The Angel (17 page)

‘Position?’

‘Heading north-east. Just going through Crans-près-Céligny.’

Pope looked at the satnav stuck to the inside of the windscreen. The convoy was three miles further up the road. He needed to get there as quickly as he could. He was driving fast, nudging the car up to eighty as he tried to catch up with them. The limit was
seventy-five
, and he knew that the road was usually heavily policed, but he couldn’t dawdle. If al-Khawari’s men were good, and he had reason to believe that they were, they would be skilled in counter-surveillance. It was very easy to identify a single pursuer. If they made Kelleher and Snow, all they would need to do would be to peel off onto a quieter road and see whether they followed. If they did, they would be suspicious. Another turn onto another quiet road would confirm their speculation. A two-car surveillance, though not
optimal
, would increase their chances of staying undetected. In an ideal world, Pope would have operated a ‘floating box,’ with multiple cars that could merge into and drift out of the
pursuit
. But this was not a perfect world, and they would have to make do with what they had.

He saw them half a mile ahead and started to slow down so that he was travelling just a little faster than they were.

‘I’ve got a visual on you,’ he said into his mic.

‘Want us to drop off?’

He looked at the satnav again. ‘There’s a turning two hundred yards ahead on your right.’

‘I see it.’

‘It’ll pick up this road again in a mile.’

‘Copy.’

Pope watched as Kelleher and Snow decelerated, indicated and turned off.

He edged closer to the Land Rover at the rear of the convoy. He could see nothing through the darkened windows, but they were driving carefully, observing the speed limit. He marshalled the gap between them, getting a clearer view of the other two cars as they followed a gentle bend in the road. There was a uniform twenty feet between each car and the next.

They were on the E62. It was the main thoroughfare along the northern shore of the lake, and it would have appeared natural for Pope to have been behind the convoy. The roads coming off it were minor ones, not ones that it would be unusual to keep missing. Kelleher reported that she and Snow were back on the E62, and Pope told them to keep their distance in case he needed them, but as they travelled on, he grew more comfortable. They hadn’t been made yet, and he saw no reason why that would change.

He saw a sign for Rolle, and the lead Discovery indicated that it was going to come off the main route and follow the turn.

‘They’re coming off,’ Pope radioed. ‘I’ll go ahead and come around. You follow.’

‘Copy.’

Pope drove on for half a mile and then took the next left-hand turn off the E62, coming back on himself and entering the village from the north. He passed the Chateau de Rolle and the Île de la Harpe in the lake, an artificial island with an obelisk poking from between the trunks of a clutch of trees. Kelleher radioed their location and Pope navigated to the north-west, taking the Route de Gilly and then the Avenue du Jura until he saw the signs for the Institut Le Rosey and realised where the convoy must be going.

‘It’s a school,’ he radioed.

‘There’s a long driveway. They’ve turned onto it. We’re going on.’

‘I’ll go past for a look. Stop in Rolle. I’ll radio in fifteen
minutes
.’

Pope parked the car for a second time and followed the narrow road back to the south, retracing his route. The property to the east was demarked by a tall stone wall. He continued until he came to a pair of impressive stone pillars with ‘CHATEAU DU ROSEY’ engraved into each of them. There was a pair of security cameras on tall posts set just behind the pillars, so he continued onwards, following the lazy curve of the wall until he was far enough away from the cameras to be confident that he would not be seen. A young oak grew out of the verge between the road and the start of the wall, and after checking that the road was clear, Pope clambered up it.

He pulled himself onto the top of the wall and brought out his binoculars again.

The road wound its way through picturesque grounds until it straightened out into an avenue lined by elms. The road stopped at a collection of buildings that were half a kilometre away from his position. Pope’s eye was drawn to a chateau and, set around it, a campus comprised of a series of impressive buildings. He found the two Land Rovers and the Bentley. They had parked alongside a two-storey building painted a mellow yellow, with red tiles on the sharply sloping roof. He watched as al-Khawari and the boy he now assumed to be his son got out of the car. One of the heavies brought a suitcase down from his Discovery and hauled it to the entrance of the building that they were nearest to.

