The Angel

by Mark Dawson

  This riad was smaller than the one she had shared with Beatrix, and much less opulent. It had been a wreck when she had purchased it, using some of the bequest that her mother had left to her, but a year of hard work had seen it brought back to life again.

  There was still a little work to do, but most of the big jobs had now been completed.

  The crumbling bricks had been renewed with fresh courses. The rotting window frames had been taken out and replaced. The décor, which had been so dated, had been brought up to date. The walls had been painted a slate grey, with colourful pieces of local art hung to provide splashes of colour. She had bought second-hand furniture from the souks and then refurbished each piece herself. She had bought carpets from the Berber markets in the mountains. The plunge pool had been retiled in emerald green, and her favourite pastime was to sit beside it in one of her lime-green easy chairs and stare up at the square of sky above.

  She climbed the stairs to her bedroom on the second floor, found the false floorboards underneath the Berber rug and lifted them aside. There was a small cavity beneath, with a leather satchel inside. She took it out, opened it and withdrew two bundles of banknotes. She still had a lot of money in a bank in the Caymans, but she always ensured she had enough to manage without needing recourse to it. She had $20,000 in the bag. A rent of 5,500 dirhams a month meant that it would cost 66,000 for the year. That was a touch over $6,500. She counted out $7,000, put the rest back into the satchel and replaced it in its hiding place. She laid the floorboards over it and covered those with the rug.

  She returned to the ground floor and made herself a glass of mint tea.

  It had been a relief to escape London and return home. The aftermath of the bombing had been chaotic. A triage centre had been established in a nearby branch of Marks & Spencer and the police were insistent that everyone pass through it. The reason, they said, was that they wanted to check that those people who had been in the station had not been injured by the first blast. Isabella had checked herself immediately and was happy that she was unscathed. The police also required that everyone leave their name and contact details. Beatrix had been very clear that she should never leave a record of her presence and so, using the routine that had been taught to her, Isabella provided a fake name and address and then pretended to cry. The policeman who had been talking to her went in search of a box of tissues, and Isabella took the opportunity to make her exit.

  It had been difficult to get to the airport. The entire Tube network had been suspended, and there had been no cell phone reception until the early evening. She had walked for two hours before she was able to find an empty taxi. Heathrow had been operating, albeit under the watch of armed soldiers. Anyone who had looked remotely suspicious was stopped. The terminal had been loud with the sound of raised voices and accusations of racism. She had found a space on the floor where she could lean against a wall and watched the looped footage of the atrocities on the twenty-four-hour news channel.

  Her plan had been to return to Morocco that day, but she had concluded that it would not have been prudent to fly directly to a Muslim country. Instead, she had taken a British Airways flight to Gibraltar and stayed overnight at the Ibis near to the airport. A ferry crossed the Strait of Gibraltar several times a day, and she had taken a place as a walk-on passenger on the following morning’s first crossing. She had caught a coach from Tangier to Marrakech and arrived in the early evening. The diversion had cost her a day’s travel, but it was what her mother would have done, and it pleased Isabella to know that she was following her mother’s example.

  The tranquillity of the riad had been a balm when she finally arrived home. She had stocked up on the things that she thought she might need and intended to stay out of sight for the rest of the week.

  She rarely used her television, but she found that she was unable to resist watching the news. That it was a terrorist attack was beyond question, but the authorities were unable to suggest who might have been responsible. Pundits filled the spaces with incessant speculation. Isabella was not interested in international affairs, and she would not have pretended to have the knowledge to qualify her for making her own determination, but even to her eye, it was obvious that the authorities were floundering.

  It didn’t look as if they had any idea what had happened.

  The first footage of the aftermath of the blast was vivid to her. She watched the camera jerk and shudder as the operator struggled to negotiate the debris. She saw the brief suggestions of atrocity caught in the camera’s light. The report triggered her own recollection and replayed the things that she had seen. She had nightmares that night. She knew that she was buttressed against shock by the things that she had already seen and done, but that did not mean that the nightmares were any less frightening. She woke up in the middle of the night, wide-eyed with fear and with sweat-drenched sheets wound around her legs.

  She went to the roof of the riad and looked out over the sleeping city. There was a breeze blowing in from the desert, and it cooled her. She took a drink, swallowed a sleeping tablet and returned to her bed.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Captain Michael Pope spent the first week of his enforced sabbatical working on his fitness. He had been sitting behind a desk for too long as it was, and he had started to feel lazy and fat. But that wasn’t the only reason. He had never felt as frustrated as he did now, and working up a sweat had always been his best way to alleviate stress. He had made it his annual tradition to run a marathon, but he had allowed his resolution to slip since he had been promoted from Number One to Control. He decided that the best way to get back into fighting shape was to run one once again.

  Pope was a tall man with close, dark hair. He had the physique of an athlete and the kind of constitution that adapted quickly to an increase in physical activity. He was slender, but muscular. He was also very strong.

