Three Great Novels (13 page)

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Authors: Henry Porter

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‘Hadaya led to a man named Furquan, with whom he had had contact in Rome. Finally we nailed the identity of the third man, a Moroccan engineer and part-time college professor named Ramzi Zaman. By the way, we had help with all this from the North African intell’ services but they have no idea exactly what we’re doing. Anyway, these three guys vanished in the late nineties, having lived quietly in Italy’s large North African community and worked in various menial jobs that were way below each man’s capabilities.’
Without asking Herrick, Collins placed a cup of coffee in her hand. She nodded gratefully.
‘So, these men wind up in Western Europe. Hadaya is in Paris, Furquan in Stuttgart and the Moroccan, Zaman, is in Toulouse. Each was received by a bunch of North African helpers, who prepared for their arrival by arranging work, accommodation, cars and all kinds of local permits and passes.’
Lyne continued for another half hour talking without pause. The Northern group consisted of five men, two in Copenhagen, one in Stockholm and two who had come to rest in Britain after flitting around Europe on May 14 and 15. They were working on the suspects in Scandinavia and were now sure that they included an Indonesian national called Badi’al Hamzi who had once been a science teacher in Jakarta. The Syrian in Denmark and the Egyptian in Sweden were unknown quantities. The two suspects in Britain were a Pakistani and a Turk. Lyne said neither of these gentlemen could break wind without MI5 and Special Branch watchers knowing about it.
‘In fact they had an astonishing piece of good fortune yesterday. The Turkish fellow, Mafouz Esmet, was taken ill on the street, outside a tube station in East London. One of the female officers with the Security Services called for help and then went with the guy to hospital. He was suffering from appendicitis and had an operation last evening. She’s going to visit with him tomorrow, and you know what, this could be a very important break for us.’
‘Okay, so now we come to my specialty - the Southern group. These three men landed in Rome, Sarajevo and Budapest. For a time we lost one of the guys in Budapest but then we got another lucky break. An agent with the FBI’s outfit in Budapest, which is mostly devoted to the Russian Maf ia’s activities, was travelling on a bus and just happened to see the very man whose picture he was carrying in his breast pocket. He trailed him to a poor part of town where the guy is living with a couple of Yemenis. This rang bells and again we had all three members of the Southern group checked out against descriptions of men who served in Afghanistan. But Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence couldn’t find a match for any of them. Besides, these men don’t really look the part. They’re out of condition and spend a lot of time eating, drinking and smoking. They’re not clean-living Muslims, that’s for sure.’ Lyne put his hands together and turned to look at her with radiant American purpose. ‘So, basically, your job will be to chase up everything you can on these three guys. You speak Arabic, I hear. There’s going to be a lot of reading to be done. You’ll live and breathe these men for as long as you’re with us.’
‘Questions, Isis?’ said Vigo, in a tone that implied he didn’t expect any.
‘Yes, do we have any idea about their plans? I know it’s early. But are there any suspicious shipments being made? Have they been observed looking at potential targets? Do we have any communications intercepts?’
‘As yet we don’t have the vaguest notion what they plan,’ said Collins. ‘They haven’t been talking to each other and there’s no movement of anything like your WAYFARER. Chemicals and stuff - nothing like that. There’s a general feeling among the surveillance teams that the suspects are in a period of stasis, a kind of hibernation.’
‘Aestivation,’ said Herrick.
‘Come again?’ said Lyne.
‘The summer equivalent of hibernation,’ said Vigo, not disguising his irritation.
‘Perhaps I should say something about how RAPTOR is set up,’ said Collins. ‘We’ve split the operation between surveillance and investigation. The surveillance teams on the ground - there are about thirty officers in each team - report to a desk dedicated to each suspect, which is manned twenty-four seven. Once the subject is moving, his route is plotted on an electronic map so everyone knows where he is. The field officer in charge of each surveillance consults the desk on questions of strategy and security. When there’s a problem with implications for the entire operation the issue is settled by RAPTOR control, which consists of myself, Walter here and a representative of the National Security Agency. Beyond that there is a level of analysis and risk assessment reporting to our respective governments.’ Collins smiled weakly, as if he had made a poor joke.
‘There should be a lot of interaction between the two sides so anyone working on the investigation desks, like you, will have real time access to surveillance, all the communication traffic between the watchers, photographs and film, when they are available. Equally, we want to feed the material you’re finding out to the surveillance teams as soon as you get it.’
‘Can I ask a little about the surveillance? How many of our people are involved?’
‘You know a few of them,’ said Vigo. ‘Andy Dolph, Philip Sarre and Joe Lapping are all involved on the ground, as you would expect. You will know many others too, but as we’ve made clear, this is a very closed and secret order. We’ve had to chose personnel who do not have past associations with the cities we’re covering, except in the case of Sarajevo where we felt it would be better to have people who’ve got Balkan experience. That’s why Dolph is there.’
Herrick could feel herself bridling and hoped it wasn’t showing. Dolph deserved a place in any surveillance operation: he was sharp and versatile. Sarre was at best mediocre and Lapping downright feeble. She remembered what Dolph said about Lapping after they’d been on a job together. ‘He needs help crossing the road, that Lapping. You’ve got a better chance of going undercover with Liberace.’
Vigo saw what she was thinking. ‘There’s no room for personal competition on this team,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s all for one and one for all right from the top. Believe me, those people in the field will need to be rotated and your turn will come. But we thought you would appreciate a period experiencing the whole operation beforehand. After all, it’s your baby, Isis. None of us would be here were it not for you.’
She made appreciative noises.
On the way to the car that would take them to the outskirts of West London, she saw Collins murmur to Lyne, ‘Brittle, but cute.’
‘And a fair lip-reader too,’ she said, before climbing into the Chevrolet. ‘Though not in Arabic.’
 
