by Chris Ryan
Guerrero had ditched his North Face jacket and wore a grey shirt, the top few buttons open. He eyed the newcomers with apparent suspicion. Neither Rollett nor Ludlow spoke. Danny could tell they were waiting for Guerrero. He was the leader of this mismatched trio. He suddenly stood up and a broad, likeable smile crossed his face. He held out one hand. ‘Brad Guerrero.’ An accent straight from the deep south of America.
‘Danny Black.’
Guerrero looked at Bethany. ‘And this is?’
‘You can call her Jane.’
Guerrero didn’t immediately reply. There was tension in the air. The Yank had a challenger for his position of authority, who was withholding information. Danny stood firm. These three freelancers needed to understand that he was in charge now. Guerrero inclined his head. ‘Pleased to meet you, Jane,’ he said.
‘Me Tarzan,’ Rollett muttered, but nobody paid him any attention, least of all Bethany.
Guerrero turned back to Danny. ‘I need to get into Syria,’ Danny said. ‘Covertly. With weapons. No official border crossings.’
‘Crawling with Lebanese border police on this side, friend, and Syrian government troops on the other. Not to mention Russian special forces, here and there. Where exactly are we going?’
Danny unfolded the satellite map with the lat/long location and handed it to Guerrero. Guerrero glanced at it, then fetched a small, scuffed flight case from the pile at the back of the room. When he opened it up, Danny realised it was a laptop. He typed in the lat/long numbers, reading them out loud as he did so. Then he sat back and looked at the screen. ‘You don’t want much, do you, friend?’ he said.
‘Can you do it?’
He looked at Bethany. ‘Is she coming?’
‘No. Can you do it?’
Guerrero didn’t answer immediately. When he did, it was with a slow nod of the head. ‘You want the lil’ lady to hear all this?’
Bethany was about to retort, but Danny silenced her with a glance. ‘It’s fine,’ he said.
Guerrero shrugged. ‘You’re the client,’ he said. ‘Getting across the border itself isn’t the biggest issue. There are plenty of stretches where it’s just a fence – rolls of razor wire, about a metre high, strung between pickets. The locals have smuggling routes for moving commodities in and out of Syria and Lebanon – weapons, alcohol, drugs, whatever there’s a market for. They cut through the fence and move across the border that way.’
This was not new to Danny. He’d crossed borders this way before and it gave him confidence that Guerrero and the others knew what they were talking about.
‘The border guards fix the holes up again, but they tend just to use normal barbed wire for repairs so the fences are easier to cut through where they’ve patched it up – a pair of wire cutters will do it. You don’t want to mess around cutting the rolled razor wire without protective gear and plenty of time. But the authorities have taken to digging in anti-personnel mines around the weak spots. Guess they like to make things a bit spicier for guys like us.’
‘You have mine-detecting equipment?’
Guerrero jabbed one thumb over his shoulder at the flight cases.
‘And you know where the current weak spots are?’ Danny asked.
‘We have a little team of guys,’ Guerrero said. ‘Lebanese. They drive up and down the border every few days and mark the weak spots on a map.’ He pointed at the laptop. ‘This area here, where we’ll want to make the crossing, our fixer there is a guy called Barak. He’s good news. Lebanese, but knows the Syrian terrain well and he can translate. We should take him with us.’
Guerrero spoke with confidence and expertise. Danny liked him. He could tell Ludlow and Rollett were the muscle in this trio. Guerrero could certainly handle himself, no doubt about that. But he had the brains to back it up. He was also already talking like he was on-side. This was a done deal. ‘What about transport and weapons?’ Danny said.
‘We have a Hilux here with press markings. Weapons, we can’t safely keep here in Beirut. The authorities pretty much know who we are, but we can’t keep up the pretence of being press employees if we’re toking assault rifles. We have weapons caches dug into the ground at strategic points along the border. We’ll collect them before we make the crossing.’
Danny nodded. Guerrero was inspiring even more confidence. ‘What about timings?’ he said. ‘I want to get to my guy as quickly as possible.’
