Fortress

by Andy McNab

  ‘Cicadas: the trees are alive with them. It’s practically tropical here.’

  The photo call with the President – on a golf course, for fuck’s sake – had been a disaster, an absolute gift for Private Eye and Mock the Week.

  ‘You’ve seen the latest, Prime Minister?’ She had just forwarded him a briefing, a stark rundown of the latest casualties: twenty dead and at least six hundred injured. All police leave cancelled indefinitely; army medics drafted into overflowing A and E departments.

  ‘Yes, yes. Very troubling.’

  She knew he hadn’t read it, and he knew she knew.

  ‘Look, Sarah, we really appreciate all you’re doing.’ We? As if the President himself were patting her on the head. ‘We’re cracking on here …’ Cracking on eating twelve-course fucking banquets and downing the President’s personal bourbon. ‘And they’re talking openly about us speeding up our exit from Afghanistan. But for that fracas in Helmand …’

  ‘Sorry to butt in, Geoff.’ She couldn’t give a flying fuck about Afghanistan. ‘May I speak bluntly?’

  ‘You always do, Sarah. That’s why I put you in the job.’ He gave one of his falsetto laughs, which she recognized as a sign he wasn’t amused.

  ‘The war on everyone’s minds is right here on their doorstep, not three thousand miles away in Helmand. It’s not going away.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I appreciate that – but, Sarah, this is a win-win. We get our boys home and we’re not fighting Islam any more. Should send the right messages to both sides. We – that’s the President and I – see this as a real opportunity to press the reset button on our relationship with the Muslim world, and he’s prepared to put some real economic muscle behind it. And, by the way, just to give you a little bit more … support, I’ve asked the office to go hard on finding some young Muslim voices – you know, who we can put up to show we’re inclusive.’

  Seriously? ‘I think we’ve rather passed that point.’ His feeble Tiggerish enthusiasm made her want to beat him to death with his own golf clubs.

  ‘Come on, Sarah, positive thinking. Crises can bring out the best in us. Let’s use this opportunity to shake the Party up a bit. With all this kerfuffle at home, it’s a good moment to start widening the gene pool.’

  Kerfuffle?

  She felt the chill of despair setting in.

  ‘Look, just do whatever you can to keep a lid on things. You’ve got my total confidence. And – you never know – it could be your finest hour. Anyway, must dash. The President wants us to get going again.’

  The line went dead just as Spate slid back into the room. ‘The car’s ready, Home Secretary.’

  A second, and her mental diary had gone blank.

  ‘For COBRA.’

  She let out a low groan and reached for her bag. ‘I’m not getting into a car to travel three hundred metres down Whitehall.’

  ‘Under the current circumstances, Home Secretary …’

  ‘There’s a press scrum on my doorstep. I’m bloody well not going to be photographed climbing into a bulletproof Range Rover to go half a block. People need to see that someone’s got some fucking balls around here.’

  ‘Absolutely, Home Secretary.’

  Was that the hint of a smirk she detected? It had better bloody not be. The PM had already put her in a foul mood and, if necessary, she was prepared to get the nutcrackers out. In fact, she was looking forward to it.

  9

  COBRA Briefing Room, Whitehall

  The COBRA room smelt as if the same air had been inhaled and expelled by successive mandarins, through a filter of tobacco, alcohol, pizza and curry. Buried as it was in a blast-proof windowless basement under Whitehall, to keep the inhabitants breathing it relied on an ancient air-conditioning system that should have been donated to the Science Museum long ago.

  As Garvey entered, she paused and looked over the sea of male faces. For a moment she was propelled back to her schooldays, the solitary female in her Latin class. Nothing changes. ‘Sorry I’m late. The PM kept me on the phone.’

  The room went quiet. Their petty smugness at having started without her was trumped by the fact that she’d had a private call with the prime minister, as she’d known it would. Curiosity compelled them to listen.

  ‘He wants to bring in some fresh Muslim voices – “press the reset button” on relations with the Islamic community.’ She looked up. ‘Fine, so long as it’s not wired to blow up in our faces.’

