Authors: John Gardner
“The flesh-eating mystery virus,” Worboys said when he called in to the Office.
The information was flashed to London and Washington, where it was immediately understood by the agents in the field. The final intention of the
Intiqam
teams had obviously been to release the deadly bacteria through air-conditioning or heating ducts in the House of Commons and the Capitol, and so paralyze the governments of at least America and Britain. The original plan had almost certainly included the Italian and French governments also. One of the specialists maintained that, had this succeeded, he would have expected to lose fifty to sixty percent of the Members of Parliament, and the same number who might be sitting in the House and Senate in the Capitol.
In Washington it was felt that no further chances should be taken. The three terrorists they knew about should be arrested immediately, but when Herb, Bex and their two companions from the FBI arrived to check in at the exclusive Willard Hotel, they were informed by a waiting Counter-Intelligence officer from Langley that Walid, Hisham and Khami were no-shows.
The suite that had been taken for Herbie and Bex had been organized so that it could double as an operational headquarters. Now all of those who were considered part of what would be known as
Conductor
—as in lightning conductor—sat down to discuss exactly how they should proceed.
They knew the names under which the three Iraqis were traveling—Dr. Sa’dun Zaidan, together with Mr. and Mrs. Jaffid—so they worked the telephones, checking every hotel within a ten-mile radius of Washington.
They worked until late that night, backed up by agents in the Hoover Building, Washington’s FBI Headquarters. The no-shows seemed to have disappeared into thin air, so they started again. This time with descriptions.
By early afternoon on the same day, several FBI officers, accompanied by a SWAT team, had gathered in and around a wooded area in the Hudson Valley, some twenty miles from the old and picturesque town of Rhinebeck.
They were concentrating on a lonely cottage, once the retreat of a famous painter, now leased to three men who had been described locally as “A-rab looking.”
The team watching the house were certain that its occupants were from the Middle East. They had done just what their British counterparts had achieved in Oxfordshire. From the information passed by Hisham, they traced the telephone number and knew the cottage was the site occupied by the American
Yussif
group.
Finally, they went in at four in the afternoon, surprising the
Yussif
trio as they watched television. Not a shot was fired and the arrests were made with no media involvement. The trio were driven away to a very secure house not far away, close to Hyde Park, once the seat of the Roosevelt family. They had played it by the book, even bringing in a local resident judge to hear the charges brought against the men, and sign an order allowing them to be held without bail or a court appearance for as long as necessary.
In the now empty cottage two FBI agents manned the telephone, connecting it to both a recorder and a fast Caller ID unit, able to trace a number anywhere in the United States within ninety seconds.
The call came in just after five, and one of the agents picked up the telephone but said nothing. From the distant end a voice asked, “Yussif?”
Busking it, the Special Agent simply replied, “Yussif. Yes?”
“We’re in Washington, but we’ve had to change our location. We have the goods and will begin activation tomorrow.”
“Good. Give me your present position.”
There was a lengthy silence at the other end, then the sound of a quick intake of breath, followed by the dial tone. It was obvious that the Special Agent had not conformed to some prearranged method of contact, but the line had been open for long enough. A Caller ID lit up on the LED. Within minutes they had traced it to a public telephone in Washington’s Georgetown. The police were alerted, but when they arrived in the area, they found only tourists, students and the usual people you would expect to find in that part of Washington.
Earlier in the day, when Hisham had checked into the Grand Hyatt in the Westernized name of James Tait, he was shown to a room on the third floor. He washed, took the elevator downstairs again and went outside into the sticky heat of late-summer Washington. He took a cab to National Airport, going straight to the Air Freight collection area. The package was there, as were two FBI Special Agents on surveillance duty to report on the pickup. They managed to get a whole roll of film showing Hisham arriving at the collection point; Hisham handing over the waybill and retrieving the package; and even a couple of photographs of him getting into a cab.
That was as far as it went. They had no orders to follow him. Their instructions were to get the pictures and then return to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, where the film was processed, ready to be checked by the various agents who were dealing with the current situation.
