Agent of the State by Roger Pearce

Fargo’s 1830 team traced the owner of the fingerprints to a vegetable store in Leyton, east London. They identified him as Fazal Shakir, a fifty-nine-year-old Pakistani raised in Karachi only a few streets from bin Laden’s hiding place. He had lived undetected in London since escaping there in 2007.
    MI5 wanted no action against Shakir until they had clearance from their Washington counterparts, but John Kerr had had him watched anyway. Jack Langton’s operatives had tagged their target ‘Zoom’ because of his skill with a camera and slow progress on the street. And because Kerr had followed his better judgement, there was now a real possibility that the ageing Pakistani would reveal the bomb factory they had been seeking for months.
    The address he had led them to this morning was Barrington House in Walthamstow, to the south of the old dog stadium. Fielding Road ran east to west, with a cemetery to the north and a leisure centre at the western end near the junction with Blackhorse Road. It was a mix of residential and low-rise business premises, part industrial, mostly retail. Directly opposite Barrington House lay a tacky 1930s parade of shops with flats above. There were kebab, pizza and chicken joints, a pawnbroker, two bookmakers and a couple of shops offering best prices for gold and foreign-exchange currency.
    The block itself was council-owned and twelve storeys high. Built in the 1950s, it was set back fifty metres from the road, separated by a rough stretch of treeless green with a fenced area to the left containing dilapidated swings, a broken slide and a ‘No Dogs’ sign. To the casual observer the whole area looked barren. In Kerr’s eyes it was a no man’s land offering minimum cover for an assault from the front. He noted two worn tarmac footpaths crossing the green diagonally from Fielding Road and a narrow service road leading to a car park at the rear of the block.
    Kerr had reached the scene from the Yard in seventeen minutes and parked up on a double yellow out of sight of the flats. Very soon the whole area would be sealed off but, for now, traffic was heavy, obstructed by the commandeered bus. Shoppers ran their local errands unaware they were in real danger of being shot or blown up on the street they had walked along for years.
    Kerr grabbed his BlackBerry and sprinted along the front of the parade. The top deck of a London bus is not a bad site for a makeshift control post until the sourcing guys come up with something more permanent. Seven or eight disappointed passengers were still hanging around on the pavement, anticipating an imminent return to normal service, while the rat-faced, hi-vis-jacketed driver drew on his cigarette and shouted into his mobile.
    Melanie had ridden pillion with Langton again, and Kerr found her on the top deck at the rear of the bus, already working with Alan Fargo. Already they had most of the comms up and running. Despite the cold, Fargo’s face glowed red and his shirt was dark with sweat as he set up the remote surveillance and recording gear. He looked as though he had jogged all the way from Pepe’s Place.
    Kerr squeezed between them and peered through the side window. They were parked around a hundred and fifty metres from the building, half hidden by a beech tree. ‘So, what are we looking at?’
    ‘Shakir went to 608,’ said Melanie, ‘halfway up. Couldn’t be worse.’
    The block was covered with ugly grey cement cladding and had old-fashioned metal windows; the main entrance was a pair of double doors, dead centre, with a rough strip of tarmac along the front connecting the two diagonal paths and leading behind the block to the car park. There were no balconies. Kerr counted the windows from the ground. ‘The one with the dirty net curtains, yeah?’
    ‘They’re all disgusting,’ said Fargo, racing through the electronic voters’ register, ‘and the adjacent flats are occupied, above and below.’
    Kerr stepped back and sat down to