Hellfire (33 page)

The lift opened up into another reception area with a magnificent tank full of brightly coloured tropical fish. More marble flooring. A comfortable-looking leather sofa. A door at the far end with the logo of a helicopter, and another opposite the lift. Saad was just wondering whether he should knock on the door, when it opened. A man appeared. He wore a white robe, but no headdress. He was a handsome man, with a neat goatee beard, but his eyes were tired.

‘Mr Al-Essa?’

The man nodded. ‘How may I help you?’

Saad had learned that the best way to deliver bad news was directly and without embellishment. ‘Mr Al-Essa, I’m very sorry. It’s about your parents. I’m afraid they’re dead.’

Al-Essa blinked. ‘What do you mean?’ he breathed. ‘When?’

‘Yesterday morning.’

The older man’s face darkened. ‘Why am I only hearing about this now?’

‘That’s why I’m here, Mr Al-Essa. May I come in?’

Al-Essa bowed his head. ‘Of course,’ he said. He stepped into the apartment. Saad followed.

Saad had never witnessed such luxury, and in the oil-rich state of Qatar, that was saying something. The room in which he found himself was huge and ornate. Marble statues. Gold-framed artworks. An incredible vista over the bay, where the lights of skiffs and other fishing boats twinkled in the early morning darkness. Al-Essa sat down in a comfortable armchair. He looked very shaken as he indicated that Saad should sit opposite him.

‘What happened?’ he asked in a cracked voice.

‘They were killed, sir. Murdered. I’m very sorry.’ Saad allowed that shocking news to sink in before he continued. ‘I’m afraid my superiors don’t want you to know that. They have spent the last twenty-four hours trying to cover it up. But your parents . . .’ He tried to find the right words. ‘Your parents are wealthy, sir. Mine are not. A few years ago, your father helped mine out with a little money when he was struggling. Our family have not forgotten his kindness.’ He bowed his head. ‘It is hardly a happy way to repay the debt, but I thought you would want to know the truth.’

Al-Essa stared at the young man. ‘Thank you, my friend,’ he said. ‘I am grateful.’

Saad opened his rucksack and pulled out an A4 envelope. He hesitated for a moment. ‘Your parents died in a bad way, sir. What I have to show you is unpleasant. If you would prefer to . . .’

Al-Essa shook his head. ‘Show me,’ he said.

There were ten photographs of the crime scene, all extremely detailed. One showed an old woman lying in a reclining chair, her throat deeply cut. Another showed her legs, smeared with the contents of her split urinary bag. Then the photographs became more gruesome. An old man with gaping wounds for eyes and a bloody mess of a mouth. A third person – a younger, fatter man – lying in a pool of his own blood. Al-Essa stared at these pictures, clearly aghast. He was halfway through them when he said, ‘Excuse me’, and disappeared into an adjoining room.

Saad sat silently for two minutes. When Al-Essa returned he looked like a different man. Deeply shaken, as though he had aged years in those two minutes. He sat down again. ‘Why would your superiors cover this up?’ he asked finally.

The young police officer had more pictures to show him. A mirror, with a word scrawled across it. A painting, with a word scrawled across it. A patch of floor, with a word scrawled across it. In each picture the word was the same:
Caliph
.

Saad watched Al-Essa’s face turn pale. He stared at the police officer. ‘
He
did this?’

Saad nodded.

‘And your superiors are scared?’

‘Some of them. But some . . .’

‘Some would prefer to live in a world where this sort of thing is allowed to happen?’

Saad inclined his head. ‘I would be in a great deal of trouble, Mr Al-Essa, if anybody were to find out that I came here this morning.’

‘I understand,’ Al-Essa said. He stood up. ‘Thank you for your honesty. I would like to give you something for your trouble.’

‘It’s not necessary. I have a job now. My family no longer needs to live off charity.’

‘May I keep these photographs?’

Saad nodded. ‘I’ll show myself out, Mr Al-Essa,’ he said.