Guerrero looked at his laptop again. ‘We can get to the cache in about three hours,’ he said. ‘We hook up with Barak, make the crossing tonight. I advise that we lie up during the day. We don’t want to be stopped and asked difficult questions. We’ve got some NV goggles so we’re good for night-time driving.’
‘Roger that,’ Danny agreed. ‘How long from our lying-up point to the target.’
‘Another three hours. Maybe four, depends on how we go. You should expect to close in on your target at dawn in two days’ time.’
Danny looked at each of his team in turn. ‘When we reach our destination, it might go noisy. There’s a chance my guy will have some IS militants guarding his place. You fellas comfortable dealing with that?’
The three men stared back at him. They didn’t answer directly. They didn’t need to. Their grim, resolute expressions told Danny everything he needed to know.
‘Do you have enough heavy weaponry in your cache to put in a decent distraction while I find my guy?’
‘Gimpy, Minimi, AKs,’ Ludlow said. ‘Heavy enough for you?’
Danny pointed at the laptop. ‘Can I look at that?’ he said. He sat down next to Guerrero and examined the satellite image on the laptop screen. The lat/long numbers had pinpointed a ringed compound in the centre of an agricultural area. Danny couldn’t make out any entrances in the compound wall, but a single road led to it from almost precisely due south, from which he surmised that the main entrance was on the southern edge of the compound. The agricultural land completely surrounded the compound, and the crops – olive trees, Danny supposed – were grown in neat lines, like vineyards. The compound itself comprised several buildings. Guerrero pointed at two large blocks in the western half of the compound. ‘I’d say this is some kind of processing facility,’ he said. ‘These blocks here are most likely the living quarters, but we won’t know for sure till we’re on the ground.’
Danny pointed to the area north-east of the compound. ‘This looks like raised ground,’ he said. ‘When we arrive, I want you guys to put in a firing position there. Open up and draw them out. That’ll give me a chance to enter the compound and find my guy.’
If the others felt uncomfortable about purposefully picking a firefight with a bunch of IS militants, they didn’t show it. If anything, Danny sensed they were more eager to get moving. Ludlow and Rollett looked fierce, like attack dogs on a leash, ready to pounce. For men trained to fight, years of escorting news crews from place to place could grow monotonous, Danny supposed. Guerrero looked more thoughtful, like he was still weighing up the pros and cons of the operation. Danny turned to him. ‘We can discuss it some more when we’re on the road,’ he said. ‘Jane and I have something to sort out. You make contact with Barak and get together any gear you think we’ll need. I’ll be back here at midday. You’ll be ready to go by then?’
‘We’re always ready to go, friend. We’ll see you back here at midday.’ He smiled at Bethany. ‘You and Jane have a good morning now,’ he said. ‘And don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’ Ludlow chuckled. Rollett openly eyed Bethany up and down, stroking his nose. Guerrero reclined on the sofa, watching them.
‘Do you trust those guys?’
‘Trust is the wrong word,’ Danny said. ‘They’re pros, and they’re getting paid. They want to stay alive just like I do. They’ll do a job for us.’
‘What about the fixer? He could be anyone.’
‘I’ll work that out when I meet him. But Guerrero’s right. Local knowledge will get us in and out faster and safer.’
‘That Rollett char
acter is obscene. You should have heard what he said to me in the cafe.’
‘I’m not hiring them for their table manners. Guerrero’s got them under control and they’ll know what to do if we run into trouble.’ He looked back over his shoulder at the tower block. He wondered if Guerrero and the others were watching them leave. Probably, he decided. ‘We need to get you to a hotel,’ he said. ‘It can’t be anywhere you’ve stayed before, or that you’ve ever mentioned to Ibrahim. And I don’t want MI6 to have an inkling where you are either.’
‘I know somewhere,’ Bethany said. ‘I identified it as a safe place when I first started coming to Beirut, in case I ever needed a place to lie low.’
‘Have you ever mentioned it to anybody?’
‘Nobody.’
