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  While the men debated the merits of the Argentinian footballer, Sitwell had one eye on the front door. When he saw his driver walk back to the vehicle and climb in behind the wheel, he turned to the manager.

  ‘Mr Larkin, I’m afraid I’ll have to be going soon. If you could show me the rest of your layout, it would be appreciated.’

  Larkin got the message, and ushered both men into the warehouse. He pointed Fenton in the direction of the three boxes, then started explaining to Sitwell how his company would handle the logistics of getting his Chinese goods from the port to his lock-up garage in London more cheaply than his rivals.

  Fenton loaded his packages, waved at Larkin and climbed into his van. Sitwell waited for him to drive away before thanking the manager for his co-operation and jogging to his car.

  Inside he saw the screen affixed to the console with their current position marked in green and a red dot moving slowly away from them.

  ‘Don’t get too close,’ Sitwell said, as the driver reversed out of the parking space and headed towards the exit in pursuit.

  An hour and a half later, Charlie Fenton’s van pulled up outside Guler Motors. He got out and went round to the back to open up the double doors, then emerged with the wooden box and carried it into the open bay.

  Sitwell watched from fifty yards away, preparing to radio his men to move in. From his position he could see Fenton talking with someone, possibly the owner, who looked very confused. Fenton put the box down and offered a shrug, and once his docket was signed, he got back into his van and drove off.

  The moment the Transit van disappeared from sight, Sitwell told his driver to floor it and ordered his men into action. By the time he reached the open work bay, the other vehicle was right behind his, disgorging armed police officers who ran into the workshop, barking instructions.

  Sitwell ran to where he’d seen the manager carry the box, a small office with dirty glass windows. He barged in, with a gun-toting officer close behind him.

  ‘Armed police. Hands where we can see them!’

  The man had been in the process of opening the box with a flathead screwdriver, and he froze with the tool sticking out of the underside of the lid. Slowly, he raised his hands and took a step backwards.

  Sitwell ordered him around the desk and forced him up against a wall before searching him. The man found his voice and began protesting, but Sitwell ignored him. After confiscating the man’s phone, Sitwell had another officer cuff the suspect and load him into the van, which had arrived seconds after the raid began.

  Sitwell called in the bomb-disposal team and left the office while they assessed the package. Three minutes later, they declared it safe to transport, and carried it to their vehicle while Sitwell made a call.

  ‘The suspects are in custody, Mr Harvey, and we have the explosives.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll meet you at the station in thirty minutes.’

  From his position next to the window of the café thirty yards away, Ahmed watched the raid unfold. He’d been tasked with keeping an eye on the garage, and in the last four hours he’d been through more coffee than he normally drank in a week.

  His order had been simple: keep an eye on the place and report any unusual activity, especially anything involving the police.

  Why, he had no idea, but the day’s surveillance work had earned him an easy hundred.

  Ahmed activated his phone and began filming the scene. After ten minutes, he reckoned he had enough to show the man who’d given him the assignment. With his mission complete, he made a long-awaited trip to the bathroom before heading to the mosque to share his findings and collect his reward.

  CHAPTER 7

  Thursday, 20 July 2017

  Nabil Karim looked at Javad Zarifa with more than a little astonishment.

  ‘Really? Abdul al-Aziz?’

  ‘We got confirmation fifteen minutes ago. There is a video available if you wish to view it.’

  ‘No need,’ Karim said. ‘It’s just that Abdul is the last person I would have suspected.’

  ‘I must admit, I was surprised, too. How would you like to handle this?’

  Karim had thought about the punishment for several days, and he shared his idea with Zarifa.

  ‘Also, check to see if we have any video of Abdul in action. It could be useful.’

  Zarifa hurried away to carry out his orders, leaving Karim relieved to have found the traitor, but annoyed at having been duped in the first place.

  The one redeeming note was that only he, Zarifa and the military council knew what he had planned in the coming weeks. Not even the people carrying out the most hazardous part of the mission knew their roles.

