Wow. Someone had been busy.
The Defence Secretary broke the silence.
‘We’re not talking Wilson coup plots or anything of that type. It’s just come to the point where the police are proving a hindrance and we need free rein to get on with the mission. As of today, RPOC is reinstated, and KTS is officially part of the MOD and RPOC, and therein, retains responsibility for the defence of the realm.’
The Colonel and I glanced at each other and shrugged. Fine by us.
‘Item one point five. Your crazy Muslim friends, the…’ he paused and looked at his notes… ‘Hur al-Ayn. We like their style. Get them on board.’
The Colonel started chuckling silently then stopped. The Defence Secretary continued. ‘Since the girls are UK nationals and civilians, we feel the best way forward is to place them under the auspices of the MOD’s Military Stabilisation Support Group. That gives us a bit of leeway.’
I nearly laughed as well. But it made a kind of sense. MSSG was a joint MOD-TA-civilian group specialising in training forces for operations in places like Afghanistan. A bunch of lunatic Muslim girls would fit right in to the order of battle.
‘OK. Item two. It’s now obvious to everyone that there has been major penetration of the Met and its associated PSCO elements, by al-Qaeda. We were watching some of these people but we didn’t realise how bad it had got. That changes as of today. We’re going for them.’
‘Item three. The late Lord Khalil. In case you’re wondering, we tasked E Squadron to take him out and they did a great job. Looked like an accident AND sent a message to his associates.’
The Colonel raised a hand.
‘How are the Prime Minister and his deputy on all this? Is this OK with them?’
The Defence Secretary met his gaze. ‘You bet they are, David. They’ve had enough. They’ve also been reminding all who need reminding that we all swore an oath of allegiance to the Crown and that is the trump card here. When all is said and done we serve Her Majesty the Queen, and not some overpromoted ticket puncher from Scotland Yard.’
The Colonel gave a stiff nod of his head. ‘Agreed. All the way.’
‘And item four. Assessment of the involvement of the Socialist Workers Party in the logistical support for the September 13th attacks. Obviously we figure it’s quite heavy so at some point their leadership is going to have to be taken out.’
It was my turn to speak.
‘All of them? Including the two who are Security Service assets?’
‘All of them, Mr Sabir.’
The Home Secretary interjected. She’d just got off the phone.
‘Just so you know, gentlemen, that letter from that jumped - up little semi-literate shit from the Muslim Police Association spurred me to action. I’ve just authorised the cutting of all of their funding.’
That was a relief. No funding for a group normally meant…no group, after a short while. We talked military logistics for ten minutes or so and the Defence Secretary pronounced himself satisfied. 'If you're happy David, then so am I. I'm signing off on it. Try not to get blown up.'
The Colonel laughed again, but only for half a second. He'd known Airey Neave.
All these references to Airey Neave were making me uneasy. Officially he’d been assassinated by the INLA, a loony offshoot of the IRA, but plenty of people in our world thought differently. Some of them even maintained MI6 elements had carried it out, or, and this made more sense to me, allowed the INLA to do the deed.
The Home Secretary spoke. ‘My turn.’ She slid her own folder across to us. The cover read ‘Infidels/C18 intentions and capabilities’. This one I
had
seen before, as myself and Duckie had been some of the advisors on it.
She turned to me. ‘I’m told you’re the best in the business at getting inside groups like this.’
Cheers, Colonel Mahoney, I thought inwardly. ‘I have my moments.’
Again that harsh bark of a laugh. ‘Get yourself, or one of your friends, inside the Infidels, and or, Combat 18. We want to know what they’re planning. They’re almost impossible to get a handle on. And the last thing we want is a lone wolf attack on British soil. No lone wolves, Riz, no Breiviks.’
I looked at the Colonel. He tilted his head in assent.
OK. ‘Home Secretary. One thing though.’
I stood.
‘Before I do everything else, I’m getting my fiancée back, alive or dead. Ma’am.’
She stood. To my left and right, as though by some strange magnetic pull, my boss and the Defence Minister stood too.
She nodded. ‘Whatever you need, Rizwan. Go find your jaan.’
