Spider Shepherd 11 - White Lies

by Stephen Leather

A jeep screeched around the corner, full of gun-toting terrorists. Willoughby-Brown raked the vehicle with gunfire. The terrorists screamed and died, the jeep overturned and burst into flames. Putin raced forward, firing his M249 from the hip. ‘Die, you motherfuckers!’ he shouted in Willoughby-Brown’s headset.

  ‘They’re dead, Putin,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘And you’re wasting ammo. We’ve a way to go yet.’

  ‘Aye, someone needs to put a bullet in the Ruskie,’ growled the Texan. He was off to Willoughby-Brown’s left, carrying a Barrett .50-cal sniping rifle. He was the unit’s sniper and using the call sign ‘Cowboy’. From the way his accent was thickening, Willoughby-Brown figured he was drinking, and drinking heavily.

  He heard a ringing sound and frowned, wondering where it was coming from. ‘What was that?’ he said, into his microphone.

  ‘What’s what?’ growled Cowboy in his ear.

  The ringing sound was repeated and Willoughby-Brown realised it was his doorbell. He looked at his wristwatch. It was ten o’clock at night. He took off his headset, muted the sound of his television and pushed himself up out of his chair. He walked over to the window and pulled back the curtain a fraction. Whoever had rung the bell was standing at the far side of the door, out of view.

  He walked into the hall and tiptoed to the front door, his heart still racing from the Xbox game. He bent down and looked through the security peephole. There didn’t seem to be anyone there. He put the security chain on and opened the door. Charlotte Button was standing to the side wearing a black overcoat with the collar turned up.

  ‘Charlotte?’ he said, unable to conceal his surprise. ‘How did you know …’ He left the sentence unfinished. She worked for MI5, she knew where everyone lived. He closed the door, fumbled with the security chain, and opened it again.

  ‘I’ve not called at a bad time, I hope,’ she said.

  ‘I was just watching television,’ he said. He looked down the path behind her, then up and down the road.

  ‘Don’t worry, Jeremy. I came alone.’

  ‘So who’s that in the black Lexus?’

  ‘My driver.’

  Willoughby-Brown looked back at her, frowning. She was holding something in her pocket, something quite large. ‘Please don’t tell me that’s a gun,’ he said.

  She took her hand out, holding a bottle of Pinot Grigio. ‘We need to talk,’ she said. ‘I figure we can handle this in one of two ways. Either we sit down, open the bottle and talk like civilised adults.’ She hefted the bottle in her hand. ‘Or I beat you to a pulp with it.’

  Willoughby-Brown chuckled and held the door open for her. ‘I’ll get some glasses.’

  Shepherd was lying on his side, trying to sleep. It was warm in the cell, but not stiflingly hot, so he figured it was either late morning or early evening. His internal body clock was no help as it had been disrupted by the flight from London to Islamabad. His mouth was bone dry and his breath rasped in his throat. The stone floor was unyielding and he was using his left arm as a pillow. Sleep wouldn’t come, though he did drift in and out of consciousness. How long had he been in the cell? One day? Two? Three? He had no way of knowing. Two maybe. He hadn’t needed to go to the toilet. His body was shutting down, conserving water in every way it could.

  He tried to focus on home. On Liam. On Katra. He pictured Katra standing at the kitchen sink, but then she was cooking, frying him steak and onions, and then the hunger pangs kicked in, so painful that they made him grunt out loud. He forced himself to ignore the hunger. They’d feed him eventually, he was sure of that. And they’d give him water. It was just a matter of time. There was a structure to what was happening. Isolation. Darkness. Hunger. Thirst. Soon there would be sleep deprivation. Then beatings. And torture. Shepherd closed his eyes and tried to think happier thoughts; it was best not to dwell on what lay ahead.

  Willoughby-Brown gave the corkscrew a twist and a tug and the cork slid out with a whisper. He poured wine into two glasses, handed one to Button and sat down. He had pushed his Xbox, controller and headset under the coffee table and switched off the television. She commandeered his favourite chair, the winged leather one that he sat on while he played video games, so he sat down on the black leather sofa that faced the fireplace. ‘What is it you want, Charlotte?’ he asked. ‘I gave you the intel.’

