Firefight

by Chris Ryan

  'He did not disappoint us. As soon as he returned to his home country, he went about insinuating himself into the ranks of a group of mujahideen that was being heavily funded by a Saudi Arabian benefactor. His name was Osama bin Laden.'

  Will's eyes widened and he couldn't help notice that Priestley seemed pleased that this last nugget of information had finally elicited some kind of response from him.

  'Of course,' Priestley continued, 'back then Bin Laden was not the bête noir he is today. Al-Qaeda was yet to be formed, although he had led a group called Maktab al-Khidamat, which channelled money into the mujahideen for the Afghan war. The CIA were interested in Bin Laden anyway, because even though we were kind of on the same side back then, his anti-American stance was no secret.

  'In the early 1990s the Taliban started to emerge as a powerful force in the country, then al-Qaeda. Ahmed was effectively Westernised by then; certainly he had no sympathy for the Taliban or al-Qaeda. He was able to infiltrate the higher echelons of both those groups - he even met Bin Laden a couple of times in the mid-Nineties - and even when American policy towards the mujahideen changed, he remained loyal to us. He was an intelligent guy and I guess he saw what was happening, saw that the Taliban could only ever be bad news for his country.'

  'And, of course, you were still paying him,' Will observed flatly.

  Priestley nodded. 'We were, as you so rightly point out, still paying him,' he agreed. 'And we got our money's worth, Will. You don't need to know the details, but let me tell you - the kind of information that was fed to us by Faisal Ahmed during the late 1990s was pure gold dust. Information of al-Qaeda plots, details of their rank and file, their structure. If it weren't for him, we'd have been in the dark. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that his information directly saved thousands of lives. Thousands, Will. And you know what? If he'd still been with al-Qaeda at the time, there's a very good chance that 9/11 would never have happened. That's how important he was to us.'

  'So what went wrong? 'Will asked.

  Priestley shrugged a little sadly. 'His cover was blown.'

  'Who by?'

  Priestley and Pankhurst glanced at each other. 'We don't really know, Will,' the American admitted. 'But it seems likely that it was someone in our own ranks.'

  'You're telling me that al-Qaeda infiltrated the CIA?'

  'No security service is impregnable, Will,' Priestley said quietly. 'We've shown that by infiltrating enough ourselves.

  You'd be surprised if I told you some of the places where we have agents.' He smiled. 'Which I'm not going to do, of course. Anyway, Ahmed was taken over the border into Pakistan, to an al-Qaeda training facility. He was tortured for three days - brutal torture, Will, sickening torture. Physical and mental. The skin on his back was flayed and allowed to go septic. He was beaten and branded. But as far as we know, he didn't crack. And at the end of it, more dead than alive, he managed to escape. He fled west into Iran, from where he managed to make it to the United Arab Emirates. Ten weeks of escape and evasion, horribly wounded. It was something else.'

  Will nodded.

  'It was in the UAE that he contacted us and we picked him up. For someone who had been through such a lot, he was still remarkably calm and focused. We offered him safe passage to the US, but he declined.'

  'I'm not surprised,' Will commented.

  'Why's that, Will?'

  'Because governments aren't exactly famous for treating their ex-soldiers well,' he said. 'And with everything he knew, he could easily have become a potential liability to the US. He was probably scared that someone would come up to him in a dark alley and put a bullet in him.'

  Priestley smiled.

  'I don't think he was afraid of that, Will. Despite what you might think, the US government would have looked after him. We're not as bad as some people make us out to be, you know. No, that wasn't the reason. The reason was that we couldn't tell him who it was that blew his cover. He knew that coming back into the US under CIA protection would be a death warrant. And so he decided to go to the UK - somewhere he could be anonymous. Somewhere he could be safe.'

  'Don't give me that,' Will sneered. 'I bet you stopped paying him once he was no use to you.'

  'We didn't have to continue paying him, Will,' Priestley continued, 'because our British counterparts took over that job.' He glanced over in Pankhurst's direction.

  The director had been sitting in his chair, fingers pressed together, and a look of concentration on his face as Priestley's story had unfolded. Now, though, he stood up, walked to the front of his desk and perched on the edge. 'Faisal Ahmed,' he explained, 'was a unique asset for us. We were very grateful to the CIA for allowing us to make use of him.'

  'He wanted to carry on working?' Will asked. 'After everything he'd been through?'

  Pankhurst looked Will straight in the eye. 'What else could he do, Will?' the director asked. 'He was intelligent enough to know that if a military man stops his career before the time is right, he risks wasting away into nothing.'

  Will looked down awkwardly as Pankhurst continued.

