Early next morning a group of about thirty people assembled at Thames House. Herrick and the key members of the SIS team arrived shortly before Vigo entered the building. The Chief had evidently spoken with him overnight and agreed that the man Vigo had identified in the Bosnian photographs as Jamil Rahe was the only hope of tracing Youssef Rahe and Sammi Loz. Vigo was once again the architect of a plan, but now he had the support of the entire security establishment and, though looking drawn, somehow managed to present a picture of righteous self-possession.
Jamil Rahe had been traced to a maisonette in a quiet street in Bristol, and a surveillance team was already in place. At 8.15 a.m. a uniformed policeman and a member of the local Special Branch, posing as an immigration official from the Home Office, approached the building and rang the doorbell. The exchange with Jamil Rahe was relayed to Thames House from a microphone in the Special Branch officer’s briefcase, and it was agreed that their manner was striking precisely the right balance between suspicion and reassurance. They explained that a form had been overlooked in the processing of Jamil Rahe’s application for political asylum and that it must be completed that day to make everything legal. Across the street a cameraman, hidden in the back of a TV repair van, silently recorded the scene. The three men were still talking on the doorstep when the first images arrived through the secure internet server at Thames House. One glance showed that he was the man from the Bosnia photographs. These images were then forwarded by email to a laptop in the possession of Special Branch officers on the roof of Heathrow’s Terminal Two.
At length, the big Algerian offered the two officers coffee while he filled in the form. They went in, and within a very short time the plain-clothes policeman had secreted a tiny transmitter in Rahe’s home so that the sound coming to Thames House was of much better quality. Jamil said he was familiar with the form they’d brought and insisted that he had already filled in one like it. The officers apologised. While he sat at the table writing, they gently questioned him about the kind of welfare benefits he had been claiming, his prospects of work and his wife’s attendance at a language course. Once or twice Rahe’s replies seemed rather too considered, particularly when one of the officers mentioned that with his brother Youssef in London things would not be as difficult for him as it was for other new immigrants. The fifteen minutes of talk and coffee passed off very amicably, yet by the time they left, saying that this would certainly be the last he saw of them, Jamil was plainly on his guard.
Five minutes later, the police at Heathrow contacted Thames House. Three plane-spotters had identified the Algerian definitely as the man who stood with them on the observation platform on May 14 and on several occasions before that. Jamil Rahe was now confirmed as a very significant element in the story, and not for the first time the Chief looked towards Herrick and winked his thanks. Now all they had to do was wait for Jamil to make contact with someone.
An hour passed, during which the Chief and Barbara Markham, the Director General of the Security Services, discussed the raid on Youssef Rahe’s bookshop in Bayswater. The Security Services wanted to move on the premises immediately, but the Chief argued that they should wait for as long as possible, although plainly it had to be done by the time the arrests started across Europe the following morning. Eventually they compromised on 5.00 p.m. that afternoon, with the agreement that the staff of the Secret Intelligence Service would have the run of the place once it had been secured. The Chief returned to Vauxhall Cross, leaving Dolph and Herrick to watch as a stream of visitors looked over the shots from Bosnia. Journalists, diplomats, army officers and even the odd aid worker had been contacted the previous evening and asked as a matter of urgency to Thames House. They were all on time for the unusual invitation to coffee and croissants, but as each of them pored over the photographs laid out on a table and consulted a map where the photographs had been shot, it became clear that the remaining men would not be so easily identified. ‘Well,’ said Dolph as the last one left, ‘we’ve still got the Guignal gal. Maybe Lapping should fly out to Skiathos with a disk. He might even lose his virginity.’
‘It would be quicker to get her to an internet cafe and send them by email,’ she said.
‘You’re not worried about security?’ he asked.
‘Damn security, and anyway we do need to speak to her about Jamil Rahe. She may remember him. Why don’t you do that?’
Dolph’s eyes flared. ‘All of a sudden I’m your runner, Isis. Why the fuck don’t you do it?’
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘We’ll both talk to her, okay? It will be better.’
Dolph still looked put out. ‘You’re tired. You need to rest.’
‘Yes,’ she said, managing a grin. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve had a rough few weeks and sooner or later it’s going to tell.’
