by A P Bateman
“We’ve got this footage emailed over to headquarters and we’re pulling all the CCTV in the area as we speak. All of the borough’s traffic cameras have been requisitioned and I’ve got bodies at desks going through it all.”
“We need to ascertain how they got here,” Hodges said. “Have you checked the body for keys? The woman had pretty chunky heels. I doubt she drove. Could mean their vehicle is still nearby.”
“Good thinking,” Forester said. He looked at the Special Branch officer. “Commander Anderson, can you get uniform on to that? We’re done here, we need to get the asset out and question him.”
“I want in on that,” Anderson said. “I’ll get uniform directed on to searching for a vehicle, let me know where you’re interviewing him.” He folded his laptop and walked towards the stairs.
“Anderson, I’ll need a copy of that film,” Forester said.
“Of course,” he replied without turning round.
“I have a bad feeling we’re going to get in a tangle with this,” Caroline said. “The Security Service and Special Branch have never been so closely involved as this. They are going to be on a crusade for their officers, we don’t want to lose our dominance with the investigation,” she paused, looking at Hodges. “No offence, but we’ve got the Met in on this too and it’s all connected.”
“No offence taken,” Hodges replied. “I’ve got a thick file of murder cases to work on. Take the pier killings if you want. I’m here by request. I won’t be sitting back and twiddling my thumbs if I’m not needed anymore.”
“No,” Forester said. “I want you to see this through, for the sake of my dead agents. I think we’ll do better with you leading the murder investigation. I want these bastards. I want them brought to justice and I want them now.”
11
Mohammed Betesh was four years older than his brother Rafan. Rafan meant beautiful, graceful and it had been no secret that their mother had doted on the youngest of the three brothers, despite the belief that the first born was always the favourite. Mohammed had never borne his brother contempt, instead he had taken the role of his brother’s protector initially to win favour with his mother. Now, as the tears trickled down his pock-marked, battle scared face he knew he had failed, and his mother’s love would be lost. He was the last Betesh brother. His other brother, the middle brother Jamil had been killed in Iraq by an infidel sniper a year ago.
His right hand held the pistol grip of the AK 47 assault rifle. It comforted him. It was a folding stock model, and fitted beside him in the foot-well perfectly. He had taped three magazines together to speed up his reloads. He was looking forward to using it.
He watched the comings and goings from the end of the street. The police had walked towards him and he had considered moving, but they had opened the van sixty metres in front of him with a key fob and now the vehicle was the centre of attention. The crime scene police were now dusting it for prints and uniformed officers were making calls. How he wished he could step out of the van right now and hose them down like he had those worthless, godless souls in France. He had bought them terror in Lyon like his Muslim brothers had in Paris. And all France had done in return was bomb his heroic brothers in Syria and strengthen their resolve, keep the fight going.
He had watched the two men in suits leave the house. The taller man was clearly in charge and spoke with both high-ranking uniformed officers, the coroner and another man in a suit. They had both left in a black Jaguar saloon which had been driven by a driver who had waited with the car. The coroner’s ambulance had left and was replaced briefly by another. A gurney operated by two men was wheeled out of the building, across the pavement and into the ambulance. Mohammed Betesh almost wailed as the vehicle drove away and on past him. Was his brother inside? He was in one of the vehicles for sure. He thanked God that his brother had not shared the same journey with the godless British pig he had slaughtered. He cursed Alesha at once. She had fled for her life. She should have stayed and ended the fight. She was a Russian whore and she was not a true believer. She was kafir. General Zukovsky was her mentor and he was a Chechen Muslim, a fellow brother. He had hidden his beliefs within a lifetime of service in the Soviet and later Russian military. He had risen to the top, but had served his Muslim brothers well. He was the ultimate undercover saboteur inside a regime which once permitted no religion at all. But his fascination with this Russian whore was a weakness. She served him, not an ideal. The hold he had on her was total, but her resolve was not stoic. She had too high a leaning towards self-preservation. Zukovsky had convinced his men that she was a true believer and that she would make her own sacrifices for their cause. Only now, knowing she was in fact safe and that his dear brother Rafan lay dead and cold destined for a coroner’s slab, he was not so sure. He would not receive his sharia funeral, his janazah. His body would not be bathed, no kafan would wrap his body. He grimaced at the thought that he may be cremated now that nobody would ever come forward to claim his body. Damn that bitch! Damn that bitch for fleeing without him!
Mohammed watched the woman leave the house. She was tall, slim and wore her blonde hair tied in a ponytail. She strode confidently outside and stood beside a dark blue Vauxhall Insignia which had just pulled into the empty space left by the coroner vehicle. She opened the rear door and Jeremy Hoist walked meekly across the pavement and ducked inside the car. The woman followed him and closed the door. A passenger sat beside the driver. The car moved swiftly off and Mohammed tensed as it drove on past. He started the van and waited for the car to disappear from view before he pulled a three-point turn and followed. He knew that the end of the road was a no right turn and he could afford to lose sight for a few minutes.
He dialled on his voice activated mobile phone. “Call Rashid…” The phone dialled and after a few seconds was answered.
“Yes?”
