Thunder (8 page)

Carefully and quietly he went over every inch of the room. No other telltales.

He grabbed the board bag, ducked quietly back out of the sash window, and then drew the glass gently down until the window was neatly closed behind him.

He found the Renault Clio parked a couple of streets away. It was the right car, even though Iron had apparently swapped the number plates at some point. Ellard checked it quickly for booby traps – none – lifted the hatchback door – empty – and threw in the board-bag. As with the clumsily screwdriver-forced door locks, the interior of the car betrayed Iron’s thievery with the wiring loom hanging as a confused tangle from the steering column. Fortunately the regularly used, stripped back, starter motor wires were easy to spot.

Ellard started the car and drove off, out of the city, in search of somewhere safe to get rid of it.

~~~~~

Barfold

Grey Beard is back. And Dad. And you. And Elizabeth.

I don’t mind you and Lizzie coming to see me.

I can just about put up with Dad.

But, Grey Beard, come on! I’m having enough trouble sleeping without your gruesome visage cropping up every night. Leave me alone. Please! I’m very sorry you’re dead. I’m sorry you’re all dead...

I can see your sweet lips moving, my darling Iuli. So are Dad’s. And Grey Beard’s... You all seem to be mouthing the same thing. Silently. Over and over again. “Do the right thing... Do the right thing...”

Lizzie waves her little hand.

I wish I was dead too.

~~~~~

Berlin

Jeyhun Farhad Ebrahimi sat on his solitary metal chair and stared nervously at the light blinking on top of the answering machine. The machine sat, oblivious to his undivided attention, on top of a battered wooden desk which – apart from a mouldy mattress, a crumpled sleeping bag, Jeyhun’s backpack, and a solitary chair – was the only furniture in the huge shadowy loft-space. Dusty light struggled in from a single, circular, glass window set into the gable-end wall of the abandoned warehouse. The rest of the loft was bathed in semi-permanent darkness.

The answering machine’s wire trailed off the table, across an expanse of bare floorboards and continued, an ongoing straggle of cable, to the top of an iron staircase at the dim, windowless, end of the cavernous room. The cable disappeared into this hole and dropped, vertically and entirely unattached, three floors to the distribution box near the single back door. The local Deutsche Telekom telephone engineer had never had an easier installation: some young, well tanned, foreign man had met him by the door and had asked him to point out which pair of screw terminals the line was on, for a reel of cable and a socket, and then thrown him out...

Jeyhun pushed himself up from the chair, stomped three short paces to the table and pressed play again. “They’re close. Watch your backs...,” the recorded message sounded bad.

‘Come on Sergei, come on, you must call in,’ he thought as he roughly pushed his long black hair to one side and glanced at the copies of Bild stacked on the table. Copies of newspapers he’d bought shortly after the attack.

He pulled one nearer to him and, still standing, started turning the dog-eared pages. Time and time again he’d flicked through these copies. Looked upon the victims faces staring up from the pages. Read about the fury and anger directed toward them. Seen the news that their helpers, in the UK, had been arrested. Examined the pictures of the devastation in front of Victoria Station. Wondered whether his brother had known, any better than he had, what Murat and Azat had meant when they’d said they were putting together a glorious strike at the heart of his country’s enemies. A strike that they’d said would really put Khandastan on the map for all time.

Well, whatever he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this.

The young man’s shoulders shuddered, his head dropped, and a teardrop splashed off the table edge beneath him.

~~~~~

Madrid, Spain

Jack stood up, flexed his stiff legs, grabbed his pack from the chair beside him and stepped off the train.

Passing swiftly, and inconspicuously, through the ticket barriers, he made his way out of the main entrance to Madrid’s Atocha Station, turned right and headed along the footpath. The grandiose façade of the Ministry of Agriculture building shone whitely in the hot sunshine. After a few hundred metres he stopped at an unoccupied phone box and made a call.

“I’m here,” he said, leaning closely into the small booth.

“Took your time, Tin,” came the response.

It sounded like his bug-eyed boss speaking. Code-named Ace.

‘The albino must be in the field for the slime-ball to be answering the phones,’ Jack thought to himself. ‘I wonder where?’ He glanced up and down the street again. He couldn’t see anyone suspicious.

“Whatever,” he said calmly into the phone. “And now?”

“Hold your position. Check into a hotel. Somewhere quiet. Keep your cell on. We’ll call you. Change hotels every few days.”

“Roger that.”

Jack hung up, swung his pack onto his broad back, and wandered off in search of lodgings.

