The Excalibur Codex (3 page)

The rocket attack on the tanker must have been the signal to withdraw, because the terrorists began to funnel back through the cars to a central point on the motorway verge a hundred yards to her right. She was surprised how few they were, probably only a dozen; tall and lean in their dark clothing, faces covered by identical masks and carrying their weapons with the casual ease of people who handled them every day. Abeba bunched up in an attempt to make herself smaller as two of the killers walked by within feet of her – no, not walked; the way they moved, confident, arrogant, but always wary, made her think of films she had seen of hunting leopards. She felt a surge of relief as they disappeared from sight and fought the urge to vomit, making a tiny choking sound as they moved off.

A minute later she heard the sound of engines starting up. Her first instinct was to stay hidden, but curiosity and an odd feeling of guilt commanded her movements. She had survived. All those people in the burning cars had not. Their killers were about to escape to God knows where and she owed it to them to at least see which direction their murderers took.

She turned and wriggled through the bushes to the top of the bank. By the time she reached the summit, two or three powerful cross-country motorcycles were already gunning their way across the field and they were quickly followed by four more. The first bikes reached a
fence, and she expected them to stop, but they rode on as if it didn’t exist. Of course, they would have cut it to clear their escape route. Sirens in the distance. At last. How had it taken them so long? She glanced at her watch and was astonished to see that less than ten minutes had passed since the lorry overturned. Images flashed through her head; blood and flame and terrified young faces. And something else. To her surprise she was still clutching her mobile phone as if it was some kind of talisman, the message to Jamie still on screen. He’d hear about the attack on television. She needed to tell him she was safe. Her fingers fumbled for the correct buttons and she had time to form the words ‘I’m OK’ before she heard the rustling behind her. Somehow she managed to type in seven more characters and hit send before the shadow loomed over her. The sirens were increasing in volume and they’d been joined by the soft, rhythmic thud of a faraway helicopter, but she knew it was too late for her.

She looked up in mute appeal and the figure in the mask said something she didn’t quite catch. The gun barrel rose. Abeba Trelawney’s last conscious thought was that her killer had blue eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ Leopard 1 repeated. ‘You should have stayed quiet.’

The masked figure turned to join the others, but at the last moment noticed the mobile phone in the dead woman’s hand and stooped to pick it up, staring at the screen. The ‘whup, whup, whup’ of the approaching
helicopter precluded any further deliberations and the terrorist leader ran to where the three remaining Leopards waited on their trail bikes, pulled on a helmet and mounted the fourth machine.

‘Let’s go,’ Leopard 1 shouted. ‘Pull them into the middle of the field.’

‘Jesus Christ, what the hell is happening down there?’ The forward observer’s words echoed what the pilot of the police surveillance helicopter was thinking, but he was too professional to broadcast his own feelings over the air. Besides, he knew exactly what he was witnessing as he flew through the pall of smoke that towered over the motorway. Unusually for a police pilot, he had flown choppers in combat, in Iraq, and the scene below reminded him of the road to Basra after American jets and attack helicopters had shot up a ten-mile convoy of fleeing Iraqis. He could see the burning cars and the great glowing pink flower that had once been some kind of petrol tanker. Among the jammed lines of traffic lay dozens of still figures, some of them so small they must be children. He hoped they were hiding, but knew they were not. The pilot was a parent himself and as the scale of the massacre became clear his initial shock turned to anger. He vowed that, if he had anything to do with it, the evil bastards who’d done this would spend the rest of their lives in jail.

‘There! At six o’clock.’

The pilot felt his heart quicken as he spotted the little
knot of motorcycles speeding away across the fields. In the distance he could see several others making their way towards a large wood. For once anger overcame discipline. ‘I wish this was a fucking Apache,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘They wouldn’t be so cocky with a couple of hundred rounds of three-hundred-mill and a Hydra up their arses.’

‘Just stay on them.’ The observer, operating the helicopter’s video camera, liked his pilot well enough, but sometimes resented the fact that he thought the only heroes were in the military. In the rear, the aircraft’s tactical commander relayed instructions to the ground units homing in on the attack. He grunted. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get the bastards.’