  He was unfussy and straightforward, and chose his clothes from a simple wardrobe that allowed him to fade into the background without attracting attention. He favoured simple suits in charcoal and black, and when he was out of the office, conservative jeans or chinos and poplin shirts. His only extravagance was his shoes. The years he had spent on his feet as a soldier had incubated a preference for quality, and that was displayed by the two pairs of boots that he owned from Red Wing of San Francisco, each of which had cost him £300.

  He was a good-looking man, ageing well. He tended towards the severe in the office, most appropriate for a man with his responsibilities, but when he was on his own time, he had a ready smile and a quick wit that made him popular with his many friends. He looked like a man who could handle himself, a man who would be a better friend than an enemy and a man who could be trusted to do what he said he would do.

  He had been born in a village on the outskirts of Salisbury in the south-west of England. It was close to Salisbury Plain, an important army training facility, and the town and its surrounding villages were full of soldiers. He had flunked his way through school, and with no trade to follow, he had enrolled as a boy soldier at sixteen, joining the Royal Green Jackets. There had been time in the sandpit for the First Iraq War, a transfer to the First Battalion when he got back and then the first of several tours of South Armagh. A friend of his brother served in the 23rd SAS Reserves, and he had invited Pope to join him for a weekend’s training. Pope excelled and repeated the trip several times after that, attempted Selection and passed it. He joined B Squadron as a medic and spent the next five years carrying out both covert and overt operations around the world. That was until his predecessor as Control picked him out as a man with promise and offered him a transfer to the Firm and, more specifically, to be the new Number Twelve in Group Fifteen.

  He had served his country as a Group Fifteen headhunter until his predecessor’s treachery had been revealed, and he had been asked to take over. He had accepted reluctantly. He did not consider himself to be a desk man, and he felt that he was young enough and better suited to continue as
a field agent. Stone, who had asked him to consider the promotion, had insisted. Pope realised that the choice he was being given was illusory. He was being ordered to take over.

  His promotion had come with more generous remuneration, and Pope had moved his family to a thatched cottage in the heart of the Cotswolds. It was a pretty part of the country, known for honey-coloured limestone buildings and the miles of dry stone walls that divided the lush landscape into parcels.

  One of the benefits of living here was the number of pleasant roads that he could use in his daily runs. He had gradually increased his distance as he got his legs back beneath him, and this morning, the start of a cold and frosty early autumnal day, he had planned to run the full length of the local amateur marathon. He started in Broadway, climbed Broadway Tower for the views out over the Vale of Evesham, and then crossed to Snowshill and Stanway. He reached the halfway mark in Winchcombe, the walking capital of the Cotswolds, passing Sudeley Castle before attacking the final big hill of the route. Once he had surmounted it, he ran along the escarpment for a few miles before descending again for an easy return on the gently undulating fields, from Stanway back to Broadway again.

  Running also enabled him to think. The steady cadence of his steps, the sound of his breathing and the beating of his heart all contributed to an almost meditative state that often allowed him to solve problems that he had not otherwise been able to fix. Today, though, his thoughts were of Paddy McNair.

  There had been a low-key funeral the day before yesterday. Scouse had always been a womaniser, and he had no family. His parents had died years ago. The mourners were old friends from the Regiment. There wasn’t much left of him to bury, but they had all stood around the grave in the Regimental plot in Hereford and watched as the casket was lowered into the ground. Pope had looked around at all the other graves and seen that the plot was almost full. He had overheard two of the men making the same observation, one of them suggesting that the Regiment would have to buy a new plot or stop going to war.

  The former was the most likely solution to that problem, Pope had thought, especially now.

  He picked up the pace a little. He could see the village in the distance as a black BMW passed him slowly on his right-hand side. He wondered, for a moment, whether it was just a considerate driver giving him plenty of room, but when the car continued slowly ahead and then indicated to pull over, he started to be concerned. He didn’t have a weapon with him, and if he was attacked out here, there would be very little he would be able to do. He scanned left and right, identified a gap in the hawthorn hedge at a spot just ahead of the car and tried to find the energy to sprint, should that be necessary.

  It wasn’t.

  The rear passenger-side window slid down, and as he drew alongside, he saw Vivian Bloom.

  He stopped.

  ‘Sorry to surprise you out here, Control.’

  He took a moment to fill his lungs and bring his heart rate back under control. ‘You couldn’t have called to make an appointment?’

  ‘You know better than that, old boy. Do you have fifteen minutes? There’s something we need to talk about.’

  Pope looked down at Bloom through the open window of the car, scrubbed the sweat from his face and looked away to the road leading back to his home. He didn’t know much about The Reverend; almost nothing, in fact, he realised with discomfort. The man was well connected, but difficult to assess. Pope remembered how Bloom had behaved at the meeting when Group Fifteen had been shut down. He had said very little, sitting and observing, an enigmatic expression on his face.

  Pope didn’t trust very many people, and he didn’t trust Bloom.

  He exhaled. He couldn’t very easily tell the man he didn’t want to talk to him and run back home. His country had just been attacked, and Pope was a soldier. He had responsibilities.