‘Nine, Control. What’s going on?’

‘That was the school run,’ he said quietly. ‘Ask around town. See what you can find out about this place.’

‘Will do.’

Pope watched the buildings a little longer. He saw a group of teenagers exiting one of the buildings, milling around near to the Bentley. Al-Khawari was talking to the boy, but as they noticed the newcomers, something was said, and they shared an awkward embrace. The boy turned and went to join the other pupils.

Pope had an idea.

Chapter Thirty-Five

M
ichael Pope was at the same motorway services as before. It was raining heavily and he had taken shelter inside. The building was arranged as a large atrium with fast-food outlets and coffee shops around its edges. The space in the middle was given over to seating and tables. It was busy, noisy and hot. Pope sipped at his cup of coffee and kept a cautious watch of the people around him: families struggling with
children
,
businessmen
and women stopping to use the facilities before
heading
off to wherever it was that they were needed. There was a big LCD screen on the other side of the room, and Pope glanced at it occasionally. It was showing the first pictures from inside the damaged ticket hall at Westminster. He had watched the footage in his hotel room when it had been released last night, but the broadcasters kept returning to it again and again. Pope found it all a little salacious. He had switched channels to try to find something else, but it seemed that every programme had some connection with t
he atta
ck.

He saw Vivian Bloom at the entrance, gave a slight tilt of his head and waited for him to come over.

‘Bloody weather.’

Bloom was wet. He took off his dripping overcoat and folded it over the back of the chair.

Pope took the envelope of photographs and passed them across the table.

Bloom looked at them, picked one up and looked at it more closely. There were twelve in all. Pope had sent Hannah Kelleher to Marrakech the afternoon following the surveillance of al-Khawari on the way to Le Rosey. She had located the target and put her under close surveillance.

The photographs had been taken with a long lens from positions that would have made it very difficult for the subject to know that she was being observed. Pope recognised the locales from his own visits to Marrakech to see the girl’s mother two years ago. There was a picture of the central square, Jemma el-Fnaa, the girl bartering with a local tradesman for a bag of fresh oranges. There was another as she came out of a grocery store with a bag of supplies. Another showed her disappearing into the mouth of a
narrow
,
darkened
alleyway, the sort that made close surveillance almost impossible in the city.

The subject of the series of photographs was Isabella Rose. Pope knew that the girl was fifteen, although, as he had confirmed when he had met her on the South Bank on the day of the attacks, she could easily have passed for much older than that. These photos, though, had captured something in her that he hadn’t noticed when they had met. The girl had always looked like her mother. She
had t
he same blonde hair, the same blue eyes, the same porcelain skin. But she had grown up. She was taller. Her hair was longer. More fundamental than either of those changes was the severe cast that lay behind her beautifully defined features. Her mother had had the same edge to her appearance, an otherworldly bleakness that Pope had always found unnerving. Isabella had it, too. It was chilling in one so young.

Now, the likeness between mother and daughter was truly striking.

The final shot was in profile. The girl was wearing a sleeveless top and was turned so that her right-hand side was presented to the camera. There were tattoos of two roses on her right shoulder and arm. Beatrix had had the same tattoos, adding another each time she eliminated one of the names on her list. She had never had the chance to add the final rose, the one that would denote her
murder
of Pope’s despicable predecessor as head of Group Fifteen. Her daughter had completed the set for her.

As far as he knew, there were no photographs of Isabella Rose that existed in the information held by Her Majesty’s government. There had been an entire file on the girl, but Pope had arranged for Group Two to have that deleted, together with every official reference that she had ever existed. It was a last favour for Beatrix, the request of a dying woman who had been so badly wronged by her country. He had been unable to refuse it.

Bloom dropped the photographs on the table and looked up with a sceptical expression on his face.

‘You’re serious?’

‘I am.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘You want to send a fifteen-year-old girl to spy on al-Khawari?’

‘I do.’

‘And you know how foolish that sounds, Captain?’

‘She’s not an ordinary girl. Her mother worked for Group
Fifteen
. She was Number One before John Milton and before me.’

‘What? That’s Beatrix Rose’s girl?’

