The Angel (3 page)

Chapter Five

P
ope went through his report once again.

The shooting had been two weeks ago, but it was still fresh. It had dominated the front pages of the newspapers every day since then and had been the subject of a quickly assembled BBC documentary entitled
Death of an Innocent
. For a man like Pope, required to work in the shadows, the publicity was exquisitely uncomfortable. The establishment could not possibly allow the truth of his unit’s involvement to come to light – that was a rabbit hole down which no investigation could ever be allowed to stray – and an extensive cover-up had been put into play. That, too, was embarrassing.

But it was none of his fault.

The Metropolitan Police and MI5 were searching for the members of a terrorist cell suspected of being in the final stages of an attack on the London transport system. A member of the public had found a bag that had been discarded on a common in Wanstead, East London. The dog walker had opened the bag and discovered that it contained a pipe bomb and a detonator.

A large police investigation and manhunt began immediately. An address in Homerton was written on a video rental shop membership card that was found inside the bag. The card was in the name of Ramzi Hassan Omar, and the address was a block of flats designated for those on low incomes. It housed a collection
of worki
ng-class families. Some were locals who had been driven out of the more affluent streets as property prices were pushed up by the influx of workers from the city. Others were first- and second-generation immigrants from all around the world, the kind of men and women who came to do the jobs that no native Londoners would do.

Fèlix Rubió was a cleaner who lived in one of the flats with his sister, her husband and their children. He worked for a company with a contract to service the offices of a leading London law firm. He was due into the office at 8 p.m., once most of the staff had gone home. He would work for five hours and finish at 1 a.m., when he would then work as the night-shift caretaker in a local
hospice. He was
, by all accounts, one of the nicest men you could ever hope to meet. Hard-working, honest and good-natured. Not the sort one would expect to have any truck with hard-line jiha
dist Islam.

The police had the block under heavy surveillance, and at seven-thirty, they saw Rubió emerge from the communal entrance.

The officer on duty had been unable to photograph him as he came out of the building’s lobby. Pope had heard that the man had been urinating, but whatever the reason, it was unfortunate for Rubió. The officer was unable to provide an image to Gold
Command
, the Metropolitan Police operational headquarters that was in charge of the investigation, and it was impossible to compare him to the passport images of the suspects who had been identified.

The commander in charge of Gold Command panicked.
He authorised officers to continue pursuit and surveillance, and ordered that Rubió was to be prevented from entering the Underground
system.

The officers trailed Rubió as he followed Kingsland Road to a bus stop. He took the No. 242 and headed south. Plainclothes police officers boarded, too, and kept him under close observation. He used his telephone during the trip into the city, and one of the officers thought that she heard the word ‘bomb’.

The surveillance officers believed that Rubió’s behaviour suggested that he might be one of the suspects and – worse – that he might be on his way to carry out an attack. The pursuing officers contacted Gold Command and reported their suspicions. Based on this information, Gold Command authorised ‘code red’ tactics and again ordered the surveillance officers to prevent Rubió from
entering
the public transport system. The commander ordered the surveillance team that Rubió was to be ‘detained as soon as
possible
,’ before entering the station.

Gold Command then transferred control of the operation to Group Fifteen. Pope had positioned all ten of his available agents within the boundary of the City of London, and he tasked
Numbers
Three and Twelve, McNair and Snow, to interdict the suspect. Snow’s inexperience within the Group was not ideal, but it was hardly the case that he was green. He was an experienced soldier with five years in the SAS. This kind of interdiction was something he had done many times before.

McNair was held up in traffic and had to sprint the remaining mile. Snow was there before him. In the meantime, confusion over the handover from the police to the Group meant that Rubió was allowed to enter Liverpool Street railway station at about 7.45 p.m., stopping to pick up a free newspaper from a distributor who stood in the lobby. He used his Oyster card to pay the fare, walked through the barriers and descended the escalator to the Central Line. He then ran across the platform to board the newly arrived train.

McNair arrived at street level as Snow was hurrying down the escalator to the platform.

Three surveillance officers followed Rubió onto the train. He had taken a seat with a glass panel to his right, about two seats in. The carriage had a handful of commuters leaving the city to go home. One of the plainclothes officers took a seat on the left, with about two or three passengers between Rubió and himself. When Snow arrived on the platform, a second officer moved to the door, blocked it from closing with his foot and called ‘He’s here!’ to identify Rubió’s location.

