Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (6 page)

The last remark cut dead a dozen sarcastic mumbles. Wells had more stagecraft than she’d thought, though he did have heady material to work with.

‘General Thaba may have been delirious, he may have been dying, and he may even have been lying, but he mentioned the Black Spirit. That is what it has to do with you, officer, and that is why you’ve all had to come here this morning. The possibility we are facing is that one of the world’s most dangerous and ruthless terrorists could be planning his first strike on British soil.’

A smattering of scornful tuts and sighs grew into a wider undercurrent of discontented mumbling. Lexington stayed put, significantly less protective of the wispy Wells than the SAS man. That significance, however, remained lost on most of the assembly.

‘It’s hardly grounds for a national alert, is it?’ said one, a dumpy wee bloke she recognised from a placement she’d done in London last year. Hart, his name was, and like many in the big city he was used to a more tangible terrorist threat, with specific times, locations and codewords, not this airy‐
fairy bollocks.

‘Not yet,’ Wells said flatly, an unmissable admonition in his tone. ‘But if it gets to that stage, then you’re going to be very glad you paid attention to the speccy bloke from MI5. Because make no mistake, this is not just another homicidal fanatic with a shedload of Semtex, howling at the moon. The Black Spirit is a whole new species. He is a contract terrorist: you give him money and he kills people, that’s the deal. He doesn’t have a cause, he doesn’t have an agenda, he doesn’t have a leader, he doesn’t have a sponsor and he doesn’t have anything that could possibly ever be mistaken for a conscience. He does it because he gets paid, and believe me, his services are in demand, because he is very, very good at it.’

Wells was fairly warming up now, banging out the goods with an undisguised relish. He’d been surprisingly unruffled by the early heckling, and her guess was that this was because, like most obsessives, he was obliviously confident that his audience would share his enthusiasm once he reached the meaty part.

‘He first flashed on to our radar screens just under three years ago, when he blew up the American embassy in Madrid. You may remember that responsibility for the bombing was claimed by Islamic militants. In truth, they merely paid the piper. The Black Spirit played the tune. The audacity of the attack was, analysts believe, intended as an overture, and the theme of high civilian casualties has remained central to the symphony. As well as gutting the embassy of the self‐
pronounced “most powerful nation on Earth”, the explosion also demolished a cinema in the adjoining building, killing forty‐
eight people. They were watching the film Close Action 2, which for those of you lucky enough never to have seen it, is about an elite US anti‐
terrorist unit. The timing of the blast was not thought to be coincidental.’

Wells could now have reverted to his previous quieter tones if he’d wanted. In fact, he could have whispered. Little chance of that, though: he was having way too much fun.

‘Since then, his CV has included the sinking of the Black Sea cruise‐
liner Twilight Queen, the deputy Prime Minister of Georgia among the eighty‐
one dead; last year’s poison‐
gas attack in Dresden, which claimed fifty‐
five victims, and January’s St Petersburg railway disaster, in which he effectively turned a passenger train into a moving bomb then derailed it through a Russian army base. The death toll for that one broke the three‐
figure mark. And these are only the ones I’m allowed to tell you about. He’s been responsible for others, but his involvement in them remains classified.’

A hand went up amid the hush. It was Willetts, he of the Rosebud remark. He wasn’t looking quite so jovial.

‘How do you know these were carried out by the same guy?’

‘Oh, he makes sure we know. He leaves us a sign, a, ehm, calling card, you could say. Like most terrorists, he’s very protective of his work. He’s not giving anything away, though, he’s not stupid. It’s his way of identifying the ones he wants us to know were his. We’re certain he’s carried out others anonymously, and if we could match him up to those we might get a better glimpse of his identity. The problem is, there’s sixty terrorist incidents around the world per month, on average.’

‘And what’s the sign?’

‘I’m afraid that’s classified too.’

Groans echoed round the room. Lexington was right: cops hated secrets. They weren’t missing much this time, though; she had seen the Black Spirit’s little territorial piss‐
stain, and there was nothing mysterious about it. The reason it was classified was so that they could be sure when they were looking at his work, which helped to join a few dots; even if, as Wells admitted, they were only the dots he wanted them to join. If the signature became common knowledge, then every bampot with a bomb could spread it around to claim second‐
hand kudos and cloud the picture.

