Nine Lives (Sam Archer 1)

by Tom Barber

  *

  Four minutes later, the three black 4x4 Fords chewed up the airport ramp at breakneck speed and pulled to a halt as close as they could get outside Terminal Five, the tyres screeching as the rubber dug into the tarmac.

  Travellers standing nearby were shocked by this sudden arrival and were even more taken back when ten armed officers piled out of the doors, each cradling a sub-machine gun.

  Together, the ARU team sprinted for the entrance, Rivers and Shapira jumping out of the third car and following close behind. There was armed airport security stationed by the doors who’d seen this dramatic arrival. Fox ran ahead and started talking fast, explaining the situation to them.

  The two men he spoke to listened intently, then together both sets of security swept into the Departures hall.

  Inside the building, the young woman was shaking. Her whole body was icy cold, yet sweat was gathering on her forehead as if she had a fever.

  She was a hundred yards inside the building, standing alongside a restaurant packed with customers.

  She looked up at the neon sign above her.

  Carluccio’s, it said, in bright blue neon.

  She dropped her gaze to all the people inside.

  There must have been close to fifty of them at least, most of them smiling and having a good time, killing time before their flights.

  Turning, she swallowed and checked the clock.

  8:59 pm.

  One minute.

  By the entrance doors across the hall, Mac turned to Deakins.

  ‘Take Team Two downstairs to Arrivals. Go!’

  Without a word, six of the men ran to the lifts.

  As Mac shifted his attention back to First Team, a man with a radio and three armed airport police ran over having seen the task force arrive from across the hall. Mac moved forward to meet them. He recognised the man holding the radio; his name was Richards, Head of Security for Terminal Five. Mac knew that he would have been fully briefed of the situation with the nine suspects, given his role. Neither man bothered with greetings; they didn’t have time.

  ‘We’ve tracked the leader of the terrorist cell to this building,’ Mac said. ‘We think he’s still here.’

  It took a moment for this to register. Oh shit, Richards’ face said.

  Mac continued, not wasting a second.

  ‘He’s Number Nine on the list. Also, he’s with a young woman. She appears pregnant, but we think the bump is concealing explosives of some kind. Tell your men.’

  Richards nodded without a word, turning to a group of his gathered team of security.

  Mac swivelled to see his own men had already moved off into the hall.

  Searching for Dominick Farha and the woman in the green dress.

  Her back turned, the girl was as yet unaware of the commotion by the doors and the arrival of the task force.

  But suddenly, she heard the echo of boots running across the hall.

  Turning, she saw a squad of armed policemen dispersing, obviously looking for something or someone.

  Her blood ran cold.

  They knew.

  It was only a matter of time before one of them saw her.

  She looked up at the clock.

  9:00 pm.

  It was her departure time.

  Her hand moved to her pocket. Stammering, she started reciting something Dominick had told her to memorise. He’d assured her that they’d be saying it together, hand-in-hand, as they prepared to move on to the next life.

  Standing alone, her lips moving almost imperceptibly, she whispered her way through the paragraph as she desperately tried not to throw up.

  Fifty yards away Archer was by a check-in booth, frantically scanning the crowd.

  He cursed. Nothing. He couldn’t see either of them anywhere. Around him, people standing in queues for the check-in desks were clearly un-nerved by the sudden arrival and focused activity of the policemen around the giant hall.

  Given the day’s events, they were understandably on edge.

  Archer looked down the left side of the building, all the way to the wall. Shit. They needed to evacuate the building immediately.

  As the thought ran through his mind, he turned and looked the other way.

  He saw the woman.

  She had her hands hidden in the folds of her emerald-green dress.

  She was staring straight ahead, and her lips were moving as she muttered something to herself.

  He started to run.

  TWENTY FIVE

  The young girl was almost all the way through the passage in her memory. Tears were brimming in her half-open eyes distorting her view, the hall swimming like crystal in front of her. A commotion to her right broke her concentration, stopping her just short of the closing prayer.

  To her right, she saw a policeman racing towards her.

  He was young, with blond hair and a kind, handsome face, but not at that moment. He pulled to a halt forty feet away, and lifted a machine-gun jammed into his shoulder, the other end pointed at her head, shouting at her.

  ‘Police! Put your hands up!’

  She looked straight at him, petrified.

  Obeying, she lifted her trembling hands from the folds of her dress.

  Around her, people started to run and scream in terror.

  There was a switch in her hand, connected to a black wire that disappeared into the folds of her gown.

  Seeing the wire and switch, Archer aimed his crosshairs on the girl’s chin.

  ‘Drop it!’

  She stared at him helplessly, like a doe caught in the headlights.

  She had big brown eyes, the colour of hazelnut; tears welled and spilled from them down her cheeks.

  For a split second, Archer hesitated.

  ‘Look at me!’ he ordered. ‘LOOK AT ME! You don’t need to do this. You don’t need to die here!’

  Her chin quivered.

  ‘Don’t do this!’ he shouted again, aiming his foresight on her forehead.

  She looked at him for one last time.

  ‘He never came back,’ she said, tears spilling from her eyes.

  She closed them.

  ‘No!’ shouted Archer, clenching his finger on the trigger of the MP5.

  But suddenly, there was a gunshot from another weapon.

  The girl’s head snapped back as she took a nine-millimetre bullet in the forehead.

  People around the Terminal screamed as the gunshot echoed around the giant building. The bullet exited the back of her skull and slammed into the bar of the restaurant, shattering bottles from the impact, and the girl was dead before she hit the floor.

  Blood and brains had spattered all over the pristine white linoleum floor behind her. Turning, Archer saw Mac, his weapon aimed rock-steady at the girl, the air filled with the smell of cordite from the gunshot.