As the young police officer walked towards the door, he looked back over his shoulder. Al-Essa was staring out of the window over the bay. Saad caught a glimpse of his reflection. It chilled him. Al-Essa was distraught, there was no doubt about it. But there was something else in his expression that seemed to master all other emotions. Saad recognised it only too well. He had seen it in the faces of men condemned to forty lashes for small crimes, and in the eyes of a woman raped and disbelieved.

There was no doubt about it. Above everything else, Ahmed bin Ali al-Essa, one of the richest men in the world’s richest country, was scared.

Spud awoke in the darkness.

He winced. There was a cracking pain in his head, worse even than the dull ache in his abdomen. The sort of pain that only comes from too much booze. And there was no doubt about it. Spud had hit the bottle hard. So hard that for a moment he couldn’t quite remember where he was.

He was in a bed. A big one. Bigger than the standard double in his own grotty little flat. And there was a woman next to him. She rolled over and cosied up to him, draping one hand across his broad chest. She smelled of perfume, wine and sex.

Spud groaned inwardly as he remembered pitching up on Tony Wiseman’s front door after taking the train from Birmingham to Hereford, to be greeted by his missus, Frances. How she’d invited him in and plied him with Tony’s red wine. How she’d flirted with him by asking his advice about how to get fit for the marathon in three days. How she’d started crying, telling him what a shit Tony was.

How one thing had led to another . . .

He barely dared move, because that would wake her up. He glanced left. A radio alarm told him it was four in the morning. He breathed deeply to stem a surge of nausea. What the
hell
was he doing here?

Frances muttered something in her sleep. Spud didn’t move. He felt like a total bastard. Tony was no mate of his, but shagging the wife of another Regiment guy was a low thing to do. It was almost as if he’d been trying to prove something to himself, but he wasn’t quite sure what.

He thought back to the previous day. His trip to Birmingham with Eleanor the spook to check out the dodgy cab driver who didn’t seem so dodgy after all. On the train all the way down from Birmingham Spud had tried to get the facts straight in his head. The guy had never owned a passport. Which meant he’d never even left the country. He’d come to the conclusion that he had to face facts: the idea that he’d acquired that Claymore bag from some jihadist training camp was clutching at straws. Pretending he was on a real job, when in fact he was two steps away from the scrapheap.

Slowly, he moved Frances’s hand from his chest. She muttered again, but then rolled over to face the other way. Spud eased himself out of bed and silently – groggily – pulled his clothes back on. He crept out of Frances’s enormous bedroom and down the stairs – almost tripping up over the petite running shoes lying in the hallway. A minute later he was out on the pavement, bathed in the yellow light of a street lamp. It was deserted at this hour. He looked back over his shoulder at the house, knowing that Frances would be pissed off with him when she woke. But she’d get over it. And she’d keep quiet with Tony. Something told Spud she
really
wouldn’t want her husband to know she’d crossed that line.

It felt good to be up and breathing cold, early morning air. It was a mile from here to his own flat, and as he purposefully paced the street he felt his hangover subside. It was a quarter to five when he walked up to his front door. His motorbike – a BMW, his most treasured possession – was parked right outside. The curtains were shut. A few junk mail leaflets protruded from the letter box. He let himself in.

It was dark and musty in his one-room pad. The sparse accommodation of a single man who barely spent any time at home. He stood alone in the darkness of the hallway. There was a key rack on the wall to his left-hand side. The keys to his car were hanging there. He stared at them.

Something was troubling him. What was it?

He closed his eyes and pictured himself sitting in the cab yesterday with Eleanor. He ran through the conversation in his head, as best he could remember it. He pictured the Claymore bag, and suspicion washed over him again. But there was something else. Something he’d seen, but hadn’t pieced together. He felt his forehead wrinkling as he closed his eyes and forced his hazy mind to picture the cab driver again, just as he’d seen him. Every last detail.

