False Friends ss-9 Page 5

  ‘Including the Seals?’ asked Malik.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

  ‘You know the Yanks paid thirty million dollars to one informant who gave up Hussein’s kids,’ said Chaudhry. ‘Uday and Qusay. Remember? The Yanks went in and blew them away too. And like I said, they handed over thirty million dollars to one man.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘Google,’ said Raj. ‘It ain’t rocket science.’

  ‘So do we get a piece of the reward, or not?’ asked Malik.

  ‘I’ll put out some feelers, Harvey.’

  ‘Yeah, well, make sure you do. I just worry that what me and Raj did is going to get lost in all that Yank back-slapping.’

  ‘What you did won’t be forgotten, you have my word.’

  ‘That and a quid’ll get me on a bus,’ said Malik, his voice loaded with sarcasm.

  ‘You’re not saying you’re doing it for the money, are you?’

  ‘Fuck you, John!’ spat Malik. ‘Fuck you and fuck MI5. We put our lives on the line, Raj and me. We spent three months in Pakistan and if we’d put a foot wrong they’d have killed us without blinking an eye. But we went into the lion’s den and we walked out and now it’s like we don’t fucking exist.’ He grunted and pounded his fists against the dashboard.

  ‘Bloody hell, Harvey. Steady, mate, or you’ll set off the airbag,’ said Shepherd.

  Malik grunted again but then began to chuckle. He shook his head as he laughed.

  ‘You okay, brother?’ asked Chaudhry anxiously.

  Malik nodded. ‘Aye, brother, I’m fine.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘I’m fine. It’s been a bit stressful, you know?’

  Shepherd patted him on the shoulder. ‘Mate, more than anyone I know what you guys went through and as far as I’m concerned the sun shines out of your arses.’

  Chaudhry gestured at the service centre. ‘Can we go and get something to eat? I’m starving.’

  ‘Not with me,’ said Shepherd. ‘Can’t take the risk.’

  ‘No one knows us this far out of London,’ said Malik.

  ‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Shepherd. ‘We need to keep our heads down for the next few days. Everyone’s going to be ultra-sensitive so I don’t want anyone spotting us together in a coffee shop or on the Heath.’

  ‘So we have to drive out here whenever we want to meet?’ asked Malik.

  ‘Here or somewhere just as safe,’ said Shepherd. ‘Just for the next week or so until it dies down. Look, it’s Sod’s Law: the time you think you’re safest is the time when you bump into someone who recognises you. So we’ll stay right where we are and you can go and have a coffee when I’ve gone.’

  ‘Why don’t you get us a safe house?’ asked Malik. ‘You people always use safe houses, don’t you?’

  ‘Horses for courses,’ said Shepherd. ‘But if you were seen going into a strange address then you’d be screwed. This way is best. Not much can go wrong in a service station car park.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Touch wood.’

  ‘You know what? I’d really like to see inside the MI5 building,’ said Chaudhry. ‘What’s it called again? The one by the Thames?’

  ‘That’s MI6’s HQ,’ said Shepherd. ‘Vauxhall Bridge. MI5 is at Thames House, in Millbank. It’s not as impressive. Why would you want to look round it?’

  Chaudhry shrugged. ‘Dunno. Just be interested to see what the place is like, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s easily arranged,’ said Shepherd. ‘But best to wait until this is over.’

  ‘And what happens then?’ asked Malik. ‘When we’re done with this?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Malik looked at Chaudhry, then back at Shepherd. ‘What happens to us? We get the reward, right? Do we get new identities? Witness protection?’

  ‘Have you two been discussing this?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘We were wondering what you’d got planned,’ said Chaudhry.

  ‘What do you want to happen, Raj?’

  ‘Other than the reward, you mean?’ Chaudhry smiled. ‘I’m joking. I just want this to be over, John. I want be a doctor; I want to help people.’

  ‘You should think about joining MI5,’ said Shepherd. ‘Or the police. Once this is over you could write your own ticket.’

  ‘Be a professional liar? Because that’s what I’ve been doing for the last twelve months. I’m sick of it. Sick of the lies, sick of playing a part. I want my life back.’ He grinned. ‘And the reward, of course.’

