Free Agent of the State by Roger Pearce Page A

with the IRA here,’ Weatherall snapped, as the phone buzzed. ‘Everyone knows we face an unprecedented threat.’ She answered the phone and covered the mouthpiece. ‘Times have changed, and you people don’t seem to have noticed.’
    They had heard it all before. Weatherall belonged to the new breed of police bosses for whom page one in the Textbook on Terror was Al Qaeda, and 9/11 happened in Year Zero. To the generation with clear eyes and clean hands, Ritchie was a remnant of the old school.
    ‘Thanks, Bill,’ murmured Kerr, while Weatherall was distracted.
    ‘Do yourself a favour and button it.’
    The two men went back a long way. Two decades ago Ritchie had been Kerr’s boss when he was deployed on a secret, long-term infiltration assignment. Ritchie’s official title was ‘cover officer’, and it meant he protected every aspect of Kerr’s parallel lives as Special Branch officer and political extremist. In a way Ritchie, too, had led a double life. At debriefing sessions in safe-houses around London he was the friend who reassured and the chief who gave out the orders. Kerr would sometimes badmouth him as one part counsellor, three parts dictator, which suited Ritchie fine. From those hard-edged years had emerged a habit of plain speaking between them that transcended rank. These days it often troubled Kerr to see Ritchie morph from an effective operator into a politician; sometimes he had accused him of selling out, of receding into the pensioner’s twilight zone. The two men would inevitably clash again, but this morning Kerr felt grateful to his mentor.
    When Weatherall had finished the call she reached into her desk drawer and withdrew a policy file. It had a red cover and she held it forehead high like a sacrament. ‘We play by different rules, these days. You both know that.’
    Kerr got back first, this time too fast for Ritchie’s nudging foot. ‘Yeah, like shooting an unarmed man in the head.’
    ‘I don’t need you to tell me how to run a counter-terrorist operation, Chief Inspector,’ said Weatherall, letting the file drop to her desk. She looked from one to the other, her face red with anger. ‘Your job is to find this so-called bomb factory you keep telling me is out there.’
    ‘I think the suggestion is that Jibril might have taken us there,’ said Ritchie. As he delivered the killer blow, he was the height of reasonableness and looked her straight in the eye. ‘If it turns out Ahmed Jibril was our only link, you appear to have severed it.’
    Weatherall blinked. Lost for words, she turned up the volume on the TV. It was surreal, as if the presenter had been listening to their argument.
    ‘In scenes reminiscent of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station in 2005, witnesses report seeing armed officers with weapons drawn aiming at the man’s head, when two undercover police officers appeared to intervene to arrest him. A witness close to the police line says the two teams of officers appeared to be at odds in dealing with the incident. A spokesman from the Independent Police Complaints Commission said it has begun an independent investigation. Now we return to the scene for an update from Katy Bradley.’
    Weatherall stared at the screen, transfixed.
    ‘So, are you content for me to review this, ma’am,’ Ritchie gestured at the TV, ‘before that lot really get started on us?’
    Kerr spoke, not softly enough: ‘I can almost hear them hammering the nails in.’
    The gibe seemed to revive Weatherall. She swung to face Ritchie. ‘I haven’t got time for this, so you’d better bring this officer back in line, Bill.’ She turned to Kerr. ‘And you need to get real, or get out.’
    The door flew open a nanosecond before the knock. Donna was followed by Melanie Fleming, still dressed in the combat pants and boots, T-shirt and denim jacket she had been wearing for her undercover operation in Hackney.
    ‘Don’t just crash in without . . .’ began