Maestro

by John Gardner

  The disappearing act had been well worked out. When they first rented the house in Clapham, Hisham had also found a second house for rent in the Camberwell area of South London, quite near a well-known pub called The Grove.

  He had kept this house in reserve. Money was no object, for he had brought thousands of American dollars into the country, exchanging them, a little at a time, for British sterling. The whole team had taken part in the money-changing business, and later—in some cases over a year later—the forged hundred-dollar bills had turned up in other parts of Europe, even as far away as America itself.

  While they were still in the Clapham house, the two youngest members of the team had carefully removed the floorboards in a downstairs cupboard and dug out a seven-foot-deep recess below the ground-floor level. They had lined this hiding place with plywood, and even put in a chair. Then they had refashioned the floor of the cupboard with great care. Even if you stood on it and jumped up and down, you would not detect that there had been any tampering.

  They had also added some subtle touches. The cupboard contained brooms and mops, with some shelves, high up, on which stood cleaning materials. The floor to the cupboard was now carefully hinged, and they left it open before leaving the house, balancing the brooms and mops on the edge of the trapdoor. So, when the last arrival returned he would enter the cupboard, close the door and climb into the hiding place. Now he only had to carefully lower the trapdoor for the mops and brooms to slide down into their usual positions.

  Hisham was convinced that the British would latch on to at least one, maybe two, of his bomb placers. It was inevitable that they would follow them back to Clapham and begin surveillance on the house, so, on the night before the bombs were due to be set, he called the whole team together. Those who had no specific jobs regarding the placing of the explosives would move out first thing in the morning, taking everything with them, including the personal possessions of those who were placing the devices.

  The men and women who were to do the dangerous work of carrying explosives across London were put on a strict timetable. Hisham had worked out to the minute how long his people would take to get back to Clapham. He had factored into this the way in which the Security Service would operate. It was safe for three of the placers to return, enter the Clapham house by the front door and quickly walk through to the back door, then speedily leave the area.

  The last arrival—Ahmad—would not be able to do this walk-through so openly. Hisham thought, correctly, that by the time he returned the house would be surrounded. So it was Ahmad who let himself into the empty house and went straight into the hiding place they had prepared under the cupboard. He was chosen because he did not mind the dark and was adept at remaining very still for long periods; so Ahmad was actually inside the house when the SAS and police raided the place. Later, he told of his fear, for there had been loud explosions and the front door had been broken in.

  At three in the morning Ahmad had gently raised the trapdoor and lifted himself out. As far as he could see, they had left only two police constables in the street, outside the smashed front door. An hour after coming out of hiding, Ahmad was making his way across London to their new headquarters.

  Hisham had made another decision for that night. While he had told the Security Service of the four targets the FFIRA had picked for assassination by the Intiqam team, he was one hundred percent certain that nobody would expect an attempted killing on that particular night. He had also told the MI5 people that he would do his best not to allow the attacks to be lethal. They would, he had said, look like attempts that had gone wrong. It would be impossible to be one hundred percent inaccurate and he was determined that the assassinations would take place. Each, he thought, would succeed.

  Terrified and in a no-win situation, with his loyalties cut in two by fear, Hisham had now taken the step that would lead him into the even more dangerous game of trying to work both sides of the street. He played as best as he could, in a doomed attempt to keep his country and his secret masters believing in him.

  So, when everyone was settled in the new Camberwell house, he issued instructions—Ramsi, Samira and Nabil would be on one of the early commuter flights to Paris. There, they would carry out the work already planned. From Paris they would fly to Rome and do similar jobs. They had been over these operations in detail. Yussif had issued information regarding where the explosives and weapons were cached in the French and Italian cities; and when it was all accomplished, they would come back into London separately, going by slow and devious routes and coming back directly from Dublin.

  When he had gone over the briefings again, he left with Dinah.

  Early in the Intiqam operation they had bought two secondhand vehicles—a Previa, which would take all of them when necessary, and a Volkswagen Golf. Hisham and Dinah set off in the VW, drove to Lyndhurst—almost in the heart of the New Forest—and checked into The Crown Hotel late that night. At around eleven Hisham had called ahead and reserved a room, saying they were making for Southampton for a business conference the following afternoon, but had been held up when their car had broken down. There were rooms available, and Hisham gave them a credit card number, saying they expected to arrive sometime before two in the morning.

  Once on the outskirts of the New Forest, they turned off and headed towards Burley, where they parked the car and set off on foot to reconnoiter Kruger’s cottage, which stood, isolated, by the roadside, on about an acre of land a little over half a mile away.

  There were lights on, and as they approached the pretty little house, they could hear the sound of voices. Hisham was satisfied that somebody was at home, so they made their way back to the car, opened the trunk and removed the four one-gallon cans of gasoline that had already been prepared personally by Hisham during the afternoon. Each of the cans had three sticks of dynamite secured to the side with duct tape, and detonators, fuses and timers were in place. While they were still in the trunk of the car, Hisham set the timers, with Dinah holding a pencil torch. These were crude devices compared with many that Hisham had used during the forty-two years of his life, but they should do what was required of them.

