As he walked out of the stairwell and into the street a man in a beige raincoat stepped aside to let him go by.
‘Thanks,’ muttered Shepherd.
The man grunted. He had his head down but Shepherd caught a glimpse of his face. Light brown hair, a long face with a dimpled chin, brown eyes. It was a face Shepherd had seen before. He looked over his shoulder but all he saw was the man’s back disappearing up the stairs.
Shepherd walked down the road and stopped outside a mobile-phone shop. He stared into the window, unseeing, as he flicked mentally through his memory files, searching for that face. It wasn’t someone he’d met, or spoken to, he was sure. And it wasn’t a computer file he’d seen. It was a photograph – but where? And when? Then the correct neurones fired and Shepherd remembered. He took out his mobile and phoned Sharpe. ‘Razor, are you in the car?’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. Where are you?’
‘Still parked up. Did everything go okay?’
‘I’ve got the passport, but something’s cropped up. I’ve just seen a face I recognise.’
‘Who?’
‘That’s the problem,’ said Shepherd. ‘I recognise the face but I don’t know the name. It’s a terrorist that Button’s on the lookout for. She had his photograph up on some sort of hit list.’
‘What sort of terrorist?’
‘Al-Qaeda.’
‘Shit.’
‘Exactly. Look, you hang fire there. I’m staying put until I’ve spoken to Button.’
Shepherd cut the connection and phoned Button.
Yokely and Button gazed through the glass window at the man sitting in the room next door. He was an Arab in his early thirties, good-looking with jet-black hair and piercing black eyes. He was wearing a well-cut suit and a crisp white shirt, buttoned with no tie. He sat with his legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his chest.
‘He can’t see us, but he probably knows he’s being watched,’ said Yokely. The American nodded at a manilla file on the table behind him. ‘I’ve printed out some of the information we have. See what you think.’
Button sat down and opened the file. There were a dozen or so surveillance photographs of the Saudi, taken with a long lens.
‘Can I get you some coffee?’
‘Tea would be nice,’ said Button, setting the photographs to one side and picking up a computer printout. ‘Low fat milk, if you have it.’
Yokely went out of the room and reappeared a couple of minutes later. ‘On its way,’ he said.
‘There’s nothing in the file that says you arrested him,’ said Button.
‘He’s not under arrest,’ said Yokely.
‘Just helping you with your enquiries, I suppose,’ said Button.
Yokely flashed her a cold smile. ‘This isn’t a police investigation,’ he said. ‘We’re not bound by the usual rules of interrogation. He stays here as long as need be. And if he refuses to co-operate, he sits in a cell in Cuba for as long as we deem necessary.’
‘But what evidence do you have?’
Yokely sat down at the table and adjusted the cuffs of his shirt. ‘Your Forensics boys found a DNA sample on a glass in a safe-house used by one of the suicide-bombers who hit the Tube last year. They drew a blank but we gave it to our guys.’
‘And they had him on file?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Yokely. ‘We knew it wasn’t the bomber because the bomber’s DNA was all over the place. It matched the DNA of the guy your man Shepherd shot in the Tube station. But we couldn’t get a match on the other DNA on any of our databases, and there were no prints other than the bomber’s. All we had was the DNA from saliva on the glass and no match. That’s when we got creative.’ He grinned. ‘We ran a check through all the available databases looking for a close match. Not a perfect match, but enough of one to suggest a family relationship. And we got a hit, from Baltimore of all places. There was a guy there, a Saudi, who’d been accused of rape back in the nineties. He was a Ph. D. student at Johns Hopkins. The alleged victim was a secretary. She claimed the guy had doped her with Rohypnol, then raped her. She vaguely remembered the rape and a video camera, but there was no physical evidence.’
‘He used a condom?’
‘He did indeed. But he left his fingerprints all over the place, so off the back of that the police took DNA and blood samples to cross-check with other unsolved rapes. Nothing came up, and the case never went to trial. The Saudi left the country and the secretary was driving around in a brand-new Porsche.’
‘He paid her off?’
‘That’s what it looks like, and we couldn’t get her to press charges. But the guy’s DNA stayed on file, and it was a close match to the saliva sample we found in the bomber’s flat. Not close enough to be a sibling, but definitely a first cousin or a nephew. We had enough information to start tracking down all the members of his family. Two hundred or so names, as it turned out. Then we started cross-checking them with visas issued for the UK in the six months running up to the London bombings. That gave us a handful of hits, but by then we’d realised that quite a few of them had British passports.’ Yokely smiled. ‘You do make it easy for them, don’t you?’ he said. ‘The way you hand out citizenship to almost anyone who asks for it.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ said Button. ‘You need to take it up with our home secretary.’
‘Your capital city is now so foreigner-friendly they call it Londonistan, you know?’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Button patiently. ‘It’s part of being a multicultural society.’
‘Anyway, the ones with British citizenship wouldn’t be recorded entering or leaving the country, so we started to look further afield,’ said Yokely.
There was a discreet knock at the door, which was opened by a young blonde woman carrying a tray with a mug of coffee, a pot of tea, a jug of milk and a bowl of packets of sugar and sweetener. Yokely smiled at the woman and took it from her. He put it on the table, waited until she had closed the door behind her, then resumed. ‘We looked for countries where there had been terrorist incidents and started cross-checking the coming and going of the family members. As you can imagine, it took time. Milk and sugar?’
‘Just milk,’ said Button.
‘Am I right that the Queen puts the milk in first?’
Button smiled. ‘I’ve heard she does, yes.’
‘And why would that be, do you think? Doesn’t it make sense to put the tea in first so that you can see how strong it is before you add the milk?’
‘I think it’s to do with the flavour,’ said Button. ‘If you add cold milk to hot tea, the milk scalds and tastes bitter. If you add the hot tea to the cold milk, the temperature of the milk rises slowly, so it doesn’t scald.’
Yokely nodded as he added a splash of milk to Button’s cup. ‘Okay, but if that’s the case, why does everybody add milk to coffee? Coffee’s just as hot as tea, isn’t it?’ He poured tea into the cup, then handed it to her.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Tea has a subtle flavour that can be spoiled by scalded milk. Coffee is more… robust.’
‘I’ve always been a coffee-drinker,’ said Yokely. He sipped and smacked his lips. ‘I can’t function without a high caffeine level.’
‘There’s more caffeine in tea than there is in coffee,’ said Button.
Yokely arched an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t know that,’ he said.
‘Well, you live and learn.’
‘And then you die and forget it all,’ said Yokely. He chuckled and put his mug on the table. ‘Anyway, enough chit-chat. The family are all well travelled. Rich Saudis like to stay away from their own country during the really hot season, and there are perks to being on the move during Ramadan. Like no fasting. Anyway, we came up with several possibilities, so then it was a matter of getting DNA samples on the quiet. That was fun, I can tell you. We had guys posing as waiters, garbage-collectors, hairdressers. No stone unturned, as they say.’ He gestured with his thumb at the two-way mirror. ‘I have to hang my head in shame and admit that we used a lady of the night to get Abdal Jabbaar bin Othman al-Ahmed there. I won’t bore you with the details but we took a perfect sample from him last night. Anyway, we struck gold. He was in the bomber’s flat, no question. And as you’ll see from the file there, he’s been in and out of countries where some pretty heavy stuff has gone down. Madrid. London. Bali. And the kicker was that he was in Australia just before the bombings there.’