Black Ops: The 12th Spider Shepherd Thriller Read Free Page A

Khalaf spoke to no one while he was at prayers. He would occasionally shop for food and once a day he would take a walk through the thirty-one acres of Abney Park garden cemetery.
    The cemetery was always a difficult venue. There were dozens of paths winding between the 200,000 or so graves and while there were always some people wandering around, it was difficult to stay close without being seen. Dogs were always a good cover and the teams could call on more than a dozen offered up by volunteers prepared to allow MI5 to borrow their pets.
    During the third week Khalaf visited Stoke Newington public library in Church Street. On the first visit he had wandered around the bookshelves for ten minutes before leaving. A few days later he visited again, this time making use of one of the library’s six computers. The visit to the library then became a daily event, and each time he would spend up to an hour on one of the computers. The surveillance teams installed keystroke programs on all of the machines and they were able to keep track of his Internet activities. Immediately they saw what he was doing the teams went on to full alert. Khalaf was reading articles on the mass jihadist killings in Iraq, Kenya and India, and spent time studying online newspaper articles about the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby who was hacked to death near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich. During the fifth week of surveillance, Khalaf went to the place where Fusilier Rigby was murdered and spent more than an hour walking around.
    During the sixth week of surveillance, Khalaf opened a Yahoo email account and sent an email to an address that was traced to a library computer in Ealing. Khalaf used a drafts folder for the account to contact a British-born Somalian later identified as Mohammed Mahmud. Like Khalaf, Mahmud had broken off his studies and travelled to Syria to fight with ISIS. He had somehow managed to travel there and back without attracting the attention of the security services. From the messages that piled up in the drafts folder it was clear that the two men were planning a beheadings rampage in the London area. In the sixth week they were joined online by a third London-based jihadist who was also a member of ISIS. The third man had been harder to track down, he went online using a pay-as-you-go smartphone and was rarely active for more than a few minutes at a time and changed his SIM card every week.
    A second five-man team, also under Shepherd’s guidance, had put Mahmud under the microscope. Like Khalaf, he lived alone, leaving his small flat in a terraced house only to shop, visit a local mosque and the library.
    During the eighth week of Khalaf’s surveillance, both teams converged on the Abney Park cemetery. When it became clear that the two men were going to meet, Mahmud’s team pulled back.
    The two men sat together for more than an hour on a bench close to the Gothic church in the centre of the cemetery. Three watchers walked by during the time they were together but none was able to hear even a fragment of their conversation.
    There was no doubt that the men were planning a major terrorist atrocity and Shepherd had recommended that they be arrested and charged. His boss Charlotte Button had agreed with him but they had been overruled – the surveillance was to continue until the third man was identified. That had been three weeks ago and they were no closer to finding out who he was.
    The surveillance had turned up another cell, however; this one in Bradford. Khalaf had gone to a second email address draft folder and began communicating with another potential ISIS soldier, a British-born Pakistani who was about to fly out to Syria. Through him they managed to trace and identify another four would-be jihadists.
    Meanwhile Khalaf was also using Google Earth to look at the roads around several shopping centres and railway stations in London, and visiting websites for large shopping malls, including the giant