‘Why is he called the Black Spirit?’ Hart asked, unknowingly skirting the answer to Willetts’s question. ‘Can you tell us that much?’

‘It’s just a name,’ Wells lied.

The reason wasn’t important, but Wells didn’t want to get their backs up further by telling them that that was classified too. It was verboten because it referred to the also classified signature: a crude, line‐
drawn, almost shapeless black blob given a face by two white ovals and an oblong grid of grinning teeth. It had generated a number of similar nicknames – the Dark Phantom, the Grinning Ghost, the Black Ghoul – but ‘the Black Spirit’ had been the English rendering that stuck around Interpol. Wells had stumbled when referring to it as a ‘calling card’, afraid he was giving something away. This was because that was exactly what the cheeky bastard left behind, printing the image on dozens of white business cards, which ended up blowing around the bodies and debris afterwards.

‘Well, no, in fact it’s more than a name,’ Wells revised. ‘At least, it has become more, and that’s been his design all along. This individual has gone from obscurity to being one of the most wanted terrorists since Carlos the Jackal in the space of three years. And the explanation for this meteoric rise is not that he’s the best, the baddest or the most prolific, though he’s in with a shout at all those titles. It’s because he has, effectively, marketed himself. I said he was a new species, and I didn’t mean just because he kills for cash. This isn’t merely contract terrorism: this is designer‐
brand contract terrorism. The reason he leaves his mark on his most high‐
profile works is so that his notoriety grows. So for your million bucks or whatever he charges, you don’t just get your terrorist atrocity, you get your terrorist atrocity with the Black Spirit label attached. And as his notoriety grows, so does the marketability of that label. The bad guys know they can trust him to deliver, and the good guys shit themselves when they hear the name.’

Or cream themselves, as seemed a growing possibility in Wells’s case.

‘Normally, that kind of exposure works two ways. The downside of waving it in everybody’s face is that you’re increasing the risk of being fingered. Not this guy. He’s been operational for three years and we know next to nothing about him. We don’t know what he looks like. We don’t know what nationality he is. We don’t know his age. We don’t know his associates. We don’t know his intermediaries. We don’t know his aliases. We don’t know anything that’s going to give us the slightest chance of identifying him if he gets on a plane and walks through immigration at Heathrow.’

The grumbling began to resume, but it had a very different edge to it now. It had changed from the impatience borne of not believing they were needed, to the discomfort of not believing there was much they could do anyway.

Millburn’s hand went up, and all eyes fell on him, perhaps hoping his question would expose the threat Wells had built as merely a house of cards.

‘How do you know this Black Spirit is one man? If you’ve no descriptions, couldn’t it be a group, a gang?’

It was Wells’s turn to look impatient. Though he had an answer for it, he obviously hated this question. He didn’t like it when the children threatened to stop believing in Santa Claus.

‘That possibility was considered for a while, yes. There is absolutely no doubt that he has collaborators, but people in this line of business tend not to operate on a democratic basis. No matter how tightly knit the group, someone has to be calling the shots, and the Black Spirit’s exploits have been nothing if not egotistical. We also have … some intelligence: second‐
, third‐
hand accounts of, well, variable veracity would be the euphemistic way of putting it. People saying they heard this or met that person who heard someone tell someone else … You know the deal. Terrorists and their associates are no different from other criminals in that they will either tell you nothing or tell you lies, but now and again there’s the occasional inadvertent titbit dropped among the garbage. Anyway, for what they’re worth, the accounts are consistent on enough points to confirm that they are talking about an individual. Unfortunately it’s an individual nobody ever claims to have met or even seen.

‘Normally with terrorist groups, there’s so much factionalism and internal politicking that members eventually start turning dissident and selling out their former comrades. Again, this hasn’t applied to the Black Spirit. For one thing, there are no ideological tensions because there’s no ideology to argue about. But our anecdotal evidence suggests that there are two stronger reasons for the loyalty he has enjoyed. One is that his collaborators are handsomely remunerated. The other is that he has a long memory and nobody in their right mind wants to get on the wrong side of this bastard.’