The pilot put the chopper into hover at three thousand feet, just to make certain the stabilized Wescam could get the best possible picture of the terrorists and the bikes they were riding.

‘That’s great, boss,’ the observer announced. The camera’s high-tech lens was picking up every little detail. ‘Ah …? ’

‘What?’

But the white spark the observer had spotted among the trees had turned into a streak and it was already halfway to the Eurocopter EC153. The pilot reacted with the speed of a veteran, but by the time his fingers twisted the cyclical control stick and his foot kicked the left anti-torque pedal to put the aircraft into a dive it was too late.

‘Oh, fuck.’

The Stinger missile hadn’t even reached its top speed of Mach 2 when it struck the helicopter a foot below the rotor blades. The tactical commander, seated just beneath the point of impact, died instantly as the three-kilogram warhead exploded, incinerated and dismembered in the same millisecond. A ragged-edged fragment of alloy engine block decapitated the pilot so that his still-helmeted head fell between his feet and his neck fountained blood to paint the windscreen scarlet. With no power and no one at the controls, the Eurocopter went into an uncontrollable spin. Trapped at the centre of the inferno, all the observer could do was scream and watch the earth rise to meet him in a whirling blur of speed, fire and light.

The terrorist leader watched the chopper flutter downwards like a butterfly with burning wings to crash with an enormous rending of metal. The main fuel tanks exploded on impact with a massive ‘whump’, finally ending the agony of what was left of the observer. Leopard 1 brought the big bike round and rode up to the wreck. The bike slid to a halt and its rider savoured the pungent scent of burning petrol, intrigued by the blackened, twisting form sitting upright in a pool of fire beside the wreckage.

‘Here endeth the first lesson,’ the helmeted figure whispered. ‘
Allahu Akbar
.’

Jamie Saintclair felt a curious sense of detachment as they lowered the oak coffin into the grave, as if it was someone else standing here in the soft drizzle watching the violated body of the woman he loved being placed in the earth. He closed his eyes. Maybe it was part exhaustion – sleep had been hard to come by – but he should feel more than
this
. His fists clenched, nails biting deep into the palms, and he flinched as a hand touched his shoulder. Abbie’s brother Michael; he was the one who should have needed comforting. By the time Jamie opened his eyes the coffin had disappeared and the priest was muttering the last few words:
Ashes to ashes, dust to …
Oh Christ, why her? Why Abbie? His mind struggled to visualize what it had been like for her in those final moments and he had to force it to stop before his whole world disintegrated. A long silence trying not to think of anything.

Across the void her father stood, features as immobile
as if they’d been fixed in a steel vice. His expression betrayed a mix of anger and pain and grief, pale lips clamped in a razor line to cage the cry of anguish that welled up inside him like lava in a volcano. His eyes met Jamie’s and the younger man knew Robert Trelawney was seeing a mirror image. He had his right arm around the shoulder of Abbie’s mother, Meseret. Tall and slim, with the pale, golden skin and sculpted features of her daughter, Jamie had barely been able to look at her during the ceremony. The Trelawneys were believers and would take comfort from the priest’s words, but Jamie had never been sure what to believe in. The only thing he knew was that it had nothing to do with stained-glass windows or a man on a cross. If the God these people worshipped existed, how could he have allowed it to happen? Abeba, the name was Amharic and meant flower, but it could just as well have been sunshine, because she had brought a light into his life that he’d never previously known. With Abbie every day seemed filled with smiles and laughter. Now she was gone, and the darkness inside him was a bottomless Stygian well. She had been on this earth for a paltry twenty-six years, three months and twenty-two days. And now all the joy and hope, goodness and energy that made her what she was, was lost for ever. His first reaction, after the initial shock, had been rage at the people who murdered her. He would have happily killed them all: the gunmen, the planners, the facilitators and the suppliers, right down to the contributor of the last penny to the blood money
in their bank accounts. Then Bob Trelawney had told him about the doctor’s letter and the baby, and anger had been displaced by a feeling of loss beyond bearing. Jamie had lost his mother and his grandfather, and never even known his father, but he had not truly understood what loss meant until Abbie and his child had been taken from him. Loss meant a gaping emptiness that had once been occupied by his soul and would never again be filled. It meant eyes that would no longer see the world with the same delight. A heart that would never know joy. He knew this was an exaggeration. Things would change. The hurt would fade. But nothing would alter the fact that they were gone.

