Something shifted in her expression as a memory came to the surface. “Hatfield,” she said. “Of course. Brendan told me about you.”
“Brendan?”
“A colleague. He showed me one of your videos on YouTube. You’re the one the Home Office banned from traveling here, one of Copeland’s friends.”
The name landed like a depth charge in Jack’s brain. He sat upright. “How do you know Bob Copeland?”
She must have sensed a threat from him, because she put her hands up as if to reassure him. “He was a friend,” she said. “When we heard about what happened to him, we were devastated.”
“We?” Jack had no idea what to make of this. “Sara, I think you’d better explain.”
“I don’t know how much I can tell you,” she said. “We’ve already been compromised, and if you were to report anything about-”
“ Report anything? Are you serious?” Heat rose in Jack’s chest. “This isn’t about my job. I don’t have a clue what’s going on here yet it’s cost me two friends and nearly my own life-”
“You’re not the only one who has lost friends and nearly his life,” she said.
Right, he thought. He remembered her half dead in the chair. He sheathed his claws.
“A man who was like a brother to me was found dead in a pub toilet, his throat slit. And a woman I was close to was suffocated in Bulgaria.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “That still doesn’t tell me how you know Bob Copeland. What do you mean, he was a friend?”
She lowered her head a moment as if to gather her thoughts. Probably trying to decide how much she should tell him. “You may have a hard time believing this, but I’m a field agent for Interpol.”
He looked at her as if she had said she was one of Santa’s elves. Not because there weren’t women agents but because the FBI and MI6 were already folded into this thing. Now Interpol?
“Okay,” he said. “You’re Interpol. And?”
“For the last two years I’ve been working with a small, international task force, trying to gather information about an extremist Muslim group called the Hand of Allah.”
Jack knew the name well and his reaction made it obvious.
“I see you’ve heard of them.”
“An offshoot of Al Qaeda, way under the radar. I used to talk about them on my TV show, but I wasn’t sure anyone was listening. People wanted to believe we had this stuff under control.”
She nodded. “A lot we do… some we do not. The Hand of Allah is among the latter. Their leader is a nasty piece of work named Faakhir Zuabi, who reportedly used to rub shoulders with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden’s chief of operations.
“After Mohammed was taken into custody, Zuabi went out on his own. Since then he’s had his fingers in more death and destruction around the globe than we can track, all the while sitting comfortably in a mosque in East London-not that the British authorities want to believe this. He’s spent the last several years getting cozy with the elites in this country, financing campaigns of people who are sympathetic to Muslims.”
“You have people like that here?”
Sara made a face.
Jack realized he’d stepped in it.
“Not all Muslims want to be witness to the downfall of Western Civilization,” she said. “Some of us are quite fond of it, in fact.”
“Sorry,” Jack said, though he wasn’t sure he meant it.
Her expression relaxed. “But it goes much deeper than political influence.”
“What do you mean?”
“Abdal al-Fida was one of Zuabi’s followers, but he also worked for the British government. My job was to gather information from him about the Hand of Allah.”
Jack looked at her, thinking she must have had a very powerful motivation beyond a sense of duty to voluntarily lie down with a known terrorist. He imagined she’d had to take many long, hot showers after their time in bed to wash away the taint. Her stone-cold reaction to al-Fida’s so-called suicide suddenly made all the sense in the world.
“What kind of information were you hoping to get?”
“Names, places, anything actionable. But he was also a computer technician and we thought he might be our back door into the government’s counterintelligence network.”
Jack frowned. “Why would you want access to that?”
“To explore. We think that over the last several years, helped by the politicians who were in their pocket, the Hand of Allah has been slowly infiltrating the British government with hadist sleeper agents like al-Fida. Particularly the Home and Foreign Offices. All the way to the top. Which means they’d have access to and control of the counterterrorist branches, like MI5 and-”
“MI6,” Jack said. “Adam Swain.”
She nodded. “He and his gang of thugs may not look like your average Muslim radicals, but they are sympathizers. We believe they were bought off by some very deep pockets.”
“And you think Zuabi’s behind all this?”
“Without a doubt,” Sara said. “But he’s very clever about it. He keeps everything on a need-to-know basis. I don’t think even his own men-the true believers-are aware of how far this reaches. Even though al-Fida worked for the government, I never got the impression he knew anything about Swain and the others. Zuabi likes things fragmented so that it’s not so easy to connect the dots.”
“That still doesn’t tell me about Copeland. How did he fit?”
“Copeland was working with us,” she said, “a clandestine consultant, I’d guess you’d say.”
Jack nodded. Typical Bob. “So he knew about al-Fida all along.”
“Al-Fida-and several others.”
“What kind of ‘others’?” That didn’t sound good.
“When Abdal left for California a few weeks ago, he didn’t say anything to me about his real purpose in going there because that would have betrayed his oath to Zuabi. But I knew that his trip wasn’t for consulate business, so we started taking a closer look. We discovered that the Home Office had sent several employees to San Francisco over the last two years, all Muslims, all traveling on diplomatic passports.”
“A sleeper cell?”
She nodded. “We think they’re planning something in the U.S. That exploding Land Rover was a good indication that we’re right. Al-Fida was like a child, no impulse control and a desire to be patted on the head-I can certainly attest to that. When he went off the rails, the Hand of Allah had to scramble to cover their tracks. They couldn’t afford for him to expose them and interfere with their real objective.”
“So why didn’t they just kill him?”
“I suppose Zuabi had his reasons,” Sara said. “Perhaps he wished to allow a loyal follower to make peace with God or take his own life. That would have been honorable. Either way, after Abdal returned to London he was very subdued. If not for me, for wanting to spend more time together, I believe he would have died by his own hand.”
“Not that I believe Swain, but he told me that killing al-Fida was not on his to-do list.”
“That may be true,” she said. “I think Abdal was killed by a man who is devoted to Zuabi, another true believer.”
Jack suddenly remembered the guy he nearly bumped into last night as he left the pub near al-Fida’s house, a dark, angular-faced man with a wispy black goatee who had seemed to be in a hurry. Jack had thought the man was just another Muslim resident of the neighborhood, but maybe he was wrong.
“You have a name?” he asked.
Sara hesitated.
“Maybe I know him,” Jack prodded.
“Hassan Haddad,” she said. “He’s one of the Hand of Allah’s top soldiers, recruited when he was a child by Zuabi himself. Very skilled, quite ruthless. We picked him up on a cell phone call, tailed him for several days, followed him to Bulgaria where we think he may have been in contact with an arms merchant named Anton Chilikov. We don’t know if any purchases were made, but Haddad killed one of our agents to prevent us from finding out.”
“The girl who was suffocated?”
“Yes,” Sara said. “Someone I recruited.” A faraway look crept into her eyes and Jack knew the loss must have been difficult for her.