‘How old is this wonder kid?’
‘Why does that matter?’
‘It matters.’
Willoughby-Brown sighed. ‘Twenty-seven.’
Shepherd groaned. ‘You handed Raj over to a kid?’
‘Taz is an experienced operative. Tazam Bashir. His father’s a QC, his mother’s on the boards of several charities.’
‘So young Taz is being fast-tracked, is he?’
‘You say that as if it was a bad thing,’ said Willoughby-Brown. He blew smoke over the river and flicked ash over the balcony. ‘He’s bright, he’s articulate, and he can think on his feet.’
‘Undercover experience?’
‘He’s been a handler for almost five years and never put a foot wrong.’
‘Until he managed to lose Raj?’
‘That was just bad luck,’ said Willoughby-Brown.
Shepherd folded his arms. ‘You had a twenty-seven-year-old handler running a twenty-two-year-old. You don’t think there’s anything wrong with that?’
‘How old were you when I met you in Sierra Leone?’
‘That’s not the same thing.’
‘Sierra Leone in 1997 was a hell of a lot more dangerous than present-day Pakistan. And you were what? Twenty-three?’
‘I was in the SAS.’
‘Exactly. You were doing stuff a hell of a lot more dangerous than we asked of Manraj. You took out a group of mercenaries. You were chased by drugged-up AK-47-toting child soldiers. And I’d barely turned thirty.’
‘You weren’t handling me, Jeremy.’
Willoughby-Brown laughed. ‘Yes, I was.’
Shepherd shook his head emphatically. ‘We did a few things for you to kill time. You weren’t involved in the planning or the execution.’
‘If that makes you feel better, you carry on believing it,’ said Willoughby-Brown. He took a long pull on his cigar and held the smoke deep in his lungs. He stared at Shepherd, a slight smile on his face.
Shepherd considered what the MI6 man had said. Was it true? Had he been played when he was in Sierra Leone? Had he been following Willoughby-Brown’s lead the whole time? He scratched the back of his neck. He’d been a relative youngster when he’d been in Sierra Leone with the SAS, but he hadn’t been stupid. Had Willoughby-Brown been manipulating him? He could see the sparkle of amusement in the MI6 man’s eyes so he forced a smile. ‘It’s not worth arguing about,’ he said. ‘We did what needed to be done, it doesn’t matter who was or wasn’t calling the shots.’
Willoughby-Brown blew smoke. ‘Exactly,’ he said.
‘But that doesn’t make this Taz any less culpable,’ said Shepherd.
‘You’re going to have to treat that as water under the bridge,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘The mission at hand is to rescue Manraj, not to apportion blame.’
‘Was Taz working for you?’
‘The decision to put Manraj with Taz wasn’t mine. I knew of Taz but I hadn’t worked with him. Just between you and me, he wouldn’t have been my first choice but it was felt that he was ready and able to take on the task.’
‘Yeah, well that was clearly an error of judgement.’
‘No arguments there,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘But as I said, we need to put that behind us. What matters is where we go from here.’
‘You have a plan?’
Willoughby-Brown smiled thinly. ‘I have an aim. I want to bring Manraj home. So far as a plan’s concerned, well, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’
Rafiq heard footsteps outside the door to his cell, then the sound of two bolts being pulled back. He was lying on his side, facing the door, his hands still bound behind his back. The cuts in his mouth had stopped bleeding but he still tasted blood each time he swallowed. The door opened and a big man in a dark green shalwar kameez and a white skullcap appeared. Rafiq blinked up at him. ‘Brother, I have done nothing wrong,’ he said.
The man ignored him. He took a plastic bottle of water and a rough clay bowl from an unseen figure and carried them into the cell. He knelt down and put them on the floor by Rafiq’s head. There was cooked rice in the bowl, topped with a splash of brown liquid that might have been a curry of some sort. He lifted Rafiq into a sitting position and then pulled a curved knife from his belt. Rafiq flinched and the man smiled savagely, then he knelt down and cut the rope that was binding Rafiq’s wrists. A second man appeared in the doorway, squat and well muscled, holding a pistol in his right hand.
