Agent of the State (2 page)

John Kerr had executed the man who, captured alive, could have led them to the London bombers before they left on their terrible mission.

In the late morning Kerr is summoned to the commissioner’s private conference room ‘to meet some people’. There are three civilians sitting around the table, but seven dirty coffee cups and plates, and the air is heavy with earlier heated exchanges. The biscuits have disappeared, along with the commissioner and his sidekicks. Kerr is unsurprised. There is no mileage in sitting alongside an employee who has murdered in cold blood. Probably no knighthood, either.

Kerr’s interrogators introduce themselves as Beth, Hugh and Neil. They are white, middle class, surname-free and smiling, like talent-show hosts. The MI6 guy, Hugh, is an army retread, with streamlined collar and shiny shoes, straight off the parade ground. The woman is skinny, with bleached, spiky hair and a butterfly tattoo on her neck. Kerr remembers that, after a secret intelligence briefing at Cheltenham seven or eight years ago, they shared a chicken Madras and got drunk on red wine. If Beth remembers it, she isn’t saying. Years of dropping in on
jihadi
chit-chat have not been kind. She is thinner now, and the butterfly looks grounded for good.

When they are seated around the table, Kerr on his own facing the window, the boy from MI5 kicks off. Kerr is glad to find it is not to be an interrogation. They are all delighted that the attorney general has decided not to press charges. Really. They nod and flick on the smile switch again, sharing Kerr’s joy that he will not be standing in the dock at the Old Bailey.

‘There was no other option, was there,’ shrugs Kerr, ‘seeing as you covered the whole thing up?’ The media has been silent about Kerr’s interdiction, because no one told them about it. With the corpse and rucksack spirited away, the attempted bombing simply did not take place. The cover-up must have sounded a good idea right up until 7/7.

Neil is currently working police liaison. He wears wide braces and a watch with too many dials for a civil servant in charge of a desk. Since Kerr’s last sighting, he has developed the beginnings of a goatee.

There is a bit more disarming preamble to show Kerr he is among friends, and they use his first name a lot, which puts him on red alert. Kerr’s partners in the US State Department call it ‘time to decompress’, but it does not work here and now because the atmosphere is stifling and Kerr has seen it all before.

Eventually it is Kerr who calls the meeting to order. He knows they want to ask him one question: why did you take the guy out when you should have arrested him? Arrest might have led them to the 7/7 bombers and prevented the attacks eight days later. It is a fair point. Kerr has thought about this.

Then Neil blows it by saying he understands: he can imagine what it’s like to be facing that kind of threat. He says this to impress the others, as if he’s just dropped in from hand-to-hand combat in Afghanistan. But it is a mistake, like telling a terminal-cancer patient you know how it feels. He wants to appear a man of the world, but Neil is really just another tosser from Thames House.

‘John, we have to examine what you gleaned about this man. Explore if there’s anything we could have done to prevent the attacks.’ When Neil says ‘we’ he means John Kerr, of course. They want him to admit he found something out, then use it to hang him.

‘You want to know if he shared his Facebook before I garrotted him?’ asks Kerr, mildly.

‘Not exactly,’ says Neil. ‘But he might . . . I dunno . . . did he shout something in the carriage before he ran off, for example? Or in the toilet before . . . you know? Any clues at all?’

‘Did I torture him before I killed him, you mean? Abu Ghraib in the Gents at Green Park?’

Hugh evidently decides it is time to intervene. His neck is tighter against the collar and his eyes have become slits. He no longer looks decompressed. ‘Did you?’

‘Did I fuck,’ says Kerr, which irritates them even more. ‘And the only clue was a rucksack full of fertiliser and shrapnel.’

Kerr’s statement of the bleeding obvious creates a lull while they regroup. The interview is going badly, for the subject is not showing the right level of contrition. Who would have expected him to come out fighting?

During the sparring match Beth has sat in silence, head down, doodling. Perhaps she’s thinking she had a narrow escape all those years ago. ‘Your man was an associate of Khan, so probably knew their intentions,’ she says now, frowning at her rectangles and circles, ‘so why do you think he risked messing everything up for them?’