  Round the table, uncomfortable titters broke out. Her off-the-cuff remarks had often got her into trouble but she didn’t care; they were part of her arsenal in the guerrilla warfare of politics. She allowed herself a rare smile of satisfaction that she could control the atmosphere in a room full of male self-importance. As she took her seat she scanned the attendees. Conspicuous by their absence were any cabinet members: with the PM away, the imperative to show up was gone. And, in turn, department heads had sent their deputies or their deputies’ deputies. This was supposed to be the decision-making forum for domestic-crisis management. Fat chance.

  The only exceptions were John Halford, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, who was in deep conversation with the deputy head of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, and Delamere, the army chief of general staff. The owner of the only unfamiliar face was seated slightly apart, his tie adrift. She glared at him until he eventually looked up.

  ‘Woolf, ma’am, MI5.’

  ‘Don’t “ma’am” me, Woolf. I’m not the bloody Queen – yet.’

  Another titter went round the room until the sound of a pen tapping a cup brought them to order.

  Alec Clements, the Foreign Office mandarin recently seconded to the Cabinet Office, seemed to have appointed himself chair in the prime minister’s absence. He leaned back and spread his hands. ‘Shall we make a start?’

  To her annoyance, he had also bagged the head of the table. This constant manoeuvring and jockeying for position was both pathetic and tiresome, but it went with the territory. She cleared her throat and from her seat, directly opposite Halford, raised her voice just enough to make sure she had everyone’s attention. She had already made up her mind what she wanted out of this.

  ‘Thank you, Alec. Let’s keep this brief, shall we? We all need to get back to our posts.’

  Having seized the initiative, she fixed her gaze on the commissioner, who was doing a lot of silent nodding with the army chief.

  ‘John, shall we start with your update on the Suleiman shooting?’

  Halford looked at her, unblinking. He was in uniform, his cap occupying the space on the table in front of him. Perhaps he thought it made him look more powerful. Instead the effect was the opposite. The starchiness of his tunic and the way that the collar rode rather high round his short neck gave him the air of a schoolboy whose mother had got him a too-large blazer to ‘grow into’. Hired by her predecessor, he had never once said anything she agreed with.

  Clements’s eyes darted towards her and away again as he attempted to regain control of the room. ‘Ah, we were rather expecting to focus on civil security, Home Secretary. There are a number of pressing decisions regarding co-ordination, deployment and resources.’

  Garvey, knowing exactly where this was leading, waved his words away. ‘We’re not putting troops on the streets, Alec. You can forget it.’

  ‘We’re just talking about a visible presence. To send the message that—’

  ‘The only message that’s going to send is that we think we’re at war.’

  Delamere, the army chief, pursed his lips. ‘Just for the record, if matters deteriorate, there’ll have to be a rethink about the PM’s plans to cut troop numbers.’

  She brought him to a halt. ‘You can go on the offensive with the Treasury later about that. What I want to hear from the commissioner is where we’re at with how all this started.’

  Clements wasn’t ready to give up yet. ‘We, that is the commissioner and I, feel strongly that there should be national co-ordination to the po
licing—’

  ‘Yes, good idea, sort it.’ She smiled. ‘There – that wasn’t so hard.’

  She turned back to Halford. ‘So, John, who fired the shot that started all this?’

  He moistened his lips with a small serpent-like tongue. ‘Sarah, I really think that at this stage it’s too early to—’

  She cut him off with the sweep of a hand that had the makings of a karate chop to his Adam’s apple. ‘If we don’t bottom out how this started we’re never going to get a proper grip on it. As far as the public’s concerned, an unarmed British Muslim, a popular community worker with no criminal record or terrorist connections, who was trying to build bridges with the wider community, has been shot by the police.’

  ‘Which, as I’m sure you are aware, is complete and utter—’

  ‘But, nevertheless, a popular view, which we have yet convincingly to counter. Meanwhile the entire Muslim community comes onto the streets and here we are.’

