Remembering those who had died made Nourazar frown. Had Rashid, Hamdi and Omar known what they were really involved with, they would never have sacrificed themselves as they had. But then that was why this operation had been so perfect, because he inspired that sort of dedication. He was a holy man, a warrior for Islam. People followed him without question. People believed they would end up in Paradise if they did as he asked. Hadi Nourazar wondered where exactly Rashid, Hamdi and Omar were at this moment. He doubted very much that they would be receiving their reward in Paradise. Personally he didn’t believe in any of that stuff. His god was what it had always been – power.
Now that he had contact with İkmen, Superintendent Williams felt relieved. The cab the Turk was travelling in still had sight of the blue Ford Escort Nourazar had taken, though the route he was following was somewhat eccentric. It was clear that Nourazar didn’t know his way to Rotherhithe Street. Williams and three CO19 officers were due to rendezvous with DI Hogarth and his team, who were bringing Ahmet Ülker, at a two-bedroomed flat on Rotherhithe Street. They would get to the home of the late Mr Hamdi Khan before the others and would therefore have to conceal themselves in the garages underneath Trinity Wharf opposite until Hogarth arrived with Ülker. Thank God the man had finally crumbled under questioning. There was not going to be any way they could warn Khan’s wife, should she be at home, which was going to be terrible for her. Williams had no doubt that the first thing Nourazar would do when he saw her was tell her about her husband’s glorious death. The Khans had only been married for a year. Williams did not think that Mrs Khan would approve, however pious she might be.
They pulled on to Rotherhithe Street just after the YMCA on Salter Road and headed for Trinity Wharf. The caretaker of the building had been told to open up the garages for the police and when they arrived the gates were wide open. As the police car swept down the ramp and into the bowels of the building, one resident, a middle-aged bespectacled man in a suit, gaped at them. ‘Fucking hell!’ he said. But apart from that, no one seemed to notice or care about their sudden appearance. An eerie silence settled across Rotherhithe Street.
Chapter 30
The cab pulled up just before the low block of flats that Nourazar had taken his hostage into. İkmen got out and said to the driver, ‘Wait here. Call Superintendent Williams. Don’t get out.’
‘You haven’t paid me yet, I’m not going anywhere,’ Sidney said. ‘What are you going to do?’
But İkmen wasn’t listening. He was looking up at a block of old council flats where long, concrete balconies provided access to apartments characterised by scuffed and time-worn doors. He could see Nourazar and the mayor standing in front of the one at the far end of the balcony, nearest the stairs. Via the cabbie, İkmen had learned that Williams and a CO19 unit were on their way, as well as DI Hogarth from Scotland Yard with Ahmet Ülker. A phone call from Nourazar to Ülker at Scotland Yard had apparently put the factory owner into a position where he had no choice but to cooperate with the police. But İkmen knew that Nourazar would not necessarily wait until Ülker arrived before he killed Mr Üner. All he was interested in was the money and all Ülker wanted as far as Nourazar was concerned was the mayor of London’s death. İkmen wasn’t sure what he could do about this on his own and unarmed, but he felt he had to be where Nourazar and the mayor were.
Up on the balcony, the door to the apartment the Iranian and his hostage stood outside opened and İkmen caught a glimpse of a young headscarfed woman. He jogged wearily over to the concrete stairwell and began to make his way up. The walls, covered in graffiti tags, were grimy and splashed with what smelt like rancid cheese, underneath which was the unmistakable smell of piss. İkmen kicked a pizza box out of his way and reached the first floor. He listened to Nourazar and the woman talk.
‘It will only be for a few moments, Fatima,’ he heard Nourazar say. ‘Nothing bad will happen, I promise.’
‘Yes, but Ayatollah Hadi,’ a distinctly Cockney voice replied, ‘I can’t have any trouble, not in my condition. Where’s Hamdi?’
‘If you let us inside, I’ll tell you,’ Nourazar said.
There was a pause and then the woman said, ‘Ayatollah Hadi, that man is the mayor of London, what—’
There was a metallic click, which sounded like the safety catch being taken off a pistol. The woman gasped audibly.
‘Fatima, go inside and let’s talk,’ Nourazar said. ‘You will not be hurt, I promise.’