‘You’re the mind expert, Beth. You tell me,’ says Kerr, familiar. ‘Perhaps it was just good old vanity . . . you know, a compulsion to be first among the nutters. But he didn’t tell me that, either. In case you’re wondering.’

‘We’re not, John. Honestly.’ Neil is back on track. ‘It’s just that a lot of questions are going to be asked. We have to know if there’s anything you think we could have done to prevent this atrocity.’

‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? You should have gone public. Made people aware and warned them of the risk. In the end it’s always the cover-up that gets you, Neil. You guys should know that by now.’

‘
You
know full well we had to avoid alarming the public unnecessarily.’

‘You kept it quiet because your office had just lowered the threat level.’

‘That’s neither here nor there.’

‘Said there was no imminent threat.’

‘Whatever,’ says Neil, ‘we are where we are.’

‘Look, I have to live with what I’ve done. OK, seven-seven may have happened because I killed that bomber. That possibility will haunt me. But you have to live with the consequences because you kept it secret.’

‘And it has to stay that way.’

‘Does it?’ This brings another pause. They are looking at him intently; even Beth has put down her pencil. And then, in a flash, all becomes clear. ‘You think I’m going to blow the whistle, don’t you?’ He laughs. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘Not at all. We’re in this together.’

‘Bullshit. You couldn’t give a toss whether that young man said anything to me, only whether I’ll hold the line. That’s it, isn’t it? So why don’t you ask me up front?’

‘Why did you do it?’ snaps Hugh. It is a last-ditch attempt to subordinate him. ‘What made you murder a man in cold blood when you know you should have kept him alive?’

Kerr looks each of them in the eye. He knows they are not family people. ‘Ask me that when you have children.’

Part One

One

Thursday, 13 September 2012, 06.53, New Scotland Yard

Squeezing into the glass cubbyhole that passed for his office at the top of New Scotland Yard, John Kerr had to ease the door open with his left shoulder, Starbucks in one hand, encrypted laptop in the other, head tilted to clamp the BlackBerry to his ear. But the call from his deputy made him dump all that stuff and scramble for his firearm. It was a Glock 19 semi-automatic 9mm pistol, the lightweight weapon of choice for his surveillance teams. It should have been stored in the secure armoury next to the operations room but, against all the rules, he kept it in a locked cabinet inside his safe.

The call lasted less than half a minute. ‘Why didn’t they tell us immediately?’ Kerr demanded, then listened intently to the answer. ‘You’re absolutely certain it’s Melanie? Is she blown? Any demands yet? OK, Dodge, just get me the address of the stronghold.’

When he bowled out, less than two minutes later, he was on the run, firearm concealed in the shoulder holster beneath his jacket, kicked by an adrenaline rush.

Thoughts accelerating ahead of his body, he calculated the threat. It was supposed to have been a routine job, short-term infiltration of a European gang of cocaine smugglers. Kerr had tasked Detective Sergeant Melanie Fleming as the undercover officer. She was to be the courier for the last leg of the importation, the cut-off between the importer and the UK receivers.

Kerr was operational head of the Covert Operations Unit. For decades his élite team had conducted the most secret work in Special Branch. There were three types of activity: surveillance, often armed and at close quarters; the recruitment and running of agents (or ‘covert human intelligence sources’, as they were now officially termed); and ‘technical attack’, the euphemism for bugging.

It was a wide remit, sensitive, political and risky, with always too much going on. Sometimes other departments ‘borrowed’ his undercover operatives, which was what had happened with Melanie. Two days earlier he had offered her to the Anti-corruption Unit, the cops who investigate other cops. They were known as the ‘rubber-heelers’ because you could never hear them coming. How could it have gone so wrong?

He punched the lift button. ‘Fucking amateurs,’ he muttered. The risk assessment from his opposite number had been crystal clear: in the event of compromise, there was a negligible risk of violence. That was his absolute, cast-iron assurance. Yet it seemed that, in the course of a single night, what had started as a regular sting operation had erupted into a siege, with Melanie as the hostage. Kerr had the lift to himself. The sit-rep was opaque and his mind a maelstrom of questions. The threat to Melanie had no up-side, but coldly, calmly, John Kerr knew exactly what he was going to do.

