Spider Shepherd 11 - White Lies Page 10

  Shepherd peered at the picture. The faces of most of the figures were hidden and he wouldn’t have been able to recognise anyone from the grainy photograph. Willoughby-Brown pushed over the second photograph. The men were on their feet, facing a bearded man dressed in white. The figure that Willoughby-Brown said was Raj was still blurred.

  ‘We’ve had them enhanced, and we’re reasonably sure it’s him.’

  ‘When were these taken?’

  ‘The time and date and map reference are on the back,’ said Willoughby-Brown.

  Shepherd turned the photograph over. It had been taken four days earlier. His mobile phone beeped. He’d received a message. He took a quick look at it. It was Charlotte Button.

  ‘Anything important?’ asked Willoughby-Brown.

  ‘Not really,’ said Shepherd.

  Shepherd left the MI6 building and walked back to his car, deep in thought. A black Lexus was parked behind his SUV. As he reached his car the rear door of the Lexus opened and Charlotte Button climbed out. She was wearing a Barbour jacket and dark green corduroy trousers and she thrust her hands into her pockets as she walked towards him, her shoulder-length chestnut hair blowing in the wind. ‘How did it go?’ she asked.

  ‘As well as can be expected, I suppose,’ said Shepherd.

  He climbed into the front seat of his BMW as Button walked around to the passenger door. He left the engine switched off but sat with his hands on the steering wheel. ‘How much do you know about what’s going on?’ he asked as she sat down and pulled the door shut.

  ‘Very little,’ said Button. ‘Just that there’s a problem with Raj and that your expertise was required.’

  ‘But you’re my boss, why wouldn’t you be in the picture?’

  Button shrugged. ‘Five and Six are separate entities and their operations do tend to be more secretive than ours.’

  ‘How well do you know Willoughby-Brown? If that is his name.’

  Button frowned. ‘By reputation only. Is there a problem?’

  Shepherd’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. ‘I don’t know if it’s a problem. But I’m being asked to do something above and beyond the call of duty and I’m getting a bad feeling about it.’

  ‘They’re putting you in harm’s way?’

  Shepherd nodded. ‘Very much so. If it was you asking me to do it, that’d be fine. But Willoughby-Brown and I have a history.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Yeah, I ran into him in Sierra Leone. He used me and a few mates on a couple of operations, which was fair enough, but I never really trusted him.’

  ‘He was with MI6 back then?’

  ‘Yeah. Strutted around in an MCC tie as if he owned the place. Have you met him?’

  ‘No. I haven’t even spoken to him. There’s surprisingly little mixing between the two agencies.’

  ‘And they’ve told you nothing about what they’re asking me to do?’

  Button shook her head. ‘If you’re not happy, you can always turn it down.’

  ‘I can’t. Raj’s life is on the line.’ He turned to look at her. ‘I need to talk this through with you.’

  Button looked pained. ‘I can’t, Spider. I’m sorry. This is a Six operation, it’s nothing to do with Five. I shouldn’t even be here.’

  ‘That’s not good enough. I need your advice, if not your help.’

  ‘I can’t do that, Spider. I’m sorry.’

  ‘So I’m on my own?’

  ‘You’re not on your own. You’re attached to Six.’ She folded her arms. ‘I need a drink.’

  ‘You and me both.’

  She flashed him a tight smile. ‘Find us a bar,’ she said. ‘You’re buying.’

  Shepherd parked outside a pub in Battersea. There were two bars either side of the main door. There was a pub quiz going on in the bar on the left so they turned right. Button went to a table in the corner while Shepherd went to the bar and paid for a glass of white wine and a Jameson’s whiskey with ice and soda. He went over to the table, gave Button the wine and sat down. He toasted her and sipped his whiskey.

  ‘What is it you want, Spider?’ she said.

  ‘I want someone watching my back,’ said Shepherd, leaning towards her. ‘I want someone who knows what I’m doing and why so that if the shit hits the fan I’m not out on a limb.’ He smiled. ‘Forgive the clichés.’