“Coming towards you now. Dark blue Vauxhall Insignia saloon. Two men in the front, both in suits. One woman in the rear, off-side. Blonde hair, ponytail, grey trouser suit. Our target is in the middle seat. Red hair, blue jacket, brown trousers. Another suit in the near-side rear seat…”
“Registration?”
“Didn’t catch it. Begins LD – I won’t guess the rest.”
“It will be enough. They have to come past me.” Mohammed could hear Rashid’s moped revving as he moved off to intercept the car. “I have them! As you described. I will drop back and call out where we are going, what we are passing. You catch up and pass me to take over if I get too close.”
Mohammed smiled. Rashid was extremely competent at mobile surveillance. They would not get away from them now that he was on their tail and the moped was the best vehicle of all to use in London’s traffic.
The Vauxhall made good progress. It kept to a steady speed and hit the first few lights on amber or green. Which meant at its steady pace just under the speed limit it beat all the lights and barely slowed. The driver was well trained, changing lanes when necessary and watching and reading the road, traffic and obstructions ahead. Rashid kept pace, using large vehicles for cover and joining other motorbikes and mopeds when he could. This helped reduce his profile and anyone carrying out counter surveillance drills would find it more difficult to remember him.
The car wove on through the streets until it passed Hampstead Heath and drove through a series of residential streets. It stopped outside a red bricked detached house in Amblewood Road and both the front and rear passengers and the blonde woman got out and slammed their doors shut. The target got out more slowly, but was escorted swiftly up the driveway by the woman and into the house. The driver of the Vauxhall pulled a three-point-turn and parked, its front at the entrance ensuring nobody would box the vehicle in.
Rashid accelerated past without looking at either the house or the car. He turned left at the end of the road on to Brent Street and took another left. He doubled back on himself, where Mohammed was parked up in the van with its engine still running. He pulled up to the driver’s wi
ndow. “It is the fifth house on the right. The blue Vauxhall is parked facing back this way. If you go down this road and turn right onto Brent Street and then right again onto Amblewood Street, you will be able to do a slow drive past without drawing too much attention.”
“Good work, Rashid,” he said. He watched the young Pakistani pull away on his moped and followed his instructions. When he turned onto Amblewood he saw the Vauxhall parked up ahead. He crossed the road and parked on the right. As he switched off the ignition he placed his hand on the butt of the AK47 and breathed a deep calming breath. He wanted to shout, to scream, to grieve for his brother. He wanted to avenge his brother’s death. He knew he would never know who had killed him, but he knew from which agency they had been sent and that agency was in the house across the street from him protecting the treacherous, godless pig Jeremy Hoist. As soon as he had back-up, he would go in and cut them all to pieces with his assault rifle. He reached inside his jacket pocket and felt the hilt of his Khanjar. It was a viciously sharp curved Arabian dagger he had been given in Yemen. If anybody survived the onslaught from the machinegun fire, he would cut their throats slowly.
12
Forester rested his head in his hands. He felt tight-chested, needed air. He pushed himself away from his desk and sat back in his chair. “How many?”
The man across the desk from him was ex-army intelligence. He hadn’t always been. He was once a sergeant in the Coldstream Guards. His manner was still clip and no-nonsense. “Twelve,” he replied.
“No signs of violence?”
“In two cases they’d put up a fight. Blood, positive DNA but only indicating a bit of a punch up. Not shot, stabbed or slashed.”
“And any evidence left by perpetrators?”
“None.”
“So they have simply disappeared?”
“Vanished. No demands sent, yet.”
“I want this kept quiet. Who else knows?”
“Ms Chalmers, Director Howard,” the man paused. “Peters from admin, personnel section. He raised the alarm initially. Plus, two men from my section sent to investigate. David Stern and Devinder Bajway. Forensics were given the blood samples and told to match to MI5 personnel. So I guess they only know about two agents.”
“That’s about five people and a department too many. I’ll speak to the top brass, you get everybody else in and tell them that until further notice they don’t speak to anybody. If they have, then now’s the time to tell us.”
“Sir,” the man stood, nodded and left the room.
Forester put his head back in his hands and lent his weight against the desk. His mind was swimming; he was struggling to put together a cohesive chain of thought. The white telephone on his desk rang. The interdepartmental line.
“Sir, a call request has come through from the secretary of a Major Uri Droznedov of the Russian Federation, GRU.”
“I see. Usual protocols?”
“Yes Sir. Patched through the embassy with this week’s code. He said it was urgent and that Major Droznedov will be waiting for your call. He asked if you would make it a priority.”
“All right, put me through to the embassy.”
The telephone rang for a few seconds and then went silent. Forester knew that his secretary was reading the code to the operator. There was a whirling noise for a moment or two, and then it went silent again. By now his secretary would be speaking with Droznedov’s secretary. Although this was an extremely high-ranking title in Russia, mostly given to Army NCO’s of great experience.
“I have Major Uri Droznedov for you, Deputy Director Forester,” Forester’s secretary said. “Go ahead.”
“Charles Forester speaking.”
“Hello Sir, I am Major Droznedov, GRU. Thank you for taking my call.”
“You are most welcome; how can I be of help?”