‘Lecture over?’
‘I mean it,’ he said, looking down at the photographs.
She was tired, damned tired. She thought of Harland in her kitchen that morning, sitting as though drugged, over a cup of coffee. They said little, but she had tried to let him know that she didn’t regret sleeping with him. He was affectionate but also slightly remote, as though mentally drawing back to grasp the scale of something. Fine, she had thought, she’d wait, and if this turned out to be a one-night stand, all well and good. It had been very pleasant.
‘Don’t worry,’ she had said, brushing her knuckles across the top of his hand as the cab pulled up at Brown’s Hotel. ‘There’re no strings. I’m not like that.’
‘I’m not worried, just astonished that it happened. More than that, I’m moved and extraordinarily grateful that you would favour my old bones.’
‘Grateful is not a word that should ever be used in the context of sex.’
They smiled at each other and it was left at that, but as he reached for the handle of the cab door she noticed the haunted, puzzled look in his eyes. She clutched at his arm and immediately regretted it because it made her seem needy, when in fact she was just concerned for him.
‘Are you okay?
He had replied with slight irritation, ‘Yes, of course I’m okay.’ Then he pulled free and got out of the cab.
It had been a very unsatisfactory parting and she wished she could put it right.
Dolph and Herrick had returned to Vauxhall Cross by 11.00 a.m. but it was not until 1.10 p.m. that they were told that Jamil Rahe had left his house with a sports bag over his shoulder and walked to the end of his road to catch a bus. A feed from Thames House was hooked up and they were able to hear Jamil’s progress. The bus took him to the centre of Bristol, where he moved unhurriedly from store to store buying odd items – a pair of socks, a packet of soap and a school exercise book. At length he came to an electronics shop where he browsed through the display and then, as though on impulse, bought a pay-as-you-go cell phone. The phone stayed in the box and the watchers were fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to use it straight away because it would require a period of charging. Rahe then whiled away time in a park, briefly visited a library and considered the programme of movies at a multiplex cinema. The consensus was that he had activated a pre-planned routine to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Several times he went through ‘dry cleaning’ channels – an escalator in a shopping mall, an underpass and an alley, each of which allowed him to observe at leisure the people in his wake. The police response was briefly to implement a procedure known as cascade surveillance, which involved filling his path with watchers, like water falling over a boulder. But Rahe moved so slowly through the city centre that it soon became necessary to revert to traditional methods and just hang a little further back.
Herrick realised time was getting on. Even though the raid on the Pan Arab Library had now been put back to 6.00 p.m. she would need to leave Vauxhall Cross by 5.15 and it was now 3.30. She went and found Dolph and they tried for a fifth time to raise Helene Guignal. She answered on the first ring, and in response to Herrick’s question, told them that she had her laptop with her and could pick up her email. The Bosnia photographs were sent to her.
Ten minutes later she called them. Dolph put her on speaker.
‘These pictures are etonnant – how do you say? Amazing. The whole group is here.’
‘Which group? Do you remember their names?’
‘The one standing in profile is Hasan, my boyfriend. And you have seen Yaqub and Sammi, yes?’
‘That’s Youssef Rahe, ’ Herrick said to Dolph.
‘Who else do you see?’ he asked impatiently.
‘Larry.’
‘Larry? Which is Larry?’
‘The man in the foreground. He is the American – a convert to Islam. J’oublie son nomme islamique, mais Les Freres – the Brothers – they called him Larry.’
‘This group referred to themselves as the Brothers?’ asked Dolph.
‘Yes.’
‘Right, the tall man by the tree. This man we now believe to be Algerian, like Yaqub. He is passing himself off as Yaqub’s brother?’
‘Please, I don’t understand.’
‘He is pretending to be Yaqub’s brother?’
‘ Non! He is not his brother! But he is Algerien, yes.’
‘His name?’
She hesitated. ‘Rafik… no, Rasim. That is it – Rasim.’
Dolph was scribbling a note to Herrick.
‘Any other name for him?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know anyone else?’
‘These are the only names. Some of the others I recognise but I did not know them well. I do not know their names.’
Dolph passed Herrick a note which said, ‘THEY WERE ALL IN THE HAJ