Three Great Novels

by Henry Porter

  ‘Yes, that was my second visa. I was studying to be a doctor. I was at school in London before then.’

  The policeman looked at him sceptically. Khan had the odd thought that perhaps he had dreamed his past; everything before Bosnia and Afghanistan had been a kind of fantasy to protect him from things he had done and seen. Nemim was talking but he didn’t hear properly and asked the policeman to repeat himself.

  ‘This British visa is dated. This makes your passport thirteen years old,’ he said. ‘No passport can be that old. This passport is dead.’

  He closed it and swept the notebook and Jasur’s documents up from the table. ‘We understand you. We know who you are. You are international terrorist,’ he said. He got up abruptly and marched from the room.

  Two hours later Khan was shaken awake. He saw the bread, cheese and water that had been set in front of him while he slept. He snatched at it but managed to eat only a little before being taken from the room. Outside the police station quite a crowd was waiting, in the middle of which was a TV crew. Khan stood in the glare of the lights, feeling shrunken and exposed. Nemim was enjoying the moment, although he did not seem to know whether to present his captive as the heroic survivor of Macedonian brutality or a dangerous terrorist, and allowed for both options in his manner.

  The media opportunity ended, but instead of being taken back into the police station, Khan was placed in a van and borne off into the night.

  CHAPTER NINE

  At 7.00 a.m. Isis Herrick arrived with her bag at the gentrified mews house - French shutters, geraniums, carriage lamps - not far from the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The door was opened by an American carrying a machine pistol. He explained - a little apologetically - that the house was part of the embassy and she was now on US soil. Then he showed her to a room where two men stood listening to Walter Vigo, installed in a revolving leather chair with a cup of coffee and the Wall Street Journal draped like a napkin over his lap. Vigo was in his element - the nexus of the ‘special relationship’.

  ‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, tipping the paper to the floor. ‘Here’s the brains responsible for RAPTOR.’ He introduced her to the two men. ‘This is Jim Collins and Nathan Lyne from the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. Both these gentlemen were with the Directorate of Operations and have experience in the field so they know the problems and pitfalls of an operation as complicated and wide-ranging as this. Jim is one of the people in charge of things out at Northolt and Nathan is running your desk.’ He stopped for the Americans to murmur hello and give Isis firm handshakes.

  ‘Northolt?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, we’ve moved the operation out there. I think you’ll be very impressed with what you’re going to see. We expect you to spend a week or two there before a transfer to the field but, as you’ll appreciate, things are and will remain very fluid. I hope, by the way, you won’t mind the accommodation, but it seems simpler and more secure if we’re not all being ferried to and from the Bunker in minibuses.’

  ‘The Bunker,’ she said, surprised. ‘Are we confined to barracks? ’

  ‘No,’ interjected Collins, a stout man with a pinkish complexion and a brush of fine blond hair. ‘But we’re trying to keep this as tight as possible, at least for the time being. There are not too many great restaurants in the area, but you’re welcome to leave for R&R when you need. It’s more a question of not having large numbers of American spook-types filling up the trattoria in Mayfair. Besides, the facility under Northolt has a great deal of space and there’s plenty of room for solitude. There’s even a restaurant and a gym.’

  Collins nodded to Nathan Lyne, who rose and moved to sit on the sofa beside her. Tall, with a slow, understated manner, Nathan Lyne haemorrhaged high caste Yankee confidence, which she later learned was the result of Harvard law school and a short period with a Washington law firm.

  ‘You’re the only person we’ve brought on the team who doesn’t need the introduction so I’ll cut to the chase,’ he said. ‘We now have eleven suspects under surveillance. All of them passed through Heathrow on May fourteen and as far as we know at the present time, they are all lilywhites. No record of any misdemeanour and only tenuous Islamist affiliations. Certainly no training in Afghanistan. We’re making some progress on who they are and we have names for some of them.’

  ‘We’ve split the suspects into three groupings - Parana, Northern and Southern. The Parana group has a homogeneity of its own and it’s the one we’ve had most success with. Your work at the airport allowed us to trace three of the eleven suspects to the Shi’ite community in the tri-border region of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. The river that flows through the area is named the Parana. There’s a strong Lebanese contingent in the area that has links to the Hizbollah organisation and its many business interests in Lebanon. The three men appeared to have been sheltered rather than trained in the towns and ranches, sitting out the worldwide hunt for terrorists and establishing unblemished credentials for themselves. A successful operation to penetrate the community by us put names to the stills from the Heathrow security film. These guys had the smell of North Africa about them, though no one was certain about their exact nationalities. Anyway, eventually the trail led to a man named Lasenne Hadaya, a former officer in the Algerian security forces who was reported to have undergone a religious conversion after seeing a sign written in a desert rock.

  ‘Hadaya led to a man named Furquan, with whom he had had contact in Rome. Finally we nailed the identity of the third man, a Moroccan engineer and part-time college professor named Ramzi Zaman. By the way, we had help with all this from the North African intell’ services but they have no idea exactly what we’re doing. Anyway, these three guys vanished in the late nineties, having lived quietly in Italy’s large North African community and worked in various menial jobs that were way below each man’s capabilities.’