~~~~~

Berlin

Jeyhun was curled up, on the edge of restless sleep, when a series of angry squawks from the answering machine made him leap up in panic. For a second or two, he wildly brandished his pistol around the loft space until he worked out what was making the noise. Now, he stood in the pitch-blackness, fully clothed, with his sleeping bag round his ankles, as he listened to the machine’s automated message playing out.

“Come on, Sergei,” Jeyhun whispered to himself.

He could hear a clatter of background noise coming from the machine’s tiny speaker. It sounded like a bar. Then a series of tones played out as the caller keyed the remote access code.

“You have one message,” announced the buff-coloured box. “Message one:
‘It’s me. They’re close. Watch your backs. I just had to put one down here. It’s messy. They may be tracking the cellphones – switch them all off. We change to Exit Plan Delta and meet me at Rendezvous Location B’
... No more messages.”

Jeyhun instinctively leaned toward the machine as he strained to listen. For a couple of seconds there was nothing but the continued buzz of unintelligible chatter then someone closer to the phone yelled, “Dos cervezas, por favo...” The line went dead.

The call was from Spain. It was Azat, not Sergei. Jeyhun’s head dropped in disappointment and the machine plunged the room back into darkness.

~~~~~

London

“I think I’ve blown it,” she murmured sadly.

The muscular man heaved himself onto his side to face her. “What do you mean, Shaz?” he asked, surprised and concerned at her sudden melancholy.

“They’re going to get the little bastard off, because I clobbered him,” Sharinda replied.

He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

Manjeethra stroked her hand through the hairs on his chest and let her fingers run down into the softer fur near his groin. “We’ll see,” she muttered. “I feel really bad for the families.”

“You shouldn’t. You did your job. You can’t hold yourself responsible. It’ll tear you apart.”

“Says the voice of experience?” She stared deeply into his warm mahogany eyes and wondered what awful secrets they had witnessed over the years.

“Something like that.” He said and reached out to wrap his strong arms supportively round her naked shoulders.

~~~~~

Sermiers, France

Ellard squinted in the late morning sunlight as he lounged against the side of an old phone-box. “The car’s burned out, on some waste ground, just outside Paris.”

“The silverware?” asked Greere.

“At the bottom of some reservoir I passed.” Ellard replied matter-of-factly, whilst gently hefting the heavy Salomon bag which was hanging from his shoulder. “That stuff’s gone forever.”

“Good. So it’s all cleaned up then? No trail.”

“As best we can. Any chatter from the French?” Ellard was keen to find out whether he was being pursued.

“Nope. Looks like they took the bait and are chasing after our false leads.”

“I’m going to lie low for a day or so, then head for Berlin. After this mess, I want to check on Army Boy.”

“You’re not comfortable with this whole concept are you, Deuce?”

Ellard could sense more than a modicum of threat in the question. “I just want to check on things, sir,” he replied pointedly.

“Of course,” said Greere and hung up.

Ellard frowned, replaced the pay-phone receiver, and wandered over the road to the village’s solitary bus stop. As he walked, his tightly packed clothes neatly prevented his weapons from rattling against the valuables inside the board bag. It was about another thirty minutes by bus to his little French crash pad.

He was looking forward to spending a night there.

