Herrick and Nathan Lyne took to having a drink together after a late shift, during which a kind of truce operated and they talked about anything but RAPTOR. One evening Lyne told her to hang around because a decision had been taken to arrest the suspect in Stuttgart the following morning at 1.30 a.m. local time. The man known as Furquan, the third member of the Parana group, had in fact turned out to be called Mohammed bin Khidir. His voice had been recorded while he was speaking on a payphone a few hundred yards from his apartment. By chance someone at GCHQ had compared this with samples in their archive and matched it with what was known as the Bramble video.
Lyne explained that Mrs Christa Bramble, a young widow from Woking in Surrey, had been visiting the ancient sites of Carthage in Tunisia. At one of the sites, she and her party came under attack from a group of seven men armed with machine guns. Twelve tourists were killed and twenty-one others, including Mrs Bramble, were injured. As she fell to the ground, she kept her finger on the record button of her video camera and captured some blurred scenes and – crucially – the sound of the terrorists shouting and talking. From these came three distinct voiceprints, one of which was that of bin Khidir. Enhancing techniques, applied by the FBI to the film, clinched the identification. One of the moving figures matched Furquan’s height, weight and gait exactly, and that man they knew to be Mohammed bin Khidir.
Under the terms of RAPTOR, any of the suspects confirmed to have been involved in international terrorism had to be killed or taken off the street – as Lyne put it, ‘stiffed or lifted’. The former seemed a great deal easier, but they knew that a professional killing would act like a bird scarer for the other ten suspects. So a plan was developed, in which bin Khidir would be kidnapped from his apartment in the Turkish district of Stuttgart, and taken to an airfield nearby.
Herrick and Lyne went to their desks and hooked up to the live feed from Stuttgart. There was a commentary of sorts from a van parked near bin Khidir’s apartment and they caught the clipped sentences of the armed members of the snatch squad.
Lyne sat tensely. ‘If this fucking thing goes wrong…’ he said.
‘I don’t see why they’re taking him,’ Herrick said. ‘We know they’re all terrorists. Why’s he any different?’
‘They’re the rules we’re playing by.’
‘I’m not sure there should be any rules,’ she said.
‘That’s not a very smart thing to say.’
Her gaze drifted to the glass box, where the operation was being run. Everyone was there – Spelling, Vigo, Collins and the nameless head of the Special Collection Agency who had flown in from Washington DC in order to escort bin Khidir from Northolt back to an unknown destination outside the United States for interrogation.
They listened as the team gained entry into bin Khidir’s apartment without difficulty. Bin Khidir and his flatmate were drugged before they even woke and he was bundled into an airline services truck and driven to a plane waiting at the airfield twenty miles away. The plane took off for Northolt, but over Luxembourg the pilot reported that bin Khidir had come round and was proving difficult to restrain, even though his hands were tied behind his back. He was lashing out with his feet and throwing himself around the fuselage.
Herrick picked up the summaries of Southern Group activity from that day and went to the control box. As she entered, Vigo nodded to her from the table where he sat watching Jim Collins.
‘Tell them to give him another shot,’ said Collins.
There was silence until the pilot said that ‘the horse’ – the plane was normally used for transporting racehorses – had gone to sleep of its own accord. Vigo looked straight at Herrick.
‘I expect you understand what’s happened, Isis.’ Then, without waiting for her to answer, he turned back to Collins. ‘You’d better tell them to turn the plane around.’
‘Why, for chrissake?’ Collins demanded.
‘I think you’ll find the horse has swallowed a cyanide capsule concealed in its teeth.’
Confirmation came in a matter of minutes. The crew had found a dribble of foam on bin Khidir’s chin.
‘I don’t imagine there’ll be many takers for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,’ said Vigo, without mirth. ‘Tell me, Isis, what would you do now?’ Spelling and the rest of them turned to her.
‘I’d get him back to his own bed, if possible.’
‘Which is exactly what we should do, gentlemen, though quite how they’re going to get the body off the plane is another matter. The transport arrangements only worked into the airport. We have not allowed for the return journey.’
