by Peter James
‘No – it is me. I am Ahmed.’
I decided that I was on the receiving end of a sales pitch from a Middle-Eastern life-assurance salesman on his first venture into England, and nearly hung up on him. It might have been a good thing for both our futures if I had, but I was obliged to listen, and so I did.
‘I am call for Donald Frome. In bad trouble. Please you must come.’
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Pardon?’
‘What sort of trouble is Donald Frome in?’
‘I cannot talk more, here, please. You come right away, please. Men’s wash place, Royal Lancaster Hotel, twelve o’clock. You must, please.’ He hung up.
I looked at my watch: it was almost eleven thirty. I wondered whether it was a set-up, and decided it wasn’t. The man had sounded genuine. One can fake a lot of emotions, but fear is probably the hardest, and my skull was still ringing with the fear in his voice.
I had the cab drop me off a couple of hundred yards up the Bayswater Road; the traffic was light and we were there a few minutes earlier than I had expected, and I didn’t want to have to hang around either the hotel lobby or the lavatory.
I was feeling depressed, and the weather wasn’t helping my mood. It had rained almost continuously throughout June, July and August, and the Indian summer the weathermen had promised us for September hadn’t turned up, although there appeared to be more curry houses than ever before, so maybe that was what they meant. I walked through steady drizzle, with my hands in my jacket pockets, and I couldn’t remember feeling so rotten. Everything right now was bloody rotten, and the days were getting short and the air was getting chilly, and there was a long, long winter ahead with nothing much to look forward to.
I was thirty-two years old, and in my eighth year as an agent for MI5. Eight summers ago had been a glorious summer, and I had spent most of it in Paris. That was where the MI5 talent spotters had stumbled across me, and decided I was a sufficiently unpleasant piece of work to fit nicely into their little company. Not that they’d bothered to ask me first: with a little co-operation from their chums in the Paris Sûreté, I was set up and flung into a Parisian slammer, with little hope of getting out until long past retirement age – unless I joined MI5.
To be completely accurate, it was a combination of greed and laziness that had put me into this situation in the first place, but for MI5 to demand a lifetime’s allegiance in return for their help, was, in my opinion, even more greedy. Mostly, I forgot about the background, and got on with my work, but there were occasions, like today, when I could think of a lot of other things I’d prefer to be doing, and I became morose.
I hate paperwork, and the assignment I was currently on was all paperwork. I had been attached to C4, the anti-terrorist division of MI5, with the task of preparing for my boss, MI5’s Director General, Sir Charles Cunningham-Hope – better known as Fifeshire – what was to be virtually an encyclopaedia of terrorists in the United Kingdom. I think what he had in mind was one of those glossy coffee-table books, of the type that people like giving as presents to friends they know will never read them, called something like Fifeshire’s Compleat Terrorist, and featuring every known terrorist in bright colour, with a few lines of text on their breeding habits.
He had, however, set about it in the very thorough manner that was typical of him, and, treading hard on the toes of MI6, as he liked to do, had embarked upon a massively ambitious programme to infiltrate all the key terrorist organizations of the world. Donald Frome had managed to penetrate the Marzoc camp – the Eton of Colonel Quadhafi’s terrorist training schools – and had been sending back immensely valuable information for several months. It was not good news that he was in trouble, not for us or him, and I felt damn sorry for the poor bastard. I walked around to the front of the dismal grey slab of a hotel and marched in through a revolving door.
There was nothing inside to lift the gloom: a bank of shops selling cigarettes, confectionery, newspapers and Braemar sweaters looked very empty, with sales staff standing to unenthusiastic attention, and a few hotel staff in their differing grades of uniform milled around with only the vaguest semblance of being active.
I went up some stairs, along a corridor past a battery of show-cases, and into the men’s room. It was empty. I ran a tap to look busy, but almost immediately, the door opened, and an Arab, in a dirty white jellaba and brown sandals, hurried in. I put him at about thirty-five. He stared at me, several times in succession, with tiny frightened eyes. He was short and very thin, and spoke in quick bursts, without bothering to check my identity.
