Free Agent of the State by Roger Pearce Page B

Weatherall.
    ‘Melanie says this can’t wait,’ interrupted Donna, as if she hadn’t heard, then turned and left the room, closing the door behind her. Melanie approached the desk. ‘Ma’am, I need to speak with Mr Ritchie and Mr Kerr about the operation.’
    ‘And who are you?’
    ‘DS Melanie Fleming, ma’am.’
    ‘Red Two,’ said Kerr, ‘works with Jack Langton.’
    ‘Then I’m surprised you have the nerve to show your face in here,’ Weatherall said, unscrewing the water bottle again.
    ‘It’s very urgent, ma’am. I’m here to pick up some equipment and I really need to get back to the plot. Jack’s waiting for me.’
    ‘So let’s all hear it.’
    Melanie looked at Kerr. ‘It’s about Zoom in Leyton. Jack took a call in Pepe’s. He went on the move about the time we were taking Jibril off the street. With a camera case and tripod.’
    ‘‘‘Zoom”?’ interrupted Weatherall. ‘Who the hell is that?’
    ‘Osama bin Laden used him in Pakistan to produce his videos after nine/eleven,’ said Kerr, without taking his eyes off Melanie, ‘according to the Americans.’
    Ritchie looked at Weatherall. ‘I briefed you last week. They found his prints on the stuff taken from bin Laden’s compound.’
    ‘We think he’s on the way to make another one. Propaganda or suicide,’ said Melanie.
    ‘How can you possibly know that?’ said Weatherall.
    ‘Al Qaeda don’t do weddings,’ snapped Kerr.
    ‘He caught the sixty-nine up Hoe Street to Walthamstow Central, then walked,’ said Melanie. ‘Jack’s guys followed him to a block of flats off Fielding Road. Whole journey took him less than fifteen minutes. Sixth floor. Could be a safe-house or bomb factory. Jack and Justin are already on scene. I’m setting up the OP with Alan Fargo.’
    ‘Where?’ said Kerr.
    ‘We’ve commandeered a bus, actually, for now.’
    ‘You’ve what?’ spluttered Weatherall.
    Kerr guessed his team must have scrambled from Pepe’s as soon as he’d left for the Yard. ‘What’s the rendezvous point for surveillance?’ he said, already halfway to the door.
    ‘Jack’s using the car park next to the health centre in Prospect Road.’
    ‘So let’s move.’
    ‘Wait.’ Kerr turned to see Weatherall with water in full flow. She placed the bottle carefully on the desk. ‘Make sure you clear this with your MI5 counterpart. And if I invoke Andromeda again today I don’t want one second of hesitation. Is that clear?’
    Ritchie was already following Kerr, and positioned himself between Weatherall and Kerr’s look of disbelief. ‘Let’s go, John,’ he said quietly.

Nine
    Thursday, 13 September, 11.13, Fielding Road, Walthamstow
    By the time Kerr reached Walthamstow a light drizzle was falling and, although it was still mid-morning, the light was shut out by a bank of grey cloud. In his race to north-east London he felt a surge of relief that he had kept surveillance on the film-maker while Jack Langton was pulling units away to follow Ahmed Jibril.
    In May 2011, when US Navy SEALs had stormed Osama bin Laden’s compound in Karachi, Pakistan, they had recovered seven videos showing a younger bin Laden rehearsing his propaganda broadcasts, stumbling over his words through sometimes four or five takes. The same set of fingerprints was found on all the video casings, but this took the investigators no further forward: there was no match on any terrorism database.
    It had fallen to CIA interrogators to extract more information from one of bin Laden’s former couriers detained in Guantánamo. According to this prisoner, the man they wanted was in his late fifties, walked with the aid of a roughly hewn stick, and worked in a 7-Eleven in London, not far from a dog-racing track. He was a producer of jihadi videos, but had never engaged in active service himself.
    Three days before Ahmed Jibril’s arrival in London, working on a radius from the site of the old Walthamstow Greyhound Stadium, closed since 2008, Alan