  ‘I want my man back from Pakistan, alive and in one piece.’

  ‘Anything I can do, I will do, you have my word on that.’

  ‘Good. I’m going to hold you to that. The information you sent through to me today, it’s been redacted.’

  ‘Of course. It’s an ongoing investigation, we have agents at risk.’

  ‘I’m not a Guardian reporter, Jeremy. Anything you give me will stay in-house.’

  ‘I was following instructions, Charlotte.’

  ‘Not good enough,’ she said. ‘And you know it’s not good enough. Listen, Jeremy, and listen well. I am not going to let my man suffer a second longer than is necessary. I will do whatever it takes to get him out. Do you hear what I’m saying? Whatever it takes.’

  Willoughby-Brown nodded. ‘I do understand.’

  ‘I want all the data you have. All of it. I’ll decide what’s relevant or not.’

  ‘I can’t do that, Charlotte.’

  ‘Yes you can. You just have to do it unofficially. You download the data to a thumb drive and you give that thumb drive to me.’

  ‘Have you any idea how much trouble I would be in if I was found out?’

  ‘One, you won’t be found out. You have my word on that. And two, do you have any idea how much trouble you will be in if you don’t help me?’

  Willoughby-Brown’s eyes narrowed. ‘That sounds like a threat, Charlotte,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Sounds like a threat?’ She laughed harshly. ‘Jeremy, if I don’t get Spider back in one piece I am going to lash out in ways that I’ve never lashed out in before. If I was looking for anyone to blame for this present situation I’d be looking at you. That’s not a threat, that’s a promise.’

  Willoughby-Brown swallowed and almost gagged. He took a quick drink of wine.

  ‘I want the data, and I want it first thing tomorrow. I want everything you have on the mosque in Bradford and the Brits who you know have been over to Pakistan for training.’

  Willoughby-Brown nodded slowly. ‘OK,’ he said.

  ‘And I need you to get Tazam Gill back to London so that I can talk to him.’

  Willoughby-Brown frowned. ‘He’s of more use in Pakistan. He speaks the language, he can keep track of what’s happening.’

  ‘Let’s face it, Jeremy, he hasn’t done a great job so far, has he? Raj’s cover was blown on his watch and now they’ve got Shepherd, too.’

  ‘You can’t blame him for that,’ said Willoughby-Brown.

  ‘I need to talk to him.’

  ‘I don’t want a witch-hunt, Charlotte.’

  ‘I left my pitchfork and torch at home,’ she said. ‘I want to sit down and talk to him. Considering what’s happened, I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request. And that’s what it is, Jeremy. A request. From me to you.’

  ‘And if I refuse your request?’

  ‘Then, as I said, I’ll take that bottle and smash it over your head.’ She grinned. ‘Not literally, of course. But that’s what it’ll feel like after I’ve finished with you. Two major operations have gone bad and you’re the common factor. At the moment you appear to be flying below the radar but it wouldn’t take much to change that.’ She sipped her wine as she let her words sink in.

  ‘I haven’t done anything wrong, Charlotte. If there’s been a slip-up, it wasn’t me. I wasn’t even in-country.’

  ‘No, you weren’t. But I’ll tell you this, Jeremy. If it had been my operation, I would have been there, on the spot.’

  Willoughby-Smith fumbled for his pack of cigars and lit one. He blew smoke before speaking. ‘OK, I’ll bring him back.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  He nod
ded. ‘Tomorrow.’

  She smiled sweetly and raised her glass to him. ‘Thank you so much.’

  Lex Harper settled into a steady rhythm as he pounded along the walkway between the road and the beach. It was an hour after dawn had broken, his favourite time to run in Pattaya. The air was as close to cool as it ever got in the seaside resort, and the pavement was pretty much deserted, allowing him to run at a fair pace. A few foreigners were sleeping in the shade of palm trees, too drunk to make their way back to their cheap hotels, but the jet ski operators and stallholders had yet to arrive and there were none of the hookers and transsexuals who usually touted for business along the strip.