Jaan? How the hell did she know that word?
‘I will.’
We left for our various cars.
4
Noon found me at the NPIA Data Centre in Hendon. 100 years earlier I’d been sat in this bunker, watching blurry footage of my late friend Iqeel. OK, it wasn’t really 100 years, it had been but months. But that was how I felt, and that was how much older I felt. I was in the next data centre along from the main centre. This was the national police automatic numberplate recognition site. I was acting on a regular nine-to-five hunch, the assumption that whoever had taken Bang-Bang Kirpachi’s body from the scene of the shootout had left Westfield in a vehicle, maybe an anonymous one that could carry a team. After all, you couldn’t just carry a blood-smeared Asian girl onto a bus in Stratford, could you?
On the desk before me was a pile of blown-up scene of crime photos from our final shootout in the Armani Jeans store. None of them were good. It was like Francis Bacon had decided to do location shots for the day. Blood. Scraps of clothing. Al-Qaeda corpses sneering into space. Overturned display racks. And the ubiquitous little Met Police yellow numbered chocks that indicated something of forensic interest. I kept coming back to photo J28. A massive slick of blood, and Holly’s rifle. And no Holly. No Bang-Bang. The blood smeared off to the left, out of shot.
It was hard to look at these photos. Every time I blinked I could see Johnny Devlin calling me an apostate and getting ready to shoot me, and Holly lying on the ground, still as death. I closed my eyes but that didn’t help as now Johnny Devlin’s eyes were boring into my own.
A hand gripped my shoulder and a canteen tea appeared on the desk. Emlyn was here. The one SO15 cop I trusted, and the only one that liked me. He’d pulled in many favours to get me in here and get me these photos.
‘You holding up, son?’
I nodded. ‘Course.’
He was a cop. Cops can spot untruths. He took the chair next to me. ‘See anything?’
‘Not yet Emlyn, not yet.’
We looked at photo J28. And it was then that I saw it.
‘Em. What is that?’ I pointed to the carpeted area to the left of Bang-Bang’s rifle, to what looked like…‘What do those look like to you?’
‘Those are syringe and dressing wraps. And what looks like part of a giving set.’
‘Someone treated her, dressed her wounds and got her out while the rest of us were all shoving and arguing?’
‘Could be, son. No-one’s going to notice paramedics working on the injured when they’re busy checking for X-Rays and booby traps. Never mind the fact that your girls got into a punchup with the SAS and one of them tried to scalp Johnny Devlin’s corpse there.’
I’d been unconscious on the shop carpet by that point and bleeding out. Emlyn spoke again. ‘Anyway…if you and me sit and watch the exit cameras for the loading bays there, we might see something worth following.’
‘Jesus, Emlyn. You’re right.’
We both raced to the front of the centre and Emlyn got on a terminal and started gripping techies. ‘OK lads, I’m wanting the exit camera feeds from Stratford Westfield on 13th September, starting from 11am. I’m also wanting ALL ANPR - linked cameras out of town North and East.’
The whole room just bogged at us like baby owls. Emlyn pulled his SO15 ID. ‘Boyos, I think you know what this means, this is a terrorist investigation!’
They got to it. Terror enquiries could mine traffic camera data up to an indefinite period after the event. The Oracle database was set to work and got chugging on the raw information held in the memories of the centre and other sites.
An hour later we finally saw it on video feed 11. From the main loading bay of Stratford’s Westfield shopping centre, out rolled a black private ambulance. Its green lights went on, and it slowly drove away, north, up towards Leytonstone High Road.
The team on the floor cheered. I turned to Emlyn and he was grinning triumphantly.‘There you are.’
‘And thar she blows. Are they allowed to use emergency lights Emlyn?’
‘Hah! Do you know that no-one actually knows? Big grey area. They definitely did though. These lads look good. They’ve done this before... Riz. Why were they so keen on lifting Bang-Bang?’
It was obvious.
‘She’d created a version of the Flame spy software called FlameLite. It had run out of control and developed a life of its own. It’s out there on social networks and all sorts. You bet they’d be interested in her.’
