Taking herself grimly in hand, she turned her attention back to the explosive. Taking three pipe cleaners, she pushed them through the cooling wax of the central sphere and out the other side-she was praying out loud now-and twisted the ends together for connection to the detonator hook-ups. Standing back, she cast a cold eye on the result. It looked as she wanted it to look, and the seamed, mirthful face of the Takht-i-Suleiman instructor seemed to nod in approval. The triple-cascade C4 detonation had always been favoured by the Children of Heaven. It was, you might say, their signature, and she, the fighter Asimat, was signing off.
Feeling more balanced now, and with the stormclouds in check, she carried the little pipe-cleaner-limbed fetish over to the fridge. It was very light, most of the weight was in the wax, and she laid it reverently on the top shelf. That done, she walked out of the back door and down the shingle to the sea’s edge, where she stood expressionless and unmoving with her arms by her sides and the wind lashing her hair about her face.
37
Tell me,” said Liz, pulling her coat around her as the wind shuddered the phone box door. It was the seventh reverse-charge call she’d made to Judith Spratt.
“As things stand, we’ve drawn a blank.”
“The Bath woman?”
“Sally Madden? She spent the evening and night of the murder in the town of Frome with a friend whose dog was sick.”
“Does that check out?”
“The friend corroborates and the Frome vet remembers the two of them bringing the dog to his surgery at five-ish. And according to your phone call earlier, the person we’re after was buying petrol at a Norfolk garage by six.”
“Damn. Damn. And none of the others… the ones who live alone, for example, what about them? And the Christmas shoppers?”
“They can all be accounted for at some point on that evening or night. Or were met off the Eurostar on the earlier date by someone who can vouch for the fact that they didn’t hire a car. Or both.”
“OK. Before you go through the same process with the French women and the non-EUs, I want you to do something for me. Have you got a copy of the passenger list there?”
“Yes.”
“Right. Cross off all the passengers in the right age group that have been cleared.”
“I’ve done that.”
“How many women left?”
“Of the seventeen to thirties, about twenty non-EU-Americans, Aussies et cetera-and fifty-odd French.”
“How do you know the French are French?”
“How do you mean?”
“How did you separate out the French from the Brits, when you first went through the passenger list?”
“By name, basically.”
“Not by passport?”
“No, both British and French are just down as EU.”
“OK. Go through the French names, and see if you can find a Christian name that’s not specifically French. That could be English. Can you do that now?”
“OK, I’ll do that right now. Here we go… I’ve got a Michelle Altaraz… Claire Dazat… Adrienne Fantoni-Brizeart… Michelle Gilabert… Michelle Gravat-that’s three Michelles-Sophie Lecoq… Sophie Lemasson… Olivia Limousin… Lucy Reynaud… Rita Sauvajon… and, um, Anne Matthieu. That’s it.”
“Damn. They all sound very French. No possibility of a mistake there, or of any of that lot being English?”
“None of them sounds very English.”
Liz was silent. The thought of having to ask the police, via Investigations, to check another fifty or so names, possibly with interpreters present, filled her with something close to despair. “The non-EUs,” she said eventually. “What females have we got in the right age group?”
“Nine Australian, seven American, five Japanese, two South African, two Colombian, and one Indian.”
“Forget the Japanese, but get your team on to locating and ringing the rest. All of them should have submitted details of where they’re staying at the immigration desk at Waterloo. We’re looking for an English accent, OK? A ‘mid-posh’ English accent, like I told you. Any that answer that description-get them checked out by the police as quickly as possible. And could you do something else? Encrypt and e-mail me the whole passenger list, divided by age, gender, and nationality. And have a team standing by to work tonight.”
“Sure.”
Ten minutes later, in her room at the Trafalgar, she was scrolling through the list on her laptop. It was just 2:30 p.m.
What have we missed? she asked herself, staring at the screen. What have we missed? Somewhere on that neat black and white list was the invisible’s name.
Think. Analyse. Why did she come into the country under her own name?
Because whoever she was working for-whichever cell of whichever network-would have insisted on it. They would never have risked using false documentation and compromising their operation if they didn’t absolutely have to. Because transparency was an essential element of invisibility.
Why use a stolen licence to hire the car?
Because once she was past Immigration and in the country there was nothing to connect her to the transaction. It was a cut-out. Even if the car was spotted its hirer would be untraceable, leaving the woman free to use her own identification as and when she chose. But for Ray Gunter, the plan would have been perfect. Gunter, however, had got himself killed, and from then onwards things had started to unravel.
But not quite fast enough. Whatever the terror cell were intending might still happen. Was Mackay right? Were they planning an assault on one of the American air bases, on Marwell, Lakenheath or Mildenhall? On the face of it, as symbols of the hated US-UK military partnership, they were the obvious local targets. But she had seen plans of the bases and they were vast. You couldn’t get near them for security, both military and police, especially now that the status had been upgraded to red. What kind of attack could two people mount? Shoot a couple of guards at long range with a sniper’s rifle? Loose off a rocket-propelled grenade at a gatehouse? Only with enormous difficulty, she suspected. You’d never live to tell the tale, and the press wouldn’t be allowed within a mile of the story, so the impact of the attack would be minimised.
A bomb, perhaps? But how delivered? Every incoming consignment of baseballs, auto parts or hamburger buns was being X-rayed or hand-searched. No vehicle venturing outside a base was now left unattended or out in the open so that a device could be attached. All such scenarios had been played through in exhaustive detail by the RAF, the Military Police and the USAF security planners.
No, Liz told herself. Her best bet was to go at the problem from the other end. Find the woman. Catch her. Stop her.
Glancing at the laptop screen, a thought occurred to her. Had Claude Legendre been wrong? Was the woman in fact French, but fluent in English?
Instinct said no. Legendre dealt with English and French customers day after day, month after month, year after year, and would have subconsciously interiorised every tiny nuance of difference between the two nationalities. Accent, inflexion, posture, style… If his memory said that the woman was English, then Liz was prepared to trust that memory. And if the same woman had been identified as “mid-posh” by a Norfolk garage assistant…
The woman looked English. You couldn’t see the details on the blurry Avis CCTV footage, but in a strange sort of way you could see the person. Something in the diffident carriage of the upper body and shoulders spoke to Liz of a particularly English coupling of intellectual arrogance and muted physical awkwardness.
The clothes, she guessed, served as a disguise on several levels. They were ordinary, so people ignored her, and they were shapeless, so she escaped being identified by her physique. They were security-conscious clothes. But they were also the clothes, to Liz’s eye, of a woman who wanted to pre-empt criticism. You will never be able to accuse me of failing to be attractive, these clothes said, because I will never attempt to be attractive. I despise such stratagems.