Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [76]
But Jack knew this wasn’t suicide. He was convinced that, just like Copeland and Thomas—and just as Swain had threatened to do to him—Abdal al-Fida had been disposed of for the sake of expediency. He was a liability that had to be silenced.
Jack felt no love lost for a man who could very well have been planning to kill thousands of Americans, but the thought of yet another death rankled him.
When would these people stop?
And what the hell were they hiding? No matter how many times Jack ran the chain of events through his mind, however often he stopped to reexamine an event or a fact or even a half-cocked assumption, he still couldn’t make any sense of it.
By the time the ambulance left and the police finished taking the woman’s statement and started wrapping things up, the neighborhood crowd had already lost interest and people had wandered back into their homes. From the shrugs and brief conversations and lack of anything approaching shock or sorry, Jack gathered that not many people had known al-Fida.
Before long, the woman was back at the window, watching the last of the police cars drive away. Jack decided to give her a few minutes before he crossed the street and knocked on the door. But to his surprise, when the lights of the last police car had faded, she immediately doused the light and a few moments later emerged from the entryway of the building. She stepped out to the sidewalk, stopped, and once again pulled the cell phone from her purse.
Jack quickly stepped backward, moving deeper into the shadows beneath the oak tree, hoping she didn’t look his way. But she seemed intensely preoccupied as she put the phone to her ear.
Despite the distance between them, he could clearly hear her when the line was answered and she said, “There’s a problem. We need to talk.”
She listened for a moment, then hung up, dropping the phone back into her purse as she started up the sidewalk in the direction of the pub.
Jack waited until she was about half a block away, then started out after her.
22
The woman caught a train at the Upton Park underground station. She took the Hammersmith and City Line toward Liverpool Street. It was nearly half past midnight as she boarded a car along with a handful of others.
Jack had to run to get in before the doors closed. He took a seat, careful not to glance in her direction as she headed for the opposite end of the car and sat.
He kept his gaze forward, trying to catch his breath as he puzzled over who this woman was and what she was up to.
“There’s a problem. We need to talk.”
She was certainly no girlfriend—although he couldn’t be sure her alleged boyfriend knew this. They had obviously been intimate enough for her to feel comfortable walking into that flat, and Jack had a feeling al-Fida would have been just as surprised by her reaction to his death as he was.
But she also didn’t seem to be aligned with Swain and MI6, or whoever had killed the terrorist. Otherwise, why would she have shown up at the flat at all? Why would she have notified the police and made that phone call when she left?
What was the problem?
Who did she need to talk to?
Jack sat there through stop after stop—West Ham, Bow Road, Mile End, Stepney Green—running various scenarios through his mind. Once again, none of them fit. Too many missing pieces. It was starting to agitate him.
About fifteen minutes into the ride, the woman got up from her seat as they approached Whitechapel Station. Watching with peripheral vision, Jack waited for her to pass as she moved to the doors in preparation for the stop. Chancing a glance as she walked by, he noticed that she was no longer wearing the hijab. She had removed it in the train, revealing a head of luxurious dark hair that only enhanced her beauty, and he once again