Stephen Leather - False Friends

Shepherd headed down the road to Hampstead tube station. A vendor was giving away copies of a glossy magazine at the entrance to the station and Shepherd took the opportunity to stop and have a quick look around. He waited on the northbound platform until two trains had gone through, then he walked across to the southbound platform and caught a train to Charing Cross. To the casual observer he was simply sitting and reading his magazine on the train, but in fact he was taking careful note of everyone who got on or off.

When he did get off the train he walked slowly down the platform and was one of the last passengers to step on to the escalator. He walked through the station as if he was going to buy a ticket but then changed direction abruptly and headed instead for the taxi rank. He took a black cab to Thames House, confident that no one had followed him.

Charlotte Button was waiting for him in a meeting room on the third floor. Several dozen photographs taken from CCTV footage at St Pancras station were pinned to a board that took up most of one of the walls. ‘How did it go?’ she asked him as he sat down at the long highly polished table in the centre of the room.

‘He’s a bit squirrelly, but that’s to be expected,’ said Shepherd.

‘Not too squirrelly, I hope.’

‘He’ll be fine. But I was wondering if it would help for the two of them to have a chat with Caroline Stockmann.’ Stockmann was an MI5 psychologist who was responsible for Shepherd’s six-monthly psychological evaluations.

Button turned her back on the photographs and folded her arms. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘It’s no biggie, it’s just that the pressure is mounting and Caroline is always good at getting to the heart of any problems I might have.’

‘Caroline evaluates you twice a year to check that you’re up to undercover work,’ said Button. ‘If it ever gets to the point that you’re showing signs of being overstressed then we can move you into another area of work. That’s not an option for Chaudhry and Malik. This isn’t their job; it’s their lives. Even if they are under pressure there’s not much we can do other than offer as much support as we can. It’s not as if we can pull them out and put in someone else, is it? We’ve got to work with what we’ve got.’

‘I agree. I just thought it might help them, that’s all.’

‘Do you think I should talk to them?’

‘I’m not sure that’ll help,’ said Shepherd. ‘To be honest, relaxation techniques are what they need. Yoga or meditation. They’re fairly tightly wound at the moment.’

‘Which is good,’ said Button. ‘Considering what they’ve been through and what they’re now involved in, they should be stressed. If they suddenly start looking as if they haven’t got a care in the world then their al-Qaeda handlers are going to think that something’s wrong.’ She sat down opposite him and linked her fingers. ‘We’re on the home stretch, Spider. St Pancras was a dry run and the real thing is likely to be in days rather than weeks.’

Shepherd nodded. She was right. There would be no point in doing a full rehearsal and then putting everything on the back burner.

Button pointed at the photographs. ‘From our point of view the St Pancras rehearsal was a gift from above, it really was. We’ve identified eighty-seven possibles from the CCTV footage, based on ethnic status, age and possession of a backpack.’

‘Ethnic profiling?’ said Shepherd.

‘We’ve no choice,’ said Button. ‘There were thousands of people at the station and most of them had luggage of one form or another. Now we know that Chaudhry and Malik were given backpacks by Khalid it’s a fair enough assumption that anyone else involved also had a backpack. What we’ve done is trawl through the CCTV footage looking for Asians with backpacks. We’ve done male and female even though previous attacks in the UK have always involved men. If we’d widened it to include all ethnic groups there would have been thousands and we don’t have time for that.’

‘And you think they had eighty-odd people there?’

‘Of course not. What we’ve got to do now is compare them with our watch list and disregard those who are just innocent travellers.’

‘What about the passengers who arrived from France? Can’t you check with the Border Agency?’

‘Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that. Passports are checked in France before passengers board but they’re not checked at this end. And they’re not photographed. But we have CCTV footage of passengers disembarking at St Pancras so we can check that footage against the footage inside the station. We’re using a facial recognition system at the moment but it’s not great so we might end up doing it manually.’

She stood up and walked back to the photograph display. Seven photographs had been put to the right-hand side, separate from the rest. The top two were of Chaudhry and Malik.

‘We’ve already identified four from our watch list,’ said Button. ‘They all came up from the tube station at different times and from different trains.’ She tapped a photograph directly below Malik’s. ‘This one was one of the leaders of Muslims Against Crusades and we have some very nice footage of him burning poppies on Remembrance Day in 2009.’ She tapped a second photograph, and a third. ‘These two are from Leeds. Bangladeshi origin but born in the UK. They were both students there up until three years ago. For a while they were full-blown fundamentalists wearing skullcaps and dishdashas to lectures and growing their beards long, then they went off the radar. We know they visited Pakistan last year for six months, and as you can see from the CCTV photographs they are now clean-shaven and wearing western clothing, which is as big a red flag as you’ll ever get. They’ve obviously been told to alter their appearance to blend in.’

She pointed at one of the two remaining photographs. ‘This one wasn’t on our watch list but we got a match from the Police National Computer. His father and elder brother set fire to his younger sister five years ago. Third-degree burns over most of her body and she’ll never walk again. The father and brother were sent down for ten years. He was also charged but the CPS didn’t think there was a good enough case to make against him.’

‘Honour killing?’

‘Not much honour in it, but yes, they wanted her dead because she was going out with a Sikh boy. She was seventeen. She survived only because a neighbour saw what was going on and dialled 999. Although when the ambulance arrived the entire family turned on the paramedics and said that it was Allah’s will that she died. Anyway, this guy is from Bradford and had no legitimate reason to be at St Pancras that we know of; plus, he was in Pakistan last year, supposedly to attend a wedding but we’ve checked flight manifests and he was out of the country for three months.’

‘Must have been one hell of a wedding.’

Button ran a finger along the last photograph. ‘This one’s a little unusual in that he’s Egyptian and not Pakistani. Riffat Pasha. At least that was the name he used when he claimed political asylum a few years back. He popped back up on the radar when he started posting on a Fundamentalist website, one of those “kill all infidels and we’ll go to Heaven” rant sites. He’s working in a hotel in Mayfair as a kitchen porter.’

‘Why hasn’t he been deported?’

‘Because there’s a whole industry geared up to keeping him here. He’s had a child with a Portuguese woman so if we did try to throw him out of the country his human rights would kick in. Besides, he hasn’t actually done anything yet, other than post inflammatory statements.’

‘Are you thinking his hotel could be the target?’