Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (18 page)

The only piece of intel to stimulate much of a response all week was the initially worrying news that Mopoza’s eldest son had been AWOL from his college digs at Oxford since Friday. The timing of his disappearance seemed at last to provide some form of corroboration of what General Thaba had claimed, but it evaporated when the lad turned up for his Classics tutorial on Wednesday morning, wearing a smile that corroborated only his boast to have got seriously laid over the weekend.

It didn’t tally with the Black Spirit’s known practices anyway. The efficiency, discretion and loyalty of his accomplices suggested he was extremely discerning in their recruitment, and he was understood to be highly protective of the edge he believed the dispassionate professional enjoyed over the emotionally involved. He didn’t carry passengers and he definitely didn’t tolerate liabilities.

After that, they were back to the fumbling conjecture of Monday’s briefing, leaving them with two possibilities. The first was that this would join the long list of tedious and ultimately unsubstantiated alerts that were nonetheless a necessary part of the policeman’s lot; and the second was that all of their security efforts were about to be circumvented by a new kind of enemy who they were embarrassingly powerless to fight. Odds and experience favoured the former. Nonetheless, up and down the country, every force’s Special Branch had some poor mug who’d have to put his (or very occasionally her) ongoing investigations on the back burner for a few days until the word came to stand down.

The only way to chase the feeling of being in limbo was to stay busy, not such an easy prospect when the few local leads to be pursued were the likes of the Great Borrheid Fertiliser Robbery or the case of the Southside Fantasist. At a national level, no‐
one was coming up with anything other than their own regional variations of the same barely remarkable absurdities, incidents and reports that could come in any day, any week, any year. The whole exercise seemed resigned to its own futility, as though it carried an asterisk admitting *may not apply. The only truly tangible factor worth investigating was the Black Spirit himself, so Angelique had occupied much of her time appraising the latest intelligence.

The briefings out of Lexington’s office were broken down by their relevance to two questions: ‘Who is he?’ and ‘What might he hit?’ The hope was that any advances in answering the first would better inform their speculation on the second, which thus far only had his track record to go on, a depressingly varied repertoire.

Mopoza, as with any of the Black Spirit’s clients, wouldn’t have been permitted to get entirely specific about his desired target, as the contract terrorist’s efficacy stemmed from his capacity to invent, adapt and improvise. It wasn’t true, however, so say he could strike anywhere. He had a deft touch for feeling out vulnerable points of attack, but there always had to be a degree of prestige about his targets, or at the very least an element of semiology. He bombed a cinema to take out a US embassy, he bombed a train to devastate a Russian military base, and when he demolished a motorway flyover, it was to send a coded message to the heart of the European Parliament. For the purposes of his own marketability, he had to be more than a cartoon anarchist lobbing a big black fizzing bomb into the public square, as any eejit could do that. And even in exploiting what appeared in retrospect to be gaping flaws in security, there was a dark kudos in having been the one who thought of it first.

A list of possible targets had been compiled, annotated with various parties’ opinions as to greater or lesser probability. It was based on the Security Service’s standard catalogue of locations identified either for their potential vulnerability or strategic/
ideological significance. Given Mopoza’s martial motives, emphasis had been placed on military sites, and records of British operations during the Buluwe conflict had been combed for specific incidents that the General may have considered as particularly demanding of vengeance. Instances of collateral damage were highlighted, making very cold reading under any circumstances, but all the more chilling in this context of possible retribution. The myth of precision airstrikes, long since dispelled by the Kosovo conflict, had been thoroughly buried in the rubble of a city as populous, ramshackle and cramped as Freeport. The missiles didn’t have to miss to inflict unintended casualties. Schools, hospitals, churches, buses, bars, markets and factories had all seen multiple fatalities, every category therefore legitimised for belated retaliation.

