Disorder (Sam Keddie thriller series Book 1)

by Paddy Magrane

  There were two beds in the room but, without hesitation, she climbed in next to him.

  She moved closer to Sam, reaching out for his face in the darkness, tracing her fingers gently down his cheek.

  ‘I don’t feel scared tonight,’ she said.

  ‘Me neither,’ Sam said. ‘I think it’s the painkillers. I might take a few tomorrow.’

  She leaned into him, kissing his cheek just to the side of his mouth. She was soon fast asleep.

  Sam lay awake, his mind working overtime. The truth was, he did feel scared. Hearing her slow breathing next to him, it was impossible not to dwell on his feelings for her, the attraction that had been growing, he now realised, from the moment they’d met. The fear he felt was based on one thing – a certainty that, sooner or later, Eleanor would be torn from him.

  Chapter 36

  Earl’s Court, London

  The walls of the travel agency were lined with shallow shelves, each one filled with holiday brochures – cruises in the Caribbean and the Med, trips to Disneyland in Florida, long-haul holidays in the Far East, romantic city breaks in Europe. The world they represented – one of care-free relaxation – now appeared to Sam like a parallel universe.

  He and Eleanor sat with their backs to the window that faced the street. Sam kept turning to look outside. Despite a new theory about their pursuers that had been gathering weight since their experience in Stoke Newington, he felt defenceless and exposed, and knew those feelings would only increase as the day wore on.

  They had bought tickets for a flight leaving early that afternoon to Marrakesh. The sales assistant had disappeared to print them off. Eleanor turned to Sam.

  ‘This feels like madness,’ she said, her voice low, all traces of last night’s composure gone. ‘Our details have just been entered on to a system. We’re visible again. Christ, they found us in the Lakes when we’d been really careful. What chance do we have now?’

  Sam placed a hand over one of Eleanor’s. ‘I’m coming to the conclusion that our pursuers aren’t as sophisticated as we thought.’

  He explained his thinking. If the people after them really had tentacles everywhere, then why had that man outside Sam’s house been apprehended? It suggested the police weren’t in on it.

  ‘Think about it,’ he continued. ‘If you wanted to keep a secret, how many people would you involve? I think this is a tight operation, run well below the radar.’

  Eleanor smiled, frowning at the same time. It was clear she only partially bought what Sam was saying. And of course this new theory was only moderately comforting to him. Eleanor was right, their pursuers had found them in the Lakes, and that was after they’d taken great pains to keep their movements hidden. Were these people simply one step ahead, all too aware of where he and Eleanor would look next? In which case, was it not wiser to just run? But then how long would they last before they were caught? No, there was only one course of action – the one they were taking.

  The sales assistant returned with their tickets and wished them a safe journey. Sam smiled back weakly.

  There were still a few hours to kill before check-in, so they crossed the road to an internet café to tackle the other task they’d set themselves.

  Nursing watery cappuccinos and occupying stools at the rear of the café with a good view of the street, they logged on to the DFID website. The home page featured a large image of grinning African schoolchildren and the headline: ‘Access to education for all finally a possibility?’ Above and below were a series of other tabs including one, Sam noticed, directing visitors to a page that paid tribute to Charles Scott. If Eleanor had noticed, she didn’t let on. She clicked instead on ‘Diary’ and a new page appeared, one that detailed the Minister’s most recent movements – or at least those the Government chose to publicly reveal.

  Some entries were rich in detail – the new Secretary of State’s address at a conference in Edinburgh on violence against women, which was accompanied by the conference timetable and his actual speech – while others were more skeletal.

  ‘Here,’ she said, her finger resting on the screen.

  Sam leaned in to read the entry.

  Charles Scott, Secretary of State for International Development, attended a series of sustainability seminars in Marrakesh this month. The meetings, held at La Mamounia Hotel, aimed to capitalise on the region’s existing potential while drawing on British skills and expertise.

  ‘Is that it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s what they call transparency,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘So we visit La Mamounia,’ Sam suggested.

  ‘And the Sofitel,’ said Eleanor, who had now moved on from the DFID site to a Google page listing Marrakesh hotels.

  ‘I was racking my brains this morning, trying to remember whether Dad had mentioned the hotel where he stayed. It was the Sofitel, I’m positive.’

  ‘Right,’ said Sam, ‘so we have two leads. All we need to do now is leave the country.’

  *

  Sam hated Heathrow at the best of times. Confronted now with the crowds, the low ceiling of steel beams and bright lighting, the multitude of signs and advertising messages, he could feel his chest constrict.

  He thought back to their near-death experience in the Lakes. Something that had been designed to appear an accident or, more to the point, not murder. He looked at the people before him. Any one of them could be a killer, ready to brush by, to administer a dose of some lethal chemical simply by touch, or the tiniest pin-prick. A dose inducing a death that appeared to be natural.

  He shook the thoughts from his head. This was no time for paranoia.

  Sam looked up at the departures board. Their flight was still on time, scheduled to leave in two hours. They took the escalator upstairs to Departures. Here, it was marginally calmer although Sam took no comfort in the lack of crowds. Exposed or surrounded, neither felt safe.