‘Thank you,’ said Rafiq. He picked up the bottle of water, twisted off the cap and drank greedily. He gulped down half the bottle and then wiped his mouth with his sleeve. ‘Where am I, brother?’ he asked.
The man folded his arms but said nothing. He had a long beard, twice the length of Rafiq’s, dark brown at the end but white close to his skin. His eyebrows were jet black and his hair was only flecked with grey.
Rafiq put down the bottle and reached for the bowl of rice. He scooped some up with his fingers and pushed it into his mouth before chewing slowly. ‘Brother, if I am to be held here for much longer I will need to pray,’ said Rafiq. ‘Can you get me a prayer mat and a copy of the Qur’an? And water so that I may bathe.’
‘Praying won’t help you, brother,’ said the man.
‘Praying always helps, brother,’ said Rafiq.
‘You are a liar and a traitor and Allah will not listen to your prayers,’ said the man. He pointed a yellowed fingernail at Rafiq’s nose. ‘You will burn in hell and all the prayers in the world will not save your lying soul.’
‘You have to believe me, brother, I am not lying. I am a good Muslim and a committed jihadist. I would not be here if that were not so.’
The man cursed and slapped the bowl out of Rafiq’s hands. It shattered and the rice scattered over the ground. Rafiq stared up at him in surprise. The man kicked him in the chest and Rafiq fell back, banging his head against the wall so hard that he lay there stunned as the man left the cell and bolted the door.
After a few minutes Rafiq rolled on to his stomach, crawled across the floor to the shattered bowl and began to lick up the spilled rice.
Willoughby-Brown walked over to a large map that had been pinned to the wall opposite his desk. It covered the Middle East and most of Asia. ‘This is where Manraj was being trained,’ he said, tapping the north-eastern part of Pakistan. ‘He and the five men he was with flew to Islamabad about a week ago. From there they went overland, close to the border with Afghanistan.’ He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves.
‘You don’t have an exact location?’
‘They move their training camps around, they’re never more than temporary,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘The Yanks are forever flying drones over and that whole area is regularly looked at by their satellites.’
‘So what intel were you hoping to get from him?’ said Shepherd. ‘If they’re temporary, there’d be no point in attacking them.’
‘To be honest, we were more concerned about what they were planning here in the UK,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘He only knew one of the men he was flying out with, a chap he’d met at the mosque in Bradford where he was recruited. The operation was to identify the rest of the men who were being trained so that we could put them under surveillance back in the UK.’
‘Wouldn’t that have been a job for Five?’
‘Possibly, yes,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘But we were interested in the funding and the logistics of whatever attacks they were being trained for. Once we knew who was involved in the UK, we could follow the money trail and hopefully identify the paymasters.’
Shepherd nodded. What the man was saying made sense, but it would have made even more sense for there to have been a joint operation.
‘He really shouldn’t have gone,’ said Shepherd. ‘He should have backed out and you could have followed the other guy to Pakistan and seen who he met up with.’
‘We didn’t see there’d be any real risk,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘They were due to be away for
a month and his legend was rock solid.’
‘Well, something went wrong, obviously.’
‘And hindsight is always twenty-twenty. If I had known that this was going to happen then I wouldn’t have allowed him to go. But at the time, with the information I had at hand, it was the right call.’
‘Do you have any surveillance photographs of the area?’ asked Shepherd.
‘They wouldn’t help. He’s been moved.’
Shepherd frowned. ‘How do you know that?’
‘The Pakistanis have told me.’
‘Who specifically? Where is your intel coming from?
‘It’s from the Pakistani Secret Service,’ said Willoughby-Brown.
‘That’s awkward because there’s no such thing,’ said Shepherd.
‘I was using shorthand,’ said Willoughby-Brown tersely. ‘Of course I mean the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. ISI.’
