Tracers (25 page)

He ignored her anger and pointed to her rucksack. ‘Empty that out.’

‘Why? What the hell are you saying?’ She snatched the bag away as if daring him to take it from her. She was standing squarely, balanced and ready, and it was easy to see why she had stood out to the recruiter for the operation in Iraq.

‘He’s saying you might have a bug,’ Rik suggested calmly, leaning on the wall with his back to the river. ‘Either that or Rafa’i told somebody where he was meeting you. My bet’s on a bug.’

With obvious reluctance, Joanne opened her rucksack and allowed Harry to go through it. He checked the side pockets and the few items of clothing inside, then examined the straps and fabric, feeling for anything unusual in the structure of the bag.

There was nothing. He handed it back.

‘Finished?’ Joanne muttered with a withering scorn. ‘Jesus – no wonder you’re single. You’re paranoid, you know that?’

Harry ignored the comment. He nodded at her camera, which she was still clutching. ‘Where did you get that?’

Joanne frowned. ‘I bought it a few days ago. I had to leave the issue one behind. Why?’

‘What about your mobile?’

She dug into her pocket and held it out. It looked scratched and well used. ‘This? It was part of my original kit, along with the sat phone. I was supposed to surrender everything personal before I left for Iraq, but I held on to it.’

‘What about the phone? Where’s that?’

‘In a sewage ditch. I dumped it the day I flew out. They searched us at the airport – I couldn’t exactly pretend I was an aid worker with that kind of kit on me, could I?’

Harry took the phone from her and stripped off the back. He took out the battery and studied the SIM card, then turned and tossed everything over the wall into the swirling brown water below.

‘Hey – what did you do that for?’ Joanne turned on him. ‘Are you nuts?’

Rik placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘They must have placed a tracker in the phone,’ he explained. ‘It’s the only way that guy could have turned up just like that. He wasn’t following Rafa’i. He was following you.’

She batted his hand away. ‘How the hell do you know that? Anyway, if they’d bugged the phone, they’d have known days ago that I was still alive and come looking for me before.’

‘They probably did,’ he replied. ‘Only they hadn’t any leads until you switched it on and made a call. Right up until then, they must have thought you’d got caught in the blast and were no longer active.’ He moved away a couple of paces to prevent anyone getting too close and overhearing their conversation.

‘He’s right,’ Harry said. ‘They’d hardly have sent someone to Baghdad to check it out after the explosion. But once they realized you’d made it out, there was every reason to start tracking you through the signal.’ He gestured around them. ‘They already had your number and it’s easier here with all the transmitters. The moment you made a call, they had you pinpointed.’

Joanne looked unconvinced. ‘Then how come Humphries didn’t say anything?’

‘Why should he? The whole point of operational security is that they don’t tell people what they don’t need to. It gets in the way.’

‘That’s ridiculous. He’d have told me.’

‘There is another explanation,’ Harry spoke reasonably, trying to take the heat out of the situation. ‘The phone might have been bugged as a rescue option. If anything went wrong and you got isolated in hostile territory, they could send in a team to find you. That would have been the good guys.’

Joanne chewed her lip but said nothing, still too angry with him. But at least she was listening.

‘Then along come the bad guys,’ he continued. ‘The ones trying to kill Rafa’i. They worked out that you were both alive and running, and decided to use the phone for different reasons. Where you and your phone went, so did the man in the anorak. Trace you, catch a lead on Rafa’i at the same time and finish the job all nice and neat.’

The silence ticked away, interrupted by the rattle and clang of a gangplank being wheeled away from one of the pleasure cruisers. A man shouted and the water around the stern began to boil as the boat moved away.

Joanne took a deep breath. ‘That would be saying somebody never meant for me to come out again. Or if I got out, they could silence me. I don’t believe it. They wouldn’t do that –
Christ, they don’t kill their own people!
’

Harry didn’t deny it and didn’t look at Rik.
How do you tell someone that you know different, that you were once marked down for death by people on your own side?

