Maestro

by John Gardner

  By the wonders of modern electronics, the message would immediately patch through to the earpieces of the watchers, who, at one point, seemed to outnumber the actual civilians going about their business along this Mayfair thoroughfare.

  They saturated Trafalgar Square and the large concourse of Piccadilly tube station, which is very big and almost impossible for ultrasafe surveillance. As one of the watchers was heard to remark, “Trying to find a terrorist in Piccadilly Underground is like trying to find the twelve of clubs in a deck of cards.” Apart from the many tunnels and platforms, there is a great circular concourse around the ticket machines, small shops, entrances and exits to Piccadilly Circus. There are also the big banks of escalators, and this Underground station is reckoned to be the most used in the whole of London.

  Changing shifts and places, twelve teams went onto the platforms, up and down the escalators, walked the passages and had the circular concourse covered completely. The operation was so large that the professional watchers of the Security Service had to be tripled by police officers trained in surveillance techniques.

  It was the same in Trafalgar Square, and the entire business called for a lot of dressing up, the use of reversible coats, the changing of hats, briefcases, handbags, umbrellas and the like. The officer in charge of MI5’s watchers complained that he was undermanned and really needed things as they were in the old days when he could bring people in by the busload. By one that afternoon the Security Service had requested assistance from the Secret Intelligence Service, an action that made senior members of the SIS rub their hands with glee.

  The message had been that the explosions would take place at an unspecified time between six and seven, which meant that, with sophisticated timing devices, the bombs could well be in place before two, though the general agreement was that the Iraqis would not risk leaving the devices too early. They reckoned the mean time would be around four or five o’clock.

  In the event, they were out by fifteen minutes. All the devices were placed during a five-minute period starting at five-fifteen.

  A dark young man who for the past hour had been sitting at the base of Nelson’s Column stretched and got to his feet very slowly. He looked around and then started to saunter away.

  One of the watchers had spent the past fifteen minutes keeping him in sight and had moved quite close to him. He saw immediately that right next to where the man had been sitting was a bulky yellow plastic shopping bag with the TOWER RECORDS logo on it.

  “You’ve left your bag, John,” the watcher called to him with a distinct cockney accent.

  The young man glanced around, saw the yellow bag, shrugged and in good English said it was not his.

  A second watcher moved in and began keeping a discreet eye on the man, who was young Ahmad, almost a boy. A woman in the same surveillance team fell into step behind the watcher who had already begun to follow Ahmad.

  While this was taking place, one of the police teams—a male and female couple who had been strolling around the circular concourse in Piccadilly Underground station—saw a lovely young woman with long dark and gleaming hair dump what looked to be a shoe box into one of the rubbish bins near the steps that led from the concourse to the bottom of Regent Street.

  The female of the team fell in behind Samira, following her down to the main Piccadilly line platform, using a weekly pass—issued to everyone on this particular surveillance operation, which had been cryptoed Cyclops. Her male counterpart began speaking rapidly into the radio mike in his lapel.

  In Bond Street they were very lucky. Another pair of male and female watchers saw the youth Nabil pause beside the now closed door of a jeweler’s shop and drop a Harrods plastic carrier bag. Plastic bags seemed to be the order of the day with this group of terrorists. The male officer followed and the female gave the warning.

  In Berwick Street they were not so lucky. The two officers watching from the window above the butcher’s shop saw a tall youth slide a bulging plastic bag into a refuse dumpster. They immediately alerted the people on foot and two officers began to follow the young man.

  All the alerts were in by twenty minutes past five, and the coordinators allowed ten minutes for the bomb placers and their shadows to get clear before police and bomb squad teams descended on the areas, moving people out and closing off all possible exits and entrances.

  Dinah, cool, tall and elegant in a stylish navy suit with gold buttons, had been running a few minutes late and was coming up Rupert Street, ready to cross the road and head up the alley towards Berwick Street, when the police cars and vans descended. She dumped her bomb into some litter outside an Indian restaurant. It exploded at three minutes past six, destroying the front of the restaurant, killing nine people and severely injuring another twelve, two of whom were policemen who had begun to fan out and look for the explosives, the bomb squad having identified the contents of the plastic bag as trash from a nearby office.

  Ramsi, the bomb maker, had done a very good job.

  Eventually, all roads led to the house in Clapham. Young Nabil had gone to see a film in Leicester Square; Samira had an appointment with a hairdresser just off Piccadilly; and Ahmad had made his way into the warren of streets bounded on three sides by Park Lane, Curzon Street and Piccadilly—the area known as Shepherd Market.

  In Shepherd Market he made a telephone call, which, they soon discovered, was to a prostitute. They even followed him to the whore’s place of business and noted the small advertisement pinned below the bell push: ANTONIA. 2ND FLOOR. SPECIAL SERVICES. The services must have been very special and Ahmad obviously had money. He reappeared over an hour later, looking a very happy man, and treated himself to dinner at a small restaurant nearby. Eventually, he was the last member of the team to arrive back at the Clapham house.

  Once they were all counted in, the final phase of Cyclops took almost an hour to put together. Members of the Special Air Service had been brought down from Hereford, and the raid took place ninety minutes later, after they had checked the entire area.