  ‘You’ll get your life back, I can promise you that,’ said Shepherd. ‘But that’s why we have to keep you both deep undercover at the moment. Once the operation’s over we pull you out, you move on and do whatever you want to do. But no one must ever know.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ said Malik. ‘If anyone at the mosque knew about us they’d hack off our heads with a blunt knife.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen, Harvey,’ said Shepherd. ‘And most of the guys at your mosque would be as appalled as anyone about what’s being planned.’

  ‘Yeah, but they’d see us as traitors for spying on our own.’

  Shepherd didn’t like the way the conversation was going. It was vital that the two men concentrated on what they were doing and not on what the possible repercussions were. The more they considered the downside, the more likely it was that they would become nervous and make mistakes. ‘Guys, you’re doing a great job and we’re on the home stretch. What you’re doing is going to save a lot of people.’

  ‘But no one can ever know, right?’ said Malik.

  ‘The people who matter will know,’ said Shepherd. ‘And afterwards, doors are going to be opened for you. Like I said, you’ll be able to write your own ticket. If you want a job within the security services I doubt that’d be a problem. They’d bite your hand off.’

  ‘I don’t wanna be no spy,’ said Malik.

  ‘Brother, you’ve already crossed that bridge,’ said Chaudhry. He laughed and squeezed his shoulder. ‘That’s what we’ve been doing for the last year. But go on, tell John what it is you want out of life.’

  Malik shook his hand away. ‘Stop taking the piss.’

  ‘Harvey wants his own restaurant.’

  ‘Seriously?’ said Shepherd.

  Malik nodded enthusiastically. ‘Japanese. I love sushi, the whole raw-fish thing. I was telling Raj that if we get the reward for Bin Laden I’m going to open one up. Fly in the best chefs from Japan, really go upmarket. You like sushi, John?’

  ‘It’s okay. I prefer my food cooked, though. I like that thing the Japanese do, cooking the stuff in front of you with the flashing knives. Food and theatre combined.’

  ‘Teppanyaki,’ said Malik. ‘Yeah, I thought I’d do that too, concentrating on seafood. Lobster, prawns.’

  ‘You’ve given a lot of thought to it,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘My plan was to get my master’s then try to get a job with one of the big restaurant groups, but now I’m thinking about my own restaurant. That would be something, right?’

  ‘It’d be great,’ agreed Shepherd. A white Transit van pulled up close by and parked with its engine running. Shepherd sat back and looked over at the driver. He was shaven-headed with a mobile phone pressed to his ear and as Shepherd watched he pulled out a copy of the Sun and spread it across the steering wheel. Shepherd relaxed. ‘So what was the buzz after everyone heard what had happened in Pakistan?’ he asked.

  ‘In the mosque?’ said Chaudhry. ‘Mostly they thought it was a lie. They don’t believe anything the Americans say these days. I kept hearing that it was all bullshit and that Bin Laden’s been dead for years.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I shit you not. The Americans have been caught out lying too many times. And, to be honest, until I met the man I thought he was a myth too. I figured that he’d died in the caves in Afghanistan years ago. But it’s not like I can tell the brothers in the mosque that, is it? So they reckon that the Americans had been u
sing Bin Laden as an excuse to invade Muslim countries and now that they’re pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan they don’t need the myth any more. So they tell the world that he’s dead and that they buried the body at sea.’

  ‘It’s a nice story,’ said Shepherd. ‘Most conspiracy theories are.’

  ‘The same brothers don’t believe that Bin Laden was behind Nine-Eleven either,’ said Malik. ‘They say it was all an American-Zionist plot.’

  ‘There’re plenty of Americans who believe that too,’ said Shepherd. ‘But why would the Americans kill their own people?’

  ‘For oil,’ said Malik. ‘You think they care about their own people? How many of their soldiers have died in Iraq? Five thousand or so, right? Plus how many Iraqis? A million? You think with numbers like that they’d worry about how many were in the Twin Towers? And you know that at first Bin Laden denied having anything to do with Nine-Eleven, right?’

  ‘There was a lot of confusion in the early days,’ said Shepherd. ‘But I don’t think there’s much doubt now. You should have asked the man himself when you had the chance.’