  ‘I told you, it’s not my operation. If it was …’ She shrugged. ‘There’s no point in my finishing that sentence because if it had been any operation of mine I wouldn’t have involved Raj.’ She ran a hand through her hair. ‘I was told to put you in touch with Willoughby-Brown and facilitate your secondment to Six. The actual details of the Six operation are need-to-know.’ She stared at him for several seconds, then took a long drink of wine. She raised her eyebrows appreciatively. ‘Good choice.’

  ‘The barman recommended it.’

  She took another sip then put her glass back down on the table. ‘Officially I can’t know anything,’ she said. ‘And officially we never had this conversation.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘This is putting me in a very difficult position, you realise that?’

  Shepherd nodded. ‘Not half as difficult as the position I’m being put in, believe me.’

  ‘And you have a problem with this Willoughby-Brown?’

  ‘I don’t trust him,’ said Shepherd. ‘And if it was you asking me to go to Pakistan, of course I’d do it, no questions asked.’

  She smiled. ‘That’s good to know,’ she said. ‘OK, tell me everything.’

  Shepherd quickly laid out what it was that Willoughby-Brown wanted him to do. Button listened, her face a blank mask, until he’d finished. ‘I can see why you’d be uneasy,’ she said eventually.

  ‘That’s an understatement,’ he said. ‘The thing is, Raj is in danger so I can’t not help. But joint operations are never a good idea at the best of times and the Pakistani special forces don’t have the best reputation.’

  ‘They’ve had their moments,’ said Button.

  ‘There’s no way that this could be an off-the-books operation, is there?’

  Button’s eyes narrowed. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘This whole need-to-know business worries me. You’re my boss so it seems only right that they’d want to keep you in the loop. In Sierra Leone, Willoughby-Brown seemed to be doing things off his own bat. I got the feeling that back then he was on a very long leash, getting us to do stuff without clearing it with the office. In fact some of the stuff he got us to do, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have got official approval.’

  ‘But you did it anyway.’

  Shepherd grinned. ‘We were SAS, we were bloody invincible. A lot of the time we had nothing to do so it helped relieve the boredom.’ He took a sip of whiskey. ‘So that’s why alarm bells are ringing now. He’s screwed up, obviously. He was running Raj and Raj has been caught. I wonder if he’s using the SAS again to save his own skin.’

  ‘Without clearing it? I think that’s very unlikely.’

  ‘Unlikely or impossible?’

  ‘Nothing’s ever impossible,’ said Button. ‘But sure, it’s highly improbable, especially these days. What’s your main concern?’

  Shepherd shrugged. ‘Where do I start? He wants me to go in with a team that I have zero experience with. He’s promised me a few rehearsals when I get to Pakistan, but storming a building with armed targets is a bloody dangerous business. Before I went with the SEALs to get Bin Laden I spent a week rehearsing entries in North Carolina and another week in Nevada practising helicopter assaults. And despite all that it ended up as a cock-up on the night; they crashed a helicopter and ended up having to blast their way in through the front door.’

  ‘Helicopters crash, they’re inherently unstable,’ said Button.

  ‘Agreed. But that’s more of a reason to be with a team you can depend on,’ said Shepherd. ‘When I was in the SAS, you knew everyone, you knew what they’d d
o in every possible situation. Most of the time you’d know where they were without looking. Once you start bringing new faces in, the risk goes up exponentially. A stray bullet in the back can seriously ruin your day. Happened in Sierra Leone, a warrant officer I knew got shot by a Para. He was wearing body armour so he was OK, but even so.’

  ‘They want you on the operation so that Raj will see a friendly face, presumably?’

  Shepherd nodded. ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘So you can hang back, take more of an observer’s role, same as you did on Neptune Spear.’

  ‘Sure. And I’ll do that. But the picture worries me. What if something goes wrong? I’m out there on my own. What if Willoughby-Brown denies all knowledge of me?’

  ‘You think he’d throw you to the wolves?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time that MI6 had abandoned an agent,’ said Shepherd.

  She sipped her wine. ‘What do you think I’ll be able to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Like I said, watch my back.’