‘They might not have planned it that way. They might have hoped you’d get out in time and it could all be explained away. Maybe they got Humphries to call the meeting to get you out of harm’s way. When the bad guys realized you’d made it out and had dropped off the radar, you became a loose cannon – a liability. Because one day you’d work out what had happened and you’d want to talk about it. And with what you knew about the operation, you were dangerous.’

‘What about the good guys? They wouldn’t just consign me to the dustbin, would they?’ Joanne’s face flushed red at the idea that she had been so casually dismissed as expendable by the people who had selected, recruited and trained her.

‘Think about it,’ Harry pointed out. ‘You didn’t surface after the explosion, neither were you at the safe house, which is where they’d have expected you to turn up. The logical assumption after a while would have been that you’d been killed. Without a thorough forensics check of the compound, they wouldn’t have been able to prove otherwise. Frankly, I can’t see anyone risking a forensics team for a non-attributable operation over there, anyway.’ His tone was sympathetic but matter-of-fact. ‘You said it yourself; you had no family, nothing to tie you down. There was nobody to tell . . . and nobody to press for an inquest. Sorry to be brutal, but it’s why they chose you in the first place. You were expendable.’

Her expression said she knew he was right, but her words said different. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Don’t let it get to you,’ said Rik, moving closer. ‘If you were abandoned, it was through a balls-up, not callousness.’

Joanne hugged herself, absorbing the information and looking at them in turn. Bit by bit she appeared to relax. ‘Bastards,’ she muttered softly, although it wasn’t clear to whom she was referring. ‘How do we contact Rafa’i now? My mobile number was all he had. He doesn’t know anybody else.’

‘We wait,’ said Harry. ‘To be precise, you wait – back in the park.’

‘You think he’ll come back?’ Rik asked. ‘He might’ve been spooked for good.’

‘I doubt it.’ Harry looked at Joanne. ‘He doesn’t know anyone else, and you saved him from Anorak Man, so he’ll trust you. Did you notice he wasn’t carrying anything?’

The realization of what Harry was saying gave Joanne’s voice an edge of excitement. ‘He’s staying nearby. I never gave it a thought.’

‘At least somewhere close enough to leave his stuff.’ Harry gestured back towards the park. ‘Come on. Let’s see if he’s still around. In the meantime, you can help us understand why somebody’s so intent on killing him.’

‘What about the man with the knife? He might be hanging around as well.’ Joanne looked unsure, but they knew it was not about her own safety. She didn’t want to expose Rafa’i to another attack.

‘This time we stick together,’ Rik murmured. ‘If he tries again, he’ll come unstuck. Pity we didn’t get a good look at him, though. I was too busy running to focus clearly. All I saw was a blur.’

Joanne held up the camera. ‘No problem. I took a shot of him as he ran towards us. It should be clear enough to give us a face to watch out for.’

FORTY-ONE

‘
W
hy does this face look familiar?’ Rik was studying the six-by-four print that Joanne had produced from her digital card at a nearby camera shop. The photo was slightly out of focus, but showed the man in the anorak striding along the path, leaning forward as he broke into his attack run. His face was thin and edged with concentration, and he appeared to be staring right into the camera lens. Frozen in time around him was a scattering of people and birds, a vivid framework of motion that served, if anything, to emphasize his total focus on where he was going. The overriding impression was of a jungle cat stalking its prey, ignoring every other distraction around him as he concentrated on his target.

‘You know him?’ Joanne looked surprised.

‘I’m not sure. Maybe the type, not the bloke.’ They knew what he meant. He had the chilling aura of a hunter – purposeful and resolute, and not the kind to be put off easily. The fact that he had backed away when faced by Harry and Rik meant nothing. He had clearly judged the odds and found them unfavourable. He would simply try again when circumstances were better. The danger was, next time they might not see him coming.

Harry leaned forward. Rik was right: there was something familiar about the man, but he couldn’t place him, either.

‘Was he the man in the car?’ he asked Joanne. He hadn’t been close enough to see the man she’d shot at, merely the bulk of his outline.

‘I don’t know.’ She fingered the photo. ‘I only caught a glimpse. It was all so quick.’ She looked past Harry and scanned the area behind him, sifting groups and watching for anyone who didn’t fit. The two men were doing the same.

