He drank from the shower, then bound one end of each of the hoses with copper wire from a length of cable, filled them with water and fastened the other ends. There was maybe half a litre in each, which would buy him an extra day in the desert. He secured them round his waist, then put the dried meat in one pocket of his jeans, the rest of his belongings in the other.
That’s it.
The muscles of his back were suddenly alive with the smooth, powerful feeling he’d got from popping that youth’s shoulder in the Camden park. The feeling that whisked caution away, then sent it back as guilt. He felt his heart punch at his ribs. You may not need to kill anyone, he told himself. For all the water he’d drunk, his mouth was sticky and the taste of the cornbread he’d had for supper clogged his throat.
Sam would have no truck with this. To doubt is to bare your belly to the sword of your enemy. He went up to the roof, repositioned the cowling, and crept along towards the corner where his two guards slept. He looked over, saw the arm of a white plastic chair, one leg stretched out: Younes, sleeping fitfully. The feet of the chair scratched at the concrete as he shifted position in an irresolute attempt to keep himself awake. He’d be difficult to get at, slumped in his seat like that, with a ridge of plastic protecting the back of his neck. James searched the roof with his fingertips until he found a few chips of stone, then tossed some at Younes’s head, a few more at his feet. The bits of gravel skittered across the walkway. Younes came awake, shook his head. He stood up, took a few paces forwards. James padded along the roof behind him.
Younes stopped.
James dropped off the roof, locked his right arm like a hoop of steel round the guard’s neck. He wrenched Younes’s head round, getting the guard’s torso beneath his as they thumped down. The AK47 crunched against the concrete. The warm, knotted body writhed powerfully beneath him. Right arm still clamped around Younes’s neck, James gripped the bicep of his left and swung his forearm round behind the guard’s head, used the leverage to compress his throat. Younes’s struggle became wild and James smelled fear. He was strong and managed to roll James on to his side, get one hand on the forearm crushing his neck. But that was all. James felt euphoria coursing through him, giving terrible strength to his arms. Younes’s ribcage pumped in a frantic attempt to suck air down his swollen windpipe, his back twitched as the muscles around his spine began to tear. After a moment, James felt the big body fading beneath him, the vigour seeping away, leaving only a slack, meaty weight. His elation disappeared. Instead, a foretaste of the revulsion that would follow.
He released his arm. Air whooped into Younes’s bruised throat and he pressed his hand against the guard’s mouth to muffle the noise. As soon as his breathing quietened, James rolled off him, dragged him into the passage that led out of the yard. He crossed to the guardroom door, knelt, listened. The door was ajar – snoring from within. The passage was silent, its walls criss-crossed with shadow from the steel lattice of the exit gate. James turned to watch the door to the room occupied by Mansour. No lights, no movement. He went back to Younes, tied the semi-conscious man’s arms and gagged him with a strip of canvas, then ran back for the AK47.
He stepped into the guardroom and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Salif was sleeping on a mattress in the corner of the room. There was a wooden table and two chairs, and a steel cupboard against the wall by the door. James moved over to Salif’s mattress, studied the side of his skull for a moment, then hit him with the butt of the AK47. Salif gave a groan of protest and his head rolled back.
He found the Beretta Tomcat under the mattress, along with the key to the steel cupboard. A row of labelled keys hung from hooks fastened to the underside of the top shelf, above a tatty cardboard box with spare rounds for the AK47 and the Tomcat. He took the keys to the two rooms nearest the guardroom and went and unlocked them, then dragged Younes into the first. He stripped off his sand-coloured fatigues, canvas belt and trainers and put them on, then used a plaited cable to tie Younes’s hands behind his back and lash them to the iron bars of the window. He heaved Younes upright, fed another cable through the bars and secured it round his neck.
He went back for Salif and tied him up in the second room. He checked his pockets and found an old bone-handled hunting knife in a makeshift leather scabbard, the grip worn smooth and bound with electrician’s tape at the heel. An embroidered wallet with three hundred dirhams, a prayer card in decorative script, and a cracked photo of two little boys of eight or nine dressed up in clean white shirts and with their hair carefully brushed.