Herrick went to call up satellite maps of the airport on her screen, printed them off and returned to Vigo and Collins with her idea. Twenty-five minutes later the plane landed at the airport, the pilot having complained to the German air traffic control of two un-commanded aileron movements. As the de Havilland Dash taxied through the first light of dawn towards the end of the runway, a hatch in the belly of the aircraft opened and four members of the Special Collection Service, who had cut their way through the perimeter fence, sprang from the darkness to receive the body. Forty-five minutes later, they reported back to say bin Khidir was in bed and the other man was still out cold. Everything was as it should be in the apartment, and bin Khidir’s helpers would assume that he had bitten through the capsule in his sleep. RAPTOR was safe.
‘It will be interesting,’ mused Vigo, ‘to see if they report this to the authorities and risk the pathologist discovering the cause of death. My bet is they’ll dispose of the body and get in touch with the man running things. That provides us with an unusual opportunity.’
Isis watched the glitter of Vigo’s eyes fade as he became absorbed in his thoughts. Then his head turned slowly to the men from GCHQ and the National Security Agency. ‘We should pay great attention to phone calls from Stuttgart over the next few hours, for we know they must deliver a message that their man is dead.’
Next morning, Herrick went back to her house. The isolation of the Bunker and its eerily regulated conditions – the fact that it was neither hot nor cold, humid nor dry, light nor dark – were getting to her. She and Lyne were getting on each other’s nerves, which had as much to do with her bad temper as his unwavering faith in RAPTOR. She was still sure that RAPTOR was missing something in the flood of information, yet when challenged by Lyne found it difficult to be precise. At that point, he gave her a twenty-four-hour break. ‘Take off, go to a hair stylist, see a movie, get laid,’ he had said, without looking up from his screen.
Just one of those would be enough, she thought. She booked an appointment at the hair salon opposite Rahe’s bookshop and submitted to the pleasure of a hair wash and head massage. As she had done a couple of weeks before, she moved to the seat that enabled her to watch the bookshop as her hair was being cut. This was how it started, she thought: an average-looking bloke, a bit on the chubby side, bustling from his bookstore to meet a cab and then a plane. She stared at the shop front, imagining him there in his ludicrous green jacket; Vigo’s man rushing to a terrible death in his Sunday best.
She left the hairdresser and walked up and down the street, noticing a couple of bureaux de change, a printing shop and a Lebanese restaurant. Then she went into the Pan Arab Library – despite Rahe’s absence, the bookstore was still open and doing a reasonable trade. She stopped at the cash desk, smiled pleasantly at the young woman, and asked if the store had a book called The Balance of Power in the Jordanian Islamist Movements by Al-Gharaibeh, a title she remembered seeing on one of the Wallflowers’ desks. The woman explained she was new and wasn’t sure which section the book would be found in: she’d check the computer stock list. As her varnished nails skittered across the keyboard, Herrick’s gaze came to rest on the smears of grime on the return key and space bar – grime accumulated in tens of thousands of keystrokes by Youssef Rahe. She realised suddenly that she had found what she was looking for.
‘That’s a Dell computer, isn’t it?’ said Herrick. ‘I’ve had the exact same one for three years and it’s never caused me any trouble.’
The woman looked at her oddly. ‘Yes, it seems to be very reliable.’
‘Can I look?’ asked Herrick, leaning over and memorising the model number. The woman was still trying to find the book on the stock list. ‘I can always come back later,’ said Herrick. ‘I’ve quite a number of purchases to make. Perhaps it would help if I brought a list this afternoon.’
The woman seemed relieved. Herrick left the shop and caught a cab to Notting Hill Gate where she began to search the second-hand shops. Very soon, she found a Dell for sale, slightly newer than the one in the bookstore, but with an identical keyboard. She examined the socket at the back of the computer and practised pressing the plug home. Then she negotiated with the youth behind the counter to buy the keyboard separately. Clutching her prize in an old supermarket bag, she walked a few doors along the street and entered a large bookshop. The back of a recently published book in the politics section called Jihad had an excellent bibliography, from which she took the titles of half a dozen obscure-sounding books on the Middle East.
