Fahim leaned over the railing to make sure nobody was coming before heading briskly down the hallway and through the open door of his mother’s dressing-room. It was a small room – at least by the standards of this house – with a sink, a dressing table and fitted wardrobes running the length of one wall.
He tracked the ringing phone to a handbag – the one his mother had taken to Warrender Prep the previous afternoon. He pulled it out and glanced at the display: Fahim calling.
It was odd that his mum wouldn’t take her phone. It seemed even odder when he noticed her purse, her house and car keys and the wallet in which she kept her credit cards.
Fahim realised his father was lying to him. How could his mother have run off to stay at a spa with a bloody mouth, no car keys and no credit card with which to pay the bill?
Had his father done something horrible – like killed her, or hurt her so badly that she was in hospital somewhere? Fear welled up until Fahim felt like he had a table tennis ball lodged in his throat. He raced back to his bedroom, then lay on his bed, digging his fingers into a pillow as his whole body trembled.
Fahim was terrified about whatever had happened to his mum, but he was also angry with her: she’d told him the whole aeroplane thing was a misunderstanding, but then he’d overheard her threatening to go to the cops. She’d lied, his father had lied and Fahim hated being trapped in a situation he couldn’t understand or control.
‘Why can’t I just have normal parents?’ he moaned to himself.
He racked his aching head, searching for a plan. His mum always told him to stay out of the fighting, but what if she needed his help? What if she really was dead, or if she was scared and didn’t come back for weeks or months?
Hassam might have been remorsefully boiling eggs and offering presents this morning, but his mood would swing back eventually. Without Fahim’s mum to defend him, another beating and a one-way ticket to Abu Dhabi was just a matter of time.
Fahim rolled off his bed and kept his mobile in his shaking hand as he stepped across to his PC. Windows was on standby, so it took seconds to bring up Google on his web browser. The number had scrolled across the screen on all the TV news bulletins about the air crash, but he couldn’t remember it, so typed plane crash hotline and clicked the grey search button.
The first link brought up a picture of a telephone and a giant freephone number in the centre of the screen. He slid his phone open, peeked between the doors to make sure nobody was coming up the stairs, then dialled as he walked back to the bed.
It rang several times before a recorded message came on, telling him that the hotline was receiving an unprecedented number of calls and that an operator would be with him as soon as possible.
As a string quartet blared in his right ear, Fahim wondered if he was doing the right thing. If his mother was dead he really had to speak to someone. But what if she was alive? She was opposed to whatever it was his father had done, but she clearly knew all about it and what if that made her an accessory? What if his mum ended up being sent to prison because he’d grassed to the police?
The music in his ear stopped.
‘Anglo-Irish incident hotline, Detective Love speaking. How may I help?’
What kind of person grasses up their own mother? Fahim thought, before stuttering into the phone.
‘I…I don’t know for sure, but I think my dad…I think …’
The telephone operator spoke soothingly. ‘Why don’t you calm down and start from the beginning?’
‘No … It’s just a prank, I’m sorry,’ Fahim stammered, before sliding his phone shut, throwing it on the bed and staring at it like it had burned his hand.
His face was red and he dripped with sweat, but whatever his father had done, he didn’t want to risk betraying his mum.
17. MAC
Thirteen days later
Getting invited to the mission preparation building on CHERUB campus usually meant you were being offered a job. Lauren had walked the gently curving corridors many times and always with the same mixture of excitement and anxiety. This Monday morning was different, because she’d been invited by Dr McAfferty and felt awkward about seeing him.
‘Can I come in?’ Lauren asked, poking her head into Dennis King’s office.
King was one of CHERUB’s two senior mission controllers. His post warranted one of the large offices at opposite ends of the building, but his job involved organising all the routine missions, such as security checks or sizing up potential cherubs on a recruitment mission.
‘Morning,’ King smiled as he looked at Lauren over the rims of his reading glasses. ‘Don’t stand on ceremony. Go on through. Mac’s waiting for you.’
