Osama

by Chris Ryan

  Eva was quiet for a few minutes as Joe negotiated his way onto the South Circular.

  ‘Joe,’ she said at last, ‘remember when your dad went to prison?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Nobody talked to you about it, but behind your back they hardly talked about anything else.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘You’re in trouble. We both are. We can’t run for ever. When they catch up with you, maybe – maybe – you can persuade them about Caitlin. Maybe you can persuade them that the guy you . . . the guy in prison . . . was self-defence. But can’t you see what it looks like? You’re leaving a trail of bodies everywhere you go.’ She gave him a piercing look. ‘You can’t kill him, Joe,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t let you.’

  Joe felt his eyes flicker involuntarily to the glove compartment where his stolen weapon was stashed.

  ‘Mr Ashe and I have a few things to discuss,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

  He looked at the Range Rover’s clock again. Less than twelve hours till the RV. He fixed his eyes on the road ahead, and drove.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was a largely silent journey. The Range Rover’s satnav blinked monotonously as they ate up the M4. A full moon rose. Joe wondered how much light it would give him when they reached Pembrokeshire.

  Around 1930 hours the traffic on the motorway suddenly slowed down. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, Joe saw a flashing blue light; seconds later there was a siren. He checked his speed – 65 mph – and pulled into the left-hand lane. Eva said nothing, but he could feel her tension. It was a relief when the car sped past. A minute later they crawled past the scene of an accident, with two ambulance crews and four police cars parked on the hard shoulder. Joe just kept a steady speed. ‘They’ve got no reason to stop us,’ he told Eva. She didn’t reply.

  At 2100 hours Joe turned on the radio and tuned into the news. He was the lead item. ‘Following the escape of Sergeant Joseph Mansfield from Barfield Prison in London, the leader of the opposition has criticized the Coalition’s “laissez-faire attitude to issues of public safety”. Sergeant Mansfield, recently returned from Afghanistan, was being held in custody following the brutal murder of his partner. Police are advising that he is highly dangerous and possibly unstable, and that members of the public should not approach him under any circumstances . . .’

  It was Eva who turned off the radio. They continued in silence.

  Joe used the last of the money he had taken from Eva’s cash box to buy petrol just beyond Reading and to pay the toll at the Severn Bridge. The further west they travelled, the more the traffic thinned out. But any speed a clear road might have offered them was cancelled out by the mist. It was barely noticeable at first, just a thin, wispy film in front of the windscreen. By 2200 hours, however, it felt as though they were surrounded, as though an army of ghosts was following them wherever they went. The mist swirled in the beam of the headlights, like a thick barrier.

  A barrier between Joe and his son.

  It was just gone 2300 hours when they entered Pembrokeshire. The roads became smaller. The red dot on the satnav approached the blue of the sea.

  Joe looked at the time: 2330 hours. Six and a half hours till RV. Thirty metres ahead, the silhouette of an old church emerged from the mist, the clock face on its steeple glowing palely in the night like a second moon. Joe slowed down. The church was on their right. On the other side of the road was a small car park. He saw as he turned in that there were no other vehicles. It looked like the starting location for a country walk, but nobody was venturing out at this time of night and in this weather.

  Nobody except Joe.

  ‘You got the map?’ he asked when he’d pulled over, positioned the car so that it was facing the exit again, and killed the lights.

  Eva handed it over. Once he’d opened it out in front of him, it took Joe seconds to locate their position on the map with the interior light. They were two klicks, he estimated, from the house that was his destination. He studied the contour lines carefully. The road on which they were travelling was about to head uphill. Once they reached the brow, there was a direct line of sight from the house towards the road that led to it, in a westerly direction. Even if they travelled without the help of headlights, they would be completely visible to anybody watching them with the right kind of equipment: the warmth of the engine would burn brightly on any thermal-imaging equipment and NV capability would light them up like a fucking Christmas tree.

  The bottom line was this: they could go no further in the Range Rover.

  He turned to Eva. ‘You’ll be all right here?’ he asked.

  She looked around anxiously into the blanket of dark mist. Joe switched off the interior light. ‘Keep it dark,’ he said, ‘otherwise you’ll be blind. Keep the doors locked and the keys in the ignition. If anyone approaches you, head back the way we came. Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘What if you don’t come back?’

  ‘I will come back.’

  ‘But what if you don’t?’

  Joe reached over her, opened up the glove compartment and removed the weapon. ‘I will.’

  Frank’s bike was nothing special – a Yamaha TW, its tyres worn almost smooth by constant city driving – and it was certainly not designed to be driven offroad. He’d have to take it carefully to avoid a blowout, but he’d do that anyway: moving slowly, keeping the revs low in order to make as little noise as possible. Not easy, when he wanted to get to the house as fast as possible. To get to Conor. Ashe would definitely try to move him under cover of darkness. The question was, how long before the 0600 RV would he do it? Had Joe arrived in time?

