Timebomb (Paul Richter)

by James Barrington

  Morschel smiled slightly at Hagen’s choice of words.

  ‘They’ve changed the plates and loaded the devices, so the vehicles are ready to go right now. The other vans arrived today,’ he continued, in a low voice, ‘and all the equipment you requested for phase one is in place and ready. So that just leaves the boat to collect and prepare.’

  ‘We can do that tomorrow morning, as originally planned. Now, bin Salalah’s already booked into a hotel in central London. He flew straight into Heathrow, as usual.’

  ‘Of course he did,’ Hagen muttered. ‘The playboy terrorist. He’s probably getting comprehensively laid right now.’

  ‘Jealous?’ Morschel asked.

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘It’s the best possible disguise,’ Morschel pointed out. ‘With his lifestyle, who would suspect what he’s really doing here in Britain? But I happen to know he’s not in bed with a magnum of champagne and a couple of high-class whores right now. He called me just before I came down from my room to tell me he’s hired a car and he’ll arrive here in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Here? What’s he coming here for? I thought we’d only see him and his man when we started the final phase.’

  ‘He’s coming because there’s one other thing we have to do before we start this operation.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Hagen asked, so Morschel told him.

  After he’d finished, Hagen sat back in his seat. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked doubtfully.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Morschel said, ‘but I’m not prepared to take the risk, and nor is bin Salalah. There are too many questions about this business for my liking, and before I finally commit us I want some real answers. I’m not prepared to even start this unless I’m pretty certain we can walk away from it. Right, let’s go and have dinner now. We can talk while we eat.’

  He stood up and led the way out of the bar and into the dining room.

  Maidstone, Kent

  Richter stood in the darkness of the observation room, peering through a two-way mirror into the brightly lit interview room. Sitting at the table, looking entirely relaxed and composed, was a heavily built man, an empty mug and plate in front of him. He was flicking through a copy of the local paper somebody had presumably given him.

  ‘Have you talked to him yet?’ Richter asked. ‘I mean, in any detail?’

  The sergeant shook his head. ‘This is the middle of Kent. Normally we deal with road accidents, or stack lorries every time the bloody French block the Channel ports. Foreigners carrying handfuls of Semtex are a bit out of our league. The inspector said we should just hold him here and wait for the cavalry to arrive. And you’re it, I suppose,’ he added doubtfully.

  ‘Yeah,’ Richter replied. ‘I left my horse tied up outside. OK, let’s get started.’

  ‘How do you want to play this? Go in by yourself, or pretend to be a police officer working with one of our detectives?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ve got time to fanny around, so I’ll go in there alone. Get some more tea or coffee sent in, please. And there are security implications in this, so I want the constables out of the interview room, no tapes running, and nobody sitting here listening and watching through this mirror. That means you put the lights on so I can see exactly who’s here in this room.’

  ‘That’s not normal procedure,’ the sergeant objected.

  ‘This isn’t a normal situation,’ Richter snapped. ‘If you’ve got a problem with that I can make a couple of calls and turn it into an order.’

  ‘No, you can play it your way. I’m just pointing out what we normally do. Follow me.’

  The sergeant led the way to the door of the interview room, knocked twice and opened it. He gestured to the two uniformed constables, who left their posts by the wall and stepped outside.

  Richter walked in, shut the door behind him and sat down. Then he stretched out his hand and popped the eject buttons on the two fixed tape recorders. He removed the cassettes and placed them on the table.

  The man opposite looked at him appraisingly and opened his mouth to speak, but Richter held up his hand, looking pointedly across the room at the two-way mirror. After a few seconds, a fluorescent light flickered into life behind the glass, and he could see the dim shape of the observation room, which was obviously empty.

  Kleber turned round, following Richter’s gaze, and nodded. ‘You’re not a policeman,’ he said, a statement rather than a question. ‘So who exactly are you?’

  ‘My name’s Richter. More importantly, who are you?’ Richter countered. ‘Am I talking to Rolf Hermann – or rather his doppelgänger?’