One end of King’s office was an alcove with floor-to-ceiling windows in which were usually placed suede sofas and a coffee table. These had been cleared out to make a space for Dr McAfferty to work. His desk had been extracted from a classroom and CHERUB’s retired chairman could barely be seen behind mounds of meticulously stacked paperwork, cross-indexed with hundreds of Post-it flags.
‘Ahh good,’ Mac said with a smile. He placed a hand on to his back as he stood up and shook Lauren’s hand. ‘I was just looking at your file and it seems congratulations are in order.’
Lauren was slightly perturbed at finding Mac in a cheerful state.
‘Wasn’t your thirteenth birthday last week?’
‘Oh that,’ Lauren said happily. ‘It was great. I went shopping with the girls on Saturday afternoon, then we had cake and stuff in the dining-room and a corridor party in the evening.’
‘Sounds fun,’ Mac replied. ‘I remember when you first came to campus and you were nine. You’ve really changed.’
Mac grabbed his back again and groaned as he sat down. This surprised Lauren because although Mac was in his late sixties, he was in good shape and he’d regularly run on campus right up until he’d retired.
‘Are you OK?’ Lauren asked warmly, as she sat in a plastic chair.
‘My wife was a potter,’ Mac explained, ‘a good one too. She won all kinds of prizes and even wrote a couple of books on it.’
‘I remember,’ Lauren nodded. ‘You used to have that huge bowl in your office.’
‘My youngest daughter followed in her footsteps and I said she might as well take her mother’s clay oven. But it weighs about a ton and I did the old back in lugging it out to the car with my son-in-law.’
Lauren smiled because Mac was smiling, but she felt really uncomfortable. She didn’t know what to say, but at the same time didn’t feel she could ignore what had happened to Mac’s wife and grandchildren.
‘I’m really sorry about your family,’ she said, feeling a touch of heat in her cheeks. ‘Everyone was. It must have been awful.’
‘It certainly has been,’ Mac said. ‘But life goes on and we had some relief this morning. It looks like the FAA is going to release all the bodies so that they can be flown home for a proper funeral.’
‘Great,’ Lauren said, although she immediately felt like she’d said the wrong thing. I’m glad, or that’s good would have been OK, but blurting out great felt totally dumb. There was nothing great about it.
‘I got so many messages from people on campus and Zara was wonderful. She was driving me everywhere. In the end I had to tell her to go back to campus and get on with her job.’
Lauren nodded. ‘I’m so glad they picked her as your replacement. She’s really nice.’
‘Have you heard what I’ve been doing on campus?’ Mac asked.
‘Only gossip, though obviously everyone knows it’s to do with the air crash.’
‘Although I’m retired from full-time work I still have seats on several intelligence committees and I do regular advisory work for the government; so I still had my security clearance,’ Mac said. ‘Whenever there’s a major incident, someone at CHERUB has to shadow the investigation and see if and where there’s a situation in which agents such as yourself might be useful. It’s not the most exciting part
of a mission controller’s job, but I didn’t fancy sitting at home brooding so I asked Zara if she’d let me muck in. You can see the results in front of you.’
Mac panned his arms around at the mounds of papers.
‘And as I’m sitting here, I take it you’re on to something?’ Lauren asked.
‘I might be,’ Mac said cautiously. ‘It’s a lead, but it could easily turn out to be a hoax or a cry for attention.’
‘What kind of lead?’
‘A phone call,’ Mac explained. ‘Over eight hundred were made to the anti-terrorist hotline in the days after the air crash. Every call they receive is recorded and categorised A through D. A basically means send the cops out to arrest the bad guys now. B is a serious lead that will be followed up within a matter of days or hours. C is a lead that’s put on the back burner and may be investigated if more information comes to light. The majority of hotline calls are graded D, which basically means they’re regarded as prank calls, nutters and time wasters.
‘I was going through the D-graded calls when I came across this one,’ Mac said, as he clicked an icon on his laptop to play a sound file.