Shepherd nodded. The ISI was the country’s main intelligence agency, the others being the Intelligence Bureau and Military Intelligence. He had little confidence in any of them as sources of intelligence. During the Russian occupation of Afghanistan the ISI had actively helped the mujahedin, albeit with the assistance of the CIA, and they had supported the Afghan Taliban during the country’s civil war in the 1990s. Now they were supposedly on the side of the West but Shepherd doubted that old allegiances could be so easily forgotten. ‘From what I’ve heard, the ISI leaks like a sieve,’ he said.
‘There is a lot of idle gossip in the intelligence world, as I’m sure you know,’ said Willoughby-Brown.
‘It’s more than gossip. The Afghans have been complaining for years that the ISI is financing and helping to train Taliban insurgents and tipping them off whenever the Yanks are firing missiles into the tribal areas.’
‘I think there’re two sides to every story,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘I’m sure there were close connections between MI5 and agents and sources within the IRA, but that doesn’t mean security was compromised. I’ve no doubt the Pakistanis would argue that they need to be in contact with the Taliban in order to gain intelligence. I can assure you that in this case the intel is good.’
‘So which division has supplied the intel?’
‘Which division?’
Shepherd frowned. ‘You are a Pakistan expert, right?’
‘I’m more of an al-Qaeda expert, to be honest.’
Shepherd smiled but he was far from happy about the way the conversation was going. ‘There’s the Covert Action Division that’s in charge of covert operations, there’s the Joint Intelligence Bureau that’s mainly concerned with political intelligence, there’s the Joint Signal Intelligence Bureau that handles electronic intelligence, there’s the SS Directorate that monitors terrorist groups in Pakistan. And there’s another five or six divisions, all separate fiefdoms. Some are trustworthy and some aren’t, so your source matters.’
‘I know it’s human intel,’ said Willoughby-Brown.
‘So the ISI has an inside man?’
‘That I’m not sure of,’ said Willoughby-Brown.
‘You don’t seem sure of much,’ said Shepherd.
‘The ISI are as protective of their sources as we are of ours. But I can tell you that Raj has been exposed and is being interrogated. And if we don’t do something, they’ll kill him.’
‘How much does he know?’
‘Raj?’
Shepherd suppressed a sudden urge to grab the MI6 men and hurl him off the balcony, but instead he forced a smile. ‘Yes, Raj.’
‘Other than his own operation, not much,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘We did some training with him, but mostly we were debriefing him.’
‘How much does he know about you?’
‘Next to nothing. Same with Taz. He doesn’t know our real names.’
‘But he knew you were with Six?’
Willoughby-Brown nodded.
‘What about other assets? Does he have any names he can give them?’
‘No. He was a stand-alone.’
‘So he doesn’t have any solid information to give them?’
‘Nothing that can damage any ongoing operations.’
Shepherd sighed. Whether or not Raj had any useful information on MI6 investigations wouldn’t matter to his interrogators. They would know that his handlers would act quickly to render useless any information that he had. What would be of much more interest to them would be what Willoughby-Brown had asked Raj to find out. That would show up the gaps in MI6’s knowledge as well as indicating the direction the investigation had been taking. ‘Had he had any counter-interrogation training?’
‘It wasn’t thought necessary. Raj was well trusted, he’d already been out to Pakistan when you were running him. The last thing we expected was for his cover to be blown.’
‘So he’s no idea what to do? How to act?’
‘We’re assuming he’ll deny everything at first.’
‘Until they torture him, then he’ll crack.’
Shepherd gritted his teeth. Willoughby-Brown’s offhand attitude was seriously starting to annoy him. Raj had risked his life to penetrate an al-Qaeda cell in London and now he was being tortured in some Pakistani hellhole while Willoughby-Brown preened himself and smoked his ridiculous tiny cigars.
‘So what’s the plan? What are we going to do?’
‘The Pakistanis are going to go in and rescue him.’
‘The army?’
‘The SSG. Special Services Group. They’re equivalent to the SAS.’
‘Do you have any operational details? Are they using helicopters? A ground approach?’
Willoughby-Brown shook his head. ‘They’ve not been forthcoming on that front, I’m afraid.’
‘But they’re happy to allow me to go in with them?’