  Without asking Herrick, Collins placed a cup of coffee in her hand. She nodded gratefully.

  ‘So, these men wind up in Western Europe. Hadaya is in Paris, Furquan in Stuttgart and the Moroccan, Zaman, is in Toulouse. Each was received by a bunch of North African helpers, who prepared for their arrival by arranging work, accommodation, cars and all kinds of local permits and passes.’

  Lyne continued for another half hour talking without pause. The Northern group consisted of five men, two in Copenhagen, one in Stockholm and two who had come to rest in Britain after flitting around Europe on May 14 and 15. They were working on the suspects in Scandinavia and were now sure that they included an Indonesian national called Badi’al Hamzi who had once been a science teacher in Jakarta. The Syrian in Denmark and the Egyptian in Sweden were unknown quantities. The two suspects in Britain were a Pakistani and a Turk. Lyne said neither of these gentlemen could break wind without MI5 and Special Branch watchers knowing about it.

  ‘In fact they had an astonishing piece of good fortune yesterday. The Turkish fellow, Mafouz Esmet, was taken ill on the street, outside a tube station in East London. One of the female officers with the Security Services called for help and then went with the guy to hospital. He was suffering from appendicitis and had an operation last evening. She’s going to visit with him tomorrow, and you know what, this could be a very important break for us.’

  ‘Okay, so now we come to my specialty - the Southern group. These three men landed in Rome, Sarajevo and Budapest. For a time we lost one of the guys in Budapest but then we got another lucky break. An agent with the FBI’s outfit in Budapest, which is mostly devoted to the Russian Maf ia’s activities, was travelling on a bus and just happened to see the very man whose picture he was carrying in his breast pocket. He trailed him to a poor part of town where the guy is living with a couple of Yemenis. This rang bells and again we had all three members of the Southern group checked out against descriptions of men who served in Afghanistan. But Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence couldn’t find a match for any of them. Besides, these men don’t really look the part. They’re out of con
dition and spend a lot of time eating, drinking and smoking. They’re not clean-living Muslims, that’s for sure.’ Lyne put his hands together and turned to look at her with radiant American purpose. ‘So, basically, your job will be to chase up everything you can on these three guys. You speak Arabic, I hear. There’s going to be a lot of reading to be done. You’ll live and breathe these men for as long as you’re with us.’

  ‘Questions, Isis?’ said Vigo, in a tone that implied he didn’t expect any.

  ‘Yes, do we have any idea about their plans? I know it’s early. But are there any suspicious shipments being made? Have they been observed looking at potential targets? Do we have any communications intercepts?’

  ‘As yet we don’t have the vaguest notion what they plan,’ said Collins. ‘They haven’t been talking to each other and there’s no movement of anything like your WAYFARER. Chemicals and stuff - nothing like that. There’s a general feeling among the surveillance teams that the suspects are in a period of stasis, a kind of hibernation.’

  ‘Aestivation,’ said Herrick.

  ‘Come again?’ said Lyne.

  ‘The summer equivalent of hibernation,’ said Vigo, not disguising his irritation.

  ‘Perhaps I should say something about how RAPTOR is set up,’ said Collins. ‘We’ve split the operation between surveillance and investigation. The surveillance teams on the ground - there are about thirty officers in each team - report to a desk dedicated to each suspect, which is manned twenty-four seven. Once the subject is moving, his route is plotted on an electronic map so everyone knows where he is. The field officer in charge of each surveillance consults the desk on questions of strategy and security. When there’s a problem with implications for the entire operation the issue is settled by RAPTOR control, which consists of myself, Walter here and a representative of the National Security Agency. Beyond that there is a level of analysis and risk assessment reporting to our respective governments.’ Collins smiled weakly, as if he had made a poor joke.

  ‘There should be a lot of interaction between the two sides so anyone working on the investigation desks, like you, will have real time access to surveillance, all the communication traffic between the watchers, photographs and film, when they are available. Equally, we want to feed the material you’re finding out to the surveillance teams as soon as you get it.’

  ‘Can I ask a little about the surveillance? How many of our people are involved?’

  ‘You know a few of them,’ said Vigo. ‘Andy Dolph, Philip Sarre and Joe Lapping are all involved on the ground, as you would expect. You will know many others too, but as we’ve made clear, this is a very closed and secret order. We’ve had to chose personnel who do not have past associations with the cities we’re covering, except in the case of Sarajevo where we felt it would be better to have people who’ve got Balkan experience. That’s why Dolph is there.’

  Herrick could feel herself bridling and hoped it wasn’t showing. Dolph deserved a place in any surveillance operation: he was sharp and versatile. Sarre was at best mediocre and Lapping downright feeble. She remembered what Dolph said about Lapping after they’d been on a job together. ‘He needs help crossing the road, that Lapping. You’ve got a better chance of going undercover with Liberace.’

  Vigo saw what she was thinking. ‘There’s no room for personal competition on this team,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s all for one and one for all right from the top. Believe me, those people in the field will need to be rotated and your turn will come. But we thought you would appreciate a period experiencing the whole operation beforehand. After all, it’s your baby, Isis. None of us would be here were it not for you.’

