Agent of the State Read Online Free PDF Page B

date of birth, and the header was marked ‘STRICTLY PERSONAL’ for the information of Detective Chief Inspector John Kerr. The picture was a ragged frame taken in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, in the middle of the crowded medieval market-place. The image, blurry and skewed, had been snatched on a cheap digital camera by one of Allenby’s secretaries playing tourist.
    Late that night, while Jibril was in the air, Kerr’s most trusted friend, Alan Fargo, had unearthed three top-secret ‘UK EYES ONLY’ security traces linking Jibril to Al Qaeda. Fargo ran Room 1830, the Terrorism Research Unit, a square corner office on the Yard’s south side, looking towards Battersea Power Station. Access was by swipe card and PIN, and heavily restricted. Two sides extended six windows along from the corner, but the four highly vetted officers who shared the room with Fargo enjoyed no benefit from the view or natural light because the blinds were always closed.
    Room 1830’s primary purpose was to house a computer server known as Excalibur, which linked Fargo’s office to databases in MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. The computer was a featureless, gunmetal-grey rectangle, taller than a man, a metre wide and deeper than Fargo’s desk. It dominated the corner of Room 1830, to the right of the door, at the farthest point from the double-aspect windows. Government engineers from GCHQ had installed it shortly after 9/11, digging up Broadway outside the Yard one Sunday afternoon to connect the fibre-optic cabling from the street to the eighteenth floor.
    Like a dangerous animal, Excalibur was completely enclosed by a metal cage and protected with an alarm. There were five terminals on desks around the room, but only Fargo was vetted to go near the server itself. As its keeper, he had his workstation between the door and the cage. Excalibur gave off a low, incessant hum, of which Fargo had long since ceased to be aware, and a heat that kept the temperature at a constant 75 degrees. Fargo’s officers called their workplace ‘The Sauna’, and no one ever wore a jacket.
    Room 1830 was also the focus of intelligence about terrorist finance and cell-site analysis from mobile phones. People often described it as the beating heart of SO15, but Fargo downplayed its capability. The product depended upon the quality of the source intelligence: feed rubbish in, he was always warning in his Cornish burr, ‘and you get shite out’.
    Ahmed Mohammed Jibril, it seemed, had been born on 25 May 1981 in Karachi, Pakistan. In addition to the unauthorised mobile call, the results showed Jibril to have attended two training camps in Afghanistan, 04 and 05.
    The target in Allenby’s photograph was wearing a full beard, turban and calf-length white shirt. The man Kerr’s surveillance officers later saw collect a single case from the baggage hall at Heathrow’s Terminal 4 and walk swiftly to the Underground was contemporary and clean-shaven, dressed in faded jeans and Puffa jacket.
    Apart from his one and only slip-up, Ahmed Jibril was to be highly professional. He stayed in a furnished bedsit, flat nine, on the top floor of a converted, double-fronted Victorian house in a narrow street of terraces between South Lambeth Road and Clapham Road, south of the Thames. On the Monday of his arrival from Yemen via Dubai he had taken the Tube direct from Heathrow, paying cash for a one-way ticket to Stockwell. There were no stop-offs along the way, no phone calls or emails, no indiscretions.
    The change in appearance came as no surprise to the surveillance operatives, for the unexpected characterised their professional lives, as it had for generations of Special Branch officers before them. At the run-down letting agency across the road from Stockwell Underground station they watched him pick up the keys, a Yale and a Chubb, without paying any cash deposit, then followed him to the address. From the moment he had arrived in London Jibril had lived the life of a holy man during