‘Apparently they feel it would be helpful if someone who knows Manraj was there. You were the obvious choice because you know the man and you’ve got SAS experience.’
‘Can you do me a favour and stop calling him Manraj?’ said Shepherd. ‘Everyone calls him Raj.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yeah, I am. His name’s Raj. Calling him anything else just seems disrespectful.’
‘You’re a funny bugger, Shepherd.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m the funny bugger that’s going to be risking his life in Pakistan to rescue the guy you put at risk, so you’re going to have live with it.’
Willoughby-Brown’s eyes narrowed, but then he nodded. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Raj it is.’ He went back to his desk and pulled open a drawer. He took out a manila folder, sat down and opened it. It contained several dozen photographs, most of which appeared to have been taken from CCTV cameras. Willoughby-Brown flicked through them and then slid one across the desk towards Shepherd. ‘You should know that Raj’s appearance has changed a bit.’
Shepherd looked at the photograph. It was split in two, a full head-on shot and a side view. He frowned. The profile was markedly different from the Raj he remembered. He looked back at Willoughby-Brown and found him grinning. ‘We gave him the scars, lengthened the nose and added to his chin. On top of that, he’s grown quite a respectable beard.’
‘So that he couldn’t be recognised? So you knew there was a risk?’
‘A calculated risk.’
Shepherd glared at him. ‘A calculated risk when the downside is torture and beheading? Who the hell made that call?’
‘Raj was OK with it.’
‘Raj is a kid. He’s easily led, as I’m sure you know.’
‘He wanted to go. He was insistent.’
Shepherd shook his head in disgust.
‘He believes in what he’s doing. He’s a patriot. Proud to be British.’
‘And you played on that, I bet?’
‘He wants to serve his country, I helped him to do that.’
‘And now he’s being tortured in the bloody desert,’ said Shepherd. He tossed the photograph on to the desk. ‘What about his parents?’
‘Have they been told?’
‘Of course not.’
‘They need to know what’s happened,’ said Shepherd.
‘I’m not sure there’s any advantage in keeping them in the loop until we have a clearer idea of where we stand.’
‘Do they know he’s in Pakistan?’
‘He told them he was going there for a friend’s wedding and to do some travelling. A few white lies. It’s no big deal.’ Willoughby-Brown passed him another photograph, a surveillance picture of a young Asian leaving a mosque. ‘Naseem Naeem,’ he said. ‘He’s the one who flew out with Raj. He’s a mechanic, Bradford born and bred. Third-generation, his grandparents came over in the fifties to work in the mills.’
Shepherd studied the photograph. The man looked younger than his age and could easily have passed for a schoolboy. Willoughby-Brown pushed the file towards Shepherd. ‘The rest of the pictures are young men who flew on the same flight, and on other Pakistan flights the day before and the day after. We’ve weeded out the ones who were working or who went to Pakistan for genuine family reasons.’
Shepherd flicked through the photographs. There were more than fifty. ‘That’s a lot.’
‘You’re telling me. And that’s just three days. It’s a lot of needles in a bloody enormous haystack, which is why we needed Raj there. If we can get him back, he’ll be able to tell us who the naughty boys are.’
‘Was Raj able to communicate with you or anybody while he was at the camp?’
Willoughby-Brown shook his head. ‘We couldn’t take the risk of him taking any sort of communication device with him. He had a mobile with GPS but they took it off him when he arrived in Pakistan. We were able to get a look at him from an American spy satellite.’
Shepherd frowned. ‘Run that by me.’
‘We spoke to the Yanks and they gave us access to the feeds of satellites moving over that general area of north-west Pakistan. Most of the scans showed nothing. The Yanks tell me that al-Qaeda know the times and orbits of most of their long-standing surveillance satellites, but there’s one that they don’t seem to know about.’
He went back into the drawer and pulled out a couple of photographs, grainy and with the colour washed out. One showed a group of men doing some sort of exercise. Press-ups or planks, it was hard to see. Willoughby-Brown tapped one of the figures. ‘We’re pretty sure this is Raj.’
Spider Shepherd 11 - White Lies Page 9