Henry Porter: Empire State

As she was about to suggest they all return to London, Campbell, Beck and Fisher were summoned to the Baggage Hall to observe a woman named Raffaella Klein and follow her from the airport. They left immediately, now intrigued by the flow of commands from London.

Herrick, alone with her coffee and free of the in-house banter of her MI5 colleagues, began to think about Rahe’s behaviour. It just didn’t seem right that this unimpressive North African had suddenly departed for the Middle East. She wondered if he had a rendezvous on the plane – the best possible place for a long, unobserved talk, as long as you fixed the seating. She drained the coffee and experienced a random flash of memory: fishing with her father in Scotland, making the last cast of the day without hope of a pull on the line. What the hell, she had nothing else to do. She’d go to the security room and see what she could find out about the people on the Kuwait flight with Youssef Rahe.

Fifteen minutes later she was sitting at a desk with the passenger manifest of Kuwaiti Airlines KU102 on a screen and noting down the names of the people seated in Rahe’s immediate vicinity at the back of the plane. Around her were three men from Heathrow security who had kept tabs on Rahe by the airport CCTV system as he moved through the terminal to his departure gate. She asked them to print off the complete manifest from the computer, then let her eyes drift to the screen immediately in front of the supervisor, who had compiled a medley of clips showing Rahe as he progressed through the airport. He appeared in the check-in area at 12.30 p.m., a few minutes after the flight opened. At no stage did he talk to anyone or make any sign to a fellow passenger. The cameras then picked him up just after he had been searched and followed him to the duty free shop where he paid for two bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label whisky with cash. Ten minutes later he was seen buying a newspaper, then he crossed the field of another camera and entered a coffee bar. After this he vanished for a period of about twenty minutes, although the supervisor insisted that with a few hours they could piece together his movements for the whole period. As things were, they could be sure that Rahe had got on the plane. He ran the final film and Herrick watched Rahe approach the desk, swap the duty free bag and his little suitcase from his left to his right hand and show his boarding card and passport.

She put her hands to her mouth, aware that her mind was tripping over something. ‘That’s not the same man,’ she said, without consciously understanding what had produced such certainty. ‘That’s not bloody Rahe!’ Vehemence made her voice rise.

‘Right gate,’ said the controller, yawning. ‘And the jacket – I doubt there’re two jackets like that on the planet, let alone in this airport.’

‘It’s the same jacket,’ she snapped, banging the desk with her hand. ‘But it’s not him. Rahe is right-handed. When he gave his passport to the woman at check-in he took it from the left breast pocket with his right hand. Here he’s using his left hand to take the boarding card out of his right pocket,’ she said, jabbing at the screen. ‘Look! He changed the bags over so he could do that. Even from behind you can see they’re different – this man’s got a narrower head, a longer neck. He’s thinning at the crown.’

The supervisor leaned into the screen. ‘Maybe you’re right. But the angle’s not too clever up there. We had to shift our cameras because of work on the cabling ducts for the visual recognition system. It’s a shame we don’t have a head-on shot of him there.’ He knew she was right.

‘I’ve been following Youssef Rahe all bloody morning and that’s not him.’

They went back over the footage of Rahe in duty free, and noted how he walked away from the camera with short paces in which his feet veered outwards as they came down. The man who had just boarded KU102 walked with a definite roll and his arms worked more as he went along. There was a further, clinching anomaly. As Rahe waited in duty free he looked at his watch several times, thrusting his wrist out of his sleeve and revolving the gold strap which hung loose like a bracelet on his wrist. The man at the boarding gate appeared not to be wearing a watch, at least not one that could be seen below the sleeve of his jacket, nor as his left hand reached up and plucked the passport and boarding card from his inside pocket. Admittedly, they were seeing him from above and behind, but there was no doubt that while Herrick caught a flash of shirt cuff in this movement she could not see a watch.

She didn’t need any further confirmation. She dialled the direct line to the operations room at the Security Services. ‘Youssef Rahe didn’t get on his plane. There was a stand-in. Rahe may be your problem.’

Route Three took the convoy of cars from the north perimeter road westwards towards Terminal Four along a canyon formed by tall leylandii bushes and noise barriers at the edge of the airport. They travelled at 80 mph with the Range Rover sitting within a few feet of the Jaguar’s offside rear bumper. One false move by the Prime Minister’s driver, Jim Needpath, and there would certainly be an accident, but he had worked with the protection officer in the Range Rover before. Out in front, five police outriders leapfrogged each other and raced past the convoy of cars to hold up traffic at every intersection. As they came to the roundabout near Terminal Four, they turned left and doubled back along the A30 towards London, the plan being to cross over to the M4 motorway by a dual carriageway and make their way to central London using the fast lane reserved for buses and taxis.

Inside the Jaguar, Chambers was on the radio, demanding to know why there was no sign of the police helicopter that was going to act as a pathfinder into central London. The sardonic reply came back that it was generally considered poor aviation practice to place a surveillance aircraft in the main flight path into Heathrow. At this Norquist smiled and looked out at the dismal housing estate rushing by – people walking with their heads bowed to the rain, a pair of cyclists struggling along in cagoules and an Indian woman sheltering her kid in the folds of her sari. He wondered briefly how the Brits managed to keep their sense of humour in this climate.

The outriders shepherded the motorcade smoothly through the roundabout under the M4 before the four cars rose on a slip road to join the motorway. Two motorcyclists stayed just in front of the Jaguar while the other three formed a chevron to snowplough the traffic out of the fast lane with their sirens and lights. At this point the helicopter appeared and hovered for a second or two at about 1,000 feet before spinning round to join the flow of traffic eastwards. Llewellyn was patched through to the pilot and told him that he needed an exact description of the traffic conditions ahead, and a warning about vehicles parked on the hard shoulder and on or under bridges.

The road was unusually clear and they covered the four-mile stretch quickly, with the pilot giving regular snatches of laconic commentary. Suddenly an interested note entered his voice and he told them he was going to take a look at a white lorry that had pulled up about a mile in front of them at the beginning of the elevated section. As they rounded a bend they saw the truck with the helicopter positioned above it. Llewellyn told the drivers to reduce their speed and then sent the three motorcycles on to investigate.

‘What do you see?’ he asked the pilot.

‘There’s just one man in there,’ came the reply. ‘I’m taking her down a bit. He looks Asian, but I can’t be sure. He’s not responding to anything we do. He looks a bit freaked.’

They saw the helicopter descend on the left of the motorway.