The anger remained. He still wanted these people dead.

He must have shaken Michael’s hand, because here was Bob Trelawney, solid as a west-country outhouse, thrusting a fist like a leg of lamb at him. He took the hand and shook it, neither man bothering with the traditional crushing match that had defined their relationship so far.

‘Remember, you’ll always be welcome, Jamie. Our house is your house.’ The words came out in a choked rush. Jamie nodded, not daring to speak, ashamed that he couldn’t articulate his thanks for what was an unlikely offer. Bob was replaced by Meseret, pinning him with Abbie’s tear-filled, wondrous brown eyes, dabbing his cheek with Abbie’s soft lips and filling his head with her perfume. He heard a whisper in his ear,
or it might have been the breeze, and he held her close, only realizing he hadn’t released her when she pulled his arms away from her body. She took a step back, her eyes never leaving his, nodded and was gone.

Jamie waited while the crowd moved away and he was completely alone, standing over the grave and staring down at the polished casket that contained the mortal remains of Abeba Trelawney. For a minute and more his mind fought for something to say, something that would make it right, but there came a moment, almost, of liberation when he sensed there was no need. The essence that had been Abbie was gone, to wherever such essences found peace. Part of her remained, not in the wooden coffin, but inside him, and she would always be there.

The council gravediggers stood patiently a few dozen yards away, talking together in low voices. They didn’t look at him, but he knew they wanted to finish their job. With a last look into the grave, he reached into the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out two red roses. The rose had been Abbie’s favourite flower. He’d joked that it was because it resembled her: a delicate thing of exquisite beauty that could be dangerous if not handled with care. She had enjoyed that. He dropped them on top of the coffin. One rose for a life extinguished on the very threshold of fulfilment. One for a tiny life that would never be lived. When he turned away the world was a blur.

As he walked towards the cemetery gates he felt a
presence at his side and an immaculately dressed man in his mid-forties took step beside him.

Jamie acknowledged Adam Steele with a polite nod. ‘I didn’t see you in the crowd, but thanks for coming along.’ He wished the tone matched the sentiments, but the other man would understand. A friend since the Cambridge days when Steele had been one of his tutors – though friend was perhaps too strong a word for it – they’d had similar interests; art and languages. Jamie had eventually graduated with a First in Fine Arts, fluency in German and Spanish, and a working knowledge of Russian that was getting a little rusty. At first he’d found the antics of the public school set a bit overwhelming, but Steele gradually eased him into a group of acquaintances who’d been helpful since he’d set up his own art dealership and recovery business in a fourth-floor Old Bond Street office the size of a shoebox. Their paths diverged when the older man had inherited the better part of a substantial merchant bank and exchanged the leafy groves of academia for the dogfight of the City, but recently a shared hobby had brought them closer again.

Steele pushed his hands deeper into the pockets of his cashmere overcoat and hunched his neck against the raindrops dripping from the cherry trees lining the path. ‘The notice said friends and family, so I thought I’d keep a low profile,’ he said. ‘She was a very special girl, and …’ He shrugged. Yes, Jamie thought, since the massacre there had always been an ‘and …’ Two weeks
after the horror on the M25 they still hadn’t finalized the number of dead. At least Abbie’s parents had been able to identify their daughter’s body and the police were sufficiently satisfied with the cause of death to release Abbie for burial. They were the fortunate ones, if you could call it that. There had been whole coachloads of bodies, all mixed together in a great carbonized mass as they died fleeing the bombs and the bullets. Some of the people closest to the exploding petrol tanker had been more or less atomized. Burnt-out cars might contain the remains of one cremated body or four, only forensics would ever tell, and that would take time. Meanwhile, the families waited. He’d heard that just one body in four had been formally identified, leaving hundreds praying that their missing father, son or daughter was one of the still anonymous burns victims lying in a coma, or taken to a hospital so overwhelmed by the number of casualties that they couldn’t keep up with the paperwork.