  Each of them carried two of the cans, and when they returned to the cottage, the place was in darkness. Two of the containers were set close to the front door and two at the back—one against the door and another balanced on a rear windowsill.

  They left quickly, driving to Lyndhurst and actually getting to The Crown just after one in the morning. A night porter let them in, showed them to their room and even brought them a pot of coffee with some cheese sandwiches.

  As ever, Dinah knew what was expected of her. As ever, she also looked forward to a quiet time with Hisham. He was a good lover and the adrenaline that had been pumping during the day—first with the bomb she had dropped in Rupert Street, and more recently with the setting of the devices at the cottage—had left her ready for the most erotic of sexual encounters. Most of all, in the private part of her brain, she wanted the sex to be violent. The same obviously applied to Hisham, for, apart from the odd hour’s sleep, they spent the night engaging in violent forms of sexual pleasure.

  They had hardly finished with the coffee and sandwiches when Hisham took her, fully clothed, dragging her skirt up, pushing her underwear to one side and mounting her from behind as he threw her roughly across the bed. She followed his lead, and enjoyed the fierceness of his thrust.

  Later, she tried some of her own variations on Hisham, holding the strong, tough Iraqi down on the bed, her hands like twin vises around his wrists. Still only half naked she rode him, occasionally releasing his wrists to slap him across the face. Hisham knew the game well, and while it was not manly to be dominated by a woman, he succumbed to it for the sheer pleasure.

  Later, he turned the tables on her, tying her wrists to the bedposts, lashing at her silk-covered buttocks with his belt, so that she cried out in the exquisite pain, though not as loudly as she did when he entered her, again from behind, a
nd she grunted “Harder … harder” and surrendered herself to the halcyon moments that lay beyond the mixture of pain and pleasure.

  It was while they were both enjoying the games of love that the cottage blew up.

  The two gas-and-dynamite bombs at the front blew a gaping hole in the façade of the cottage, sending a sheet of flame into the main living room, while the two devices at the rear spread fire through the kitchen and brought a section of the upper floor crashing down in a puzzle of bricks and mortar.

  It was the device placed on the rear windowsill that ruptured the gas main to the house, adding greatly to the explosion, which was heard as far, away as Cadnam. The initial flame from the gas inferno was seen from a distance of ten miles. Within an hour, in spite of a fast reaction from local fire brigades, there was little left of the cottage.

  In the United States, things had started to go badly early that morning when Awdah and Jamilla were picked up at JFK as they came off a flight direct from LAX. Both of them had been reluctant to head straight back to New York, but the events of the previous evening told them they should get out of L.A. as quickly as possible. Awdah had reasoned that nobody had got a good enough look at them to make a positive ID.

  Awdah was wrong. The FBI had released the descriptions taken-from people at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, together with computer-generated pictures put together with the help of a highly sophisticated program and worked on with eye witnesses.

  Plainclothes officers now watched all major air and seaports on the East Coast, armed with the descriptions and the computerized photofit picture. Those at JFK, meeting every flight in from LAX, had no problem in identifying the pair of terrorists.

  The NYPD officers, together with FBI Special Agents, had managed to keep the media off their backs. They had learned, from the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, to use diversionary tactics with them.

  They had learned the hard way. Following the explosion on Friday, the twenty-sixth of February, the forensic investigators had traced the vehicle used in the bombing to a Ryder Truck Rental company in New Jersey. The local Ryder officials knew who had rented the truck: a man called Salameh, who had reported the vehicle stolen and wanted his four-hundred-dollar deposit back. The FBI instructed the Ryder company to call Salameh and tell him that he could come and collect his money. This happened on the Wednesday following the bombing, and the FBI plan was simply to watch Salameh, putting him under close surveillance so that he could lead them to others involved.

  The media, however, got wind of the plan and—in the interests of freedom of information for the general public—threatened to blow the story if the FBI did not arrest the man. In the end, it did not hamper police investigations, though the FBI were now thoroughly disillusioned with a media that did not understand the necessity of keeping certain information back to help investigators. They, rightly, felt that they had been blackmailed into making the arrest, and they even had to allow publication of the story that Salameh had been a loose cannon by reporting the theft of the van. In fact, Salameh’s action was an obvious piece of terrorist tradecraft. By making a fuss with Ryder about the theft of the vehicle, he had been attempting to draw the heat off himself and his associates.

  This time, they remained watchful and maintained a very low profile. After all, the recent shootings and bombings had become a new dimension in the American way of life. Terrorism, until now, had been rare, and since the first explosions—the car bomb in Manhattan, the detonation in the New York subway, and the horrifying Boeing 737 explosion on takeoff from La Guardia—the NYPD and, particularly, the FBI had remained close-lipped.

  When Awdah and Jamilla were spotted at JFK, they were virtually surrounded by a highly trained surveillance team, and with split-second timing the cab they entered outside the airport was actually driven by an undercover agent. By the time they paid off the cab—five blocks from the apartment building on Park Avenue—they were well blocked in.

