by David Gilman
‘Then I know who’s taken him,’ said Raglan.
*
Maguire and Raglan sat in the car beyond the cordon. Maguire remained silent. The boy’s voice faltered on the audio recording of the debrief.
‘... there were two, no... three men, yeah, definitely three... in the street… They were just doing the road… and then Dad shouted, really shouted and told Charlie to drive, to get us out of there. I didn’t know what was happening… and then we smashed into a car. Dad grabbed me, he got hold of me and shook me and said to run like hell, to come here, to find you... And… and said tell you… Serv… Serval… Yes, that was it… and then JD, to tell you it’s JD... He shouted at me, he really shouted, he scared me… and then the men came at us… They were shooting… It was like fireworks going off… I just ran.’
Raglan switched off the phone. ‘There wasn’t much more he could tell me.’ He tugged a photo from his pocket. ‘I found a photo album in the boy’s bedroom when I was at the house. This was in it.’ Heavily armed, unshaven men, including Raglan, stared back at Maguire. Two others wore loose-fitting tropical suits and were non-combatants. One of the men was Carter; the other wore an eye patch.
‘JD,’ said Raglan, pointing out the one-eyed killer. ‘We were in West Africa taking out drug-distribution bases. At first we thought he was French, but then reckoned he was a mongrel, some kind of Russian expat. The Americans had used him. He was a freelancer and an asshole. He wouldn’t tell us his name, but his initials were JD, so we called him John Doe.’
Maguire studied the photograph. The man referred to as JD had a cigar gripped between his teeth. ‘No name?’
‘We never found out. We didn’t care. It wasn’t important. He had this pseudo way of talking. He liked to get in on a kill if it was operationally possible. Months after that photo was taken we were on Operation Serval. I figured Carter was back in London and that JD had something to do with intelligence liaison because he was there all the time.’
‘I’ll have his face enhanced and get copies out on the streets,’ said Maguire.
‘Don’t let a street copper get taken out. Advise extreme caution. He’s armed and dangerous. He’s a psycho. But an intelligent one.’ Raglan tapped the photograph. ‘We didn’t want him anywhere near us. He was over the edge. Carter used him for special jobs.’
‘What kind of jobs?’
‘You don’t know? Carter is your man.’
‘Operational officers use various people on the ground. I don’t know this man. He has never appeared in any report or any financial audit. So he was below the radar. An asset who was off the books,’ Maguire said.
‘About a month after I was in hospital after the Serval op, John Doe was in a chopper that was shot down in the jungle. The remains of four bodies were found. The two pilots, John Doe and the American liaison officer.’
‘DNA?’
‘Not out there. It was a given. There was no flight plan. I heard it was an undercover job. An assassination. Some tribal leader.’
‘On Carter’s orders?’
Raglan shrugged. ‘Who knows? But if he’s the man Carter saw here, then JD’s come back from the dead.’
Maguire flicked the photograph with his thumb. There were never many certainties in his line of work. ‘Or Carter arranged the whole charade – blaming this John Doe to throw us off the scent.’
‘You can’t take that chance. If he’s been lifted, the clock’s ticking.’
Maguire raised the photograph. ‘If I publish this, it will panic him into finishing off Carter.’
‘He doesn’t panic. But you’re right, you can’t publish it in the media. It’ll tell him we’re on to him. Make it tougher for Carter.’ He watched the rain dribbling down the window.
‘How long do you think Carter can last?’ said Maguire.
‘He hasn’t been at the sharp end for a few years. Tonight perhaps. Maybe tomorrow. Best hope is the day after. JD will get what he wants out of him. No one holds out forever.’
Raglan’s gaze stayed on the blurred light beyond the murder scene. A red traffic light reflected on the rivulets trickling down the window. The red light flickered. Raglan’s memory unfurled. Images concertinaed. Blood rain.