‘No contacts? No friends?’
Bethany gave a cynical laugh. ‘Friends?’ she said. ‘I work for MI6. I can’t tell anyone what I do, who I am, where I’m going. I don’t have any friends, Danny.’
‘I just need to know . . .’
‘When are you going to realise I know what I’m doing?’ Bethany interrupted. ‘I’ve never mentioned it to anybody, okay? It’s a couple of miles east of here. We’ll need a cab.’
Danny had told Bethany that wherever she stayed, it couldn’t be fancy. The hotel they found themselves approaching forty-five minutes later, having been dropped by a cab a couple of blocks away, certainly was not. It was called the Hotel Faisal and situated in a litter-strewn street between a convenience store and a boarded-up building. Its frontage was brick. There had once been a window here, but it was filled in with bricks of a different colour. Danny checked for CCTV cameras, but did it out of habit rather than necessity. This was a place where someone could go off-grid for a bit.
Before entering the hotel they went into the convenience store, where Bethany bought food and bottled water to last her several days. Danny had been expecting an argument when he reiterated that she wasn’t to risk leaving her hotel room while he was away, but he received none. ‘I understand, Danny,’ she said. ‘I’m not going anywhere. Believe it or not, I don’t want to be killed either. Just get back over the border as quick as you can. I’ll be going stir-crazy.’
The reception area of the Hotel Faisal was dingy and deserted. A pot plant was dying in one corner, next to an empty vending machine. The room tariff behind the counter was all in Arabic. They had to ring the brass bell three times before anyone appeared to help them: a corpulent, sweating Lebanese man with a roll-up hanging from the corner of his mouth. He approached the desk, but then a telephone rang in the adjoining room. He muttered something under his breath before abandoning them again to answer the phone. When he returned a minute later, Bethany did the talking, her Arabic fluent and convincing, as the ash fell from his cigarette to the floor. The man looked lasciviously at her, and Danny had the impression this was an establishment where rooms were often rented by the hour. But they were renting a room for several days, and the guy greedily counted the notes Bethany gave him, payment in advance, before handing over a key attached to a chunky wooden key ring. Then he nodded at the staircase at the far end of the reception area.
Bethany’s room, number 35, was on the third floor at the far end of a corridor that smelled of body odour and cigarettes. TVs blared behind the doors of a couple of the rooms they passed, and behind the third was the sweaty, grunting sound of a man having sex. The room itself had little to recommend it. A double bed with a couple of thin blankets. A wardrobe and table with a pencil and notepad, where Bethany neatly laid out her food and water. A TV on the wall. A tiny toilet and shower cubicle that hadn’t been cleaned since the last person used it. If Bethany was in any way put off by her surroundings, it didn’t show. She moved immediately to the window, which overlooked a grim courtyard full of junk, and checked the window locks before drawing the heavy curtains. Danny checked the lock on the bathroom window, before examining the security arrangements on the main door. There was the main lock, and a feeble-looking security chain. Neither would be good enough to withstand a persistent intruder. There was a hook with a wooden door wedge hanging from it. Danny held it up. ‘Put this under the door while it’s locked,’ he said. ‘It’ll make it a lot harder for anyone to enter.’
‘Nobody knows I’m here,’ she said.
‘Right. But this isn’t exactly the best area of Beirut. There could be opportunists. Can you move that table?’ Bethany had a go at shifting it: it was heavy, but it moved. ‘If you get worried, use it to block the entrance. If you need ballistic protection, get the mattress up against the door.’ She frowned as he spoke. ‘Take this seriously, Bethany,’ he said. He scrawled his access number to Hereford on the notepad. ‘Keep your phone switched off. Only turn it on in an absolute emergency. I don’t want anyone using it to trace your position. It means I won’t be able to keep in touch. If I’m not back in four days, call this number. Tell them where you are and do what they tell you.’
‘But you’ll be back in four days, right?’ She sounded genuinely concerned.
‘Sooner,’ Danny said, ‘if I can. Where’s your weapon?’