  Not yet, at least.

  It would soon be time to take control of the chemical-weapons storage facility, and once he had the X3, he would share the details with the five who needed to know. As far as everyone else involved was aware, including those helping to facilitate the travel arrangements, he was simply helping a handful of people to be reunited with their families in the UK. Now that Abdul had been exposed, he was confident that he could keep things that way.

  An hour later, he received a call from Zarifa to say that the meeting had been set up, and he walked down two flights of stairs to his SUV. He told his driver, a huge man of few words, to take him to an address on the outskirts of the town, then settled back in his seat and contemplated the pleasure to come.

  Abdul al-Aziz pulled up outside the building he’d been told to report to and saw Karim’s right-hand man, Javad Zarifa, waiting by the door. Half a dozen vehicles already dotted the area around the two-storey stone building, beyond which lay a vast expanse of desert. Two German shepherds chained to a wall snarled as he approached the door.

  He’d never been invited here before. He hoped he’d have something worthwhile to report home afterwards.

  After the usual greetings, Zarifa showed Abdul inside, where a dozen others were already gathered. They were lining the walls of the room, and on a long wooden table a video was playing on a laptop.

  ‘Ah, our guest of honour,’ Karim said, opening his arms wide and smiling. ‘Come, sit. You are just in time.’

  Immediately, Abdul sensed something was wrong, but before he could react, two men grabbed his arms and forced him into a chair facing the old Dell laptop. He recognised the person on the screen, a man with an AK-47 standing over a kneeling figure.

  It was him.

  ‘I see you recognise yourself,’ Karim said. ‘This was taken shortly after you joined us, remember? It was your initiation, your way of showing me that you were one of us.’

  Abdul nodded, trying to hide the panic invading every sinew of his body. He wanted to convince himself that his worst fear wasn’t about to come true, but one glance at Karim told him everything he needed to know. The smile was gone, replaced with a glare that could strip paint from walls.

  He remained silent, hoping that by playing dumb he could find a way out of the situation.

  ‘This film has never been released,’ Karim said. ‘No-one knows that you killed this man. That is all about to change.’

  ‘I don’t understand. It was a simple headshot. How will that instil fear in our enemies?’

  ‘It won’t,’ Karim told him, ‘but it should come as a shock to the British public when they discover that the man who pulled the trigger is one of their spies.’

  Before Abdul could fashion a response, he was hoisted to his feet and the laptop was moved out of the way. The others in the room crowded in as he was picked up and thrown onto the table, where four men held his legs and two others pinned his shoulders to the wooden surface.

  Abdul could see a video camera being set up on a tripod, and he began pleading with his captor.

  ‘Nabil, this is a mistake! Why are you doing this?’

  ‘I suspected there was a traitor among us for some time, and it was simply a case of finding him. That’s why I let you and certain others believe you were delivering explosives to England
. Only one of those packages was intercepted. Yours.’

  ‘It’s not true!’ Abdul shouted. ‘Maybe the explosive was detected by customs.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ Karim said, drawing closer. ‘We switched packages before they were shipped out. The consignment that the police picked up contained normal shock absorbers. There was nothing in the box to raise any suspicion at all.’

  Abdul realised there was little point in further protestation. It was now just a matter of how Karim chose to deal with him. Any hopes of a swift death with a bullet to the head were quickly dispelled when he heard the roar of a small engine starting up. The men around him started masking their faces, and it was obvious his demise was about to be filmed.

  ‘We are going to send a message to your masters,’ Karim said. ‘They can send as many spies as they like, but this will be the fate that awaits them.’

  Karim stood aside to make way for a soldier wielding a chainsaw.

  ‘For the tenth time, I have no idea why it was delivered to me!’

  ‘It had your name on it, Mr Guler,’ the police officer said, sounding bored.