  The police and the watchers were bewildered when, after the use of stun grenades and a lot of noise, the SAS team reported the house to be empty. After all, they had seen the bomb placers enter the house. A thorough search revealed nothing. No personal effects, no sign that the building had been recently occupied. Nothing. The final conclusion was that on their return each of the bombers had walked in at the front door and slipped out of the back—a move that would have taken only a matter of two minutes. They deduced that by the time Ahmad returned, everyone else had left, and that the house had been virtually cleared of personal items either during the morning or even the day before.

  At the debrief everyone admitted that the Iraqi group had completely left-footed them by careful planning. Various senior officers had already started referring to them as the Keystone Kops. The only gain was the fact that they had surveillance photographs of three of the team. By ten o’clock that night, blowups of the faces, captured by cameras in the act of planting the bombs or walking away, were released to the SIS, MI5 and SO 13.

  Shortly after ten o’clock, news began to filter through from the United States. Naturally, the information received that morning from the Security Service’s asset among the Vengeance of Iraq group had been immediately passed on to the Americans, but because of the different time zones, the explosions about which they had been warned would not hit their deadlines until much later by British time.

  The first was in Grand Central Station in New York. The undercover police, FBI and highly trained members of Delta Force, together with the fast-response FBI team from Quantico, did not spot the planter. The result was that, as they neared the deadline, the authorities cleared the railway station and the explosion occurred at six forty-five Eastern Standard Time. Seventeen people were killed—mostly police and bomb squad experts—while there were about one hundred injured.

  The media began to ask awkward questions, and those who had been on the surveillance team were roas
ted, with righteous anger, by those in command. “These people’re running circles around us,” the Director of the FBI shouted, in the privacy of his office. “Damn it, we’re not part of a Laurel and Hardy movie. I want to see some arrests, and I want to see them now. People’re dying out there, and it’s our fault.”

  At roughly the same time, in New Orleans, the local police, with some FBI Special Agents in tow, picked up Kayid with a bomb in a brown paper parcel. It was more luck than anything else. One of the FBI people thought he looked shifty—but they pulled in a whole bunch of shifty-looking people. Unhappily for him, Kayid became very anxious—as well he might, for the timer had only around ten minutes to run when they finally got around to him.

  Later that night, Kayid hung himself in a police cell rather than risk giving away the rest of the American Intiqam team.

  At six forty-five Pacific Time, two forty-five the following morning in England, Awdah and Jamilla just escaped capture at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. They had been spotted in the Emergency Room as they walked out leaving a carry cot behind. The carry cot contained enough explosive to damage the main structure of the hospital, but was taken away in an armored van and defused with only seconds to spare.

  They had no security photographs of Awdah and Jamilla, but several descriptions which were circulated immediately.

  Pressure was beginning to come to bear on the two Intiqam teams.

  During the surveillance and final outcome of the bomb threats in London, Big Herbie Kruger sat down at Gus Keene’s old desk with all the files, folders, manuscript and notes that had been destined to become the book Ask a Stupid Question.

  His immediate task was to comb through material to see if there was any reference to the name Jasmine, and he did not really know where to start. He checked the files for what were known as work names, or cryptos, and nothing showed. Then, more because it worried him than any other reason, he went back to the Cataract file: the killing of the four IRA members in central London in 1984 and the final cover-up conducted by Gus himself.

  He now understood why they had brought Gus, an interrogator, down to oversee that bit of magic.

  “Ten years ago,” he muttered. “Ten years and is gone like a flash.” As he spoke, so his eyes alighted on a passage among the Cataract files. It was a memo, direct from Willis Maitland-Wood—Deputy Director of the Office—to Gus telling him to put a hold on Faygeleh and head to London straightaway.

  What the hell was Faygeleh? he wondered, and started to go back through some of the other files, his eyes searching for Faygeleh. Eventually, he came across it under “Middle East Operations.”

  Under some of Gus’s entries for October and January 1983-84, there had been reference to the recruitment of a high-ranking Iraqi officer by Mossad in Tel Aviv. As it is with intelligence operations, the word had come back via an asset in Israel that Mossad had turned the Iraqi, sending him back to Baghdad and using him as an agent in place.

  At this point in the early and mid-1980s the more far-thinking intelligence analysts had already become concerned about the regime in Iraq. The Iraqi Leader had, over the past years, carefully built up a military dictatorship very much as the Nazi Party had done in Germany under Hitler. There was a note here in Gus’s files in which a witty analyst drew attention to the fact that the Leader and his government resembled the Nazis—“But without their human warmth.”

  Herbie, used to cross-checking documents and reading between the lines of field reports, became aware that the SIS’s Middle Eastern Desk was doing its best to finger the Israeli agent, whom the SIS had codenamed Oytser, from the Yiddish meaning “treasure.” Then, in December 1983, the tone of the notes changed. Instead of constant references to Oytser, there was a new cryptonym, Faygeleh, Yiddish for a number of things, mainly “little bird” or “sweet little child.” It amused the Secret Intelligence Service to give Israeli-related cryptos in Yiddish. Insecure? Certainly. Childish? Of course, but boys will be boys and it was always overlooked.