İkmen heard them go inside and after several seconds he moved out of the stairwell and on to the balcony. The door to the apartment had been left ajar, possibly for Ahmet Ülker. Inside he heard, at first, the sound of a television. This was switched off and replaced by the low rumble of Nourazar’s voice. Out in the street, a large silver BMW car pulled up in front of the block. At the same time the door to the underground garages of the executive apartments opposite began to move upwards.
From inside the flat he heard the woman shout. ‘No!
No!
’
İkmen could not see what was happening inside, the gap between the door and the door frame was too small.
‘I thought you were a good man! I thought—’
‘Fatima, Hamdi is a martyr, a saint, he has gone straight to Paradise!’
‘Hamdi never wanted that!’ the woman screamed. ‘We talked about it. He wanted to serve Allah in this life, with me and with our baby!’
He heard her get up, heard her feet slap down on the wooden floor.
‘That on the news, was that you?’ she said. ‘Killing people on a train and . . . What do you think they will do to Muslim people if you do these things? And now here with Mr Üner—’
‘He is a homosexual!’
‘So? He wants to build more play parks for the kids,’ she said. ‘Wants to make the roads safer.’ İkmen heard her footsteps on the wood again.
Opposite the block, Williams and the CO19 officers were emerging and quietly cordoning off the street. Two men had got out of the BMW; one of them was Ahmet Ülker.
‘I wasn’t happy about Hamdi getting involved with you,’ Fatima continued. ‘I told him! I said we should stick to our own, not go getting involved with people from Iran. We, he didn’t understand your country! We—’
‘Shut up! Shut up!’ There was silence for several seconds. İkmen pushed the door open a little more and looked inside. The woman was at the door of the room at the end of the corridor, her hands braced against the posts, blocking İkmen’s view of anyone else.
‘A woman shouldn’t talk to a man like that!’ Nourazar said. ‘Sit down, disgusting bitch! Hamdi—’
‘Hamdi was flattered by you, but I never was,’ she said. ‘Mr Ülker gave him a job, which was good, but you – you’re not even wanted in your own country! Hamdi told me! I was suspicious of that, I—’
‘Whore!’
He must, İkmen reckoned, have been standing already when he hit her. Fatima fell to the ground and suddenly İkmen found himself looking into the eyes of Hadi Nourazar.
DI Hogarth handed Ahmet Ülker a large briefcase. The factory owner was shaking.
‘You get up there, Ahmet,’ he said. ‘You give him this and you ask him to hand over the mayor, alive.’
The briefcase contained hastily assembled stacks of paper topped off with a thin layer of £50 notes.
‘He’ll know it’s not—’
‘We’ll be right behind you,’ Hogarth said.
‘Will you kill him?’
Superintendent Williams joined them. ‘If necessary,’ he said.
‘Allah,’ Ülker muttered and gritted his teeth to help control his shaking jaw.
‘We can’t leave it any longer,’ Hogarth said and began to push Ülker towards the stairwell. ‘One of our men is up there already. But you just go past him.’
Ülker looked up but he couldn’t see anybody. He mounted the stairs nervously, feeling as if his bladder was going to give way at any moment.
‘Who
are
you?’ Nourazar asked, trying to keep his gun trained on both the mayor seated on the sofa by the TV set and Fatima lying on the floor.
‘My name is Çetin İkmen and I am a police officer from İstanbul,’ İkmen said. ‘You caused some misery in my city, Mr Nourazar.’
‘Ayatollah . . .’
‘
Mr
,’ İkmen repeated. ‘You are no more a man of religion than I am. You use religious people to make money for you. You trick them. This lady’s husband—’
‘Hadi!’
Nourazar looked up. ‘Ahmet,’ he said with some relief.
Ahmet Ülker pushed past İkmen, frowning at him as he went. ‘What’s this man doing here?’
‘He says he’s a policeman, from İstanbul,’ Nourazar said. ‘You know Derek Harrison always had a bad feeling about him.’
But Ahmet Ülker didn’t respond to that. ‘Things went wrong,’ he said.
‘Yes, I—’
‘Here’s your money.’ He put the briefcase down on the floor in front of Nourazar and then reached out a hand. ‘Give me the gun.’
Nourazar frowned. ‘Why?’
‘Because I will have to take the mayor away from here and do what I have to where we originally planned, in the countryside.’ The Iranian looked unconvinced. ‘Hadi, no one knows we’re here. I wasn’t followed, you—’
‘This man followed me,’ he said and tipped his head towards Çetin İkmen.
‘So we’ll get rid of him and the woman!’ Ülker said.
