The Sanction Read online

  Javed looked up from his screen, horrified. ‘You mean taken out?’

  ‘It figures. What else can explain the lack of a follow-up?’

  Javed shrugged. ‘If it’s somebody close to Taher then the risk must be enormous. Perhaps they got cold feet.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ But Holm didn’t think so. They’d sent one message. The tease. The wake-up call. The bait. If the source was still alive there had to be another one along at some point.

  And so it proved.

  On Friday afternoon, as Holm was deciding whether to take up Palmer’s offer of a couple of jars after work, Javed lurched back in his chair.

  ‘We’re on!’ The chair rocked violently as Javed changed direction and hunched forward, his face inches from the screen. ‘What the…?’

  Holm stood and moved over. The tweet was a sequence of numbers, seventeen in all.

  ‘18, 18, 14, 0, 21, 11…’ Javed began to read them. He turned from the screen. ‘Another code.’

  ‘Makes sense, after all, it’s what we spooks do, isn’t it? Codes and dead-letter drops and listening to phone conversations. Least that’s what I believed before I signed on. More fool me.’

  Holm read the numbers back to himself and tried several simple substitution ciphers in his head. The first three tries were gobbledygook so he went across to his desk and grabbed a few sheets of paper and a couple of pencils. He handed a sheet and a pencil to Javed. ‘Let’s see what that brain of yours can do.’

  Holm wrote the numbers out large. Then small. Then in a scrawl. Then neatly. He tried placing them in a clock face, moving round the dial in a random fashion. He multiplied the numbers together. Divided them. Added them.

  ‘You got something, boss?’ Javed said. He appeared to have a similar idea to Holm as he was using the calculator on his phone to perform some kind of complicated transformation. ‘Because it’s beyond me.’

  ‘Nothing, and we can’t very well give it to the bods at GCHQ. We have to work this out ourselves.’

  ‘They want us to get this,’ Javed said. ‘Else why bother?’

  Holm read through the numbers once more. There were, of course, certain codes that couldn’t be deciphered. They were uncrackable and offered perfect secrecy even against the most powerful supercomputer.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ Holm said, realising what the cipher was. ‘These numbers are from a one-time pad.’

  Javed nodded, understanding immediately. ‘So we’re stuffed?’

  ‘Unless we can find the key, yes.’

  A code created with a one-time pad used a sequence of letters or numbers to encrypt the message. Without the source material, decryption was impossible.

  Holm screwed up his piece of paper and lobbed it towards the filing cabinet where it bounced off the front and fell into the waste paper bin. He shook his head.

  They want us to get this… Javed had said.

  He stared at the filing cabinet for a few seconds and walked over and opened the top drawer. The drawer held various documents relating to the fake animal rights investigation, but Holm rummaged behind them and pulled out the index card he’d discovered when they’d first moved in to the office.

  ‘Christ.’ He read the name on the card. Robert Gerard Sands. The full name of Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker who’d died way back in the nineteen eighties. There were seventeen letters in the name and there were seventeen numbers in the tweet. He jabbed a finger at the name, not quite believing what he was seeing. ‘This is the key. This is the one-time pad.’

  ‘How the—?’

  ‘I’ve no bloody idea.’

  ‘A is zero, right?’ Javed was at his shoulder now, the lad’s face creased in concentration. ‘At least that’s what I was taught.’

  ‘Yes, let’s start with that.’ Holm began to do the calculations himself. He wrote out the full code sequence, below that the name, and below that an A to Z scale numbered zero to twenty-five.

  18, 18, 14, 0, 21, 11, 25, 8, 8, 13, 9, 23, 23, 5, 1, 14, 2

  Robert Gerard Sands

  A/0 B/1 C/2 D/3 E/4 F/5 G/6 H/7 I/8 J/9 K/10 L/11 M/12 N/13 O/14 P/15 Q/16 R/17 S/18 T/19 U/20 V/21 W/22 X/23 Y/24 Z/25

  The first number in the code was 18, while the first letter in the one-time pad sequence was R. The position of R on Holm’s scale was 17 so he took that from 18, which left 1. Letter 1 on the same scale was B, so B was the answer. He moved on to the second number, which was also 18. However, the second letter on the pad was O which was 14 on the scale. 18 minus 14 was 4 so that became E. The third number was 14 and the third letter B. 14 minus… before he got any further Javed had it.