This done, she returned to Rahe’s bookshop with the list and the keyboard, but the obliging young assistant at the desk had been replaced by a rather stout and ill-tempered woman wearing a hijab to cover her hair and neck, who must have been Rahe’s wife. She told Herrick to leave the list overnight and return to collect the books next day, then picked up the phone and began speaking. Herrick placed the list on her desk and moved to the door, taking from her pocket another piece of paper now nicely compressed into an oval pellet. As she reached the door, she again checked for an alarm, then wedged the pellet into the metal opening of the lock and slipped into the street.
She made her way to Westbourne Grove and took lunch in a brasserie – sea bass with half a bottle of Mersault – and read the Guardian, which had a detailed analysis of the Norquist shooting and raised the possibility of a stray police bullet. She was interrupted by a man who said she reminded him of an American film actress, whose name he couldn’t quite recall. She tolerated him for a little while, admitting to herself that being complimented wasn’t such a bad experience after nearly a fortnight in the Bunker. But at length, she made her excuses and went to a department store, buying a small plastic pill container, a make-up powder brush and a thin, very flexible metal spatula.
With these she went home to wait. In the hours that followed, she made some calls, took a nap and packed a fresh set of clothes for her return to the Bunker. At midnight, she drove her car to a road leading off Forsythe Street and parked opposite Rahe’s bookshop. At 1.00 a.m. she left the car and crossed the road. There were still one or two people about, so as she approached the bookshop door she pulled out her own flat keys and lifted them as if to unlock it. At the same time, she shook the head of the spatula from her sleeve, raised it to the door-frame and worked it in at the point where the wad of paper had prevented the lock from sliding home. One firm push and the door opened.
She removed the keyboard from her bag and went round the desk to face the computer. As she stretched behind the box to remove the keyboard plug, she knocked the mouse. The computer whirred and the screen flashed on. Instinctively, she moved to block the light from the window, but as she did so, she noticed the aquarium screensaver appear and begin to animate. It was exactly as Dolph had described, but what interested her now was the noise coming from the hard drive. Behind the picture of the fish making their progress across the screen, something was going on. She changed the keyboards, knowing this would not affect the computer, and put Rahe’s into her bag, never letting her eyes leave the screen. A few seconds later, she heard the modem dial out. Suddenly she was looking at a web page in Arabic. She read the words ‘Ansar Allah’ – helpers of God.
A noise came from the door. ‘Is there a problem here, Miss?’ A policeman was standing in the doorway with a flashlight.
‘Oh, you gave me a shock, officer.’
‘What are you doing here?’ he said, moving from the door.
‘Just changing the keyboard – I’ve had a nightmare trying to find the right one. Mrs Rahe wanted it here by morning.’ She pointed to the ceiling. ‘We’d better keep our voices down. I don’t want to wake her.’
The policeman looked doubtfully at her. ‘You work here? I’ve never seen you in the shop.’
‘I read Arabic, so I look after the stock at the back and do the re-ordering from publishers in the Middle East. I’m part-time.’
‘Let’s have some light, shall we? Where’s the switch?’
‘By the door,’ she said. ‘But I’m going now.’
‘It must be difficult to learn Arabic. What’s that say there?’ he asked, pointing to a card.
‘This? It says the Pan Arab Library welcomes you. Our staff will be happy to offer every assistance in finding your purchases – Youssef Rahe.’
‘Very impressive,’ said the policeman. ‘I don’t know how you manage it.’ His radio crackled with a voice and he turned down the volume. From upstairs, there was the sound of a light footfall.
‘I’ll just shut down the computer,’ she said. ‘They left it on.’ She got up and moved around the desk. ‘I must say it’s very reassuring to see you, officer. You hear so much about there being no police on the beat.’
The policeman nodded. ‘Would you mind if I took a few details from you, Miss? Just as a precaution.’
‘Not in the least,’ she said, leaning against the door and letting her forefinger remove the pellet of paper from the lock. ‘My name is Celia Adams. I live at 340 Ladbroke Grove.’ She smiled again, this time more coquettishly. ‘You could give me a lift there.’
‘Just a moment,’ he said, writing in his notebook. ‘Celia… Adams. Do you have some form of identification with you?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She made as if to look in her bag, but just then a voice called out from the back of the shop. She looked up to see the woman whom she’d spoken to on her second visit. ‘My apologies, Mrs Rahe,’ she said in Arabic. ‘We have woken you up. This officer was worrying about your lock but I told him there was a knack to it.’