No, course not. All the fanatics, psychopaths and assassins round the globe, they all skip a beat at the mention of his name. He eats guns and shits bullets. He bathes in blood and dines on body parts. Oh God, keep talkin’ baby, keep talkin’, ooh yeah baby. He’s the baddest of the bad. He’s a killing machine. Ooh you say it so good, you say it so nasty, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooooooh …

Fuck off.

Lexington had probably told Wells to ham it up in order to light a fire under everybody, but there had been no need for such priming. If the Black Spirit had walked in the door right then, the MI5 creep would have dropped to his knees and swallowed every inch.

He’s a whole new species. He’s audacious. He’s resourceful. He’s ingenious. He’s cool. He’s bad. He’s scary. He’s got a two‐
foot cock.

Aye, very good.

He’s a wanker, that’s what he is.

All terrorists are wankers. Whatever flags they wrapped themselves in, whatever religions, histories or myths they attached to their crusades, they were, to a man, just wankers. They told themselves and anyone bored enough to listen that they were in it for the glory of their cause or the welfare of their ‘people’ (few of whom were ever consulted about this), but the truth was that they were in it because they liked killing people. Every last fucking one of them.

Listening to Wells eulogise about this tosspot was making her itch. Her spine was stiffening, her fingers stretching taut by her side, clenching and unclenching. ‘Designer‐
brand terrorism.’ Listen to yourself, you prick.

Oh yeah, it’s mass murder, but it’s mass murder with style.

The victims should be bloody well honoured to die at the hands of someone with such panache. It was laughable to hear him talk about how inventive, how proficient, how good the Black Spirit was at terrorism. You didn’t have to be ‘good’ to be a terrorist, you just had to be, well, no better way of putting it: a wanker. You just had to be prepared to do despicable things; there was no genius required in their execution. You could walk up behind Captain Shephard eating in a restaurant and smash him unconscious with a whisky bottle – that didn’t mean he wouldn’t plaster you across the four walls in a square go. The whole point about terrorism was that any arsehole could do it, anywhere, anyhow. That was where the ‘terror’ part came from – society not being able to protect itself from a threat that could come from any source and strike at any target. It was all about attacking the unsuspecting and the undefended.

The cops and the politicians could be relied upon to go on TV and denounce every terrorist incident as ‘cowardly’. The perpetrators would be smirking at this flimsy little insult, or justifying it to themselves as a legitimate tactic against a much larger foe. But it was cowardly. Planting bombs in unguarded places took no balls at all.

How hard was it for the Black Spirit and his wankers‐
in‐
arms to blow up that train in St Petersburg? You wouldn’t get far in an airport with a suitcase full of C4, but at a railway station, you could simply climb on board, stick your luggage in the rack, then walk away again, which was what they did. No checks, no X-rays, no sniffer dogs, and no‐
one in the carriage left alive to give a statement.

Madrid had taken slightly more sophistication, but for Wells to describe it as ‘audacious’ was a generosity borne of infatuation. The word he was looking for was ‘sneaky’. For effect, Child Molester had said the explosion ‘also’ demolished the adjoining cinema, which was true but more than a trifle disingenuous. It was the cinema itself that was bombed, its adjacency proving the point of least resistance in attacking a heavily guarded target. The intelligence agencies racked their brains to decipher the political ramifications of it being the Spanish US embassy that was singled out, before they were forced to conclude that there were none. It had an accessible public building backing on to it and other US embassies didn’t, that was all. The nationality was irrelevant.

Not that the cinema was entirely a soft touch. There were very few capital cities in the world where you could catch a flick without first having someone root through your handbag, and given ETA’s on‐
going bloodlust, Madrid wasn’t one of them. However, no matter how security‐
conscious the staff were trained to be, if there was one thing guaranteed to inspire credulity in modern‐
day Europe, it was bureaucracy. People are sceptical of what seems too good to be true, but if something sounds like a pain in the arse, they’ve no problem believing it must be for real. The Black Spirit’s outfit posed as officials from the city’s Health and Safety department, complete with IDs and paperwork, there to perform a spot‐
check on the cinema’s alarms, fire extinguishers, smoke detectors and sprinkler systems. They removed all of the extinguishers, saying they didn’t meet the latest specifications, then fitted their own replacements. According to the house manager’s death‐
bed statement, they even got him to sign a receipt, telling him an invoice would follow shortly. It sure did.