On the ground floor a cluster of female records staff crowded round the lift doors. He was working with them on a stronger system of human-source protection and found himself face to face with their head, a civil-service high flyer with stilettos to match her ambition. He felt her hand on his arm but kept moving. ‘Sorry, Jules, gotta crack on,’ he murmured. ‘Catch up with you later.’

His phone vibrated and he took the call. ‘I’m going to the car now,’ he said, racing down the spiral staircase to dig out his Alfa Romeo 156T Spark from the Yard’s cramped, subterranean garage. ‘Pick you up usual place.’

He was still inserting the BlackBerry into the hands-free as he spun up the ramp, scattering another bunch of workers emerging from St James’s Park Tube station. His Tetra radio mainset shared the glove compartment with a makeup bag Gabriella kept for emergencies when she stayed over. He switched it to Channel Five, the protected frequency used by his surveillance teams.

Accelerating into the thoroughfare he narrowly missed his commander’s dark blue Toyota Prius as it crossed his path onto the Yard’s forecourt. From the back seat Paula Weatherall lowered the window to glare at him. He knew the reason - one of the girls in Registry had tipped him off. Weatherall had been studying the Met’s summary of the inquest into Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent Brazilian electrician shot dead by police two weeks after 7/7.

Among those criticised were Kerr’s surveillance officers, who had followed him to the Tube. Believing Jean Charles was a suicide bomber, one operative had tried to arrest him in the Tube seconds before firearms officers had shot him. Afterwards Kerr had staunchly defended his bravery to the Met’s top brass and anyone else who wanted a fight. His lone voice had set him apart as a maverick, but falling out with the bosses had never troubled him.

This morning, Paula Weatherall was having a working breakfast with the commissioner. Kerr knew that, too, because he made it his business to find out the hierarchy’s significant diary fixtures. She looked ready to say something, but Kerr already had the blue Kojak light on the dash and squirted the siren to get her driver out of his way.

Two

Thursday, 13 September, 07.03, Victoria Street

Dodge was instantly recognisable from his bulk, at least two hundred and twenty pounds (which he regularly denied), the ruddy face beneath an unkempt shock of white hair, and the baggy grey suit that always looked like he slept in it. But it was the intelligence in his ice-blue eyes that drew everybody in. He was waiting at the corner of Victoria Street and Strutton Ground by the entrance to the market. Surprisingly agile, he jumped in while the Alfa was still moving, inputting the satnav as Kerr accelerated down towards Westminster and the Embankment.

‘Head for Mare Street, Hackney.’ After three years in London, Dodge’s Belfast accent was as hard as ever. ‘Stronghold’s a Victorian house, converted ground-floor flat.’

‘It’s all right, Dodge,’ said Kerr, switching off the device as the Alfa split the pack of vehicles trailing onto Parliament Square. ‘I’ve worked that ground a lot.’

‘Negotiators are in a junior school,’ said Dodge. ‘Same street.’

The man Kerr had chosen to lead his undercover team was a former RUC agent runner in his early fifties. Everyone called him Dodge, irrespective of rank, but no one knew why. In another life he had survived an IRA assassination attempt near the border and moved his wife and daughter overnight twice, so they guessed it had something to do with that.

‘How bad is it?’

Dodge steadied himself as Kerr slid round the square. ‘Two male hostage-takers.’ Dodge often claimed he had given up smoking, but the cough always gave him away. ‘Serious traces with Europol and heavy duty.’

‘Any demands yet? Threats against Mel?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘What’s the firepower?’

‘Shotgun and handgun. At least. Hostage-takers believed Turkish.’

‘Believed? For Christ’s sake, Dodge.’

‘The tossers are only just giving us the full story.’ Despite the engine noise, as Kerr wove in low gear through the congestion around Parliament, Dodge’s tone was conversational. He could have been out on a Sunday-afternoon drive with his family. ‘They took Melanie in the van on the dummy run to South Mimms services, showed her the handover spot in the lorry park, then straight back. Everything as planned.’