  Harper ran every morning before breakfast; three miles to the start of Walking Street, the city’s main entertainment area, then three miles back to his apartment, a three-bedroom penthouse with a wraparound balcony that offered stunning views of the bay. He felt a vibration in the denim hip pack around his waist. Harper always had the hip pack on him, no matter what the time of day. It contained one of his many phones, an Irish passport in the name of Brendan O’Brien, two credit cards in the same name and fifty thousand baht in cash. The pack, and the heavy gold chain he always wore around his neck, meant that he could leave the country at a moment’s notice, either through the airport or overland to Laos or Cambodia if necessary. He had a larger bug-out bag under the bed in his apartment and another in the back of his SUV, but the essentials were in the hip pack. He loved living in Thailand, the Land of Smiles, but he had made it a rule never to be so enamoured with a place that he couldn’t leave at a moment’s notice. He jogged on the spot and took out his phone. The text message was from a UK number that he didn’t recognise. ‘YOU HAVE MAIL’.

  Harper grinned, slid the phone back into the hip pack, and started running again. He ran at full pelt and he was drenched with sweat when he reached the point where the beach road became Walking Street, home to many of Pattaya’s raunchier go-go bars. At night it was neon lit and packed with drunks, sex tourists and Asian tour groups being shouted at by scantily dressed girls and overenthusiastic touts offering cheap booze and sex shows. It was a much gloomier place during the day, the sunlight exposing the shabby shopfronts, dubious electrical wiring and potholed pavements. Harper picked up a bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice from a roadside stall and drank it as he walked along a side street to a beauty parlour that doubled as an internet café. It was open twenty-four hours a day, and even at that early hour there were customers, a girl having her hair washed and two girls sitting together at one of the computer terminals. The bargirls were in the process of composing an email to one of their sponsors, a request for money to pay for an operation for an aged relative who in all likelihood didn’t exist.

  The lady who ran the shop was in her late fifties. Khun Bee’s nut-brown face was wrinkled and her hair was starting to grey but she still had a fit body that suggested she had once made her living dancing around a chrome pole. He ordered a coffee and paid her for half an hour’s internet usage before sitting down at the terminal farthest away from the two bargirls. He took a swig of orange juice and logged on to Yahoo Mail. He had committed the email address and password to memory though he had never used the account to send an email. Only he and Charlotte Button had the password and they used the Drafts folder to communicate. It was a technique first developed by al-Qaeda to ensure instantaneous communication that was pretty much surveillance free. Between them the National Security Agency in the States and GCHQ in the UK could eavesdrop on every phone call made and read every email sent, but using the Drafts folder trick meant that the email was never actually transmitted and so never became visible.

  There was a single message in the folder. It had been placed there an hour earlier. ‘I NEED YOU IN LONDON. NOW’. Harper deleted the message just as Khun Bee arrived at his elbow with his coffee. He flashed her a beaming smile. ‘I’ll take that to go,’ he said.

  The door was flung open and Shepherd flinched at the sudden bright light. He rolled over and sat up with his back against the wall, his hand up to protect his eyes from the glare. He heard the scuffle of sandals on concrete. He tensed, not sure what was coming. He squinted up at the light. There was a figure there, bearded and scarfed. There was a blur of movement and Shepherd flinched and then he was doused in water. He heard a voice say something in Arabic or Pashto and then the door slammed shut and he was in darkness again. Water was running down his face and chest and he used his hands to gather as much of it as he could, licking the precious liquid off his fingers. He dropped to the ground and ran his fingers along the floor. There was a small dip in the concrete and water had pooled there. He lowered his head and lapped at the liquid. It tasted foul but he forced himself to gulp it down. The fact that they had given him water was a good sign. It meant they wanted to keep him alive, for the time being at least.

  Charlotte Button was sitting in her office studying a report on the Bradford mosque where Raj had been recruited for the overseas training when her mobile rang. It was Willoughby-Brown. ‘I’m reluctant to send this around by courier,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want to meet?’

  ‘I don’t think I have much choice,’ he said.

  Button looked at her watch. It was ten o’clock and she was due to attend a JIC meeting at 10.30. ‘How about lunch? On me?’

  ‘I could do lunch,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll have to come across the river, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Not a problem.’

  ‘There’s a Pizza Express down the road,’ she said. ‘Cheap and cheerful. Shall we say twelve?’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘Isn’t there something you need to tell me?’ asked Button.