Hisham stood in line for over fifteen minutes in the broiling heat to get a taxi back to the Grand Hyatt, where he paid the cab off and hurried back into the pleasant chill of the air-conditioning. Below the entrance level of the Washington Grand Hyatt there is an ornamental pool that laps around an open-plan restaurant. This can be viewed as you walk from the entrance to the bank of elevators, and Hisham was seriously thinking of dropping off the parcel in his room and returning for an early lunch.
He glanced down at the couples and family parties already eating at the tables below him. Then his heart rate suddenly increased, and he felt his stomach lurch. He stopped dead and looked harder, just to be sure. The longer he looked, the more certain he was. There, below him, sipping a drink across the table from an elegant woman, was a face from his past. He even recognized the woman and could not believe what he saw.
Quickly he moved away and walked to the elevators, his mind in turmoil. Once in his room, he placed the package carefully on the table beside the TV, went into the bathroom, sprinkled water over his face and wondered what he should do. What he had seen was unbelievable, and his one thought was to get out of the Hyatt as quickly as possible. It was not feasible, though; he did not even know what time Walid and Khami were due to arrive or what name they were to register under.
He called down to room service for food and drink, then waited, not daring to show himself in the main body of the hotel. This place had now become completely unsafe. If he had been on his own, it would have been a different matter, but with the last two members of the
Intiqam
team still to arrive, he could do nothing but wait. He considered other possibilities. He could, if the situation were as serious as he thought, throw himself on the mercy of the authorities, citing the British Security Service as his masters. Finally, he decided this was too dangerous.
It was not until almost four in the afternoon that the telephone rang and he heard Walid’s voice telling him they were here—Dr. and Mrs. Hendler—in room 416.
“Get down to my room quickly,” Hisham said, keeping his voice as calm as possible. “We have a small emergency. I’m in 364. This is serious.”
Within four minutes Walid and Khami were there.
“We cannot stay here in this hotel,” he told them. Then he explained why, though he left out sections of the story that he could never share with either of them.
Walid went pale, and Khami turned away and walked to the window, looking down at the traffic. “Where the hell do we go?” she asked in a small voice.
“To somewhere completely safe.” Walid seemed to have recovered from his momentary concern. “Don’t worry, we were only going to stay here for a very short time anyway.” He then explained that during the planning phase of the operation,
Yussif
had organized two safe houses in Washington. One was in the Georgetown area, a nice apartment not far from the famous Georgetown Inn on Wisconsin Avenue. One telephone call and their local contact would open it up and leave the keys for them. There they would be safe, for this same contact was to deliver the explosives and the necessary timing devices for
Magic Lightning
.
Walid acted swiftly and with great care. The last thing he wanted was to have the people on the reception desk remember them checking in and then leaving after being in the hotel for less than an hour. He made excuses about a death in the family, and had the two rooms charged to a credit card for one night.
Within the hour they were settled into a four-room apartment overlooking the shops and restaurants of Wisconsin Avenue. Hisham was relieved. The people whom he had spotted were nowhere to be seen as they left the hotel. Now he was alone in this pleasant apartment, waiting while Khami shopped for groceries and Walid went out to use a public telephone to check in with
Yussif
.
Khami returned first, her arms clutching brown bags of what little food they would need, for Walid had said he thought it would be quite safe for them to eat in one of the many restaurants along Wisconsin Avenue.
She had only been back for some five minutes when Walid returned, his face grave and sweat visible on his forehead.
“They’ve taken out
Yussif
,” he said baldly.
“Taken …?” Khami began.
“I didn’t recognize the voice that answered, but I’ve only spoken to two of that team until now. We talked for a few minutes, and then the code procedure broke down.”
“How?”
“
Yussif
asked, ‘Give me your present position.’ This is wrong. Very wrong.