  He reversed the bike off its trailer, then examined the OS map again. He’d be heading north across a field for two klicks before coming to a bridleway that would take him through a forested area over the brow of the hill. From there, he hoped, he would be able to see the house – or not, according to the thickness of the fog. But he would need to follow the bridleway down the hill and three miles in a westerly direction, past the house and up to the clifftop by the coast, before heading south for a mile. The bridleway passed approximately half a mile to the west of the house – close enough for the bike’s engine to be heard if the wind was in the wrong direction. He would decide whether to cover that final stretch on the bike or by foot when he was on the ground.

  Eva had moved into the driver’s seat. Her hands were resting on the steering wheel as if she was intending to drive away immediately. Joe gave her what he hoped was a reassuring nod. He heard the central locking click shut and started the Yamaha. It coughed unhealthily into life, but then he heard a sound from the Range Rover. He turned to see Eva opening the door again. ‘Joe,’ she said. ‘I hope he’s—’

  ‘He’s going to be fine,’ Joe replied grimly. He had to believe that, otherwise nothing else mattered. With the bike’s headlight switched off, he increased the throttle and moved away.

  The field across which he needed to travel to reach the bridleway was located on the opposite side of the church. It meant manoeuvring the bike across a churchyard crowded with tombstones that seemed to jump out at him from the mist. Joe kept his attention fully fixed on the ground ahead. Within a couple of minutes, he came to the perimeter of the churchyard, where a metal gate, tied shut with a length of frayed rope, marked the edge of the field. Joe untied it, opened the gate and passed through. He left the rope untied: he might need to pass through this way again.

  The ground was bumpy. Treacherous. It was beginning to freeze. Joe pushed the bike as hard as he dared, rebalancing himself every time it slipped. His visibility was no more than ten metres – the moon was little help. Beyond that, he was aware of bulky forms moving in the field. Cows, he presumed, or horses. The bike’s low rumble kept them away.

  It felt like it took longer than it should to cross the field and reach the bridleway, half his mind on Conor, the other half on the terrain. In reality it was probably no more than the ten minutes
he had estimated. There was a second gate on the opposite edge of the field. Joe passed through it and headed up an equally bumpy track at a steep, 25 per cent gradient. Two minutes later he had travelled what he knew from his study of the map to be about a third of a mile – 500 metres or so – and emerged from the mist as he reached the top of the hill.

  He dismounted before he reached the brow itself, laying the bike on its side and crawling up to his vantage point. The ground was hard and cold. From this location, looking west towards the shore, Joe could see that the mist, although thick, was patchy and low-lying. It appeared to glow in the yellow light of the hazy full moon, almost like snow. He couldn’t make out where land met sea, but he could discern the lights of a ship out on the water. The rim of the hill on which he was standing ran north to south. He couldn’t see the road he and Eva had been following, but his mental snapshot told him that it forked after about 100 metres. The right fork headed to the top of the cliff, the left fork to a lone house.

  And it was this that he could just about make out now.

  The house lay, he estimated, about three klicks to the south-west, at approximately ten o’clock from his current position. He used the binoculars to focus in on the house. The magnification was high, the field of view narrow. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but tonight his hands were shaking. He had to concentrate hard on making them still before he could get a proper look.

  There were no lights on – not, at least, on the northern or eastern sides of the house. But then he remembered that the video he had watched had been shot in a room overlooking the sea. If, as he suspected, it had been taken in this house, that meant it was on the far western side, out of view from this position. He could see the front entrance, and tried to see if there were any vehicles parked outside. But the night was too dark and the binos too weak to make out that kind of detail. After thirty seconds the mist rolled in and obscured the whole of the ground floor from his view, leaving just the steep roof peeping out from above the white blanket.

  He cursed under his breath. He’d been hoping for some indication that Conor was definitely there. His boy’s face swam before his eyes, cut, bruised and terrified. With a pang, it hit him that his expression in the video was not so different from the one on his face when Joe stormed into his bedroom and tore his Xbox from the TV. He felt like throwing all this stealth out of the window and storming in a direct line down to the house to rip Conor from this bastard’s clutches as soon as humanly possible. But his military training told him that would be the worst thing to do. He needed to approach unseen.

  And he couldn’t waste time. The mist would now be compromising the view of anyone watching from the house, so he took the opportunity to crest the hill and drop quickly to the west, keeping to the bridleway. Back on lower ground, the mist engulfed him again. He could see no landmarks, nothing with which to get his bearings. After ten minutes he estimated that he was directly north of the house, but his reckoning must have been off because two minutes later he had to brake as a sheer clifftop appeared with heart-stopping suddenness just five metres in front of him. He swung the bike round to the south and followed the bridleway along the clifftop, stopping after a couple of hundred metres to check the wind direction. It was onshore, blowing out to sea. He estimated that he could risk another 200 metres before ditching the bike and approaching on foot.

  From there, it would be just half a klick cross-country to where Conor was surely being held.

  He crawled along at less than 5 mph, to keep the noise of the bike’s engine as low as possible. He could hear the sea crashing to his right, and a lone gull called somewhere in the darkness overhead.

  To the left of the bridleway there was half-a-metre-high bracken. Joe used it to hide the bike on its side. He ran east, away from the clifftop, along a mud path through the bracken and into an area of rough grassland. Fifty metres away, the house emerged from the mist.