Snow boarded the train and shot him. The shell casings
collected
from the floor of the carriage indicated that he had fired eight rounds. Rubió was shot with a classic double tap – once in the chest and then once in the head – and died at the scene.

McNair arrived a minute later.

It took less than five minutes after that to understand that an awful mistake had been made.

McNair and Snow had followed protocol and left the scene at once. A cover story was concocted at short notice and then
calibrated
overnight. The surveillance officers were anonymised and described as members of the police’s elite CO19 firearms division. It was
suggested
that they had fired the fatal shots. There were
witnesses
on the train, but pressure was put on them so that they either agreed with the official account or stated that they were (conveniently) looking the other way.

The oak-panelled door to the conference room opened, and a smartly dressed woman stepped out. Pope glanced beyond her and saw a large circular table with a lot of severe-looking men and women sitting around it.

‘The committee will see you now,’ the woman said curtly.

Snow exhaled.

‘Ready?’ Pope said.

McNair stood and straightened out his suit. ‘Come on. Let’s get this over with.’

Snow followed them both inside.

The train was full, with smartly suited commuters heading into London for another day at work. Aamir was in the first carriage. They had split up on the platform. There was nothing to suggest that they would be compromised, but Mohammed had told
them th
at they needed to be careful. Three brown-skinned boys
heading
into London together with three heavy rucksacks might attract attention.

All the seats were taken, so Aamir stood in the aisle, balancing himself on the headrests of the seats on either side of him. He had the rucksack on the floor between his legs. Several of the other passengers were reading from newspapers, and Aamir was able to look at them over their shoulders. The front page of the popular free sheet was dominated by a messy celebrity divorce, but in a column on the right, there was the beginning of a story that reported that an allied bomb had destroyed a school in Aleppo. Aamir could only read the first three paragraphs, but he didn’t need to read the rest to know what the story would say.
Children
massacred. He could almost hear Mohammed’s voice angrily denouncing the ‘imperialists’ and ‘crusaders’. He remembered the words of the clerics who distributed their sermons on CDs so that believers did not have to use the Internet to hear them. It was wrong, Aamir thought. People needed to know that it was wrong. Mohammed had explained it all to him. The only way their
message
would be heard was to respond in kind. They needed to use the
same languag
e.

The train took fifty minutes to reach Kings Cross. Aamir was jostled by other passengers as they surged for the exit, and he wondered whether they would be so brusque and rude if they knew who he was and what he was carrying. What he was here to do.
They don’t know yet,
he thought,
but they will. They all will.

He disembarked and saw the back of Bashir’s head as he
disappeared
down into the tunnel that led to the Underground.

He followed.

Chapter Six

P
ope, McNair and Snow took the three empty chairs at the head of the table. The conference room had not been decorated for decades. It was panelled in oak that was warped and cracked. The table was new, but so modern and cheap that it looked out of place here. It was also too big; it was four metres long and one metre wide and would have been able to accommodate fourteen men and women around it. The chairs at each end could barely be pulled out without bumping against the wall.

The passing traffic on Whitehall and Northumberland
Avenue
was far enough removed to be reduced to a gentle hushing.
Pope he
ard a footfall in the corridor outside, the rustle of pigeons on
the para
pet outside the window, the whipping of a radio mast in the wind overhead, the gurgle of water in the antiquated central heating system.

It was oppressively stuffy. Pope unbuttoned his jacket and
settled
in his uncomfortable chair. Snow and McNair sat on e
ither side of him.

This was a meeting of the Intelligence Steering Committee, the body that was putatively responsible for overseeing the secretive work of the MI5/MI6 intelligence operation known within its own walls as ‘the Firm’. The organisation was as labyrinthine as the building that accommodated it.

It was divided into fifteen separate Groups. Each was supposed to mesh seamlessly with the others, but in practice, there was as much interdepartmental conflict as one might expect to find in any office of the same size and complexity. Group Three, for example, was responsible for providing intelligence through watching and
listening
– what the Americans would crassly refer to as IMINT
and SIG
INT – together with liaising with the electronic dragnet that was GCHQ. Group Five maintained dead-drop ‘post boxes’ and safe houses for agents in the field, and was also the home Group for the postmen who were tasked with couriering intelligence and equipment around the world. Other Groups were
dedicated
to research and development, cryptography and cryptanalysis, interpreting and transcription, forgery, vetting, interrogation and research. Service Departments ensured the smooth running of the Old War Office. They occupied themselves with the daily functioning of the building, pay and pensions, the personal problems of agents, the storage of documents and the maintenance of security.

