Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

any of these matters, so if one agency within the Met needed information from another agency within the Met, it wasn’t impossible to find someone who could impart a few details if a name was given.
    Barbara got inside to talk to Chief Inspector Harry Streener by using the magic words
Pakistani national living in London
and
a developing situation in Italy
. The bloke had the accent of someone who should have been whistling commands to his sheepdog in the hills of Yorkshire and the pasty cue-ball complexion of a poor sod who hadn’t seen the sun for the past ten years. His fingers were yellow from nicotine and his teeth weren’t much better, and when she saw him, Barbara made a mental note that giving up smoking wasn’t an entirely bad idea. But she set this aside for future consideration and gave him the name she was loath to give him.
    “Taymullah Azhar?” Streener repeated. They were in his office, where an iPod in a docking station was playing something that sounded like hurricane-force winds in a bamboo grove. Streener saw her glance in its direction. “White noise,” he said. “Helps me to think.”
    “Got it,” she said with a wise nod. It would have driven her to the nearest Underground station for shelter, but everyone’s boat floated on different water.
    Streener tapped at his computer’s keyboard. After a moment, he read the screen. Barbara itched to get out of her seat, crawl over his desk, and have at the information, but she forced herself to wait patiently for whatever it was that Streener decided to impart. She’d already sketched in the facts for him: Azhar’s employment at University College London, his entanglement with Angelina Upman, their production of a child together, Angelina’s flight with Hadiyyah to destinations unknown, and Hadiyyah’s disappearance via kidnapping. Streener had listened to all this with a face so impassive that Barbara wondered if he was actually hearing her. At the end of her recitation, she’d said, “Superintendent Ardery’s put me onto the London end of things while DI Lynley’s working the Italian end. I thought it best to check with you lot and see if you’ve been having a look at the bloke.”
    “And your thought as to why SO12 would be onto this . . . What was the name again?” Streener said.
    Barbara spelled it out for him. “Just seemed like an
i
that needed to be dotted,” she told him. After a moment, she added, “Pakistan? You know what I mean. I don’t have to be PC with you, do I?”
    Streener guffawed. The last thing cops needed to be was politically correct with each other. He typed a bit. Then he read. His lips formed a whistle that he didn’t make. He nodded and said, “Yeah. He’s here. Ticket to Lahore triggered the usual alarms. One-
way
ticket upped the noise.”
    Barbara felt her gut clench. “C’n you tell me . . . Were you looking at him before the one-way ticket?”
    Streener glanced at her sharply. She’d tried to keep her voice intrigued by this development but not involved other than as a professional doing a job. He seemed to evaluate her question and what it might imply. He finally looked back at his screen, scrolled a bit, and said slowly, “Yes, it appears that we were.”
    “C’n you tell me why?”
    “It’s the job,” he said.
    “I know it’s your job, but—”
    “Not mine. His. Professor of microbiology? He has his own lab? You can fill in the blanks there, can’t you?”
    She could indeed. As a professor of microbiology, as a professional with his own lab . . . God only knew what tasty weapon of mass destruction he could be cooking up. As she herself had said, the magic words were
Pakistani national living in London
.
Pakistani
meant
Muslim
.
Muslim
meant
suspicious
. Put one and one together among this lot in SO12, and you came up with three every time. It wasn’t fair but there you had it.
    She couldn’t really blame them. To them, Taymullah Azhar was just a name just as, to them, terrorists were hiding in every garden shed. The job of SO12 was to make sure those blokes didn’t emerge from those sheds with bombs inside their shorts or, in the case of Azhar, with a Thermos filled with God only knew what, sufficient to contaminate the water supply of London.
    She said, “Have you blokes been following the kidnap situation, then?”
    Streener looked some more, then nodded slowly. “Italy,” he said. “He landed in Pisa.”
    “Any indication that Azhar’s contacted an Italian there?