‘That’s right. Isabella.’

‘I thought we lost her?’

‘No, sir, that’s not strictly true. I gave Beatrix my word that
I woul
d hide her. We didn’t think it would be safe for her after what she was planning for Control. Her mother made some very influential enemies.’

Bloom nodded. Beatrix’s quest for revenge had caused ripples around the world. Control and his five rogue agents had been
working
for Manage Risk, a large and powerful American private
military
contractor. Beatrix had eliminated them, one after
the oth
er, and the fight had concluded on American soil near to The Lodge, Manage Risk’s vast headquarters in North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp. Isabella had murdered Control and two guards in a North Carolina hospital. Pope and Milton had arrived in time to get the girl to safety.

‘What are you proposing, Control?’

‘Isabella is an unusually talented girl. Her mother trained her thoroughly in the year they had together before she started to work her way through her list. She’s had weapons training, she’s fit and strong and she’s been given the rudiments of surveillance and
counter
-surveillance. She has no family and no friends that I can find. She won’t be missed. I am proposing that we give her a new identity and a cover story, and enrol her into that school with the aim of ingratiating herself with Khalil al-Khawari.’

‘The son.’

‘Correct.’

‘What would that achieve?’

‘We’ve investigated his social media accounts. It’s his sixteenth birthday next month, sir. Look at this.’

Pope spread printouts from the boy’s Facebook page over the photographs of Isabella. Bloom looked at them. The printouts contained details of Khalil al-Khawari’s birthday party. It was to be held at his father’s property on the shore of Lake Geneva.

‘We would be there with her. Number Nine and Number Twelve would be her parents. I’d be there, too. There might be another way to get inside, but if there isn’t, we can run this in the background.’

Eventually, a small smile curled the crinkled edges of
Bloom’s mouth.

‘You know this is madness?’

‘A little,’ Pope admitted.

‘And you know that there is no way I would be able to get it approved?’

‘That’s an issue for you, sir.’

Bloom steepled his fingers. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘With all respect, does anyone have a better idea?’

‘No,’ Bloom said. ‘They don’t.’

Chapter Thirty-Six

T
he house was in Leytonstone, in the East End of
London
. Queen’s Road was a short distance from the Underground station. A Victorian terrace ran along both sides, with
gardens
between the front of the houses and the road. Most of
the gardens
had been concreted over to provide parking spaces, and those cars that could not be parked off the road were crammed on both sides, leaving enough room for a single car to pass through. Wheelie bins were left on the pavements, bushes that had never been cut back towered out of overgrown gardens, and Union Jacks and the cross of Saint George were hung against the inside of
windows
.

Mohammed drove along the terrace, turned and then drove back. He saw nothing to suggest that the house was unsafe, but nevertheless, it paid to be careful. He found a space on the side of the road fifty feet farther along and reversed into it. He waited there for
two hour
s, watching the comings and goings. Elderly women pushed shopping trolleys toward the parade of shops near to the station. Tattooed skinheads walked muscular attack dogs. Kids with nothing better to do smoked cigarettes and drank from bottles wrapped in brown paper bags. It was a poor area, down at heel, with a diverse range of ethnicities and a transient population. The sort of place it was easy to disappear into.

He listened to the radio. There was a discussion about the
terrorist
atrocity and the steps that needed to be taken to combat it. The usual roll call of suspects was rehashed. Al-Qaeda seemed to
be th
e favourite at this early stage, although there was the
suggestion
that the Islamic State was a possibility, too.
The usual knee-jerk
reaction
,
Mohammed thought.
It must be the Islamic bogeyman. How convenient. How easy.
They had much to learn. The discussion moved on to what would happen once the investigation had determined who was to blame. The presenter referred to a snap opinion poll, taken that day, which recorded that the percentage of people who would be prepared to back military action had climbed by 10 per cent. The reluctance to commit British troops to foreign wars seemed to be waning. The thirst for revenge was growing stronger.