The Bunker was part of the Nato command centre at Hillingdon and sat directly under an airfield where there were one or two military and private aircraft. At first glance she thought of a trading floor built for decades of nuclear winter. Two constellations of circular desks spread out across the vast space, almost like molecular diagrams. RAPTOR’s full complement was never seen because of the shift system but at present she reckoned there were about 130 officers from three US agencies, the FBI, CIA and NSA, and the British counterparts, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Lyne explained that the surveillance operations were handled to the right of central aisle. To the left were the investigation and intelligence desks, three modules per terrorist group. They walked towards a vast notice board which featured the faces of the eleven suspects. Every known detail had been summarised and added next to the name. Lyne said the board was more reassuring than helpful. He was equally dry about the tracking operation in which the suspects’ positions were marked at any time of the day or night on one of the electronic city maps. A touch of a key would give an officer a record of an individual’s movements over the entire course of the operation and, if desired, the program would helpfully point out his favourite routes, where he met contacts, even the bars where he took coffee in the morning. All of this had been subject to furious but so far fruitless scrutiny, he said.
RAPTOR was still experiencing teething problems. Technicians were crawling about the floor, adjusting screens or hooking cables across the ceiling. NSA programmers struggled with two large mainframes that lived in their own special environment way off in the distance. There was a good deal of noise above, and someone from a surveillance desk would occasionally call out that one of suspects was on the move. ‘Number Two going walkabout, number Six in transit.’
Raised from this activity was a control box with glass sides where Vigo, Collins and the man from the NSA, a Colonel John Franklin Plume, worked. Vigo had already taken his seat and removed his jacket to reveal a pair of vermilion braces. In front of him was a large screen, split to accept several different feeds at once from secret surveillance cameras. Above the aisle was a much larger screen that could be seen by everyone. The screen was being tested and flashes of blue TV lightning probed the recesses of the cavernous space above them.
They went over to the investigation and intelligence desks. Lyne introduced her to his group, then to the ‘Wallflowers’, a team of twenty eager young American research assistants whose work stations were ranged along the concrete wall of the Bunker. ‘These are the slaves of the investigation desks,’ he said, giving a managerial shoulder rub to one of them. ‘Our Stakhanovites.’
She looked down at the desk. Each Wallflower was on the internet. Their work stations were choked with boxes of files and copies of every conceivable reference book. Herrick read some of the titles -
Gulf Maritime Conventions
,
Ancestry and the Tribes of Saudi Arabia
,
The Dictionary of Muslim Names.
‘That’s about it,’ said Lyne. ‘Coffee, food, exercise machines, massage, laundry, sleeping arrangements: you can find them for yourself.’
She nodded, impressed.
‘This is America mobilising,’ he said.
‘Right,’ she said, and sat down at Southern Group Three.
 