  They moved towards two policemen wearing flak jackets and carrying semi-automatic weapons, who stood either side of a thoroughfare that led to the desk they needed to reach.

  Eleanor’s sweating hand clutched his tightly. Sam cast a glance at one of the men as they passed. The man’s eyes looked through him, scanning the building for dangers that, it appeared, did not include him and Eleanor.

  They joined the line at check-in. In contrast to the other queues nearby, this one was short. Ahead of them were three North African men, dressed in suits and in the midst of an earnest discussion. In front of them, a family – the parents standing in silence, their teenage sons both engrossed in tablets. The stillness unnerved Sam.

  Moments later they reached the desk. The woman who took their passports and tickets displayed evident disinterest, only breaking into a sentence to confirm that Sam and Eleanor had no luggage to check in.

  The next challenge was security. Here the queues were longer, with every departure descending on this one part of the terminal. Sam stood protectively behind Eleanor, her back pressed into him. As the queue crept forward he was suddenly pushed from behind and turned to see an overweight man, his face glistening with sweat.

  ‘Sorry bud,’ the man said in a Midwestern accent. ‘Wasn’t looking where I was going.’

  They inched on, Sam now rigid with tension as he examined every person near them for signs of intent. He could feel his shirt clinging to his back and knew he needed to calm down if he was to pass through the next stage without drawing attention to himself.

  As they reached the head of the queue a security officer indicated to Eleanor that there was an opening to their right. When Sam tried to follow, the man raised the palm of his hand.

  ‘One at a time, sir.’

  Eleanor looked back, eyes wide with distress.

  Sam was now directed to his left. He placed his bag, keys and the phone that had been switched off for days into a tray and then moved through the scanner. To his right, he could see that Eleanor was one step ahead of him. She was now in discussion with a security officer, an older woman with
tightly drawn-back grey hair. The woman wasn’t smiling.

  Sam, who’d paused, was now urged to move on. He collected his stuff from the tray and went to Eleanor.

  As he approached, he heard the tail-end of the conversation she was having, and felt his stomach relax.

  ‘It’s more than 100 millilitres,’ the security officer was saying, as she held a bottle of water in her hand. ‘We’re going to have to dispose of it.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Eleanor. ‘My mistake.’

  ‘Christ,’ whispered Eleanor, as they moved away. ‘When that woman called me over, I thought that was it.’

  ‘We need to calm down. The way we’re acting, we’re going to get arrested for looking like a pair of sweating terrorists.’

  Eleanor exhaled loudly. It was then, over her shoulder, that Sam saw a pair of security officers – the older woman who’d been talking to Eleanor and a younger man – walking at a pace in their direction.

  Eleanor noticed the expression on Sam’s face, and turned.

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘We wait,’ said Sam. ‘There’s nowhere to run or hide here. Besides, if we do, we’ll certainly be arrested.’

  The two officers were now a few metres away. Sam felt like a small animal caught in the headlights of a fast-moving car, immobilised, yet keenly aware of impending danger.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the female officer to Eleanor. Her face was flushed. ‘You forgot these.’

  She held out a plastic bag containing the items that Eleanor had put in the tray. Keys, a mobile, her passport, some coins.

  Eleanor gushed her thanks, a broad smile suggesting joy at being reunited with her belongings. But Sam knew it was an expression of something quite different – enormous relief that another moment of gut-wrenching fear had turned out to be a false alarm.

  ‘I almost prefer genuine danger,’ she said, as they walked through duty-free. ‘This is unbearable.’

  As they sat by their gate a little later, Sam sensed that Eleanor had now given up, no longer able to maintain the heightened vigilance they’d both shared since the start of the day. Her head rested on his shoulder, a hand on his forearm. Sam couldn’t let up. His eyes darted around the room, seeking out signs that any of the other passengers meant them harm.

  The flight, as the queue at check-in had suggested, was near empty. Sam counted around fifty passengers and not a single European among them. There were the three men and the family with teenage sons; an elegant couple in their fifties; a group of school children in their early teens, marshalled by a visibly irritated male teacher who kept barking at them to be quiet. As Sam studied each face in turn, he caught the eye of a small boy who was travelling with his parents. The child smiled at Sam and he found himself smiling back. His shoulders dropped.

  Perhaps his new theory was right. After all, would they have got this far if the people after them had access to the airport’s CCTV footage, or the Border Agency’s database?

  But even with this crumb of comfort, Sam couldn’t help questioning the sober mood of the room. Other than the immediate coverage of Scott’s death, Sam hadn’t given the news a thought since this business had started. He remembered a mention of riots in Marrakesh the day Scott’s suicide had broken. Was this what was troubling his fellow passengers? What united them in their dark mood?

  They were calling the flight. The families with children moved off first. The little boy, the one person in the room who seemed blissfully unaware of the tension, turned and waved at Sam. His face was full of excitement, the prospect of flying clearly an adventure. Sam nodded and waved back, even as he felt a deep sense of foreboding.