  Andrew Harvey watched the interview on CCTV, and so far had seen nothing to convince him that the garage owner had anything to do with a bomb plot. The interviewing officer had been all round the houses, trying to trip the suspect up, but the answers always came back the same. Usually the guilty ended tying themselves up in knots as they wove their webs of lies, but this man seemed genuinely surprised that the parcel had been delivered to him.

  ‘I don’t even know what was inside,’ Guler continued.

  ‘But you were in the process of opening it when we arrived.’

  ‘Of course! Someone sends you a parcel, all paid for, what else would you do?’

  ‘You could have reported it to the police.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Guler asked. ‘That has to be the most stupid suggestion I’ve ever heard. What if one of my mechanics orders something that I’m not aware of? Do you expect me to call the bomb squad just in case?’

  ‘This package clearly originated abroad,’ the officer continued. ‘Doesn’t that strike you as strange?’

  ‘Not strange enough to call the police without first checking the contents.’

  Harvey’s phone rang, and he stepped away from the console to take the call.

  ‘You have to get back to the office,’ Farsi said when he hit the ‘Connect’ button.

  ‘What’s up?’ Harvey asked, already moving towards the door.

  ‘Bomb Disposal called and told us what was in the shock absorbers. Nothing out of the ordinary. They were the real thing.’

  ‘It can’t be. SO15 had the shipment covered from the moment it reached the dock. There wasn’t time to switch it.’

  ‘I don’t think they did,’ Farsi said. ‘We got played. A few minutes after BD called, we received a video from Nabil Karim. They killed Hannibal.’

  Realisation hit Harvey like a heavyweight boxer.

  They’d been set up, and all to expose their man in Karim’s ranks. Harvey massaged his temples, knowing that their spy hadn’t suffered a swift death. Reluctantly, he asked Farsi what they’d done to him.

  ‘They amputated his arms and legs with a chainsaw, just above the knees and elbows, then dragged him outside and let two German shepherds finish him off.’

  Harvey could hear the tension in his friend’s voice, angry and bordering on tears.

  ‘They ate him alive, Andrew. That bastard fed him to the fucking dogs!’

  Harvey gripped the phone until he nearly cracked it. He could almost hear Hannibal’s screams.

  ‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

  Harvey ended the call and went in search of Sergeant Sitwell. He found him in the canteen.

  ‘Kick Guler loose,’ he said. ‘It was a trick, and we fell for it. There were never any explosives; they did it to root out our operative.’

  ‘You’d better get word to your man, then. Tell him to get his arse out of there.’

  Harvey just nodded and turned on his heels. There was little point in telling Sitwell that his suggestion was already too late. No, it was time to get back to the office to see what they could salvage from this mess.

  Half an hour later, he had his team assembled in the conference room. Veronica Ellis sat near the head of the table, next to a teary-eyed Sarah Thompson. Sarah had known Hannibal personally from her time with MI6, and was taking his demise hard. Also present were Hamad Farsi, Eddie Howes, Elaine Solomon and Gareth Bailey.

  ‘Hamad, please tell us what we know so far.’

  Farsi tapped a couple of keys on his laptop and an image appeared on the fifty-inch wall-mounted screen. ‘This is Mohammad Abdulrashid,’ he said for the benefit of those who didn’t know the young operative known as Hannibal. He had a thin face and the beginnings of a beard. ‘He was deployed in Syria where he went by the name Abdul al-Aziz. He had infiltrated a unit called Saif al-Islam – Sword of Islam – headed by this guy, Nabil Karim.’

  Another picture appeared on the screen. This one showed a man in his forties, with a moustache and swept-back hair.

  ‘We recently received news that Karim had killed Mohammad, and they sent video evidence to prove it. I won’t be showing that, but they also sent this.’

  A video began playing, and it showed Mohammad standing over a kneeling figure with a rifle in his hand. Unlike the others on the screen, Mohammad’s face was clearly visible. As he raised his weapon, Farsi paused the footage.