  She made appreciative noises.

  On the way to the car that would take them to the outskirts of West London, she saw Collins murmur to Lyne, ‘Brittle, but cute.’

  ‘And a fair lip-reader too,’ she said, before climbing into the Chevrolet. ‘Though not in Arabic.’

  The Bunker was part of the Nato command centre at Hillingdon and sat directly under an airfield where there were one or two military and private aircraft. At first glance she thought of a trading floor built for decades of nuclear winter. Two constellations of circular desks spread out across the vast space, almost like molecular diagrams. RAPTOR’s full complement was never seen because of the shift system but at present she reckoned there were about 130 officers from three US agencies, the FBI, CIA and NSA, and the British counterparts, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Lyne explained that the surveillance operations were handled to the right of central aisle. To the left were the investigation and intelligence desks, three modules per terrorist group. They walked towards a vast notice board which featured the faces of the eleven suspects. Every known detail had been summarised and added next to the name. Lyne said the board was more reassuring than helpful. He was equally dry about the tracking operation in which the suspects’ positions were marked at any time of the day or night on one of the electronic city maps. A touch of a key would give an officer a record of an individual’s movements over the entire course of the operation and, if desired, the program would helpfully point out his favourite routes, where he met contacts, even the bars where he took coffee in the morning. All of this had been subject to furious but so far fruitless scrutiny, he said.

  RAPTOR was still experiencing teething problems. Technicians were crawling about the floor, adjusting screens or hooking cables across the ceiling. NSA programmers struggled with two large mainframes that lived in their own special environment way off in the distance. There was a good deal of noise above, and someone from a surveillance desk would occasionally call out that one of suspects was on the move. ‘Number Two going walkabout, number Six in transit.’

  Raised from this activity was a control box with glass sides where Vigo, Collins and the man from the NSA, a Colonel John Franklin Plume, worked. Vigo had already taken his seat and removed his jacket to reveal a pair of vermilion braces. In front of him was a large screen, split to accept several different feeds at once from secret surveillance cameras. Above the aisle was a much larger screen that could be seen by everyone. The screen was being tested and flashes of blue TV lightning probed the recesses of the cavernous space above them.

  They went over to the investigation and intelligence desks. Lyne introduced her to his group, then to the ‘Wallflowers’, a team of twenty eager young American research assistants whose work stations were ranged along the concrete wall of the Bunker. ‘These are the slaves of the investigation desks,’ he said, giving a managerial shoulder rub to one of them. ‘Our Stakhanovites.’

  She looked down at the desk. Each Wallflower was on the internet. Their work stations were choked with boxes of files and copies of every conceivable reference book. Herrick read some of the titles - Gulf Maritime Conventions, Ancestry and the Tribes of Saudi Arabia, The Dictionary of Muslim Names.

  ‘That’s about it,’ said Lyne. ‘Coffee, food, exercise machines, massage, laundry, sleeping arrangements: you can find them for yourself.’

  She nodded, impressed.

  ‘This is America mobilising,’ he said.

  ‘Right,’ she said, and sat down at Southern Group Three.

  It soon became clear to Herrick that every second of the day, RAPTOR was producing a vast amount of information which in turn spawned endless new investigative possibilities. Field officers were being sent to check out the most casual contacts made by the suspects while a lot of work was being done on the helpers who had eased the men into their hiding places. A separate data bank was dedicated to this information as it constantly threw up possible links and cross-references in the backgrounds of people and organisations across Europe. Already, interesting connections had been made - men who had attended the same university or were from the same Middle Eastern tribal grouping; clerics who had visited mosques in Stuttgart and Toulouse; businesses belonging to the fixers which had arrangements with cities where suspects were present; the use of the same banks or hawala agents to transfer money.
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  The range of activity was bewildering. The hackers based in Crypto City at Fort Meade were penetrating the defences of every relevant public agency, including in a few instances the computer records of European intelligence services. Vast amounts of data were sucked up and flung unedited in the direction of London, where the systems people had breakdowns trying to absorb the flow of information and make sensible arrangements for its analysis. Added to this was the work of the Special Collection Service, a joint unit run by the CIA and NSA, based in Beltsville, Maryland. Known simply as ‘Collection’ it had sent a substantial proportion of its staff to Europe to eavesdrop on the suspects and their helpers. A similar outfit run by MI6 and GCHQ was also on the ground, erecting eavesdropping antennae disguised as TV aerials and dishes, and attaching devices to the suspects’ phone lines. But circumspection was called for because a few of the helpers and two of the suspects were seen carrying out anti-surveillance routines while on the street. This meant they would also be alert to the possibility of electronic eavesdropping and might have access to the equipment to detect it. Electronic surveillance added another swollen tributary to the flow of intelligence that the Bunker attempted to process each day.

  The British and American service chiefs let it be known they were already exceptionally pleased with the detail being gathered and sifted - they were already far in advance of their previous understanding of terrorist methods and planning, and most importantly there had been no breach in security.