First Response (11 page)

The man who had handcuffed himself to El-Sayed’s son was watching the television anxiously. A blonde presenter was detailing the latest suicide bomber who had locked himself into a pub in Marylebone, not far from the coffee shop.

‘How many is that?’ asked the man, almost as if he were addressing the newsreader. Then he turned and glared at Hassan. ‘How many?’

‘S-s-s-seven,’ stammered Hassan. ‘It was five, then you, and then the pub.’

‘Can I get you something to drink, brother?’ El-Sayed asked the man. ‘Water, perhaps. Or a fruit juice?’

‘No,’ said the man, who was now staring out of the window. There were two armed police, sheltering behind a car, aiming rifles in his direction. He shouted to one of the waitresses, ‘You! Yes, you!’ She looked at him and pointed at her chest. ‘Yes! Stick some newspaper over the window so that they can’t see us.’

The woman left the counter and picked up a copy of
The Times
. Another waitress gave her some Sellotape and she went over to the window to begin sticking the sheets onto the glass.

‘I’ve got to go home and feed my dog,’ said a woman sitting at the table next to El-Sayed. She was one of the few non-Asian customers in the shop, in her thirties and wearing a green parka with a fur-lined hood over an Adidas tracksuit. Her mousy brown hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail and she had applied too much blusher. Her lipstick was also a slapdash affair and she had smeared some across her top teeth. ‘I can’t stay here all day.’

‘Madam, that is a suicide vest he is wearing,’ said El-Sayed. ‘If he presses that trigger in his right hand, it will detonate and everyone here will die and then there will be no one to feed your dog. Now, please, be quiet.’ He turned to the man again. ‘What about something to eat? You must be hungry.’

The man shook his head.

‘May I know your name, brother?’ asked El-Sayed.

He shook his head again. ‘My name doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters to me, brother. We are both men, are we not? We are in this situation together. My name is Imad El-Sayed. That is my only son, Hassan.’

‘You need to stay quiet,’ said the man. ‘If you want to talk, talk on Twitter and Facebook. Tell people that we want the six warriors released from Belmarsh.’ He waved his right arm around. ‘All of you, do it now. Keep sending messages to all your friends. Keep telling them what is happening here. And use hashtag ISIS6 with every message.’

Customers and staff began taking out their phones.

El-Sayed smiled. ‘I never use Twitter,’ he said. ‘I never really understood the point of social media. People need to talk to each other. They need to connect, face to face, or at the very least to hear each other’s voices. I call my friends and family, I don’t text them.’

The man said nothing.

‘At least let me get you a drink, brother,’ said El-Sayed. ‘Some water if nothing else. You must be thirsty.’

The man didn’t look at El-Sayed, but he nodded.

El-Sayed waved at a barista and clicked his pudgy fingers. ‘You, bring him a water. Quickly.’

The barista hurried over with a bottle, twisted off the cap, put it down in front of the man, then scurried back behind the counter.

The man used his left hand to lift the bottle to his lips. El-Sayed smiled and sipped his coffee, then smiled encouragingly at his son. Hassan’s face was bathed in sweat and El-Sayed could smell the boy’s fear. He wanted to tell him that everything was going to be all right, but he had to take it one step at a time.

‘We’ve identified four of them now,’ said Waterman. She tapped on her keyboard and four pictures flashed up on her screen. All bearded Asian men, all in their twenties or thirties, they could have been cousins, if not brothers. ‘Top left, Mohammed Malik. Top right, Ismail Hussain. We talked about them earlier. Bottom left, Rabeel Bhashir, bottom right, Mohammed Faisal Chaudhry. Rarely uses the Mohammed as a Christian name.’ She pulled a face. ‘Whoops. Can’t say that, obviously. Anyway, we’re reasonably sure that Bhashir is in the church in Brixton. Chaudhry is the bomber in the pub in Marylebone.’

‘What do you mean you’re reasonably sure about Bhashir?’

‘Facial recognition isn’t an exact science,’ said Waterman. ‘A lot depends on the material we’re working with. One of the hostages posted a picture of him on Twitter but it was a side-on view. But even so we’re looking at an accuracy prediction of eighty per cent. We’re more sure about Chaudhry.’

‘And are either of them known?’