  'Ahmed was a stranger in a strange land. He had been a fighter from the age of ten, a trained spy from the age of sixteen. Now he was in his early thirties. I hardly think he could have been expected to go and work in a supermarket, do you? We gave him work to do. We made him feel useful. On his arrival in England he was given a new identity and a place to live in an area of London known to be a hotbed of fundamentalism. It wasn't long before he had infiltrated a number of terrorist cells and was using his considerable skills to tip us off about their activities. Faisal Ahmed warned us about any number of potential terrorist strikes all over the country and we were able to prevent them. He worked with us for three years and in that time I estimate that he put a stop to ten major terrorist operations.

  'But then, in 2003, he went dark. Vanished completely.'

  Pankhurst stood up and walked over to the window. 'It's pretty hard to vanish in this country when MI5 really want to find you, Will. But as you've heard, Ahmed was well trained.'

  'Maybe he left the country,' Will suggested.

  'That's just what we thought, at first. Until intelligence started coming in that a person matching his description was involved in masterminding a series of low-level terrorist strikes like the ones I just showed you.'

  'The Glasgow Airport bombing?'

  'Among others. The intelligence was sound and we know Ahmed was involved. We even discovered where he had been staying on a couple of occasions - bedsits, usually, on the outskirts of satellite towns around the UK, the sort of places anyone could merge into the background with ease. But every time we closed in on him, he had always disappeared. At first we cursed our bad luck, and of course the excellent training the CIA had given him.' He smiled somewhat ruefully at Priestley, who affected a look of false modesty. 'But soon it became clear that there was more to it than that. Ahmed was being tipped off and it could only be by someone in the security services.'

  'Five's got a mole, you mean?' Will asked directly.

  'Yes, Will,' Pankhurst said calmly. 'Five's got a mole. Like Don says, it's hardly a great surprise - we expect this sort of thing from time to time. But it means we are extremely compromised in our search for Ahmed.'

  'Why do you think he went dark?' Will asked.

  'We don't know,' Pankhurst admitted. 'Not for sure. But we can hazard a guess. The last contact we had was in February 2003, about three weeks before the invasion of Iraq. You don't have to be a political scientist to know how unpopular that little move was, even among ordinary white Britons and Americans. But obviously it was also very unpopular among moderate Muslims in both countries. We can only surmise that Ahmed objected to the invasion on some ideological level and that caused him to change his allegiance.'

  'He's a strangely principled man,' Priestley interjected, 'and if you think about it, it makes a certain amount of sense. When the US invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, there were sound reasons for doing it
, not least that the Taliban were most likely giving Bin Laden refuge. But Iraq? That was political, cynical - at least, that's what plenty of people thought.'

  'Anyway,' Pankhurst continued, 'whatever the reason, the first terrorist attack that we know Ahmed was involved in occurred about two months after the invasion of Baghdad and they've been going on ever since. With a few exceptions, nobody has been hurt in any of his attacks - it's almost as though they've been warning shots, as if he's letting us know that he's still around and that he's -' Pankhurst seemed to be struggling to find the word.

  'Pissed,' Priestley supplied helpfully in his American drawl.

  'Quite,' Pankhurst muttered. 'Recently, however, there has been a development.'

  'What sort of development?' Will asked.

  Pankhurst sniffed. 'A significant one,' he said flatly. 'We've been picking up a lot of intelligence chatter about Ahmed - nothing concrete, but it was clear something was in the offing.' He narrowed his eyes. 'You are aware, I suppose, of the existence of what certain people have taken to calling "black camps"?'

  'Yeah,' Will said slowly. He had heard the rumours of course - that there were places outside the legal jurisdiction of America and Britain where suspects were taken to be interrogated in ways that were illegal in more civilised countries. Places they could be tortured without there being any comeback. Places you didn't want to end up.

  'Well, we got lucky with one of our leads. A joint British and American operation apprehended a young Pakistani student in Rome three days ago. He was taken to a black camp and -' again Pankhurst seemed to search for the right word, '- persuaded to reveal everything he knew about, well, everything. He informed us that Faisal Ahmed is planning a terrorist strike against London some time in the next three weeks. Something major. We bled our informant dry, but that was all he could tell us. We don't know where it's going to happen and we don't know when. All we know is, it will happen.'

  Pankhurst's stark prediction seemed to echo around the room. The two men stared at Will for a while without saying anything.

  'Well, I don't know what you think I can do about it,' he said in an attempt to break the uncomfortable silence.

  The two men remained expressionless. The American turned again to look out of the window. 'I was in New York on 9/11,Will,' he said quietly. 'I've never seen such horror. I've never seen fear like that in anybody's eyes. But you know what? Compared to Faisal Ahmed, the men who plotted and carried out that attack were amateurs. Ahmed's the best there is - if he wanted a major strike on London, he has the capability to make it the most horrific act of violence we've ever seen.'