The dossier contained a map of central London with the major rail routes picked out in bright red to emphasise where they ran beside or in some cases directly beneath significant buildings. Angelique had scorned the idea of the Black Spirit wanting to operate in such a security‐
conscious city, but the map demonstrated that he didn’t necessarily have to. He could put a bomb on a train three hundred miles away, rig it with a GPS tracker and then remote‐
detonate the thing at any point, accurate to within metres.

There was a note from Eric Wells doubting the likelihood of the Black Spirit repeating a stunt, on the grounds that ‘he wouldn’t want it to look like he’d run out of ideas’. Lexington’s own comments acknowledged the point, but cautioned that it didn’t constitute a good enough excuse for getting suckered twice by the same punch. For that reason, British embassies overseas had also been put on alert, with particular notice taken of those adjacent to publicly accessible buildings.

The size of the ‘What might he hit?’ file was inversely proportionate to what it could usefully tell them, a bulging testament to there being far more possibilities than they could ever hope to guard against. Meanwhile, the slimness of the ‘Who is he?’ folder said everything about what they knew. When the most substantial single document in a case file is the psych profile, you know you’re grasping. There’d been a few instances in which these shrink‐
raps had proven useful (or at least retrospectively accurate once hard work and harder evidence had tracked the subject down), but in Angelique’s experience they usually amounted to screeds of vague or highly speculative theorising, padded out with liberal doses of the staggeringly obvious.

‘This is a man who has little or no empathy with his fellow human beings [oh, no shit, Sherlock]; even his accomplices will be regarded as mere bit‐
part players in the greater drama that is his life. For this reason it is difficult to envisage him in a role other than that of loner or leader. In his mind, others exist to serve him, please him or praise him, and anyone who does not fulfil one of these functions is irrelevant or despised.

‘There have been no code‐
worded warnings, no attempts to limit the civilian death‐
toll even when his principal target is military. The bodycount glorifies him. He doesn’t see the casualties of his actions as victims, enemies or even trophies: just numbers. He sees only what the accomplishment of his mission brings to him in terms of personal achievement and notoriety. His sin is not anger, but pride.’

All quite plausibly true, but not much help in telling them what they were looking for. The only part that shed any light in that respect was, paradoxically, the passage dealing with why they knew so little about him.

‘The meticulous caution he has exercised in his endeavours – and in protecting his identity – suggests a fear of being caught beyond that which normally attends a criminal’s prudence. He fears being caught because he has never been the naughty boy before and does not know how he would handle it. I would doubt that his true name appears on any police records, and consider it even less likely that he has ever been imprisoned.

‘He will have been at one time – and ostensibly may still be – a respectable individual from a normal background. By this I mean that, unlike most terrorists, he was not raised amid a criminal, paramilitary or conflict‐
scarred culture, where a resignation to fate, martyrdom or sacrifice is engendered by the prevalence of brutality, incarceration and violent death. Violence does not touch him; he doles out death from a distance without fear of reprisal. It is violence by device and by remote‐
control, not requiring him to overcome a single individual in personal combat. In this respect, he is a tourist, which is why we can find no footprints on the paths his like have usually trodden.

‘Something, therefore, had to precipitate his descent into this underworld. A personal tragedy, perhaps, involving the loss of a loved and respected authority figure; a parent or mentor who fulfilled a super‐
ego role. He would not have been able to carry out his subsequent acts if he thought this person might ever learn of them, and this figure was probably also what tied him to the life of respectability and responsibility he lived before.’

Yeah, but where’s the bit where it says he’s a wanker?

The obligatory purple prose and psycho‐
babble aside, the profile got one thing balls‐
on. This guy rose without trace. He made his grand debut amid the bloody fanfare of the Madrid bombing, but there was no way he had simply sprung fully formed from the loins of Zeus. It had often been postulated at Interpol that they were looking at a man who had no orthodox crooked pedigree, but they knew he still had to have cut his teeth, learnt his trade and earned some respect in certain quarters in order for him to get the Madrid gig in the first place.