  ‘From here? Thousands of miles away? What can I do?’

  Shepherd rubbed the back of his neck. He could feel the tendons there, as taut as steel wires. ‘Keep an eye on the operation. Listen to the chatter. I don’t think Willoughby-Brown is telling me everything.’

  Button smiled. ‘You’re asking me to spy on spies?’

  ‘Pretty much, yes.’

  Button drained her glass. ‘Tell you what, get me another drink and it’s a deal.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ said Button. ‘You’re one of my best men, I don’t want anything to happen to you.’

  Rafiq didn’t know how many men were keeping him prisoner, but he knew how many had beaten him. Four so far: all Pakistanis, all in their thirties or forties, and all intent on causing him as much pain as they could without actually killing him. They tended to work in pairs, one carrying out the beating while the other one stood at the door holding a weapon, sometimes a handgun, sometimes an AK-47. The gun was unnecessary because Rafiq didn’t have the strength to fight back. All he could do was curl up and pray for the beating to stop. There were no questions and when he asked them what they wanted from him, they remained silent. They slapped him, they punched him and they kicked him. And once one of the men used a cane and whipped Rafiq’s legs and backside so hard that the welts bled. Sometimes Rafiq would pass out, but the men seemed skilled at what they were doing and would pull back just before his consciousness faded, waiting for him to recover, before starting again. Rafiq soon lost all sense of time. He wasn’t aware of the hours passing, he didn’t even know if it was day or night. He was either being beaten, or he was lying on the floor waiting for the next beating to start. That was his life now. There was nothing else. Just the pain. And the anticipation of the pain. They would kill him eventually, he was sure of that. He didn’t want to die. Nobody wanted to die. But he didn’t think he could take the pain for much longer.

  Shepherd spent the night at the Premier Inn, part of the massive riverside building that had once been County Hall. He caught a black cab to the MI6 building at eight o’clock the following morning. ‘So are you James Bond, then?’ asked the driver as they drove to Vauxhall Bridge.

  ‘Yeah, that’s me,’ said Shepherd. ‘Licensed to kill.’

  ‘But you work there?’

  ‘Just visiting,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Weird, innit?’ said the driver. ‘They’re spies, right? They do secret stuff. So why would they tell everyone where they’re based?’

  ‘That’s a good question,’ said Shepherd. ‘It makes no sense to me, either.’

  ‘And if you were really spies, why would you want to be in a building by the river where anyone can take a potshot at it? Like the IRA did back in 2000. I was working in Battersea when they did it, fired a bazooka from across the river. Bang!’

  Shepherd nodded. In fact it was a Russian-built Mark 22 anti-tank weapon and it was never likely to do any serious damage to the building. But the driver was right. Open government was a wonderful idea in theory, but when it came to spies it made no sense to have them or their headquarters on public display. Far better to have them in a secluded location surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. Which is exactly where he’d like to have Willoughby-Brown billeted.

  The cab dropped him outside the building and Shepherd headed inside. This time it was Willoughby-Brown himself who came down to take him upstairs. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on the previous day and he didn’t seem to have shaved. His shirtsleeves were still rolled up and there were dark sweat stains under the armpits. ‘Have you had breakfast?’ he asked as they rode up in the lift to the fifth floor.

  Shepherd shook his head.

  ‘Me neither. Let me have a smoke and then we’ll have a bite.’ Willoughby-Brown took him along to the terrace where he took out his cigar case and lit one of his small cigars and flicked the match away. ‘So, the good news is that the Pakistanis are getting ready to go in and they’ve approved your involvement.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A couple of days. They’re getting their ducks in a row as we speak.’

  ‘What ducks?’

  ‘The personnel. The equipment. Logistics.’

  ‘The longer they leave it, the more pain Raj is going through.’

  ‘They know that.’

  ‘But do they care?’ asked Shepherd. ‘If they know where he is, why don’t they just go in?’

  ‘They don’t want to rush it,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘Softly-softly, catchee monkey. On the plus side, it gives you time to get out there.’