  ‘Ben Western Suffolk.’ Javed smiled and moved back to his chair. ‘Whoever the hell that is.’

  ‘Search it.’

  ‘I am.’ Javed’s fingers were already tapping his keyboard. He ran his eyes down a screen of search results. ‘There’s a number of newspaper reports from last week. A man called Ben Western went missing in Suffolk. Doesn’t appear to be anything particularly interesting about the case.’

  ‘A misper?’ Holm used his old police shorthand. ‘That’s it?’

  Javed peered at the screen again. ‘Well it can’t be a coincidence.’

  Holm slumped back and tried to get his head round the information. How could it have anything to do with the master terrorist he’d been hunting for years?

  ‘Do you want me to look him up?’ Javed had closed the browser and opened MI5’s internal database. It held huge amounts of information and cross-referenced the Police National Computer, material held at GCHQ and MI6, as well as international databases from foreign agencies and police forces. Javed began to type. ‘Might be a chance—’

  ‘No!’ Holm swung his chair round. ‘There could be a flag on the record.’

  ‘You mean…?’

  ‘Think about it. Whoever sent us the information on this Ben Western guy must be in MI5 or have some sort of access. That could have been any one of hundreds, even thousands, of people.’ Holm glanced at the filing cabinet. ‘Nobody else would have been able to get the index card in there.’

  ‘But why the subterfuge?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but whoever it is can’t want Huxtable or anyone else to know what we’re up to. They must realise Taher has a contact in the security services. It’s what I’ve been saying for ages.’ Holm held up a finger and thumb and squeezed them together. ‘Every time I’ve been close to catching Taher he’s slipped away. I’m not risking that again.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  Holm thought for a moment. ‘Animal rights. Start searching the PNC for crimes suspected of being committed by animal liberation groups. That will bring up dozens of records spread across the country. Pick a few from the Suffolk area we can use as decoys.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘We follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City.’ Holm waited for a quip back from Javed but there was nothing. He shook his head, wondering if the lad’s cultural references bore any relation to his own. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of The Wizard of Oz?’

  ‘Of course I’ve heard of it. I’ve dreamed of being Dorothy for half my life.’ Javed pouted and laughed as Holm reddened. ‘But you, I imagine, would be better suited to playing the scarecrow.’

  Chapter Eleven

  They arranged to rendezvous on Plymouth Hoe, close to the spot where Silva had sat in the rain on the day of her mother’s death. She strolled across the expanse of grass towards the red and white lighthouse where a man stood looking out at the view. Hair the colour of desert sand and just as fine swirled in light curls. There was a hint of red in the hair and a dusting of freckles on the face. If he’d been standing at the bar in a pub in Galway he could have been mistaken for an Irish poet, the type of man who always had a smile for the teenage girls, a rhyming couplet for the women, a tall tale and a pint of Guinness for his mates.

  As she approached, Sean turned as if something had alerted him to her presence. He didn’t smile, simply made a shr
ugging motion and opened his arms and embraced her. She’d steeled herself not to get emotional, but the gesture overwhelmed her. With her mother gone, there was no one else she’d ever been as close to as Sean. She held him for a long time and neither of them said anything until she sniffed away the last of her tears.

  ‘I wished you’d met her,’ Silva said.

  Sean nodded. ‘So do I. From what you told me and what I read she was—’

  ‘Stop.’ Silva raised a finger to Sean’s lips. ‘It doesn’t matter what she was or wasn’t beyond the fact she was my mother. All the media coverage, the press stories, what do I care?’

  ‘You must be proud of her work?’

  ‘I’d prefer she was still alive.’ Silva pushed free from Sean and they began to walk across the grass. ‘I never thought this could happen.’

  ‘There were risks in what she did.’ Sean shook his head. ‘But to be honest, these days there are risks for all of us.’