  He opened the door and slid inside.

  ‘Thank you, Captain,’ Bloom said, shaking Pope’s hand.

  Pope took it gently, like a doctor probing brittle bones, but Bloom surprised him with the firmness of his grip.

  ‘You can probably guess what this is about,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir. I expect I can.’

  ‘A mess. A bloody mess. But it’s been coming, you know. We knew they would have a go eventually. An RPG into Buckingham Palace, Kalashnikovs in Trafalgar Square, a suicide bomber blowing himself up in the Tate. I think it’s fair to say that they surprised us with the scale of their ambition and the level of preparation. It was a very well put together operation.’

  ‘The bombs were diversionary?’

  He nodded. ‘I think that’s obvious now. There were supposed to be three of them. The early assessment is that they were going to detonate one on the train, and then the other two as survivors made their way to the surface. It’s more sophisticated than we’ve seen before.’

  ‘It’s standard for the sandbox, sir. They draw you in with the first one and then hit you properly.’

  ‘They obviously wanted to do as much damage as they could, but those bombs were designed to concentrate our attention on the station and put the Commons on lockdown. And both of those things happened. It’s thanks to you, McNair and Snow that they didn’t get into the chamber. Especially McNair. God knows what would have happened if they had managed to get in.’

  ‘It was just good luck we were there.’

  ‘That’s as may be. Doesn’t change the facts. I want to show you something.’

  Bloom opened his briefcase and withdrew an iPad. He tapped an application, and a video player appeared. With a cautious check to ensure that they were still unobserved, he tapped ‘Play’ and handed the tablet to Pope.

  The shot showed a man in a traditional Arabic dishdasha and a chequered scarf around his neck. He was sitting in a blank, anonymous room that would be almost impossible to identify. The black and white flag of ISIS was fixed to the wall behind him. Pope recognised the format immediately: this was a martyrdom video.

  The man cleared his throat and spoke in a calm, confident voice.

  ‘What you have witnessed now is only the beginning of a series of attacks that will continue until you pull your forces out of Syria and Iraq and until you stop your financial and military support to America and Israel. I, and thousands like me, am forsaking everything for what I believe. Our driving motivation doesn’t come from tangible commodities that this world has to offer. Our religion is Islam – obedience to the one true God, Allah, and following the footsteps of the final prophet and messenger, Muhammad . . . Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we have security, you will be our targets. And until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight. We are at war, and I am a soldier.’

  ‘This was uploaded to YouTube thirty minutes ago. His name is Ibrahim Yusof.’

  ‘One of the shooters.’

  ‘We have reason to believe that the other men who attacked inside Parliament were Faik Khan, Nazir Begun, Abdul Rashid and Mo Rafiq. The two men you shot before they could get inside were Bilal Ismail and Aneel Mirza. Until yesterday, we thought they were all in Syria.’

  ‘They certainly knew how to use their weapons.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Been out there awhile, we think. Training camps, then sent out to the front lines. It appears that they managed to get back into the country without our knowledge. We’re obviously looking into that as a matter of the utmost urgency.’

  ‘The bombers?’

  He swiped across the screen, and a CCTV picture of three young men appeared. They were on a platform. The sign in the background said Luton. All three were wearing rucksacks on their backs.

  ‘More troubling. Home-grown. The two who triggered their bombs were a little more difficult to identify, for obvious reasons.’ He pointed at t
he two older men of the three. ‘This one is Bashir Anwar and this one is Hakeem Mustafa. The bomber who lost his nerve is this man, here. His name is Aamir Malik. These last three are from Manchester.’

  ‘Are you close to finding Aamir?’

  ‘Found him today. His body was found in the Thames. Two bullet wounds: one to the gut, one to the head. We’re working on the assumption that he lost his nerve and was killed for it.’

  Bloom took the iPad and slid it into his case.

  Pope felt a little awkward, sitting in the back of the car dressed as he was, still hot and sweating from his exertions. ‘Why are you here, sir?’

  ‘We can’t sit back and let this play out the usual way. It’s already a bloody mess. The police are all over the place. The forensic people thought it was organic peroxide, home-grown explosives; then they changed their mind to military-grade plastique, and now they’re saying the stuff was scraped out of artillery shells. Immigration doesn’t know how the shooters got into the country, let alone how they brought artillery shells with them. MI5 is passing off the blame to the local police on the radicalisation of the bombers. No one is standing up to the mark. The investigation is a shambles, Captain. A fucking shambles. And we are taking everything our friend Ibrahim said in his little video very seriously. GCHQ says that chatter suggests there’s going to be another attack. They are most definitely not done. Remember 7/7?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘There would have been 21/7, too, if those bombs had gone off, rather than just the detonators. I see nothing to suggest that this isn’t the jihadists doing their level best to make sure they do it right this time.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We need to move in the grey areas to make sure that doesn’t happen, and that means you and your headhunters. I need you back in the game.’

  ‘What does the home secretary think about that?’