‘Well that’s good then, son, they’ll be talking to her somewhere. I’d bet my police pension she’s alive. Don’t worry.’
And at that point, the main door opened and in came Chief Inspector Kevan James. The Peel Centre was his personal fiefdom. He had a face like thunder and he was bearing down on me. His pointed finger came before him.
‘I did NOT authorise Army mercenaries free access to our site or our data! Who let him in here?’
Emlyn took the opportunity to look beatifically into space.
I waited till the Chief Inspector was up close, and dialled the Colonel. Three rings. ‘Riz. How goes it?’
‘Boss. Got a woodentop that needs schooling.’
Chief Inspector James’s face was starting to turn puce.
I handed him the phone. ‘My boss on the line. You won’t like it.’
All we could hear was “
Home Secretary Defence Secretary career traffic police aaaaagh
”. Everyone in the room was trying to avoid each others’ gaze for fear of cracking up. Chief Inspector Kevan James handed my phone back. He drew himself to his full height.
‘I do…not! Want any breaches of the Data Protection Act!’
He turned smartly and stalked out. We gave it ten seconds before laughing. I turned back to the floor team.
‘Great work guys. Let’s see what we can find.’
For the rest of the day, we followed the black private ambulance registered BV44 VND. I rang NAPAS, the National Association of Private Ambulances, and ran the numberplate past them. They had no record of it. I then ran the plate through AskMID and the local databases and eventually got some bizarre holding company in Jersey called Grace Capital. Ten minutes on our databases at KTS got me their headquarters in Virginia, USA.
Emlyn looked at the address, and looked at me.
‘Virginia. CIA?’
I shrugged.
‘Looks more like it by the minute.’
We followed the ambulance via the ANPR network right out to the M11. It made its way up the motorway and turned onto the M25. At this point I called the Colonel and asked him for the spyplane feeds. The MOD had a set of Britten-Norman Islander planes based out of Northolt. They had Wescam MX-20 turret cameras fitted in the nose, with low-light television, thermal imaging, and the right ANPR software. Unfortunately, this was a cold lead. They’d had it but had lost it when they were tasked east on the day.
And at that point I ran to the toilets and threw up. I looked in the mirror after a while. I was definitely not alright.
Next morning at six I got shaken awake from the floor at the back of the room. I got groggily to my feet. My side was aching from the bullet wound and cracked ribs. The data trawl had found the van turning off the M25 onto the M40, heading out into the Midlands. They’d activated all the ANPR databases on every relevant camera in Britain. Within minutes that ambulance had become the most wanted vehicle in the country. Hendon’s ANPR centre captured 25 million readings every day, which were stored for two years, from over 10,000 static and mobile cameras. This bit was relatively straightforward. One by one, the cameras on each gantry of the M40 came back with the right hits. Black ambulance…black ambulance…
And at junction 10 of the M40, where it turned off, the trail went cold. The whale had flicked its tail and vanished.
Emlyn was looking at me and grinning. ‘You’d better get out there to Oxfordshire, then, hadn’t you?’
‘Ladies! This is not helping!’
A plastic bottle bounced off my head.
‘Listen! We have a lead!’
They quietened down a bit.
‘We have a lead. We think they took her out to the Midlands. First thing tomorrow I want you to get looking at maps. Maps of airfields.’
‘Airfields?’
‘Yes. US airfields. CIA airfields. Rendition airfields. We start with Oxfordshire.’
Fuzz was our resident pilot. She looked glum.
‘There are over fifty airfields in Oxfordshire, used and unused, bhai.’
‘I just need some areas to look at, Fuzz. I’m driving out there tomorrow. Let’s start with airfields within twenty miles of Junction 10. When I find something of interest, I’ll text you.’
My phone went. Emlyn.
‘Boyo. Got something for you. Thames Valley Police are trialling a fixed ANPR camera scheme on roads in their area. The ambulance was spotted by one of their units passing through the village of Deddington on the afternoon of 13th September. Heading north on the A4260 at a sedate thirty-two miles per hour.’
‘Em, you’re a star. I’m out there ASAP.’
I looked up at the girls. ‘Airfields north of Deddington.’