Yussif
has one question regarding where we are. He should always say, ‘Are you at the same place?’ They’ve never made a mistake like this before. We’re on our own, which means that we have to begin first thing tomorrow. At least we
can
get on with it. The Semtex is here, in the refrigerator, with detonators and, of course, the timers for
Magic Lightning
. So everything is possible. We must do all we can.”
“And then?” Khami asked.
“And then we go our separate ways and finally return home.”
At the Willard, Herbie was putting his point of view to the rest of the
Conductor
team. There were five agents present, apart from Kruger and Bex: Hatch and Christie from the FBI; a pair of gray suits from Langley, one introduced as Cork Smith, the other referred to only as Krysak—a cuddly-looking man built like a fireplug but with clear, very light blue eyes, which looked as though they had been sculpted from ice. Also in attendance was another woman, Sheila FitzGerald, from the Secret Service—tall, slender and very fit: a woman who moved like a panther and had claimed, at the start of the meeting, that the Secret Service owned the streets around the White House and the Capitol.
“You’re all here to round up these pretty dangerous clowns,” Herbie began, looking a little flushed. “I am only here because these terrorists seem to have wandered into the path of
our
investigation.” He touched Bex’s shoulder to link her to himself. “I’m only interested in the
Intiqam
people if they happen to have murdered my former colleague, Gus Keene. Bex is here for the same reason. We think we now know who blew my old friend into the wide blue yonder, and it isn’t your set of Iraqi hoodlums. By rights, we’re out of this as from now.”
“You squeamish about terrorists?” Christie looked hard at Herbie and then switched to Bex. The mocking look on her face seemed to be a permanent feature, not a look assumed simply for them.
“Squeamish?” Kruger’s voice went up an octave, and his color changed noticeably, “Young woman, you call
me
squeamish? I’ve dealt with bringers of terror for nearly my whole life. Put this lot next to
real
terrorists and they come out like the gang who couldn’t shoot straight. Sure, they’ve killed, they managed to plant bombs, but they’ve slowly been hived off. They’ve either got themselves killed or caught.” He paused for a deep breath, as though trying to control his anger. Then: “I would suggest you get yourselves out on the streets, search among the crowds, look in every nook and cranny, then put them out of their misery altogether. DCI Olesker and I have a different agenda. What I’m telling you is that there is only a very tenuous link between our job and your terrorists.” He grinned at Bex and quietly said, “Tenuous is good, yes?”
“Brilliant, Herb.” She winked at him.
Hatch got to his feet, paced the floor for a couple of minutes, then said they could not just walk out on
Conductor
. “You’re under discipline.”
“Been under discipline nearly all my life, Dick.” Herb smiled up at him. “But this time you’re wrong. I’m retired and I’m only being paid out-of-pocket expenses. I’m on this job to find out one thing, and I think it’s within reach. Bex is also here for the same reason. Our job is to catch a killer, or killers, who I honestly don’t think are connected with
Intiqam
.”
“So the Brits are opting out?” Christie’s face showed open disgust.
“You want to put it that way, okay.” Herb turned to Cork Smith from Langley. “If I were you, I’d get on to your opposite number at Vauxhall Cross. If you still want us on your team, the SIS will have to give it a big thumbs-up, but they’ll qualify that. In the end, they’ll tell you okay, but they’ll also tell you that, should we come across a direct link to our real case, it’ll have to take precedence. Sure, maybe these Vengeance people
have
got the key to the case we’re here to crack”—again he touched Bex’s arm to include her—“but I for one am opting out of your form of discipline.”
“We can always close you down. Take you off to Dulles and put you on a flight to Heathrow, persona non grata.” Smith, if that was indeed his real name, appeared to be serious.
“Why not?” Kruger seemed perfectly happy with the idea. “If that’s what you really want. But I think you might get yourself overruled.” As he spoke, he noticed Krysak slip quietly from the room.
“Your friend’s gone to get a ruling?” Kruger asked brightly. “We’ll abide by whatever answer he gets.” He tilted his head towards the main bedroom, then rose and walked to the door. Bex followed him.