‘She can’t be in here,’ she said. ‘Are you nuts, Joy? We’re conducting an active murder enquiry in here.’
Joy jumped down from the workstation.
‘You need to hear this,’ she said.
We all stared at Scarlet Bush. She looked older than I remembered. The strain and stress of working in a declining industry, I guessed.
‘I know where the poison comes from,’ she said.
And we let her talk.
‘The Khan brothers were thugs,’ Scarlet said. ‘All three of them. Adnan, Assad and Ahmed, the one who died in Syria, Layla’s father. Thugs and losers. Their digital footprint on social media suggests non-stop party animals and petty criminals. And then suddenly they are joining the global jihad. And then they are bringing down a helicopter in London. And dying in shoot-outs in the East End with armed police officers. And Ahmed – the one we never met – is dead in some bloodstained sandbox in Syria. It doesn’t add up, does it? One minute they are sucking on a spliff in Ilford and knocking back the vodka shots and wondering if their benefits will stretch to one more pole dance. Then all at once all three of them are willing to kill and die for jihad? It makes no sense.’
‘No, it makes perfect sense,’ I said. ‘In fact, it’s shockingly common. Life’s losers latching on to something far bigger than themselves – it happens all the time, Scarlet, especially if there’s a history of violence, drug use or mental illness.’
‘True. But I stick to my original theory – the poison still has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it?’
I shrugged. ‘Sit in front of your computer for long enough every day and you can convince yourself of anything,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘It’s more than that. And I can prove it.’
There was a manila envelope on the workstation.
She took out a photograph of three men.
A westerner in a suit and two men in shalwar kameez, the traditional long shirt and baggy trousers of the northwest frontier of Pakistan. One of the Pakistanis was in his sixties. The other was around thirty, and cradling an assault rifle.
‘This was taken in the Services Bureau in Peshawar, Pakistan in 1981, around a year after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan,’ Scarlet said. ‘It appeared next to an op-ed in the New York Times predicting that Afghanistan was going to be the Vietnam of the Russians. The westerner is from the US Embassy in Islamabad and, I would guess, CIA. The older Pakistani is from the ISI, the Pakistani secret service, who backed the rebels who were resisting the Soviet invasion and occupation. And the younger man is one of the rebels.’
‘The mujahideen,’ I said.
‘The mujahideen – Arabic for those who struggle and strive for a cause worthy of praise. Those engaged in holy war. Because they weren’t terrorists back then. They were plucky freedom fighters taking on the wicked Reds. They were our brave Muslim allies. That’s why these three men are smiling for the camera. The west couldn’t help them enough.’
She touched the old photograph.
‘All of this is hotly denied now, of course,’ she said. ‘Because one of the mujahideen who helped set up this Services Bureau was a Saudi Arabian called Osama bin Laden. But the ISI and the CIA provided arms, money and training to anyone who resisted the Russian invaders. Anyone. They didn’t ask for character references. Radical Muslims were not a threat to the west back then – they were on the same side as us.’
She placed her fingertip on the image of the man with the assault rifle.
‘That’s an AK-74 assault rifle captured from Spetsnaz – the Russian Special Forces. The AK-74 was a big status symbol. Bin Laden had one just like it. It’s the gun you see with bin Laden in every photo opportunity. People think it’s an AK-47. But the AK-74 was designed thirty years later.’
‘And who is he?’ I said.
‘His name is Hamid Jat. He had a sister who came to London to get married in her teens. And her name is Azza.’
‘Azza Khan?’ I said. ‘The man with the gun is her brother?’
We stared at the photograph.
‘So you’re suggesting the Khan brothers took up terror because their dear old Uncle Hamid fought the Russians in Afghanistan?’ I said. ‘Sorry, Scarlet. I don’t buy it.’
‘I am saying that it is an unbroken line,’ she said. ‘I am saying this family has armed resistance in their DNA, Max. I am saying that the poison was in them from the start. But they wouldn’t see it as poison. They would see it as – I don’t know. Defending their faith. Standing up to the non-believers. A cause worth dying for. Look, modern terror has its starting point in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. But now they don’t wait for your commanding officer to give you your orders to attack a Russian tank. You buy a drone online, fly it above a shopping mall that’s on a flight path to Heathrow, and cross your fingers. But the mujahideen are the vanguard of modern terror, the roots of jihad without borders. And the Khan brothers would have known all about Uncle Hamid because it’s like having a war hero in your family. Their mother – Hamid’s sister – would have told them all about him. And they would have been proud of him.’
‘You know who I blame for all that death and destruction, all those broken bodies and lives?’ Edie said. ‘I blame them. The bastards who killed Alice Stone. The scumbags who stuck that drone in the sky.’ She nodded at the photograph. ‘Not some beardy old bloke wearing a dress in 1981.’
Scarlet shook her head, and I wondered if she had written her story already. And I wondered why she had come to us before running it.
‘This man Hamid Jat – and all the men like him – were an inspiration to the Khan brothers and their kind,’ Scarlet said. ‘Because they believed that the mujahideen inflicted the death wound that killed the Soviet Union. And they believe that if they can draw America into another war just like it, then the United States – and the western world – will die too.’
We thought about it in silence.
‘It’s not complicated,’ Scarlet insisted. ‘The Khan brothers believe the end is nigh for the wicked west. They believe we will fall just as the Russians fell. Their worldview is a virus that has been around for decades. We think it’s a modern phenomenon but there is nothing remotely modern about it. The nature of the beast changed, that’s all. In the Eighties it was a conventional army, fighting the Russians. And now it is leaderless resistance, sustained by an idea, fighting the west. And the mother of the Khan brothers is the link between then and now.’
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Azza Khan is the widow of a London bus driver. I knew the man. The crimes of his sons had nothing to do with their father. Why should they have anything to do with their mother?’
‘Because Azza Khan is the sister of a mujahid who fought the Russians in Afghanistan. And she is the mother of the terrorists who brought down that Air Ambulance over Lake Meadows. The mother of the men who killed Alice Stone. It might not be a crime to be that sister, to be that mother, but forgive me – at the very least, it’s a great story. And do you know what I think, Max? That it wasn’t the Internet that radicalised them. And it wasn’t some hate preacher that filled them with poison. It was their mother. Azza Khan is jihadi royalty. And she passed the torch to her sons.’
Suddenly Whitestone was standing in the doorway of MIR-1.
‘This woman shouldn’t be in this room,’ she said.
‘You need to hear this,’ I said.
DCI Whitestone listened to the story in silence.
‘What happened to Hamid Jat?’ she said.
‘When the Soviets finally pulled out in 1989, the mujahideen started slaughtering each other. Hamid Jat slips off the radar for a while but we know he survived the civil wars and in the Nineties he joined the 055 Brigade, also known as the 55th Arab Brigade. They were the elite of al-Qaeda – one hundred of them were bin Laden’s personal bodyguards. They fled to the Tora Bora caves in the White Mountains of eastern Afghanistan that the Americans built in the Eighties and then bombed in 2001. Hamid Jat died in the battle of Tora Bora.’