  ‘And you?’ Silva reached out and touched Sean’s hand. ‘Are you still in the field?’

  ‘I try not to be.’ That grin. A mirror of the one Silva had first seen in Afghanistan. ‘You know me, I’m no hero, but on occasion, yes.’

  ‘You mentioned Sudan?’

  ‘Yup. North Africa is the new front. Three and a half thousand miles from Mauritania to the Red Sea, two thousand miles from the Med to Somalia. Makes what we were up to in Afghanistan look like a game of hide and seek in the park. Things are pretty bad out there right now.’ Sean slumped his shoulders and looked apologetic. ‘Well, you know all about that.’

  Silva nodded. ‘ISIS?’

  ‘ISIS, ISIL, IS, Daesh, AQIM, al-Shabaab, whatever you want to call them. These groups are something akin to a hydra. Cut off one head somewhere and another one emerges. There’s no stopping them. There seems to be an infinite number of young men deluded enough to believe the propaganda. We take out half a dozen and another six come forward. The hydra.’

  ‘I wish you were desk-based.’ Silva linked arms with Sean as they walked. ‘I’d feel a lot happier.’

  ‘What’s this, a change of plan?’

  ‘I still care about you, even if…’ Silva made a funny face and wrinkled her nose. ‘You know.’

  ‘Look, if I was desk-based, my desk would be on the other side of the Atlantic and I’d be sitting behind it and staring at a computer monitor instead of staring at you.’ Sean turned his head and looked her up and down. ‘No comparison. On the other hand, I guess I could get a screensaver with a picture of you. That might do. Something nice to look at anyway. Something to remind me of the good times we once had.’

  ‘Stop it, Sean. We’ve been through this before.’

  ‘We have, Becca. I’m like a recorded message playing on an endless loop.’

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘I worry about you.’

  ‘No need. I can take care of myself, remember?’

  ‘I’m not talking about physical danger. I mean your well-being.’

  ‘You sound like my dad. He’s scared I might be going mental.’ Silva turned and faced him. ‘But I’m not. You can see that.’

  ‘He said you’re delivering letters. You’re a mailman or something.’

  ‘You spoke to him?’

  ‘I didn’t have your latest mobile number. He was very chatty. Wanted to know what I’d been doing in Africa. He seemed to be quite up on world events.’

  ‘Not quite so up on events concerning his own daughter.’

  ‘You’re still at loggerheads, then?’ Sean shook his head. ‘I thought you’d have made your peace.’

  ‘This is one conflict that will never end.’

  ‘You’re bitter at him for not backing you. I can understand, but you can’t go on hating him for that. Not now.’

  ‘He hasn’t been around since I was ten years old. Years later he tries to make amends and we come to some sort of amicable understanding. Then, when I really need him, he abandons me again.’

  ‘He was in a difficult position, Becca. He couldn’t back you over the incident in Afghanistan, at least not professionally.’

  ‘Well he didn’t do so personally either. In fact with my father I’m not sure there’s any difference. Strategy and tactics cover his whole life from his morning crap to his evening cocoa. Everything has to be planned out in advance or timed to the second.’

  Sean shook his head once more. ‘You’re as bad as him, you know? Stubborn, obstinate, and you think your way is the only way.’

  ‘If I’m so awful, then why are you here?’ As she asked the question the answer came to her. Silva stopped and let go of Sean’s arm. ‘Hang on, you didn’t phone my father, did you? He phoned you.’

  Sean shrugged. Didn’t say anything. They resumed walking, heading down to the Barbican area of the waterfront. When they reached the quayside they sat down at a table outside a bar and ordered drinks.

  ‘Look,’ Sean said once the waiter had brought the drinks over. ‘You’re right, your dad called me a couple of days ago. I just happened to have a month here in London on embassy duties, but I’d have come from anywhere if I’d thought there was a chance we might get back together.’

  ‘But not otherwise?’

  ‘No.’ Sean hung his head. He reached for his beer and took a sip. ‘Why continue to beat myself up?’

  ‘You’re not my friend, then?’

