Countdown to Terror

Epilogue

Early evening on Tuesday 3rd July, Monroe called the meeting at Kensington police station. Spinner was also there. The mood was sombre: several people were dead, Samir among them. His stab wounds had proved fatal, and he had been pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. Ali and Abdullah, the other two members of the Manchester trio, drowned in the murky waters of the dock

Monroe began, ‘As you know, there were two vehicles involved a van and a car. The first drove up Joiner Street to the plaza outside London Bridge Station. Two men jumped out and threw petrol bombs into the station and at the windows of the Shard building. Fortunately the glass was purposely designed with reinforced glass to withstand just such attacks. They jumped back in and the car sped off down London Bridge Street, leaving five members of the travelling public dead and twenty with injuries, some life-threatening. Fortunately for us, they ran into the back of a double-decker bus just as it was pulling out. They were too dazed to make a getaway on foot and were collared within five minutes. They are currently in the custody suite under interrogation with appropriate briefs, as you might expect, but being caught red-handed, so to speak, it can only be deal making.

‘The second car with four occupants, the Manchester trio and Hussein, as you may know from the news reels, led us a merry chase, with the trio ending up dead and Hussein making good his escape – to where, we as yet have no idea, other than that he disappeared after running out of Whitechapel underground station. After searching the area for an hour, no sighting was made. He just vanished into thin air. Talk about a disappearing trick; he must have had a magic carpet. We’ve got the car out of the dock. It’s going to take a while to do forensics on the bodies. There’s no ID on them, but we’re 99% sure it is Ali and Abdullah, and we have asked GMP to arrange for family to come down from Manchester to identify. Samir’s parents are already on the way down, but his body has already been identified by his Aunt Shakira. We also found a powerful bomb in the boot – very professionally made. This would have been the main event. It was primed to go off remotely by a mobile phone call. The petrol bombs were merely a diversion to get police to the London Bridge Quarter and away from the main target.’

Spinner spoke next. ‘Do you know what the target was? Did we win, or was it all a waste of time?’

Monroe replied in emphatic tones, ‘It most definitely was not a waste of time. We prevented many more deaths of innocent people. Who was actually behind it all? It must be Abelgadar? What the target actually was, well—’

The Gent broke in. ‘No. Abelgadar only thought he was the mastermind, but it was really Hussein. He is the Al Qaeda man.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ asked Spinner.

‘Well, I can’t be positive, but my doubts about Abelgadar were first raised when you told me your information from the Middle East was that he only became a firebrand cleric after his disastrous time in Bahrain.

‘Your efforts to trace his background came to nought: not unexpected given the history of Iraq over the last two decades. Even if the names given were not faked, they could now be dead, if not killed by Saddam then by US forces. As for the authenticity of documentation, we know he travelled through Egypt, for example. Cairo would be just the place to acquire the appropriate fake documents virtually to order. I think it entirely possible that Hussein reports to someone other than Abelgadar, and was assigned to watch him just as much as to protect him. The fact that he appears to make his own rules and lives where he chooses supports this, as does Monroe’s information about him visiting Western Union branches on a weekly basis, which in turn suggests that he had a regular supply of funds. Quite easy, really, when all you need to collect money from Western Union is some form of ID, and a password from the sender which can be texted from virtually anywhere in the world.