  Malik snorted. ‘We weren’t allowed to ask anything,’ he said. ‘They were very clear on that before they took us in to see him. No questions, no speaking unless he spoke to us, minimum eye contact, never contradict him.’

  ‘He knows that, Harvey,’ said Chaudhry. ‘He debriefed us, remember?’ He turned round to look at Shepherd. ‘There are those who don’t believe that Bin Laden died in that raid, but there are others who see it as yet another American attack on Islam. And the Pakistani brothers are the most fired up because of the way they flew in without telling anybody. Some of them are talking about it as if it was an invasion.’

  ‘Which it bloody well was,’ said Malik.

  ‘But you can see why it had to be done that way,’ said Chaudhry, turning back in his seat. ‘If they’d told the Pakistanis then someone would have tipped off Bin Laden.’

  ‘But if they’d done an air strike or something it wouldn’t have looked so bad,’ said Malik. ‘Flying in troops was like invading the country, wasn’t it?’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘Do you know why they didn’t do an air strike, John?’

  Shepherd laughed. ‘Mate, that’s well above my pay grade,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, but you must have an opinion. Why would they piss around with helicopters and guns and that? Why not use one of them Predator things?’

  ‘Maybe they wanted to make sure,’ said Shepherd. It was something he’d asked Charlotte Button when she’d first told him that he would be going on the mission as an observer. Usually the Americans preferred to strike from the sky using the unmanned drones that were piloted from the other side of the world. Malik had referred to the Predator but the American military’s death-dealer of choice was now the Reaper, bigger and faster than the Predator and able to stay in the air for more than twelve hours before firing its fourteen Hellfire missiles. Button had explained that the Americans wanted to collect DNA evidence to make absolutely sure that they had the right man, but that hadn’t made sense to Shepherd, especially when the Seals had gone and buried the body at sea. A body was proof of death, a DNA sample wasn’t. ‘Also they’re saying that there were women and children in buildings nearby.’

  ‘That’s never worried them before, has it?’ said Malik.

  ‘You know, the Americans are a law unto themselves,’ said Shepherd. ‘The important thing is that he’s dead. And the fact that he’s dead makes it much more likely that they’ll do something with you guys, sooner rather than later.’

  ‘You think?’ asked Chaudhry.

  ‘Al-Qaeda will want revenge, there’s no question of that,’ said Shepherd. ‘And you guys are in place.’

  ‘At what point do you arrest them?’ asked Chaudhry.

  ‘That’s above my pay grade too,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘But they’ll stop them before anyone gets hurt, won’t they?’

  ‘I’m sure they will,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘What about if we wore a wire or something?’ said Malik. ‘Wouldn’t that help? We could record Khalid talking about what he wanted us to do — that would be conspiracy, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘And what if they found the wire?’ said Chaudhry.

  ‘Why would they find it?’ He looked at Shepherd. ‘They’re really small, aren’t they? They can put them in buttons, can’t they? Cameras too.’

  ‘Raj is right,’ said Shepherd. ‘You’d be taking too much of a risk. And Khalid is very unlikely to start revealing his plans all of a sudden; he’s only ever going to tell you what you need to know. He’ll give you the mushroom treatment.’

  Malik frowned. ‘Mushroom treatment? What’s that?’

  Chaudhry laughed. ‘It’s when they keep you in the dark and feed you bullshit,’ he said. ‘And John’s right. That’s how terrorist cells work: the upper echelons restrict the information that goes to the individual cells. That way the damage is limited if a cell is blown.’ He nodded at Shepherd. ‘Right?’

  ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself, Raj,’ said Shepherd. ‘But even a tape of Khalid saying what he wants to do isn’t enough. He could claim to be a fantasist, he could say that he was joking, or that you were acting as an agent provocateur. We need him with weapons, or bombs — hard evidence that no jury can ignore. So we just carry on playing the waiting game.’

  ‘And you have him under surveillance all the time, right?’ said Malik.

  ‘Best you don’t know about the operational details,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Now who’s treating us like mushrooms?’ said Malik.

  ‘There’s a difference, Harvey,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’m doing it because I’ve got your best interests at heart. I’m on your side. Khalid just wants to use you.’