Each Group was led by a man or woman referred to as ‘
Control
’. Pope was responsible for Group Fifteen. His agents were regarded with a measure of fear by the other staff. In the fashion that the operatives of Group Five were known as ‘postmen’, and those who worked in cryptanalysis were ‘crackers’, the agents of Group Fifteen were referred to as ‘headhunters’. Assassinations and other wet work comprised a large part of their responsibilities, but not all of them. They carried out the Firm’s extrajudicial dirty work: burglaries, kidnapping, blackmail. They were responsible for bodyguarding other members of the intelligence community, emissaries of the government or businessmen and women who were important to British interests overseas. They were all well-regarded
soldiers
before they were selected, but after their year of training at the Manor House, the Group’s establishment in Antsy, Wiltshire, they emerged as something else entirely: ethically flexible operators who were adept at submerging themselves within foreign cultures. When so ordered, they became murderers who emerged from cover to eliminate their targets without regret or compunction before disappearing again like shrimps into sand.

The Committee had been imposed on the Firm following the scandals involving John Milton and Beatrix Rose, two Group
Fifteen
operatives who had gone rogue. The government had installed it as an extra layer of control that would also act as a suppressant to a potentially flammable political situation, should the full details of the organisation’s activities ever come to light. The Committee was a mixed inter-ministerial body composed of representatives from Westminster and Whitehall. It brought together senior members of the Cabinet and Whitehall mandarins, and was placed between the intelligence fraternity and the government as a guiding light or, as required, a brake. The staff of the Firm, sceptical to the last, had dubbed it the ‘Star Chamber’.

Sir Benjamin Stone, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, was on Pope’s right. He was in his late fifties, a moderately large man, a shade under six foot tall, with an accumulating gut. His hair was lank and grey, and his smile was as warm as a corpse.

The woman opposite him was Home Secretary Elizabeth
Morley
, a high-serving member of the cabinet ever since the
election
. Appointed home secretary three years ago, she was
hawkish
,
aggressively
right wing and possessed of an infamously short temper.

The woman to her left was Eliza Cheetham, the director general of the Secret Service. She was in her early sixties and more handsome now than the beauty that he knew she had been when she was younger. She was dressed in simple loose-fitting trousers and a shirt with a jacket over the top.

There was one other man. Pope knew him, too. His name was
Vivian
Bloom. He was the permanent liaison between the Firm and the Government. He had briefly been the sub-rector of
Lincoln
College, Oxford, and his previous profession was the reason
for the
nickname
by which he was most commonly referred to within
the Firm
: The Reverend. Bloom must have been in his late seventies and had held on to his position through dint of the knowledge he had acquired over the course of his long career and, Pope assumed, the secrets he held over those who might otherwise have ushered him into his dotage. He had cut his teeth during the Cold War, and his successful work in recruiting agents at Berlin Station was legendary. Pope wondered how he liked this new world, where the monolithic Soviet enemy had been replaced by a myriad of asymmetric threats.

Bloom was plain and average, very much the archetypal bachelor don, remarkable only for his dreadful dress sense. He dressed like a man with a modest budget but no taste whatsoever. His suit was a little too baggy for him around the shoulders and waist, cinched in with a leather belt. His shirt had been washed too many times, the collar turning inwards and fraying at the tips. His top button was undone, and his tie looked as if it had been knotted by a child. He managed his terrible eyesight with a pair of thickly-lensed spectacles that had the effect of magnifying his pupils. He was pudgy and red cheeked, and his thin hair was cut short to his scalp, as if he couldn’t be bothered with anything that would have required more than an occasional wash.

Cheetham cleared her throat. ‘Thank you for coming, Captain Pope. And these are Sergeants McNair and Snow?’

‘That’s right. Agents Three and Twelve.’

‘Thank you for coming, gentlemen.’

Snow nodded but didn’t speak. McNair grunted.

‘We’ve been briefed by Benjamin,’ she said. ‘But we wanted to speak to you before we reach a conclusion.’

The atmosphere in the room was tense, and Pope got the
feeling
that a decision had already been made. This, he worried, was just window dressing. An attempt to give the impression that a
thorough
enquiry had been undertaken. An exercise to provide the
justification
for the course of action that would follow.

‘Of course, ma’am,’ he said.

‘Bit of a mess, wasn’t it, Captain?’