‘Please – in there, in there – we must not be seen.’ He flapped his hands towards the cubicles; at the same time he went over to the entrance door and jammed a silver coin underneath it – to make a scraping noise if anyone should come in. He ushered me into a cubicle and went into the adjacent one. I took down my trousers, so that if anyone did come in and looked underneath the door, they would see nothing unusual, and sat on the seat.
‘Thank you for come, thank you,’ said the Arab.
‘That’s all right, my friend.’
‘I be quick.’
‘Take your time.’
‘Donald Frome in – very bad – I think now he dead.’
‘What happened?’
‘He is caught – somehow – I don’t know how – someone find out. He give me message to bring you – he write down – I am too frightened – I read and then burn; he tell me it is very important I must give you message – it is difficult – I no speak much good the English.’
‘You’re doing fine.’
‘I try to read – it not easy – I have not anyone to ask for help. He say Operation Angel. Most important. Operation Angel. Many countries. Very bad. Nuclear power stations – they will blow up – many—’
‘Who will?’
The silver coin screeched across the marble floor. There was a flat clacking of footsteps across the floor; it was the clacking of a pair of sandals. A whispered voice said, ‘Ahmed?’
The Arab in the cubicle beside me said something in Arabic, which I didn’t understand. I heard the splintering sound of a wooden door parting company with its hinges, followed by a scream of terror, which then turned to a scream of pain, a terrible scream. Suddenly, it stopped completely and was replaced by a weird gurgling sound. I struggled with one hand to pull up my trousers and with the other to yank my Beretta out of its shoulder holster, as I heard the fast patter of sandals retreating from the room.
I dashed out of my cubicle, struggling with my zip, and looked into Ahmed’s cubicle. The door had been kicked off its hinges, and was suspended by its lock. Seated on the lavatory was just a volcano of blood. Ahmed’s head had been almost completely severed, and hung at a strange angle to his neck, from which blood was erupting and running down his jellaba. His arms were outstretched and rigid. The only movement of his body was a macabre twitch in his left cheek.
I gagged twice and had to swallow hard to prevent myself from throwing up. I gaped in horror, and as I gaped, a fury grew inside me. I turned away. If any man had ever wanted to convince me that he had been telling the truth, he couldn’t have done a better job than this.
The fury turned to a rage, a rage against all the terrorist bastards in London, in my town, in my world, for their ever-increasing gross outrages. I was going to get the bastards that had done this particular outrage, and I was going to teach them a lesson they would never forget. I hurtled out into the corridor. There was no one to be seen. I sprinted to the end of the corridor and dived down the stairs. As I hit the foyer, I looked in every direction, and saw a side door down one end swinging shut. I sprinted towards and through that door, just in time to see an Arab scramble into the back of a dirty grey Fiat, which drove off before he had time to close the door. I looked desperately around for a vehicle to commandeer. Almost on top of me was a taxi with its ‘For Hire’ sign illuminated. I scrambled into the back.
‘Follow that grey Fiat.’
‘You what?’
‘Follow that Fiat!’
‘What is this? The movies?’
‘No – it’s a ten quid tip if you do what I say.’
He did. The Fiat had slowed right down in a bottleneck at a roundabout and the cab got onto its tail.
‘Stay right behind it, and don’t lose it.’
‘Orl try.’
For fifteen minutes the cabbie was a damn good trier. There were three Arabs in the car, and they were beginning to panic. They kept looking behind them, and every time they looked they saw the same view: the nose of the Austin taxi. We were heading towards Wembley, on a very erratic course, with the Fiat doing a fast U-turn at every red light it came to, and slowly making its way over towards the M40, where they knew they would be able to outrun us. Suddenly, one Arab in the back thrust his hand out of the window and fired two shots at us. One missed, the other punched a neat hole in the left side of the windscreen.