  ‘There’s no need to show the rest of it. You can guess what he does next.’

  ‘Why did they send us this?’ Howes asked.

  ‘They copied in all of the news channels and told them who pulled the trigger. We can expect the phones to start ringing any second now, but that’s the least of our concerns. Mohammad told us early on that SAI was created to strike the UK. More recently, he led us to believe that a shipment of explosives was being sent here, but that turned out to be a ruse. It cost Mohammad his life.’

  Harvey stood and began pacing. ‘That’s what we have so far, but the chain of events suggests that SAI already have people sympathetic to them here, in London. Someone was watching that garage when the police swooped in, and we need to find out who. I want CCTV from the area combed to see if anyone left the scene shortly after the police arrived. I don’t care if it’s a kid or an old woman, they had to be reporting to someone, and that someone fed the information back to Karim. We need to find them, and fast. Eddie, you check CCTV. Gareth and Elaine, I want you to scour social media and see if anyone uploaded footage of the garage being raided. If you find a video, identify the person who took it. The rest of us are going to go through everyone on our watch list and put tails on anyone with the remotest ties to SAI.’

  He walked towards the door, signalling an end to the meeting and, back at his computer, opened the communications-monitoring form template. He had a feeling he was going to be filling them out for the rest of the day and into the night.

  CHAPTER 8

  Monday, 24 July 2017

  At 3 a.m. precisely, Wahid gave the signal for his men to make their move.

  The chemical-weapons storage facility, a huge, one-storey building surrounded by a ten-foot wall made of reinforced concrete, was situated near a village on the outskirts of Homs.

  Wahid’s men had been making their way towards the compound for the last four hours, crawling slowly on their bellies while covered with sand-coloured sheets. He had traced their painstaking progress, moving inches at a time to preserve the advantage of a surprise attack. A Syrian military unit was based less than three miles away, giving them minutes to carry out their mission before reinforcements arrived.

  Wahid had been sweeping the walls of the compound for hours with his night-vision glasses, but there were no signs of CCTV cameras and no-one had stuck their heads up.

  Still, he wasn’t taking any chances.

  Seven of his soldiers were now ten feet from the wall, and he w
atched from six hundred yards away as they prepared rappelling ropes with rubber-coated hooks on the end. The first man swung his towards the top of the wall and Wahid saw it come tumbling back down. The man tried again, and this time the hook caught. Three of his people were already halfway up the wall, and he heard nothing from inside the facility to suggest they’d been compromised.

  He watched as the men disappeared over the wall, then ordered his reserve to move up. His own driver was the first to crank his engine and gun the truck towards the gates. In the darkness, Wahid could see flashes of light dancing off the top of the wall.

  By the time he reached the gate, it was already open, with two of his men standing guard. The bodies of four Syrian soldiers lay on the ground. Wahid walked over to one of the dead and removed a plastic card from a chain on the corpse’s waist, then jogged to the glass double doors and swiped it. A click signified that they had entry, and he stepped aside as his men poured into the building.

  Gunfire erupted as Wahid’s soldiers pushed forward, then subsided as he entered the building. Three more guards lay dead, leaving another three to contend with. He jogged down the hallway to the junction and looked both ways. The right was clear, and he ordered two men to cover it. To the left, his people were already working to open the door he’d ordered them to look for. He ran to join them just as it burst inwards.

  Wahid let the soldiers check the room for guards, then walked inside and looked at the bank of large refrigerated cabinets. Third from the left on the top shelf, he’d been told, and when he looked at the labels, he confirmed that the intelligence his master had paid for was accurate. The cabinet door was locked, so he used the grip of his pistol to shatter the glass and carefully lifted the tray of phials off the shelf. He placed it on a workbench and extracted a leather case from inside his combat jacket.

  He’d been instructed to take five phials, no fewer. He stole a look at his watch and saw that it had been two minutes since the first gunshots. The army would have been alerted by now: he had to get his men out of here.