  ‘Of course,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘I’m really sorry about all this, Charlotte.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Button. ‘I’m talking about Taz.’

  ‘Ah, right, yes, sorry. He’s arriving this evening. I’ll give you the flight details when I see you.’

  Button shook her head and ended the call. Willoughby-Brown was an idiot but until she had the data files she had to be reasonably civil to him.

  Harper smiled as he handed the passport to the overweight Garda officer. ‘How’s it going?’ he said.

  The officer scowled. He clearly hadn’t joined the Irish police force to end up checking passports at Dublin Airport. He took the British passport from Harper and slowly flicked through it, examining every page even though most of them were blank. The picture and the date of birth were Harper’s, but the name wasn’t. For the purposes of entering Ireland he was Nicholas Cohen. Harper had paid five thousand pounds for the passport to a guy in Pattaya who swore that it was genuine and that the details on the biometric chip were in the Home Office computer database. Harper could see that the passport was good, but there was no way of knowing what would happen when it was checked against the Home Office’s Warning Index, which immigration officers relied on to weed out suspected terrorists, criminals and paedophiles, so instead of flying direct to London he had caught a KLM flight to Amsterdam and from there flew to Dublin. The guards who carried out the duties of immigration officers did nothing more than give the passports a visual once-over, they didn’t check the details on biometric chip or run them against any databases. As a EU citizen Harper could enter Ireland without hindrance and then all he had to do was to take a taxi from Dublin Airport up to Belfast. Belfast Airport was in the UK so the only check made was that the name in the passport matched the name on his ticket. Harper always laughed when he heard British immigration officials talking about tightening up border controls as in his experience every man and his dog knew about the Irish back-door route.

  The Garda reached the final page of the passport, looked at the photograph then at Harper. Harper smiled. The Garda handed the passport back and waved for Harper to move on. ‘You have a nice day,’ said Harper, though that clearly wasn’t on the cards.

  Charlotte Button sat back in her chair. It was ergo
nomically designed to make sitting for long periods as comfortable as possible, but already her back and neck were aching. Lunch with Willoughby-Brown hadn’t helped the tension in her neck muscles and more than once she had had to fight to resist the urge to throw her wine in his face. He had given her the thumb drive in a folded copy of the Daily Telegraph and she’d asked him for a verbal briefing while they ate their pizza.

  According to Willoughby-Brown, the operation had been all about Akram Al-Farouq, at least in the early stages. Al-Farouq was an al-Qaeda paymaster and a legitimate MI6 target. Somewhere along the line, Willoughby-Brown didn’t seem to be exactly sure when, the name of a Bangladeshi-born British imam based in a Bradford mosque had surfaced. Mohammed Ullah was the sort of Muslim cleric the British media adored, a moderate who believed that British Muslims should be building bridges with other religions in the country. He was often quoted in the Guardian and the Independent and was a frequent guest on BBC radio panel shows such as Any Questions?, where his moderate views were loudly applauded. But according to the MI6 investigation, Ullah was in fact a hardline fundamentalist who was helping funnel al-Qaeda money to home-grown jihadists. Unlike many of the hardline clerics who burned poppies and called for British soldiers to be killed and demanded that sharia law be instated in the UK, Ullah just smiled and told the British what they wanted to hear. He was all sweetness and light, and was even rumoured to be in line for an MBE or CBE in the next New Year’s Honours list. According to Willoughby-Brown, Ullah was playing a very clever long game, and the British were falling for it hook, line and sinker. The only way to test that theory for sure was to send in an undercover agent, and Raj had been selected for the task. Knowing how successful he’d been when working for MI5, Six had appealed to Raj’s patriotic instincts and he’d agreed to help. He’d been briefed, given a watertight legend, and sent to Bradford where he’d begun to attend Ullah’s mosque. Raj had portrayed himself as an angry young British-born Asian Muslim and had started hanging out with other young extremists. After six months he had been invited to evening sessions with the imam, supposedly for extra Qur’an studies, but it soon became clear that the meetings had a much more sinister purpose. Raj – or Rafiq, as he had been known in Bradford – was groomed to become a jihadist and eventually offered the opportunity to travel to Pakistan for specialised training.