From down on the floor, Fatima muttered, ‘Bastards!’
‘Come on, Hadi!’ Ülker began to feel sweat breaking out on his brow. ‘Give me the gun. I’ll do it. You take the money and get out of here.’
For just a fraction of a second Ahmet Ülker and Çetin İkmen exchanged a glance. It was fleeting, meant little and was really no more than an acknowledgement of each other, but Nourazar saw it and he said, ‘No, I think I’ll keep the gun for the moment, thank you, Ahmet.’
‘But Hadi, to open the case—’
‘I can do that very well with one hand,’ he said and proceeded to open first one catch on the case, then the other.
Now almost fainting with tension, Ülker said, ‘Hadi—’
The aiming of the pistol and the subsequent shot happened in less than half a second. But Nourazar was not a good shot. He aimed for Ülker but hit Fatima, wounding her in the top of her arm. Çetin İkmen threw himself on her, putting his body between hers and any further shots. But none came.
‘Put the gun down, Nourazar!’ A heavily armoured CO19 officer was now where İkmen had just been. He was staring down the barrel of an HK MP5 submachine gun.
Nourazar instantly pointed his pistol at the mayor’s head. ‘No, I think that it is you who should—’
‘This place is surrounded,’ the officer said. ‘Go outside and you’ll get your head blown off. Surrender.’
Nourazar jabbed his pistol hard into the side of Haluk Üner’s head. ‘No.’
‘Then bloody kill me!’ the mayor’s voice suddenly echoed around the room. ‘You’ve kidnapped and beaten me, you’ve killed people in my city, you’ve called into question my—’
‘Shut up!’
‘No, I will not!’ Haluk Üner said. ‘Kill me! You are as fake as Ülker’s handbags, Mr Nourazar! Let’s have an end to it, shall we? You kill me and then this officer will kill you. Then you can go to Paradise! That is, after all, what you want, isn’t it?’
But Nourazar didn’t shoot. He didn’t shoot even though everyone could see that he wanted to. The CO19 officer walked slowly forward, reaching out a hand as he did so.
‘Put the gun down,’ İkmen said from beside Fatima. He was covered in her blood but she would be all right. Whether her baby would survive the experience was another matter.
‘Put it down!’ Another officer had entered behind the first one. The small room was filling up. Nourazar’s face was now white.
‘Put it down!’
Whether he lost his grip on the pistol or whether he consciously let it clatter to the floor, no one knew. But suddenly Nourazar’s pistol was on the floor, one officer picking it up almost before it had landed, the other officer twisting Nourazar’s arms behind his back and kicking him to the floor.
‘Get down and spread your legs, you fucking cunt!’ the officer screamed.
İkmen saw the mayor wince at the brutality of it but then he shakily came over to İkmen and looked at Fatima. ‘Madam, I am so, so sorry,’ he said. And then he turned to the ever increasing number of officers in the room and said, ‘Can we please get an ambulance for this lady?’
DI Hogarth, who was now cuffing Ahmet Ülker, called through to Superintendent Williams outside. ‘Sir, could we have an ambulance here?’
Williams was already on it.
İkmen helped Fatima to sit up. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said.
She smiled and then looked up into Haluk Üner’s concerned face and said, ‘You were very brave, Mr Üner.’
‘He hijacked our religion,’ Haluk Üner said. ‘He made me very angry.’ And then tears slowly began to roll down his face. Fatima, crying too now, put a hand up to his face and began to gently wipe the tears away.
Chapter 31
Çetin İkmen hadn’t really wanted to go to hospital on his own account.
‘They have far too many injured people to deal with to be bothered with me,’ he told Superintendent Williams as the latter nevertheless made him get into a bed at Guy’s Hospital. In reality İkmen knew that Williams had no choice. He couldn’t send him back to İstanbul until he had rewarded İkmen’s work for the Met by making sure that he was OK. İkmen was exhausted, dehydrated and his pulse was very high. The doctor recommended a sedative and a night of observation in hospital. As İkmen drifted off to sleep, more trolleys carrying the injured from Mark Lane were brought into Guy’s. At that point there had been thirty-two confirmed deaths and a hundred and twelve seriously injured.
Sunshine beating down on the window outside his room was not something İkmen had been expecting. Not just because he was in the UK but because somehow he had not imagined that such a thing could happen amidst such horror. Something else he hadn’t reckoned on was the sight of his son.