Peggy had stayed in cobra all day with a small group from Thames House, working closely with the intelligence analysts from the other departments as they put together as much information as they could find to help the SAS plan their rescue mission. From time to time Liz had rung in for an update, and at six o’clock in the evening she had joined the substantial group of people from various departments who’d assembled to hear the SAS’s presentation to the Foreign Secretary of their operational plan for the rescue attempt the following morning.
In the pre-dawn darkness, Liz again climbed the few steps from Whitehall to the door of the Cabinet Office, to wait for news to come in of the progress of the operation. By the time she reached the windowless briefing room, reports had started to arrive of a fire fight at the camp; a little later she heard with relief that Dave Armstrong and Captain Guthrie had been successfully rescued. She was still there several hours later when medical reports came in that Guthrie was suffering from what appeared to be pneumonia and that Dave had been beaten badly but was not seriously injured.
Shortly afterwards, as she was watching a shaky hand-held video of the rescue on one of the screens, Peggy waved her over. A call had come in for her from Martin Seurat’s office in Paris. Liz took the phone, expecting to hear Martin congratulating her on Dave’s rescue, but it was one of his colleagues telling her that M. Seurat had gone over to the Santé prison with a colleague from the DCRI. Amir Khan had told his warders that he was prepared to talk.
Much later, after Liz was back at home, exhaustedly downing a glass of Sauvignon in celebration of Dave’s rescue, Martin himself rang. ‘I have heard that your colleague is free. Congratulations.’
‘Thank you. It’s a great relief,’ Liz said. Enough had gone wrong in the operation for her to feel that they were very fortunate things had turned out as well as they had.
‘It’s not the only reason I am calling. I hope you got my message that I went to see our friend in the Santé with Cassale. He says he’s willing to talk some more, but he’s scared – he knows there are Al Qaeda prisoners in there who would not hesitate to kill him if they thought he was talking to us. He wants reassurances about his safety before he gives out any more information.’
‘Can you or Cassale give those to him?’
‘I could try, but there’s a problem. He wants reassurances from you too. And in person – I’m afraid he was insistent on this point.’
So, this morning, Liz had dragged herself out of bed to catch an early Eurostar. It was clear when she arrived at the prison that something fairly dramatic had occurred to change the French attitude to Amir. She had been surprised to be told that the interview was not to take place in the high-security wing. She had instead been shown into a small, comfortably furnished office, where she settled into an armchair, with a cup of coffee to wait for Amir Khan.
The door opened and Amir walked in, followed by Martin. The armed guard had gone, as had the chains that had bound Amir’s arms and legs. Now he walked upright instead of shuffling, his head no longer bowed. Looking straight at Liz, he nodded and said ‘Good morning’ with a slight smile, then sat down on the chair that Martin indicated.
Martin said formally to Liz, ‘I have had a long talk with Amir and he says that he wants to tell us his story. There are some reassurances he is asking for that only the British can give, so I thought it best that you come in person to hear what he has to say.’
Amir looked at her and nodded. ‘I want to tell you what happened because I want you to stop it happening to anyone else. If I do this, then I want to see my sister so I can explain things to her. But you must guarantee she’ll be safe if she comes to see me here.’
Liz said nothing while she thought about this. What Amir was asking for was perfectly reasonable from his point of view, but it was not something she could immediately agree to. It would take a lot of sorting out. Liz couldn’t give him any reassurances about his own position, since it hadn’t been decided yet what if any charges he should face, or in which country he would face them: France or England.
Tahira, moreover, was now effectively a recruited agent and vital to the investigation. If she were suddenly brought over here, she would have to be pulled out of the operation, which would mean they’d lose their one means of contact with Malik. And what’s more, as Amir himself understood, just bringing her to the prison to talk to him might put her in serious danger. This would need careful thinking about.
Amir was watching her closely; Liz could see from his face that if she said the wrong thing he was going to refuse to speak. She had to take a risk.
She said, ‘Amir, I’m very glad that you have decided to help us. We also want to stop others getting involved in all this. I’m going to explain what I can do to meet your terms. First, about Tahira. I’ve met her and talked to her.’ Amir looked surprised, but Liz went on, ‘She is terribly worried about you. She wanted to come and see you but your father wouldn’t let her.’
He nodded as if that were no surprise.