  ‘I’d like to go to Hereford first, to get in some practice. It’s been a while since I’ve held anything bigger than a handgun.’

  ‘Can you get there and back by tomorrow?’

  ‘With your help, sure.’

  ‘I’ll fix that up after breakfast.’

  Shepherd nodded. ‘You still haven’t told me what Raj was doing in Pakistan.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ asked Willoughby-Brown.

  ‘Don’t pull that need-to-know bullshit,’ snapped Shepherd. ‘I need to know everything there is to know.’

  The MI6 man blew bluish smoke into the sky before speaking. ‘MANPADS,’ he said. ‘You know what a MANPAD is, of course.’

  Shepherd nodded. ‘Man-portable air-defence systems. Shoulder-launched surface-to-air-missiles. Weapon of choice for taking out a low-flying aircraft or a helicopter. And just so you know, there’s no such thing as a MANPAD. It’s always MANPADS. The S stands for system.’

  ‘I stand corrected,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘They’re the perfect terrorist’s weapon, portable, relatively cheap and damn effective. They’ve been used in South Africa, Georgia, Sri Lanka, Mombasa, Mogadishu, and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.’ He took a long pull on his cigar and blew smoke before continuing. ‘Manraj was being trained in the use of MANPADS. Him and other British-born Asians.’ He held up a hand. ‘Sorry. I mean Raj was being trained in the use of MANPADS. Anyway, they told him they wanted him in Pakistan to train him in the use of the 9K38 Igla. You’re familiar with it?’

  Shepherd nodded. Igla was Russian for ‘needle’ and the ground-to-air missile had been used by the Russian army since the eighties. ‘NATO calls it the Grouse, right?’

  ‘That’s the one. What makes it especially nasty is that the propellant acts as a high explosive once detonated by the warhead’s secondary charge. The whole thing, ready to fire, weighs less than forty pounds. Maximum range seventeen thousand feet and can hit anything travelling at less than seven hundred miles per hour.’ Willoughby-Brown took another pull on his cigar. ‘Just between you and me, Manraj – sorry, I mean Raj – wasn’t overly happy about making the trip. But he was told by his al-Qaeda handler that it was imperative that he went.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because they are in the process of shipping a consignment of Iglas to the UK. They want people trained to use them ready and
waiting for when they arrive.’

  ‘To attack what?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘To attack whatever the hell they want to attack,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘They could shoot civilian airliners at any of the major airports, they could do a lot of damage to pretty much any London landmark. Remember when the IRA fired an RPG at MI6 headquarters back in 2000? That’s nothing compared to what the Igla can do.’

  ‘Totally different piece of kit,’ said Shepherd. ‘And you’re saying that al-Qaeda is bringing Iglas into the UK?’

  ‘I’m not saying that, Raj’s handlers said as much. And not just one or two. Raj was one of six they took out training, and there’s every chance his wasn’t the only group.’

  ‘All Brits?’

  ‘So far as we know, yes. The idea seems to have been to take them to Pakistan for intensive training and then to get them back to the UK. Two were from London, two from Bradford and two from Birmingham.’

  ‘So multiple attacks.’

  ‘That’s what we were assuming. The hope was that Raj would come back and we could do a full debrief.’ He took another long pull on his cigar.

  ‘Where did al-Qaeda get the missiles from?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘They’ve been around for years,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘Most of them were looted from Saddam Hussein’s arsenals after the Gulf War.’

  ‘So why is it becoming an issue now?’

  ‘We think this particular consignment were in a US-controlled area and while the Yanks were there in force the missiles had to stay put. Now that the American troops are being wound down, the bad guys have been able to retrieve them.’

  ‘Do we know how many?’

  Willoughby-Brown shook his head. ‘We were depending on Raj coming back. They could be using two-man teams, they could be trained as individual shooters.’

  ‘Sounds to me you don’t know much,’ said Shepherd sourly.

  ‘It was an ongoing operation,’ said Willoughby-Brown. ‘We had no idea it was going to go so badly wrong.’

  ‘And what about the other groups?’