  Kleber inclined his head. ‘You recognized the significance of the number I gave to the police?’

  ‘Yes. You provided the Swiss police with the same information – the serial number of a stolen Kalashnikov AK47 – and that was why they mounted the assault on that apartment in Onex.’

  ‘I had to give them something I knew they could check.’

  ‘Four Swiss police officers died during that assault. Did you consider that possibility when you walked into the Onex police station?’

  ‘I told them the residents of the apartment were armed. I expected the assault to be conducted in a competent manner.’

  There was a knock on the door and a uniformed constable entered with a tray with two plain mugs on it. He put it on the table between them, picked up the plate and empty mug and left.

  ‘So why did you tip off the bad guys just before the police went in?’ Richter asked, reaching for one of the mugs. ‘That more or less guaranteed a bloodbath. Or was that your intention?’

  ‘You work it out,’ Kleber said.

  ‘Oh, I think we already have. You were involved with the Onex group as well as the terrorists in Stuttgart and you really couldn’t afford to leave any of them alive and in police custody to identify you as the man who telephoned that last-minute warning. That’s why you finished off the only survivor in the Stuttgart hospital. That was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It might have been,’ Kleber said, ‘but you’ll never hear me admit it, with or without tapes in these machines. This whole room could be wired for sound, for all I know.’

  ‘I’m not interested in the murder of a piece of shit like him. I’d have done the job myself, given the opportunity. Now, I know you’re not Rolf Hermann, because he’s a rickety old fart currently trying to sue the Swiss government for damages, so give me a name I can use. Who the hell are you?’

  ‘My German passport says Helmut Kleber.’

  ‘I don’t believe that, obviously, because your accent is American, but we’ll use it for the moment. OK, Helmut, who are you working for? The CIA? FBI? DEA? NSA? Or some other three-digit secret squirrel outfit in the States?’

  Kleber shook his head. ‘Why do you think I’m working for anyone?’

  ‘This time, you work it out.’

  ‘The AK47 serial number?’

  ‘That’s one point. Knowledge of something like the serial number of a stolen assault rifle more or less guarantees you have access to government data, because you won’t be able to find that information anywhere else. Nor was it the number of any of the weapons the Swiss police found in the apartment they raided. That all suggests you do work for a government agency, probably American. And as you’ve left a trail of blood and bodies half-way across Europe, my guess is you were given your orders not too far from Langley, Virginia.

  ‘The other factor to consider is the incidents you’ve been involved in. If you were just an undercover cop, it’s possible you might have been part of the Onex cell – but not the one in Stuttgart as well. But if the CIA had sent you undercover to burrow deep into a Europe-based terrorist organization, you could well have links to both. Or that’s the way we’re looking at it, anyway.’

  ‘OK, Mr Richter, you’re not too far from the truth, though I don’t actually work for the CIA. On the other hand,’ Kleber added, with a slight smile, ‘even if I did, I probably wouldn’t tell you, would I? Now
, cards on the table. I am an undercover agent and I am working for a particular government – though you’d already guessed that – and I was trying to infiltrate this terrorist group. In fact, I have infiltrated it and I’ve been supplying money and logistical support for the last few months.’

  ‘What was your brief, then?’

  Kleber shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you my real name and I also can’t tell you that. Even if I could, you simply wouldn’t believe it. The orders I’ve been following, frankly, amount to a suicide mission, but the money was very good, and I’ve been real careful along the way. Now, I’ve been trying hard to ensure that the group’s attacks have either been foiled completely – as in Switzerland and Germany – or at least resulted in minimum casualties.’

  ‘So you’ve been helping to fund a terrorist group and supplying – what? – weapons or explosives or something, and encouraging them to attack civilian targets. But at the same time you’ve been tipping off the authorities ahead of those same attacks. That’s either wildly schizophrenic or quite simply insane. Which is it?’

  Kleber smiled. ‘It’s neither, actually, but I agree it doesn’t make obvious sense. At least, not without a knowledge of the briefing I was given.’