It soon became clear to Herrick that every second of the day, RAPTOR was producing a vast amount of information which in turn spawned endless new investigative possibilities. Field officers were being sent to check out the most casual contacts made by the suspects while a lot of work was being done on the helpers who had eased the men into their hiding places. A separate data bank was dedicated to this information as it constantly threw up possible links and cross-references in the backgrounds of people and organisations across Europe. Already, interesting connections had been made - men who had attended the same university or were from the same Middle Eastern tribal grouping; clerics who had visited mosques in Stuttgart and Toulouse; businesses belonging to the fixers which had arrangements with cities where suspects were present; the use of the same banks or hawala agents to transfer money.
The range of activity was bewildering. The hackers based in Crypto City at Fort Meade were penetrating the defences of every relevant public agency, including in a few instances the computer records of European intelligence services. Vast amounts of data were sucked up and flung unedited in the direction of London, where the systems people had breakdowns trying to absorb the flow of information and make sensible arrangements for its analysis. Added to this was the work of the Special Collection Service, a joint unit run by the CIA and NSA, based in Beltsville, Maryland. Known simply as ‘Collection’ it had sent a substantial proportion of its staff to Europe to eavesdrop on the suspects and their helpers. A similar outfit run by MI6 and GCHQ was also on the ground, erecting eavesdropping antennae disguised as TV aerials and dishes, and attaching devices to the suspects’ phone lines. But circumspection was called for because a few of the helpers and two of the suspects were seen carrying out anti-surveillance routines while on the street. This meant they would also be alert to the possibility of electronic eavesdropping and might have access to the equipment to detect it. Electronic surveillance added another swollen tributary to the flow of intelligence that the Bunker attempted to process each day.
The British and American service chiefs let it be known they were already exceptionally pleased with the detail being gathered and sifted - they were already far in advance of their previous understanding of terrorist methods and planning, and most importantly there had been no breach in security.
‘In due course,’ said Spelling in a rallying speech at the end of Isis’ second daily briefing in the Bunker, ‘these networks of sleeper cells and enablers will be lit up like an air traffic control board. We will know the routes, the timing, the intention of these people before they know themselves. This is a very great step in the war against terrorism.’ Beside him were Barbara Markham, Director of MI5, and Walter Vigo.
The Americans had all fallen in love with Vigo. They said he knew what it was like to be at the sharp end. Herrick observed that he often wandered over to the investigation desks and chatted to Lyne. On Friday evening he had made a crucial suggestion. The Rome suspect had disappeared for two days after losing the surveillance at the city’s northern rail terminal.
‘Have a look at the Muslim student groups in Perugia,’ said Vigo. ‘There’s a foreign university there and our chum may be in contact with the radical groups around the Italian university.’
This advice turned out to be spot on, and two Arabic-speaking Americans were sent to the Umbrian town to sign up for Italian language courses. After this, Vigo made a point of coming over to them at least once a day. He would pull up a chair and sit with his hands folded across his Anderson and Sheppard suit to attend to detailed questions about the beliefs of the Wahabis or the transfer of gold through the Gulf States. His manner was that of a concerned PhD supervisor. The vibration of sophisticated menace Isis felt in the late night meeting with Spelling a week before had been replaced by an almost amiable focus.

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