Enrique Sallas had, in fact, made this a particular line of investigation, convinced that valuable clues were to be found if they could identify the works of his bloody apprenticeship. The complete file of ‘possibles’ made Lexington’s bulging brief look like the Geri Halliwell Guide to Self‐
Awareness, but with time on her hands and little worthwhile to fill it, Angelique had got a copy couriered from Brussels.

It contained extensive bumf on literally dozens of ‘unsolved’ terrorist attacks and high‐
profile murders believed to have been professional assassinations, almost certainly his route into the bigger game. The ‘unsolved’ status ignored the matter of attributed (or more usually claimed) responsibility, as there was seldom much doubt over who had been behind the atrocities. Rather, the file dealt with incidents for which police had no solid suspects, concentrating on those claimed by newer and lesser‐
known factions who did not enjoy the resources or infrastructure of their more established counterparts, Hamas, ETA and Hezbollah not being known to rely on hired help.

The dossier came with an up‐
to‐
the‐
minute cover document detailing Enrique’s own analysis, but even from photocopies it was obvious what were the most thumbed pages, revealing Enrique’s instincts and fixations just as vividly. However, there was no point to Angelique’s own exercise if she was anything less than methodical, so she had been slogging her way through the whole thing over the past two days in between phone calls, coffees and snacks, such as the croissant she was demolishing now, detailed carnage proving no impediment to appetite.

Enrique had focused on larger‐
scale incidents rather than the individual hits, though a couple of those had also caught his attention. Despite her attempts not to prejudice the experiment, she was inclined to second his judgement. Many of the attacks just seemed too crude, too obvious, in target, method and execution, to have been their man, even on a steep learning curve. Vanilla terrorism: car bombs, mortar attacks, ambushes; taking out police stations, army patrols, judiciary, political offices. These were the cartoon anarchist again, with his big black fizzing bomb.

The more likely candidates were those that had some imagination involved, sickening as it was to so credit them. The attack on a Lisbon garden party hosted by the Peruvian ambassador, for instance, in which two people died and fourteen were injured when a remote‐
controlled, explosives‐
laden model plane was flown in on a miniature kamikaze mission. Or the campaign that successfully decimated the tourist economy on France’s independence‐
seeking Pacific island colony, Anjou: one hotel swimming pool was pumped full of hydrochloric acid, killing the first two guests who simultaneously dived in for their early‐
morning swim; another pool had a Portuguese man‐
of‐
war released into it during a busy aquarobics session.

The only inclusion she was minded to dissent was flight 941 to Helsinki, which exploded minutes out of Stavanger courtesy of an Urkobaijani guerrilla movement with an utterly unpronounceable name. Granted, it was a major departure, both geographically and operationally, for a rebel militia more used to mining dirt tracks and blowing up public markets, but the Black Spirit wasn’t the world’s only freelance operator, and taking out a passenger jet was big‐
league stuff for a supposed beginner. It was also arguably too passé for such a precociously self‐
conscious innovator. Nonetheless, the screeds of annotation were testament to Enrique having a particular interest in this one, and she wanted to know why.

‘It lacked his, you know, style,’ Angelique contended, once he had finally picked up his phone.

‘Style as in methods or style as in panache?’ Enrique asked.

‘Both.’

‘And I would say that it had both. He prefers a vulnerable point of entry: this was a regional airport in Norway. How many terrorists ever go to Norway? Do you think there are armed police patrols up and down the departures hall in Stavanger?’

‘I’ve never been, but I’ll give you that one.’

‘And as for panache, is there not a certain flourish about bringing a plane down in a deep fjord from where very little evidence was ever to return? No remnant of the device was recovered, nor were the authorities able to reconstruct the plane sufficiently to know even whether it was planted in the hold, or the cabin, or was externally attached. No‐
one survived, no‐
one on the ground saw anything unusual. This was as close to the perfect crime as I would care to imagine, and something I cannot imagine is that it was the work of the knuckle‐
dragging farm hands who claimed it.’

‘That’s a given. But that doesn’t mean it had to be him either. And if, as you say, it was so bloody clever, why didn’t he put his signature on it?’