“Sir, it is I who can help you. Are you recording? I think you should, but maybe not publicly, officially, if you understand me, no?”
Forester flicked a switch on the base of the telephone. “Go ahead.”
13
Caroline showed the two MI5 debrief experts into the house and closed the door. Behind the door was a half inch solid steel inner door with reinforced hinges and a steel frame fixed to the wooden doorframe. Caroline closed this also, which took not inconsiderable strength, and drove the steel bolt home. This activated a total of three steel bolts evenly spaced at twenty-four inch intervals. The back door was the same. The windows were bullet resistant to 5.56mm NATO and 7.62mm (short) – the two most commonly used military calibres. The French developers claimed each pane could take five rounds before shattering and even then the composite self-healed under dramatic heat increase, the kind caused by rapid multiple bullet strikes. What resulted was a sticky spider’s web that could continue to take small arms fire long after it looked damaged. The windows could also withstand up to two 7.62x51mm NATO sniper rounds. Each laminated glass pane was thirty percent smaller than the windows in the rest of the street and the frames were reinforced steel coated with white UPVC. This meant that if an intruder actually stuck around long enough to break the glass, they would stand little chance of getting inside.
The two new arrivals used to be called interrogators but after all the waterboarding that went on in Iraq the Security Service sought to get rid of the name. There had been little remit out there after the fall of Saddam’s regime and the CIA, MI6 and MI5 acted with impunity. It was a dark time for the intelligence services. Caroline was not entirely sure what these people were called now, but it didn’t really matter. They were experts at getting people to loosen their tongues. They wouldn’t be connecting Jeremy Hoist’s testicles to a car battery or pouring water on a wet towel over his face, but they were extremely persuasive and would not have to physically touch the man in order for him to tell them what they wanted to know. What was difficult for them, was that they did not already have the answer. They needed to find out what Hoist had done, not whether he had done it. This line of questioning needed to follow a formula, a pattern. Anybody will admit to doing something with enough persuasion, which was why torture was relatively ineffective. What was harder to achieve was getting a person to admit they have done something and then elaborating on it truthfully.
The woman was in her early fifties, short and rotund. She wore her greying hair in a tight bun and carried bifocal spectacles around her neck on a gold chain. She looked like a seventies school headmistress. The man was ageless, in that he could have been forty with older looks or sixty with younger looks. He did not merely look fifty. His hair greyed at the temples and graduated to jet black on top. He was well over six foot and extremely thin. His features were gaunt and drawn. His suit hung far too loosely from his coat hanger shoulders. To Caroline he looked like death. She had once referred to the man as the Grim Reaper and the person she had been talking to knew exactly who she had meant. That had been a few years ago now and she had been relatively new at MI5, but she was still wary even though she was a senior agent with the General Intelligence Group.
Alice, the safe house operator had provided the Special Branch close protection team with refreshments and was busy getting a sweet milky tea and a strong black coffee for the two new arrivals. The two interrogators could not have been more different and their choice in beverages mirrored this fact. Alice had served as an MI5 operative during the seventies and eighties. Her husband, an operative also had died in Northern Ireland in part of a deep cover operation. Now at retirement age, she had been given a handsome pension and the job of running the safe house. It paid well and provided her with a comfortable home in return for looking after MI5 operatives at debriefings or providing a secure location for clandestine meetings a day or two at a time, a few times a month. She appreciated the company and loved the distraction from retirement.
“Where is the subject?” the woman asked. She smiled at Alice as she accepted the tea, nodded appreciatively as she took a sip. Caroline suspected that the two had met previously.<
br />
“In the interview room,” Caroline answered.
“How long?”
“About an hour.”
“Any refreshments?”
“No,” Caroline paused. “Thought I’d let him sweat a bit.”
“Good,” the man said. He sipped his coffee and looked at the file he had kept pinned under his arm. “DD Forester filled me in and a courier bought this over. I briefed Barbara in the car on the way over. What would you say his frame of mind is?”
Caroline thought for a moment, rubbed her chin subconsciously. “Arrogant,” she said. “The people he was involved with tried to hit him and it could have gone very differently.”
“I heard,” Barbara said. “Good shooting, by the way.”
Caroline shrugged. “Hoist has been quiet, but I heard him with Forester, and there was no remorse, just arrogant indifference. He wanted to lawyer up. He is scared though.”
“Good,” the man said. He turned to the woman. “So, Barbara, good cop or bad?”
“Oh, bad, I think,” she smiled.
“Great,” the man said. “I’ll go in first then.”
Caroline led the way, then turned around. “I’ll be in the booth.”
“Okay dear,” Barbara said. She stood to the side of the doorway and let her colleague open the door.
Caroline walked to the booth, a small room alongside the one-way glass panel which made up all of one wall. It was toughened glass from the same French manufacturer as the windows. This was rated to five 9mm pistol rounds and could withstand a sledgehammer. At least until the average person tired of wielding it. She looked at a small black receiver unit and lights above corresponding labels signalled that audio and three cameras were recording. It was a digital set-up, and must have either operated constantly, recording over itself every six weeks or so, or was operated by the movement inside the room by passive infrared.