14
Back in those caves time ceased to exist, swallowed by the thundering noise and dust cloud that billowed after the explosion. Terrorists blundered through it and grabbed the semi-conscious Raglan. They knew their leader Abdelhamid Abou Zeid had martyred himself but the legionnaire had survived the explosion, saved by the low rock formation in the middle of the underground chamber. Blood trickled from the legionnaire’s nose and ears but he was alive and that gave them a hostage. A part of Raglan’s mind knew he was being dragged away. It urged him to fight but his body was unresponsive and failed him. One of his eyes was already puffed and closed. He did not know how long it took for the blows being rained on him to shock him back into consciousness. He was on his knees, bound, the glare of bright lights blinding him. Voices cursed in Arabic as another fist broke more teeth. Raglan spat blood. Adrenaline surged and focused his mind. This was not the time to retreat into the safety and darkness. An unseen assailant punched him in the kidneys.
The red eye watched. Silently recording everything.
He knew he had been taken from the caves. The room was square. Adobe walls. Dirt floor. Dust rose from the men’s scuffling feet as they danced around him choosing where to strike next. He was naked. Humiliation was part of the process. He knew that. Had endured it before when his training demanded he be subjected to interrogation techniques. That had lasted a week. How long had he been in this room? He tried to recollect how many beatings he had taken. After every session, they dragged him into a darkened room with a heavy wooden door. Before they beat him they gave him water. There was no food, but water would keep him alive. No light penetrated the room and when they came to drag him away again it was into a narrow passage with an overhead light and then once again into the interrogation room. Time and again they hurt him, always under the watchful red eye of the camera. He gave snippets of information away. Capture and torture was no time to show bravado. Keep your eyes low. Don’t challenge them. Whatever information he gave them was already out of date but it showed willing.
The first time they put the blade across his throat ready for the ritual beheading he thought it was over. He was determined to fight his way to his own death but as he willed his weakened body to prepare itself for a lunge, the knife was withdrawn and the terrorists laughed. Three times over as many days they repeated the threat. On another day they hauled his arms above his head on to a pulley attached to the roof beam and forced a yoke of wood between his ankles. His splayed legs offered no protection and when the terrorists ushered in half a dozen veiled women he felt the sickening lurch in his stomach, believing that one of the women would castrate him. It was another attempt to break his will with further humiliation. One of the men handed a blade to a woman and pointed at Raglan’s genitals. She stepped forward. His heart raced. He struggled against his bonds and then bellowed and spat a curse. A guard punched him and then slapped him hard across the side of his head. Raglan sucked in air but kept his eyes firmly on the woman, who seemed to hesitate. His ears were ringing so he could not hear what the woman said to his tormentor but she handed back the knife. The man smiled and nodded. He turned to Raglan and repeated what the woman had said. She thought his private parts were too small to cut off. Raglan almost laughed with relief. All the men who served with him had endured the scorn of female staff when they underwent their interrogation training. That was their ritual. Men were taunted, badgered, threatened, beaten and waterboarded. They were as prepared as they could be to face the possibility of being seized and tortured. One of his captors suddenly levelled a kick into his balls. There was no food in his stomach to vomit but bile spewed from his throat and he passed out.
They left him alone after that. He did not know how much time passed as he lay face down in his cell. Ins
tinct dragged him back to consciousness when he heard his captors’ raised voices preparing for his execution. This time they would do it.
Raglan forced his back into the corner and pushed himself upright, determined to attack the first man who entered and do everything he could to kill him. An explosion floored him as rapid gunfire swept through the air.
He would learn later that the legionnaires had been searching for ten days. They had stopped a goatherd and noticed the combat boots he wore that could have only come from a dead or captured legionnaire. The men had their own methods of persuasion and discovered where Raglan was being held.
As they stretchered Raglan to the waiting helicopter Sokol walked alongside and held his friend’s hand, just as Milosz, the big Polish commando, did on the other. Raglan was slipping away into a pain-free world from the injection the medics had administered and the beating hum of the chopper’s blades almost drowned out any spoken words. In those final moments, he strained to hear what Sokol was saying.
‘You look like shit,’ said the Russian.
