Stephen Leather - False Friends

‘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 using 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.’