  Porter and Chalky ran forward as other officers stayed back, keeping any civilians from getting close. They needn’t have bothered; the Terminal was almost completely empty by now.

  Kneeling by the dead girl, Chalky eased the detonator from her hand as Porter checked for a pulse.

  ‘She’s dead,’ he confirmed, stating the obvious.

  As Archer caught his breath, Chalky pulled a knife from his tactical vest and made a small incision in the front of her gown.

  He peered inside, and turned back to Mac immediately.

  ‘We’re going to need bomb disposal, Sarge. Again.’

  Archer was still standing, motionless. From his position, he could see the girl’s face beside Porter’s knee. The bullet had taken her in the middle of the forehead. The front of her head and face was completely intact, save for the small dark hole ringed with maroon.

  He saw her big brown eyes staring up at the ceiling.

  A final tear fell from her right eye and slid down her cheek to the white floor.

  The EOD arrived quickly and set to work dismantling the device as airport security kept every civilian outside the building
, as far back as they could get them from the blast radius.

  The ARU task force and police were also told to exit as the device was still unsecure, but the defusing was straight-forward; there were no trips, no collapsible circuits. The guy in the blast-suit turned to his team-mate standing across the hall and gave the thumbs up. The message was passed on, and the various ARU officers and airport police moved back into the building.

  It was safe.

  Archer had already walked back inside and was standing alone, thirty yards from the dead girl. He was watching the bomb team remove each brick of C4 from a white dress hidden under the green gown, stowing them carefully. Someone had laid a blanket over the woman’s face

  ‘You OK?’ Fox asked as he joined him, the two men standing side by side.

  Silence.

  ‘I couldn’t kill her, Fox,’ Archer said quietly, staring at her body.

  ‘Doesn’t matter, mate. She’s dead. No one got hurt.’

  ‘Yeah. No thanks to me.’ Archer cursed, shaking his head. ‘Shit, I’m an idiot. I looked into her eyes. She was scared. Confused. No idea what she was doing. And it made me hesitate. And it almost got everyone killed.’

  ‘But you were the one who spotted her. If you hadn’t, we might all be dead now.’

  Archer didn’t respond.

  ‘Maybe I don’t belong here,’ he said quietly.

  The sandy-haired officer turned. ‘What?’

  ‘In this Unit. She was seconds from killing us all and I hesitated. I couldn't shoot her. What use is that? Suppose everyone was right; maybe I am too young for this.’

  Fox shook his head.

  ‘Before I joined this detail, I was in an armed response vehicle,’ he said. ‘Rode in that car for four years. We were arresting drug-dealers, confiscating weapons, real front-line stuff. I thought I’d seen everything, you know?’

  He paused and jabbed a finger at the dead girl.

  ‘But this isn’t normal, Arch. None of what’s happened today is. You can train all you want, but nothing prepares you to do something like that,’ he said. ‘You know why you hesitated?’

  Archer looked at him.

  ‘Because it meant something to you. As it should. Cobb, Mac, they tell you to take responsibility for every shot fired. But that also means for every life you take.’

  The pair of them looked at the girl, and Fox shook his head.

  ‘And that's the difference between people like us and people like them.’

  ‘Tell you what, I owe you one, Mac,’ said Richards as he watched the EOD team work. The two men were standing together in the middle of the Terminal, a distance from Archer and Fox. ‘We had no bloody idea she was here. Or who the hell she was.’

  An armed airport policeman was standing near the bomb team talking in lowered tones with the lead disposal guy. Turning, the officer approached Mac and Richards.

  ‘How're we doing, Parsons?’ asked Richards as the man got closer.

  ‘Last of the explosives been stowed, sir. There’s an ambulance outside. I’ll tell them to come in and collect the body.’

  ‘How’s the crowd?’

  ‘An old man fainted and some kids are going to have nightmares for a while. But other than that, everyone’s ok.’

  With that, Parsons turned and departed. On the way, he passed Porter who was moving swiftly towards Mac.

  ‘Sarge?’ he asked.

  Mac turned. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I need to talk to you for a moment. Alone.’

  Mac took the hint and walked away from the airport security with Porter.

  ‘I just spoke to Director Cobb about Dominick Farha,’ Porter continued, in a lowered voice. ‘He said that the DEA know where he is.’

  Mac’s eyes widened. ‘So tell them to send the info. Let’s go get him.’

  ‘Cobb said we had to hold back.’

  He paused.

  ‘Apparently, Farha got out of the country on a private jet. He’s on his way to Paris as we speak. There’s a DEA team waiting to tail him when he gets there. Cobb said that there’s a drug trade happening at the airfield where Farha will land; he’ll be there, along with his uncle, some drug baron from the Middle East. Agent Crawford wants to get that on camera, then move in and take them both.’

  Mac looked at him in disbelief as Rivers approached them.

  ‘Did you know about this?’ Mac asked the American, accusingly. ‘We speed over to the hotel, all that effort, but you knew Farha wasn’t there?’

  ‘If we hadn’t come down, we never would have found her,’ he replied, pointing at the dead girl. ‘And remember that Crawford has shared all that information with you. No one said he had to.’

  Mac glared at him, then pulled the photocopy from the pocket of his tac vest.

  ‘OK. He’s your problem now,’ he told Rivers with venom. ‘If you lose him, you can find him. So let’s move on to the other three.’

  Rivers was standing close, but he’d stopped listening to the sergeant.

  He was staring at the sheet of paper in his hand instead.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Porter asked, noticing the change on the man’s face.

  Then without a word, Rivers suddenly turned and sprinted for the exit.