They were sitting facing inwards on the edge of the grass, not far from where Joanne had met Rafa’i. There were already far more pedestrians about than there had been an hour ago, which was making their task that much more difficult. But without knowing Rafa’i’s whereabouts, or even whether he would come back to find Joanne or not, they could do nothing else but sit and wait. And hope.

‘He’ll come,’ said Harry. ‘If not now, then another time.’ He was counting on the former cleric’s desperate need for help in a foreign land to bring him back to the one person he knew he could trust. That would be Joanne. Placed in the same predicament, Harry would have done the same.

‘It’s crazy,’ said Joanne thoughtfully, ‘but I’ve seen him somewhere, too.’ She prodded the photo lying on the grass between them. ‘But not here – I’d remember it.’

‘In Battersea?’ Harry probed her gently. ‘He might have been hanging around outside.’

She shook her head without looking at him. She still hadn’t forgiven him his treatment down by the Embankment. ‘No. Not there.’

Rik said, ‘Have you still got the photo you took in Baghdad?’

‘A copy, yes.’ Joanne dug in her rucksack. They had left the other one with Sheila Humphries. It would have been almost callous to take it from her; the most recent picture she had of her brother. She handed it over.

‘I knew it!’ Rik muttered with a grim smile. He held up the photo so that they could both see it, and pointed to the two security men in the background. One of them was lean, the face distinct and familiar. It was the man from the park.

‘He’s official,’ said Harry. ‘That makes things worse.’ A freelance they could have coped with; someone who was merely working for the money might give up if the opposition got too tough. But a man on the payroll of a government department would have no such freedom . . . and would have the resources and backup to follow the job through. He’d therefore be all but impossible to dissuade.

‘Unless he jumped ship afterwards,’ said Rik. ‘Or he’s a subbie.’

‘What?’ Joanne was still staring at the photo.

‘A sub-contractor,’ Harry explained. ‘Most of the security staff out there are working for PSCs. A few are ex-Special Forces on short-term contracts to the MOD. They’ll have already been through all the security training, and if any of them go down, it doesn’t impact the official payroll.’ He shrugged. ‘The government being creative with public money.’

‘So he’s a merc?’

‘Yes. But they’re sensitive souls – they don’t like that word very much.’ He studied the photo and the faces, and wondered how close the man with the thin face was to Major Andrew Marshall, the one sitting opposite Gordon Humphries.

They sat and waited, concentrating on watching the park. If Rafa’i was coming back, he was taking his time.

‘Would he go to the nearest Iraqi community?’ Harry asked. He knew that London hosted a mixed Sunni, Kurdish and Shi’a population, and Rafa’i might look for an area where he could blend in. Safety in numbers.

‘No.’ Joanne shook her head emphatically. ‘There’s a risk he’d be recognized. There are people here from the same area, although not necessarily from the same tribal group. But he’s too well known; if anyone saw him, word would spread fast.’ She gestured to the open park around them. ‘Out here is different. People don’t look too closely at other faces, especially if they’re in western clothes. To them he’s just another man.’

‘Bummer,’ said Rik, and went back to people watching.

Eventually Joanne stirred and checked her watch. ‘He won’t be back today,’ she announced. ‘It’s gone noon.’

‘Time for prayers?’ Rik asked.

‘He has a strict prayer regime, but it’s nothing to do with that. One of the things I was told to impress on him was that if something went wrong and we got split up, we had to have an arrangement for meeting up again. They said to try again one hour after the agreed time, then at twenty-four-hour repeats.’

They checked their watches. It was well past the first hour already.

‘And always the same place?’ Harry asked.

‘Yes. That way, we wouldn’t have to rely on finding somewhere new to either of us, and twenty-four hours would allow any dust to settle. I never thought we’d have to use it, though.’

It made sense. This wasn’t Rafa’i’s home turf, so he wouldn’t be familiar with the terrain. After what had happened earlier, he’d be doubly cautious, yet desperate enough to rely on using the same place again. As long as he could conquer his fear of being spotted again. ‘So he’ll be here again at ten tomorrow.’

‘I hope so.’