‘Remember,’ Saadi hissed, barely louder than a whisper. ‘If possible, avoid contact with the guards. If you’re spotted and have to take action, use a garrotte or knife. And don’t forget to bring the body back here.’
As he locked the car, Massood and Bashar each shrugged on a rucksack and picked up a second one. Saadi took the two rope ladders and led the way down the road, keeping close to the boundary fence until they reached the spot he’d selected earlier.
The fence was about nine feet high, a simple chain-link structure supported by concrete posts. Saadi stopped beside one of these and, as he untied the cord securing one ladder, Massood scrambled up the fence. When Saadi tossed him the end of the ladder, he looped it over the top of the post, letting it dangle against the outside of the fence. Then he repeated the operation with the second ladder, on the inside.
Within minutes, all three men and their bags were inside the racecourse. They concealed the ladders in a hollow dip in the ground a few yards away. Each man pulled on a rucksack and then Massood and Bashar seized the straps of the fourth one, and they followed Saadi towards the Millennium Grandstand. Within seconds, all three figures had vanished into the gloom.
‘You said there were a couple of things we had to talk about,’ Richter reminded Michael Watkinson. ‘What was the other?’
‘I had a call from Saeed Hussein. The forensic people went over the horsebox. They found no definite evidence of explosives, but there were traces of two different types of oil on the hay. One was definitely gun oil, but the second proved more difficult to identify. There were only very slight traces and, in their estimation, it was probably the kind you find on oiled paper of the sort used for wrapping military ordnance.’
Richter nodded. ‘That makes sense. Modern explosives come in either plastic or oiled paper wrapping. It’s confirmation, I suppose, that our deduction was right, but we’re no nearer finding the terrorists or discovering what their target is. But if they risked bringing weapons and explosives into Dubai, the target must be here.’
The knock on the door was quick and urgent. Before either Watkinson or Richter had time to respond, it opened and Chris Halls burst in.
‘I’ve found it,’ she said simply.
Less than an hour after Saadi and his companions had vanished into the night, they reappeared, empty-handed. They climbed back over the perimeter fence, walked up the road to the parked Renault, stowed the ladders in the boot, and pulled the gellabbiyas back on over their clothes.
Saadi started the engine, and three minutes later the road was empty.
‘It was a hidden partition,’ Chris Halls explained. ‘He used a program called Steganos Safe.’
‘Is it unusual?’ Watkinson asked.
Halls shook her head. ‘No, but Holden did his best to make it as difficult as possible to find. He renamed the program file and tucked it away deep inside the operating system in a hidden, read-only folder, which is why it took me so long to find it. Then I had to crack the password to get in, but I’ve got a couple of tools that helped me do that fairly quickly.’
‘So what’s inside it?’ Richter asked.
‘Not as much as I was hoping,’ Halls replied. ‘Let me show you.’
She led the way to her office, sat down and touched the space-bar to remove the screen-saver. They stood on either side of her as Halls double-clicked a new icon — a tiny representation of a safe — on the desktop.
A box popped up listing a single secure partition: drive Z. Halls clicked the ‘open’ link beside it and immediately a password prompt appeared. She typed rapidly, pressed ‘OK’ and a directory listing appeared on the screen. There were just three names in it — ‘Damascus’, ‘Manama’ and ‘Dubai’.
‘That looks promising,’ Richter observed.
Halls double-clicked ‘Damascus’.
‘As I said, there’s not that much in here, but it proves that Holden was being fed information.’
The screen display changed to show six filenames. The first five mini-icons represented images, and the final one a Microsoft Word document. Halls double-clicked the first image, and a photograph of the entrance to a souk filled the screen.
Watkinson looked closely. ‘That’s the Bab Al-Nasr end of the Al-Hamidieh souk.’
Halls nodded. ‘Three of the other pictures show different views of the interior, including one of the roof.’ She quickly flicked through them.
‘And the last picture?’
‘That,’ Halls said, ‘is Saadallah Assad.’
An image appeared of a handsome young Arab boy with a slightly arrogant expression, looking off to the left. It wasn’t a portrait, so Richter guessed it had been taken surreptitiously with a small digital camera.
For a few moments the three of them stared at the photograph of the young man who, just days or hours later, had caused the deaths of nearly thirty innocent people.
‘He could almost be an actor,’ Halls observed. ‘I bet he had no shortage of female admirers.’
There wasn’t anything Richter or Watkinson felt like adding to that remark.
‘The Word document,’ Halls continued, while opening the file, ‘is entitled “Damascus data”.’
It contained three short paragraphs. The first gave Assad’s name and a brief word-picture, and the second a very abbreviated history of the Society of Muslim Brothers. The third listed a date, the same day Assad had triggered his suicide bomb, and a single, chilling sentence: ‘Gonna be a big one!’, and a brief instruction: ‘Don’t tell them it’s Damascus. Just describe the souk and leave it at that.’
‘Well, that’s certainly clear enough,’ Watkinson said bitterly. ‘Let’s see the Manama files.’
Halls opened the second directory. The contents looked very similar to the first — four image files and a Word document. She double-clicked the first photograph to reveal a street with cars parked along each side.
‘That could well be Al-Mutanabi Avenue,’ Richter remarked, ‘but I was only there after the explosion, so I can’t be sure.’
‘It is Al-Mutanabi,’ Halls confirmed, ‘and the Word file makes that clear. The next two pictures are of the same road, apparently taken at about the same time, because the parked cars are identical in each. The last one is a street map of Manama.’ The images appeared, one after the other. ‘This Word file is also fairly short.’
There were just two paragraphs this time. The first described the bomb vehicle as an old American car that would be positioned by two men wearing traditional Arab dress, and confirmed that it would be left somewhere on Al-Mutanabi Avenue. The second paragraph instructed Holden to suggest that the location was Manama, but not to mention it by name, only by reference to a landmark. The last sentence read: ‘Think of an extra piece of information — maybe the airport on Muharraq Island or the Al-Fateh Mosque — and give them that.’
‘You were right, then,’ Watkinson said grimly. ‘Hol-den was a mouthpiece for this bunch of terrorists, but I still don’t understand what their motive was. Why were they using him?’
‘The obvious answer is to establish Holden’s credibility as a psychic, though I have no idea why that should have been so important. But that theory falls rather flat since he’s just been murdered, probably by these same people. We’re obviously missing something here — some other factor.’
‘Exactly,’ Watkinson sighed. ‘Right, Chris, let’s see the “Dubai” files.’