‘We talked about this. After all the training they’ve put us through they wouldn’t throw us away like that. And remember what The Sheik said. They want us to be warriors, not shahid. Now stop talking nonsense.’ He reached for a jar of Nescafe. ‘Do you want a coffee?’
‘Do I want a coffee? We might be dead in a few hours and you’re worrying about coffee?’
Chaudhry pointed a finger at Malik’s face. ‘I told you, stop talking crap. Now do you want coffee or not?’
Malik nodded. ‘Okay, thanks,’ he whispered.
‘It’s going to be okay, Harvey. We always knew we’d get the call at some point.’ He spooned coffee granules into two mugs.
‘I just worry that they might not be straight with us,’ said Malik. ‘We don’t know what they’re capable of, not really.’
Chaudhry leaned against the fridge and folded his arms. ‘Khalid wants us in Church Street at five. We’ll be collected and taken to wherever it is he wants us. What do you want to do? Call him and tell him we’ve had a change of heart?’
‘We could do that,’ said Malik. ‘We absolutely could. We could just call it a day.’
‘We can’t,’ said Chaudhry, shaking his head.
‘We can. We’ve done enough. We just tell John that we want out. MI5 can’t force us to go on like this. We gave them The Sheik. We showed them who’s bad in the mosque. We can walk away with our heads held high.’ He gripped Chaudhry’s shoulder so hard that Chaudhry winced. ‘Let’s go, brother. Let’s go before we’re in any deeper.’
‘We can’t do that,’ said Chaudhry. ‘We can’t let John down. And what would Khalid do if we left now?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Malik, letting go of his flatmate’s shoulder.
‘With everything we know about him and the organisation, how could he let us live?’
‘We could run. Disappear.’
‘Harvey, how could we do that? To disappear we’d need money, we’d need documents, passports. The only people who could arrange that for us would be MI5. And if we run they’re not going to help us, are they?’
‘We’ve helped them already, haven’t we? We gave them The Sheik. They owe us for that. In fact screw them. We can go to the Americans. They’d put us in their witness protection scheme. We’d have a whole new life in the States.’
‘Yeah, and who do we talk to? You want to phone the White House and talk to the President?’ Chaudhry laughed harshly. ‘Sure, that’d work,’ he said sarcastically. ‘We don’t even know for certain that they told the Americans about us.’
‘So we’re trapped,’ said Malik.
‘It’s not a trap, it’s an opportunity,’ said Chaudhry. The kettle finished boiling and he poured water into the mugs and stirred. ‘When we first went to MI5 we went because we knew that people would die if we didn’t. We knew what Khalid and his people were planning to do, right?’
Malik nodded. Chaudhry splashed milk into both mugs and handed one to his friend.
‘I’ve already spoken to John. He’ll be watching us. They’ll move in before anything happens and we’ll be heroes.’ He raised his mug. ‘Trust me, Harvey. We’ll be heroes, this will be over and we can get on with our lives.’ He clinked his mug against Malik’s.
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Malik.
‘We’ve got a live video feed from a van across the road,’ said Luke Lesporis, MI5’s head of London surveillance. Lesporis had cut his surveillance teeth following drug dealers in south London, more often than not with dreadlocks and a Bob Marley T-shirt. But his streetwalking days were almost a decade behind him. MI5 had hired him to head up their London surveillance team and he now had close-cropped hair and spent most of his time behind a desk in a Hugo Boss suit. He looked over at Charlotte Button and pushed his wire-framed designer spectacles up his nose and then pointed at one of the twelve LCD screens on the wall they were facing. Shepherd could see an Indian restaurant, and a traffic warden writing out a ticket. ‘The traffic warden’s ours,’ said Lesporis. ‘We also have two motorcycle couriers and a black cab in the street and black cabs in the streets parallel. We’ve a Met helicopter on the way.’
‘Thank you, Luke,’ said Button. She was wearing a grey Prada suit and had hung the jacket on the back of her chair. A small gold crucifix nestled below her throat from a thin gold chain. They were in an operations room on the top floor of Thames House. There were no windows and the overhead lights were subdued to give them a better view of the LCD screens. There were half a dozen young men and women sitting at a bank of computer terminals, while Button and Shepherd were sitting in high-backed black leather chairs in front of a control console. Luke Lesporis was to their left, standing up and drinking occasionally from a plastic bottle. There was a large clock on the wall facing the door. It was twenty minutes to five.
‘SAS?’ asked Shepherd.
‘They’re on alert but we are confident we can handle this with the resources we have,’ said Button. ‘The Combined Firearms Response Team is ready to go and we’ve got six ARVs ready in north London. We’ve got three in position south of the river. We’re drafting in teams from other forces and within the hour we should have at least a dozen more in place.’
One of the lower screens was showing a map of London, centred on Stoke Newington.
Another screen flickered into life. This one showed a view from the roof of a building overlooking the street. Lesporis raised his hand and touched his Bluetooth earpiece. ‘We have a camera on the roof of a building opposite,’ he said.
‘Tell them to make sure they’re not seen,’ said Button.
Lesporis nodded and turned back to his computer.
Button smiled at Shepherd. ‘Coffee?’
‘Coffee would be good,’ said Shepherd.
Button picked up one of the handsets in front of her and asked for a coffee and a tea. ‘And sandwiches,’ she said. ‘Whatever’s going.’
Two dark-haired young men in pinstriped suits walked in, both wearing Bluetooth earpieces. Button greeted them by name and they sat down at computer terminals and logged on.
‘We’ve got two walkers on the ground — the traffic warden and a BT engineer — but this is going to be vehicle surveillance obviously,’ said Button. She picked up a Bluetooth earpiece and put it into her right ear.
‘There’s no chatter, no sense that anything big is happening?’
‘It’s quiet,’ said Button. ‘But it’s been quiet for weeks. That can mean that nothing’s happening or it can mean they’ve battened down the hatches in preparation for a big one.’
A blonde woman in a grey suit raised her hand. ‘Helly telly coming online,’ she said.
‘Thank you, Zoe,’ said Button. One of the top screens went live, giving them an overhead view from the Met’s helicopter. ‘Ask them to give the target plenty of room,’ she said.
Zoe nodded and began talking into her Bluetooth headset.
‘There’s a police commander on the way but this is our operation,’ Button said to Shepherd.
‘What do we do about Raj and Harvey?’
‘In what way?’
‘Hell’s bells, Charlie, two of our men are in the middle of this. If the cops start shooting what’s to say they won’t be killed?’
‘I can’t lie to you, Spider. The primary aim is to safeguard the public. We’ll do what we can to protect our assets but that has to be a secondary consideration.’
Shepherd lowered his voice and leaned towards her. ‘Charlie, these guys trust us. You can’t hang them out to dry.’
‘That’s not what’s happening here,’ she said. ‘At the moment we don’t know where they’re going or what they’ll be doing. This is a surveillance operation. If we move to another level then hopefully we’ll have eyes on them and be able to identify and protect our assets. One step at a time, okay?’
‘Will you stop referring to Raj and Harvey as assets?’ hissed Shepherd. ‘They’re people. Human beings. They’re not inanimate objects.’
‘They’re assets. That’s the technical term,’ said Button quickly. Her eyes narrowed. ‘I understand your depth of feeling,’ she said. ‘But keep in mind the big picture here. These people have been planning a major terrorist incident for several years so it’s going to be big. Just how big we’ve yet to find out. Preventing that incident has to be our priority.’