The other three were in the lounge, with a television set blaring. The CO19 men ran down the corridor so fast that two of them were still sitting down when the lounge door burst open.
The Glock ready in his hand, Richter ran into the lounge directly behind two of the police officers. More shouts of ‘Armed police! Don’t move,’ echoed around the apartment. Richter had already checked the suspects in the bedroom and bathroom as he stormed down the corridor. None of those had been Salah Khatid, but as he looked across the lounge he immediately recognized the slim dark-haired figure standing beside the window, despite not having set eyes on him for several years.
Richter stepped slightly to one side, ensuring that both the CO19 officers were clear of his line of fire, and brought his Glock up to the aim. ‘Remember Abu Sabaawi,’ he shouted — the precise but incomprehensible message Simpson had given him.
Khatid stared across the room at him, and almost visibly flinched. Then he tried to run, but it was too late for that.
Richter aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. His first shot missed, the sound appallingly loud in the small room, the nine-millimetre bullet screaming past the young Arab’s head and smashing through the window, but his second found its mark. The left side of Khatid’s chest bloomed red, and his body slammed back against the wall before crumpling to the floor.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ one of the CO19 officers yelled, swinging his Heckler & Koch round to cover Richter. ‘He was unarmed, no threat to anyone. That was just a cold-blooded fucking execution, you stupid bastard spook.’
Richter ignored him and walked across the room to kneel beside Khatid’s broken body. He checked for a pulse, then nodded in satisfaction, stood up and looked at the CO19 officers, now joined by three others. Pointing at the two young Arabs who were staring at Richter and the body of their fallen comrade with a kind of sick fascination, he ordered: ‘Get them out of here. I’m taking over this scene as of now.’
‘I’ll see you in court, you bastard,’ one of the CO19 officers shouted. ‘I don’t care who you are — you’re not above the law.’
‘Just do it,’ Richter snapped, ‘and get Jessup in here.’
At that moment the inspector himself walked into the lounge. ‘What the hell’s happened?’
‘This fucking spook just slotted an unarmed man, that’s what happened. And now he’s trying to take over.’
Jessup stared across at Richter, and then at the two frightened Arabs. ‘Get them out of here,’ he instructed. ‘I’ll sort this out.’
He stepped across to Richter and held out his hand. ‘Give me your weapon.’
‘No,’ Richter said simply.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Jessup said. ‘You’ve just shot an unarmed man in front of two police officers. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your orders were, you’re under arrest for murder. Now hand over your weapon.’
‘No,’ Richter repeated. ‘Get these officers out of here, and then I’ll tell you why I had to do what I did.’
For a moment Jessup just stared at him, then turned round and pointed at the remaining two Arabs. ‘Take those two outside, caution them and arrest them, and the other three, on suspicion of CPIA under TACT — you know the form. Then just wait outside.’
Once the other police officers had left the room with their captives, Jessup turned back to Richter. ‘This had better be fucking good,’ he snarled.
‘Oh, it is,’ Richter said. ‘I can guarantee that.’
And, directly behind him, Salah Khatid stood upright again, with a broad smile on his face.
Chapter Four
They left the Chevrolet in a car park lot abutting the King Faisal Highway and walked from there to the Al-Jazira Hotel, which they’d chosen primarily because of its constantly changing clientele. The car was parked far enough away that, unless somebody was already following them, which O’Hagan was pretty sure was not the case, nobody could connect it with them. And even if someone — some section of the Bahrain security apparatus — did seize or search the vehicle, there was nothing inside it to incriminate anyone. The weapon components, the discovery of which would certainly have resulted in the immediate arrest of the two Americans, were now in the large briefcase Petrucci was carrying.
Jessup pushed open the door of the café and they walked inside. Richter sat down in a booth at the back. ‘Just coffee?’ the inspector asked, received two answering nods, and walked across to the counter to place the order.
‘It’s been a long time,’ Richter said, looking across the table at Khatid.
‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw you pointing that pistol at me. And then the code-phrase. It was lucky I still remembered it. Simpson gave it to me before I went to Afghanistan after 9/11.’
‘Presumably it meant you were about to be extracted?’ Jessup asked, sitting down beside Richter.
Khatid nodded. ‘I think he had a less dramatic exit in mind, but that was the general idea.’ He opened his jacket to reveal the huge red stain on his shirt. ‘What is this stuff?’
‘Something the boffins at Vauxhall Cross cooked up, I believe. It’s a mixture of dye, some kind of powder and a binding resin. The resin holds the round together when it’s fired, the powder provides the knock-down effect when it hits, and the dye itself looks remarkably like blood. You’ll have a bad bruise on your chest for a couple of weeks.’
‘But the first round was live?’ Jessup asked.
‘Yes. My boss wanted this execution to be as realistic as possible, so I deliberately missed with the first shot to prove that my weapon was firing live ammunition. Only the second bullet was a dummy.’
‘I don’t understand why our friend here had to be “killed”. Why couldn’t we just have arrested him and then handed him over to your lot?’
‘Three reasons,’ Richter explained. ‘First, we’ve got another job waiting for Argonaut here — and that has to be one of the silliest code-names yet devised — which is apparently somewhat urgent. Second, getting our asset back would have taken days or maybe weeks, once he’d been arrested, but taking possession of a corpse takes no time at all. Finally, Simpson thought that you’d have an easier time getting the other members of the cell to cooperate if they’ve just seen one of their own shot dead right in front of them.’
‘Why didn’t you confide in me before the operation?’
‘If you’d known what I intended to do, you’d have insisted on briefing your entry team. And unless they’re trained actors, which I doubt, they’d have reacted in exactly the wrong way. But by doing it for real, with no pre-briefing, they responded precisely the way a couple of good coppers should have done.
‘Now, as far as the world is concerned, one of these six terrorists was shot dead when armed police attempted to arrest him. The five remaining know he was in fact executed, which might mean they’ll be easier to handle, and Argonaut can start his new undercover operation as soon as he’s ready. All in all, an excellent result.’
Assembling an IED isn’t difficult as long as you know what you’re doing, as has been proved by the IRA and other terrorist groups on many occasions.
The most difficult weapons to fabricate are those using improvised explosives, usually based on ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with fuel oil. Such devices are bulky and unstable, but can be devastating. The Oklahoma City truck bomb that killed over 160 people in 1995 contained about two tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and the IRA used the same substance to construct the half-ton bomb that caused such massive damage to London’s Canary Wharf in 1996.