15
When the child spoke to him his whispers kept sleep at bay. Raglan wedged a chair into a corner of his flat, pulled a light stand close and opened a book to read. The light comforted and the book distracted him. His back against the wall made him safe. It was not the fear from when he was tortured and minutes away from being beheaded that tormented him. Nor was it the years of violence and killing. It was the fixed stare of the dead boy’s brown eyes. The boy he had killed in the cave. Reaching out, even in death. Asking why Raglan had killed him. The look in those eyes as Raglan’s bullets snatched him into darkness bored into Raglan’s mind. It was not accusatory, but filled with shock and surprise. There had been a time when alcohol blurred the child’s face, but not the words. They kept whispering throughout the night. Raglan, held in regret’s vice-like grip, had tried to answer, wanting to know the boy’s name, wanting his forgiveness. But the boy never gave him absolution. Raglan had crawled out of the well of alcohol years before. Had kept that monster at bay ever since through sheer willpower.
Sometimes lights triggered the flashbacks. Like those down at the kidnapping scene: the angle of them as they exposed the carnage. The terrorist’s knife at his throat. Their laughter. Their taunts as they took him to the edge of the abyss. The dead child led him into their arms. He had long ago reconciled himself to the thought that his torture was the boy’s revenge. Raglan could go months, even a year without the haunting, and then it would return. He had learnt how to deal with it: with wakefulness and distraction. The small bookshelf in his apartment held a couple of airport thrillers from times he’d come back to London on leave. Often as not he wouldn’t tell Amanda he was in town. The apartment was his own desert oasis. His quiet retreat from the pursuit of death.
Other books stood spine straight at attention, but none tempted him. There was an eclectic mix of classics, novels, biography and travel. The thriller he had chosen was set in the snow-laden north of Europe; the ambience was too cold to hold his interest. He slipped it back into place on the lower shelf. His eyes scanned other books and realized there was a gap in the tightly packed volumes. He fingered their spines, searching his memory for what was missing. Then he remembered. An old favourite. A 1940s pocket hardback, in Arabic, about the Tuareg. He had picked it up in Algeria years before on an operational tour, an insight into the culture of the nomads which helped him understand how the desert shaped them and showed him how to fight an enemy adept at being at one with their environment. His eyes scanned the room. It lay in plain sight on top of the low side cabinet, where no one would notice it except Raglan. Who had moved it? Hardly likely to be Steven. It fell open on a well-read passage and a slim bookmark slipped free. He reached to pick it up and saw it was a boarding card. First class, for Hamad International Airport, Doha, the capital city of the natural-gas- and oil-rich Qatar. It was dated two weeks ago; the passenger name was Jeremy Carter. Had he been expecting something bad to happen? If it did, he knew Maguire would send for Raglan. And he knew that Raglan would go to his flat, and being the kind of man he was would notice when something was out of place. And that’s where Carter had left a message.
Qatar. Middle East Gulf States had severed diplomatic relations with Qatar when it was accused of supporting and funding terrorism. Now there was a direct link between an MI6 officer and the suspect state. And two weeks after that visit Carter was taken. Yet Maguire had not mentioned the trip, had raised no causal effect between the visit and the kidnap. Why not? Was he trying to keep Raglan out of the picture? Was the visit legitimate? Or did MI6 have a rogue agent?
The book and its content served their purpose. Raglan was distracted.
*
Less than a twenty-minute drive away at the demolition site the night’s rain swallowed the old building. The warehouse behind the heavy gates was nothing more than a blackened shape in the darkness. Inside the lights were as harsh as those at the snatch site where Maguire and Raglan had stood on the street. The light’s glare accentuated the agony of the man strapped to the chair. It highlighted the sweat dripping from Carter’s face on to his heaving chest and crystallized his tears as he wept with pain. His tormentor sat close by and examined the glowing end of his cigar. He glanced at his watch and waited patiently for his victim to snort back the phlegm and recover his breathing to something that might resemble normal. Normal if agony from every nerve ending wasn’t already tearing into his pain-specific neural pathways.
Carter buried himself deep inside his mind, trying to blank out the agony. The torturer’s words pierced the darkness.