The woman stared at them uncomprehendingly. Herrick knew she had to make a run for it or be arrested. She stretched her hand to the door, flipped the latch upwards and jumped into the street, pulling the door shut behind her. She ran straight across Forsythe Street, dodging a bus, but did not immediately make for her car. Instead, she turned into another side street, glancing behind to see the policeman tearing towards his patrol car with his radio to his mouth. She was badly out of condition, so she took the first possible escape route, a short driveway leading to a high wooden gate. She scaled the gate and found herself in an untidy London garden. Thanking God there were no intruder lights, she negotiated a wall covered by a rambling rose, and lowered herself into the next garden. She was aware of the blue light flickering in the gap between the houses behind her, but kept going through several gardens until, eventually, she ended up in the street where her car was parked. Out of breath and feeling slightly silly but elated, she moved without haste to her car and drove off in the direction of Paddington.
Ten minutes later, she parked under a street light, placed the keyboard on her lap and unscrewed it with infinite care. She prised it apart and began to stroke the inside surfaces with the make-up brush, gathering the dust and strands of hair that had worked their way down through the keys, and sweeping it all into the pill container. She wasn’t surprised at how much matter had accumulated in the keyboard, for she had once unscrewed her own to repair a jammed key and found a mass of hair and a couple of dead insects. After a few minutes of brushing, the bottom of the box was covered with a few millimetres of debris. She closed the box and placed it in an envelope that bore the address of an establishment in South Parks Road, Oxford. This she fed into a nearby postbox, then drove home.
Next day, Isis got to the Bunker early and passed through the numerous security checks to find that her place at the archipelago of investigation desks was taken. Nathan Lyne saw her and rose. ‘We have some business, you and I, in the conference room,’ he said, jabbing his finger over her head.
Vigo and Spelling were ranged on one side of the table. Lyne took up a seat at the end, leaving her standing.
Spelling didn’t look up. ‘We understand you broke into Youssef Rahe’s shop last night. Can you explain why?’
How did they know? Surely the bookshop couldn’t still be under observation. ‘I wanted to take a look at his computer,’ she said. ‘His role in all this still seems unclear.’
‘Unclear?’ said Spelling. ‘In what way unclear?’
‘It doesn’t seem sensible to put all this effort into the eleven others without trying to work out what happened in Lebanon: why Rahe fell for it; who the other man on his flight was. We’re missing something.’
The room was thick with pious male complacency. Spelling finally looked up, his reading glasses magnifying the anger in his expression. ‘I specifically instructed you not to press your personal inquiries further, for the very good reason that if these people understand we know Rahe is dead, they’re very likely to conclude their entire operation is compromised. I assumed you had grasped this elementary point and yet you go off on your own, break into the premises and provide the police and Mrs Rahe with a very good idea of what you look like. What if you had been apprehended and charged? How would you have explained your presence in the shop?’
‘But I wasn’t caught.’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid. I’m talking about the risk you took.’
Vigo shifted in his chair. ‘We were extremely lucky,’ he said. ‘The local police were aware of our interest in the shop and alerted Special Branch about the break-in, so we were able to acquire the film from the security cameras outside the adjacent premises.’ He slid a photograph across the table. She looked down and saw herself moving from the door with the plastic carrier bag in her arms.
‘What was in the bag?’ he asked, fixing her with utterly expressionless eyes.
‘I took a keyboard. You know, to look as if I had some business being there…’
‘A little amateurish for you, I would have thought,’ said Vigo. ‘What would anyone be doing mending a computer at that hour?’
‘It nearly worked,’ she said. ‘If Mrs Rahe hadn’t come down, I would have been okay.’
‘That’s beside the point,’ said Spelling. ‘Your actions threatened RAPTOR. It was exceptionally irresponsible of you.’
She held her temper and spoke deliberately. ‘I concede that I may have been a bit rash. But I don’t agree that my actions jeopardised anything.’
‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ Spelling shot back. ‘Mr Collins and I believe you’ve forfeited our trust and therefore your place in RAPTOR.’
Lyne clenched his hands together and turned them out to click his knuckles. ‘Look, gentlemen, we all agree this was very dumb of Isis, but in her defence I’d like to point out that she’s easily one of the best investigators we have – you saw how quick she was the night before last. Hell, she really gets it. I’d hate to lose her.’
Herrick tipped her head in thanks.
‘What were you hoping to find on the computer?’ asked Vigo. ‘You know we had all that covered. Did you imagine we had overlooked something?’
‘To be honest, yes. I feel we’re all missing something. I’ve told Nathan this, countless times.’
‘I can vouch for that,’ said Lyne. ‘She’s been a real pain in the ass.’
‘And you think that because you spotted the switch at Heathrow, you have some superior insight into this operation? ’ said Vigo.
‘Well, at least my personal inquiries achieved something on that occasion.’
‘So you felt you had the right to go off piste again?’ said Spelling.
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘And did you see anything on the computer that interested you?’ asked Vigo.
‘As a matter of fact, yes, it was in sleep mode and when I touched the mouse it automatically logged on to an Islamist website. I didn’t have time to read much, but it struck me as interesting that the messages were still coming through to a man they knew was dead. I wondered whether his wife had knowledge of the way the screensaver operated as a gateway. I wondered about the site I saw. The internet address showed it was based in Malaysia.’
‘The screensaver – did you know about it before?’
‘I made it my business to find out as much as I could about Youssef Rahe. I still feel he’s important.’
‘But where from?’ demanded Vigo.
She returned his stare and gently shook her head. ‘My sources,’ she said defiantly. Damn Vigo: he’d still be selling second-hand books if it hadn’t been for her. He owed his resurrection to her. She turned to Spelling, determined to get off the subject of the computer for good. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong, and if you don’t mind, I repeat that we are ignoring an essential part of this case. What happened to Youssef Rahe?’
Spelling rested his chin on his hands, then removed his glasses. ‘That will be all,’ he said.
Twenty minutes later the three men emerged, and Lyne came over to Herrick. ‘You’re off the team,’ he said. ‘They’re sending you to Tirana. A suspect is being held there, and we think he’s interesting.’
‘Why me? We’ve got our own people at the British Embassy. Why can’t they give him the once-over?’
‘The resident officer is ill – cancer. His stand-in is too inexperienced and besides, he’s not in on the big secret. Maybe the suspect has something to tell, and if he does, I want you to be there to hear it. There’s a really good case for going. I was arguing for them to send you before you started burglarising bookstores. Hell, Isis, this is a reprieve. They want you back in a couple of weeks. Jim Collins thinks you’re shit hot.’
‘I wish you could persuade Spelling of that.’
‘I think he’s already there. But Christ, you’re a fucking handful. You know that?’
She smiled sheepishly. ‘By the way, thanks for sticking up for me in there. It’s not everyone who would do that.’
‘That’s okay. You’re flying out tomorrow morning to Zurich, then Mother Teresa airport, Tirana. Spelling says you’ll have the usual diplomatic status, but they don’t want you mixing too much at your own Embassy, so you’re to stay at the Byron – it’s Tirana’s only good hotel. You’ll see a lot of the guys at the US Embassy, but again, I don’t have to tell you to stay off the subject of RAPTOR. Some of them may have got wind of it, because of the involvement of so many personnel, but you’re Garbo – right?’
‘Who am I reporting to?’
‘Me – this is an officially sponsored RAPTOR tour. Just see the guy interviewed, turn in a report and bring your butt safely back here in a couple of weeks. It’s a piece of cake. You’ll probably end up with a beautiful tan.’ He paused and placed his hand on her shoulder. ‘But you be careful. There are some bad, bad people out there.’
‘Then I’m going to need a story. That requires a little preparation. I don’t know if I’ve got enough time. ’
‘You got all day. But make it better than the keyboard story. That was bush-league stuff, Isis – just terrible.’
She stayed for a further two hours to read the file on the Tirana detainee and draw some money – $7,000 in hundred-dollar bills – from a character who came from the US Embassy and stressed that every last cent was to be accounted for.