‘If you’ve got the baggage it means you know the name I was travelling under.’
‘That’s rather the point, sir. Your security has been compromised. ’
They made for a door at the side of the hall, which opened from the inside as they approached, and passed along a corridor of mostly empty offices. Here two policemen in anoraks and fatigue trousers joined them, so a party of more than a dozen descended three flights of a metal stairway, causing it to vibrate with a dull ring. At the bottom the corridor turned right and led to a fire exit where a security officer was on hand with a swipe card. He signalled to a surveillance camera above and operated the lock, throwing both doors outwards. The fumes of aviation fuel and the noise of taxiing aircraft filled the corridor. Rain slanted through the door. Norquist began to put on his raincoat, but Llewellyn took it from him and passed it, together with Norquist’s bag, to one of the policemen behind. He waved the two uniformed police out to a line of four cars just visible off to the right.
‘We’re having to make this up as we go along,’ said Chambers. ‘We’ve had very little notice.’
Norquist shrugged. ‘Right,’ he said.
They waited a few more moments until a voice came over Llewellyn’s radio. The rest of the men bunched round Norquist and they spilled from the door in a security rush, holding his head down until he was in the back of a black Jaguar. Chambers climbed in beside him; Llewellyn got in the front. The rest of the men divided between a dark green Range Rover, a Ford saloon and a BMW which brought up the rear.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Norquist.
‘We understand they are going to make an attempt in or around the terminal. I’m afraid this arrangement is far from ideal. We’d have preferred to use a helicopter to get you into town. We may yet have you picked up on the way, but the main thing is to get you away from public areas of the airport now.’
Norquist nodded patiently as if being told of some further minor delay in his schedule. The plane had already stopped for two hours at Reykjavik with a computer fault.
‘We think it’s a big operation. No details though,’ continued Chambers, giving him a significant look which was to say that he couldn’t talk in front of the driver and Llewellyn.
The cars moved off, weaving under the piers of Terminal Three. They had to slow for aircraft manoeuvring in and out of the gates and occasional service vehicles that blocked the route across the concrete apron. The squall that had blown in from the south-west didn’t help their progress either, and several times the Jaguar hesitated, either from poor visibility or disorientation in the sprawling tentacles of the airport. After a few minutes they cleared Terminal Two and set off at speed over the open ground between the take-off and landing runways, towards the vast hangars on the east side of the airport. They were held up once by a yellow airport car to allow a 747 to be towed across their path from the service hangars. Instead of taking the exit by the British Midland hangar off to their right, they moved towards the head of the runway a few hundred yards away, close to the eight aircraft waiting to take off. Rain and exhaust from the engines blurred the landscape and they had to slow to look for the exit. Someone spotted a policeman on a motorbike waving in the distance.
Llewellyn yelled into his radio over the noise of the engines. ‘Route Three. Is that understood? Route Three.’ He sat back as the cars started forward and said under his breath, ‘Let’s hope this works.’
A little over a mile away a man held a Bresse Optic telescope to his right eye and scrutinised the procession of vehicles with twenty times magnification. The few plane spotters that had remained with him through the rain and poor light on the observation terrace of Terminal Two also trained their binoculars and telescopes to the head of the southern runway - or, as they referred to it, Runway 27 right. But when the four cars veered off through the grass margins of the airfield towards the emergency gate in the perimeter fence, their interest returned to the line of Boeings, followed by two Russian-made aircraft - a Tupolev Tu-154 and a Yakovlev Yak-42 - which by chance landed seventy seconds apart on the northern runway - or 27 left.
The men on the observation terrace mostly carried telephones. Some even held hand-radios with which they chatted to fellow enthusiasts around the airport. So it was perfectly natural for the man with the Bresse Optic to turn away from the noise of a taxiing Tunisair flight, to gaze across Heathrow’s roofscape of air-conditioning ducts and radio masts and dial a pre-set number on his phone. Muffled in their anorak hoods, absorbed in the comings and goings of the jets, fiddling with their Thermos flasks and packets of sandwiches, the plane spotters paid scant attention to what he said about the cars leaving the airport and turning right towards the A30.
A surveillance operation of an entirely different kind had just ended in the Terminal Three Departure Lounge when a mixed team consisting of an Arabic speaker from MI6 named Isis Herrick, three officers from MI5 and four members of the police Special Branch were pulled off the observation of Youssef Rahe, an Arab bookseller. They were told by New Scotland Yard and MI5 headquarters at Thames House that an important American had just arrived in the terminal and that the highest possible priority was being accorded to moving him from the airport to Whitehall. The Prime Minister’s armoured Jaguar, being driven back from Cardiff to London without its usual passenger, had been diverted to Heathrow. Through her earpiece Herrick then heard that the four undercover policemen with her were being summarily removed from the mixed surveillance team and would be armed with handguns in a room near the Immigration Hall.
Herrick and her three slightly dour colleagues from MI5 - Campbell, Beck and Fisher - went off to have coffee, Beck caustically remarking that the Special Branch officers had taken with them the keys and parking receipts for two of the three cars. As they sat, they were informed that the few Special Branch officers permanently stationed at Heathrow had also reported to the Immigration Hall. She realised this meant that Youssef Rahe would leave Britain unobserved, except by the security cameras. It was no great disaster. As an anonymous voice pointed out from MI5 headquarters, Rahe, a minor intellectual figure in London’s North African Community, represented no threat to the aircraft whatsoever. He and his baggage had already been thoroughly searched and he was, after all, travelling on an Arab airline to an Arab country. Once he got to Kuwait, the cooperative members of the local intelligence service, al-Mukhabarat, would watch him and log any contacts he made.