  ‘Not just your friend. I could never cope with that.’

  As Sean put his beer down, Silva gave a resigned look and half smiled.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  * * *

  Javed spent an hour conducting an extensive search for crimes associated with animal rights that had been committed in East Anglia. He printed out the results.

  ‘Here you go,’ he said, waving a dozen sheets of paper in the air, his voice tinged with triumph as if what he’d done was a major achievement. ‘The animal libbers love it up there in Suffolk. Pig units, chicken units, Huntingdon Life Sciences just over the border in Cambridgeshire. By the number of incidents it seems to be a regular hotbed.’

  ‘Great,’ Holm said. ‘But we’re not really looking for animal rights activists, are we?’

  ‘No, I guess not.’ Javed lowered the crime reports and dumped them on the table. He swivelled his chair to face Holm. ‘Pity.’

  Holm reached across his desk for his old address book. The scrappy A5 booklet was full of contacts he’d made over the years, many from way back when he’d been a copper. Pre-smartphones, almost pre-mobiles, the pages were a mess of hurriedly jotted addresses and telephone numbers. Most, he realised, would be out of date, but he only needed a name or two. He flicked through the book, pausing every now and then as he tried to recall old colleagues and where they’d ended up. He was halfway through when he stopped and snapped the book closed.

  ‘Suffolk Constabulary, of course,’ he said. He smiled, a face coming to mind. And not just a face, a body too. Rounded and curvy and moving under the sheets like no one else ever had. ‘Billie Cornish.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘She. Billie was colleague of mine when I was on the Met. I’d completely forgotten she moved to East Anglia. If she’s still there and in the job she might be able to help.’

  ‘Are we talking work-related help?’ Javed was digging, a grin on his face suggesting he’d worked out Holm’s past relationship with Cornish wasn’t solely on a professional level. ‘Only we don’t need any distractions.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. I was younger and she was much younger.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had it in you, boss.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Sounds like I might have to if you’re planning to meet this woman. What are you going to tell her?’

  ‘I’ll tell her MI5 would appreciate some help.’ Holm looked round for his phone. ‘While I do that, you enter some of those crimes into our mock database so we have an excuse to go up to Suffolk and do some groundwork.’

  ‘Right, boss.’
>
  Holm wasn’t surprised to find Billie Cornish had moved on and up. She’d been a Detective Constable fifteen years ago, wet behind the ears, wet… he felt a shiver go through him. He’d never met anyone as exciting before or since, and even though their affair had been short-lived, he still remembered every moment like yesterday. She wasn’t much more than half his age back then, mid-twenties to his early forties, but she’d made all the running. She’d ended it too, three months down the line. She was going places, she said. Too many things to do, too many people she wanted to screw. He was sweet, he was a great lover, but it was never going to be a long-term thing between them – he could see that, couldn’t he?

  Yeah, he supposed he could. He’d had two kids under ten, a wife who’d made a nest without a word of complaint about the long hours he worked or the fact she’d had to sacrifice her own career to raise their children, a nice house in a decent part of London. And yet…

  ‘You going to actually make that call?’ Javed. The grin was now verging on subordination. ‘Only we’re supposed to be catching Taher before he retires and draws his pension.’

  Holm dismissed Javed with a wave. He found a number for CID in Suffolk, but it took several calls before he was put through to Detective Chief Superintendent Billie Cornish at force HQ in Ipswich.

  He found himself stumbling through a couple of minutes of casual chit-chat, embarrassed it had been so long since they’d been in touch. He congratulated Cornish on her rise through the ranks, played down his own position with JTAC and then he was on to the meat of the call.

  ‘We’ve had some intelligence recently about a group of animal activists planning something big, something to rival the jihadis. The fox-hunting debate has been won, animal testing is on the way out and the public have lost interest. They need a marquee event to garner a little attention.’

  ‘Other people taking their thunder, hey?’ Cornish said.

  ‘Something like that.’ Holm paused. Even though he’d worked a long time in the security services, he still found the lying difficult, and he didn’t like deceiving Cornish. ‘The way the wind is blowing they need publicity to promote their cause.’