‘Oh no, mate, this is where you get off,’ said the driver, slamming on the brakes. ‘Ar’m not gettin’ shot at for a bleedin’ tenner. Ar’m not getting shot at for a bleeding monkey. Out!’ He turned to face me and found himself staring down the wrong end of my Beretta.
‘Either get this crate going or get out.’
He gave a weak grin, his face twitched, then broke into an exaggerated nervous grin. ‘If it’s all right with you, I’ll get out – weak heart, got a pacemaker.’ He jumped out the door. ‘Tank’s full. I’m not a coward, like, it’s just I—’
I wasn’t interested. I clambered into the driving seat, crashed the gear-lever forward and did the nearest thing to a wheelie that any London cab is ever going to do. The Arabs were stuck at the back of a queue at a red light, all peering around. There was an island in the middle of the road which prevented them from doing a U-turn. They backed up several feet and then drove onto the pavement, and Ghengis Khan in the back loosed off two more shots at me. There were too many other cars and people around for me to risk firing back. They stopped at the end of the pavement as a giant articulated lorry thundered across their bows, followed closely by another. I carried on with the accelerator pressed flat on the floor and hit them full in the back. I stopped dead, but on the pavement greasy with the drizzle, they cannoned forward, neatly into the gap between the front and the rear wheels of the second artic’s heavily laden trailer. Above the roar of the lorry was a swift metallic crunch, a sound like a foot crushing a metal biscuit-tin, as the little Fiat was blotted, for a fraction of a second, from view by the huge wheels of the lorry, then the lorry was past and the Fiat reappeared, alone in the road, the boot and bonnet reasonably intact, but the entire passenger compartment no higher than ten centimetres off the road at its highest point.
I was aware of nothing for a moment but the staccato of the taxi’s diesel engine. I realized I was holding the clutch down. I lifted my foot a fraction and, with a loud protest from somewhere up front, we began to move. I let the clutch right out and accelerated hard. We lurched forward. I was amazed. The bumper must have absorbed almost all the impact. There was a grating sound, but it wasn’t loud. I looked around. People were clambering from their cars and running over towards the Fiat. The lorry had stopped and the driver was walking, puzzled and dazed around the side.
I decided the best place for me to be right now was anywhere but here. The police would get their report in due course and we would get ours, but there wasn’t a great deal of love lost between the police and MI5, particularly when it came to corpses in wholesale quantities as it was always them that had to do the clearing up, and I didn’t want to be stuck for the rest of the day with a bunch of sarcastic traffic boys from Ealing.
I accelerated off to the left, ignoring several shouts. Five hundred yards down the road a woman with suitcases hailed me. I ignored her and she waved furiously as I drove past. I wanted to make my report to Fifeshire and make it fast. I wanted to know what else anybody knew about Operation Angel, and if nobody knew anything about it, how we were going to find out more, and find out fast.
After a couple of miles, I started looking out for a phone booth. I wanted to make a call to the forensic boys to make sure they went through that car, and what bits of its occupants they could separate from it, with something considerably finer than a toothcomb. After about a quarter of a mile a booth came up on the left.
The vandals hadn’t messed about with this one: all they’d left were the Yellow Pages and a length of wire. It’s funny, but I’d had a feeling that morning when I woke up that somehow it wasn’t going to be my day.
3
‘The basic principle of a nuclear power station is no different from any other form of electricity generating station. It is very important to remember this. Everyone gets blinded by science when they hear about nuclear power stations, but we are not all about fission cycles and fast neutrons and complicated formulas. All we do is to generate steam which is then forced past turbines that rotate and cause electricity to be generated – just as the wheel of a bicycle rubs against the dynamo, turning the knob at the top of the dynamo, which then generates the electricity that lights the lamps.
‘Steam power is the key. Nothing has changed since James Watt invented the steam engine – it is exactly the same principle of operation. The only technological advance in a nuclear power station is the way we heat the water to get the steam – that’s what we’re all about. Ninety per cent of what you’re going to find if you walk around this plant is the same as what you will find if you walk around any coal-fired or oil-fired or gas-fired power station anywhere in the world. The ten per cent that’s different is the way we make the steam – that’s what’s important, that’s what nuclear power is all about.’
