CHERUB: The Sleepwalker - Robert Muchamore Page 0,68
After Lauren and Jake left for school he’d spend each morning looking for clues in the latest intelligence briefings and reports from the crash investigation team. In the afternoon he’d receive an e-mail report from the MI5 team who were monitoring the surveillance equipment inside Fahim’s house.
Lauren was always anxious for news of progress when she got in from school, whilst Mac enjoyed hearing the kids charging up the stairs to the apartment after spending the day on his own. It was now Friday, nine days after they’d planted the bugs.
‘You want cocoa?’ Mac yelled, as Lauren dumped her backpack and hooked up her blazer in the hallway before wandering through to the kitchen. ‘Cruelty-free organic milk, as per Madam’s instructions.’
‘Sounds lovely,’ Lauren said, as she grabbed her hot mug and let the steam rise up to her face. ‘It’s a right miserable day out there.’
With time on his hands, Mac took good care of the two young agents. There was always cooked breakfast and packed lunches prepared before they got out of bed, hot drinks and a snack when they came home from school and a good dinner after homework. Mac’s cooking was decent, but didn’t extend beyond roasts, fish and chips and other traditional British fare, so they’d also been out for a curry and visited an excellent Italian restaurant in the parade of shops directly below their apartment.
‘Where’s the little guy?’ Mac asked, as he sat at the opposite end of the small dining table, facing Lauren. ‘I made some for him too.’
‘Playstation at Fahim’s house. They’re getting on really well – I almost feel unnecessary.’
‘That was always likely to be the case,’ Mac said. ‘But Jake needed your help at the start and I’d rather your experience was still on hand. We’ll need you again if anything interesting crops up now.’
‘Any news from MI5 surveillance today?’
‘Nothing,’ Mac sighed. ‘If Hassam and Asif are part of a terrorist organisation they’re hiding it remarkably well.’
‘If they’re cautious they might stick to speaking in code.’
Mac rocked his head from side to side. ‘That’s possible, but you’d think it unlikely when you’re talking about conversations between two brothers in their own offices.’
‘Maybe Hassam is involved but not Asif,’ Lauren suggested.
‘I was wondering that myself,’ Mac nodded. ‘But to be honest I’m starting to think we’re flogging a dead horse.’
‘But Fahim seems pretty certain about what his parents said,’ Lauren noted. ‘And there’s no denying that his mum vanished off the face of the earth in very dodgy circumstances.’
‘Perhaps Fahim misunderstood,’ Mac said. ‘He seems very bright, but MI5 have three operatives on twenty-four-hour surveillance duty. They’ve picked up every phone call, listened to every conversation and read every e-mail. Hassam’s DNA and picture have been checked against all known terrorist databases and he comes up clean, as does his entire immediate family.
‘We’ve opened every file on the hard disks and studied all the documentation you copied. There’s evidence of tax fraud in the accounts, but the picture we’re getting is of a slightly shady trading company that’s bending the rules here and there. Not one word has been said about terrorism.’
‘What about Fahim’s mum saying that the plane was refitted by a company owned by his grandfather?’
Mac shook his head. ‘The plane that crashed originally belonged to a Japanese airline. It was given an overhaul and fitted with an Anglo-Irish interior in India a couple of months before it crashed. I checked out the maintenance facility’s ownership and none of the major shareholders have links to the Bin Hassam family.’
‘Isn’t that a bit iffy?’ Lauren asked. ‘I mean, why send planes to a developing country for maintenance?’
‘It surprised me too,’ Mac nodded. ‘But apparently the aviation industry has boomed in India recently. You can easily fly an aircraft to the sub-continent and maintenance work is labour intensive. It costs up to a third less in India than in Europe or America. Most Indian workshops are modern and either owned or co-owned by Western aerospace companies who stake their reputations on highly trained workers and standards equal or better than anywhere else.’
‘But still,’ Lauren said, ‘it must be easier for a terrorist to get hold of explosives and detonators and place them onboard an airliner while it’s undergoing maintenance in India than it would be to get a bomb through airport security at Heathrow?’
‘Perhaps,’ Mac shrugged. ‘Straight after the crash the investigators sent people across to India to speak with the team that refurbished the aircraft and get copies of their