He crept to the corner of the yard and checked the number of the room he had seen Mansour enter the previous night: 7. He got the key from the guardroom, then crouched at the door. A muggy, faintly acrid smell. The hackles on his neck stirred. Still no light on, but a leather sole scuffing the floor. Fabric swishing. He rose and stood close to the wooden panel, put one hand on the handle. It started to move down, pushed by a hand on the other side. He released it and waited for the click.
He burst the door open and reached for Mansour’s neck. Mansour stepped back and ducked down, shielding his head with his arms. James moved alongside him, used his left foot to sweep the man’s legs from beneath him. As he fell, James drove his right palm down into the back of his head and Mansour’s nose smacked into the concrete. James straddled him, got the fingers of his left hand under his chin and pulled his throat into a high arc, like a man wrestling an alligator. Mansour was choking noisily, making no attempt to break free. You’re not much without your Taser and your shears, thought James. He slackened off, rolled him over onto his back, reached under his beard and gripped his throat. It was slippery beneath his fingers, and the beard gave off the sweet, musky perfume that brought back the house in Oran, the barb in his ribs, the sap held high.
‘Answer my questions or I’ll kill you. Speak quietly. I’ll ask you once only. What is your name?’
‘Mansour.’
James’s fingers mangled the nerves beneath Mansour’s collarbone. His heels scrabbled at the floor.
‘Mansour Anzarane.’
‘Who do you work for?’
‘I will answer your questions, I swear it. I work alone.’
James probed the soft tissue at the top of Mansour’s left lung. Mansour gasped and blood bubbled from his nose.
‘No. You work with Etienne.’
‘Please, Etienne has gone now.’
‘Where?’
‘Home. Oran. Etienne made me cut you, it is he—’
‘Who told you to kidnap me?’
No answer. James jammed two fingers up Mansour’s nostrils and gouged his sinuses. Panic swirled in the man’s eyes.
‘Sheikh al Haqim. He ordered this. I am his poor servant.’
The name was such a shock James almost let him go. Ibrahim al Haqim, founder of al Bidayat. . . He’d been abducted on the say-so of the second most wanted man after Osama bin Laden himself?
So that was why the Playpen was watching this place.
‘Where is al Haqim?’
‘I do not know. . . I am not permitted to see him. I did what he said, I made him promise you would not be harmed, you must believe me. . . ’
He was starting to gabble. James looked down into his eyes. I told you everything, they said. Now spare me. He applied a fatal hold, the shime-waza, to the superior carotid triangle and watched the man’s eyes flood with disappointment and loneliness. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six. . . His face fattened and puced. Mansour passed out at two. His heartbeat stumbled on. Another twenty seconds. Add ten to be on the safe side. And because, James thought, whatever you’ll feel about it later, there’s a certain sordid pleasure to be had from squeezing the nasty life out of Mansour Anzarane.
He searched Mansour’s room for the key to the gate that led out to the compound. His guards didn’t have one, but surely an al Bidayat operative who took orders from Ibrahim al Haqim himself did not have to whistle to be let out. Mansour travelled light: a nylon grip with a
change of clothes; a wooden box with a bar of soap, a biro and two Egyptian passports. One was in his own name, Anzarane; the other had the same photo but bore the name Mansour el Shaafi, and had visas for the UK and Germany, and stamps showing Mansour had entered Algeria the day before James had. The only key he found was the one to his room.
He was tempted to hunt down Etienne. But what if he couldn’t find him? Younes would be expected to collect food for them at seven – that gave him less than six hours before they set off after him. He went back to the guardroom and found two old prayer mats, which he left by the door. He wiped the firing mechanism of the Beretta Tomcat with a lump of goat fat, loaded the clip and shoved it into the pocket of his trousers, then found the key to a room that was out of view of the guardhouse but close to the hollow where the dogs usually slept.