Mohammed heard the distinctive
thwup-thwup-thwup
of a
Chinook
and looked up through the windshield as the big, two-rotored chopper rumbled overhead. There was an airfield at the
Honourable
Artillery Company in Central London. It must have been headed there. It was an apt underlining of the increasingly
martial
mood. It wasn’t unusual to see the military in or over
London
these days. That had been anticipated, and he was glad to see it.

Mohammed kept a careful watch on the property throughout the two hours. Nothing struck him as suspicious. Eventually, he concluded that it was safe enough for him to enter.

He approached the property. Mohammed had seen the place advertised on Gumtree and knew that it would be perfect for his purposes. He had paid for a six-month tenancy in cash, the landlord asking him no awkward questions and the paperwork kept to a minimum. The garden had been paved over, and the husk of an old and broken washing machine stood against the wall. The bins had been covered in graffiti and were filled with fetid black bin liners that had been dumped there by neighbours. The front door opened into a small porch with a screen door behind it.

Mohammed took out his key, unlocked the front door, went inside, unlocked the screen door and then stepped into the quiet house. He was in the small sitting room. He had drawn the floral curtains the first time he had visited, and he had kept them closed since. Grey, insipid light leached through the thin fabric, revealing the moth-eaten sofa, the gas fire and the paint that was peeling in leprous folds from the walls. He paused and listened. He could hear the sound of a muffled argument from the street outside, but there was no sound in here. He breathed in, smelling the faintest tang of cordite. Not too strong, but there, and easily identifiable if you knew what it smelled like.

Mohammed knew.

The front room led to a corridor with stairs going up to the first floor. Mohammed had been sleeping up there, but he had other business to attend to today. The kitchen was at the back of the house next to the downstairs toilet. There was a window to the
side th
at was half covered with a dirty roller blind, with enough space beneath it to give a glimpse into an overgrown garden. There was a door beneath the stairs. He opened it and pulled the drawstring to switch on the light. The sixty-watt bulb glowed brightly, casting its light onto the flight of rough concrete steps that led down into the
cellar
. He had to duck his head as he descended, reaching the foot and then reaching out for the light switch for the strip light that he had fitted to give himself the illumination to do what he needed to do.

The basement was large, filling the footprint of the reception room and kitchen that were above it. He had bought a large decorator’s trestle table from B&Q and unfolded it so that he had a large enough surface to work on. The three old artillery shells were on the floor next to the table. They were about two feet in length, reaching up to just below his knee. They were cylindrical, with an ogive-shaped nose that made them look like oversized bullets. They were easy enough to find. Eastern Europe was awash with them, and a contact in Chechnya had sourced six for him. They had been smuggled into the country on the same trawler as the gunmen who had stormed the Palace of Westminster, collected in a rented panel van and driven to London. It had been very, very easy. Mohammed had known that it would be.

He took one of the shells and heaved it up, carefully lowering it onto the table so that he could get at the fat rounded end. The shell was equipped with a percussive fuse that detonated the explosive on impact with the ground. Provided he was careful, it was safe to handle. He used an electric saw to cut away the cartridge case that held the propellant charge, so that he could get to the projectile itself. He opened it up and started to scoop out the explosive inside. He made a pile of it on the table. Each shell contained eight kilograms of plastic bonded explosive. The three bombs that he had prepared for the first attack had been created from the explosive that he had accumulated from the first three shells.

He took a plastic Tupperware container and swept the explosive into it. There were already fifteen full containers on the table. He was planning on twenty-five. The rest of his equipment was on
the flo
or. He had bought twenty bags of galvanised 30 mm nails. He had sp
read those purchases out across several builders’ merchants
so as not to arouse suspicion. They would be packed in tight around the explosive to maximise the damage the blast would cause. He had two suitcases; cheap wheeled ones that he had found in a
shopping
centre near Dalston Kingsland station. And he
had two
pay-as-you-go mobile phones that he had picked up from the
Carphone
Warehouse in the same precinct. He’d soldered wires to the speaker output circuits of each phone so that when they rang, current would flow to the trigger of a thyristor that would then send current to the alligator clips that he had fastened to the detonators.

He only had to finish with the explosive, and he would be ready. It was another three or four hours.

He picked up a fresh shell, lowered it to the table and started to work.