The neatly combed hair. The tan-coloured jacket.

The gloves.

It had been sunny in Dudley yesterday. Why the hell had he been wearing gloves?

His eyes pinged open. He could almost hear Eleanor’s patronising voice.
You think he’s a terrorist because he was wearing gloves? You’ve got a lot to learn about intelligence, Spud . . .

But when it came to intelligence, Spud knew one thing for sure. Sometimes, you just have to follow your gut.

He hurried into his bedroom. From a rickety old cupboard he grabbed a leather jacket and his bike helmet. He wished he had a firearm handy, but he didn’t. No problem. He could always improvise a weapon if he needed to. Back in the hallway he grabbed the bike keys from the key holder. He also owned a car – an old Honda – but for some jobs a bike was better. Easier to follow someone. Easier to get up close to traffic lights on red, or to cut the wrong way down a one-way street. He strode outside and locked the door of his flat behind him. Thirty seconds later he was revving the bike’s engine. A face appeared through parted curtains on a first-floor window opposite, obviously wondering what the noise was about. Spud ignored it. He pulled out and burned down the street. At this time of day, if he pushed it, he could be back in Birmingham in an hour.

Dawn broke over the eastern Atlantic, the sun’s rays gleaming off the steel grey of the frigate. The waters were calmer now. An exhausted Danny stood in the corner of the ops room. Caitlin and Tony were at the other side of the room, out of earshot, talking quietly to each other. Buckingham, however, was with Danny, facing him, just a metre away.

‘So let me get this right, Black,’ he said quietly. ‘On leaving the UK, you elected
not
to wait for a supporting platoon from the Parachute Regiment. You
blackmailed
a high-ranking member of the Nigerian government. And you
failed
to locate the British High Commissioner and his aide before they were killed. You allowed one of your team to become infected with the
Y. pestis
virus –
very
careless . . .’

Danny stepped forward, but Buckingham looked around meaningfully. ‘You need to put a lid on your temper, old sport,’ he whispered. ‘Especially in front of everyone.’

Danny took a deep breath, then stepped back.

‘And when you had the man responsible for all this in your sights,’ Buckingham continued, ‘you allowed a Nigerian suicide bomber to
kill
him before we could bring him in for questioning. All in all, hardly a very auspicious couple of days’ work, wouldn’t you say?’

Danny didn’t say anything. He knew the beginnings of a stitch-up when he heard it. But before he could speak, the ops officer had marched up to them. ‘We’ve got London on the line.’ He nodded at Buckingham and Danny. ‘They want both of you.’

Danny noticed a slight tightening around Buckingham’s eyes. He obviously didn’t like being put on a level pegging with the SAS man. But there was nothing he could do. They crossed the ops room together and, at the ops officer’s instruction, sat down at a laptop screen. Being this close to Buckingham made Danny’s flesh creep, so he focused on the screen itself. The ops officer tapped the keyboard and an image appeared. A man in a crumpled suit was sitting at a desk. To his left and slightly behind him was a second man sitting in a wheelchair – Danny remembered that his name was Bixby. He had a big bushy beard and his head was resting against a cushioned side-panel.

‘
Is this thing working?
’ said the man in the suit.

‘It is, sir,’ Buckingham said. ‘This is Buckingham, by the way.’

The man peered into the computer screen. ‘
Is that Black next to you?
’

‘Yes, sir, Danny Black. I’ve been reading him the riot act—’

‘
Bloody good work, Black
,’ the man cut in. ‘
Colin Seldon, Chief of SIS. Bixby here will fill you in.
’

Danny could almost feel the heat of Buckingham’s outrage. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

The guy in the wheelchair cleared his throat. ‘
Flight BA33489 has made an emergency landing over the Mauritanian desert. That’s classified – word’s already leaking through the press that an aircraft has disappeared over African airspace, and we want to keep it that way. It’s early days, but the bioweapon is on board and it’s looking like a hundred per cent infection rate.
’