Crisis Four (59 page)
Authors: Andy McNab
Sitting back on the cigarette-burned red velour, I started to pick at the label on the Pils bottle. The old man bent his neck as he tried to read the headlines on my paper. I passed it across the table.
The night before last had been another hot and humid one. Lynn had picked me up as usual for our daily debrief on the debrief, but this time in his new Voyager. It looked like the Firm’s budget had got a bit of a boost this new fiscal year. The air-conditioner was going full blast. The Serb, as ever, kept his eyes fixed on the road.
‘How was all this allowed to happen?’ I said. ‘How come you didn’t suspect her earlier?’
Lynn kept his gaze on the real world beyond the darkened window. ‘Elizabeth voiced concerns.’ He shrugged. ‘We took a few people aside for a word, but there was nothing we could put our finger on. The false-flag operation in Syria seemed like a good moment to put her to the test.’
Lynn obviously held a lot more pieces of the puzzle in his hand than he was letting me see, but he did tell me this much. The Syrian operation had only been taken on by the Brits as a means of checking whether Sarah was Bin Laden’s best mate. It was Elizabeth’s idea. Sarah changed the data, killed the Source and covered her tracks. She was good at doing that. I thought back to her giving the American a round in the head after taking his clothes in the forest. But she wasn’t good enough in Syria. Without knowing it, Sarah confirmed that she didn’t exactly go to sleep every night humming ‘Rule Britannia’. It was then just a question of letting her lead the way to Bin Laden. The only problem for Elizabeth was that she had omitted to fill in the Americans when Sarah was posted to Washington.
Lynn had turned and looked at me as if to underline his next disclosure. ‘Things got slightly out of hand when Sarah took an active part in the ASU,’ he said. ‘Once that had happened, how could we tell our friends across the sea? That was where you came in.’
I let that one sink in – in amongst all the other crap I was trying to make sense of.
The investigating team had been clutching at straws to explain Sarah’s behaviour, and I wasn’t doing much better. I asked him, ‘Do you know what turned her?’ He seemed to know everything else.
‘We’ll never completely know, will we? People are still trying to fathom out T. E. Lawrence… and who really knows what made Philby and the rest do what they did?’ There was a pause. ‘A team went to Sarah’s mother, to pass on the tragic news. She was saddened, of course, but very proud of her daughter’s most untimely death in the service of her country.’
‘I thought her parents were dead.’
‘No, just her father. He died when she was seventeen. A team have been weaseling with the mother for a few weeks now. You know, trying for any links or information that may be useful.’
Sarah’s father, George, they had learned, was a big-time oil executive who was a stern disciplinarian and a major-league hypocrite. He’d spent his whole working life in the Middle East without ever getting to like the Arabs – unless, that is, they were either royal or wealthy – preferably both – and took to all things Western in much the same way that flies take to shit. The right sort of Arab certainly didn’t include his lower-class domestic staff and their nine-year-old son.
The friendship between Sarah and Abed had been perfectly innocent, the mother had said. The fact was, her daughter was just desperately lonely. But as far as George was concerned, inside every Arab was a rapist just waiting to get out.
The two kids were inseparable. Sarah was an only child, pushed from pillar to post all her life, with a remote, domineering father, a placid, ineffectual mother, and no opportunity to make lasting relationships. You wouldn’t need to be an agony aunt to understand her joy in finding a friend at last.
George, however, was not amused. One day, Abed’s mum and dad didn’t turn up for work. Nor did the boy come round in the afternoon, as he usually did. The whole family seemed to have vanished. Then, just a few days later, Sarah’s father pulled the plug on her education in Saudi and packed her off to a UK boarding school.
It was only after her father had died that Sarah learned what had really happened. She was helping her mother go through her father’s things when she came across a gold Rolex Navigator.
Sarah said, ‘I never knew Daddy had one of these.’
Her mother looked at the watch and burst into tears.
The Rolex had been given to him by a grateful business acquaintance. It was George’s prize possession. He had accused Abed of stealing it, and thrown the whole family out onto the streets. With a reputation as thieves hanging over them, their chances of ever working again would have been ziff. They would have seen out their days as ‘dust people’, the lowest of the low, outcasts from Saudi society and living on the edge of starvation. Sarah waited until her mother had finished, then left the house without another word. She never saw her again.
‘Of course, I don’t go along with all this nonsense about blaming everything in your life on the traumas of childhood,’ Lynn said. ‘My parents dragged me around South-East Asia until I was seven, then I went to Eton. Never did me any harm.’
The menus were being plonked unceremoniously on the bar counter by the girl who’d served me before. The thought of dishing out another hundred stuff and chips obviously didn’t fill her with too much excitement.
I decided on the pie and another beer. The same as last night and the night before. A quick look at Baby-G told me it was seven forty-eight, just over half an hour until my RV.
Traffic was still clogging the street by the time I left, but at least it was moving. I turned left, checked my watch yet again and headed towards Victoria station. Thirteen minutes till the pick up. I turned two corners and stopped, waiting to see if anyone was following. They weren’t.
Crossing the road, I cut through a housing estate that was packed with K reg Vauxhall Astras and Sierras, sat on a wall by the rubbish chute and waited. Half a dozen kids were skateboarding up and down the only bit of clear tarmac they could find – the slip road in front of me that led onto the main drag towards the station. I listened to their banter, thinking about when I was where they were.
I thought of Kelly – the girl who’d had her whole family killed, and now had a stand-in father who constantly let her down. And worse than that, much worse, I was probably the closest thing she had to a best friend. Sarah’s words came back to me. ‘You have a child now. I hope you live long enough to see her.’
I cut away from all that and got back to real life by reminding myself of the two big lessons I’d learned in Washington. The first was never again to be so soft with someone who showed emotion towards me. I had to stop kidding myself that I knew, or even understood, that sort of stuff. The second was easier: always carry a pistol. I never wanted to play Robin Hood again.
It was last light as I sat, watched and listened. Sarah’s words still bugged me. ‘You have a child now…’
The Voyager would be arriving any minute. I looked at Baby-G and thought about George’s Rolex. And then I knew what I had to do. I wasn’t exactly a top-of-the-range example for Kelly, but the very least I could do was be dependable. Maybe, just maybe, the one thing that Sarah had given me by sparing my life was the chance to do the right thing.
Moving swiftly away from the RV point, I jumped a fence that secured a communal garden.
Crouching in the shadows, I pulled the Leatherman from my pocket, opened the knife blade, and cut away at the plastic encircling my ankle. The pliers made short work of the half-inch steel band that ran beneath.
I knew that the instant the circuit was broken the alarm would be raised. Even as the tag was being binned in the bushes, the standby team would be running for their cars, getting briefed via their body comms (personal radios).
Jumping back over the fence, I headed towards Victoria at a controlled, fast pace. Fuck ’em. What were they going to do? Well, quite a bit, but I’d worry about that when it happened. It wasn’t as if I was doing an out and out runner. I’d be back in the flat on Sunday, talking to the morons about Afghanistan. The only difference would be that I’d have acquired two new friends with necks as big as the Serb’s, assigned to guard me 24/7, just in case I was overcome again by the desire to take a weekend off.
There were sirens behind me now on the other side of the estate. They must be flapping big time to call in the police.
As I neared the station I just hoped the investigating team had kids of their own, and would understand when I explained to them on Sunday that all I wanted to do was take my child to the Bloody Tower for a day out.
After all, I’d made her a promise. A normal person’s promise.
THE END
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