But instead of enjoying a long soak in a hot bath, a decent meal and then a pleasant evening in the mess, he’d been forced to dump all his gear, grab a quick shower, and drive straight back to London.
The only redeeming feature of the day had been the drive, and only because it had finally stopped raining and Richter had gone up to Hereford in his favourite toy. His first love had always been motorcycles, and he hadn’t even owned a car for three or four years, simply because it was so much easier to get around London on two wheels rather than four. So it was hardly surprising that when he’d finally decided to buy a car, what he’d chosen was more or less a four-wheeled motorbike.
It was a jet-black Westfield Sport 2000, a spiritual descendant of the original Lotus 7. Two seats, four wheels, a long bonnet covering a two-litre engine, rudimentary weather-proofing and a very basic interior, but with about the same power-to-weight ratio as a Saturn Five rocket. Or at least that was what it felt like to Richter. It was an animal. It could out-drag just about any alleged ‘supercar’ on the road, irrespective of make, model and price, and it had cost him about the same as a cheap family box on wheels. He simply adored it.
The journey back to London had been quick — very quick, as the traffic police officer indignantly pointed out to Richter when he finally caught up with him at a set of road works on the A5, south of Weedon Bec. Richter had listened politely, waited until the man had finished, then produced a small leather folder containing a laminated exemption card that he flipped open in front of the officer’s face. It was basically a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ permit issued to SIS — and by extension Foreign Operations Executive — operatives and agents.
Once he was certain the traffic officer had fully read and understood it, Richter closed the wallet, slipped it back into his pocket, waved a brisk two fingers under the officer’s nose, then engaged first gear on the Westfield and dropped the clutch. The rear wheels spun for almost seventy yards, leaving two parallel black scars on the road surface. He hit sixty in a whisker under four and a half seconds, and he didn’t see the policeman again.
‘I wanted you back here two days ago.’ Simpson closed the file and fired his opening salvo. ‘I called your mobile, but it was switched off.’
‘I was on an exercise. I was supposed to be carrying out covert surveillance, watching a target. I’d have looked a right prat if my bloody phone had started ringing in a hole in the middle of some field. Of course it was switched off. In fact, I didn’t even have it with me.’
‘Well, your little holiday playing war games with the SAS has severely inconvenienced us.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ Richter replied smoothly.
‘Keep your sarcasm to yourself. And another thing. Next time you use your exemption card to avoid a prosecution for speeding, don’t wave two fingers at the Black Rat who’s stopped you.’
Richter glanced at his watch. By his calculation, the incident at the road works had happened less than two hours ago. ‘How do you know about that?’
‘I know almost everything, Richter, almost all of the time. In this case, he ran your registration plate through the PNC. The plate was blocked, of course, and that raised a flag which stopped his enquiry. The system forwarded the time, date and place of the incident to Vauxhall Cross, because Six issued the card. The duty officer contacted the patrolman who’d stopped you, and then he told me all about it. QED. Anyway, don’t do it again.’
‘So why did you want me back here in such a hurry? And why are you in the office on a Sunday afternoon? Isn’t there any cricket on television?’
‘You’re here because the woodentops reckon they’ve discovered a terrorist cell lurking in an apartment pretty close to where we’re sitting right now.’
‘I presume you’re referring to the Metropolitan Police?’ Simpson’s dislike of all police officers was legendary. Richter assumed he’d been nicked as a spotty youth by the local bobby — probably for something embarrassing. ‘And what has that got to do with us, exactly? Just to remind you, the “F” in “FOE” stands for “foreign”. That means we’re not supposed to operate in Britain.’
‘I do know that, Richter. I run this outfit — remember? The reason we’re involved in this is quite simple. It’s also classified Top Secret and SCI, code word “Jason”.’
‘I’m not cleared for “Jason”.’
‘You are now, with effect from fifteen twenty-two this afternoon.’
‘Wonderful, thanks. So what’s the story?’
‘One of our people is on the inside,’ Simpson said. ‘We have someone in the terrorists’ flat. He’s supposedly a part of the cell.’
‘Who is he, and what’s he doing there?’
‘You know him. In fact, you’re one of the very few people working here who has ever met him, but that was a while ago. To everyone outside this room, his codename is Argonaut. Remember Salah Khatid?’
‘Christ, I thought he was dead.’
‘Not yet he isn’t,’ Simpson replied, somewhat enigmatically. ‘He’s been deep-cover ever since 9/11. We originally sent him out to Afghanistan to join the Taliban as a sympathizer. He gradually worked his way down through Pakistan and into Iran, then crossed the Gulf into Saudi Arabia, sending us information the whole time. Good quality, real-time HUMINT. We’ve been filtering his information to Five and Six, and selected bits to the Company.’
Simpson frowned. ‘About eight months ago he arrived in Germany, told us he’d made contact with a small group of Arabs, and then vanished. We assumed he’d been burnt, but six weeks ago we heard from him again. The group was on the move, heading for London, and we guessed the next thing we’d hear would be target details. Instead, on Friday morning we were advised by Six that a Met Police Legion Patrol had managed to locate Khatid’s terrorist cell. Five was planning to send in CO19, mob-handed, early on Saturday morning. I had to spend some time convincing Six this was a really bad idea, and I’ve managed to get the assault delayed until tomorrow. Just as well, considering how long it took you to get back from Hereford. And I need you there because you know Khatid.’
‘So what do you want me to do — go in and get him out before the plods kick down the doors?’
‘Not exactly,’ Simpson said. ‘I want you to go into the flat with the cops, positively identify Salah Khatid and then kill him.’
Chapter Two
A somewhat battered three-ton truck with two men in the cab stopped in a small car park on the outskirts of Kondal. The driver, Alexei Nabov, turned the vehicle round so that it faced the road, then switched off the engine. Moments later, an elderly saloon car of Russian manufacture drove in and parked a few yards away, a middle-aged man behind the wheel.
Two men emerged from the hotel next to the car park. The names listed in their American passports were Richard Wilson and Edward Dawson, and they told anyone who asked that they were writers collaborating on a book about the transfiguration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into the Confederation of Independent States and studying the effects this national trauma had caused to the former citizens of the USSR. It sounded reasonable enough, and accounted for their laptop computers and conversations in Russian — both men spoke the language fluently — with local workers and officials.