Still, Rahe’s hasty departure from the Pan Arab Library in Bayswater had interested Herrick because there was no warning of his trip. He travelled little, spending most of his days seated at the desk in the front of the store, glasses dangling on a chain, testily answering customers’ questions or consulting his computer. He was not a key figure by any means: they weren’t even sure if he had connections with Islamist groups. However, during the sweep of Arab communities in Britain the name of the bookshop had come up, and it had been learned from the FBI that a suspect arrested in Canada had visited it while in London.
Herrick had been assigned to the operation for a few days. She had taken the first appointment at the hairdresser that lay diagonally across from the Pan Arab Library. She arrived just before it opened at 9.45 a.m. and by ten she was in position at the seat nearest the window where the mirror allowed her a clear view of 119 Forsythe Street, an unusual nineteenth-century building, Italianate, a cut above its neighbours.
Rahe usually appeared in the shop just after ten, having left his family in the flat above, and unlocked the door from the inside to a sluggish morning trade. The plan was for her to drop into the bookshop in this slack period, look around for a while and engage Rahe in conversation on the pretext of needing to practise her Arabic. Despite Rahe’s unfriendly manner, she’d learned that he appeared to have an eye for English women. The watchers monitoring his visitors from the street and from a room in a flat opposite had noticed he stared longingly at the fair women passing his shop and that he became more helpful on the rare occasions they went in.
‘You never know,’ said the officer running the surveillance, ‘he might take you to dinner. There are one or two very good Leb restaurants in the area where you can order in Arabic and then you can charm him.’
Herrick watched for signs of Rahe in the mirror, but nothing happened until 10.35 a.m. when she saw him step out into the street with a small suitcase and what looked like a folder of travel documents. He was dressed nattily - bright tie, dark grey flannel trousers, olive green jacket and shoes with a showy buckle at the side. A few moments later a minicab pulled up and, after patting his right breast pocket to check his passport in the gesture of nervous travellers the world over, Rahe climbed into the back.
Herrick got up, removed her gown and shook out her almost-dry hair. She reached for her black leather jacket, and announced she’d just remembered she had a meeting. By the time she was outside and calling the other members of the team on her mobile, they had already phoned the cab company and learned that Rahe was on his way to Heathrow. A search for his name on the airline computers began.
Three surveillance vehicles followed the cab along Gold-hawk Road and the M4 to the drop-off point for Terminal Three departures. Rahe got out, entered the building then walked out. This he did a total of three times without checking the notice boards for the 2.15 p.m. flight to Kuwait on which they had now established he was booked. At length he seemed to settle something for himself and walked purposefully to the Heathrow chapel near Terminal Two, where he sat in the Garden of Remembrance reading a newspaper and occasionally checking his watch. Herrick thought he seemed unsure rather than nervous, and wondered whether he was expecting to meet someone. But after half an hour he suddenly got up and hurried over to the check-in area, where he waited behind about half a dozen passengers. He did not speak to anyone or, as far as they could tell, use his phone.
Still, his behaviour was considered suspicious and when he got to the security checks he was asked to step into a room and submit to a thorough search involving sensors being run over his clothes and shoes. His suitcase was examined intensively and scrapings of plastic were taken from the handle and sides and tested for explosives. Everything was found to be in order and Rahe was sent on his way. It was at this moment, as he wandered off towards the duty free shops, his dignity visibly ruffled, that the order came from New Scotland Yard that Special Branch officers watching Rahe should instantly drop what they were doing and report to Peter Chambers in the Immigration Hall.
Herrick had grown slightly impatient listening to Campbell, Beck and Fisher discuss the events of the morning in the usual oblique code. Thames House had made the connection between Rahe’s presence in Heathrow and the arrival of the American but had concluded that it was nothing more than coincidence. Besides, a few minutes before the American had been located in Immigration, Rahe’s distinctive olive green jacket was seen on the security cameras, making its way to the gate where he duly presented his passport again and boarded the Kuwaiti airliner.
As she was about to suggest they all return to London, Campbell, Beck and Fisher were summoned to the Baggage Hall to observe a woman named Raffaella Klein and follow her from the airport. They left immediately, now intrigued by the flow of commands from London.
Herrick, alone with her coffee and free of the in-house banter of her MI5 colleagues, began to think about Rahe’s behaviour. It just didn’t seem right that this unimpressive North African had suddenly departed for the Middle East. She wondered if he had a rendezvous on the plane - the best possible place for a long, unobserved talk, as long as you fixed the seating. She drained the coffee and experienced a random flash of memory: fishing with her father in Scotland, making the last cast of the day without hope of a pull on the line. What the hell, she had nothing else to do. She’d go to the security room and see what she could find out about the people on the Kuwait flight with Youssef Rahe.
Fifteen minutes later she was sitting at a desk with the passenger manifest of Kuwaiti Airlines KU102 on a screen and noting down the names of the people seated in Rahe’s immediate vicinity at the back of the plane. Around her were three men from Heathrow security who had kept tabs on Rahe by the airport CCTV system as he moved through the terminal to his departure gate. She asked them to print off the complete manifest from the computer, then let her eyes drift to the screen immediately in front of the supervisor, who had compiled a medley of clips showing Rahe as he progressed through the airport. He appeared in the check-in area at 12.30 p.m., a few minutes after the flight opened. At no stage did he talk to anyone or make any sign to a fellow passenger. The cameras then picked him up just after he had been searched and followed him to the duty free shop where he paid for two bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label whisky with cash. Ten minutes later he was seen buying a newspaper, then he crossed the field of another camera and entered a coffee bar. After this he vanished for a period of about twenty minutes, although the supervisor insisted that with a few hours they could piece together his movements for the whole period. As things were, they could be sure that Rahe had got on the plane. He ran the final film and Herrick watched Rahe approach the desk, swap the duty free bag and his little suitcase from his left to his right hand and show his boarding card and passport.