  No lights. Was his man sleeping? Joe doubted it.

  His heart was thumping. He could hear his pulse as he advanced.

  Halfway to the house there was a picket fence, but it was collapsing in places and Joe passed through a gap. He registered a tumbledown wooden shed five metres to his left, and a bleak concrete garage almost adjoining the right-hand wing of the house. Most of his attention, however, was on the two windows on the first floor. The curtains were open, but inside all was dark. Was Conor holed up in one of those rooms? Was that where his son was being held?

  Joe removed the handgun from his shoulder bag. Then he approached the back door of the house, treading absolutely silently: toe first, then heel. He couldn’t afford to make a single sound. A single stumble or broken twig.

  Even his breathing was, despite his exertion, noiseless.

  A sudden, clattering noise in front of him. Movement.

  He froze, three metres from the door, his weapon at the ready. What the hell was happening?

  Then he exhaled slowly. It was a cat, bursting through a flap at the bottom of the door. Its eyes glinted in the darkness as it stared directly at him. As Joe took another step forward, the cat turned tail and headed back into the house.

  Joe glanced up to the first-floor window. No light. No movement. Nothing.The paint on the back door was gleaming in the moonlight. He moved quietly to the door, then slowly reached out his free hand and grasped the handle. He twisted it gently so as not to let it squeak or scrape.

  It opened. Did that mean someone was here? Probably.

  Inside it was even darker than out. Having silently shut the door behind him, he waited a moment for his eyes to grow accustomed to the lack of moonlight. It took him twenty seconds to realize he was in a small utility room that led into a kitchen. There was a strange smell, and it wasn’t just the musty aroma of neglect. It was something else. A smell he recognized: sickeningly sweet. It grew stronger as he passed through the kitchen and along a narrow corridor that led to what was clearly the front hallway.

  He had been expecting to see a body, so the sight of a crumpled human frame at the bottom of the steps was not a surprise. The cat was prowling around it. It miaowed, and that one sound seemed to echo around the house. Joe took a couple of steps closer. The strongest smell now was of shit: the corpse’s bowels had loosened after death.

  Don’t let it be Conor, his mind was crying out. Don’t let it be Conor . . .

  He bent down in the darkness to examine the corpse’s face.

  It was an old lady. Her eyes were wide open, her expression terrified. A sticky, mucus-like substance had oozed from her nose and ears. Joe estimated that she had been dead for less than a day. Maybe she had accidentally fallen down the stairs. Or maybe – he noted that the stairlift was halfway up the staircase – she hadn’t.

  He stopped stock-still and listened. But there was nothing to listen to, other than silence.

  Stepping over the body, he started to climb the stairs. His eyes were firmly fixed on the door at the top and to the left. It was slightly ajar.

  The cat miaowed again. Joe froze. Had something disturbed it?

  No sound.

  He continued to climb.

  At the top of the stairs he stopped. His finger was resting lightly on the trigger of his handgun. His breathing was shallow and silent. Slowly, he extended his right foot and gently kicked the door open.

  By the misty moonlight shining through the windows, Joe immediately recognized the place. The video he had seen was burned on his memory. There, against the far wall, was the bed on which Conor had been sitting. On the wall behind it, a picture, its details obscured by the darkness, but Joe knew that if he looked more closely it would show a ship in a storm. His eyes panned round the room. There was a table in the middle, piled high with books. Boxes were piled up in corners and against the walls. The room was chaotic.

  And it was clear nobody was at home.

  Joe stepped over to the bed. Something had caught his eye. He bent down and picked it up off the blanket: a small, grey elephant, patched up
and the worse for wear.

  He flung the toy down on the ground, hissing with frustration. There was nobody here. Less than six hours till the RV that was only a couple of klicks away. Was it really likely that they’d already set out?

  Joe raced through the rest of the house – two more bedrooms upstairs, a large sitting room and a fourth bedroom on the ground floor. He knew it was pointless. He knew the house was deserted apart from him, an old lady’s body and a restless cat. Back in the room where Conor had been held he was almost careless enough to switch on the light. He stopped himself at the last second: if he could observe the place from afar, anybody could. And if Conor’s abductor had even an inkling that events were not unfolding as he had planned, that could only be bad for the boy. He stalked round the room, seeking anything that might help him. It was only thanks to the moonlight streaking in through the window that he saw it.

  The passport was in plain view, sitting atop one of the piles of books on the round table. On the front it had the words ‘United States of America’. Joe examined the identification page. There was no mistaking the features of the man in the photograph. Joe had seen that face once before. Until now he had been unable to recall its features, but as it stared out of the passport at him, he was transported back to the visiting room at Barfield.

  This was him. Mr Ashe.

  But the name on the passport was Mahmood Ashkani.

  Only two thoughts spun around Joe’s head. Two simple statements of fact.

  First: the Middle Eastern man who had abducted his son held an American passport.

  And second, if he wanted to see Conor again, the only option open to him was to turn up at the RV tomorrow at 0600 hours. At which point, Mr Ashe, or Mahmood Ashkani, or whoever the fuck he really was, would undoubtedly try to kill him.