At Risk (4 page)

But at just twenty, she asked herself, was Marzipan truly aware of the risks that he ran? Had he really taken on board the fact that, if blown, he might have a life expectancy of no more than a few hours?

Marzipan’s name was Sohail Din, and he had been a walk-in. An exceptionally bright young man of Pakistani origin whose father was the comfortably-off proprietor of several Tottenham newsagents, he had been accepted to read law at Durham University. A devout Muslim, he had decided to spend his gap year working in a small Islamic bookshop in Haringey. The work was not well paid, but it was close to the family home, and Sohail had hoped that it would provide the opportunity for religious discussion with other serious-minded young men like himself.

It had rapidly become clear, however, that the tone of the place was rather less moderate than it had seemed. The version of Islam celebrated by those who came and went was a long way from the compassionate creed that Sohail had absorbed at home and at his local mosque. Extremist views were aired as a matter of course, young men openly discussed their intentions of training as mujahidin and taking up the sword of jihad against the West, and there was jubilation every time the press reported that an American or Israeli target had been hit by terrorists.

Unwilling to voice his dissent, but clear in his own mind that a world view which celebrated the murder of civilians was abhorrent before God, Sohail kept a low profile. Unlike his fellow employees, he saw no reason to hate the country of his birth, or to despise the legislature that he hoped one day to serve. The crunch came one late summer afternoon when three Arabic-speaking men had entered the shop from an elderly Mercedes. One of Sohail’s colleagues had nudged him, indicating the oldest of them—a nondescript figure with thinning hair and a scruffy beard. This, Sohail learned when the three men had been taken to the rooms above the shop, was Rahman al Masri, an important fighter. Perhaps his arrival meant that Britain would at last taste some of the terror inflicted by its Satanic ally, the United States.

This was the point at which Sohail decided to act. At the day’s end he had not caught his customary bus home but instead, after consulting an A to Z, had taken a main-line train half a dozen stops south to Cambridge Heath. Exiting the railway station, having satisfied himself that he had not been followed, he had pulled up the hood of his coat and made his way through the drizzle to Bethnal Green police station.

Special Branch had acted fast; Rahman al Masri was a known player. MI5 had been notified, an observation post had been set up near the bookshop, and when al Masri and his two minders left the following day, it was with a discreet surveillance escort. Intelligence allies had been informed, and with several countries working closely together, al Masri was allowed to run. He was eventually picked up at Dubai airport, and taken into custody by that country’s secret police. After a week of what was officially described as “intensive questioning,” al Masri admitted that he had visited London to deliver instructions to terrorist cells there. Attacks were to be unleashed against targets in the City.

Forewarned, the police were able to identify and arrest those involved. One of the prime objectives throughout the operation had been to preserve the original source of the information. When it was over, after extensive background checks on Sohail, it had been agreed between a senior Special Branch officer and Charles Wetherby that the young Asian might be suitable for development by Five as a long-term agent. Wetherby had handed the file to Liz, who drove up to Tottenham a couple of days later. Their first meeting took place in a disused classroom at the evening institute where Sohail took a weekly computer course.

She had been shocked by how young he was. Physically slight, self-effacing and neatly dressed in a jacket and tie, he still looked like a schoolboy. But there was a steeliness there too, and talking to him she was struck by the unswerving rigour of his moral code. Nothing justified murder, he told her, and if informing on his co-religionists helped to prevent it, and to protect the good name of Islam from those who sought the nihilist Apocalypse, then he was happy to do so. She had asked him if he was prepared to remain in place at the bookshop, and to meet her at intervals to hand over information, and he had told her that he was. He had guessed which organisation she represented without being told, and appeared unsurprised by their involvement.

Since then there had been three more meetings at the evening institute. Sohail kept a record of the comings and goings at the bookshop in an encrypted online file on his laptop, and as a Special Branch officer kept unobtrusive watch in the corridor outside, he read off his reports to Liz. None of the information he had provided had been as momentous as the report of al Masri’s presence, but it was clear that the bookshop was a key staging-post for, in Special Branch parlance, “the Bin-Men.” If there was a big operation going down in the UK involving any of the ITS groups, the chances were that Sohail—Marzipan—would be aware of the advance ripples. Potentially, he was intelligence gold.

The last meeting had been a difficult one—for Liz at least. She had asked Sohail if he would consider putting off university for a further year in order to remain in place at the bookshop, and for the first time she saw the twenty-year-old flinch. He had been counting, Liz knew, on being free of the intense pressure of his double life by the following autumn. The sense of an end-date had probably made the whole business supportable. And now she was asking him to remain there for a further twelve months—twelve months in which, for all she knew, anything could happen. Pressure might be put on him to undergo training as an undercover fighter—several of the young men who had drunk mint tea and talked of jihad in the bookshop’s upstairs room had made the journey to Pakistan and the camps. At the very least the delay would seriously threaten his dream of becoming a lawyer.

His distress had been almost invisible—a momentary shudder behind his eyes. And then, with a quiet smile, as if to reassure Liz that all would be well, he had agreed to continue.

His bravery had wrung Liz’s heart. She prayed that she would never have to meet Sarfraz and Rukhsana Din, never have to tell them that their son had died for his faith and his country.

“Bad one?” asked Dave Armstrong from the next desk.

“You know how it is,” said Liz, exiting the Marzipan file and kicking her chair back from the desk. “Sometimes this job can be really shitty.”

“I know. And that supposed goulash I saw you tackling in the canteen can’t have improved your mood either.”

Liz laughed. “It was kind of a wild choice. What did you have?”