  ‘Which you won’t tell me,’ Richter pointed out.

  ‘No,’ Kleber said, and changed the subject. ‘Maybe you heard about two earlier terrorist attacks, the bombings in France and Italy? They were both linked to bank robberies that took place nearby.’

  Richter nodded. ‘In both cases the police received warnings and managed to clear most of the civilians out of the way, but we understood they were tip-offs from members of the public reacting to something suspicious. Did you make those calls as well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I suppose we should thank you for that, at least.’

  ‘The thing is, those early attacks were just the preamble, as it were. How much do you know about what’s happened so far?’

  ‘As much as anyone else,’ Richter said. ‘I was on the ground at Onex and Stuttgart, and I also know about Hans Morschel.’

  ‘Do you?’ Kleber raised his eyebrows. ‘How?’

  ‘He paid a visit to the building in Stuttgart where the bad guys were holed up, and the BGS got a couple of pictures of him. But he wasn’t inside when the troops went in.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been,’ Kleber concurred. ‘Morschel is really cautious and thoroughly nasty – a right bastard, in fact. He tends to set things up and then watch from a safe distance how they pan out. And he almost always makes his attacks self-financing. Whenever his men detonate a bomb, another group almost always hits a nearby bank at about the same time. In fact, it’s a bit of a moot point whether he’s a genuine terrorist or just a particularly violent bank robber.’

  ‘What’s his agenda? Why’s he doing this?’

  ‘I didn’t hear this from Morschel himself, but a couple of the other gang members claimed that he’s working with a radical Islamic group – for money, obviously. The story was that, since 9/11, Arab terrorists have found it increasingly difficult to mount successful attacks, simply because they are Arabs, so they’ve started recruiting non-Arabs to do their dirty work. Obviously they’re not likely to find many suicide bombers among European terrorists, but that doesn’t mean their recruits can’t operate successfully. But I’ve no idea if there’s any truth in the story.’

  ‘How many people in his group?’

  ‘He seems to have a hard core of about a couple of dozen, but he uses a lot of extra foot-soldiers for each operation. In Switzerland, for example, three of the terrorists that died – interestingly, one of them was an Arab – had been recruited from Morschel’s underworld contacts and paid lavishly to join. A fee up front, plus a bonus after the job’s over.’

  ‘How many attacks had he planned, exactly?’

  ‘Five. The four in Europe, plus the big one, the one that Morschel had really been concentrating on, which will be in London.’

  ‘We guessed as much from some of the conversations taped by the BGS in Germany. And we think he’s now here in Britain. We’ve had an unconfirmed sighting of him coming through Dover this afternoon, driving a Mercedes on dodgy plates.’

  ‘Could be,’ Kleber said. ‘He was running around Stuttgart in a Merc with a Hanover registration. I can even give you the number if it’s any help.’

  ‘Thanks for the offer, but it won’t be. Morschel will know those plates would have been photographed and fed into the system when he came through the ferry port, so he’ll have had another set ready to replace them. We’ve got CCTV cameras set up on just about every street corner in Britain, so there’s a good chance we’ll pick him up somewhere. I’m more interested in this so-called “big one”. And, while we’re on the subject, why you are sitting here talking to me.’

  ‘Those two questions are linked,’ Kleber replied. Although it wasn’t really his idea, I know that the culmination of the campaign Morschel’s been running is intended to be what he calls “The London Event”. The problem is, that’s about all I do know. With those attacks in Europe I knew dates, times, places, targets and even which of his men were going to carry out the bombing or whatever. But for this London operation I’ve been kept right out of the loop. And I’m sitting here talking to you because whatever he’s planning is devastating – I’ve gathered that much – and pretty damned imminent. Days, maybe even only hours, away.’

  ‘Why is this London attack the biggest?’