Once inside the room, he went to the shower and drank again, shocked at how thirsty he was. He pulled the lumps of diazepam-impregnated meat from his pocket and wet them, then went to the barred window and held out the handful of doped meat, squeezing to loosen the high, sweet odour. After a minute, the heavy snout of one of the dogs cocked up, the delicate flaps of its nose quivering. Its movements disturbed its neighbour and the two dogs got up and trotted towards James. The other two woke up and followed. James scattered the meat in a semi-circle round the window, and watched them padding around, snarling sleepily at each other as they went for the same scrap. One of them got his paws up onto the window ledge and licked where drips from the wet meat had fallen, then whined and scratched for more.
He watched them drift back to the fence, circle and settle, then counted out six hundred seconds to give the diazepam time to take grip. The dogs lay still. He collected the prayer mats from the guardroom and tossed them onto the roof near the south-east corner of the guest wing, the opposite end from the guards and the dogs, then climbed up, crawled across the roof and dropped off the other side, his legs absorbing the impact and his feet making no more noise than if they had landed in cotton wool.
He ran to the five-foot-high roll of razor wire and laid the mats in a channel over the coils, then took ten paces back and focused. He’d dived over razor wire before in training. It wasn’t any great feat physically, but required precision and a certain bravura. Mistakes were messy. He breathed and prepared for his run. Then he saw the dog.
It was already ten yards in from the corner, coming fast in a flat, low run. Its broad muzzle seemed to enlarge as it raced from the gloom into the ambient light from the barracks, the black, stubbly cheek-skin pulling back from its incurved teeth. James crouched and braced, right arm poised, fingers forming a spearhead like the hood of a python. He stared into the dog’s shining amber eyes, waited until its front paws left the ground as it leapt for his throat, then plunged his hand between its open jaws. The dog’s momentum and his own arm-speed together drove his fingers deep into the wet tissue of its gullet. He seized the roots of its tongue, using his nails to grip the slippery muscle. For a second the dog stood still, impaled on James’s arm, unable to come on or retreat, bite, bark or breathe. James pushed and twisted, grabbing the animal’s front paw and flipping it onto its back so it couldn’t use its legs to fight free. The dog was trembling, its eyes rolling. He trapped its front paws under his foot and used the side of his fist to hammer a point directly over its heart, already stressed to bursting point by the hand still clenched in its throat. Three heavy blows in quick succession and the dog was dead.
James gingerly withdrew his hand. It was lacerated by the dog’s teeth, but not badly hurt. He rolled the body into the razor wire. One more lump of dead evidence in his wake.
He stepped back from the razor wire, took his run-up and hurled himself head-first into the air, felt his shins brush the mats, came down hard into a forward roll. He went back for the mats. A barb snagged his sleeve. The wire bounced and hummed, vibrations coursing through the coils, steel blades plucking at the dirt. He used his free hand to unpick the wire. Clear.
He rolled up the mats and tucked them under his arm, ran hard and low for the cover of the bunker between the guest wing and the barracks. He bound his forearm to stop the flow of blood drawn by the dog’s teeth, then checked around him. Not much of a moon, just a shaving of pale bone suspended above the southern horizon. Beyond the wire, a profound darkness lapped at the features of the sand. He couldn’t see any of the guards from here, though he knew there’d be some by the warehouse and some by the main gates. No one else about. Then, as he scanned the wall of the barracks a second time, he saw a shadow that didn’t look right. . . A ripple of black – a large bird, maybe, scavenging at the base of one of the two galvanized steel rubbish bins. He watched for five minutes, then the shadow became a crouching figure who stood up slowly and leaned against the bin, turning irresolutely from side to side. The figure stepped unsteadily to the corner, one arm against the wall, feet catching in the rough ground. A tall woman, wearing a headscarf that seemed to stick out on either side. . . And suddenly in his mind’s eye James saw a girl with a halo of frizzed hair stooping to climb into a taxi on Camden Road, her black courier bag catching on the door.
