgeting with a set of keys, oblivious to the movement of his hands.

  Wasim checked that the keys were still in his pockets. He liked the feel of this good old-fashioned opening device.

  “Problem?”

  The receptionist shook his head. “The room next door has been made available.”

  Henry and Wasim exchanged a puzzled look. Arriving on their floor Wasim stood in front of the new room and hesitated. He opened the door. The room was indeed free and the bed had been freshly made up.

  It seemed they had earned an upgrade, despite last night’s mayhem… or perhaps The Treasurer was flexing his muscles.

  This room’s decoration had also been stripped, but the furniture that remained was comfortable. Apart from a stain next to the sliding doors, the room was identical to the one Henry and Wasim had shared. Henry entered too but neither man spoke.

  They went meticulously through the room’s electrical fixtures, looking for listening or videoing devices just the way they had done several times already with the first room. They finally stood in the centre of the place and nodded.

  “Clear.” Wasim let a long breath out.

  “Clear,” Henry agreed.

  “I’ll move in.” Wasim handed Henry his set of keys.

  “Well, it seems that the integration phase in our spy-laundering scheme is working.” Henry chuckled.

  “Perhaps…”

  “What? You don’t think it’s a good sign.”

  “Nothing good ever comes from these people. And we don’t have any means of contacting MOTHER… The Treasurer is in no hurry to kit me up. Why should he be?”

  A rebuff that Henry did not mind. Vigilance was the key to staying alive in Raqqa, not only a job well done. Henry should have been more worried about Wasim’s laptop and phone disappearing or his Glock being stolen. But he sensed that he was making progress with The Treasurer. If al-Haddawi had not been enthusiastic about Henry, The Treasurer was prepared to form his own opinion… he too had a political agenda.

  Henry entered what was now his room and after Wasim had removed the couple of items which belonged to him, Henry went through the same debugging process again.

  Vigilance… always.

  * * *

  The encrypted laptop had been re-booted almost an hour ago. Amina could not sleep. She had woken up at around 5.00am and spent 15 minutes pretending she might go back to sleep. She had then thrown off the bedcovers and gone over to her device, keen to find out what had landed in her inbox.

  Amina yawned and walked from the kitchen table where she had placed the laptop to the coffee machine that was bubbling away. She poured herself another mug. The old machine had seen better days, but she liked to brew her coffee from freshly ground beans. Her husband had taken away the newly acquired Nespresso machine, good riddance on both counts. She glanced at the dishes left in the sink from the previous night. Her two daughters had been spending an evening with her, before her ex-husband had come to collect them for a two-week holiday. The pizza box was still on the counter, as were the Coca-Cola cans and the empty tub of double chocolate chip ice-cream. It had been the right call to have shared custody, but it still hurt her raw that she had had to make that choice.

  Amina’s mind drifted back to the mission she was supervising with Steve Harris, RED HAWK. She would get ready in a moment. Her fingers slid on the mouse to bring the screen to life one final time.

  The words ‘hostage’ and ‘execution’ hit her square in the face. She scanned the email from OMA, holding her breath has she did.

  The OMA team allocated to RED HAWK had been tracking coded messages for a few days now. On the face of it these men were exchanging mundane information… Where to buy a good quality taqiyah or which mosque to visit for prayer in a foreign city, but hidden messages were embedded in the simple text. And the messages were clear: hostages were at risk.

  Her cup of coffee wobbled in her hand, spilling drops across the wooden surface of the kitchen table. She hardly noticed. She left the half-drunk mug on the counter, ran to her bedroom, grabbed a clean shirt and her suit and dashed into the bathroom. Within 20 minutes she was collecting her laptop from the kitchen table, shoving it into her bag and running out of the door.

  She called Harris. His mobile was engaged. He too must have seen the OMA email. She left her maisonette on Vauxhall Grove and started a breakneck walk towards the SIS building. She managed to make the journey in a record five minutes, catching the green lights at the Lambeth Road crossing, expertly negotiating the complex set of roads below Vauxhall train station.

  It took her more time to clear security when entering the building than it had done to come from her home. The several checks to gain access to the floor on which she was working tested her patience. She tried Harris again… Still engaged. She finally alighted on the third floor, walked past the Control Room and went straight to OMA’s office. She called Ahmed, no answer from his landline, his mobile going to voicemail.

  Were they already huddled in an emergency response meeting? Surely Harris would have called her. Or perhaps there was no time. She typed her security credentials into the keypad and called the interphone.

  “I am here for a meeting on RED HAWK,” she chanced.

  “You are?”

  “Amina Brown… with Steve Harris.”

  The voice cut out and came back again.

  “Room 5.”

  The door’s latch released with a small sigh and Amina dashed in.

  Steve Harris was in deep conversation with a young Asian man when she entered the room. She had knocked at the door and the young man had opened it without dropping the exchange with Harris.

  “We’ve just started to go through the data in detail.” Harris had not bothered to greet her and she did not care.

  “Is it legit?”

  “Almost certainly… information obtained from sources in Raqqa.”

  “I thought Raqqa had gone dark?”

  “This is very recent chatter… never picked up before.” The young man nodded.

  “Is it a negotiation stance or have they decided already?”

  Amina sat next to a set of laptops that had been connected for the meeting.

  “Difficult to say… But from what we can tell, ISIL has abducted a good number of hostages, Americans and Europeans.”

  Amina slid a look at Harris. He nodded almost imperceptibly; Jack, his Langley contact, must have confirmed the American side of things.

  “We are aware of four men, all British, who are building a reputation for themselves amongst the ranks of ISIL.”

  “Reputation for what?” Amina glanced at the laptops that were still churning data.

  “Savagery with the kafir.” The young man did not hesitate. To him there was no doubt the situation had become critical. “What we don’t know yet is whether this has been approved.”

  “You mean… by al-Baghdadi?”

  “
Correct.”

  “How close are these four guys to him?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Harris and Amina fell silent. Beyond the dreadful news for Mattie Colmore and all the other hostages lay the worrying question about Henry and Wasim. How exposed were they now?

  They had not had news from them since yesterday… an eternity in the volatile environment that was Raqqa.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It had been less than 24 hours since Henry had seen Mattie, but perhaps already too long. The more time it took for him to claim her, the more likely other jihadists would decide her fate.

  His mind drifted from the room to the day of the crossing at Bab-al-Hawa. She had tried to escape, a brave though foolish move that Henry somewhat admired. He moved back inside, walked to the corner of the room where an electrical ring had been installed. He lined up the ingredients necessary to make a cup of spiced tea, the only enjoyable thing he had learned from the camps. It soothed him to go through a ritual that was simple and brought pleasure when done.

  The tea, spices, milk and sugar were now simmering… It would take another few minutes.

  A silhouette materialised in front of the sliding doors. Henry turned around, surprised. Wasim knocked at the glass but did not enter. Ali was in his shadow.

  Wasim’s knitted eyebrows and ashen face told him a lot.

  “That bad?”

  “Ali has been talking to some of the other fighters he shares a room with. There are rumours of a hostage execution.”

  “Where?”

  “In Raqqa.” Ali had found his voice again.

  “Mattie?”

  “No one knows… But there are other hostages around the city.”

  “What about the other journalist?”

  “No idea what happened to him but according to the others he’s not here.”

  “Are you sure?” Henry had moved his attention to the young man and his searching blue eyes made him recoil.

  “Yes… Good intel.” Ali nodded.

  “OK…” Henry ran his hand over his cheek and slid it down his neck. “We need to go back to The Treasurer today.”