He needed to make sure his little pension fund was all still safely in its hiding place, and to introduce it to these latest new additions. ‘Best to make sure you regularly put something away for your retirement,’ his old man had always said.

~~~~~

London

Greere frowned...

Why had Ellard elected to use a landline, given that his cellphone was fully encrypted? What was he trying to hide...? Was the lazy bastard skiving-off somewhere...?

He picked up his desk phone and dialled one of the building’s many covert technical units.

“This is Brigadier Greere,” he announced. “Please get me an urgent location trace on Lieutenant Colonel Ellard’s secure cellphone. Mission in progress, so be very careful how you go about it. Report back only to me.”

He knew that, even with discretion, the chances were that the cellphone would need to be scrapped afterwards. Ellard’s device would currently be somewhere on one of France’s radio networks.

“Ah, and send me up a replacement unit for him.”

~~~~~

Berlin

Steel sat, cross-legged again, in front of the wall of glass. There were no knives being sharpened tonight. He sat motionless. Entranced.

All across the skyline, brilliant fireworks were rising from unseen fuses. Fizzing into the clear blackness, leaving wafer-thin trails of tiny orange and yellow sparkling ashes, before exploding into magnificent temporal flowers of coloured light. Huge red and orange bursts erupted in front of the penthouse. Great white and blue expanding dishes exploded further behind.

He didn’t know what the big event was, and he didn’t care.

He’d been told to hold position.

His target was here, somewhere in the expanse of humanity sprawled in front of him. When the target broke cover, Steel would be told. When the target broke cover, the target would die.

But Steel wasn’t thinking about his target right now.

He wasn’t even watching the fireworks.

His shoulders, arms, and feet are twitching. Jerking as his muscles clench in time with the bangs and whistles from outside.

His expression is one of pure fury.

His eyes are glazed with much more than a thousand-yard stare.

Steel is back on the battlefield.

A place his mind can never completely leave behind.

He has, of course, developed another convincing personality which he presents to the civilian world. He has, of course, learned to do this very well. Certainly, this façade has been effective enough to persuade Ace and Deuce to take him on. To get him back into action.

But deeper still, in the world where he
really
lives, his comrades scream in perpetual agony. Hissing FMJ rounds whistle past his ears. Mortar bursts fall closer and closer to his position.

“I must hold position,” he mutters, twitching and jerking, with his hot breath misting the glassy panes in front of him.

~~~~~

Jeyhun stood at the circular window, watching the fireworks raging across the near-distant skyline of the city. He stood there, in the multicoloured darkness, until his legs got so tired that he had to go and grab the metal chair and drag it over.

He sat there all night.

Dawn crept back over the city and its feeble rays started to ease their lazy dust-strewn way into the loft-space. He hadn’t eaten since the call two nights ago, and his stomach grumbled noisily as he sat with his head in his hands.

The newspapers were sprawled in a huge arc on the floor around his feet. They started to become visible in the increasing brightness and he swept them angrily off to one side. Where was his brother? Was he dead? Why hadn’t he called in yet? Murat’s message had said that their enemies were close. Killing was happening. Had they already killed his only family?

Part of him felt as if he wouldn’t blame them if they had.

He had never imagined that they were going to kill so many people with their bomb. He had never imagined he wasn’t going to see Hossein again, after he’d driven off in the van with that mad-crazy look in his eyes.

Jeyhun had often thought that there was something seriously wrong with Hossein – a mad-crazy look had been the man’s most usual expression – but Jeyhun hadn’t known that the lunatic was heading for London that day. On a one way trip.

There must have been something else they could have blown up?

Why so many people?

He got up, walked over to the desk, and pressed the button on the answer-machine again. To check it was still working.

It was.

Where was Sergei? The guys were supposed to dial-in to this machine every other day – every three days at the most – to check for latest instructions and information. It had been four days...

As part of the original getaway plan, and even now under the revised protocols, Jeyhun’s task was to stay here and guard the box. He had to keep out of sight. To use cash – he had a large wad of Euros in his rucksack. To go out at night for provisions. To vary his buying locations and dump any trash in different bins whilst on the same journey. He was instructed to make contact with no-one. To draw no attention to himself.