A boy’s voice came out of the speaker. ‘I … I don’t know for sure, but I think my dad … I think …’
Then the operator’s voice. ‘Why don’t you calm down and start from the beginning?’
And finally, the boy again. ‘No … It’s just a prank, I’m sorry,’ and the call ended with a click.
Lauren was underwhelmed and Mac laughed at her expression. ‘You don’t look wildly impressed.’
‘Well, it’s not much to go on,’ Lauren said awkwardly.
‘From tiny acorns mighty oaks may grow,’ Mac smiled. ‘Of course, most acorns end up as squirrel food, but every investigation has to start somewhere and this particular lead intrigues me.’
‘When we did forensics training they used the example of a murder that was solved by a tiny flake of paint found on a wooden post,’ Lauren said.
‘A detective called Mark Love took the call,’ Mac continued. ‘He categorised it grade D and the lazy sod didn’t even bother doing a background check on the incoming number. It intrigued me because if there’s one thing thirty years of working on campus has taught me, it’s that there’s often more to what children say than meets the eye.’
‘Like what?’ Lauren asked. She leaned forward curiously, but couldn’t help wondering if Mac’s judgement had been affected by his grief.
‘How old did that boy sound to you?’ Mac asked.
‘Twelve or younger,’ Lauren said. ‘The voice hadn’t broken … I mean, it could just as easily be a girl.’
‘I’ve done background checks,’ Mac said. ‘But you’re right, I wasn’t sure about the sex at first either. The thing is, pranks are generally called in by teenagers and he sounded too young. What about the accent?’
‘Definitely Middle Eastern,’ Lauren said.
‘Anything else? What about the sound of his voice?’
‘He’s scared,’ Lauren acknowledged. ‘So what else did you get from the background checks?’
‘The phone was an unregistered pay-as-you-go, but it had been topped up several times using a debit card belonging to a woman named Yasmin Hassam and on one occasion by a credit card belonging to a Hassam Bin Hassam, who turns out to be her husband. The couple have one son, Fahim Bin Hassam, who is eleven years old. The family lives in Hampstead in North London, less than two miles from where you grew up.’
‘Not far, but it’s dead snooty. You wouldn’t find the likes of me and James living round Hampstead.’
‘I guess you wouldn’t,’ Mac agreed.
‘So Fahim’s the caller?’
Mac nodded. ‘I don’t have definitive proof, but it’s the only reasonable assumption.’
‘So what do we know about the Bin Hassams? Do they look like potential bombers?’
‘Yes and no,’ Mac said. ‘Hassam runs a trading company called Bin Hassam Dubai Mercantile, or BHDM, with his younger brother Asif. As far as I can tell, the brothers’ main business involves bulk-buying empty space on container ships leaving ports all over the world and using it to move anything they think they can sell at a profit. A lot of it is junk. Usually Chinese manufactured, stuff like the sets of cheap steak knives or tools you might find in a market or everything-for-a-pound store.
‘There are a lot of these trading companies operating out of Dubai because the Emirate offers low taxes and one of the world’s biggest container ports. Some trading companies are reputable, but an awful lot of them have shady reputations. BHDM has been prosecuted for tax evasion in India and Germany. Over here they’re on a Customs and Excise watch list of companies suspected of fraud.’
Lauren shrugged. ‘So they’re a couple of dodgy businessmen, but is there any evidence linking them to terrorism?’
‘The British intelligence service drew a blank, but the TSA does have the name Asif Bin Hassam on their no-fly list.’
Lauren leaned back. ‘TSA?’
‘Sorry,’ Mac said. ‘United States Transport Safety Administration.’
‘So the Bin Hassams must have been up to something,’ Lauren guessed.
‘It’s not as positive as it sounds,’ Mac said warily. ‘No-fly lists were introduced in 2003 and the name itself is a misnomer because people on the lists are allowed to fly, they just have to undergo rigorous extra security whenever they pass through an American airport. The major problem is that it’s a list of names only; there are no dates of birth or physical descriptions and Asif Bin Hassam is a common Arab name.’