Sarah. A London girl from a good family. It was shocking to see her here, stumbling round in the darkness by the waste bins. She disappeared round the corner of the barracks and James ran to the corner where’d she’d stood. She was slumped against the wall a few yards away, knees drawn up, head down. James moved in quickly beside her, but the moment she felt his hand over her mouth she twisted away from him, legs flailing, arms struggling to push him away. There was a strange floppiness in her movements, and as they grappled in the dirt, James’s long, powerful arms suddenly recalled the feeling of Younes’s convulsing limbs. Horrified, he relaxed his grip, felt her exhausted body subside into a succession of short, half-suffocated breaths.
‘It’s me, James Palatine,’ he whispered.
He pulled his hand from her mouth and she peered at him in the gloom.
‘They’re going to kill me. I don’t know why. But they are.’
‘Speak very quietly,’ said James. ‘Does anyone know you are out here?’
‘No. They don’t lock me in.’
‘If they meant to kill you, they’d have already done it.’ He tried to sound more certain than he felt.
‘I don’t know why they brought me here. I don’t know.’ She was trembling, clutching at his arm. ‘They killed Hamed. A man called Mansour made me look at his body. I felt sick and then I fainted.’
‘They just want to frighten you.’
A feeling of dread uncoiled in his gut. She’s a prisoner, he thought. The man she worked with has been executed, and the stream of homophobic invective was no more than a pretext. The real reason is that Hamed knew who was behind my abduction.
‘Sarah,’ he said, ‘do you know who was giving Hamed his orders?’
‘No, I didn’t know they were going to bring you here. I didn’t know about any of this. I swear I didn’t. God, I’m so sorry.’
‘Then they have no reason to harm you. How did you get here?’
‘Hamed said his charity would pay for me to visit a refugee camp. We flew to Oran. I think they drugged me, because I passed out soon after we got to the hotel. When I woke up. . . ’
‘Listen, it’s going to be OK. I killed Mansour.’
She looked up at him, searching his eyes for signs of hope. She wiped the tears from her cheeks and drew a shuddering breath.
‘What will they do to you?’
‘Nothing, I’m on my way out.’
‘Take me with you. Oh God, please take me with you.’ She was crying again, clinging to him. ‘Take me. I can’t stay here, they’ll kill me. The other one will kill me. He wants to hurt me, I can see it in his eyes.’
Go after Etienne, hunt him down. . . It might take all night to find him. And was Etienne the only person in this place capable of murdering a young English girl? Then take her with you. He started to work through the implications. He’d planned f
or two days in the desert, but with a twenty-year-old English girl at his side. . .
‘Do you have access to food and water?’
For a moment, she didn’t respond. Then she looked up at him, and her large eyes were like wind-blown lanterns that could barely hold the darkness at bay. ‘You can’t take me. I don’t even have any shoes.’
‘We’ll find some.’
‘The drugs they gave me. . . I’m so weak I can’t even walk without holding on to something.’
James remembered the feebleness in her limbs as she’d struggled in his arms, then thought of his own grim battle to overcome the doctor’s hypodermic cosh.
‘How long since you arrived?’
‘I don’t know. I came round yesterday, I think. Maybe a few times before. I can’t eat anything. Christ, I’m scared.’
‘I’ll come back for you.’
‘You won’t. Why should you. I did this to you.’
‘I will. Trust me. I haven’t finished with this place – they have something of mine.’
They sat in silence for a while, then he felt her disengage her arm. She pulled away and curled herself tight like a frightened animal.
‘You have to go,’ she said faintly. ‘Why are they doing this to me?’
‘Listen, Sarah, there’s a tall man in officer’s uniform, older, maybe sixty. Have you seen him?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Try to find him and speak to him. He didn’t like what happened to Hamed, and he has some kind of authority here. Appeal to him and I think he’ll help you.’
‘Do you know who he is?’
‘No, but the guards respect him. Tomorrow, they’ll be too busy looking for me to worry about you.’
He stood up and helped her to her feet.
‘How long, do you think?’
‘Not long. Don’t lose heart.’
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 17