She gave him the chauffeur’s Browning. Danny checked it over, then cocked and locked it. ‘Keep it close,’ he said. ‘By your bed if you’re sleeping, in the bathroom if that’s where you are. Don’t let anybody in, no matter what they say, unless it’s me or you have an order from the guy on that number. No housekeeping, no nothing.’
‘Okay, Danny, I’ve got the message.’
‘Good. Because believe me, if Ibrahim Khan locates you here, he isn’t going to announce himself. He’s going to . . .’
‘I know him better than you do.’ She had a slightly waspish edge to her voice. ‘And in any case, the only way he’s going to find my location is if you give it to him. And you’re not going to do that, are you?’
Danny didn’t immediately answer that question. He knew that, under torture, there was a limit to the amount of time any man could withstand interrogation. If he was caught by IS, he would have to hold out until he knew Bethany had made her escape. But he saw no point in telling her all this. She was anxious enough as it was. ‘Four days,’ she said eventually. ‘No longer.’
There was an awkward silence. Danny, not quite knowing what else to do, held out his hand. Bethany didn’t take it. Instead, she embraced him. Her waspishness had disappeared. ‘Maybe I made a mistake last night,’ she whispered into his ear.
They unwrapped themselves from each other’s embrace. Bethany looked demurely at the floor. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Go on. Leave. I’m tired and I need some sleep. Get back soon.’
Danny nodded. He turned his back on her, left the room and closed the door behind him. He stood there for a moment, listening for the sound of the key in the lock and the security chain, then the wedge being slid under the door. He checked the time. 11.20 hrs. He needed to get back to the team. But something had unnerved him and he couldn’t quite work out what it was. He looked down the corridor. There was nobody there. He was certain they’d entered Bethany’s room completely unobserved. He stepped up to the door again and listened closely. No sound. He pictured Bethany lying on her bed, eyes closed, her weapon on the floor beside her.
Maybe I made a mistake last night.
Danny couldn’t deny those words gave him an urgent thrill. He liked Bethany. He liked her pluck and her complexity. He liked that she didn’t seem put off by the darker side
of his job. Maybe, when this business with Ibrahim Khan
was over . . .
But not now. Now he had business to take care of. He stepped away from the door, walked along the corridor and down the stairs. The reception area was empty again. Danny let himself out and checked left and right. Nobody seemed to be paying him any attention. He headed back into the streets of Beirut, hailed a taxi and retraced his steps back towards the apartment where Guerrero, Ludlow and Rollett were waiting for him.
Bethany White stood at the door to her room. It was locked. T
he security chain was engaged. The door wedge was tightly fitted. She hadn’t yet heard his footsteps receding. She knew he was there, in the corridor, inches away, listening. She breathed calmly and didn’t move.
Footsteps. Light, but just audible. He was leaving. She remained where she was for a few more seconds, then walked back into the room. She entered the en-suite shower room, pulled back the mildewed shower curtain and switched on the shower. But she didn’t undress. Instead, she returned to the room and emptied her rucksack bag on to the bed. Passport in the name of Tomlinson, phone, money, make-up, hairbrush, clean clothes. When the bag was empty, she lifted a flap at the bottom to reveal a second mobile phone. She switched it on and waited for it to connect to a local network.
Bethany had been well trained at the MI6 field training centre at Fort Monckton in Portsmouth. She knew how to handle weapons, operate under cover identities, and tell when she was under surveillance. Her tradecraft was good and in one respect it was excellent. She had the facility to learn and remember phone numbers, because there were few actions less secure than writing them down or storing them on a device.
She recalled the number with ease and dialled it on her second phone.
Five rings, then someone picked up but didn’t answer.
Bethany closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. ‘You don’t know me,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know you. But I have some information, and I think it might be of interest. Do with it what you will.’
12
Guerrero, Ludlow and Rollet were well equipped. When Danny presented himself in their apartment again at midday, they had laid several sets of blue body armour and a selection of helmets on one of the sofas. ‘Take your pick, pal,’ said Ludlow.