‘They’re both known, both on our watch lists, but at a low level.’

‘Then how could this happen?’ asked Kamran. ‘If they were being watched, how did they get suicide vests?’

‘There’s a difference between being watched and being on a watch list. They were considered possible threats, not direct threats.’

‘I’d say this was a pretty direct threat, wouldn’t you?’ asked Kamran. Captain Murray joined them, holding a cup of black coffee.

Waterman held up her hands. ‘Please, Superintendent, don’t go shooting the messenger here. At any one time we have literally thousands of British Asians on our watch lists. Just visiting a relative in Pakistan is enough to get them red-flagged, or posting on a jihadist website or tweeting in support of ISIS. But we don’t have the resources to put every one of them under full-time surveillance.’

‘So they were known to be potential problems, but not considered a serious threat?’

‘That’s the situation, yes.’

‘So what can you tell me about the latest two? What are we dealing with?’

The MI5 officer gestured at the bottom left photograph. ‘Rabeel Bhashir. He’s the oldest of the group by far. Forty-six next month. He came to the UK with his wife and two young daughters about twelve years ago. They claimed to be Afghan refugees but they are almost certainly Pakistanis. Arrived on a BA flight having burned their passports on the plane and flushed the ashes down the toilet. They were granted refugee status and five years later they all became citizens.’

‘You mean we can’t even tell what country they’re from?’ asked Kamran.

‘The border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan is porous at best,’ said Waterman. ‘You get a family saying they’re Afghans fleeing the Taliban and it’s hard to prove otherwise. They’ve destroyed their passports so where do you send them back to?’

‘Presumably they showed their passports to get onto the plane,’ said Captain Murray. ‘If they showed Pakistani passports, ship them back to Pakistan.’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ said Waterman. ‘There’s a whole industry geared to getting asylum-seekers accepted and settled. Anyway, Mr Bhashir was in the news last year when his daughters ran off to become jihadi brides in Syria. One was sixteen, the other fifteen.’

‘I remember that,’ said Kamran. ‘He blamed MI5 and the cops for not tipping him off that his daughters were leaving the country. Blamed the school for not keeping track of them. Then it turned out he was at a few flag-burning protests with one of the men who murdered Lee Rigby. One was outside the Israeli embassy and there’s a video of Bhashir screaming that all Jews should be killed.’

‘Was he arrested for that?’ asked Murray.

‘Not that I recall,’ said Kamran.

‘There were a lot of protesters and it would have been seen as inflammatory to start making arrests,’ said Waterman.

‘And what was the Lee Rigby connection?’ asked Murray.

‘One of Rigby’s killers, Michael Adebowale, was at one of the demonstrations with Bhashir, as was Anjem Choudary, the hate preacher.’

‘And despite that he wasn’t considered a threat?’ asked Murray, in disbelief.

‘They were at the same demonstration, so it’s only guilt by association,’ said Waterman.

‘But the fact that his daughters went to join ISIS should have been a red flag, surely,’ said the SAS captain.

‘As I said, he played the injured father perfectly. Blaming everyone else but himself. It was several months later that he was identified in the flag-burning episodes. I think it was the
Mail
that broke the story.’ Waterman pointed at the final photograph. ‘Mohammed Faisal Chaudhry. British born. Spent three months in Pakistan in 2014, we think for Al-Qaeda training but unfortunately we have no evidence. He returned to London at the end of the year and has been quiet since. He was a minicab driver before he went to Pakistan but has been on benefits since he got back. Runs a fundamentalist website but he’s careful to stay within the law.’

Kamran folded his arms and stared at the four photographs. ‘So we’ve got four men, none of whom was considered a direct threat. On the same day they all decide to put on suicide vests and take hostages. Someone is running them, right? Someone is pulling their strings.’

‘No question of that,’ said Waterman. ‘But so far we haven’t found anything that connects them personally. They are all Muslim men, all physically fit, three of them youngish and one middle-aged, all under fifty anyway, but other than that and the fact they live in London there doesn’t seem to be anything that ties them together.’

‘Except they’re all wearing explosive vests and seem prepared to blow themselves to kingdom come,’ said Murray, sourly.