  'Fine,' Will replied. 'I still don't see where I come in.' He was getting impatient now and wanted to leave. His eyes flickered over to the door and he wondered what would happen if he just walked out.

  'You come in, Will,' Pankhurst said quietly,'because you've been out of service for the last two years.'

  Will blinked. 'What are you talking about? That makes no sense at all.'

  'I told you, Will. We have a mole. We don't know who it is and we don't know where it is. Most importantly, we don't know how far their influence extends. You, however -' Pankhurst gave him a thin smile. 'As far as we can tell, you've had no contact with the military or with the authorities since you retired two years ago. We've been watching you for a while, Will, and it seems your longest conversations have been with the gentleman round the corner who runs the off-licence.'

  Instantly Will stood up. 'For fuck's sake,' he muttered. 'I don't have to listen to this shit.'

  He made for the door.

  'I apologise, Will,' Pankhurst announced. 'That was uncalled for. Please, sit down and hear me out.'

  Will stopped in his tracks. He found that he was shaking, but at least his brain hadn't turned to jelly. He knew Pankhurst was going to finish saying what he had to say - if Will walked out before that happened, chances were that he'd only be dragged in again, and probably a lot less politely than last time. A frown wrinkled on his forehead as he turned and sat down again.

  'Thank you, Will,' Pankhurst said quietly, and for a moment Will thought he sounded genuinely grateful. 'The truth is, we need you. We need someone clean and we need someone we think might just be a match for Ahmed and for the operation we have in mind. We don't have many options, Will. We don't have any options, apart from you.'

  'I'll level with you, Will,' Priestley continued. 'I wanted to put one of our boys on this job. But then Lowther showed me your file and even I've got to admit it's impressive. You've fought your way out of some pretty nasty corners.'

  'Yeah, well that was a long time ago. If you've read my file closely enough, you'll see that I've got more reason to hate terrorists than most. But there's nothing I can do about it. Not now. I've been out of it for too long.'

  'I don't think that's true, Will,' Pankhurst said. 'I saw the way you dealt with my people this morning.'

  Will shrugged. 'Whatever,' he said. 'I'm not interested. You can find someone else and that's my last word. Now if there's nothing else, I'd like to go.'

  'Actually,' Pankhurst said a bit too quickly, 'there is something else.' He exchanged a worried glance with his CIA counterpart, then took a deep breath. 'There's one other thing I haven't told you.'

  Will's eyes narrowed. 'What?' he demanded.

  'I mentioned that Ahmed's bombing campaign had practically no casualties, that they were like warning shots.'

  'Yeah?'

  'There was one exception. Two exceptions, actually. 'The director looked piercingly at him and as he spoke Will felt a sickness in his stomach and a hot surge of adrenaline. Pankhurst took another A4 photograph from the sheaf and held it lightly in his fingertips. 'It was two years ago,' he said, his voice flat. 'A bomb outside a department store in Knightsbridge. Two casualties, both female, a mother and daughter.'

  He handed the photograph to Will. Drawn to it like a bystander to an accident, he looked at the image. He knew it well, of course. It had haunted his dreams for months on end. He recognised the curve of the woman's back as she wrapped herself around her dead child. He recognised the way the little girl's long, honey hair was spattered over her bloodstained face.

  His hand started to shake even more.

  'I'm sorry to have to tell you this way,' Pankhurst continued, relentlessly. 'But you need to know. Faisal Ahmed killed your family, Will. And now you're the only one who can do anything about it.'

  FOUR

  The room seemed to spin.

  Will was barely aware of the other two men as they stood there, watching him intently, checking to see what his reaction would be. The photo in his hand seemed to fill all his senses, to bring back all the grief like a sharp shard of glass slicing right through him. He found that he was biting on his lower lip, so hard that he could taste the hot, metallic flavour of his own blood, and without a word he stood up. The picture fell to the floor as he did so, but Will didn't bother to pick it up. He had no need of a photographic reminder of that scene. It was etched on his brain and would be until the day he died.

  'You bastards,' he whispered.

  The two men remained silent.

  'You fucking bastards!' he shouted. 'Why didn't I know about this before?'

  'It wasn't necessary, Will,' Pankhurst replied calmly.

  'I'll decide what's fucking necessary!' he yelled. 'They were my family. Not a couple of pawns in your fucking game.' His body was shaking now and he felt violent. He wanted to hit them, to make them feel his pain; but something stopped him, paralysed him. He looked from one to the other and their blank gazes infuriated him even more. In the end, he simply turned and left the office, slamming the door. Neither Pankhurst nor Priestley tried to stop him.