‘Somewhere, old friend, you have hidden a list of names. A long list. Long as my arm, as you Brits say. Why do they say that, Jerry? Eh? Your list is much longer than my arm. And that list is worth serious, serious money. And I have a client who has very deep pockets. You have hidden the magic key to those hundreds of names. Important names. Secret names. Bank accounts. Contacts. Agents and informers. What a cornucopia it must be. A gourmet’s menu of delights. And I really, really need it. I bet it’s encrypted somewhere. On a flash drive maybe. Or…’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘… perhaps it’s on the Cloud. Do you think the Almighty guards it? The good Lord is no firewall, Jerry. He does not give a fuck about you and me and what happens to the great unwashed. It’s a game. Now, the information I want cannot be in your head. You’re not that clever. Clever enough to know the pain is going to get worse though. Hey, Jeremy? A lot worse.’ With a weariness borne of tedium, he blew out a column of blue smoke. Carter had slipped into unconsciousness. JD sighed and accepted the plate of food delivered by one of the gunmen.
Eddie Roman was hovering far enough away not to make himself too obvious, but his body language left no doubt he wanted to speak to the gang leader who had begun spooning food into his mouth.
‘What is it, Eddie? Come over here.’
Eddie shuffled forward. At one time in his life, he would have shown more courage, but age and fear now made him subservient. ‘I agreed to sort out the vehicles and gear – I did that, didn’t I?’
‘And a good job you made of it too.’
‘I didn’t know nothing about no kidnapping or shooting at kids or any of this... stuff... this kicking the shit out of him.’
‘There is a point to all this?’
‘Thing is, boss, I’m on parole, I got to report in, I didn’t know it was gonna be anything like this. I’m gonna end up back in the nick if I don’t get back to my routine and the wife.’
‘Parole was never mentioned when I employed you. My contacts said you came highly recommended.’
‘This is a high-risk gig. Bigger than I’d thought.’
‘And you’re being well paid for your local knowledge and skills. Yes?’
‘The money is brilliant but, tell you what I’ll do, I’m prepared to give it back. All of it. Just so I can get back home. I want out. This is too heavy. I won’t say nuthin’, that’s not my style. Ask anybody
. They’ll all tell you the same.’
JD finished eating and tossed aside the paper plate. He pulled the tab on a cold drink can and raised it to his lips. Once he had savoured the taste and run a tongue over his teeth he levelled his gaze at an increasingly nervous Eddie Roman. ‘I think it might serve all our interests better if you stayed,’ he said flatly.
Eddie knew when a veiled threat was being made. He nodded in surrender and turned away.
JD relit his cigar and looked at the nearest gunman over the flame. With a nod of his head, he directed the shooter to follow Eddie, who had made his way outside. Then he turned his attention back to his victim. ‘Wakey, wakey, Jeremy.’
Outside Eddie sheltered from the rain and drew deeply on a cigarette. It wasn’t the night’s cold air that made him shiver. He pressed his phone to his ear.
‘Listen, girl, I can’t tell you nuthin’,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll be home soon as I can... I’m all right, things have just taken a bit longer than I thought... I’m not far from home so don’t fret, I promise. I’m all right.’
The gunman stepped into view. Eddie turned, aware he was being watched. Fear-riven guilt made him switch off his phone.
16
There was nothing more Raglan could do to find Jeremy Carter until Maguire fed him progress reports and Raglan had tested the water about Carter’s trip to Qatar. The city had swallowed a victim and until it spat him out Raglan needed to be patient. His only other source was Abbie. He doubted there was much she could add to what he already knew but if she had picked up on something that had seemed irrelevant when she visited Carter’s house or had sight of a document that Maguire had not mentioned then it was worth a couple of hours with her. He instructed the taxi driver to follow the route the police suspected the kidnapper’s van had taken towards Heathrow and then turn off on to the slip road and industrial estate next to the railway line. The scarred road surface told him where the burnt-out van had been discovered and since removed by the authorities. Back on the main road, he could see how easy it was for the killers to escape. They had the choice of going in multiple directions. After going twice around the Chiswick roundabout so he could get some sense of where they were and what routes led off it, he instructed the driver to head for the airport.