Roger Metcalfe, OBE, really didn’t enjoy meeting the great unwashed, but his majority was under threat from a growing switch of his electorate to the United Kingdom Independence Party, which meant that his biweekly MP’s surgeries were more important than ever. If he could help a constituent with a planning application or write a letter in support of a visa application for a family member, hopefully that constituent would vote for him and, even more importantly, spread the word. The problem was, he wasn’t sure that he could help most of the people who came to the surgeries, and when he did help, he never seemed to get the credit. He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times a constituent he’d helped had written to thank him.

He sipped his coffee and waited for his assistant to bring in the next contestant, as he liked to think of them, because, more often than not, the consultation would turn into a battle. It always started the same way, with a smile and a handshake, but once they had outlined their problem and grasped that there wasn’t much Metcalfe could do to help them, their true natures were revealed. Metcalfe had been sworn at, slapped, spat at and had his life threatened more times than he could count. It was the sense of entitlement that he found so worrying. Men who had never worked a day in their lives felt they were entitled to a larger house for their families. Parents who spoke next to no English themselves, despite having lived in the UK for years, felt their children were entitled to teaching staff who spoke their home language. Obese women in disgustingly short skirts would bang on his desk and demand that the NHS pay for their gastric bands or boob jobs. Former asylum-seekers who had only just been granted citizenship would jab their fingers at him and demand that their newly discovered wives and children be allowed to join them in the UK. Metcalfe always promised to do what he could but there wasn’t much that was within his gift, these days. He’d been an MP for the best part of twenty years and had never felt so powerless. He was giving serious consideration to packing it in at the next election. The pay was bad and the public scrutiny was soul-destroying; he was treated as a punch-bag by his constituents and as voting fodder by the leaders of his party. He’d earn more money and have more respect if he went back to his former career – accountancy.

The door opened and his assistant, a recent political science graduate called Molly, who was prepared to work for a pittance to gain experience at the cutting edge of politics, opened the door and ushered in an elderly woman with white permed hair and skin the texture of parchment. The constituents who wanted to see him waited in an outside room until it was their turn to be brought in. Metcalfe had tried meetings where he addressed groups but they never went well and it didn’t take much to turn an unhappy bunch into a lynch mob. At least one at a time they could be controlled. She was wearing a cheap wool coat and had a black plastic handbag clasped to her chest. She sat down and perched the bag on her lap. ‘This is Mrs Ellis,’ said Molly. ‘She’s having problems with the council with regard to her spare bedroom.’

‘Bedrooms,’ said Mrs Ellis, primly. ‘They say I have two spare bedrooms even though one of them is a sewing room.’

‘It’s a council house, is it, Mrs Ellis?’ asked Metcalfe, his heart sinking as he anticipated exactly how the conversation would go. Thousands of council tenants had been hit by changes to housing benefit introduced in the Welfare Reform Act of 2012, which basically reduced the amount of money given to those who lived in homes larger than they actually needed.

She nodded and tightened her grip on the handles of her bag. ‘They want to cut my housing benefit,’ she said. ‘By twenty-five per cent. If they do that, I can’t live there any more. I just can’t afford it.’

‘Well, as I’m sure you know, the councils are trying to get the maximum use from their housing stock.’

‘But this is my house. I moved in there with my husband forty years ago, God rest his soul. Forty years, Mr Metcalfe, and now I’ll have to move out.’

‘No one is saying you have to move out, Mrs Ellis. The council is just asking you to pay for the rooms you don’t need.’

‘But that doesn’t make any sense. Why should I pay for something I don’t need?’ Metcalfe was struggling for an answer when the door burst open. A young, bearded Asian man stood there, with a look of confusion on his face, as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was.

Molly jerked out of her iPhone reverie but he had walked in before she had even got to her feet.

‘I’m sorry, there’s a queuing system,’ said Metcalfe. ‘We deal with people one at a time. You talk to Molly here and she’ll take your details.’ He smiled but the man didn’t appear to be listening. He walked up to the table and Metcalfe caught a whiff of stale sweat. There were flecks of white lint in the man’s straggly beard and hair and the whites of his eyes were threaded with tiny burst veins. Metcalfe wondered if he might be high on drugs. He stood and held up his hands defensively as the man continued to swivel his head from side to side. ‘Look, please, you really need to wait outside in the other room. I will get to you eventually.’