The man paused for a moment, looking nervously through his spectacles, which were fast sliding down his nose. He wrung his hands together, sweat glistened on his brow, and his brown hair cut like a pudding basin clung greasily to his head as the sweat poured into it. He swayed on his feet, occasionally elevating himself onto tiptoe as he spoke, occasionally shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his tweed jacket, so deep at times I thought the jacket was going to come apart at the shoulders. He was used to parties of school children and university students. He wasn’t used to a crowd like this lot; they could eat him for breakfast, and he knew it.
In an effort to swing ever-increasing public hostility to nuclear power stations into some measure of support for their construction programme, and to try and gain export orders, the British government had thrown open to the international press their latest star-studded masterpiece, Huntspill Head on the shore of North Somerset. It was the first pressurized-water reactor to be built in Britain and its one major drawback, as far as public relations went, was that it was based on the same system as the infamous Three Mile Island reactor which, in 1979, had come perilously close to wiping out a large chunk of Pennsylvania.
The future of the government’s energy policy was in jeopardy, and a favourable outcome today would be a big boost for it. It was essential they got the right message across, and to get the right message across, it was essential they used the right man. Douglas Yeodall had been chosen for his school-teacher-from-next-door appearance and manner, his extensive knowledge on the subject of nuclear power, his honest face and, as much as anything else, for his thick Somerset accent. It had been decided that his accent, with its strongly rural flavour – an accent that reminded one of crude jokes about lecherous farmers – would put people at ease. The journalists present were of a different opinion. Half of them couldn’t understand a single word; the other half, which could, with some difficulty, make out the general gist of what he was saying, had decided that the British government had deliberately laid on the village idiot.
It wasn’t just the journalists who thought Douglas Yeodall was a lousy choice; so did Douglas Yeodall. He stared out across the sea of seven hundred faces, at one thousand, four hundred eyeballs, across the battery of cameras and microphones and s
horthand note pads, and a silence as thick as a mushroom cloud of fall-out dust, and soldiered on.
‘I’m sure there are many of you who understand the principles of nuclear physics,’ he paused for a murmur of assent, but none was forthcoming, ‘I’m sure there are many of you here today who know a great deal more about this subject than I do – I just work here!’ He paused for a titter of laughter; there was none. His audience ate ordinary statesmen and prime ministers for lunch, and presidents and kings for dinner; they weren’t going to start laughing at the wisecracks of a two-bit lecturer from the backwoods of Somerset. Any more gags and Douglas Yeodall wasn’t even going to make the peanut bowl at cocktail hour. He appeared to realize this, and straightened up his body, and aimed the tip of his nose at the back of the hall. His eyes were now staring straight into the floodlights. They dazzled him, but he didn’t mind. At least he wasn’t staring into the eyeballs of those stony-faced bastards any more.
‘If I bang my two fists together …’ He did so, close up to the microphones, and winced; he’d done it too hard and it hurt. He shook his hands, and the audience burst into a roar of laughter. Yeodall looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled to himself; he had a feeling he’d scored a point.
‘If I bang my fists together – it hurts!’ He continued. ‘It also makes them warmer, because the friction of the two hands banging together has made heat. If my hands were to disintegrate on collision, even more heat would be generated. It is the way in which heat is generated that makes nuclear power stations different from all other types of power station. I’m going to put this as much into layman terms as I can, but if I lose you – or you lose me – it is explained in the booklet you have been given.
‘Everything in life is made up of atoms – that, I think, everybody now knows – but atoms also are made up of something. They are made up of particles called protons and neutrons; to give you an idea of the size of these particles, one thousand billion neutrons placed side by side in a single line would just about stretch the width of a pin-head.’ He waited for a gasp of amazement. There wasn’t one.