  Chapter 37

  Whitehall, London

  The Cabinet Office Briefing Room A is a stuffy, windowless room in the bowels of a bland Whitehall building. It’s a place where selected Ministers, armed forces chiefs and emergency services heads are called in the event of a national crisis, whether caused by terrorism, extreme weather, a potential pandemic or other major emergencies.

  COBRA meetings were, as Philip Stirling knew all too well, often a complete waste of time, dragging professionals away from co-ordinating appropriate responses to gather with a group of politicians who were more concerned with their personal ratings than anything else. Many of the MPs, even those who’d previously visited the room, still couldn’t find the place and would hurry in late, gushing with apologies, brows glistening with sweat, having jogged up and down the gloomy corridors outside for ten minutes.

  That said, the media loved COBRA. If it was meeting, it meant the Government was taking something seriously. Today, it was in response to the diabolical weather that Northern Ireland had been having. Following torrential downpours, several towns had experienced severe flooding and the news had been full of Biblical imagery of bridges washed away and cows and sheep floating down high streets. Stirling had convened a meeting to which he’d invited the Home, Transport and Environment Secretaries and – because he knew the man would be asked if this event was due to global warming – the Energy and Climate Change Secretary. Also in attendance were the Head of the Marine and Coast Guard Agency and the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (via a video link). Frears, ostensibly because of his knowledge of the military logistics involved in such a crisis, had also been summoned.

  In truth, Stirling did not give a crap how much Frears knew about erecting temporary bridges. He was here because the shit had hit the fan. The Guardsman had informed him, in a snatched and wholly inconclusive conversation in a hallway at Number 10, that Keddie and Eleanor Scott had survived their car crash in the Lakes.

  The Prime Minister sat impatiently while the professionals briefed the room and then the Ministers flexed their muscles, selfishly seeing the whole business from their own standpoint. Eventually he pressed for conclusions and, finally, drew the meeting to a close.

  ‘Could I have a word, Frears?’ he said, as the now red-faced attendees began filing out of the stifling room, all visibly grateful for the air in the corridor outside, which contained a degree more oxygen than the space they were leaving.

  Once the door was closed, he wasted no time. ‘It’s clear your men didn’t hang around long enough to ensure the job was done properly.’

  ‘It wasn’t safe to stay at the scene.’

  ‘What the hell were the two of them doing there?’ asked the PM, ignoring the proffered excuse.

  ‘We think they were sniffing around a hotel where Scott stayed with Jane Vyner.’

  Stirling was silent, mulling over the implications of this latest titbit.

  ‘So,’ he asked, ‘how do you intend to find them now?’

  Frears looked momentarily disorientated, a look that worried the PM greatly. The man had many annoying traits, not least his clipped intonation and ‘militarising’ of everything, but he always displayed a confident decisiveness. The thought of Frears not knowing what to do was truly worrying.

  ‘I’m making some calls,’ he said.

  ‘You do that.’

  The door closed behind Frears. Stirling began gathering up the papers in front of him, attempting to convince himself that he was still doing the job he’d been elected to do, rather than walking a tightrope over hellfire, which was how he now felt. He stopped for a moment, running his hands through his unruly locks.

  Outside in the corridor, his Cabinet Secretary and a couple of advisers were waiting. Right now, he couldn’t face them. He wanted to crawl under the table and weep. Surely, with Keddie and Eleanor Scott still alive, he was royally fucked. They now knew unequivocally that an attempt had been made on their lives. They were bound to go to the press.

  Stirling breathed in deeply. Proof. There was no proof that anyone had tried to kill them. And as for their presence in the Lakes, this suggested they were still some way off the truth.

  He moved towards the door. Before he left this ghastly building, he’d pause to visit the gents at the end of the corridor. He was finding it harder
and harder to control his bowels. Gone forever was the smooth-operating politician who had risen, almost imperceptibly, to the top. He was now a physical wreck.

  Of course, Prime Ministers were allowed to look tired. But little did the people of Britain know, that the baggy eyed man at the helm was now fighting, not just for his political survival, but to avoid complete and utter annihilation.

  Chapter 38

  Marrakesh, Morocco

  While they’d both experienced a sense of exhilaration as their plane surged down the runway and climbed into the grey September clouds and away from the UK, their arrival in Morocco quickly dispelled the optimism.

  The airport certainly felt European and familiar – a terminal of white steel latticework that could have been built by Richard Rogers, flights to places like Madrid, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam – but what was happening on the ground seemed altogether less comforting.

  Appearing like a wall in front of them, a large group of dark-suited men and their wives, all dressed head-to-foot in black robes, were trying to check in. Whatever was holding them up was causing enormous stress. A couple of the women were screaming in high-pitched voices while three of the men were involved in heated exchanges with airport staff.

  Sam and Eleanor passed through the group and then side-stepped a gang of teenaged Arabic girls standing by their bags. They were clad, by contrast, in tight jeans and midriff tops, but their young, thickly made-up faces seemed etched with the same tension.

  Beyond them was a group of Saudi businessmen in long white robes, red check scarves over their heads held in place with thick black cords. Although clearly together, they stood apart, each talking rapidly and with agitation into mobile phones.

  Watching over this scene were around forty policemen, armed and accompanied by restive sniffer dogs, agitating at the ankles of passing passengers.