  They walked the five blocks, not sensing that anything was amiss. Within twenty minutes the police and FBI knew exactly where the American Intiqam team was hiding out. It was only a matter of time before they would close in and make the arrests.

  When his car drew up at what had once been Herbie Kruger’s retirement cottage, Worboys could see the figure of Herbie standing, desolate, near the ruins. The big man wore a long black raincoat, fashioned to look like a nineteenth-century riding coat, long-skirted, with flaps, like gills, at the back. He wore it unbelted and the material billowed around him in the gray first light, shoulders bent in an attitude of hopelessness and head slumped forward as though he were praying that this was a nightmare.

  Tony Worboys had said he would meet him at the site, so Herbie had awakened Ginger, written a note to Bex Olesker and called the main house to bring Kenny Boyden over to lie across the door, as the arcane argot has it.

  The note had said:

  Bex, I got to be out for a while. Do not see Carole again until I come back I know some good questions for her now. Not likely to be easy. In meantime, go and root out that magic man you talked to on the telephone. He must have been one of the last people to see Gus alive. You know the questions to ask him. Love and kisses, Herb.

  “He’s taken it very bad, Mr. Worboys.” Ginger was at his elbow, almost touching his arm. “If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought Mr. Kruger was weeping, sir.”

  “Just look after him when we leave, Ginger. This is bad, and it’s likely to get worse.”

  He moved forward and stood next to Herbie. “You’re well insured, Herb, right?”

  The big head nodded, and the distraught face turned towards Young Worboys. “Sure. I can build twenty cottages better than this with insurance, but I’ve lost a lot of nice bits and pieces from my brilliant career.” There was bitterness in the way he spoke. “Shit,” he said. “My own bloody silly fault. They thought I was inside.”

  “How?”

  “You know me, Young Worboys. Always fixing my own security.” A long pause followed by a great sigh, which finally changed to a raw laugh. “Did it all myself. Ran the place off a computer when I was away. One thing I remembered to do when I left here.”

  “Alarms, you mean?”

  “Sure, there were alarms, but I did more. The program was computer-driven. Pulled curtains closed and open at certain times. Switched on lights in different rooms. Put the television on and off. Even played voices I recorded on a big old reel-to-reel. Anyone getting near the place would think I was at home.”

  “Thank God you weren’t.”

  “You got to watch your back also, Young Worboys. You already warned me. Is The Whizzer fully briefed now? If not, you’d better tell him what they done to this place, yes?”

  “Yes.” Worboys nodded. “The Office’ll see you have somewhere to live while you’re sorting things out.”

  “Should bloody think so, Tony.” He grinned like a Halloween lantern. “Think of all the fun I have in building up my record collection again.” Then, as though it were an afterthought: “Also, now I might do some dabbling in the magic, like Gus.”

  “Lord save us from that, Herb.”

  Presently the local Fire Captain came up to them, apologizing and saying that the explosions and ensuing fire looked like something deliberate.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” Herbie did smile, though the words came out brittle and harsh.

  “There’ll still have to be an inquiry, sir.”

  Worboys stepped between them, and taking the fireman by the arm, he led him a few paces away.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Mr. Kruger.” Ginger came over from the car.

  “Sure, Ginge. Let me have a few minutes with the good Mr. Worboys. Alone in the car would be best, I think.”

  “I’ll stay out of the way until you’ve done, Mr. Kruger. I’m so sorry about all this.”

  “Don’ be, Ginge. I got my life. I got my health. What more can a man want? Possessions aren’t everything, you know. Don’ worry.�
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  Worboys returned, saying that he had fixed the Fire Captain. The police he would deal with as soon as he got back to London.

  “Tony, a word in my office, huh?” He gestured towards the car.

  Once settled in the back of the car, with Ginger discreetly standing several paces away, Herbie told him what he had discovered about Gus and Jasmine.

  “So, she’s come alive again.”

  “Looks very like it, Tony. Problem is meeting her. We have to give a map reference disguised as a couple of telephone numbers, which means some playing around. We do it the wrong way and she dives under the surface again. Neither do we know the tradecraft: which signals for safe and which for keep off the sodding grass.”

  “It would be better if we could get around that. You say Gus had an affair with this one?”

  “That’s how it reads. He did some hanky-panky with her, that’s for sure. I’m wondering how much Carole knew.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake take care when you’re talking to her. Carole can be bloody volatile, Herb. Could get your dick trapped in a mousetrap.”

  “Ouch! Now you really scare me, Tony. You got absolutely nothing in the forbidden secrets department?”

  “Jasmine, yes. Yes, of course we have. We’ve got the product. She was very good. Gave us indispensable intelligence during the Gulf War. Amazing stuff.”

  “I mean how she was run?”

  “It was Gus, and Gus alone.”

  “Shit,” said Kruger with a good deal of emotion.

  “I’m so sorry, Herb.” Bex was waiting in the dining room when he returned to the Warminster Dower House.

  “It’s terrible.” Bitsy was hovering, and the table was laid out with cold meats, hard-boiled eggs and seven kinds of salad. Enough to feed a couple of armies.