Donaldson took him next door. Four people sat at computers, tapping busily away. No one looked round. Donaldson approached the nearest operator and laid his hands on the guy’s shoulders, making him jerk out of his concentration on the screen.
‘Mansur Rashid,’ he said simply. With a nod, the man began to interrogate his PC. ‘Access to thousands of databases,’ Donaldson said to Henry, ‘including every single thing Lancashire Constabulary has on computer record — and every other force in the country.’ He wasn’t bragging, just being matter-of-fact. Henry didn’t even raise an eyebrow. Nothing surprised him anymore.
Ten seconds later, the man said, ‘Mansur Rashid.’ He leaned back to allow Donaldson and Henry to look at the screen. ‘This is from Special Branch files in Lancashire.’
The two officers looked at the computer.
Donaldson read out, ‘Mansur Rashid, date of birth 22/10/64 in Pakistan … address on Balaclava Street, Blackburn … attends a local mosque … and that’s about it, a one-line entry … very thorough, you lot,’ he said critically, then more magnanimously, ‘Though to be fair, there’s a hundred thousand entries like this the world over, one-liners about people who might be of interest.’
The computer guy scrolled down the screen and said, ‘This file has been looked at twice today, by the way.’
Angela Cranlow and Graeme Walling, Henry guessed. That’s how they discovered his address. And Jenny Fisher accessing it for the same reason following Henry’s instructions: to find Rashid’s address.
‘No trace on any other database,’ the guy said.
‘Anyway, Karl,’ Henry said, ‘you haven’t told me how you magically appeared on Balaclava Street and saved my life.’
‘Eavesdropping,’ he admitted. ‘Our surveillance team lost Fazul Ali, then not long after I hear the chatter on the local radio channel that we are monitoring. I recognized your voice and picked up that a couple of your officers have gone missing in the same vicinity as Ali was mislaid, and you were investigating. I just decided to take a look … and in case you haven’t worked it out, pal, this is the second time that you’ve missed Akbar because I’m pretty sure that he was in the house when your people knocked … and how do I know that? The dead cops, for one thing, and for another, the guy who wanted to slice you up.’
‘Is Fazul Ali?’ said Henry, deadpan, suddenly realizing he’d been in hand-to-hand combat with one of the world’s most dangerous men.
‘Fazul Ali,’ Donaldson confirmed.
‘And you shot him.’
‘Winged him, actually,’ Donaldson said with a grin. ‘Now let’s go and torture him.’
Sixteen
Henry’s disbelief diminished as Karl Donaldson took him along the ground-floor corridor, up the set of wooden steps and on to the first-floor corridor, which virtually replicated the one below. ‘The far offices have been turned into sleeping quarters,’ Donaldson said with an airy wave of the hand, ‘and this is the interrogation suite.’ He opened the door of the first office and stepped through, Henry behind him like an obedient puppy.
They entered a dimly lit room. It took a moment for Henry’s eyes to make the adjustment and to his amazement he saw that there was a large two-way mirror in one wall, on the other side of which there was a very bare looking room. In the centre of that room was a chair and, tied to it and slumped forward, was the naked form of Fazul Ali, his head lolling drunkenly to one side, eyes glaring sullenly towards what must have been a very large mirror to him. He must have realized what it was and that he was being observed from the other side of it. The chair was screwed to the floor and Ali’s feet were shackled by thin chains to bolts fixed in the floor, his wrists cuffed to the back legs of the chair.
His right shoulder was bandaged, blood flowering slowly through the gauze from the gunshot wound underneath. Henry had a flashback of Ali being shot by Donaldson, recalling how the shoulder had seemed to explode. It was a bad wound, one which required hospital treatment.
There were two people in the observation room — Dr Chambers and a man in his late thirties who wasn’t even introduced to Henry. They were sitting on chairs, looking through the mirror at Ali. A door adjacent gave access to the interrogation room beyond. The two looked up at Henry and Donaldson as they came into the room, nodding, then, as if on cue, all three Americans put their right forefingers into their ears and their brows furrowed. Henry realized they were all listening to tiny earpieces.
Donaldson said, ‘Roger.’ They all removed their fingers. He looked at Henry. ‘The Secretary of State is due to leave Merseyside, nothing of interest to report. Estimated she’ll be crossing into Lancashire in twenty minutes. They hand over to your escort at Switch Island and then she’ll be brought into Lancashire.’
Henry knew that Switch Island was the complex roundabout to the north of Liverpool at junction 7 of the M57 where it joined the A59 and where the M58 started.
‘Which way will she come up into Lancs?’
‘M58, M6, M65 then off at junction 4,’ Donaldson reeled off from memory.
Working that out, Henry guessed that it would be less than an hour before Rice actually set foot on Lancashire soil once she actually got on the road. Security escorts stop for neither man nor beast.
‘What’s her itinerary?’ Henry asked. He’d seen it, but couldn’t recall it.
‘First stop is a school in Pleckgate, then she’s due to visit Ewood Park after that, home of that soccer team, Blackburn Rovers, which doesn’t give us much time.’
‘To do what, exactly?’
‘Find out exactly how Akbar intends to kill her, otherwise it’ll just be pot luck — and I don’t like pot luck.’
‘So what’s your plan?’
Donaldson ignored the question and turned to the mystery man and Dr Chambers. ‘How is he?’
‘Alive and likely to remain so, but doped up with a few choice drugs,’ she said.
‘Has he said anything?’
‘Said I should fuck off back to Satan.’
‘Nice,’ said Donaldson. To Henry, he said, ‘Shall we?’
Feeling — knowing — he was being dragged into something better avoided, Henry followed Donaldson from the observation room into the interrogation room. The words of his dear old mum rang clear in his ears, often shouted at him when he was a youngster in trouble: ‘You’re easily led, you!’ and he knew she was right.
The two men walked across the vinyl-covered floor and stood in front of Ali, whose black-ringed eyes watched with a simmering hatred. He might have been shot, might have been drugged up, but Henry could tell he knew exactly what was going on.
‘How are you, Fazul Ali?’
‘I need to go to hospital,’ his reply came, the words slightly slurred through cracked, dry lips.
‘All in good time.’
Ali’s eyes settled on Henry. A reluctant grin came to his lips. ‘You fought well.’
Henry chose not to respond. Inside he was being torn apart, drawn into a situation completely alien to him. A wounded prisoner, shackled and naked in an interrogation room. Interrogation wasn’t a word ever used in police circles. It represented everything bad about how the police used to obtain confessions in the very bad old days. Now they ‘interviewed’, sought the truth using approved methods. Interrogation was totally negative and had links with corrupt and murderous regimes. And torture.
Not that Henry would ever class himself as a saint and maybe he was being two-faced about this. He had hit prisoners before, he’d bent the rules, but he’d always known the boundaries and deep down had always felt uncomfortable when he did such things … but those methods had never approached anything as brutal and lawless as this.
There would be outrage if it was discovered that such things were taking place on British soil.
‘I’ll come straight to the point, my friend,’ Donaldson said to the prisoner. ‘Mohammed Ibrahim Akbar.’ There was not even a flicker from Ali’s sullen eyes. ‘How does he plan to murder the Condoleezza Rice? It’s a simple question, the answer to which will see you receiving the best medical treatment money can buy.’