  Reading between the lines, Herb would have put money on Faygeleh’s being an attempt by the SIS to recruit an agent of its own inside the Iraqi hierarchy. He looked at his watch—already he had been working through documents and notes for almost three hours.

  He stretched, looked up, rubbing his eyes, and found himself staring at the computer screen. Why not? Already he knew that Gus had a sophisticated database in there, so he switched on the machine, logged on and asked it to search for Faygeleh. The screen blanked out, then started to ribbon-spread columns of names associated with Faygeleh. In the middle he clearly saw the name Jasmine.

  “Wow!” he said, feeding the word Jasmine back into the Find procedure. Up came another message. Jasmine: final outcome of Faygeleh. Still active. Ultrasecure. Cross under Price 2.

  He tried Price 2. Nothing, so he tried Price 1. Still nothing. He switched off. A couple of seconds later it came to him. A blinding and sudden flash. The book he had been reading early that very morning still lay on the far corner of the desk. Its title blared out at him—Magic A Pictorial History of Conjurers in the Theatre, by DAVID PRICE!! He picked it up and leafed through the heavy book. Price 1, he thought. Possibly Gus had another copy—Price 2. This one was in mint condition, almost brand-new, and the dust jacket was carefully encased in cellophane.

  He went through the procedures for opening up what he thought of as Gus’s Merlin’s Cave, strode over to the secret door and began searching the shelves. Sure enough, there tucked away on a bottom shelf was another copy of the book. He took it out and leafed through it. The last forty pages were a solid block with a recess cut in their center. Inside the recess lay a computer disk marked Jasmine.

  With the greatest care, Herb inserted it into the computer, then opened it up. It was a long file, appearing quickly on the screen. Gus had dived straight in. The heading was simply Jasmine and his first words were:

  JASMINE. Asset still current and close to the Leader of Iraq. Recruitment January 1984 while working on Cataract.

  14

  HERBIE WAS ABOUT TO read on when there was a soft knock at the door and Bex put her head into the room.

  “It’s past eight o’clock, Herb, and all’s not well. Bitsy’s doing her nut. She did a cold lunch and only Ginger’s bothered to eat. Now she’s ready to serve dinner. She’s pretty pissed because we’re not keeping to her timetable.”

  He gave a grunt of impatience. “Timetables are for railways and airlines.”

  “I think you should come, Herb. Just to keep the wheels running and well oiled.”

  She stood there as he closed down the machine and slipped the disk into his pocket. “Anything for a life of quiet.” He grinned. “Worse than being married.” Then, to the amazement of Bex Olesker, he quoted from Holy Writ: “Behold, how good and joyful a thing it is, brethren, to dwell together in peace and unity.”

  “Amen,” she said automatically, then, recovering her composure, “any luck?”

  “I think so, but have to talk to Head Office. You?”

  “Not sure. I’ve run Carole ragged. I have to think it through. We talk after dinner?”

  “Sure, why not. After I’ve spoken to Head Office.”

  As if on cue, the telephone rang and there was Worboys at the far end, asking him how he was doing.

  He waved Bex out, indicating that he would be through in a minute, then turned back to the telephone.

  “I’m working on it. Gus was running an agent in Iraq. Crypto Jasmine. Leastways that’s what I think.”

  “That’s what we know, Herb. It was highly irregular. Gus could be bloody secretive, and for some odd reason the old Chief and the Deputies cut him a great deal of slack. He was running Jasmine, but there’re no details of paths to Jasmine, no contact procedures, no emergency buttons to press and no ideas as to who Jasmine is. Gus recruited and ran her—if it is a her. It’s as though nobody wanted to know. It looks like a big secret.”

  “Thought that was the name of the game,
secrets. It couldn’t be the asset that our sisters’ve been using?”

  “No way.”

  “So Gus had an agent on the books and he held him at arm’s length?”

  “Yes. Shared the product, but kept everything else up his sleeve.”

  “Not done, that kind of thing.”

  “Don’t tell me. I know it was highly iffy. Gus was always treated with kid gloves, which was stupid, and I really don’t know why. We eventually traced Jasmine to Gus after we looked at all the intelligence that he, she or it passed to us during the Gulf War. There must be something down there, in Gus’s files.”

  “I’m working on it. You be at home tonight?”

  “Just leaving. It’s not been an easy day.” He outlined the events and the disappearance of the Intiqam team.

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  “I have something else to tell you. Serious.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Our friends at Five with their little Iraqi stool pigeon have only just come clean on everything.”

  “I thought that was done already.”

  “Apparently not. One of the deals between this Irish faction and the Iraqis consists of taking out four targets, and Gus Keene is the first.”

  “Who else?” Herbie thought he already knew.

  “You, Herb. Me, Herb, and the Whizzer, Herb. Remember the Whizzer?”

  Kruger’s mind went straight back to 1984 and the damage-control situation following Cataract. Archie Blount-Wilson. The Whizzer.

  “He still on the books? Still around?”