  Even as the words were leaving his lips, Shepherd wondered just how truthful he was being. Yes, he was looking out for the two men and didn’t want them in harm’s way, but he was also being very selective about what he was telling them and in that respect he wasn’t much different from the men planning to use them as terrorists.

  ‘You’re doing a great job, and I’m watching your backs every step of the way,’ he said, smiling confidently.

  Chaudhry and Malik joined the queue of men, mainly Pakistani, waiting to enter the Musallaa An-noorthe mosque in Dynevor Road. It was close to where they lived and catered for mainly Pakistani Muslims, with room for about a hundred worshippers at any one time. They nodded to those that they recognised but didn’t talk to anyone. The man in front of them was in his seventies, wearing a grey dishdash and a crocheted skullcap. He flicked a cigarette butt into the street before heading through the door at the side of a run-down sportswear shop. Chaudhry and Malik went down the stairs after him, keeping their hands on the walls either side for balance. At the bottom of the stairs they slipped off their shoes and put them in one of the wooden racks by the door. They were both dressed comfortably but respectfully in long-sleeved shirts and trousers and they were wearing ties. It had been drummed into Chaudhry as a child that the mosque was a place where men went to commune with Allah and that it was important to dress accordingly. But as he looked around he could see that most of the Muslims who had come to pray had not had the same upbringing. There were men in grimy sweatshirts and loose tracksuit bottoms, loose shirts and baggy jeans, stained overalls; there were even two teenagers wearing football shirts and shorts who were obviously on their way to a match. They were both chewing gum, and Chaudhry considered going over to them and admonishing them but he knew that it wasn’t his place to do that. He was there to pray, not to get into arguments with Muslims who should know better.

  At just after sunset it was time for the Maghrib prayers, the fourth of five formal daily prayers that every good Muslim carries out. The man standing directly in front of Chaudhry rolled up his jeans to make it easier to kneel when praying, but he did it casually, one leg rolled right up to the knee, the other to mid-calf, and when he did kneel the jeans rode down and
revealed his underwear. Chaudhry shook his head at the lack of respect.

  He looked over at Malik and nodded at the uneven trousers of the man in front of them. Malik grinned. Like Chaudhry he had been born in Britain to hard-working middle-class Pakistani parents and had been brought up to respect the sanctity of the mosque.

  The man’s toenails were long and yellowing and there was dirt under them. Chaudhry shuddered. He could never understand why people who followed a religion where shoes were always being removed didn’t make more of an effort to take care of their feet. It didn’t take much to clip nails and to wash before heading to the mosque. He took a deep breath and looked away. There was no point in worrying about the personal grooming habits of others.

  He knelt down and began to pray. As his face got close to the prayer mat the stench of sweat and tobacco hit him and his stomach lurched. Whoever had last been on the mat had obviously been a heavy smoker and hadn’t been overzealous on the personal-hygiene front. He sat back on his heels and sighed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Malik.

  ‘The mat stinks,’ said Chaudhry. ‘What’s wrong with people? Why can’t they shower before they come to pray? Or at least spray on some cologne.’

  ‘Do you want to move? There are spaces at the back.’

  Chaudhry looked over his shoulder. The mosque was busy and moving would mean threading their way through the rows and even then he couldn’t see two places together. ‘I’ll put up with it,’ he said. ‘But I don’t understand why the imams don’t say something.’

  ‘I think they’re more worried about numbers than hygiene,’ whispered Malik. ‘Come on, let’s finish and get out.’

  Chaudhry nodded and began to pray, as always forcing himself to concentrate on the words even though he had said them tens of thousands of times before. He knew that many of the men around him were simply going through the motions, their lips moving on autopilot while their minds were elsewhere, their thoughts on their work, on their families, or more likely on what they were missing on television or on what they would be eating for dinner. That wasn’t how Chaudhry had been brought up to pray. Prayer was the time when one communed with Allah and to do it half-heartedly was worse than not doing it at all. Not that he found it a chore. In fact he relished the inner peace that came with focused prayer, the way that all extraneous thoughts were pushed away, all worries, all concerns, all fears. All that mattered were the prayers, and once he had begun he wasn’t even aware of the stench of stale sweat and cigarette smoke.