  Halford straightened up, as if to launch into a long speech. ‘I’ve put the head of Homicide and Serious Crime Command in direct control. He’s confident that we’re going to find our man in the drug world.’

  ‘Well, that narrows it down.’

  A murmur of amusement rippled round the table. Her and the commissioner’s loathing for each other was no secret in the corridors of Whitehall. She glanced at Clements, sitting back, arms folded to enjoy the joust.

  Halford ploughed on: ‘Suleiman’s vocal opposition to drug- and gang-related crime inevitably made him some enemies. But because of the volatile atmosphere on the streets we’re having to move forward with a significant degree of caution to ensure our interventions do not exacerbate the situation by further raising tension in the community.’

  ‘So – after five days – no actual suspects.’ Garvey glanced at Woolf, but the MI5 man was frowning intently at his clasped hands, as if he had forgotten how to work them.

  Halford pressed on: ‘We have a number of persons of interest among the criminal fraternity who had reason to be upset with this individual.’

  ‘Sufficiently upset to commission a professional hit?’

  They all stared at her.

  Garvey sighed. ‘From my limited and inferior third-hand knowledge, drug shootings are almost always close range and even then frequently botched, resulting in multiple discharges to get the job done. This was a single shot to the head – or, more precisely, the left temple – a direct hit. The shooter was obviously a trained marksman, perhaps a sniper or—’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Sarah, this was not a hard stop and this was not one of my men.’

  All eyes were on Halford now. He coughed slightly, needlessly adjusted his collar and attempted to continue in a calmer tone: ‘The pursuit team came upon the victim’s car when it was already stationary.’

  The room fell eerily silent. Garvey’s eyes burned. Halford had tried to shut off her questions by addressing her as if she were a child. Bad idea. She kept her tone measured. ‘Yet it was your officers, was it not, who ordered him out of the car, with their weapons drawn?’

  ‘We had reason to believe the driver had a weapon in the vehicle.’

  ‘And Suleiman complied – presumably because your men were pointing their MP5s at him.’

  ‘Home Secretary, I’m not prepared to be questioned like this.’

  ‘No, Commissioner, you clearly aren’t.’

  Halford was now bright red and speechless with rage. Clements’s barely contained glee at the spectacle erupted into a loud snort, which he half concealed behind his hand.

  Garvey was well into her stride now, the atmosphere in the room electric. ‘Where are the bullets?’

  ‘They’ve been sent for examination.’

  ‘So you did find them.’

  ‘They were removed from the body.’

  ‘So they hadn’t exited. How come?’

  Halford’s voice was low and cold. ‘I don’t follow.’

  She leaned forward. ‘Well, unless I’m mistaken, all police rounds are designed to embed themselves in the target with the minimum possible likelihood of their exiting and injuring someone else.’

  There was an awed silence. Halford fiddled with his cap, lying in front of him on the desk. ‘Are you suggesting that we’re covering something up?’

  ‘Perish the thought, Commissioner. I’m just putting it out there that perhaps the shooter intended to make the hit look like it was one of your chaps.’

  There was another ripple of surprise from round the table. Garvey knew that, not for the first time, she was out on a limb. She had to be sure of her facts. ‘Since the shooting took place less than four minutes after the victim’s car came to a stop, it’s unlikely that the assailant was tailing him and was most probably lying in wait. So, this was in all likelihood a carefully planned assassination by a professional who had recced the location and chosen his position in advance, knowing the target would come to a halt right where his weapon was aimed. This killing ground was carefully chosen.’

  Clements’s triumph was complete, but he made sure his expression remained grave.

  Halford’s eyes bulged. ‘And exactly how did you deduce that?’

  As soon as he spoke it was clear he wished he hadn’t. The home secretary was not known for her great intellect but she more than made up for it with her grasp of detail.

  ‘Do you know what kind of car Suleiman was travelling in?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s—’

  ‘Correct. It wasn’t a car, it was a van – and since it was parked facing away from the direction of the shots, the gunman needed Suleiman out of the vehicle to get a clean shot. So you might ask yourself if the shooter also expected your lot to be there to get his man into the open for him.’