‘I’m sure she would want you to know that she is helping us, and I’m equally sure that she would want you to help us too.’ Amir frowned and Liz went on quickly, before he could speak. ‘I can promise you that when this is over, we’ll look after her. But I don’t think it would be a good idea for her to come over to Paris to see you now. If she did, I could not guarantee to keep her safe, as we couldn’t be sure her trip would remain secret – not right now, at any rate. But I will ask her to write to you and I’ll either bring the letter myself or give it to my French colleagues to give to you.’
‘What is she doing to help you? Are you putting her in danger?’
‘She is only doing what she wants to do.’ Liz’s eyes were focused on Amir. ‘No one is putting any pressure on her. She’s helping us because she wants to help you. You are lucky to have such a sister.’
‘I know.’
‘Now about your position, Amir. As you know, it hasn’t yet been decided whether you should be charged, or even whether you should remain in France or return to the UK. I can’t give you any guarantees. But if you talk to us truthfully, that will certainly be taken into consideration, both by us in the UK and,’ she looked at Martin with raised eyebrows and he nodded, ‘by the French.’
‘But if I talk to you, they’ll kill me if they can.’
‘If you talk frankly to us, we and our French colleagues will have the responsibility of looking after you – and Tahira, of course. And if that meant you couldn’t go back to Birmingham, then we would help you go somewhere else.’
Amir had been staring at Liz as she explained all this. Now he was hesitating, clearly trying to make up his mind what to do.
Martin said gently, ‘My advice is that you should tell us your story.’
Amir nodded. ‘I haven’t got a choice really, have I?’
And he began to talk. He’d first gone to the New Springfield Mosque with Malik and had been fascinated by the preaching of Imam Bakri and his message of the duty of all true Muslims to wage war against the infidel. Amir described how he’d been asked to join an inner group of true believers which had met weekly for several months. Then they had all gone three times to a mosque in North London where they had met a woman – a white woman, who spoke beautiful Arabic and talked enthrallingly about jihad.
‘She was a witch. A blonde witch,’ he said. ‘She enchanted us and took away our souls. She told us we had been chosen to be on the front line of the fight and we would be blessed. No one told us where we would go, but we thought it would be Afghanistan.’
The officials of the New Springfield Mosque had made all the travel arrangements and they were kept very secret. ‘They told me to go to my uncle in Rawalpindi, where I would be contacted, so I did. One day three men came to see me there, and I went with them. They gave me Pakistani travel documents and arranged for me to go to Athens.’
He went on to describe how he had got to Mombasa by ship, then by road to Somalia where he joined a group of Arabs who ran a training camp in the desert. ‘It was very difficult getting there overland – we arrived ten days later than expected.’ It was then that the decision was taken to take new recruits in future directly from the ships off the Horn, rather have the human cargo unloaded a thousand kilometres away in Kenya and wait for it to make its way north to Somalia.
So the Arabs moved camp, to a compound that was already inhabited by Somali pirates, on the coast about ten miles south of Mogadishu.
Liz interjected, ‘And the Arabs then tried to hijack the Aristides?’
‘Yes. They saw how easy it was – the pirates had been doing it successfully for years, so the Arabs decided to do it themselves. That way they’d get their new recruits and also make money by ransoming the ships and stealing the cargoes.’
‘Didn’t the Somali pirates object?’
Amir shook his head. ‘Their leader wasn’t happy, but he was frightened of the Arabs. So was I, to tell you the truth; and the Arabs knew it. The leader was a tall, thin man with burning eyes – I think he was mad – who made me go with the others on a pirate raid because he claimed it would make me brave. I think he just wanted an eye kept on me.
‘It was terrifying. They made me go up the ladder first and when the French Navy boat came up, they sailed off and I fell in the sea. And that’s how I got captured. The others were captured, too, and they told me if I said anything they’d find out, and then they’d kill me. Are some of them are here in this prison?’
He looked at them both with frightened eyes. Martin shook his head. ‘They’re not here, and there is no way they could know anything about what’s happened to you.’
I hope you’re right, thought Liz, as she sat and listened to Amir’s story unfold. And as she and Martin questioned him further about the details over the next two hours, she couldn’t get out of her head her first visit to this prison, and the man with the book in the back pocket of his jeans whom she had felt sure was following her. Was he Al Qaeda too? Possibly, which meant Amir was right to worry about his safety and Tahira’s if she ever came here.