‘So anyone of that name just gets automatically nabbed by airport security?’
‘Exactly,’ Mac said. ‘Senator Ted Kennedy – JFK’s brother – had problems because a terrorist suspect used the alias T Kennedy. That name was removed from the list, but there have been several other high-profile cases.’
‘Did you ask the FBI why Asif Bin Hassam is on the list?’
‘They added the name to the list after it was received from an anonymous Pakistani informant,’ Mac said. ‘That’s the only information they have.’
‘But you still think we’re on to something?’ Lauren asked.
‘Yes,’ Mac said firmly. ‘And this is what makes it look really interesting.’
Mac handed Lauren a small pile of photocopied credit-card statements and mobile-phone bills, with Yasmin Bin Hassam’s name at the top. There were more than a dozen phone calls each day and the money being run through the credit card made Lauren’s allowance look extremely humble.
‘What was the date of Fahim’s call to the hotline?’ she asked.
‘Tuesday September eleventh; two days after the plane went down.’
‘There’s no phone calls or credit-card payments after the tenth,’ Lauren gasped. ‘It’s like Yasmin Bin Hassam disappeared off the face of the earth. Did you check the airports?’
‘And the ferries,’ Mac said. ‘If Yasmin left the country she used a false passport.’
‘And on the day she disappears, her son rings the anti-terrorist hotline scared out of his wits,’ Lauren said.
Mac smiled and raised a finger. ‘So now you’re not so sure that this old codger has gone off his rocker?’
‘Suppose not,’ Lauren said. Then she shook her head desperately. ‘I mean, not that I ever was.’
‘There’s just one problem,’ Mac said, as he threw more papers across the desk. ‘Fahim was expelled from his school on the tenth and that’s the educational psychiatrist’s report on him.’
Lauren scanned through a three-page document and read aloud some of the sections highlighted by Mac. ‘Fahim suffers from emotional insecurity and constantly craves attention. He seems mildly paranoid and believes that everyone is out to get him … Fahim is disruptive in class and prone to fighting and facial tics … His parents report regular night terrors, panic attacks and sleepwalking.’
‘And he’s the bedrock on which my hunch is based,’ Mac said uneasily.
br /> ‘Tiny acorns,’ Lauren said as she put the report down on the desk. ‘It’s not much, but when you put it all together, I guess it’s worth looking into.’
18. WORK
James and Kerry had both passed CHERUB’s advanced driving course, but they were still too young to drive legally and Meryl rejected James’ suggestion that they drive to Deluxe Chicken and park up a couple of streets away.
Instead they had a cover story that they were Year Eleven pupils from a school more than thirty kilometres from where they’d be working. After being dropped at a bus stop in a village three kilometres from campus, they had to suffer a forty-minute journey on a crowded bus. The only people who used it were either too old or too poor to drive and James found it a depressing experience.
The driver had a face like thunder, nobody smiled and even when James hopped out to help an old dear bring her shopping basket on board, all he got was a suspicious look like she was expecting to get mugged.
‘Everyone loves teenagers in this country,’ James tutted, as he crashed back into his seat in the row behind Kerry.
She smiled, which was a rare thing in James’ presence. He’d broken Kerry’s heart when he dumped her for Dana, but it had been almost a year and James couldn’t understand why things hadn’t thawed out. Especially as Kerry was going out with Bruce – who was more or less James’ best friend now that Kyle had retired from CHERUB.
‘You heard from Bruce at all?’ James asked.
Kerry nodded. ‘He told me to say hello. He thought it was pretty funny us two getting the same work experience.’
‘Is he doing OK?’ James asked.
‘Seems to be. He’s annoyed about the weather though. You expect it to be hot if you get sent down under, but it’s the middle of their winter and he says it’s just drizzle all the time.’
James smiled – this was the longest conversation he’d had with Kerry in eleven months. ‘What was your first-choice job?’