“A sort of chicken thing, glazed with Ronseal.”

“And?”

“It did exactly what it said on the tin.” His hands flickered briefly over his keyboard. “How was the meeting this morning? Legoland team fashionably late again, I hear.”

“I think they were making a point,” said Liz. “There was a new guy there. Ex-Harrovian. Rather pleased with himself.”

“Don’t tell me MI6 have started recruiting smug ex–public schoolboys,” murmured Dave. “That I can’t believe.”

“He stared at me,” continued Liz.

“With or without shame?”

“Without.”

“You’ll have to kill him. Kick him in the ankle with your pointy shoes, Rosa Klebb–style.”

“OK . . . hang on a sec.” Liz leaned forward towards her screen, where an icon had appeared. She clicked her mouse.

“Trouble?”

“Flash from German liaison. UK driving licence ordered from one of the fake documents guys in Bremerhaven. Four hundred marks paid. Name requested, Faraj Mansoor. Ring any bells?”

“No,” said Armstrong. “Probably just some illegal migrant who wants to rent a car. Or some poor sod who’s been banned from driving. You can’t shout terrorist every time.”

“Six reckons there could be an ITS invisible on the move.”

“Where from?”

“One of the North West Frontier Province camps.”

“Definitely?”

“No. Just smoke.” She saved the message and scrabbled the mouse to check her messages.

The office door swung open and a hard-faced young man in an Aryan Resistance T-shirt strolled in.

“Yo, Barney!” said Dave. “How’s the world of the Far Right? I take it from the haircut and the utility footwear that you’ve got a social engagement later on?”

“Yeah. In East Ham. A lecture on the European Pagan Tradition.”

“Which is?”

“New Age Hitler-worship, basically.”

“Excellent!”

“Isn’t it just? I’m trying to look nasty enough to get alongside our man, but not so bloody horrible that I get my head kicked in by the Anti-Nazi League before I get there.”

“I’d say you’ve struck pretty much the right note,” said Liz.

“Thanks a lot.” He grinned conspiratorially. “Can I show you guys something?”

“You sound like a flasher. Quickly—I’ve got a very full in-box here.”

Barney reached beneath his desk, bringing out a limp rubber mask and a scrap of red felt. “It’s for the Christmas party. I’ve found this place that makes them. I’ve had fifty done.”

Liz stared incredulously at the mask. “It’s not!”

“It is!”

“But that’s brilliant! It’s so like him.”

“I know, but don’t say anything. I want it to be a surprise for Wetherby. No one in this department can keep a secret for five minutes, so I’m not going to hand them out until the actual day.”

Liz laughed out loud, the plight of Sohail Din temporarily but absolutely displaced by the thought of their section leader—customarily a late arrival at staff functions—faced with fifty beaming David Shaylers in Santa hats.

W
hen Liz arrived back at her basement flat in Kentish Town, the place had a reproachful air about it. It wasn’t so much untidy as neglected; most of her possessions still lay where she had left them at the beginning of the weekend. The CD dusty in the jutting maw of the player. The remote control in the centre of the carpet. The cafetière half full. The Saturday papers strewn about.

A faint funereal smell lingered; the armful of winter jasmine that her mother had given her, and that she had meant to put in water before going to bed the night before, was now a sad tangle of stalks on the table. Around it, and thick on the floor below, a constellation of dying five-pointed petals. On the answering machine, a tiny pulsing red light.

Why was the place so cold? She checked the central heating and found that the timer was two hours behind. Had there been some sort of power cut during the weekend? Possibly, but then as far as Liz was concerned, thermostats and the like had always seemed to wield some strange whimsical power that rendered them unaccountable. Moving the time forward to 19:30, she heard the boiler start up with a satisfactory
whoomf.

For the next half-hour, as warmth permeated the small basement flat, she tidied up. When the place was well enough ordered for her to be able to relax, she took a cook-from-frozen lasagne from the stack in the freezer (had they defrosted and refrosted in the power cut, if indeed there had been a power cut? Was she about to poison herself?), pierced the protective foil with a series of neat incisions, slid the package into the oven, and poured herself a large vodka-tonic.

There were two messages on the answering machine. The first was from her mother: Liz had left a suede skirt and belt on the back of her bedroom door at Bowerbridge—would they keep until next time?

The second was from Mark. He had rung at 12:46 that afternoon from Nobu in Park Lane, where he was waiting to give an American actress an expense-account lunch. The actress was late, however, and Mark was hungry, and his thoughts had turned to the basement flat in Inkerman Road NW5, and the possibility of spending the night there with the flat’s owner. Following a drink and a bite to eat, perhaps, at the Eagle in Farringdon Road.

Liz deleted both messages. The idea of meeting in the Eagle, a favourite hang-out of
Guardian
journalists, was insane. Had he told people at the paper about her? Was it common knowledge that he had that most chic of journalistic accessories—a pet spook? Even if he had said nothing to anyone it was clear that the game had moved beyond the realm of acceptable risk into crazy-land. He was playing with her, drawing her inch by inch towards self-destruction.

Taking a deep swallow of her drink, Liz called up his mobile. She was going to do it right now—finish the thing once and for all. It would hurt like hell and she would feel wretched beyond description, but she wanted her life back under her own control.

She got his voice mail, which probably meant that he was at home with Shauna. Where he bloody well should be, she mused sourly. Pacing around the flat, she was brought up short by the sight of the washing machine, and the inverted semi-circle of greyish water. Last week’s washing had now been stewing there for two and a half days. Despairingly, she reached for the knob, and the machine lurched into life.