  ‘I don’t think that was originally Morschel’s idea. I believe he was told to do something impressive by his Arab paymasters, assuming what I’m told was correct. The rationale was that, because Britain is undoubtedly America’s most important ally in the war on terror, it’s become one of the principal targets of radical Islam, and so al Qaeda would love to visit something like 9/11 on this country. What I do know is on his return from Britain six weeks ago he was very excited about something. About a month ago he sent three of his men over here to start making preparations, and Morschel himself was back here again at the beginning of this week, just for a couple of days, I think.

  ‘The other reason I’m here,’ Kleber went on, pushing away his empty mug, ‘is that I think Morschel’s now getting suspicious of me, which is why I’ve been told so little about this latest attack, and I don’t yet know what he’s going to do about it. So I’m giving you as much warning as I can, despite the lack of hard evidence to back up what I’m saying.’

  And you expect us to do what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Kleber spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I had no clue whether the British intelligence services were involved in investigating these attacks, but I now feel better knowing that MI5 has been taking part. You are a Security Service officer, I presume?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Richter admitted. ‘So what now? You’ve given us almost nothing to go on, and your immediate problem is that the local plods have every intention of keeping you locked up here because of the Semtex.’

  ‘What Semtex is that, then?’ Kleber asked innocently. ‘I didn’t actually say the stuff I put on his desk was plastic explosive. All I told the sergeant was that a piece that size was sufficient to destroy a car. That lump was just plasticine.’

  Richter grinned. ‘It was quite an attention-getter,’ he said, ‘and it certainly got me down here bloody fast. OK, so what are you going to do now?’

  ‘Go back to my hotel, turn my phone on and wait for Morschel to contact me. If you give me your mobile number, I’ll pass on any information I get.’

  Richter took a card out of his wallet, wrote a number on the back and passed it over.

  ‘That’s switched on twenty-four hours a day. Oh, one last thing. When you tipped off the Onex police, you claimed to have seen something on a laptop computer about “FRB London”. Was that true, or did you just make it up as another attention-grabber?’

  ‘No, that was true,’ Kleber said, taking the card, ‘but it was something I overhea
rd a few times, not saw on a laptop screen. The “shopping list” I claimed to have seen was entirely fictitious, just to get the Swiss moving before those bastards tried to blow a hole in the middle of Geneva.’

  ‘Any idea what this “FRB” refers to?’

  ‘No, but knowing Morschel’s fondness for hitting banks, I’d hazard a guess about the letter “B”. So if I were you I’d start looking at places in the City of London, maybe a merchant bank or somewhere like that. But it’s also worth mentioning that Morschel is paranoid about security and often gives code words to his operations. So the “FRB” might mean something completely different.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Richter said, with mild sarcasm. ‘That’s been a big help.’

  Rochester, Kent

  Morschel took a brief call on his mobile as their coffee arrived and then he immediately asked for the bill. When he’d signed it, he stood up and led the way outside to the car park.

  ‘That was Ahmed,’ he explained, as they moved away from the hotel. ‘He’ll be here in a couple of minutes.’

  They walked over towards their vehicles, the Mercedes and Renault, on the far side of the hotel’s private car park, and stood waiting. In well under the promised two minutes, a dark blue BMW pulled in and stopped close by. Bin Salalah climbed out of the vehicle and walked across to them.

  Any problems?’ he asked.

  ‘No, none,’ Morschel replied.

  ‘Good. We’ll do it right now, then. Just get it over with.’

  ‘OK, I’ll call him.’

  Morschel took out his mobile and dialled a number from memory.

  ‘It’s me. Where are you?’ he said. ‘Which hotel?’ He listened for a few seconds. ‘Good, I’ll see you tomorrow.

  ‘He’s in his room at the hotel,’ he told the other two men.

  Maidstone, Kent

  Thirty minutes later, Morschel braked the Mercedes to a halt in a side street just around the corner from another hotel on the outskirts of Maidstone. Bin Salalah remained in the car, in case he had to move it in a hurry. The other two men got out and walked over to the edge of the hotel’s open parking area, looking across at the dozens of vehicles occupying its bays.