  ‘Home Secretary, I really think that airing untested theories in this forum is unwise.’

  ‘Why?’ She looked round the room. ‘Since you’re not telling us anything, what’s going to leak? All I’m asking is, you look closely at the possibility that this was no drug shooting but a carefully planned assassination in which the Metropolitan Police appear to have been – no doubt unwittingly – complicit. What if the shooter wanted your men there to make it look like they did it? Where did your team get the information that Suleiman and his driver were supposedly armed? Surely it’s the source of that intelligence which might lead you to whoever lured both Suleiman and your men to the site, where they were made to look like complete pricks.’

  She stared at Halford, who looked as though his balls had shrunk to the size of acorns. Sweat was spreading around his high-riding collar. He made one last attempt to regain some kind of authority. ‘Home Secretary, I completely fail to see what value there is in pursuing this unwarranted line of interrogation. The whole point of COBRA—’

  ‘Is to get to the heart of things. I know, John, and you shouldn’t take it so personally. We can all see you’re in a tight spot.’

  That was the coup de grâce – the final twist of the knife. Having floored him she now turned to Woolf. ‘I’m sure MI5 would be the first to agree that this one’s going to take a lot of digging to resolve. Woolf, don’t you agree?’

  He looked startled to have the spotlight suddenly trained on him. ‘Er – absolutely, ma – Home Secretary.’

  ‘Can you bring us up to speed on their thinking?’

  He fiddled with his tie as if to check it was still there holding his head in place, discovered it was loose, made an attempt to tighten it, failed and gave up. ‘All our intelligence seems to confirm that Suleiman was clean, which may have put him at odds with the drug lords.’ He stole a glance at Halford, who was staring at his cap. ‘But if there turns out to be no drug-crime-related motive, then we could be looking at extremist elements wanting to open divisions between Muslims and the, er – well, the rest.’

  Garvey was ready to pounce. ‘Which elements? You’re supposed to be the people with their fingers on the extremist pulse.’

  She watched Woolf scan
the room. All eyes were on him. Evidently he hadn’t anticipated being put on the spot like this. She knew just what was going through his head; Mandler would have told him to sit tight and take notes, but say as little as possible. But now she had put him on the spot. He would have to try to sound as though he was answering the question, while not actually doing so at all. ‘We’re preparing a dossier for you, which we’ll be sharing with all of the security services by the end of play today.’

  ‘Oh, marvellous.’

  They give nothing away, that lot. Garvey gave him an empty smile. She needed him to know that he wasn’t in the clear yet.

  Clements was trying to get her attention. ‘Since we are without an FCO presence today …’ He cleared his throat.

  Trust him to try to ride more than one horse, she thought.

  He took off his annoying little half-glasses and twirled them. ‘There is the matter of Britons who’ve been fighting in Syria rotating back to the UK. We have to factor in that some of these folk have seen some pretty serious action and acquired, in some cases, some equally serious training. I just thought I should add that to the pot as our people are pretty stretched keeping tabs on them all, particularly in view of their increasing use of, and for once this phrase is appropriate, noms de guerre.’

  Garvey looked at him. Pretentious twat.

  He paused and glanced at Woolf. ‘I’m sure MI5’s doing a fine job of monitoring all the would-be jihadis in our midst, but if you’re looking for someone with the skills to carry out an assassination such as this, our eager returnees from Syria might be a good place to start.’

  She turned to Woolf. ‘Well?’

  Woolf bit his bottom lip while he crafted the appropriate answer. ‘The cabinet secretary is quite right that the returnees are a source of concern. And we will, of course, continue to rule nothing out.’

  She pursed her lips. Typical bloody opaque MI5 answer. Something was going on in his head that he wasn’t broadcasting to the room. She could sense it. She spread her hands flat on the table. ‘Well, I suggest we get back to work. No use fiddling while Britain burns.’